I shook my governor’s hand.
CW:Meat spoiler
My family had a fridge in the basement where we stored extra food. It failed when we were on vacation. It had a bunch of trout my dad had caught, stored in plastic grocery bags. It smelled as bad as you could imagine, and my dad made us clean it because he wanted to try to have it repaired.
The freezer was warm, the defrost cycle still happened even though it wasn’t cooling., They were partly liquefied, falling apart. Really nasty.
I once shook hands with a Raytheon recruiter when I was presenting a project.
Yeah, you’re probably going to have to wash that hand in fire
Grass
I’ve personally shook hands with George W. Bush, Oliver North, and Sean Hanity.
I have won this thread.
First, why? Second, how did they escape the subsequent rear naked choke I assume you put them in?
Okay… Well, I was raised to be a fascist. My parents were donors to the campaign and it was at a rally. They were also donors to a “charity” run by North and Hannity. I looked up to them, this was shortly before I went to boot camp. Years of Christian school cult indoctrination had me sold on the idea that the Iraq war was just and good and I was doing my patriotic duty.
Suffice it to say, I’m not exactly welcome in such circles anymore.
Damn, of those three I’ve only encountered Dubya. Actually I may have shook hands with John McCain doing school journalism.
McCain is pretty bad, though I’d rather encounter him than my list. Pretty sure I met Dan Quale as a kid too.
Real Estate agent shook my hand once.
Probably grease trap contents :(
YOOOOO I used to drive a vacuum truck and grease traps are absolutely the most disgusting things on the planet.
That’s hard to beat.
Yup, when I worked in a kitchen as a teen I regularly had to sort the grease trap, really taught me how to get on top of my wretch reflex.
FYI, typing that comment just now I actually almost threw up just remembering how bad that used to be in the summer.
I worked at a diner and generally not being bothered by being grossed out i reached down into the mucky floor drain with my bare hand to clear a clog and just, don’t ever do that. My fingers stunk for days no matter what I washed with they smelled of rot it was so nasty.
I was going to say, sink drains are probably the nastiest places to touch
Bathroom sink overflow drains are a special kind of nasty, especially when the people who lived in the house before you jammed paper towels inside the overflow holes and they have been actively growing mold for at least six years.
Oh, and the motherfucker who installed the sink didn’t know how toggle bolts worked, so he tried to secure it to the wall with screw-in drywall anchors that were maybe rated for 15-20 pounds. When that didn’t work (and he stripped out one of the anchors), he apparently moved on to construction adhesive and just decided to glue the fucking sink to the (painted, over wallpaper) bathroom wall. The fun things you get to unravel while just trying to change out a faucet that was held together with JB Weld…
When getting up to piss in the middle of the night I sat my bare ass down on a giant cockroach. Don’t live in Florida, people
I was in a place once where I went to sleep with my hand under my pillow, moved it while asleep and touched something, then reflexively flung a dead roach across the room. It suffocated or something. I made a noise I would never be able to replicate.
Oof, condolences, surprise roach corpse is a horrible way to wake up
Idk if its comparable to bare ass on roach though. My cousin once stepped barefoot onto a slug while going down some stairs. Squished the poor thing but I’m pretty sure he was traumatized. I want to give bugs their own planet where they can develop their own little societies and leave me out of it.
I used to catch butterflies as a kid and one time I unknowingly scooped up a slug. An unpleasant surprise, to be sure.
Texas.
but more seriously, I don’t know what it was. I was a kid about 7 or 8 at a subtropical beach with huge rocks just slightly under water mostly, until the tide goes out when they would be exposed. we’re talking huge boulders, slick with life growing on them.
I spent a ton of weekends at beaches in the region so I felt pretty comfortable swimming and being crazy in the water. anyway, I went out hopping from rock to rock, which was sketchy as hell because the waves are crashing over them, and the edges are jagged as hell.
anyway, I get blown off one between two rocks by a wave and I panic grab at the rock to clamber back up it before the next wave comes… and my hand slid underneath a pocket into something really slimy and slick. that then grabbed at my hand and squeezed/pulled.
pure and absolute cosmic terror seized me at the base of my skull. like jaw clenching silently, I shot out of the water like a rocket, flitting back to the shore from rock to rock with all the speed my imagination of hell could inspire. it probably wasn’t anything dangerous, but it did not feel good to have my hand enveloped in it. it felt bad and wrong. world ending.
I am a strong swimmer, but to this day I have a visceral fear of touching biofouled surfaces because they tend to look like that surface felt. I used to pursue that submechanophobia subreddit to mess with myself, because even though these were just big rocks with stuff living on em, there’s something similar in vibes.
ugh, still fucks me up just imagining the touch.
for comparison, I’ve had my hands submerged in gallons partially digested feed, hot livestock shit (on a cold day, so the heat is perversely kinda nice) and had large animals sneeze in my face and blow snot all over me, like on my lips. its not great, but unfazing and more hilarious than gross.
human stuff grosses me out though. like I seen a turd on the ground as a janitor, and I will turn around and go the other way lol. unknown adult human poop is not my area.
I never fully pursued it, but I went through some elder care training many years ago so had to wipe other people’s butts. Its not easy when they’re bed bound and it isn’t their fault, but it doesn’t make it any less gross or comparable to doing the same thing for a much smaller child.
Did some of that too, and yeah other than the obvious size differences between adults and children, seems like it’s considerably stankier when the digestive system ain’t what it used to be. Plus you have to try not to react, a baby’s feelings aren’t going to be hurt if you gag, but it’s important to not make the person who’s lost some of their faculties feel ashamed about it.
Unintentionally? Dumpster juice
Intentionally?
CW: dead bodies
Either decaying corpses or the maggots that were infesting them.
Intentionally???
It was part of a post secondary program I took a few years ago, I can’t go into more detail for privacy reasons but it involved dealing with human remains in all stages of decomposition.
Pretty interesting stuff if you had the stomach for it
Extracting a part from a junkyard car interior. This thing was 30 years old and thrashed. Aside from normal dirt, leaves, hair, and layer of human slime that exists in most cars, this one had torn up, moldy, decaying leather and cigarillo ash covering the entire interior.
my peenor
I still have eebie geebie uncomfortable ewwness when I remember the time I had to handle a cooler full of deer parts 20 years ago. I don’t even remember why I was doing it, other than having to because something something I was told to…uhh yeah idk just the horror of grabbing cut up pieces of something that was alive an hour ago and all the tendons and 👎
