Tell me about the worst job you have ever had.

[Wcross]

Back during the regime of Bush the 1st I hit a rough patch and was unemployed, out of options and desperate. I took a job with a temp service and was assigned to Walden books in their distribution warehouse. I picked and packed books. The kick in the knutz was they made you ASK permission to use the bathroom! It was a two week assignment and I left after my two weeks.
I then took a job with a company that made seat frames for automobiles. It was 4pm to 2am in the middle of summer in Tennessee.(no a/c in the plant) My job consisted of inserting small tubes into bigger tubes. When I informed them I was leaving after a month they acted like I was nuts. They said I could "move up" to the welding operation! LOL! I want to breathe welding fumes all night?

[Straight Shooter]

1. Waitress at a Pizza Hut.

Many years ago. One of the customers felt me up and I complained to the manager. He said, "That's part of the job." I said, "Not part of my job." Then I left.

I don't think things have changed much.

[jus_the_facts]

14. Waitress at Pizza Hut here too....

....my experience there wasn't that bad..but the assistant manager told me I had to clock out and finish rollin' silverware and clean the bathrooms and if I didn't the manager would be pissed...I told him there's no way I'm goin' to work off the clock for a second at this shithole...and quit on the spot. :grr:

[skooooo]

2. ugh Kmart Deli....

Working at the Kmart Deli in the late 80s was the pits.

[charlie and algernon]

3. picking up garbage at Penske's Indy car VIP tent

Worked almost 10 hours in Richard Penske's VIP tent during an Indy car race. Had to clean tables and empty the trash cans while his rich friends ate and watched the race on a massive big screen (which we weren't allowed to watch). of course, while he, and his drivers, were in the tent, none of them came over to us working his tent.

[Seabiscuit]

4. Selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners door-to-door.

I lasted 2 weeks and sold a hose. Made about $6.00.

[bettyellen]

15. oh damn, that did suck.

[Nikia]

5. They all sucked in their own way, but I think this was worst

I had a temp assignment grinding candy, like for blizzards and flurries, at this warehouse. The warehouse was extremely hot because it was summer and it had no air conditioning or good air circulation or open windows. We, a young woman and myself, had to haul 50 pound boxes of candy bars from the warehouse into the cooler so that they would be cold enough to grind. The cooler was overly crowded and very cold. Then we would haul the boxes out of the cooler that we had to grind because of the space issue and unwrap the candy bars in the warehouse. We would bring these boxes back. Then we would grind the candy.
The grinders looked like minature wood chippers. There were no guards on the machine because they broke and the company didn't want to replace them. We protected ourselves from flying chocolate with cardboard. By the end of the shift, the cooler was covered with chocolate which clung to cardboard dust. We then had to clean it.
We tried to stay away from the superviser because he was always yelling about something that didn't seem to make any sense.
I had the job 9 years ago as a summer job. It paid only $5.20/hour. My coworker was 19 and married with a baby. Her husband had lost his job because he missed a day without a doctor's excuse. They both had been foster children so they didn't really have family to help them. She had been employed there since April. She said that she had gone through 5 different coworkers. Two of them quit. The other three had substained injuries that kept them from coming back. Her last coworker had broke her leg when she slipped on chocolate.
I had quit at the end of the week. I had another temp assignment. I felt bad because my father was going to try to get the woman a job at his plant if I had the contact information, which I hadn't. I couldn't work at my dad's plant because they had a strict anti neopotism policy.

[ccjlld]

6. Roguing Milo and de-tasseling corn

one summer for Garst and Thomas seed company.

This was in southwestern Kansas in the 70's and it was the only job you could legally be hired for if you were under 16.

Mud (from overzealous irrigating), rattlesnakes, 100 degree temps, having to get up at 5:00 am, leaves of corn plants (which are sharp!) hitting you in the face.....not fun!

[rug]

7. Squeezing unformed eggs out of dead chickens before processing

[Chicago Democrat]

8. Whore

totally sucks

[Graf Orlok]

9. My time as a retail drone at KMart.

Ugh. I hate that store. I'll never walk back in one ever again.

[Wcross]

27. I went to a K-mart yesterday (saturday).

It was a ghost town. There were more employees than shoppers. It was kind of sad, I think there is no saving Kmart from the grave.

[freethought]

10. Hot top/asphalt paving in the dead of summer!

It was just after I graduated college and I needed to bring in some money. I wound up working for this landscaper/lawncare/paver, driveways and stuff. You get to hall around this very heavy wheelbarrows of smoking hot aslphalt in July and August of the New England summer. I would come home so drained and tired. What was weird was if you sat down to relax various muscles would start twitching. My mom insisted that I take a bath when I got home she wouldn't let me touch anything.
For a particular period they gave me a sledge hammer and said (no joke) turn those big rocks into small rocks. That's what I did for several days. Had I wanted to I could have reported the asshole boss/owner to I.N.S. He used undocumented Brazilian workers for the lion's share of the work but he never had them around when clients were going to be at home. The reason why I didn't was because these Brazilian guys were working their f_____g asses off! Most of them had more than one job!! They were also alot nicer than he was. I would have hated to see these guys get the rap for this asshole boss.

[pink-o]

11. Enumerator for the San Mateo (California) County Census Board

I had to go door-to-door, ring the bell and get statistics on the neighbourhood residents. The questions we asked were: Are you the lady of the house? Are you married to the man of the house? If no man, are you divorced, widowed or never married? How much do you make annually? How do you classify your job?

Nice, huh? It was the early 70 and I was 17; no one thought twice about sending a young girl into strange neighbourhoods. And when the door wasn't getting slammed in my face, women were pulling me into their living rooms to cry or scream about how the "man of the house" done them wrong. My ears were bleeding over the stories of deadbeat dads and drunks.

But I stuck with it, because I wanted to live in England after I graduated, and my parents refused to give me money for that (college was okay, though.) so I had to save up enough for a plane ticket. Looking back, I don't know how I ever got thru it.

But I bought my ticket and spent 5 years in the UK. Best move I ever made!

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

12. There's been something to enjoy in every job I've ever had.

And I've had a LOT of jobs over the years.

[bettyellen]

13. i was a waitress in a healthclub on 5th avenue. rudest people i ever

served. it was also not a permitted resturant. i should have told the health dept. assholes.

[Omphaloskepsis]

16. Warehouse at Nordstrom's..

removing the plastic from clothing. The clothing would come by on a overhead track. (like at a dry cleaning place) We would have to pull the plastic wrapping down and throw it away. It was never ending. The really shitty part was the shock from the static you would get from the plastic rubbing on plastic. I lasted about a week.

[marigold20]

17. Customer service at a mail order company

We had to answer customer complaints - answering with handwritten letters. We had to supply our own pens! They were upset because some people couldn't spell, so they bought several cheap, paperback dictionaries and locked them in a closet. If you needed one you had to ask a supervisor. Oy.

[Darth_Kitten]

18. I work at it now.

I hate/disrespect/cannot tolerate nearly all of the individuals, save one or two, in my section.

The nastiest, meanest, most self serving insecure people you will ever want not to work with.

I so aim to get out of my section, yes, I'm putting in my applications. :)

[SeattleGirl]

19. Not a job, but something I had to do for my job

Part of my job involves going on-site to different employers and getting information on specific jobs. I had a client once who worked in a sausage casing company. I went in to the reception area, and no problem. Then I had to go to the back where they cleaned the casings (ya'll know what casings are made of, right?). The absolutely most putrid, nasty smell EVER! I was in there for half an hour, and think I took the minimal amount of breaths necessary to keep myself alive. That smell was in my nose of days, and it also took days for me to not be nauseated any more! GACK!

Fortunately, most of these employer visits have been pretty cool, like when I used to do a lot of Boeing case work, and crawled around in 747's; when I did one for a client who cleaned trash and empty food trays out of airplanes at SeaTac Airport and got to help hook a 737 up to a tug (the little vehicles that tow the planes); and to a flour plant, and so many different things. I love seeing how things are done, but no more sausage casing factories for me!

[DanCa]

20. working at ziebart

That smell was terrible no matter how many showers i took it wouldnt go away.

[knowbody0]

21. milking the neighbor's goats

PfuckinU

[Redstone]

22. Besides the one where I was getting shot at, I'd have to say

the summer I worked in a cardboard-box factory. My first assignment, with my friend Mike McNaul, was to clean out a room about 40 by 40 feet that had been used to store odds and bits or cardboard to a depth of about six feet, and had been hit by a flood.

Yuck. Did I mention that was a summer when we had heat wave after heat wave, all summer long?

Redstone

[NNadir]

23. Wiping grease off of chain saws.

I was in my early twenties and I was broke and needed money.

Also when I was a kid I once worked in a pharmacy where we filled prescriptions for nursing homes. Everyone was on thorazine. The idea when one thought of it, was to keep the old folks docile for simpler warehousing. I'd call the doctors for refills and no one gave a shit. The moral stain of working there proved to be too much - the owner of the pharmacy was a morally vacuous psychopath - one is reminded of a Bush type - and I quit after a few weeks. I still shiver.

I own my own company now, and I expect that this business will go sweetly and treat me very well.

[bikebloke]

24. Chicken Incubator

On a kibbutz. After hatching, we had to empty the trays filled with egg shells and dead chooks into a dumpster. Then use a pressure hose to clean the trays. Occasionally, there were live chooks left in the trays for the dumpster. Deformed or spotted for an early death. A couple Swiss blokes rescued a couple. Sure enough, they didn't last long. I tried giving them a chance by tossing them outside. But then cats as big as lions leaped out and grabbed them. So I saved a few by putting them in the rain gutter.

We started at 4 am. Later, we were served breakfast. Eggs!!!!

[Wapsie B]

25. Nursing Assistant.

It was a dirty, very physical job. I applaud those that can do it. The one positive is that it showed me that I shouldn't go to nursing school. In every job I've had even now there's been this feeling that I belong somewhere else. But as to where is the question of my life. Well one of the biggies anyway. It seems I've been highly successful at finding out what I don't want to do.

[bearfan454]

26. I worked at a cement factory one summer

We were down in a pit shoveling rocks onto a conveyor line and the foreman was above us yelling shovel faster and put more on your shovel. That was the worst physical job I ever had.

Tyco really sucked too. We made circuit boards for cruise missiles. The people there didn't give a fuck about quality or anything else. They just had little political wars and manipulated the managers.

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

28. Picking peppers in the middle of an Australian summer

Was sleeping in a tiny caravan, had to get up at 4am & didn't get home until just after 6. There was a tractor with a beam that extended across the rows of peppers and we had to meets its pace otherwise we got smacked on the back. To pick you had to bend over which fucked your back after about an hour. There was a 5-minute break in the morning, 20 mins for lunch & another 5-minute break in the afternoon. The temperature was between 35-40 degrees & I burnt to a crisp. I lasted exactly 100 hours (at which point you got a bonus) paid at $10 an hour from which they deducted $2 for various exploitational reasons.