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14. Talk about working at a funeral home.
OK, this is where we start talking about all the jobs we had when we were growing up, huh? Well, I had a TON of them...I never knew what I wanted to be so at any given time I may have had 2 or 3 part time jobs and one of them was working at a funeral home in my home town. I was an "Apprentice Embalmer and Funeral Director"...this basically meant that I did the shit jobs that the licensed guys did not want to do. There is little that I was not involved in from the accepting the original "Death Call", through the pick up of the body from the hospital/morgue/accident site or whereever it was, through the embalming process, through the presentation of the body, to the family visitation, to the digging and vault placement graveside, to the flower running, to the home conclusion and all the way through the last of the paperwork (Death Certificates, Insurance Forms, etc).
It was a learning experience as I learned to deal with people when they were at their WORST. If you can consistently deal with people who are in mourning and come out of it in good shape then you can handle anybody else in any other situation with ease. It is a great job to take if you want to learn how to read people but it is not a job that I would want to have for a long period of time. It is not shocking that the rate of alcoholism among funeral directors is quite high....you need something to pick you up after being around that much sorrow all day every day.
--T
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