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My time as a Nazi furnace tender.
A few years ago I took a job, night shift, incinerating BSE suspected cattle.
Note, BSE suspected, the vast majority of the carcasses were simply animals that had reached 30 months old and so were due for culling, 3 or 4 times a week we'd have an actual BSE suspect carcass, with the extra 2 tags on the body, which required decapitation (done by me, alone, takes about 60 seconds when you get the knack with a sharp butcher knife) and placing the head complete with top part of the spinal column (hence using a knife and doing it by hand) into a plastic bag for dispatch to the ministry vets for analysis.
A dead cow weights about 400 kg, more or less, so the only way one man working alone on a night shift can pick it up is with a long steel spike, about 4" diameter and 10' long, attached to a forklift, you have to spear the carcass from the anus area forwards, and come out at the lower chest between the forlegs, in order to stop the carcass rotating on the spike, which you don't want, you need the legs out sideways to get her in the furnace...
The furnace itself is a commercial gas fired job, about 6' high cylinder and about 15' long, fed by 4 high capacity burners. The whole end cap swings open as a door for loading and unloading. In one 12 hour shift you can turn about 10 to 15 carcasses into a couple of cubic yards of fine white ash, no black bits and nothing larger than a very small pea, because the idea is to incinerate everything and this kill the BSE.
Tending the furnace means partly watching the flue temperature, sometime you have to turn off up to 3 of the burners and shut down the air flow to nothing, especially so when you have a quality breed of meat animal in there and their body fat starts to go up in flames, this can spike the flue temp past 1000 degrees celcuis and crack the firebrick. Othertime tending = raking and turning.
Inside the furnace shed, which has to be closed to keep the BSE in, there is you, the furnace, the carcasses on the floor, and two forklifts, and the fug from the furnace.
You have two forklifts because all furnace loading and raking operations are done by opening the 6' diameter end cap and tying it back, exposing the 1000 degree celcius interior, and getting in there with the forklift, which meant the ladder part of the forklift would be within a foot of the furnace, the paint bubbles, the grease of the roller chains sizzles, and the hydraulic pipes start to cook.
The entire floor area, thanks to the method of moving carcasses with a big steel spike, is a wash of blood and urine and other bodily fluids, you constantly hose it down, and it constantly gets messy again, so when you are in the forklift it is a skid pan.
Hence the second fork lift, when working with the open furnace door you try to do everything and get the door closed again within 60 seconds, partly to save the heat inside the furnace, partly because it's like working at a foundry, mainly because hot hydraulic oil spraying under pressure out of a cooked R2 hose in the face of a furnace is not something you want to experience, so the second fork lift sits with towing chain attached and engine ticking over, parked 30 feet from the furnace ready to reverse, just in case...
Naturally, you get a lot of time to think....
Differences between a cow carcass and a human carcass, well the cow weighs about 400 kilos, a human (me) weighs about 65, so one cow = 6 humans.
The lovely yellow fat in a meat animal burns as fuel in the furnace, so you sit there and imaging that a ruthlessly efficient Nazi will work his victims down to skin and bone, less water mass to burn in the furnace, and less fat to start a runaway furnace fire, whatever they had in the 1940s, they didn't have furnace control systems as fine as the kit I was using, so lets make it an extreme case, a starved to the point of death 32 kilo human, so one cow = 12 humans.
I Could burn 10 to 15 carcasses in a 12 hour shift, we burnt a lot of other stuff to, donkeys from the donkey sanctuary, sheep, goats, if ever there was a job to have if you were planning on murdering your wife and disposing of the body (I'd recently got divorced, you ponder on such things on a night shift) this was it. So instead of cows I could get through about 150 carcasses about the same mass as a starved human in a 12 hour shift, 300 a day, 109,000 a year, furnaces like to work 24/7.
Ten furnaces would get through a million such carcasses a year, the one I worked at were buying their second, each one got through about 5 metric tons of carcass per 12 hour shift, it wasn't the only BSE incinerator site hereabouts.
I remember going outside one night for a fag (cigarette) and looking up at Hale Bopp comet, the furnace exhaust flue was clear and (as near as I could tell) odourless, not many people aroundabouts knew what was going on at that site, fleets of cattle trucks aren't that unusual in the countryside, even if they are, once the routes start up they soon become quite ordinary and normal.
One man (me) and one 12 hour night shift disposing of 5 metric tons of (some quite beautiful and incredibly edible) meat and bone per night may not seem that much when faced with nature's abundance, but Hale Bopp comet was 1997, which puts this story ten years ago, and today I can drive through the Devon countryside, a county which used to produce a third of the UK's meat and a third of our milk, and see nothing but empty fields, no livestock anywhere.
If I had been incinerating dogs, or human babies, or jews, there would be an outcry, yet, as anyone who works with cattle knows, a cow is a smart as a dog, and has just as much individuality, personality and character as a dog, yet thanks to the BSE scare at 30 months it was Arbeit Macht Fry time for buttercup.
The waste of protein and indeed genetic heritage was awful, even breathing in the fug of my own 5 tonnes worth per night you didn't get inured to it. That meat I was burning, prion suspected or not, was a lot better for human digestion that the machine reclamed crap that goes into supermarket meat pies, never mind the starving in the 3rd world.
The beurocratic state of play was as expected, every UK cow has tags, one on the ears and so on, BSE suspected (as opposed to the majority which were simple 30 month culls) had extra tags on the anus etc, each tag has a totally unique number, the idea is, much like the Nazi system, each individual carcass can be tracked, accounted for and tallied up.
There was a MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food) or rather a shift rota of MAFF bods on duty, they were supposed to oversee and check every animal and every operation, in the six months I was there none of them did anything except sleep in the caravan outside, after all, they had day jobs, this night shift was free extra money for them, and at the end of every shift at 6 am I'd hand the guy (who had just woken up thanks to his alarm clock and made tea for us both) a bag full of tags which he'd check off, and the barrels of amputated heads that needed to go off for analysis.
The whole BSE thing was handled as cynically and mechanically as "the jewish problem", and without wishing to get into arguments about relative merits of the various species, having worked in it I can TOTALLY understand how the Nazi ovens came about, how people operated them, how people played the tallyman, how people living 2 miles away were in blissful ignorance, even today I meet people who comment about the livestock bereft countryside and fail utterly to make the connection to the BSE thing and the un-noticed actions of people like me, running furnaces.
I'll be honest with you, if one night the trucks had not unloaded cow carcasses, and had instead unloaded human corpses, and the driver had said something like "This is a bunch of brain dead politicians from London, and Jerry in the next wagon has a load of PHB's and Marketing types..." I'd have checked the paperwork to make sure it was official, and taken great pleasure using the spike to load them up.
Therein lies the ultimate danger for humanity, I had had more contact, and therefore more empathy and respect, with a bunch of dead cows that I would have for a bunch of dead PHB's and Marketing types.
There is also the disconnect you get when isolating processes, time and motion study wise, into compartments.
Crew fed weapons such as machine guns will kill more people than single operator weapons, the crew on the crew fed weapon each passed the buck, "I'm only loading the belt of bullets." and in my scenario the carcasses were already delivered dead, and the imaginary PHB's and Marketing types would already be delivered dead, which allows me to make all sorts of quite irrational rationalisations.
My employer at the furnace told me people either quit within the first 2 days, or stayed with it (the money was quite good) so my six months was neither one nor the other, the money was good, but it was a god awful job, not because of the beheading, or conditions, eating sandwiches in the fug, but it was a wholly "destructive" and "wasteful" experience.
It sounds trite, but this job with its pervading sense of wrongness is PRECISELY the reason I'd rather be unemployed during the next year or three, rather than scrabbling after the MS Vista roll out and support positions coming down the line.
MCSE? "Must Consult Someone Else" to most people, I always think "Must Cremate Someone Else"