Working security at a bus hub - some miserable job I got when I turned 18, kept it because I bought a house and couldn't afford to quit - and I couldn't find a job that paid more. The sad truth is, without a college education or some kind of trade-skill - you're more or less doomed to these customer-service-y type jobs that pay only slightly better than minimum wage.
Anyway, working this job for almost 3 years at this point - in one of the top 25 most dangerous cities in America where I saw things that made me lose ALL faith in humanity on a near daily basis. Every day was violence, drugs, homelessness, teenage pregencies and underage lewd acts - and worse these people acted like they were proud to be that way, celebrating their ignorance. Girls WANTED to get knocked up so they could have a baby and live off the government; youngest girl I know of was 12 and pregnant. After that I stopped asking how old they were, it made me feel sick.
But even with all that shit, I kept my job. I told myself it was better than not working at all and at least everyday I got to go home to my own house.
The day I quit - had a fight break out between two women. One was about 5ft tall, 130lbs tops, and pushing a baby stroller. The other was a monster of a woman, 6'5 and had to be near 350lbs.
My natural response was to interevene on behalf of the smaller woman with the child, so I jumped between them turning my back on the smaller one - because the big one was going to take all my attention.
I jumped between them, taking blows in the face/chest/back over and over, knocking my radio/keys off my person - before I finally landed a hard shove on each right on their faces shoving them apart. Then I pointed at each of them, shouted for one to leave through that door, then the other through the other side door. And surprisingly, it worked.
I stood in the middle of the passenger waiting area to make sure they didn't come back at each other, waited there for about 10 minutes.
As I was standing there watching, waiting, I had a street sweeper walk up and start talking to me. The street sweepers are sort of like security guards, they're hired by the city with a slightly increased wage (still less than my wage), to walk around assigned city blocks, usually 1-2 at a time, and they're to sweep up trash and report illegal activities.
Anyway, he starts talking to me about how brave that was of me to jump in between those women fighting. And I was like no, anyone would have done that - it was just a chick fight anyway. And he was like... didn't you see that knife the small one had? Looked like a box cutter.
I was flabbergasted, like what??? And he was like oh yeah look at your coat! He turned me around and sure enough I had about a half dozen long deep cuts in the back of my coat. Had I not been wearing an extremely oversized bubble security coat, I probably would be paralyzed or worse today. And as if that realization then wasn't bad enough... it got worse.
Goes to find out the big woman was just outside of the door out of eye-sight. Those punches they were exchanging around my head, the girl had that box cutter and cut open her face. Her entire face. Multiple slashes, the worse being down right below her left eye all the way down past her chin and halfway down her chest.
We called an ambulance for her and everything, I wrote up an incident report and called the police. The girl lost half of the moment in that side of her face, the small one got charged with felonious assault with a deadly weapon - all of which I witnessed I had to testify in court. The last actions I ever did for that job.
Almost dying for that shitty $9.00 an hour... no more. That was my last day there and it was the single best thing I've ever done for myself. Had it not happened I might still be working there - this dead end job going no where.
TL:DR Working security, almost died breaking up a chick fight, multiple slashes to the back with a box cutter.