1) As an apprentice in 1972 I went into a house to fit a phone. It smelt horrible but the front room, where we had to work, looked ok. All we had to do was run a cable along the skirting behind the sofa, we pulled the sofa out and the dof poo filled the space to about a foot high. We just left without a word, leaving the sofa in the middle of the room.
2) Lifting the lid of a pavement joint box it was full of sewage, we pumped it out into a nearby sewer and pressure washed it. As we were working more ran in intermittantly. About 10 ft from the box was a fairly new patch in the asphalt and digging it up revealed a new 110mm foul pipe plumbed (very badly) into our P.O.duct
3) Working on sound and lighting in night clubs we never put our hand into any void without a marigold AND a leather glove, there would be all sorts of animals and and their s**t, used condoms, needles, stash, human s**t, s**tty knickers/pants etc. In one we took out 4 12ft bench seats against the wall and promptly asked for the debris to be cleared before we worked on the plethora of damaged cables. The guy went to the local toot shop for a cheap pack of 50 black bags. Big mistake as he really needed more than 50 and as he handled them the needles & blades were shreading the bags, he ended up with a trail of the offensive mixture through the building. The seating area was then washed with loads of disinfectant before we repaired the chewed cables.
4) Changing a temp sensor in a an extract air duct a horrible yellow/brown liquid poured out. this was above head height and is covered my hair, face and shirt. The grill was set in the floor of the toilet above (used to be a fairly common technique) and the pan connector had a big split to the soil was leaking directly into the duct.
5) Working inside the extract duct and the drain of an offices kitchen feeding about 1000 people daily. Loadsa fat!
