What was your worst job?

[AngryAmish]

I had a lot of jobs over the years...in somewhat order caddy, caddymaster jr, laborer, college bookstore employee, stationary engineer jr, truck driver helper, truck driver, painter, laborer, pizzamaker, telephone survey taker, dishwasher, waiter, economist (very briefly) and lawyer.

Some sucked real bad (some jobs as lawyer, bookstore) and some were great (caddy, lawyer)

Anyway: what was your worst job?

[ixion]

1. managing a hotel on Miami beach

it paid nothing, required long hours, and the guy who owned the place was a complete ass.

[Brickbat]

2. I dislike classifying jobs as "worst." Some jobs are good for people at certain times.

Some jobs are good for some people and not others. These threads sometimes move into classism and class privilege, and I hate to see that. Contempt for certain jobs and professions easily turns into contempt for the people doing those jobs and in those professions.

[hfojvt]

46. speaking as a guy with a fairly crappy job

I think that is ridiculous. I have nothing but respect and compassion for people who do what I consider to be worse jobs - tougher or crappier. It certainly does not bother me if people realize that my job is crappy and have some respect and compassion for me because I sorta have to do it.

[Brickbat]

48. Fair enough.

[Hekate]

64. No contempt on my part, just recognition that some were hard, unpleasant, AND I wasn't good at them

Canning pineapple, for instance. And waitressing. My brief experience as a waitress taught me to respect those ladies forevermore.

[Brickbat]

66. That's what I'm saying. The job was bad for you.

It's just the qualifying I'm looking for, is all.

[LARED]

3. Picking strawberries

Lasted one day.

Next in line was working on a cup inking machine. Again lasted one day.

Worst longer than one day job was working under a pier repairing it. Very dangerous and boss never heard of OHSA or safety equipment.

[AngryAmish]

7. Changing sprinkler heads standing on a 6 inch beam 40 feet up in July

The sprinkler line was seated in wood with dry rot so no handhold. Grab line with one hand and crank against myself to get heads off.

Scariest day of work in my life - no safety lines.

I was 19 and making 12 bucks an hour. (good money)

[madmax]

4. Motherhood

If I knew then, what I know now - I'd have raised Yorkshire Terriors.

[babydollhead]

61. I almost said, "Being a Mom"

Whew! Ahoy from the land of the lost. Here's where I am, on the trip I CHOSE on purpose. Thrice.
Now "they" are 18, 17, 14. This is what my own Mother smirks about and mutters, "Paybacks", or she'll say, "You plant corn, you get corn." Since I am frequently reminded by my children, (who REALLY USED TO SALIVATE, with joy, when I entered the room.) Just how much I do not know.

[Hekate]

67. My kids are 32 and 34 and I am grateful that Mother Nature has ensured I'll never do that again

I wanted them desperately, and I love them a lot, but good lord.
>No further comments. delete delete delete<

Hekate

[madmax]

93. lol I agree

I only had one. The powers that be knew he'd be enough.

Now he has a 20 y.o. daughter and 15 y.o. son. I just love sitting back and giving him that big 'ol smile that asks, 'so Son, are you having fun yet?' ;)

[madmax]

92. Ah ha!

'The Mother's Curse', it works. My own Mom said, such things. :hug:

Just think someday it will be their turn :evilgrin:

[Luciferous]

72. +1,000,000! I'm a stay at home mom, and I there are days

my kids make me want to rip my hair out they drive me so crazy :)

[madmax]

95. Try to remember that they'll grow

marry, reproduce and feel as you do now. Then you can say - 'don't complain, you were worse'. :rofl:

:hug:

[gkhouston]

113. It's certainly been the job with the worst bennies... and the best. n/t

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

5. Most of my jobs kind of sucked, some were great.

I've been a copy reader, file clerk, insurance office worker, waitress, soap factory assembly line worker, real estate closer, bank paralegal, college instructor, law clerk, lawyer, and flight instructor. I think the copy reader job was the worst because it was boring, paid badly and I had to work right next to a woman who had the worst imaginable body odor. The soap factory was awful, too -- it made me sneeze, and I didn't last long. The waitress job didn't last long, either; I had to wear a skimpy costume and didn't care much for being groped by drunks. And the people at the real estate office were just nasty.

The law clerk job was great, and being a flight instructor is a blast.

[tularetom]

6. NIght watchman in a concrete precasting yard

Like anybody'd want to break in there.

I also had a job repossessing cars in college. That sucked big time. My wife made me quit because she was afraid somebody would shoot me.

Baling hay in high school was hard work but we got to drink beer at the end of the day.

[Richard D]

8. I'd arrive at 7 am

And work till 5pm. Huge stack of tires and a huge stack of rims. My job was to take the tires off of one plain rim and put them on the fancy rim.
I lasted less than a week.

[hfojvt]

30. that does not sound so bad

once I worked the night shift taking steel beams off of a paint line. On a ten hour shift, I swear that I hit the wall a couple of times. The wall, in long distance running is when your body has run out of energy reserves and starts to cannibalize itself. The steel was not that heavy, maybe 10-15 pounds, but it was just the over and over and over of taking it down and putting it on a cart. They were door frames. It was funny that I started on Sunday night with two other people, working for a temp service of all things. By Monday night there were only two of us and by Wednesday only me. On Wednesday the temp service sent another guy and he worked for about two hours, and just walked out at break time and never came back. I gave notice on Friday after they decided not to hire me. I am not gonna have a human resources person tell me "we will hire more when we need more people" when I am working 44 hours a week as a temp. At that point I was still determined to work only temp-to-hire and not temp-to-ne-jacked-around-as-a-permanent-temp-second-class-worker. And the temp service made me work two more days. Sheesh, the other two didn't have to give any notice.

[lunatica]

9. I worked in a post office one Summer in College

They put me in the basement alone to sort all the magazines and all that crap you get in your mailbox like newspapers for food clipping. To this day the stench of ink and pulp makes me get nauseated. Even the smallest amount and just a tiny whiff. Blech! They didn't keep me there all the time, just at the beginning but it was for about a week without any ventilation or windows.

[femmocrat]

10. Waitress.

Evil bosses, hard physical labor, unsafe working conditions. God bless those who wait on tables. BTW, I'm a great tipper!

[nashville_brook]

16. [phone]

was about to write the very same thing. i've actually decided not to be friends w/people based on how they treat wait staff.

[stuntcat]

20. For. Real.

I totally respect the hard job they have. I tried it..

It takes a total asshole to keep me from leaving a big tip.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

101. I loved waiting tables and bartending...

wish I could have made a real living at it...

sP

[prolesunited]

11. Not having one at all

:cry:

[pinto]

13. Good answer.

:hi:

[Dulcinea]

106. [phone]

Unemployment is a nightmare. The only thing that rivals it is telemarketing.

[pinto]

12. Shoe mill. We made synthetic innersoles. n/t

[Ruby the Liberal]

14. McDonalds. In High School in the 1970s.

Met some really cool people but can still smell the nightly "old grease" smell that never seemed to be able to be washed out of my uniform.

[Odin2005]

15. School Janitorial Assistant.

[Douglas Carpenter]

17. working in a department of the University of California at San Francisco with the best possible pay

and benefit package and the most progressive sounding job description imaginable. But we had an arrogant departmental management that was utterly and absolutely contemptuous of the staff and incapable of feeling the slightest empathy with the staff.

[dana_b]

85. wait... I didn't see you in my dept.!

;) I work at UCSF and that sounds like my boss.

[Swede]

18. Sectionman on the railroad.

8 long hours of hard labour.

[Itchinjim]

43. Nobody, and I mean nobody works harder than a sectionhand.

Pounding spikes, pulling ties and hefting rails. I worked the sections the summer after I graduated high school.There may be harder work, but I am not aware of it might be.

[Swede]

87. Tamping by hand was sheer torture.

Those tamping bars had your shoulders burning in 30 seconds. And you knew you were gonna do this all fricking day.

[Taitertots]

19. Making stuff out of carbon fiber, kevlar, and fiberglass

Green stuff started coming out of my nose at the end of the first week and it didn't stop until I quit at the end of the second week. Other than that the job was fine.

[melm00se]

21. working at a concrete mill

unloading rail cars full of raw materials during a GA summer.

it involved going underneath the cars, opening a valve and having the material pour out into the hopper.

100 degrees + 100% humidity + tons of airborne dust = some of the worst physical conditions i have ever been in. the grit got everywhere and ground away the skin at my joints and where cloth hit skin

[deacon]

103. Ohhhh, ug and ug. I did similer work. May a winning lottery ticket be in your future. :)

[melm00se]

118. 20 years and a college degree later

I am now a vendor rep for an IT manufacturer and love every minute of it.

[hfojvt]

22. found some old lounge threads

no, that was not my worst job, but some of these threads might be interesting

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=7288603

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=6817928

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=5502637

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=4641849

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=4530374

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=4238490#4238618

there are some really bad jobs out there. As a janitor, I have got to say, I do not have it that bad. The bar job only paid about $5.5 an hour until I quit and sorta forced my boss to give me a raise to $7.15. Most nights it was not that bad, although it got long on a Saturday or Sunday morning. The first time I cleaned the fryers, I almost walked out mid job. I still had another job, and didn't know what I was doing. The drain clogged for like the 3rd time and I could not get it unclogged. Finally I kinda blew up and told myself I was just gonna walk out and leave the dumb thing, and I realized I could actually do that. Which sorta calmed me down and work some more at the stupid drain.

But most nights it was kinda like a party. The bar had a five CD player that I could use and it was fun to pick out CDs and listen to them while I cleaned. Omce when we got a new manager somebody would blow chunks all over the men's bathroom every Friday night. The second time that happened I thought that perhaps my contract should be re-written to include a bonus whenever I have to clean something like that up. Fortunately that manager did not last long.

[glinda]

23. Working for an Insurance Company. I started hemorrhaging and they wouldn't let me off work.

[a la izquierda]

24. Waitressing in Beverly Hills.

A woman called me a c&*t once and people just generally treated you like crap (except, surprisingly, the celebrities).

[JVS]

96. I'm not that surprised about the celebrities.

A good manager or publicist would probably inform them that acting like an asshole in public is not good for their image. It's easy to avoid getting in a real fight with a waiter and tipping is not very expensive.

[a la izquierda]

115. Roseann was a regular...

and she was always very nice. I liked waiting on her and her kids.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

25. sorting often disgusting returns at a department store

My career had been in a slump for a number of years and when I was hired as "Internal Audit Manager - Supply Chain" I was ecstatic - until I had to sort by manufacturer the returned unsalable soiled garments. Which usually were stained with urine, shit, menstrual blood, vomit or some combination of the four. Before taking that job I would have guessed women would be to embarrassed to return garments with menstrual blood or shit on them, but it turns out they aren't.

[Trekologer]

41. You would be surprised at what some folks are not embarrassed to return

I handled returns at a supermarket for a while. We'd get mostly-eaten cakes that the person returning would say weren't good. I really wanted to ask if they decided the cake wasn't good before or after they ate 3/4 of it. Also, just because the expiration date on something says X, it doesn't mean that it will last that long once opened.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

98. Thankfully I never worked customer service,

That couldn't have gone well, however there were security cameras on the customer service counter and the disgusting returns were always good for a laugh since they would either try to hide the damage or claim it came from the store like that. The best part was that certain manufactures would do their own audits - to make sure the returns we were seeking credits for were indeed unsalable and we were not ripping them off. This was easily the most disgusting part of the job, since it required laying out the soiled clothing that had been festering for weeks or months.

At this point far and away the most offensive smell was the stale vomit. The designer reps who ended up doing this were always delighted - since they didn't think it should be part of their job either. After less than a minute one such rep turned to me and said "Your customers are fucking pigs" he then left me with about half a dozen signed blank audit sheets and said he was never coming back to our location and to write whatever the fuck I like.

The job was a means to an end, which was no glaring gap on my resume after a museum I had worked at lost funding and a perfectly respectable job title. However I am a financial guy - I didn't see this coming for a thousand miles when I was hired as an auditor.

[One of Many]

26. I worked in a factory that refurbished mannequins

I worked in the spray booth, minimum wage. The parts would come in damaged and go to tables staffed by Easter European immigrants for bondo, repairs, sanding etc. I would take the parts off a rack and spray them with primer. They then got a shot of some flesh color paint. Then to a q/a witch who sent most of them back. Rinse repeat. Once the repairs were ok'd they went on to have makeup, eyes, lip color painted on. The repair line folks were paid by the piece, and I'm sure they barely made minimum wage. 8 hours a day surrounded by racks and huge mounds of piled up body parts. After two weeks I was having nightmares and quit.

Do I win?


Edit - It looked exactly like this: http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/fashion/gallery/0906_mannequins/

[HockeyMom]

27. Not the job, but how they TREAT you

I had a job once as a Legal Secretary, with a Paralegal Degree, and was treated like DIRT. I have also worked as a Housekeeper for the elderly (yes, cleaning toilet bowls) and was treated better by these old people, who many times just wanted a shoulder to cry on, than that so called "skilled" office work.

[Edweird]

28. Cleaning porta-potties.

That's a shitty job. Pun intended.

2nd worst, but not by much, was working in the computer industry. I got hired by a major contractor while in school and hated every fucking second of it. I love computers and technology, but I hate office politics and the assholes that LOVE office politics. I'm an outside dog.

[GReedDiamond]

29. Ice cream truck driver..,

...steel factory worker, vinyl car top fabricator.

I had all three jobs between the ages of 17 and 20, back in the early-to-mid 70s.

I quit the ice cream truck driver job after having my truck "hijacked" by around eight suburban juvenile delinquents. One of them would get up on the rear bumper of the truck (an old converted step-van), so I'd have to get out of the truck to get the kid off of the bumper before I could drive the truck. When I'd do that, the rest of the JDs would go inside the truck and grab as much stuff they could get their grubby little paws on. I'd run them out of the truck, and another kid would jump up on the bumper.

I had to just sit and wait...I couldn't drive away until one of the JD's brother came along and told them to knock it off, after about a half hour or so. So much for my career at "Georgie's Happy Time Ice Cream."

[NNN0LHI]

31. Circumsizing elephants

Great tips!

[NYC_SKP]

33. They never forget.

Be careful out of doors or at the zoo.

:P

[Cirque du So-What]

32. Heavy press in a rubber factory

This place required all new hires to work a stint on the factory floor, and since I was a strapping young lad, I was put on heavy press - loading 600-lb molds with hunks of raw rubber & maneuvering them into a hydraulic press where steam heat was delivered. I hired in during a very hot July, and the air temp always hovered around 120 deg F. Add to that the acrid fumes and the frenetic pace, and I can say - without qualification - that it was the worst job I've ever had.

[Ernesto]

34. Being a GodDamned Marine in Vietnam

However, I will never regret "doing the job" that I signed on to do.

[Tom_Foolery]

49. Thank you and welcome home!! n/t

[RC]

35. I was part of a crew hired to find 'leakers' at a Coka Cola canning plant.

Defective crimps in the cans. Tearing apart pallets looking for the leakers. Not all than hard to find. That was a Temp job and it lasted several weeks. Amazing how much those canning machines could put our in a day.

My next job was in a recycling site. I couldn't believe my luck. Bailing all those leakers. I would dump the cans, most still some stage of full, in a hopper and the machine would compress them into bails. Used a fork lift to stack the bails on pallets. Pop running on the floor. August. Humid. Flies, Sticky. Ruined a good pair of shoes and a good pair of gloves.

[H2O Man]

36. Sand-blaster

in a military industrial plant.

Best: social work and farm work.

[Warpy]

37. Whether a job was good or bad had little to do with the work

and everything to do with management. My last job was a great job until a psycho in a suit took over, then morale went to hell and so did the job.

Even working with some of the best people I've ever known couldn't salvage it.

[EFerrari]

79. Not always true. I was promoted at ATT to a group of great people

but my job was to look like I was working, literally. It was horrible. My second worst job.

[dixiegrrrrl]

38. My last job was the worse.

I was hired at a infamous large non-profit drug rehab in SF where not ONE staff member wanted to do any work or be around the clients. Staff all "looked busy" and found places to hide out, while the clients took over the program.
This included my boss who did the whole Major Major routine and hid in his office.

Even more insanely, I was paid a large sum of money to audit the records, found out NO billings were being collected on, and figured the agency would fold in 6 months.
I resigned.
The director committed suicide sometime later when the state threatened a rare audit. Seems all the money had been going to the top tier of Executives.


Good news was my earnings at that last job qualified me a for a good Soc. Sec. benefit, and I took early retirement a few years later.

Mysterious ways, I guess.

[lifesbeautifulmagic]

39. being on the wrong end of a 1-800-call and bitch complaint

line for an auto insurance company. You know, the number on the bill that gets sent out. The thing that I hated the most was having no power to do anything, other than give information, as in "if we don't receive payment by midnight tonight, your coverage will lapse, even still, if we don't receive payment by midnight tonight, your coverage will lapse, no matter what colorful language you use or the names you call me, if we don't receive payment by midnight tonight, your coverage will lapse."



positively absolutely the worst job I ever had, would be psychically shaking by the time I left work, usually with a massive headache.

[yellerpup]

40. Taming monkeys.

They smell awful and the odor permeates your clothes so you can never get it out. You can't smile at them or they'll rip your face off. It's too sad. All they ever wanted to do was swing in the trees in South America, but they were captured, abused, sometime starved, shipped, dumped at a pet shop so that I, a teenager hired for minimum wage could try to get them to the point where they wouldn't kill the kid who got one for Christmas. I lasted two days.

[LiberalEsto]

42. Sales clerk at a Kresges department store

This was during the summer of 1969, right after I'd graduated from high school and starting college in the fall.

Kresges was one of the crummiest stores ever. The employees had little to do besides nitpick and gossip. Some of them resented me because I was heading for college instead of spending the rest of my life in retail hell.

One morning while driving to work in a rainstorm, a car skidded into my car almost head-on and I narrowly escaped getting killed. My first coherent thought after the crash was "Thank God, I don't have to go to work today."

[Maru Kitteh]

44. Housekeeper at the local hospital - the supervisor is a HORRIBLE woman,

who treats her employees like mildly retarded children of very questionable moral character.

The work already made you feel invisible, being treated like that by a supervisor who should have had your back made every day a fresh journey into ever-increasing depths of humiliation.

[h8okra]

45. Trying to recruit enlisted men and

women to voluntarily commit themselves (or non-voluntarily to avoid doing a stint in the LBJ - Long Bin Jail) into a drug de-toxic program in Vietnam. I did not want to do it, the troops (for the most part) did not want to do it, the Air Force did not want to do it (public awareness and opinion drove the initiative), and the Viet Cong did not want us to do it either (better a guy that has been smoking a few shoot at you you). This operation is a great example of what FUBAR Means.

[one_voice]

47. Burger King..

one summer when I was in high school. Didn't matter how many showers I took, or how much I washed my hair, I smelled like a whopper.

[alittlelark]

50. Taco Bell in 1980.

Beyond bad - I quit after 3 weeks.

[EFerrari]

75. My first job outside the family was at a KFC.

The work was easy but I quit in less than a week because I couldn't stand the grease in every pore, in my hair, on every fiber of my clothing, skating on it in the kitchen and pretending we were selling FOOD!

:rofl:

[TBF]

51. Working with an executive team that was closing down a plant.

I was the legal dept manager and corporate secretary. Had to take notes of all the board meetings - which meant I listened to all the assholes decide when they were laying off employees and ultimately closing down the plant. I also had to coordinate the legal work on outsourcing product and selling the building. I had a hard time sleeping at night & only lasted about 8 months before I took a position with another company (much lower income but at least I got out and could sleep again).

[Dappleganger]

52. My worst job...

was at a jewelry store where the owner sexually harassed me from Day One.

[TheCowsCameHome]

53. Car wash grunt.

Talk about having a slave driver for a boss.......lasted 10 hours, then quit.

[ThomThom]

54. clean-up guy at an egg packing facility

the smell was unbelievable..... only lasted a few days

[Nikia]

55. Candy grinding

The product was sold to places that sold Blizzards/Flurries. It involved extreme temperature diffrences. It also involved grinding machines without shields and chocolate all over the place. It was a summer temp job. The supervisor seemed like sort of a jerk, but I'm not sure that I was there long enough to make a fair evaulation. I worked 3 days but could have worked a few more weeks because the person who I was standing had injuries that were more severe than orignally thought from slipping on chocolate.

[etherealtruth]

56. Hospice nurse was the best job I ever had; it was also the worst

[sense]

57. Cracking crab

in a cannery. I was the only one with a full set of teeth! They were taking bets on how long I'd last.....turned out to be 3 weeks, but I had a new job before I quit.

[senseandsensibility]

58. Peeling onions for eight hours a day

Temp job. Cry me a river.

[rucky]

70. I think you win.

[senseandsensibility]

76. I don't know

There's some pretty bad jobs on this thread. At least it was a temp job, and I was young. Doing something like that for any length of time would really drive you crazy.:)

[JVS]

94. I'd think cracking crab in a cannery is worse.

[Romulox]

112. When I once worked at Olive Garden, my job was to peel and slice 50 lbs of onions, every 3 days

It was impossible to wash off the smell in the 2 days in between the time I'd done it, and the time I had to do it again.

So you have my condolences!

[senseandsensibility]

121. Wow

I didn't know Olive Garden chopped onions by hand. My job was for a research center, and they never told us temps what they were doing with all the onions. But you are totally right about the smell. I only did this for about a week, and I think I was still smelling it a month later.

[Steely_Dan]

59. I Had A Job...

at Disneyland when I was in college. I am a pretty short and I had a job playing a character in full costume. I won't tell you which character. The summers in Anaheim can be brutal. I was only allowed one break per hour and only in the changing area under the streets. I lost several pounds during the two summers I played this character...I could wring sweat from certain parts of the costume. I wasn't allowed to speak, the pay was horrible and management was less than compassionate.

-P

On Edit...I forgot to mention that customers could be very difficult at times. This was especially true of parents that didn't watch thier kids.

[mod mom]

60. life guard. SOOOOO boring!

[csziggy]

62. Telemarketer for a fake charity

I lasted three days before I realized that it was completely bogus. The job was to con people into being "block leaders" to go out, involve their neighbors and eventually solicit donations from all their accumulated contacts. Not one piece of literature for the organization mentioned how much if any of the money actually went to help the victims of the disease they were supposed to be raising money for. It was all about building the network to con people into donations.

Second worst was door to door canvasser for a city directory company. Kind of like being a census worker, but with no socially redeeming value. That lasted one day - my supervisor came out to check on me during the few minutes I took to go to the store to use the restroom and buy water. When she gave me a hard time about it, I quit. July in Florida is no time to be without water when working outside.

I had more fun literally shoveling shit than I did at those jobs.

[Capn Sunshine]

77. Collector for a fake Charity in poor neighborhoods

Variation on the scam above. A glossy "magazine" dedicated to the "inner City" and produced by a "scholarship Charity" which took ad money from every mom and pop in Watts, Crenshaw and S. Central. It was a total scam and they sent me around to these businesses asking for partial payment "so we could guarantee their ad placement"

Damn, it was depressing, and after a day it was totally obvious the whole thing was a scam. 40 years later I still wish I had known the 1st day.

[csziggy]

83. Yep - but then we were younger, and less experienced

And it took us both time to figure it out.

[Dulcinea]

107. Telemarketing absolutely has to be the worst job ever.

I did it for 2 summers in college, because there was nothing else in the '80s.

[Hekate]

63. Pineapple cannery. Aching thumbs (hold it through the hole to trim it), acid burns from the juice...

... worst of all, I was too slow to keep up with the pines shooting out of the Ginaca coring machine!

Great summer job for a 16 year old. :eyes: But it paid more than babysitting.

My other one was almost 20 years later as an admin asst for a professor starting up a new program at the university. He was new there, and no one knew he was a screamer. I stuck it out with the screaming and cussing 9 months until I cracked two molars, and finally left. It took the department three tries (two weeks for one gal, 3 months for another) to find someone who could stand the guy and stay. What a bastard. :hurts:

That's when I went to the County and had my best boss ever: a good ol' boy who had risen to be Public Works Director, a really evolved man who groomed one of the female engineers to be his replacement when he moved upstairs. Called me "toots." May he rest in peace; he was the best. O8)

Hekate

[Donnachaidh]

65. fish cannery

If you saw the conditions of the plants those sardines are packed in - you'd never touch the little bastards again. :puke:

[AnArmyVeteran]

68. Prison chain gang worker...

But seriously, the worst job I had was working at a refinery climbing up 300 feet ladders to get to the top and having to replace flanges with 6" bolts in 10 degree weather. It was back breaking work and I froze my ass off. It was then when I became convinced I would finish getting my college degree.

[rucky]

69. Telemarketing.

I have enough issues with rejection as it is.

[mrs_p]

71. night dispatcher

for college campus security -- in the summer

i could never stay awake all night and ended up leaving after a few months.

[Habibi]

73. Front desk clerk at a hotel

lasted one shift. And/or bartender at a dive bar when I was 19. Lasted a month. Couldn't deal with the stalking, harassment, and guys starting knife fights with one another.

One of my best jobs? Painting fire hydrants for the city one summer. Hot, sweaty, messy, and great pay.

'Course, I'm not crazy about what I'm doing now--IT writing. I think I just don't like work in general. :)

[mysuzuki2]

74. Life insurance salesman

it was even worse than one of my campus jobs cleaning up rat shit in the nutrition lab.

[Bette Noir]

78. Driving an airport limo to LAX.

I never knew what days or hours I'd be working until they happened. Then, I never knew when I could knock off until I was done, which might be 3 in the morning, after working all day. The dispatchers lied all the time to the customers about where I was and how long it would take to get there, so the customers were always mad, and I didn't make any tips. Rotten job.

[StreetKnowledge]

80. Brakeman on a railroad.

Spent two summers as a brakeman for Burlington Northern (now one half of BNSF) on its route from Seattle to Vancouver, WA. Hours were awful, the engineers were usually pompous asses and the conductors were often pricks, and in poor weather conditions (fairly common in southern WA) the job could be a pain in the ass. I finally left after breaking my leg bailing out to avoid being crushed in an accident just south of Olympia. Pay was very nice indeed (But then again, that job WAS a union one), but that was the only reason I tolerated it. Not long after that, brakemen were eliminated from BN trains altogether.

[kwassa]

81. Doing lighting on catwalks at the former Desilu studio in Hollywood

90 feet above a concrete floor, there was a small network of wooden catwalks missing boards on the catwalk and on the protective railing.

I had done only outdoor and location work previous to this.

It was expected that someone on the lighting crew would walk out on the 2" x 12" wooden beams with coils of rope to drop to hang lights. The size of space between beams were known as "ozones", and were at least 12' by 12' in the grid. If you start to fall ....

I knew I would quit before doing this. Fortunately, someone else volunteered, and smoked a joint before he did it.

During the shoot, one of the crew threw a rope into another ozone. It unfortunately snagged a fire extinguisher and sent it flying. It dropped the 90 feet and hit a crew member on the floor in the leg, causing a compound fracture in the man's leg.

[babydollhead]

82. kick

[Yupster]

84. Night shift at Burger King

making $ 2.15 an hour.

Walked half hour through NYC to get there and back sometimes at 1:30 am.

Sometimes I worked for three hours which means I went through all that for $ 6 a night.

Cleaning french fry machines at 1 am isn't as much fun as it sounds.

This was at age 16.

On edit, it did teach me the value of getting a degree.

First degree I got was a lifeguard license and then my employment got a lot more teenager friendly.

[tammywammy]

86. I would have to say the last 3 years at my former job

I was laid off June 30, 2009. My boss was the most god awful bitch this earth has seen. She was mean, spiteful, a liar and just a plain awful awful person. I cannot really even describe how awful she is as a person.

The good news is that I was already looking for a new job. I got laid off one day and was offered a job the next. I told my current boss that I'm like a domestic abuse victim (verbally, she never hit us, but I'm sure it crossed her evil mind). you never really understand how bad it is until you're away from it.

I now work with a bunch of great people, so nice, respectful and most of all APPRECIATIVE!


edited to add: It wasn't the job itself wasn't awful, accounting at a car dealer. It was just her that made it hell on earth.

[stevedeshazer]

88. Hauling recycled engines and transmissions and doors and hoods to repair shops

Oh wait. That's what I'm doing now to survive my Bush Administration pay cut from $45k to $19k.

Yes, I know I'm supposed to blame Obama, but that Bush feller and that Clinton feller before him shipped my telecommunications job overseas and all I got was this crappy job and 72 weeks of unemployment.

Driving a smelly diesel truck full of greasy used parts for 40% of what I used to make at age 55?

Thanks, Republicans. Thanks a whole stinking pile. You deserve my hatred. Now you want to make me work until 70 AT CRAPPY WAGES. And "privatize" (steal) the 12.4% me and my employers put in for most of 50 years.

Sweet Jesus H. Christ I so hate these bastards.

[XemaSab]

89. Being a clerk for the census

Not only was doing data entry all day boring as hell, but my boss really had it in for me.

Like, seriously, the woman was Dolores Umbridge on crack... even looked like her... and if there was ANY inclination that you were having ANY fun, she would be on you like a velociraptor. She put a write-up in my personnel file for being 5 minutes late TWICE (XOMG!!!!), and you HAD to work until 4:30, even if it meant literally crawling on the floor picking up old staples. Which we did.

The job itself was shitty enough, but having a fascist boss made it 10 times worse.

[XemaSab]

91. Since most of the thread focuses on physical labor:

Walking potential firebreaks in the Angeles National Forest. I'd come back to the hotel after 10 hours of climbing up and down mountains in 90 degree heat bleeding and covered in soot from charred manzanitas. :(

The job after that was doing a MASSIVE wetland delineation near Merced ALL SUMMER LONG with this dude who used to spend all day either screaming at me or in angry silence. That job really taught me what it's like to live inside your head all day. Homie was SUCH an asshole that I really had to have something going on inside, and it all taught me things about myself that I never knew. He was probably as bad as if not worse than that chick at the census, but at least I didn't have to concentrate on anything requiring the attentiveness of data entry, yaknow? I could pay attention to my own stuff.

[dionysus]

90. janitor job in college. 6-8am shift. loved being a prep cook. frozen food warehouse was terrible.

[Alexander]

97. Working at a movie theater.

Paid $5.15 an hour, the only good thing being free movie tickets and the ability to take people to the movies for free whenever you wanted. Thankfully I only worked there four months.

The smell of popcorn makes me sick to my stomach now, and will for the rest of my life.

Oh yeah, and the butter in the popcorn is by no means real butter.

[SoCalDem]

99. A Lucy-esque job at Hallmark Card Co

the line would speed up and we all ended up trying desperately to glue that shit to the cards as they flew by.. by break time, we were coated with glue, feathers, sparkle:rofl:

[HopeHoops]

100. Changing shit tanks in RVs (among other duties) at a sales place one summer while at college.

[deacon]

102. Cement mixer. Mixing cement by hand for others to trowel. Thanks for bringing back that

nightmare! :))) 7:30 in the morning 'till 4:30 pm. Brutal. I was eventually "promoted" to heavy construction assembly line welder just in time for the east coast summer humidity. Just thinking about those jobs makes me dehydrated :)

[CanonRay]

104. Janitor in a department store

or the asphalt crew (standing in 300 degree shit when it's 102 outside.

[Arkansas Granny]

105. Vaccinating baby chickens at a hatchery.

[Amaril]

108. Worked for a guy that imported furniture from South Africa

.....during Apartheid (hey, what did I know - I was barely 20). Lost that job when Customs came in, confiscated all his inventory and padlocked the doors.

After that I worked (for a very short time) for an attorney that was eventually disbarred for conversion.

Probably the worst though.........was selling shoes. :)

[Javaman]

109. A waiter at a Mafia run catering house.

and everything my title implies.

[Urban Prairie]

110. Scale clerk at a metal foundry

weighing metal such as zinc, aluminum, copper, manganese to be melted together in furnaces to make bars and blocks that the company then sold to other companies that made them into useful things like auto parts and coffins. A certain percentage of each metal had to be melted to make the right type of alloy for each, usually 75% being zinc.

The zinc slabs came from mines in Canada, and they were usually shipped on "pallets" with about 5000 lbs of zinc slabs on each. The slabs were bound together with over a dozen steel bands strapped tightly around them. We had to cut the bands off with a long-handled axe, and after my first day on the job, my arms, shoulders, and hands ached from swinging that axe most of the day. My foreman boss smirked at me and said "How did you like your first day of work?" as we got ready to go home while washing up in the restroom.

I said to him that there had to be an easier way to cut the bands off of the zinc pallets, and he replied that they tried using cutting shears, but that it took too long to cut them off that way. So I went home and went into my workroom, got my camping hand hatchet, and the next day I brought it in to work with me, honed the edge of it with the axe sharpening machine wheel, and began cutting off the bands easily...tink, tink, tink...snap, snap, snap, while my co-workers and foreman just stood there watching me do it with their jaws slack in surprise, dumbasses...lol!!

[Evasporque]

111. Telemarketer for Time Life and Fingerhut...partime.

I quit both after I had found a full time job.

It was abhorrent. You felt like your robbing people.

[Evoman]

114. My last job, as a Techician in a Plant Genetics lab.

Sounds pretty awesome doesn't it?

But any job can become the worst job if you are treated like shit, given too much work and not enough time to do it. I stayed 11 months.....one month short of my one year contract. My boss was a really intelligent, socially-retarded, harpy. 2 months into the job I was taking anti-depressants just to deal with it. 6 months in I took a week of stress leave and was about ready to kill myself.

And I've had bad jobs: prison guard, janitor at a casino, call centre employee for ATT. But none of them ruined me as much as that one.

You know why? Because I KNEW all the other were crap jobs I didn't care about, whereas the lab job was my CAREER. It was what I've gone to school for. And in the end, I realized that I hated what I did. I hated it because my job was a bitch, but I also realized that I wasn't that great at my job. I had little to no interest left in biology. It was like my entire life became a joke.

But in the end it was all good. I'm out. I was "let go" (I actually quit, but the HR people agreed to lay me off so I could get unemployment) about a week ago. This is my first week since I was in grade ten that I haven't had a job. And even though I know unemployment is hell for other people, It's bliss for me at the moment.

And now I'm going to change my life. I'm out of the science game. I have little debt, no payment other than rent (which I have paid for the next 4 months) and car insurance, and I have some money saved. I have no idea what I'm going to do, but the feeling of freedom I have right now has me feeling esctatic. And since I really have no interest in owning shit, and the thought of working for someone else leaves me cold, I thought I might just take a break to follow my dreams.

Now, I just gotta find myself some dreams.

[brendan120678]

116. Working for NYPIRG in a red-area of upstate NY. (nt)

[slackmaster]

117. Writing training comics to be used by the United States Army

The work itself was pretty discouraging. Officially the material was supposed to be written at an eighth grade reading level. But I and the other curriculum developers were instructed verbally to write at a sixth grade level, and not to tell anyone that we were told to do that.

The pay was low, and the man who owned the company that had the contract, was a flaming asshole and a drunk. When I got laid off, in the summer of 1982, I felt that a great burden had been lifted from me.

[Recursion]

119. Security guard at the Home Shopping Network warehouse

Patting down Bosnian war refugees every day to see if they were stealing the cheap jewelry HSN sells.

Second worst was cleaning the inside of metal cisterns in the summer in Mississippi.

[wordpix]

120. transplanting seedlings for Weyerhauser Corp after the corPOS destroyed our old growth forests

in the Pacific NW. The idiot foreman kept timing us and insisting we go faster - there's only so fast you can transplant seedlings. I quit after a couple of weeks.