The people I witnessed in the ED hallway smelled like death was imminent.

I worked for two years in a nursing home doing facilities. It straight up had a german roach infestation that used to crawl all over patients and get in the food of staff. Multiple times, the company called "pest control" which was basically Bozo & Buddies to try and deal with a SERIOUS german roach infestation. The sentence brought me back because there was plenty of times we had just straight up dying patients in the hallways, roaches crawling on them and shit. JCAHO was in their pockets...literally. That place shut down like 3 times while I was there and I had three different work-shirts with different names on them.

During COVID; at another facility, body disposal services were refusing service to the facility to the overwhelming numbers of dead. Managements solution was to pay out roughly 10k with a NDA and start shoveling bodies into bags and burning them in piles. My first pile was when I quit and said "Fuck this" after taking the 10k. They didn't even try to fuckin sue me, lmao. Without the money, I probably would have been evicted at the time (had no official lease; moratorium didn't apply)

The stench was atrocious; sometimes I still have nightmares about those body piles. There was some rumors from people who I know aren't "liars" that said they still saw some moving. Horrifying shit. Local emergency services didn't give a fuck either. Sometimes I look back at COVID and realize how thin the line is for "civilized society" if you can call it that. Usually when I tell this story to co-workers about "horrifying past job experiences" they just give me that blank "What the fuck" stare.

Isn't capitalism great? I got to experience a medieval burning pile.