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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsToday's game is "Worst Job You've Ever Had."
My turn first.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I got a job on the maintenance crew at a camp in the middle of the mountains in Colorado. Absolutely gorgeous location, perfect air, and the kind of swing-a-sledgehammer work I loved as a teenager. I put fifteen pounds of muscle on building a couple of log-cabin dorms for the campers, laying a pathway, clearing brush, etc. It was grand.
But.
The camp was built on top of a 600-foot peak, and the septic system was like something out of Dante's Inferno. Everything that got flushed down a toilet wound up in a poop lake about the size of two Olympic swimming pools, where it would get gnawed on by incredibly lethal bacteria before eventually leaching down the rest of the hill.
On three separate occasions, the camp became too crowded for the system, and it got overloaded...so we happy few on the maintenance crew were tasked with going down to the poop lake, climbing into aluminum rowboats with pool skimmers and galvanized trash barrels, whereupon we would skim giant chunks of shit, used tampons and whatever else we could out of the pond and into the barrels. The guys in charge of our crew made it abundantly clear that the pond was so phenomenally toxic that if we fell in, we'd be dead before we got to the hospital.
The second time we had to do it, one of the guys on the crew became so thoroughly horrified and disgusted that he snapped and started lacrossing chunks of shit at the rest of us with his pool skimmer. We took shelter behind an upended rowboat until someone tackled him and took the skimmer away.
...and, as ever, the third time was the charm. The camp had a set menu for every day of the week. Monday was burgers, Tuesday was fried chicken, Wednesday was spaghetti, Thursday was barbecue night with a mishmash of meats, cornbread, and corn on the cob, etc. etc. etc.
Well, the third time we had to skim the Pool of Doom was a Friday morning. The night before, every camper and employee had enjoyed their barbecue dinner, including that corn on the cob...and then, in the normal course of things, everyone pooped.
Corn passes whole through the digestive system. It is not broken down. When we got to the pool that Friday morning, it was a sea of yellow, undigested corn...and we had to get every bit of it out because it was jamming up the system.
Your turn.
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The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,683 posts)My bad jobs were either boring or involved insane bosses or low-level but annoying sexual harassment. Not vast lakes of poo.
LaurenG
(24,841 posts)I was going to say I worked at McDonald's for a while and it made me physically ill. 8 hours of really hard work and no chance to sit and relax plus the smell of my uniform when I got home was awful. In the scheme of things not really that bad. Its all relative.
Chan790
(20,176 posts)That was the best day of that job. They had the audacity to ask if I was willing to donate my paycheck after they fired me. I was like "fuck no"
countryjake
(8,554 posts)No way could I ever compare to you on that terrible task, however, being a housekeeper, I've had my own horrific run-ins with pure shit... undiluted, unadulterated, rubber-gloves-simply-not-adequate stinking messes. Crap like that has never bothered me, luckily.
Back when I was pretty young, I got a job at a hatchery. Anyone else who's done the same, will probably understand why I thought it was the nightmare job. I was positioned on a line to shoot the newborn peeps with a big hypodermic full of whatever was the poison du jour and to sort out any "defective" ones as they came along. Had to toss those into a barrel, where they would be thrown out with the rest of the trash at the end of the shift. I didn't last long there, but I did acquire quite a large flock of nice chickens (defects and all).
Listening to the sounds coming from that barrel, the dying smothered smooshed chicks, all day, is still one of the worst things I have ever done for a living.
whistler162
(11,155 posts)paid great but the overtime was a killer. About 6 hours a day for the 4 days I could handle it.
bigwillq
(72,790 posts)I was an office aide. That part of the job wasn't so bad. I just didn't like being around death and sickness.
jrandom421
(1,003 posts)I was an orderly at one of the first pediatric hospice units. The turnover was what got to me. Finally, one week we had a 200% turnover in patients. That means all the patients there on Monday were gone, and replaced by other patients, who were all replaced by Friday.
That's the day I quit and spent a month in a bottle, trying to forget all the faces and names that I met there.
femmocrat
(28,394 posts)We made 22 cents an hour plus tips. I always worked split shift-- breakfast and dinner-- so it took all day. It was hard, miserable work and I made no money.
But -- I am a really good tipper as a result.
Taitertots
(7,745 posts)Squatters had been using the basement as their toilet for several years. They had also been using it as a garbage dump, so it was filled with broken glass and needles.
I was never asked to go into that hell hole.
struggle4progress
(118,282 posts)like that: it had been used as a squat but then the doors had been locked and nobody had keys. We disassembled a small high window in a side door; she climbed up, crawled through, and unlocked the front door. But it was a duplex, and we had to get into the other side as well. The plan was to slice through two sheets of dry wall somewhere in order to access the other side. So I went in, and we decided the best plan was to cut through a closet wall. The odor was foul, because the squatters had used various places as toilets. I don't think it really took all that long to cut through the drywall and crawl through to the other side, but it was one of the longest small jobs of my life. And the other side was even stinkier. We got the second front door unlocked and scrammed
I never actually did any of the rehab work on that place, but I was doing campaigning work on that street for a school board candidate a few weeks back, and fifteen years later it looks fine. Habitat turned it into a single family residence and built a two-story in the vacant lot next door
NightWatcher
(39,343 posts)I was 16 at the time and every summer kids of employees were given jobs at the hospital.
I swept and mopped the halls of hospital, emptied the trash, stocked the bathrooms.....
But twice a month, me and the other summer worker had to turn off the biomedical incinerator, wait for it to cool, and scrape the crud off the inside with a hand scraper. The incinerator was where we threw away all the biomedical waste.
Once I was emptying the trash near labor and delivery and spilled a tupperwear bowl full placenta and afterbirth all over myself. I slipped and fell on the floor just like they do in slapstick comedy. I regularly took a shower or two a day at work due to some kind of nasty mess.
Texasgal
(17,045 posts)
benld74
(9,904 posts)Laborer at a refinery in the early 80's. Father worked there for 25 years and got me on for 2 summers allowing me to earn enough money($7.50 per hour) to pay for rent during my last 2 years of college. BUT the laborer jobs were the shit jobs. Shovel spreading white chat rock around boilers inside the plant making them pretty. There absolute worse of the lot was oiling the fire walls around the oil tanks to keep weeds killed off.
Both summers topped out at 100 degrees. The chosen garb for the oilers? Helmet, with plastic face shield down to your neck. Coveralls. Rubber boots. Rubber gloves. And the oil that came out of the 20 foot wand was 150 degrees!
Refinery had water coolers filled with crushed ice and 10 oz water cartons. We went thru 4 coolers each day, mainly opening the cartons and pouring the water down the inside of the front of the coveralls. I would drop around 5-10 pounds each day, but I was also in my early 20's.
DAMN that was hot. I can still feel the heat.
elleng
(130,895 posts)HANDS DOWN!
hay rick
(7,608 posts)I worked for a company that made courtesy coffee packs for motel chains. They made individual foil packages of instant coffee, creamer, and sugar using custom foil supplied by the chains. They also made a combo pack that included coffee, creamer, sugar...and a stir stick. Myself and another guy took turns doing one of two jobs for 2 hours- and then we would switch. Job one was to keep the hoppers full of product and the machine loaded with foil. This was done in a room that was sealed off from the warehouse, so it got really dusty. But that wasn't the worst part of the job. Job two was- stir stick feeder. The automatic feeder for stir sticks was broken, so you would take a box of 10,000 stir sticks, climb on top of the machine, and feed the stir sticks one at a time into a slot for the next two hours. I worked there for a couple of months and they never fixed the stir stick feeder. Cherry on the sundae- the radio was tuned to a station that played "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife" at least once an hour.
Mr.Bill
(24,284 posts)when I had a massive hangover was pretty bad.
bluedigger
(17,086 posts)Over 4,000 human remains. I'll spare you the details.
Rhiannon12866
(205,289 posts)
My first real summer job was portraying Cinderella at an amusement park. I was out in the hot sun wearing a long dress, riding around in circles, with hundreds of little kids, in a pumpkin coach...
raptor_rider
(1,014 posts)The main vet was a Prick!!! He was spanish, and that was when I felt racist against whites. Both my sister and I worked there. He would cuss us out in Spanish, though he did not know that my sister knew. So we'd go back in German, and get him.
hat being said, it was the animals. to be the Parvo person for the day, you couldn't touch another animal, even tough you cleaned you hands. Had to change out IV's, clean the cages when they messed. Oh the smell... Damn.
The worst was maggot infested animals. We are real close to the Navajo Reservation, and they are the worst for setting out stays.
Turbo was a 150lb Rott. Myself, was only about 120, my sister was about 100. The vet put him down in the cage, and didn't let us know. we had to bag him (we put all animals that had passed, in the freezer,) and take him out, over 1000ft away to the said freezer. It took us over an hour to do that, and clean his cage area, since he was infested with maggots. Ew ew ew!!!
My favorite was this kitten. He was slated for being put to sleep, as to where a door slammed on his spine, breaking it in half. Couldn't move his back legs. The vet said we'd give it week, and see on how he was doing. I kept him with me in my smock, for the entire week. Feed him, made him go potty. You name it, I did it. Then the day came, and I felt his back feet moving. (He was paralized from the waist down.) I made the vet take another xray, to be sure, before putting him down. Sure enough, his spine had fused back together, and was a kitten again. No one else did that, but me.
Shit, I still fed the horses. I'm very allergic to any type of grass. Broke out in hives and suffered the sinus problems from it, however I love my animals.
My overall experience with working there was good, just didn't like being talked down to from the owner. Just being talked to the way that we were for being white, since he was Spanish, really hurt, however, I've grown from that, and have scene past that. Made me grow as a person that I am now.
Side note: I didn't last there for 3 months. I just couldn't take getting in love with an animal, that I had to help put down. Breaks the heart too much!!!
jmowreader
(50,557 posts)This job had two parts.
The first was the easy one: go to the medical clinic every week on Thursday, pick up a report on all the soldiers in the unit who'd been treated for VD over the past week, and draw an issue of condoms to put on the barracks sergeant's desk in case anyone wanted any. Then you'd take the VD report to the company commander.
The bad part is if anyone actually caught VD. The primary source of VD among US Forces Korea soldiers in 1984-85 was, as you'd expect, prostitutes. If a guy came down with the shit, he would have to report to the unit VD NCO. You would then go to the motor pool and get a Korean soldier (they were called KATUSAs - Korean Augmentation to the United States Army), then go to the part of town where the brothels were. You then conducted a search for the woman who infected your troop. When you found her, you got the KATUSA to confiscate her health card and get her personal information. Before the Olympics destroyed the Real Korea, prostitution was a licensed trade, and part of the license was to go to the doctor once a week for a physical. IIRC they were tested for gonorrhea weekly, syphilis and herpes monthly. If she didn't have her card, she couldn't work. So you'd wander all over whatever district this asshole claims to have caught VD in, wait till he points out a woman (who, in all likelihood, wasn't the right one) and deprive her of her ability to earn a living for at least a week. Then you'd turn the information in to the neighborhood police box. And I think you know the downside of this: because there were no repercussions for blaming the wrong woman for your present condition, some guys who had received less-than-stellar service would go get the clap on purpose so they could go downtown and claim the women they didn't like had done it.
Here's the worst one: I had a boneheaded moran decide to go to the Turkey Farm in Dongduchon. This place was off limits because it had the highest VD rate in the entire world, but this guy went anyway - and had sex without a rubber. Let's just say he got his money's worth. He also got a field grade Article 15 for violating a direct order. He got busted from PFC to no-stripe private, lost two weeks' pay, got a month's restriction to quarters, and the colonel read a sheet of paper he wanted me to have put in the guy's medical records ordering the Medical Corps to cut his dick off if he ever comes down with VD again. After the guy left the colonel's office I told the colonel (who eventually retired as a three-star - great guy, really weird sense of humor) we couldn't order the medics to cut off someone's dick. "I know that, but he doesn't."
davidpdx
(22,000 posts)Which years were you here? I came here at the beginning of 2004 and am still here.
My wife told me when she was in college the area around Hoegi Station (Line 1) was a huge red light district. Her school is in that area (in fact I worked there awhile and we lived in that neighborhood). You can still see a few remnant of what use to be there, but the area has changed quite a bit.
jmowreader
(50,557 posts)I was on Yongsan. I haven't been back, but should go.
IdaBriggs
(10,559 posts)and let me tell you - your story has certainly helped put my experience in perspective!
You win, dude. Oh my heavens, YOU WIN!
alarimer
(16,245 posts)I've done retail, but that's as bad as it got for me.
Brigid
(17,621 posts) 
mike_c
(36,281 posts)When I was in grad school at the University of Georgia, a friend of mine was dating a woman whose parents owned a chicken farm that was affiliated with one of the big eastern egg producers. The chickens lived in football field length barn like structures with a central aisle from one end to the other flanked by long platform "bays" on each side that were elevated about five feet above the concrete floor. The chickens lived on those platforms, behind a wire fence that kept them out of the central aisle. Spent their entire lives there, actually.
This particular farm was for egg production, so the way it worked is that the company provided young chickens once each year that were delivered in trucks. The trucks backed up to a door at the end of each football field length platform and disgorged their load of chicks onto each platform. The platforms also held feeders that dispensed chicken food and water, and nest boxes where chickens laid their eggs onto conveyers that brought the eggs to a processing room at one end of the structure. The chickens lived on their long platforms for one year, happily eating the chicken food, producing eggs, and yes, pooping and pissing wet, slimy chicken shit from their beady little cloacas. The whole operation was designed to maximize egg production--during their most productive year the chickens laid eggs that were collected and graded daily, then at the end of that year they were herded back out through the doors at the ends of the platform and back onto trucks, which took them away to be converted into dog food or something similarly nasty.
The height of the platforms above the concrete floors was precisely calculated to hold exactly on year's worth of chicken poop and piss produced by however many thousands of chickens occupied each platform during each year. And at the end of each year, after the chickens had been herded out into trucks and dispatched to the dog food factory, those platforms had to be disassembled and the 100 meter by 4 foot deep by 10 foot or so wide mass of gently jiggling chicken shit on each side of the central aisle had to be scooped out and disposed of before the whole place could be hosed out and then reassembled in preparation for the next year's batch of chickens.
As a grad student, I needed money. My buddy's girlfriend's parents needed someone to clean out two of their chicken houses, preferably someone who had never done it before so that they'd be ignorant of the utter horror to come.
When we opened the first chicken house, it smelled, but wasn't too bad. It was dark inside, so we couldn't see much through the open door. Wearing old clothes and work gloves, we entered the barn, walking down the center aisle. About ten steps in our eyes began to adjust to the darkness just as the stench hit full force. The ammonia smell was so strong that my throat literally seized up. Once I began breathing again, the stench was indescribable.
The first job was to disassemble the platforms on each side of the central aisle, which were heavy wooden and metal slatted "floors" over the jiggling mass of liquid chicken waste. The chickens simply pooped and pissed whenever the need occurred, and most of the waste dripped through the slats into the accumulating mass beneath, but of course the platform sections themselves were utterly covered in soft chicken shit. We had to disassemble each one while standing on it, then moving to the next so that the disassembled sections could be removed, so we were always just one step from the four foot deep lake of semi-liquid chicken shit, which jiggled and rippled like thin gelatin whenever something vibrated the structure or, god help me, fell into the poop. Often when we lifted sections of flooring we found chickens stuck in the shit lake who had managed to work their way between the slats or something when the others were driven out onto trucks, and we had to somehow kill those poor chickens as humanely as possible, which meant, if you could reach them, grabbing whatever was above the top of the shit and lifting the poor chicken out, weakly spraying shit everywhich way, then breaking its neck, all while trying to keep as much of the shit off of yourself as possible. Other times there was no way to reach the unfortunate chicken, and the only recourse was to use a long stick or something to push its head beneath the surface and drown it in shit and piss.
After removing all the platforms, and don't forget the stench-that-is-beyond-all-description, we used Bobcat type loaders to scoop up bucket loads of gelatinous semi-liquid chicken poop by the cubic yard, which we emptied into wagons that the owner pulled somewhere else and did something with. I never followed to find out the fate of all that chicken poop-- by ten minutes into the first day all I wanted was to finish the day and ultimately, the job. Anything that added even one minute to the amount of time I spent in those chicken houses was unacceptable.
It took six days for three of us to finish both chicken houses. After it was over, I threw away the work clothes I'd worn-- they might have been salvageable, but I was never going to wear them again.
Worst job, ever.
Brigid
(17,621 posts)We might have to empanel a jury to choose our winner. 
Seriously, you probably should have been using a respirator. Don't cavers do that in caves that are really, really full of bat guano, for the same reason?
mike_c
(36,281 posts)Ugh. Twenty five years later it STILL creeps me out.
struggle4progress
(118,282 posts)WilliamPitt
(58,179 posts)Jesus H. Christ, mike. Wow.
mike_c
(36,281 posts)I'll never forget that first slap-in-the-face breath of ammonia.
struggle4progress
(118,282 posts)with six or seven inches of flushed material
The obstruction, unfortunately, was upstream from all accesses to the pipe
So I got to wade in the basement, seeking the submerged floor drains, and try to introduce caustic soda down into the submerged drains, in hopes of dissolving whatever clot had formed in the pipes
It was a less-than-optimal experience in so many ways: one had not only the olfactory joy of slogging in ripening sewage but the need to be extraordinarily careful with NaOH, which is very nasty stuff: you need to be very cautious to avoid dust from the pellets, and there's a strong exothermic reaction with water, which can produce a caustic vapor
Eventually I succeeded. I remember throwing away my clothes. I don't remember cleaning the basement afterwards: I think the boss probably decided if I'd slogged around for hours trying to unplug the pipes, he could detail some other some other goobers to scrub everything down
That was disgusting, but it wasn't as disgusting as regularly cleaning the grease-trap for the dining hall dish sinks: the water drained into large a two-part concrete box, the first chamber of which by design trapped food particles and grease, so the liquid could be processed by the septic tank. I did this a number of times: it involved scooping out bucket after bucket of rotting greasy whatever, and the foul odor really was retch-inducing
In comparison to either of those, pumping out the septic tank was a breeze: you'd just pop off the cap, run a tube into the sludge at the bottom, run the other end into the irrigation ditch, and flip on the pump. There was a light digested-sewage odor, but it was refreshing in comparison to the other two. One day we were doing this when a biker gang drove onto the ranch from the highway and headed for the irrigation ditch, a quarter mile or so downstream from us. When the boss realized what was about to happen, he took off running, waving and shouting, to warn them, but they all began drinking from the ditch long before he got within earshot -- and he decided it was too late for the bad news to be worth delivering so turned and came back. Just another ten miles on their choppers would have taken them into town; or, if they'd had the courtesy to ask for it, we'd have given them fresh water to drink
Populist_Prole
(5,364 posts)Worst job was, of all things, a busboy in a nice Italian restaurant while in high school. I quit after several days not because it was hard work ( which it was ) but mostly for the grueling schedule ( right after school till midnight ) and my awkward feelings of interacting with people ( the patrons, not the staff/owner )
While I am a definite "Type B" I am sociable when comfortable, but the pressure of always being "on" in the work setting was very stressful for me.
Mild I know, but I'd rather shovel shite for 8 hours/day than be obsequious and charming for twice the money.
LiberalEsto
(22,845 posts)Among my various jobs that summer-- between my freshman and sophomore years of college -- was a stint as a sales clerk at a head shop called Media 1 Stop in downtown New Brunswick, NJ.
The place sold bell-bottom jeans, denim shirts, tee-shirts, vests, jackets, leather sandals and belts, funky hats, woven shoulder bags, incense, rolling papers, candles, cheap jewelry, posters, records and more to the college students and townies. We had all the latest styles, Jeans were about $6 a pair, not that I could afford them. I was struggling to support myself while working on the Summer Mobe anti-war movement. The pay was terrible and the sales commissions were miniscule.
After a couple of weeks, the manager, an unattractive overweight guy with a beard, tried to drag me into a dressing room for a makeout session. I resisted. To retaliate, he cranked up the volume on the sound system whenever I was talking with a potential customer, ruining a number of sales. When I complained, he told me I could put out or shut up. I quit. This was long before women had any kind of rights in the workplace,
A couple of days later the owner called and hired me back, saying he had fired the manager for harassing me. One of my co-workers, who also was harassed by the manager, complained to the owner on behalf of both of us. So I went back.
As it turned out, I only worked there for a couple more days.
One morning shortly after we'd opened, a sheriff's department officer walked through the door and yelled "Police!" We started giggling. The guy got red-faced and yelled,
"This is no joke! This is the FBI!"
And so it was.
City cops, sheriff's officers, state police, FBI agents, every conceivable kind of cop piled in through the doors and started searching the place. They had a field day ripping through the posters and rolling papers. The head FBI guy had a search warrant and a warrant for the owners' arrests. But the owners had evidently skipped town the night before and left the clerks and acting manager holding the bag. The owners were wanted for tax evasion.
The cops were furious that not only couldn't they make the arrests, but they couldn't find even a single marijuana seed on the premises. They looked us over and told us to clear out. We were relieved to escape being arrested.
I found another job, this time as a sales clerk at a department store. But my troubles with the head shop weren't over.
Even though the owner had taken out a portion of my pathetic pay as income tax, he kept the money instead of paying it to the IRA, the bastard. So the itty-bitty little tax refund I would have gotten helped finance his getaway instead of helping pay my college expenses. It probably would have paid for a couple of packets of ZigZag rolling papers.
kwassa
(23,340 posts)though there are already two winning entries.