Happy Labor Day! What's the worst job you ever had?

[senseandsensibility]

I've peeled onions (yes, peeled onions manually) for a temp agency, and worked in a sauna-like basement loading an enormous dishwasher in hundred degree heat.

But I think the worst job I ever had was a preschool teacher. I had a Masters Degree, yet it paid minimum wage. There no benefits, sick days, or healthcare of course. I had to cook lunch for fifty or so kids every day and clean their bathroom (imagine a huge room with miniature toilets) in my "free time." No breaks of course. Planning activities to do with the children all day? Of course that was my responsibility, but I had to do that on my own time. Good thing I was young, because I was on my feet all day standing in the hot sun, or cooking, or cleaning, or leading activities,, and I was lucky to have a minute or two to use the restroom.

I think the above is the Education "reformers" dream for public education, by the way.

Anyone else want to share their really bad job experiences?

[gopiscrap]

1. Picking dead rats out of bushels of strawberries

that's why I won't eat jam or jelly

[Dreamer Tatum]

2. Worked at a packing supply retailer owned by a racist

who wouldn't even interview non-whites.

So that's all we sent him when people came into the store to ask for a job.

[NightWatcher]

3. One summer I worked at a hospital. I had to scrape out the bio-med incinerator

Normally it was just mopping the halls and dumping the garbage, but once a month they'd shut off the biomedical waste incinerator and it had to be scraped out.

I was 16 btw and a family member got me the job.

I winz this thread.

[theHandpuppet]

4. Cleaning huge sewage valves from tankers (ships)

Really ruined my health.

[Peacetrain]

5. Cleaning mens bathrooms in a huge office complex

40 years ago.

[tridim]

6. Oyster shucker at a restaurant that served lots of oysters. nt

[JeffHead]

7. 2 years in a meat packing plant.

Making sausage batter for Johnsonville brats an Oscar Mayer. Worked on the sow kill floor. Sows walk in and 30 minutes later they leave ground up and chilled in a box. I still think twice when I eat pork of any kind.
I could tell you stories that would curl your toes but I'll spare you the gory details. The experience in 1 word disgusting.

[a la izquierda]

26. Just imagining the horror is why I'm vegan. Nt

[mike_c]

8. laborer for a concrete construction company, in my misspent youth....

I lasted about a week, if I recall correctly.

[Ron Obvious]

9. Night shift at a convenience store

I was all alone managing the store and the gas pumps.

Some of the scariest people shop at night. All sorts of trolls and mutants and people who slept under a bridge during the day would come out at night to visit me. Although I don't remember him, I'm pretty sure the Green River killer shopped at my store as he was working the night shift at the nearby Kenmore truck painting plant and lots of their employees came by.

I worked 7 10 hour nights a week for 3 months straight for $4 an hour, and lived like a zombie during the daylight hours and barely had the energy to look for a better job.

[Art_from_Ark]

24. I was seriously considering a graveyard shift job at a convenience store

during the Reagan Recession, at a time when I was lucky to have $10 in my pocket. But then there was a robbery at the store, and I thought, "Screw this"!

[Jenoch]

34. To be perfectly blunt,

President Obama inherited a recession from W. just as Reagan inherited a recession from President Carter.

[Art_from_Ark]

36. National unemployment hit its post-Depression all-time high in the middle of Reagan's first term

while he was exhorting those of us affected by it to "move to where the jobs are" and "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps".

[Jenoch]

41. I was in college at the time.

My parents had built a townhouse that was supposed to e entally be their retirement home. They borrowed money at 18% to finish it. Inflation was at 12%. i remember getting student loan just to put it in a CD to earn interest. I was paying for college without help from my parents, there were three of us in school at the same time.

[LWolf]

10. I worked many low-wage jobs

as a kid. Before I was legally old enough to work, I babysat, did yard work, exercised horses, cleaned barns...those were all okay.

When I could legally join the work force, I still did all of the above. I also got a job cleaning people's houses for minimum wage. It wasn't a bad job, I just wasn't suited. I'd rather clean a barn than a house. I did it for about 3 months and then quit.

I worked at TG&Y. I waited tables. I tutored. I acted as clerk AND assembly line worker for a tiny, independent solar energy company.

They were all okay. They made a little money, which was the point.

The worst was the job stocking shelves and marking prices at TG&Y. There was nothing terrible about the work; it was just mindless. Boring and isolated.

That and the house cleaning. I just couldn't bring myself to care, or to take pride, in scrubbing people's stuff.

The best? The exercising and barn cleaning for the chance to be outdoors, to be active. Then waiting tables for the $$, and the tutoring for the satisfaction in serving. Learning all about solar energy from the ground up was fun and empowering.

[MineralMan]

11. My Current Job. I Have the Worst Boss.

He sets impossible deadlines for projects, is never satisfied with the work when it's finished, makes me work on outdated equipment in a dark, damp basement, and never gives me a raise.

I'm self-employed.

[onethatcares]

12. picking

fly poo out of pepper until my eyes went bad.

[rustydog]

13. dishwasher and graveyard cook at Dennys!

I had more fun as a teen picking cherries and apples for extra money back in the late 60's, early 70's.

I could not do that very hard work nowadays.

[TBF]

14. I did everything from fast food to clean hotel rooms -

but the 2 worst were as follows:

1) Aide in a psych hospital - I worked for someone else on the weekend (16 hours - 2 8 hr shifts back to back) and it so happened that day that I walked into them finding a patient who had managed to commit suicide during the evening. We held groups all day to deal with the loss. It was horrible.

2) Upper management job in a technology company - they were having financial difficulties and decided to outsource manufacturing and close the plant. They kept part of the company. I worked at home on Fridays because that is the day they'd do the latest lay-offs. I kept looking & finally got out of there before they did the final lay-off. It was brutal knowing from the board meetings which employees were being cut each week.

[Lars39]

15. Painting curbs with my husband.

I didn't get paid, he did, but only slightly more than minimum wage. If I didn't work for free we wouldn't have eaten that summer.

[Zorra]

16. Pruning apple trees in the cold and snow, in a corporate orchard run by a mean, nasty alcoholic

RW racist sexist homophobic bigot from Mississippi.

I also picked strawberries piecework for a week in Oregon, I know it doesn't sound bad but it's really hard, horrible work to do 8 - 10 hrs a day for very little money.

[Logical]

17. I was a tosher in London as a child. Horrible! n-t

[Zorra]

19. You were lucky.

We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/monty-python-four-yorkshiremen.html

[Logical]

21. Sounds worse than mine! :-) n-t

[Recursion]

31. Cardboard box? Aye. You were lucky... (nt)

[polichick]

18. Worked one summer as a hotel maid at the beach...

Sand, sunscreen, alcohol and condoms everywhere!

I was a student and didn't need benefits - though I'm sure there were none. It was great inspiration for staying in school as long as possible.

[senseandsensibility]

22. lol

It was kind of like that for me too. I stayed in school because jobs available were horrible, but when I got out of school they weren't much better.

[Vashta Nerada]

20. Every one of my retail jobs.

If you ever want to feel less-than-human, work a retail job.

[MH1]

23. Call center. Taking orders for Ginsu knives and "prayer" trinkets.

Sundays were the worst. Oh, and Christmas morning. Yes, those 1-800 number folks work on Christmas. I can't express the revulsion I developed for the religious shysters. From listening to people with all kinds of issues tell me their troubles and insist on giving $5 that they probably couldn't afford. And of course my job was to take their money then get them off the phone as quickly as possible, but most sounded really lonely and just wanted someone to talk to. If I didn't get them off the phone quickly enough the supervisor was on my back.

One day I just quit. The economy was less bad then but it was still irresponsible on my part. Oh well. I made it out ok, thankfully.

[Art_from_Ark]

25. My lowest-paying job

was picking blueberries in the hot sun back in 1982. Five hours of work netted me a whopping $6.25 in cash, and a few mouthfuls of blueberries.

[Butterbean]

27. Lunch buffet manager at Pizza Hut. 'Nuff said. n/t

[Behind the Aegis]

28. Telemarketer selling funeral plots.

I quit after 4 hours. I should have taken the escort job, but they insisted I "date" women too.

[Recursion]

29. Cleaning the insides of iron cisterns in the summer in Mississippi

That was really bad

[cantbeserious]

30. Telephone Sales

eom

[Jackpine Radical]

32. Bleeding into the ground out of 3 AK bullet holes

for 24 cents an hour in the middle of the night on a holiday.

I did get medevaced out, though, or I wouldn't be writing this.

[senseandsensibility]

37. Now that's bad

but I'm glad you survived, Jackpine.

[WCGreen]

33. It was my best job...

And my worst....

Delivering singing balloon-a-grams.

It was okay until St. Valentines Day.

[Jackpine Radical]

38. Not THAT St. Valentines Day I trust…

[msanthrope]

35. Diener. That took some getting used to. nt

[Jenoch]

39. I did a lot of farm work as a kid.

Last edited Mon Sep 2, 2013, 11:42 PM - Edit history (1)

I earned $1.80 an hour at age 13 detassling corn. I made less walking beans and baling hay and, once in a while, straw. I remember mowing an acre of lawn once a week for $3. I once painted a shed that hadn't been painted in over 30 years. It sucked up so much paint that I got yelled at for using too much paint. The summer I was 15, I planted 10,000 trees by hand in a wildlife preserve, all by myself. That was the hardest job ever, not because of the physical toll, but because I was doing it alone, all day, everyday.

Are these jobs really all that bad? I would not change anything, they were all character building. I wish my own children had the benefit of farm work as a young teen. All of these jobs were before I got my driver's license at 16 and got my first 'real' job as a radio announcer working midnight to 7am six days a week. I had zero social life that entire summer, but I had a job, on the radio.

[nadinbrzezinski]

40. It was both the best (the people were fun) and worst

you could have.

I worked in a chicken coop.

[NBachers]

42. Working in a Domino's Pizza in Kalamazoo, Michigan for Al and Mary Morrison

Last edited Tue Sep 3, 2013, 01:59 AM - Edit history (1)

Hideous

There was also a Winn Dixie store in Miami- a big closed-up room addition had been filled to the ceiling with cardboard boxes of old used grocery shelving equipment. It had been sealed for a decade or so, and had become the headquarters for the Palmetto Bug Invasion of Planet Earth. My brother Phil and I were given the job of going in and carrying the contents of this room to a dumpster.

Every item we picked up was filled with giant tropical flying palmetto bug roaches that came pouring out and climbing down inside our clothes and tangling into our hair. They had paratrooper roaches that crawled across the ceiling and then dropped down on us. Every step we took was "crunch crunch" of walking across legions of palmetto bug infantry. They tried to climb up our boots and up inside our pantlegs. The carnage continued outside and across the parking lot all the way to the dumpster. Injured troops flailing around and kamikaze bugs flying into us. Panicked swatting of bugs off our selves and their detached legs getting woven into the fabric of our clothes.

It was worse than I am describing here.