What's the worst job you've ever had?

[Pat Logsdon]

My position is being moved to another part of the country in a few months, and I could use a little cheering up. :D

I'll start things off - the worst job *I* ever had was selling framed pictures door to door to businesses. Unfortunately, that wasn't the worst part. The worst part is that my boss was the former lead singer of a somewhat popular 80's Christian heavy-metal band.

[trachy]

Pumping gas had its moments. Working under pressure in the elements isn't the most fun.

What part of the country are you relocating to? Be specific, as I'm not too familiar with Squornshellous Zeta. :lol:

[Pat Logsdon]

I'm actually NOT going to relocate, thus my dilemma and subsequent depression. :D
I'm in California now (but my heart is in Squornshellous Zeta (http://pcbo.dcs.aber.ac.uk/hhgttg/hitch3/node9.html)), and the job is moving to Texas. Not a bad place, but I like it where I am.

[Jacob]

Stamping pamphlets..

1.Pick up pamphlet.
2. Open pamphlet.
3. Stamp pamphlet
4. Close pamphlet.
5. Put pamphlet in other box.
6. Go back to step 1.

Oh the horror... the boredom... fortunately it was only a temporary job.

[sneech]

Stamping pamphlets..

1.Pick up pamphlet.
2. Open pamphlet.
3. Stamp pamphlet
4. Close pamphlet.
5. Put pamphlet in other box.
6. Go back to step 1.

Oh the horror... the boredom... fortunately it was only a temporary job.


HA, i had a job sorting pamphlets, by zip code. thousands of them.

[JackTheTripper]

I'm actually NOT going to relocate, thus my dilemma and subsequent depression. :D
I'm in California now (but my heart is in Squornshellous Zeta (http://pcbo.dcs.aber.ac.uk/hhgttg/hitch3/node9.html)), and the job is moving to Texas. Not a bad place, but I like it where I am.

I don't blame you. Leave CA for Texass! I think not.

Worst job was dishwasher at a diner. I was 13. Under age but paid $6 an hour under the table. Not bad in the early 80's for a 13 YO kid.

Also worked at a pet store. Lift bags of food that weighed between 50 and 70 pounds. :( Clean up birds and lizzard poop. :( Catch loos animals in the store. :( Bag crickets for food. :( Bosses favorite term was "If you got time to lean, you got time to clean." :(

[Noel]

5am Cold damp October
a loaded flatbed half a city block long rolls up to the semi-finished
suburban housing development.
a day of laying sod begins...

Details?
I REFUSE to tell (unless someone asks)

Noel

[CTSLICK]

Without a doubt it was working nights in a gas station convenience store...that gig ended the night I called in sick and the guy who covered for me got robbed. I left my resignation the next day.

A close second was working customer support/service for a mail order exercise equipment company. You haven't lived until you try to describe how to assemble exercise equipment over the phone to someone armed with a pair of pliers...and thats it.

[proutpa]

I worked on a farm one summer.
Part of my duties included cleaning out cow stalls... Phew!!

[bljarv]

Working in nursing homes as an aide to pay for school definitely had its down sides. I don’t even want to think about the number of Depends I have handled. :(

Actually, Texas isn't all that bad. For all it's quirkiness (sp?) it does have its saving graces. I lived there for about 6 months once and actually grew to enjoy it. Lots of good people there! :D

[xbalance]

The summer before going to college, I had to work 10 hours a day starting at 6am cleaning extremely dirty used heavy machinery and sweeping floors. The job was located in an ugly section of Detroit (ugly even by Detroit standards)

[Kevin Remhof]

I spent a summer working housekeeping at my college (University of Dayton). It was horrible! I had to work with foul-mouthed little high school kids who constantly got the rest of us in trouble for their goofing off. The boss was a large-round-woman who would eat apples but spit out the peel (nasty, nasty, nasty to watch).

Plus, I never imagined how disgusting college students really were. We had to clean the same appartment complex 3 times that summer. Clean, strip and wax floors, and clean again because the water would leave stains in the toilets.

The only good thing about the job was where I lived. There were 6 or 7 of us in a big 150-year-old house near the college. We partied every night and had a ball. It was one strange summer.

[JackTheTripper]

I called in sick and the guy who covered for me got robbed. I left my resignation the next day.


I got robbed at gun point when I worked at B of A. Wasn't that bad really. I we were closed the rest of the day and I was back at work the next day. Only time I've ever had a gun pointed at my head from less than 10 feet away. Also only time I've had a gun pointed at me by non-law enforcement. :D

[karen]

My father was a hunter guide at a upland game birds hunting farm. This meant that they raised ducks, geese, grouse, quail, etc. and fed them everyday at a pond about a mile away from the coops.

Around 5am, wealthy, drunk non-hunters would dress up in their designer oranges and shiny shotguns, have a big breakfast and some more liquid courage, then go sit at the pond for a while. My brother would open the coops and hundreds of these game birds would fly to the pond and be slaughtered by the newbie hunters. Father dearest would then show of his dogs retrieving the birds and drive everyone back to the lodge to have a lunch and some more courage.

Then brother would drive a truck piled with half dead birds to the cleaning shed an we'd break necks, pluck, remove skin, gut, and wash the bodies. The plop them in a ziplock bag and into a freezer. The hunters would stop by and pick up their harvest and make passes at me, who was only 13 at the time.

It was a horrible job, just terrible. It was cold, dirty, and the birds were in terrible shape. The owner of the farm would come out around 10 pm and bestow each of us with a 5 dollar bill and tell us not to get too greedy as he was overpaying us for 13 year olds. Daddy made about $500 in tips.

I quit the day I picked up a dead duck and it was covered in lice the size of ladybugs.

...and today, I'm a vegetarian hippie wannabe. I blame it all on those weekend mornings.

[Kati Compton]

My father was a hunter guide at a upland game birds hunting farm. This meant that they raised ducks, geese, grouse, quail, etc. and fed them everyday at a pond about a mile away from the coops.


Ugh... I, uh... um... Ack.

I think I need to go lie down.

[Steven Cedrone]

I quit the day I picked up a dead duck and it was covered in lice the size of ladybugs.

I feel like locking this thread... :pukeface:

I don't think anyone is going to "top" that...

Steve

[Jacob]

I quit the day I picked up a dead duck and it was covered in lice the size of ladybugs.

I feel like locking this thread... :pukeface:

I don't think anyone is going to "top" that...

Steve

This wasn't a job I had (fortunately), but a friend of mine once had the great job of clearing roadkill.....he has great stories such as "the deer whose leg came off" and.. "the racoon that would not die"

[Steven Cedrone]

This wasn't a job I had (fortunately), but a friend of mine once had the great job of clearing roadkill.....he has great stories such as "the deer whose leg came off" and.. "the racoon that would not die"

That doesn't count, it wasn't you... :wink:

The worst job I almost had: The local turnpike reststop was advertising for high paying jobs( High paying at the time. I don't even remember the hourly rate). Being a broke, underworked high school student, I went for an "interview"...

The first thing they showed me were the "thick rubber, hand to armpit, heavy duty gloves" for, you guessed it: cleaning the toilets...

My thought: cleaning toilets at a rest stop on the turnpike, I don't think so...

I left then and there... :wink:

Steve

[TypeMRT]

One day I spent my whole shift envious of the drywallers because they didn't have to clean up after themselves...gotta love college!

[klinux]

This ain't going to top the list but I used to be paid for cutting cheese.

(Explanation: Cornell University has an agricultural college and thus its own dairy and thus its own dairy products. I worked at the dairy shop which sells milk, ice cream, cheese etc. One the job was to cut cheese and there were some funky ones.)

[tj21]

I can't top some of the previous responses but I can come close for most boring. I spent several summers during college at Kellogg's dropping prizes in cereal boxes as they went down the production line. It's not that bad of a job but I still can't eat Froot Loops to this day. Try working off a hangover while breathing cereal dust and watching brightly colored boxes fly past you as fast as the line can move. Not a pretty sight.

Yes every one of those prizes in your cereal boxes are dropped by hand in case you're wondering why you usually don't get yours. Missing prizes are still the leading consumer complaint at Kellogg's. :oops:

[roberto_torres]

Working for a company with a completely lack of professionalism and appreciation for their employees. That was my experience working for Cordis LLC (Johnson & Johnson).


When they need you youre the best, when they stop needing your services you suck.

[kaiden.1]

Wow

I can't compete with a lot of you!? 8O

McDonalds.....

[derosnec]

I was a cabin cleaner at melbourne airport for a summer. Yup - one of those people who rushes onto the planes as soon as the passengers get off, and clean up. I will spare you the details, but there are some very very unhygenic people out there.

The strangest thing I saw it that job was a footprint.. just above headhight... in a toilet. Man that must have been some turbulance.

On a positive note.. I earnt more then then I earn as an engineer now. (ok.. not so positive now that I think about it....)

[Kati Compton]

Wow
I can't compete with a lot of you!? 8O
McDonalds.....

I can't even compete with *you*. Apart from college internships, I worked in high school for a while for a software store... Then grad school as a research assistant, then soon onto professorship. Quite boring by comparison, really.

[GoldKey]

I worked in the Bakery at a Winn Dixie in Gainesville, FL for about 4 months while I was in college. The only hired me because I had 2 years experience working at an upscale bakery in Miami. All the other employees were career employees and for the most part did not like me because while we all knew it was a crappy job, that was their career while I was just working for extra cash while in school. Anyway, would have to get up real early to go in and make donuts and such. (I often ended up with the early shift because the full timers did not want it.) Winn Dixie has a bunch of training video to make you watch on safe food handling, etc. that accompany written materials. The material was so poorly done that there were contradictions between the videos and the written guidelines. Every time I watched one, I would give the manager a list of things that were wrong and she would just look at me funny. Anyway, after about 4 months of "Time to Make the Donuts" jokes (old Duncan Donuts commercial) from my roommates I got sick of it and quit.

BTW - The entire time I worked there, they never showed me how to change the oil in the donut fryer despite my asking. I suspect it never got changed and to this day, I don't eat anything from a Winn Dixie.

[Kati Compton]

I worked in the Bakery at a Winn Dixie in Gainesville, FL for about 4 months while I was in college. The only hired me because I had 2 years experience working at an upscale bakery in Miami. All the other employees were career employees and for the most part did not like me because while we all knew it was a crappy job, that was their career while I was just working for extra cash while in school.

My husband worked for a summer or so at Menard's in the paint department. At one store-wide meeting a manager insultingly called him "college-boy". 8O

[jmulder]

Worst job I had was a fundraiser where I cleaned the local stadium after a monster truck rally. Man, going into those tunnels with blowers to try to get the dirt out was a mess. Not to mention the 'swill bucket'...

Worst paying job: Opera chorus. 6 weeks of 24 hour workweeks after school to get paid a $60 'honorarium' when it was all said and done.

Oh, and my father was actually once employed as a 'pickle pounder'. He worked at a pickle factory where his job was to use a wooden mallet to whack the pickles the rest of the way into the jar.

...and then there was MCI...

[yawanag]

I tried hard to think of a job that was the worst I ever had. I couldn't come up with one and here's why:

I never applied for a job that I didn't think I would enjoy or think I couldn't do.

So, as time went on what it made it the worst job was the bosses I had. I could clean up horse manure from a trough if the boss made me feel needed and appreciated.

[Brad Adrian]

During my fourth year of college, the on-the-job part of my training as a medical technologist required me to rotate through the Histology Department of the laboratory. What I learned was fascinating, as I helped with autopsies and tissue sample preparation.

In any hospital, anything (and I mean ANYthing) that is removed from a person's body must be submitted to the Histology department for review and testing. Most of the time, that means examining somebody's appendix after surgery to make sure it had really needed to be removed, etc. However, occasionally, patients would come to the emergency room with various foreign objects that had become "stuck" during certain "recreational activities." Once the objects were surgically removed, it was my job to help make sure they "really needed to be removed."

I only wish I could have been in the patients' rooms during those moments when the admitting doctor asked, "Man, what were you THINKING?!?!?"

[yvilla]

Ages ago, I worked a short time for a company that contracted with stores, restaurants, bars, etc to help them "police" their employees. I'd have to go into stores and restaurants and buy a bunch of things, watching to make sure the cashiers weren't ripping off their employers. Drove all over the state with two other people, the man driving the car being the team leader. But then I had to go into a department store and try to switch price tags, and put items inside of other items, to see if they were theft-conscious enough. Well, imagine how angry this man was when he came in looking for me after I'd been inside forever, and I had to confess I just couldn't do it! But what really ended it was the first time I actually caught this young girl at a doughnut shop pocketing the cash instead of ringing it up and putting it in the register. It was horrible. The police were called, it turned out they got her to admit she'd been doing it a while, she was crying... As far as the man I worked for was concerned I had redeemed myself--but I felt terrible, and I quit right after that! :evil:

[hubcap]

McDonalds was no big deal – it was as fun as you wanted to make it.

Detasseling corn sucked. >100 degrees F, walking through corn fields all day, getting your hands cut up trying to pull tassels from corn three feet taller than you. No fun.

[Brad Adrian]

Similarly to yvilla, I worked at at drug store and had to watch out for shoplifters. One day a guy pocketed a large bottle of booze and headed for the door. Just as I was about to grab him, he pulled a huge kitchen knife out of his coat pocket and gave me a crazed look.

I let him keep the booze.

[Kati Compton]

Detasseling corn sucked. >100 degrees F, walking through corn fields all day, getting your hands cut up trying to pull tassels from corn three feet taller than you. No fun.

You could spruce up the job a bit by calling it "Planned Parenthood" for corn. Or that you were a "Corn Contraceptive"....

[Steven Cedrone]

Just as I was about to grab him, he pulled a huge kitchen knife out of his coat pocket and gave me a crazed look.

I let him keep the booze.

Holy Crap!!!!

That was you??? :wink: :lol:

Steve

[Macguy59]

Oh that's easy. My worst job happen to be my very first job. Working at McDonalds. I lasted there all of 6 days, before I'd had enough :lol: Ah the smell of beef flavored grease and filet of cardboard err fish.

[welmoed]

My worst job (just because of the boredom factor) was as a clipper for the American Petroleum Institute, back in around 1980. My job was to go in every day and wade through a stack of about 60 local, national and international newspapers and clip any article that had reference to the oil industry.

Man, that newsprint just never, ever washed off at the end of the day. I lasted about two months at that job (it was a summer gig). About the only redeeming factor was I got to read the comics from all over the country. Lucky for me I'm a fast reader.

--Welmoed

[blazingwolf]

When I was high school I worked for the city i lived in. Part of my duties included picking up the dead animals off of the streets. Man Talk about messy and stinky. 8O

[grohl]

Not "worst jobs" - I needed the money and I think I'm a better man for it. Sure makes me appreciate those out there that do it:

1) picking grapes. Sound easy? Try $1.25 for 25 pounds, not to mention the torn-up hands, countless bee stings, and quitting to let the poor families make more money

2) stuffing envelopes. Paper cuts THROUGH bandaids.

3) warehouse work/loading trucks. And I STILL have a bad back.

4) driving a seed truck through the Louisiana Bayou for a $28 daily per diem (hotel and food) Taco Bell and $12 single rooms for 3 months.

5) Night shift, nurses aid. Sad invalids whose families never visited. After cleaning up the mess from a lady, and she promptly soiled herself again, I was told to "leave her and teach her a lesson" by my supervisor.

6) Hardee's grill man. Couldn't eat fast food for about a year.

[karinatwork]

The worst job I ever had was 6 weeks in a German kindergarten. I had to do a practical training for the diploma I was getting. Unfortunately the one I got accepted in was in a very bad part of town. There were 32 kids from 3 to 6 years in one class, with only one teacher and me.
I got called every bad word that exists in the German language, yet you'll find it in no dictionary. My hair got pulled, I got kicked and bitten, yet I wasn't allowed to even touch the kids myself (of course).
I didn't have a car back then (you're not allowed to drive with 17 in Germany), so I had to ride the train back and forth and walk three miles from the train station to the Kindergarten back and forth every day. No buses. No bikes allowed in the train. Therefore I had to get up very early in the morning to be there in time, quitting time was at 5, and sometimes I had to wait for an hour to catch a train home. Btw, the walk home was another couple of miles from the train station.

I cried very often while riding home on that train. And I listened to the music on my walkman, mostly to a band called "Simple Minds". To this day, I can't listen to their songs without getting terribly depressed.

Karin

[ntractv]

Abercrombie and Fitch, Georgetown, Washington, DC.

I didn't really mind vacuuming at the close of business. But on day three, they handed me a bathroom cleaning kit. I think I quit at the same time.

Second:

Commander Salamander, Georgetown, Washington, DC

Packing and mailing catalogue orders. Man, that really blew. I didn't really know that people had to have that many buttons on their clothes.

[EyePAQ]

Nailing cross-members to rafters to keep them spaced properly on new houses. I was the smallest in the crew, so I got the job. The roof was just mailed on and tar-papered. I left a trail of sweat on the floor where ever I went. Glad it only lasted a summer. Then I got a job making computer disks and TAPES at Adventure International (remember Scott Adams adventures?) - the rest is history...

[Brad Adrian]

Holy Crap!!!! That was you??? :wink: :lol:
ROTFLMAO!!!!
That's the best laugh I've had for a while, Steve! Thanks!

P.S. I hope you enjoyed the Mad Dog 20/20!

[Steven Cedrone]

P.S. I hope you enjoyed the Mad Dog 20/20

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/cedrones/SchmuckoRat.JPG

:way to go:

Steve

Ripped off the graphic from Schmuck-O Rat Website (http://www.landwaster.com/shmucko.html)

[Ecks]

Janitor!!!!!!!!!!

[eric linsley]

"disclaimer ... yes i know i have horribel grammar and spelling. keep in mind i have been up for to long and my mind is ozzing out of my head"

My last job, although not bad in it self, was being managed by a "Dilbert boss".
If his stupidty didnt effect me directly id be laughing about it.
I as of last week was working at compusa acting as their head tech sales guy"pdas, caermas ect..." And i love the selection of toys. .. um i mean tools.......

Any way hes the type of boss that would go up to me and ask..
"so uh eric what are you doing..., have you done any tags today.."
During this time i would be organizng my Area and making sure the various toys.. um tools were working.
he then asks "If your a customer and in the store what do you want...." hes looking at me at this time with a smugg "im goona boss you around" look execting that hes going to get me to retag a jsut tagged area.
Well i reply to him "If i was customer id want to find what im looking for."
he sputteres for a sec. and tries to complain but sputters more being unable to contradict me.
i continue "...and inorder to find what i want, the product needs to be in a reasonable location"
he sputteres more and is getting irrate at my logic
"Dont get over protective of your area Eric" he says trying to distract unlookers from his Dilbert bosseness
"As well as organized so i cna find related products in those locations." i smile he sputters more and walks off.

I smile i quit 2 days later"5/10" and start working at Office depot the following monday"5/12" at higher pay but fewer toys.

[eric linsley]

now my most intersting job was seling home security systmes door to door.

You WILL meet "people" going to every door on a block.
the most shocking one was when a guy answered the door in ful KKK garb and his "friends getting ready to leave.
for somereason i decided they didnt need security

the other was a old guy answering the door with a shot gun...
"man i wish i coudl do that to tell marketers"

[dma1965]

I would have to say working in a scrapyard at 16 was the worst job I ever had. Tearing apart just about everything for scrap metal value. It toughened me, though.

[cherring]

Packing 25Kg bags of sugar onto pallettes. Each person did 1 container per day. 1 Container holds 20 Tons.

[dMores]

door-to-door acquisition of members for a german nature-preservation-wildlife-fund thing.

the idea behind it was ok, but i wasn't really working for that nature fund, but rather a marketing company that specialized in having austrian students come to germany, then dropping them off in a different town every day and having them go around asking people if they'd want to spend (not very little) money to help their local nature.

which was a scam, pretty much, since the first year of their membership fee would go to the marketing company who would pay me half of that, the fee for the second year would be kept by the marketing company as well, and only if the member would still be around after 3 years would that money be invested in something nature-ish.

i had to lie to people to get them to sign up, it was hot, i had people start a debate on their porch, i had dogs got set onto me (mostly by farmers who thought they were "doing enough for nature" or didn't like the way the nature-fund was against them using chemicals), we'd be in towns with no commercial shops at all, and i never brought a lunch so i would be starved at night, people though we were criminals being re-socialized (or just criminals - period), ...

all in all this experience cost me more money than i earned.

what did i learn ?
if you want to help the environment, plant a tree, reduce waste, whatever. but don't donate money ... it almost never ends up where it's needed the most!

[ricksfiona]

Man, there are some sad stories, but I have to agree with grohl, he really had it tough. Mine:

Physically hard: Unloading delivery trucks at UPS, starting at 3:30am. You'd be TOTALLY exhausted, fingers cut-up/smashed and drenched with sweat - every day. I had never cursed so much in my life while deep in those trucks trying to unload packages as fast as possible. I figured out I should sit at the end of the bus with the window open when taking the bus home in the morning when people started sitting away from me. The money was great and I even thought of becoming a driver. It was just a temporary gig... For the better.

Mentally hard: Doing technical support at an I.S. sweatshop. It was a furious 50-hour a week pace. If I started to rebel, my boss would start to threaten me with write-ups and 'other changes'. I really wanted the job cause I was able to learn a lot and I wanted a spotless work record. I went 4 years before I had enough. It took me about 4 years to recover mentally. At least the I.S. department fell apart when I left. :mrgreen:

I've had other crappy jobs, but I always learned something from them one way or another. I hope I've become a better person from these experiences.

[Andy Sjostrom]

I worked a summer putting cycle wheel spokes in place... wheel after wheel after wheel after wheel...

[andrewlwood]

whoof, this thread is fun...

I worked one month only in the kitchen of an old peoples' nursing home. Job was dreadful - loading dishes into plastic racks, pushing them through a dishwasher and unloading them at the other end.

But what made it REALLY bad was the people (not the old people, they were great). The 'chef' would 'taste' the 'soup' direct from the spoon, then stir it with the same spoon - several times in the course of preparing a meal - and he'd go out for a cigarette and then toss the salad with his hands - that kind of thing :pukeface: . And the other kitchen helper was a 40-something 200lb woman with a mental health problem (quote 'my doctor found me this job') and the libido of a sex-starved husky. About six times I literally had to run away as she tried to corner me (I was 18 at the time and very, VERY scared). :ppclove: :twak:

[WindWalker]

In my high school days, the worst job I had was Park District Maintenance Department employee. This consisted of picking garbage in the parkes with a hocky stick that had the blade hacked off , a nail driven into it and sharpened, and carrying a 20 gallon bucket. Now in and of itself, this was not bad. It was the collecting of garbage bags from the parks that put it near the top. You toss them into the back of your pickup truck, and drive back to your "office." Once there, you toss them into the gigantic dumpster. Of course, everyone throws them ino the same side. So I....the youngest person in the shop and low man on the totem pole, had to climg into the dumpster and "level it out." So there I was, inside a huge dumpster surrounded on all sides by nearly week-old garbage bags, tossing them around to even out the trash. I have never ever experienced anything worse than that on the job, cause I was entriely depended on someone else to get out of that steaming, reeking pit.

As an adult, I have had a pretty decent experience with the exception of working for a private pay telephone company. In the 18 months I was there, 43 different people worked there, no more than 15 at any one time. I was fired for not having the "proper entreprenural spirit" a month and a half before my wedding. Ouch.

Ah well. Now deep into an IT career that I am planning to change, I'm a lot better off now....

[Brian K]

This is a long one. I spent a summer working for minimum wage at a local corrugated cardboard manufacturing facility.

First of all, 8 hour days, no breaks, no lunches. I'm not sure if that was even legal, but that was the policy. Two days after I started, a man lost three toes walking across some rollers embedded in the floor which transported stacks of cardboard to various places in the building. Those rollers where everywhere, and we had to ride them along with the stacks of cardboard to keep the cardboard from falling over.

No airconditioning. Normally not a problem for me, but the equipment used to manufacture the cardboard involved huge rollers heated with boiling water to somewhere around the temperature of the surface of the sun, and the temperature inside the building was routinely above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

I really had three responsibilities, all related to cleaning:

First of all, clean out from under the machines. WHILE they were running. Lying on your stomach with a superheated thousand pound steel cylinder inches from your back spinning at about 2000 rpm while trying to clean out scrap cardboard is not my idea of fun. Neither is doing the same under a machine designed to cut and fold said cardboard. I lost two hats on that second machine, they were snatched right off my head by the high-speed belts. Lucky for me it wasn't my HEAD that got taken off.

Second, I was occasionally (once or twice a month) LOCKED on the roof of the building and instructed to clean out the massive scrap cardboard storage cylinder on the roof, where scrap cardboard was sucked up with some huge vacuum effect and stored till it was compressed into cubes and shipped elsewhere. Of course, this thing would get blocked up, and I'd have to go up with a broom handle/rake/whatever was handy, open the access door, and subject myself to the 60 mph or so wind filled with scraps of blowing cardboard. MAN the paper cuts I got. ANd of course no eye protection was provided, and I had to pick up the scraps that blew out...

Thirdly, I need to give you some background. As far as I could tell, the cardboard was help together by gluing with some sort of natural starch, I think it was potato paste. The waste product was SUPPOSED to drain through a 1 foot wide, 75 foot long trench that varied in depth from one end of 6" to the other end of almost two feet. It eventually drained into a huge underground storage container, where it was pumped out every now and then. Supposedly. Anyway, it was my job (with a shovel with half the handle broken off) to clean out that trench every so often. THAT sucked. Can starch ferment? This crap did. The smells from this slowly flowing, bubbling, brightly colored (due to the dyes used to make colored cardboard) sludge made me want to VOMIT. I'd go home from work stinking like ten thousand pounds of elephant crap, covered with purple/red/green/blue/whatever pieces of half dried sludge all over my clothes, hair, arms, etc.

The final straw?

The ONE time they pumped out the sludge retaining area, they then expected ME to climb down into it and clean out the months-old CRUD accumulating in the corners/on the walls/etc. They rigged up a harnass of some sort for me, that they could pull me back out in case I succumbed to some sort of "fumes". FOr this, they would pay me time and a half.

I took a look down, it seemed to be about ten feet deep. I said sure, I could use the extra two and a half dollars an hour. I jumped down, and found out it was more like twelve to thirteen feet deep. Three feet of it was leftover sludge. I lost two perfectly good workboots in that crud. They had to use the harnass to get me out, because I was mired in purple stinking crap all the way to my crotch. To the best of my knowledge, those boots are still down there.

I was down there for about ten minutes, left for lunch, and never ever went back.

All told, I was there about three months. What an idiot kid I was.

[docnilay]

I don't think I can top most of the postings here (for example Brian K's above)... but for me anyway, working at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington was the best/worst job. It was pure manual labor.... real genuine work!

Tourists would come by all day long to take tours of the park on horseback. Every now and then I'd be lucky enough to lead the tours on horseback, but most of the time, it was just up to me (along with 20 or so other highschool/early college-aged kids) to help care for the horses... clean them, clean out their stalls (man can they make a LOT of waste!), load up new hay...

Every afternoon I'd get back home stinking so bad my mom would hand me a towel and make me strip all my clothes in the garage and jump straight into the shower.... Very different from the nearly "sterile" conditions in my clinic office these days. :)

- Nilay

[brent_anderson]

17 Years old, me and my girlfriend where in LOVE, not the boring kind that adults have, the "TRUE" kind. She was a receptionist for a local plumber and I needed a summer job. Needless to say, because of our desire to never be apart, I took a job as a plumbers helper just to be near my true love.

Do you guys have any idea what a 17 year old plumbers helper who is dating the cute receptionist gets to do for minimum wage? In rural texas, a place who's primary means of waste treatment is the septic tank? With the dreaded grease trap (man I hated those things).

I will spare you the details and just say that I lasted 1 month.

I wonder what she's doing now?

Brent

[Kati Compton]

With all this talk about worst jobs... Has anyone listened to Derek and Clive's "The Worst Job I Ever Had" / "The Worst Job He Ever Had"? :twisted: It's a bit obscure...

[Perry Reed]

Ooh boy, I've had some bad ones. In descending order, the worst three:

Third worst: Working at Jack-In-The-Box (fast food place). Work your ass off for no money and come home smelling like french fries.

Second worst: Paper route. Delivering the papers wasn't so bad, but it was a weekly "volunteer payment" paper, which meant that once a month I had to go around to houses and essentially beg them for money. Yuck!

Absolute worst: Shovelling horse manure into bags for use as fertilizer. Far worse than coming home smelling like french fries...

[Larktown]

My worst job was telemarketing. We would come in early to make phone calls. I would be in at 8am. The numbers were from New Jersey, an hour before us. Yes, Saturday, 7am calling NJ. We would tell that to the boss and he would tell us to just make the calls. These were before the days of computer calling. We would have to enter the Sprint code, then a regular number to call. We would get 1/2 asleep people who would hang up on us as soon as we said "Hi". Others would complain endlessly about us calling that early on a Saturday.

A close second would be delivering flyers for a carpet cleaning company. I was in my early teens and we would meet at the owners home. Only good thing about that was the wife was HOT and usually was just coming down from a shower in her robe. Talk about raging hormones!

[crazy0000]

I worked as a carni for one weekend and let me say it was the longest weekend in my life I got one of the booths that didnt have any shade and I worked 2, 15 hour days

[ctmagnus]

door-to-door acquisition of members for a german nature-preservation-wildlife-fund thing.

Could be worse. The job could have been in, eg, USA/Canada. Try convincing people in one country to support a fund like that in another country ;)

Not that I've ever had to do anything like that.

[Jonathan1]

I was 16 working at Denny's graveyard shift. 6PM to 2AM shift as a busboy\cook. The 2nd to the last straw was busing dishes with a used condom on it. The last straw was cleaning the woman's rest room. Someone had her period and..*sighs* missed the toilet. 2 days later I gave my 2 week notice. Nothing like cleaning up a womans period to make you reevaluate why the bloody (Pun intended.) hell you are still there. After that place it was Toys R Us for 3 years and after that IT intern that turned full time job.

[piperpilot]

Working in the deli at a supermarket. Had two emergency room trips in three months from cutting myself on the slicer, but at least I survived the stint with all ten digits intact! :lol:

[Newsboy]

Best/worst job:

Picking up old schoolbooks for a used textbook reseller. I drove an 8 year old Dodge Caravan across New York State and back (in a day!), looking for schools in the middle of nowhere in the Adirondacks, loaded 1300 pounds of books in the van (totally compressing the rear suspension!) and then drove at 75-80 mph with traffic back down the New York State Thruway.

At about 65 mph the van shook. At about 80 mph I feared for my life, and waited for one of the wheels to fly off.

Pay was $13/hour. To drive around. So, not so terrible after all!

[piperpilot]

The sedond worst job I ever had was working as an attorney in a mega-firm. Massive billable hours and no life!

[Kevin Daly]

There are so many to choose from...but I think it would be one summer while I was at university and ended up working in a converted bunker underground for an office that distributed maps for government departments. Ah the constant paper cuts, the endless paper dust, the idiot littel martinet of a boss, my psychotic co-workers (honestly, the entire handful of permanent workers there seemed to have been selected for the job because they would frighten or possibly attack the public if allowed outside above ground during the hours of daylight).
And spending most of the day folding maps (something which I have now thankfully forgotten how to do).
And all this to raise barely enough money to pay for the French literature texts which I was supposed to be spending the summer holiday reading...(I only passed because of my innate brilliance, of course :D ).

[dcmorris]

I salted cowhides at a tannery in MInnesota for about two weeks. I was in the USAF and needed the extra money(1968). We had to pick up the cowsh*t covered hides carry them into the building, pour salt on them, fold them and repeat until the bundle was about two feet square. Then carry it into another room where it was stored. The cowhides probably weighed around fifty pounds, plus another 10 poundes of cowsh*t, plus another 5 pounds of maggots. Most of these hides came from a rendering plant and no matter how much I showered at night I couldn't get the smell of dead and rotting animals out of my nose. After two weeks I had had all I could take. :?

[opus]

I note that tech jobs seem to be under-represented in this thread.

I worked in Holland for a reseller of an English vertical-market app (for managing printing companies).

Job went like this:

Take a bug report from the top of the stack.
Spend two days hunting through mind-numbing, undocumented code, written by a British lunatic (he had implemented his own windowing system, because he didn't feel any existing libraries were up to his standards).
Find and fix bug.
Take a new bug report from the top of the stack, which has grown since the last time.
continue for the rest of your life, or until you get a new release of the software from England, which will break all of your fixes

I fled after a year or so...

-- Opus

[ethancaine]

Detassling corn was boring, hot, tiring, and fun... we used to walk trough the feilds playing "paperless D&D" all day. Oh and turding in a corn feild is no fun.

Worst job, though, was shovelling pig doodoo. 48 pigs, one 15 year old boy, 7 days in a week, and two weeks of hell.

Oh, and did I mention a salary of $0.00?

My mom decided to move me to a friends house because grounding me wasn't working to fix my attitude. While there, I worked the piggy job.

[Steven Cedrone]

You could spruce up the job a bit by calling it "Planned Parenthood" for corn.

You mean "planted parenthood...."

Ouch! I should be banned for that...

Steve

[karen]

My father was a hunter guide at a upland game birds hunting farm. This meant that they raised ducks, geese, grouse, quail, etc. and fed them everyday at a pond about a mile away from the coops.


Ugh... I, uh... um... Ack.

I think I need to go lie down.

...and that's not even the grossest job I've had...

[karen]

Detassling corn was boring, hot, tiring, and fun... we used to walk trough the feilds playing "paperless D&D" all day. Oh and turding in a corn feild is no fun.



Done that, too. A difficult job, but not terrible.

[Kati Compton]

I think I need to go lie down.

...and that's not even the grossest job I've had...

Oh no. 8O

[karen]

I tried hard to think of a job that was the worst I ever had. I couldn't come up with one and here's why:

I never applied for a job that I didn't think I would enjoy or think I couldn't do.

So, as time went on what it made it the worst job was the bosses I had. I could clean up horse manure from a trough if the boss made me feel needed and appreciated.

As my hubby says: employees don't leave companies; they leave bosses.

[karen]

I quit the day I picked up a dead duck and it was covered in lice the size of ladybugs.

I feel like locking this thread... :pukeface:

I don't think anyone is going to "top" that...

Steve

While I hated the gross factor of the lice, the nightmares I have are of trying to finish off the wounded but not yet dead ones.

Today I can barely squash a bug and I only do THAT in self defense ("Take THAT you d*mn earwig!).

The burden of guilt of a ring-necked neck wringer! :twak:

[McDeb]

1. Line striping parking lots during a very hot summer for less than minimum wage. But, I was only 17 and grateful for the work.

2. I was the only female cook at a well-known restaurant chain. The male cooks could wear pants to work; I had to wear the silly checkered dress. One day boiling hot oil from the fryer splashed me pretty good. My nylons melted to my legs. Ouch!. The next day, a huge bucket of something fell off of the top shelf in the walk-in freezer and landed on my head, knocking me to the floor. I quit a day later before that place killed me.

3. This was not a bad job, just a bad day. For 8 years I worked as a police dispatcher and corrections officer. While booking in a very drunk woman, I was searching her pockets. It dawned on me a second too late that I should be wearing gloves. Submitted into evidence: one moldy chicken leg and a dead goldfish. 8O

[Kati Compton]

While I hated the gross factor of the lice, the nightmares I have are of trying to finish off the wounded but not yet dead ones.

Yes.... That was the part that had me need to take a break just reading about it. I mean, I eat meat. I know it has to get to my table somehow. But I don't like to think about it.

As for grossness, my theory is that as long as I can wash my hands, I'm okay. But reading some of these job descriptions, I'm not sure anymore.... 8O

[Kati Compton]

3. This was not a bad job, just a bad day. For 8 years I worked as a police dispatcher and corrections officer. While booking in a very drunk woman, I was searching her pockets. It dawned on me a second too late that I should be wearing gloves. Submitted into evidence: one moldy chicken leg and a dead goldfish. 8O

Better than finding something sharp!

[yvilla]

I note that tech jobs seem to be under-represented in this thread.

The question was what was the worst job. Your post notwithstanding, tech jobs are unlikely to qualify, imho. :lol:

[eric linsley]

[quote=yawanag]
As my hubby says: employees don't leave companies; they leave bosses.

I definetly agree with that
as my post earlier reflects that.
I enjoyed wrking at compusa for a little over 2 years
i hated working there for the final 9 months..
Argh... I hate Dilbert Bosses..

^ ^
H H
' '
'
___

[tregnier]

US Army, 1967-1970. Need I say more??

[donbacardi]

Worst job I ever had was as a shoe salesman in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I dealt with some difficult, arrogant customers. Many of these customers were foreigners (mainly Europeans) on vacation. Some of them couldn't make up their minds on which pair of shoes to buy. This made me have to make 5-6 trips to the stockroom for this one customer. It wasn't always that bad though. I was only 17 then & some lady customers attempted to "flirt" :lol: with me while in the process. Thus the beginning of learning to be a man. Today, I'm a successful Business Manager in Germany and always look back to those days as a shoe salesman. :beer:

Greeting from Germany !!!

[cyp]

the previous job that I have as an accountant and have to deal with 2 idiots from the IT dept. The head of department knows nothing about IT (well she's the boss's wife, I guess she is entitled to be totally clueless). Her subordinate has the gall to say that as a computer programmer he knows that computer software are never accurate in their calculation and that is why he prefers to do thinks manually! :roll:

The time I was there almost cost me my marriage. Glad I'm out of there.

[Ken Mattern]

Well it has to be either customer telephone support for a bugware company, (one day we actually wrote a program that worked!) Or keeping the sauerkraut stirred in 55 gallon wooden casks in the summertime - without a gas mask! Come to think of it that was the same company where I worked in a huge freezer and my feet froze to the floor. Thankfully I was able to reach the emergency button. :D

[cmchavez]

Probably the worst job was working as an FDA Food Inspector at a Fruit Packing Shed during the summer. In addition to running lab tests, I also had to physically inspect the waste water ponds for the plant. Man, the stink from those things would've warped a motherboard in ten seconds flat! 8O

[toshtoshtosh]

head of the IT department

[orangehat]

pumping gas from 6pm-11pm 5 nights a week to pay rent while going to college many years ago.
or maybe the week or so the boss thought about going all Microsoft, that was pretty depressing too.

[ux4484]

Made the mistake of wearing a "Merry Christmas" pin on Christmas Eve on my jumpsuit on my first job after college (electro-mechanical repair on production equipment). My Jehova's Witness boss saw it and blew a gasket.
He wouldn't talk to me all day, but just kept glaring at the pin whenever I saw him. I took it off by days end (at a co-workers suggestion), but that didn't stop him from assigning me 5 hours of O.T. (I was new, I couldn't refuse) to clean out a Zinc/tin metalization machine's dust control system (requires cartridge air mask and goggles). I went home a blue-grey mess (think coal-miner, but blue) my clothes were trashed and I had to put garbage bags on my car seats to drive home (I there after kept spare clothes at work). I completely missed my families Xmas and was needless to say VERY pissed off.
I continued at the job, and was similarly faith-based punished several other times (made the mistake of buying a co-worker a birthday gift :roll: ). I never really complained to management as it was my first REAL job, he wasn't filing complaints against me, just giving me grunt work, and I didn't want to be labeled a trouble maker. Lucky for me, I wasn't the only one he faith-punished.....he was fired about a year and a half after I started for doing the same crap to others.

[lurch]

Working on a mini assembly line at a bakery, making sure the little pastries made it into the funnel so they could be packaged right. BORING. But it did beat ripping my hands to shreds stiring a gigantic "witches brew"-type pot full of who knows what, for who knows how long. Then when I quit they said "Fine, we actually didn't even need you anyway, we were just doing this as a favor to you and your dad."