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Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

The worst job I've had was called 'putting up hay'. It amounted to climbing into the loft of a very dust-laden barn with 3 or 4 of my college buddies, catching hay bales as they spat out of the hay elevator, and running them over to stack in uniform 3-d arrays. After a couple of hours, our employer called us down for rejuvenation with Coke-a-cola and glazed donuts, and we'd blow what seemed like pounds of dusty mucous out of our noses and then head back up into the loft.

$5/hour seemed like a lot of money at the time...

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Reminds me of tagging along with my older brothers to mow lawns. After a few hours of weeding and taking my turn at the push mower they would take me to get a Slurpee. My own Slurpee that I didn't have to share!

Later in high school doing construction work for my dad digging ditches with a pick and shovel, he would walk by and casually ask if I was feeling motivated to do well in school.

Yep, as a teenager I cleaned out urethane spray booths and other shit jobs no one else would do. That motivated me to do quite quite well in electrical engineering.

I got $5.35 working at a plastics factory, making house siding and PVC pipe. I still have a scar from slashing a finger open with a hacksaw while we were starting up a siding line... basically, I would cut semi-molten PVC siding that was moving about a foot a second, because it was still too warped to make it into the cooling tanks, much less the cutters. Had to keep cutting, too, despite my injury.

The factory and manufacturing work that everyone seems to miss these days is profoundly unsafe.

I worked at a supermarket in the late 70's as my high-school job, and we didn't compress + band the cardboard boxes -- we burned them in an incinerator out back. Every so often it needed to have the ash cleaned out, so the male employees would take turns with a shovel and the ash buckets. You'd blow grey mucous out your nose for a couple of days afterwards, because masks were for sissies.

Not-so-fun story time: The stock guys left a can of Lysol aerosol in one of the boxes, and when I tossed it in the resulting fireball burned some of my hair off. Occupational safety? What's that?

Whilst a mask seems a good idea, I presume that the organic material that built up in your lungs would be broken down and washed out by the lungs natural processes within a few days or weeks?

Perhaps a doctor could clarify?

Not a doctor but.. You're falling for a bit of a naturalistic fallacy here. Just as Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral however inhaling its dust can come with very serious health problems, so can hay contain mould which can also cause serious lung disease. http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/diseases/farmers_lung.html

Chris is absolutely right, and in addition to mo(u)ld, there's also tons of antigens to provoke inflammatory responses in the lungs, which can lead to asthma and chronic bronchitis.

Hah, I got the same pay for that, but didn't hate the job so much. We got beer after, so that may be why.

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