What Job Did You Have In A Past Life

Farm managers tend to work in either animal production, dairy or crop production although some do work with all three. Livestock on farms tends to be pigs, cows or sheep while crops can cover cereals, oilseed rape, vegetables and salad.

The job is varied and includes planning strategies for maximum yield, organising farm administration, working machinery, organising associated businesses and managing staff.

More men were brought from Africa as slaves than women. But some plantation owners preferred women as the harder workers. The ‘great gang’ or first gang of slaves was made up of the strongest workers. Sometimes women outnumbered men in the great gang. They did all the heavy fieldwork, such as digging and cutting cane.The members of the second gang were not as strong as those of the great gang. Often the slaves in this gang were the teenagers, the old and the sickly. They would do the less demanding fieldwork.

Apart from being a name that’s totally fucking metal, and that has been used for comic characters, books and movies, the whole process of sin-eating is rather disturbing. Traditionally performed in 19th century Europe, a sin-eater was an outcast, poor and shunned by everyone for their profession, who was only sought out once a person had died. It was the sin-eater’s job to absorb all the sins of a dead person in order to let them into heaven, exchanging their own eternal torment for a ludicrously small sum of money. When they were hired, a piece of food and bowl of drink were passed over the dead, absorbing their sins, which the sin-eater then devoured. The logic that the sin would pass on to the social outcast, and the dead could ascend freely. Wow, hated and outcast for your entire life, starving and destitute, and now sent to hell for the sins of dozens of people? That’s a shitty deal.

Not dangerous, but excruciatingly tedious. A punkawallah’s job was to be a human fan. During the days of the British rule in India and Pakistan, ceiling fans were the hot new invention, but they certainly weren’t motorized. Instead, a punkawallah had to spend all their waking hours standing in one spot, pulling the controls for the fan to keep it going. The concept goes back much further than that, to that classic image of a slave fanning their master to keep them cool. What a soul crushing and tedious job. In some ways it’s even worse if you aren’t a slave, because you know that’s the only job you could get it keeping some rich bastard cool on a hot day for almost no pay.

The term whipping boy (and the related concept of a scapegoat) has now just become a phrase that we bandy about without realizing that it was a very real thing not too long ago. It arose in the 15th and 16th century, when the divine right of kings was a very real idea, and no one was seen as being able to punish misbehaving princes — after all, they were chosen by God. Sure, their fathers could, but said Kings were usually off ruling the country and bonking courtesans, and didn’t give a rat’s ass about their children’s education. Rather than punish the princelings, which they weren’t allowed to do, a whipping boy was used, and all the punishment was reaped on them. Usually, the boy was a high-ranking noble child who was raised with the prince and their only friend, the ensuing bond making the prince feel horrible when the whipping boy was punished. Which was markedly less effective if the prince was a sociopathic rich asshole who didn't care about the suffering of others.

The black death killed ? of the population of Europe, devastating the continent as it made its multiple sweeps through time and again. Guess who had the incomparable joy of picking up the piles of the deceased? That’s right, someone’s job was to go around with a cart, piling up the dead to be thrown in enormous pits. Guess how clean it was, what with the only basic hygiene around anyway, and society crumbling around them? Seeing as the mechanisms of disease weren’t understood in the slightest, the buriers just tied a rag around their face to stop the smell, and went about shifting the deadly bodies. I can’t imagine their fate was particularly pleasant.

For centuries, tanners were reviled around the world, even for doing incredibly important work. In India, only the untouchables could do it, and all through Europe they were forced outside of the cities due to the horrible, horrible stench they produced. Why was it so vile? Excrement. Lots and lots of excrement. The hunters would give the tanners the skins, still bloody with chunks of meat and fat attached. They would be soaked in water to remove all that stuff, leading to a pool of rotting meat. Then, the hair had to be removed, either by soaking the skin in urine, or letting it hang to rot, and then cutting it off with a knife. After that came the soaking in a slurry of feces and water, and kneading them in it to soften the skin, for hours at a time. After that it was stretched, dried and sold — but can you imagine the combined stink of rotting flesh, urine and feces? That’s the life of a tanner.

In pre-revolutionary France, times were horrible, and a huge percentage of the population was reduced to begging. Competition was rife, as the beggars struggled to gain what little money was left in the profession. Sometimes, things got so bad that they would self-mutilate, making themselves hideous and pathetic to attract more sympathy. No case of this was more terrifying that the denatsate: the mouth was slit from ear to ear, in a joker’s grin. The gums were removed, but the teeth left in place. Finally, the nose was hacked off. A living skull, begging on the streets of Paris.