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Oh man, I've had some interesting jobs. (This is a little graphic)
In high school, I worked for an SPCA for four years. It was actually the most rewarding job I've ever had, and overall, I loved it. But working with people giving up animals was the worst. They treated us like dirt and expected us to kiss their asses for dumping their unwanted pets with us. A lot of times these animals were sick, pregnant, very old, what-have-you and it took a lot of self-restraint not to strangle some of these idiots. One woman would bring us a litter of kittens every month or two, like clock-work, and refused to get her cats fixed. Another family tied up a litter of puppies outside the door in the middle of the night in November in New England - luckily they were still alive when we got there at 7:30am. Another person brought in a cat and booked it before we could ask him anything about her... and when we got in the back room and picked her up, the employee's hand went inside the cat. She had a mammary tumor that had gone untreated, then basically became a gaping hole in her belly. I could go on, but you get the idea. I became very cynical about human beings while working that job. I left when I graduated high school and went to college.
When I got to college I really wanted to go into veterinary medicine, so the summer after my freshman year I worked at two different clinics. One was very rural (out in the midwest) and mainly served farmers. The people were very sweet and I enjoyed working with them, and most of the calls to the farms were interesting. However, a big part of the work was in hog barns where they raise hogs for meat. Very "outside" few people ever get to go in there, and if you do you have to shower and completely sterilize before going in to avoid introducing disease. I got in as the vet's assistant. The buildings have no windows, and the floor is slats that all the pigs' urine and feces fall through to a pit below. The smell is pretty bad, and the noise is deafening. We were taking blood samples to test for disease, and we would be in there for a few hours at a time a few times a week. I won't go into detail, but I saw stuff way worse than what they talk about in the PETA fliers. When you're treating animals as commodities, not living things, it's very different. The vet was nothing but professional, but some of the people working the hog barns are a different story. Anyway, I left at the end of the summer when classes started up again and I had no complaints about the clinic or vets, but I learned that I definitely don't want to be a large animal/agricultural vet.
My sophomore year in college I got an office job - the first job I've ever had that didn't involve cleaning up animal poop/vomit/blood/whatever for a significant part of the workday. It's cleaner, but a lot more boring... and I do miss working with animals.
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