The Worst Job I Ever Had

The Worst Job I Ever Had

I was listening again to an old LP in my collection, Derek and Clive, Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore on this exact theme.

So on the lines of pastorDan's 'What's my F-ing Problem', I open this thread to 'The Worst Job I Ever Had'.

(link to site with MP3 files of the Pete & Dud classic)

My story below the fold...

Mine was not picking lobsters off Jayne Mansfield's bum, nor picking up Winston Churchill's bogies, it was laying drainage pipes on farms.

I'm not a physical person. Sport and physical exercise, other than walking, are anathema to me. So as student at university I tried to get vacation jobs in factories or offices, but my parents had just moved to a rural area and the only jobs for students were all manual labour.

The only one I could find was working for a contractor laying field drains on farms. Standing on the back of this strange machine with a stack of pottery pipes beside me, stuff them down this slot and jump and down on them to keep them compressed. Then there was offloading five thousand pipes by hand from the delivery track to the trailers we used, my arms ached all night after the first time I had to do this.

Steve, the boss, summed up his opinion of me one day when I was trying to clear some brush that was in our way with a machete, "God 'elp us, you'd 'ave been no bloody use in Malaya" (he'd done his service in the Army in the 50's in that country).

I was so thankful when after three weeks I was able to get a job on a farm during harvest driving a tractor.

OK folks, what was your worst job?

•  I've had so many

  •  Telemarketer for the LA Times (lasted 5 hours).
    
  •  Temp at the John Wayne Cancer Institute (lasted 1 hour 45 min. and almost put the smack down on the racist bitch I was temping for.)
    
  •  Thread cutter at sweatshops in LA.  Mom hired me for that one.  I had to travel with her to these depressing places and cut thread off of the lots before she inspected them.  If the lots passed, the owners would give me $100 which sucked because the workers didn't even make that in a week.  Asswipes.
    
  •  Photo taker for a porn studio (lasted 3 days).

  The number one job I would never want to have is jizz mopper.  

  Worst coworker ever (and I've had tons) - I worked at security place with this nutjob.  He kept saying he was in Viet Nam and he was like 12.  He dressed like an ex-cop turned coach (polyester pants and the like), listened to Rush Limbaugh.  On tape.  And would take breaks every 20 min. to go spank it in the hallway.  Which was dumb because there were cameras all over the place and we could see him.  

  by fabooj on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 12:28:01 PM PDT

  •  Physical labor

    I used to load trucks at UPS.  I'm like you, so not cut out for it. I used to get sick everyday, but after a month, I was cut!  I think the only way I'll do anything physical is if I get to build houses.

    by fabooj on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 12:29:24 PM PDT

    •  You have my sympathy fabooj

      I did have one really bad day on the farm afterwards. It had rained the night before so we couldn't harvest the grain, so all the workers we set to transferring 5000 new young hens from the growing shed to a battery.

      I had had a sheltered townie upbringing and knew nothing of the reality of farming. Two workers corralled small groups of hens and grabbing them by a leg each handed a bunch of five struggling chicks over their shoulders to us. With a bunch of panic stricken chickens pecking and shitting we then stuffed them into wire transport boxes outside.

      Once we had a trailer load, we moved them to the battery. There we plunged our hands into the boxes and grabbed legs to pull them out, one bird at a time. Now and then one of the older men would grab a bird from me, wring its neck and put it to onside. These were the poor cockerels who had been raised with the hens to help keep order.

      We students, about eight out of the twenty workers during harvest, were not offered a pullet to take home, they were a perk for the full-time staff.

      The ammoniac smell stayed with me for days.

      Ever since, I have always tried to buy free-range raised eggs and chicken. At least they haven't suffered the indignities we inflicted on those birds that day.

      by NeutralObserver on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:34:27 PM PDT

      •  Ahhh... chickens

        We bought a house with 30 acres in Georgia which came with a small broiler house.  We thought, hey, the income from the chickens will be enough to cover the mortgage, and it's only an hour of work every day.

        Before you get new chicks, trucks come and spread 6" of pine shavings.  It smells great.  Then 16,000 day old chicks come, and they are sooooo cute, lil puffballs all going peep peep peep.

        In three days, it starts to smell and the chicks have turned awkward looking and ugly.

        First thing in the morning, put on some rubber boots and go through the 40x300 foot house and pick up the chickens that had died.  If they died more than a couple hours before, the nice warm temps in the house turned them into blue green balloons with a certain jiggle to them.  Then you dump the dead chickens in a 15 foot deep pit to compost.

        As they grow, you come to realize that the average Idaho potato is several times as smart as a chicken.

        One Christmas eve as I'm getting ready to go to bed, I look down the hill to the chicken house, and I saw the north curtain, all 300 foot of it, fall.  As it is 10 degrees outside, I know that I need to fix the cable fast, or I will have 30 tons of dead chickens on Christmas morning.  The way the cable system is set up, I have to work on patching the metal cable with no gloves while physically holding up the curtain which weighs probably 150 lbs.  No problem.  I'm in bed only three hours later.

        At six or seven weeks, when the chickens are market weight, you turn off the food and water and crank everything to the ceiling and turn the lights down to dim moonlight levels, so the chickens settle down.  Then at four o'clock in the dead of night, a couple of vans of the scariest bunch of otherwise unemployable ex-cons show up to pick up the chickens.  Huge scars, speech impediments, missing arms, missing eyes, and being Georgia, the only white guy is the foreman.  They grab the chickens and haul them to their doom.

        The house dries out for a couple days, then a substance that is 30% pine shavings is scraped out and trucked off to fertilize some bermuda somewhere.  Then some fresh, nice smelling pine shavings and 16,000 more cuuuute lil chicks show up.

        Then the tornado came and put me out of my misery.  My insurance agent, who had owned the house before losing it to foreclosure, swore that the back wall had been damaged when he owned it ten years before and therefore no claim should be paid.  The fact that the wall had been replaced and there wasn't a big hole for chickens to escape through during the previous ten years didn't seem to register, but finally I got a small check, a bulldozer came, dug a hole, shoved it in, burned it and buried it.

        by George on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 06:55:24 PM PDT

        •  Did your chickens wear contact lenses?

          Apparently, if a chicken bleeds, the other chickens will peck it to death.  

          So now they make red contacts, to filter out the blood color, to reduce the attrition rate. I learned this from a friend who works for the company that designed the lenses.

          by mataliandy on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 07:09:11 PM PDT

          •  OK, now I'm waiting for the story

            from someone who had to install contact lenses in 16,000 chickens. Overnight.

            by fly on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 07:27:45 PM PDT

          •  Nope

            Not even glasses

            by George on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 07:30:11 PM PDT

            •  If they did they'd have been able to read

              the termination clause in their contracts

              by NeutralObserver on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 07:31:47 PM PDT

  •  I think I KNOW that guy...

    ..."Glen" claimed to have two PHD's and own a street paving company -- and he was in my same grade in high school at the time...must've had a military Dad, 'cause he faked "army training" and was a pathological liar and addicted to porn...he'd ask if we wanted to go to the movies, and then he'd drive to these peep show places, and well...you've filled in the rest...ick, I hope there aren't more than two of these kinds of creeps...

    by PBJ Diddy on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 12:40:32 PM PDT

  •  Telemarketer for a small local newspaper

    My very first paying job was at a small local newspaper. I was in Jr. High. I got out of bed just before 5 AM, and there was an earthquake. There aren't many around here, and they tend to be very small. It felt like when you're on one of those small metal swingsets and you swing a bit too far in one direction, which pulls one of the legs up out of the ground, then it goes back down as you swing back to the center. It was a fitting start to the day.

    I got ready in my best (only) skirt-suit and went out to wait for my ride - a friend's father was driving my friend and I over, so we could work together (yipee!).

    We arrived and had walked through the doors into the dark, cave-like entry of an old textile mill. From there we emerged into the news office, which was much brighter, but resembled the back room of a warehouse - piled high with stuff - I assume paper, I didn't pay that much attention, but I do recall a very claustrophobic feel.

    We were greeted curtly, then ushered to seats near an office (aka closet) door. I was called in first. I sat down on the uncomfortable little black chair, and crossed my legs. The interviewer immediately told me "Ladies sit with their feet together, flat on the floor, and sit up straight!"

    Okaaaay ... so I sat up straighter, uncrossed my legs, and tried my best to put my feet flat on the floor, which might have been easier had I been able to reach the floor.

    After somehow miraculously passing the interview from hell with a man who I swear is the original freeper (even back then I leaned waaay left), it was time to hit the phones for a 2 hour "trial" ... at 7:15 AM ... on Saturday.

    The boss had someone else walk me through the process and give me a phone number list while he interviewed my friend.

    I called the first number on the list. The person on the other end was groggy but polite. No sale.

    By now, the boss had finished interviewing my friend (who also "passed"). He came over to yell at me for speaking to quietly.

    I called the next person. It was now approximately 7:38 AM.  The person dropped the receiver after the 4th ring. There was a bunch of banging as they tried to retrieve it.  In response to a very terse "Hello," I yelled my script into the phone. The gentleman on the other end swore - a lot - sounding VERY hung over, and slammed down the phone. Somewhere in there he had screamed something about what #(&@%! time it was...

    The boss came over and yelled at me for not talking loud enough.

    He made someone else sit with me, to show me "how it's done." After one "no sale" call, the person went back to his own phone.

    I yelled my way through two more calls. Boy there's nothing like yelling at hung over people early on a Saturday to get them to buy your product!

    Then the boss came by to yell at me for being too quiet AND too slow.

    At this point, I decided that the best use of my remaining time would be to watch out the window for my ride while pretending to observe the technique of another telemarketer.

    Shortest job ever...

    by mataliandy on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 06:40:03 PM PDT

    •  And for the second worst...

      A brass store in a mall.  The owner opened it specifically to put this other brass store in the same mall out of business.  He hated the other guy, so he opened the store, sold everything at cost, and waited for the other guy to lose his livelihood.

      The owner used to make the female employees get his coffee for him at a place at the other end of the mall.  He got really pissed if you messed it up, and he'd go running off in a huff to get himself a new one.  Needless to say, I intentionally got it wrong every single time and walked back slowly so it would have time to cool. My favorite was the 10 sugars and 3 creams. I had to pour out most of the coffee to fit all that stuff in the cup. The look on his face when he drank that first (and only) sip was classic!

      That was the last time he asked me to get his coffee.  I guess he figured out that it was intentional.

      Oh, AND he was banging one of the other employees at a hotel nearby most afternoons.  He even tried to borrow my car to drive there once, when his wife had his car. Luckily, it was really my Dad's car, so I was able to convince him he didn't want to experience my father's wrath if he got in an accident.

      It wasn't long after that the other guy went bankrupt, at which point this guy closed up shop.

      by mataliandy on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 07:03:12 PM PDT

•  Selling -- make that trying to sell...

  ...Craftmatic adjustable beds.  Did a whole week, didn't make a sale, didn't earn a penny.  Don't think I would have felt too good about it had I sold every single prospect, since they're basically a rip.

  by westegg on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 12:31:16 PM PDT

•  The worst job I ever had

  was working for this guy "Andy" at a restaurant. I had such a tough time fining work that year, I finally took a job as a busboy, determined to make some money and work my way to a better place. My interview was brisk, but successful, and my first day at work, I showed up wearing the clothes Andy told me to. "Who told you you could wear those pants?" he hammered me, "You did." "NO! Here's $30, go to the store around the corner and get khakis and I'll take the money out of your tips tonight." Okay, psycho, you got it. The next day: "Who told you you could wear that shirt?" "You did." (and I wore it yesterday you fuck.) "NO! Take one from the office downstairs, and KEEP IT CLEAN and I'll take the money out of your tips tonight." Um...Okay Mein Führer...the NEXT night: "Why are you wearing those shoes?" Oy. Then there was, "You don't have a phone?!? Get ONE! By tomorrow!! Have the line installed, if you need a loan, I'll (you guessed it) take the money out of your tips..." and finally:
  "I have to let you go...I just don't trust you, you're TEN TIMES the busboy that anyone else here is, but if I can't trust you -- you gotta go."
  "Thanks, Andy."
  "Don't thank me..."
  "THANKS!"

  I later found out the restaurant had been closed down after the cocaine dealers he owed money to reposessed all his booze and kitchen equipment...Man, but as a young man struggling for survival in Manhattan, I made about $20 in two weeks of working and lost about 30 lbs. from this man whom I still wish ill health upon almost 20 years later...

  by PBJ Diddy on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 12:35:01 PM PDT

  •  Travelin' Jack

    Have you read The Talisman?  The kid in there worked for "Andy".  I couldn't imagine working for someone like that.

    by fabooj on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:02:44 PM PDT

•  Car hop at the A & W Root Beer Stand

  Wasn't worth the nightly goosing.

  by bumblebums on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 12:38:52 PM PDT

  •  Maybe

    It was your bumblebums?

    by fabooj on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:04:37 PM PDT

•  Receptionist for a Republican lobbyist

  This was the worst job for my sanity. I was fresh out of high school and didn't know much, but I knew these people were bad, bad, bad. I retaliated by bringing my pet hamster to work in a small cage and read subversive literature like Monkey Wrench Gang and Carlos Castaneda. They didn't even fire me. I quit to go to college.

  Worst job physically was tubing trees. Got to work in the dark. Scaled steep muddy logged off land in freezing cold rainy weather and put little plastic tubes over freshly planted fir trees until it was dark again. Grueling labor.

  by cosmic debris on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 12:59:45 PM PDT

  •  Hamster?

    That's classic.  That's hilarious they didn't say anything.  They probably thought you'd do some liberal voodoo on them.  I once temped at the place where they didn't want me to do anything because I was obviously too stupid.  So I'd IMd my husband (fiance at the time) and addressed my wedding invites and planned my wedding.  That lasted for a month.  I got "fired" because the lady said there were files and stuff that needed to be entered and didn't do it.  Yeah...cause you never told me the were there.  Oh, to make matters worse, the company was slowly going under so they had sublet most of their offices.  The room I worked in was the storage room.  There were desk and files and chairs everywhere.  I had to climb up chairs to get to my desk.  My head was a foot away from the ceiling.  

    by fabooj on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:08:25 PM PDT

    •  I was quite a hottie

      at that age, ya know, surfer girl chick from Laguna looks. I guess they thought I looked the part and I figured out the phone system and could do data entry on the computer. But mostly I sat there and read my books and played with the hamster.

      You my dear fabooj have had quite the series of hellish jobs. Could it be because you are a LOSER? buhahahahaha My twin, my losertwin ... Love ya :)

      by cosmic debris on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:18:23 PM PDT

•  Worst Job

  Handing out wooden nickels good for a free ride for a local bus company promotion. It was November, in the mid-20's and sleeting like a bastard. I had to wear a ribbon across my chest like a beauty queen... over my winter coat. I had a bad cold. I got $5 an hour and lasted one 5 hour shift. It, absolutely, was my "gotta stay in college" moment.

  by Nag on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:06:08 PM PDT

•  Telemarking, hands down

  combines two things I hate the most: telephone call centers AND selling stuff.

  I lasted one afternoon.

  Made me want to curse Alexander Graham Bell into Dante's 7th level of hell.

  But, by my next long distance relationship, I recinded the curse.

  by a gilas girl on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:19:03 PM PDT

  •  No way!

    Telemark is the only way to go.  Screw the snowboarders, pinheads rule!  :-)

    by ubikkibu on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 02:28:28 PM PDT

•  Worst job

  I rode shotgun with a guy for a week where we drove the waste extraction truck from construction site to construction site, emptying the porta-potties.

  "What do you do for a living?"

  "I suck shit."

  "No, I know that.  But what's your job?"

  by ubikkibu on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:23:30 PM PDT

  •  You win! n/t

    by cosmic debris on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:26:50 PM PDT

•  I have had several,

  but the worst was driving a diaper truck. Back in the day, before disposable diapers, folks used a diaper service. Every week the diaper guy would come by, and exchange a stack of fresh nappies for a bag of soiled ones.
  It was in Portland, Oregon, and it rained for the first 2 days, so I just didn't know. But on day 3, it was warm, bright and sunny, and the truck became a perfect little oven. By the end of the day, the 40+ bags of week-old dirty diapers had cooked to a perfect funk made of equal parts of ammonia, sulpher, milk-mold, and undigested long-chain protein substances.
  Tears were running down my cheeks, and having the window open just stirred the gasses around. I quit at the end of the day. The boss was not surprised--- he had a speech that was a sort of "you are either born a diaper guy, or you ain't" thing, that almost made me feel bad that I wasn't able to live up to his calling.
  It has been 30 years, and I can still remember the deadly stench of that day.

  by IsraelHand on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:37:43 PM PDT

  •  LOL, LOL

    

    "you are either born a diaper guy, or you ain't"

    by PhillyGal on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:44:34 PM PDT

  •  That's my bathroom you're talking about

    I feel for you.  The diaper pail in the bathroom after just 3 days smells bad.  I couldn't imagine a truck of week-old diapers.  

    by fabooj on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:47:48 PM PDT

  •  I can still remember the smell of the

    nappy (that's British English for diaper) buckets that my mother used when my sister was little and that my sister-in-law had in the 70s when my nephew and nieces were babies.

    You have my sympathy.

    The use of terry-towel nappies is now being subsidised by the government in the UK. These days, however, there are soft-paper liners available which can be flushed down the toilet, before the nappies are washed.

    When I worked on the farm as a student, there was one guy who was the pig-man. The farmer kept about 300 pigs in roofed, but otherwise open, sties. He apparently had no sense of smell, which was probably why we all sat upwind of him when he used to join us for lunch at the grain dryer.

    by NeutralObserver on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:48:02 PM PDT

•  Carwash in the early 1990's

  It was the harshest, ugliest, nastiest, down on your knees backbreaking kind of job. The owner was a high school friend's father and I was desperate for work... so he 'hooked me up'. What a pal. I lasted a year and a half and I will never forget that job as long as I live.

  The man lived in a nice affluent town in central Massachusetts, but his carwash was in a really rundown area south of Boston. He used to come pick me up every morning at 5:30. For a kid who was right out of high school it was a shock to have this guy show up outside of your parents door blaring his car horn when it was still dark out, go off and do hard labor, and then come home after dark six days out of seven. Then, sleepy as hell, it was a half hour ride to the site in stoney silence unless he got road rage. This man seethed with anger. He hated his wife. He hated his house because the gutters were always clogged with leaves. He hated the squirrels and birds outside his window. He hated that his son, my buddy, because he had dropped out of high school. Hell, he even ranted and raved about people who had offended him years earlier when he sold real estate in the early 80's. The angriest guy I think I ever met at the time. But he didn't yell and scream... he just seethed. If he had a fit of road rage, he would swear and shout for a second... but mostly he would lean on the horn. Like, for thirty seconds like he was a tugboat captain or something. He also smoked something called 'Swisher Sweets', and if you don't know what those are, they are little cigars in cigarette form. And they smell so bad I can't describe it with a comparison because I can't think of something that smells like them.

  So, you show up in the dark. Everything has to be locked up inside the carwash (even the big plastic barrels we used as lane dividers) because if it was loose outside it would be gone. Punk kids coming to and home from school in this neighborhood used to give us shit while we were working. Sometimes they'd try and steal our orange road cones... sometimes while we were there working! It was stupid as hell... you would see this idiot kid walking by where we were washing cars... carrying a cone like we wouldn't notice. More than once somebody I worked with would turn a hose on a kid waltzing by with an orange cone. You see, a lot of these guys dropped out of high school but this was their neighborhood so they got their balls busted by the local kids... so, getting to take a shot was kind of payback for a lot of ugliness. The sprayers we used were under so much pressure getting blasted with it hurt like hell. It was the type of job where everybody working it knew that they were screwed. Life hadn't worked out the way they thought it would, and they were doing a shitty job to get by. It was the early 1990's, and the first Gulf War was still in play... so these guys weren't going to join the military to get out because they didn't want to go off to Kuwait. So... they were there.

  So, we had to first wash the cars by hand with these pressure wands that looked like the waterguns of the gods with a long metal rod attached to the handle. You could tell how long a person had been working there by the way they held the wand. If you couldn't hold the wand one handed and hold the hose with the other, you were obviously a newbie. Now, if you have ever seen a power sprayer you know that it thows up a fine mist all over a large radius. (So, we were all wet within a few cars and stayed wet and cold all day.) Then, you took a, believe it or not, floor broom, like a janitor would use on a corridor, standing up in a trough looking thing filled with soapy water and wipe the cars down. Then, if the guy had whitewall tires, you had to get down on your hands and knees in the wet soapy water and scrub the white walls with a wire brush. You didn't speak to anybody who was more than a foot away from you because of all the noise... so the owner would trirl his fingers in a circle and mouth the words 'white walls'. The wire brushes were inside the big trough buckets after a few hours at work, so you would have to stick your hands in the cloudy water and grab the wire brush... and you were usually rewarded with getting finger speared by the wire bristles. Then the car went through the machine in the building. There were some days where we didn't get anybody, and we stood around like fools getting cold or baked in the sun. Or there were other days where we didn't get a break all day. We were opened from 6:30 to 6:30 every day and closed Sunday because of a town blue law (the blue laws in Massachusetts were old puritan laws that were still on the books that were meant to keep people from 'working on the sabbath').

  I was the only white kid at the carwash, besides the owner and his son, and I used to get these latin and black guys (who came and went because the job sucked and who were some of the friendliest people I ever knew once you got past the 'what the hell are YOU doing here stuff) sit next to me on the curb at lunchtime (if it was a dead day, there was no lunch on a busy day, even though it broke a bunch of labor laws I am sure) and ask me why I was there. A huge 275 pound guy named Larry (who used to be a backup offensive lineman for the Baltimore Colts -professional football players in the 1970's made nothing compared with NFL guys today) came clean and told me that most of the guys thought I was crazy, or white trash, or I owed my buddies dad money. Once I realized that I had to shut up and listen more than speak to fit in, I learned that so much of what white suburban people like me though about poor black and hispanic people was so much racist bullshit, and the guys I worked with came to the conclusion that rich white people in general sucked worse than they thought they did. Because they would not only grind minorities into the ground... but other white people as well... and this may sound weird, but this was a kind of revelation to some of the guys. The job was such a misery day in and day out that the comiseration of gutting it out day in and day out broke down a lot of barriers. I learned a lot, but mostly what I learned was a huge reinforcement of something that I already knew, that being poor sucked.  

  Eventually the job broke me. I admit it. The owner undercut his competition in the surrounding area by almost a third of the price... so you had to do crazy volume to make up the difference, and the owner expected you to work like a robot. I had one day off in a year and a half because I got a sunburn that was so bad I had to go to the emergency room. In the summer you got burned by the sun, in the winter you got your clothes frozen from being wet in the ice cold (and in New England car washes are like a zoo in the winter, because the salt from the road ruins people's paint if left on the body.) But what was finally the straw that broke the camel's back was that the chemical we used to spray down the white wall tires suddenly started to burn me. Apparently the owner stopped cutting the soap chemical with water like he was supposed to before putting it in the tanks. So we spayed a raw chemical on the white walls to make it quicker to clean them, only none of us knew it. I would come home from work and the callouses on my hands and feet would stay white and pruny like I had been in a hottub too long. Then, the callouses actually would blister up so it looked like you were wearing a skin glove or galoshes on your feet. This went on for a couple of weeks until one day in late winter, just as the one year and six months point came, I took off my boots when I got home and the callouses on my heels came completely off and were flopping back and forth almost detatched from my feet. I went to a 'Health Stop' franchise and for thirty dollars I was told the obvious, that I basically had chemical burns on my hands and feet. I called my friend and he told me about the chemicals and I lost it. The owner swore up and down that he wouldn't keep using the raw stuff anymore... but it was way too late for that.

  I was going to quit without any notice, but my parents were crushed by the recession late in Bush I's only term, so I made up some lie about wanting to go to community college and the schedule for the classes conflicting with my loopy hours, then worked out my notice over the next two weeks and left on good terms in case I couldn't find another job and I had to go back, god forbid. Then I dropped a dime to OSHA and for the state to check the place out for hazards, but apparently nobody did much besides a courtesy inspection that was passed with flying colors. All in all I earned an average of 350 dollars a week, or about a hundred and fifty dollars more than somebody working full time at Caldors or Bradlees department stores would have. Which was better than I would have earned in discount retail for the same hours. It took almost three months for the callouses on my feet to come back so that it didn't hurt to walk around. I eventually got a job that did allow me to take classes partime at Northeastern University in Boston and I never set foot in that carwash, or saw the owner and smelled his 'Swisher Sweets' again. Unfortunately, after he told me about the OSHA inspection that his dad passed with flying colors, I also never really saw my friend again either... when Clinton was elected in 1992 was the last time we spoke... but people come and go out of your life... and there is nothing that you can do about it but move on.

  by LeftHandedMan on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:45:11 PM PDT

  •  Holy Macanoly!

    That supersucks!  Now I'm glad I'm a good tipper at car washes.

    by fabooj on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 02:00:25 PM PDT

•  Had a couple

  The worst (lasted three days) was pushing replacement windows.  What a scam run by scammers who would prey on low income homeowners.

  Second was at a neighborhood grocery store where my boss was the owner's son.  An unhappy and bitter asshole who never stopped chewing me out. I was 16.

  One busy Saturday after about a three weeks on the job (evenings and weekends), he started chewing me out in the front of the store in front of customers (many of them my neighbors) about how I was moving trays of just-delivered bread.

  "Don't carry those trays three at a time!  Get the dolly and move them all," he yelled.

  I had no idea we even had such a dolly or that using a dolly was SOP for bread deliveries.

  Anyway, he just kept screaming, until, finally, I took off my red vest (we had to wear them), threw it in his face and said, loudly, "I quit!"

  It was quite a scene in the front of many customers.

  I walked out and walked home, crying.  When I got home, my mom asked me, "What happened?"

  I told her the story and, to her credit, she never shopped their again.  Nor did I.

  That's why I have my own company.  I'm not a fan of bosses.  My father always had his own business, too (in addition to being a fireman).

  At one point, two of my three siblings also had their own businesses.  I said to my mom, "Look!  We're all entrepreneurs, just like dad!"

  And my mom replied, with great insight, "I don't think it's so much that you're all entrepreneurs.  I think it's that you all have a problem with authority."

  Leave it to a mom to speak the truth...

  by Bob Johnson on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 01:59:42 PM PDT

•  Shrink wrapper

  The summer between high school and college- worked on an assembly line placing shrink wrap over air fresheners.  From my hands to the heating element they went, where others would apply the labels, and get them ready for shipping.

  I reeked of a billion perfumed roses- I thought that was bad until I read about Israelhand's adventures in dirty diaper transportation services, above.

  by cici414 on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 02:02:45 PM PDT

•  Right out of high school...

  needing work to save for college tuition, I did telemarketing for like 3 hours. The room was dark, cramped and smelled of mold. The boss yelled. The deal was ripping off old folks and when I fully comprehended what I was doing I jumped up and walked out.

  Then, I got a job at an agricultural cooperative administration office. I had to go thru piles of receipts from country stores, decipher the scrawls, add up the numbers and enter them into ledger books. (This was pre-computer work.)Besides the obvious tedium, the environment was toxic. 36 women sitting in columns and rows of desks, chain-smoking, without ventilation. By the time I left 3 months later, I was smoking two packs a day! That doesn't include the other two packs worth of second-hand smoke I inhaled. Gawd! I haven't remembered that in decades!

  by sjct on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 02:06:20 PM PDT

•  comic book guy voice: worst. job. ever.

  I temped for several months doing page layout at the Texas office of a very well known test creation company based in New Jersey. They are a bunch of cheap bastards.

  This was last year, mind you, and I had to use a piece of shit pentium 3 computer with windoze NT 4 on it. To add insult to injury, we weren't using InDesign 2 or CS, or even the old king QuarkXPress. No, we put these tests together in PageMaker. PageMaker is a crappy, crash-prone application that Adobe should have killed ages ago. (They finally did so last year.)

  I have a mean "save work" twitch, and it's a good thing I do because when PageFucker crashed my machine it would completely lock up, eat files, and take twenty goddamn minutes to reboot. Many times I literally lost an hour or more of work time because of that POS.

  I was also the only temp laying out pages who had ever done similar work before. They were fucking amazed at how quickly I could get stuff done, even when my damn PC cost me so much down time. These oh-so-important tests are routinely put together by data entry temps. "Yeah, we care about your kid's future. Yawn. How can do this as cheaply as possible?"

  My manager, whom I'll call "shrimp", was also engaged in a turf war with the Jersey production team. "We do a better job and Jersey wants to take work away from us," he said. That much was true, but the way he went about it was messed up. Our department was using old machines and two year old software that was no longer being developed. Jersey said we need to work together more. OK, but Shrimp only wanted to foster that his way. Jersey said "we're buying all new Macs and we'll outfit your office too."

  When the project coordinator told me that I had the most wonderful, beautiful, shining moment of hope. But it was dashed a half second later when she continued and said "Shrimp turned them down." Why? "Because no one in Jersey uses PageFucker on windoze so that keeps our files incompatible and they can't take our projects." Shrimp treated this like a damn pissing match!

  These morons are still laboring under the conditions that plagued page production 15+ years ago! Hello? Windows and Macs can exchange files now! On top of that, nothing is automated and it badly needs it. Temps would spend an hour renaming a hundred files! Real production shops know how to do these things. I had wanted to help get this department up to speed, but after hearing what Shrimp did I just thought "fuck 'em." I gave my two week notice shortly afterwards.

  by Slacker Gal on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 02:26:10 PM PDT

  •  The guys at the service bureau I used to use

    always called PageMaker PageShaker. It's a bit more polite.

    by fly on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 02:51:11 PM PDT

    •  self-censoring

      At work I called it PainMaker. Everyone else soon adopted the name. I got blamed for souring the other temp gals on it. They weren't page monkeys and didn't know it was crap until I told them. I was a bad influence for educating them. ;-)

      by Slacker Gal on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 06:58:20 PM PDT

•  Pizza delivery

  which didn't have to be an awful job or anything by nature, mind you, but I swear that in all of those kind of jobs, they tend to find the biggest, most insecure, inept, bad-tempered folks on the crew and make them the management.

  Work was an endless series of indignities, from not being allowed to go to the bathroom because we were slammed (maybe you could try not being perpetually understaffed, &^$^$# losers) to being cussed out for being late on a delivery where the guy had given us the wrong freakin' address. Watched closely at all times lest we put an extra .01 ounce of pepperoni on a pizza. Told they really wanted me on the front counter (which I loathed) because I was little and blonde, with the insinuation that it would be the only way for me to get a raise. That job also gave me a hatred of uniforms (generally required only for the least respected workers of our society) that lives with me to this day. Plus, there's something just horrible about, after being told by customer after customer that they think you've been great to them, having your manager flip out because you haven't been pushing enough breadsticks.

  Retail and foodservice work aren't hard because of the labor, they're hard because of the treatment from above, at least if you're at chains (or in chains, I usually say). I really can't think of many kinds of much more dehumanizing work, though there are plenty of more strenuous jobs.

  I quit there when I realized I was getting ready to kill people over olives and green peppers.

  Actually, I still work retail... but for an indy bookstore, which is just a totally different environment. I make less, actually, when you count tips, but I don't have that sick I-want-to-jump-off-a-bridge feeling when I'm about to go to work. Hard work sometimes, but without the soul sucking.

  by Spit on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 03:06:40 PM PDT

  •  Pizza Hut

    I worked at PH taking orders.  Then we got a new manager.  He was cool, cause he was never there.  Then one day he disappeared.  He was gone for 4 weeks.  The the Feds showed up.  Turns our that manager had been embezzling funds from PH, but they wanted him in connection with supplying arms to some rebel country.  

    Enter Tony.

    Tony was the manager who changed things around because he could.  He changed the layout of the place which is how I have have a 2 in. burn mark on my arm (at least it's fading, 10 years later).  Apparently, he wasn't much for our pizza "mistakes" and getting high in the parking lot.  One day he told me I had an attitude problem and the entire staff was like, "no shit, sherlock."  So, to punish me he reduced my hours.  To 3 hours every Tues.  At $4.25/hr. that's not much.  It got to the point where I just wouldn't go to work, but my friends would clock in for me, so I still got my check for $9.73 each week.  That went on for 3 months, until I got a job at the aforementioned security place for $12/hr.  

    by fabooj on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 07:47:21 PM PDT

•  Three weeks at a pawn shop.

  I had a lot of resumes out but nothing had come through, and that was the only possibility for an immediate start.  The place was full of smoke & a lot of the electronics people brought in had roaches in them (luckily one never popped out at me), and it was just depressing in ever possible way.  We had several women throw huge fits when they brought in loose diamnds from exes & were told that they had CZs instead, too.  Luckily a much better offer came through before the holiday period-- after Thanksgiving, everyone was expected to work 10-12 hours a day, six days a week.  Oh, and it was only $2.13 an hour plus some pathetic commission.

  The other employees were genrally pretty nice to me though-- always made sure I made it to my car okay, and so forth.  They knew I didn't really belong there.
  

  by latts on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 03:27:58 PM PDT

•  Flashback

  Haven't thought about this is ages, but I was a professional organizer for a right winger-

  I actually had to create a hard file for "Satan"...

  I kid you NOT.

  by tepster on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 03:51:32 PM PDT

•  nerds just can't compete

  I was lucky as a kid: my dad owned a construction company and I have done all kinds of backbreaking work - from digging ditches in 105 degree heat to manually rethreading 10,000 bolts that held the seats in place in one of the Senate hearing rooms in the California state capitol building - but I actually LIKED that work.

  The job I hated the most: being a grad student in Germany. My adviser was world-reknowned for being a huge asshole. I shoulda taken note and gone to MIT instead.

  But the worst jobbish thing that happened: one summer, I was doing sulfur chemistry. The smell was so bad, I BARFED in the lab sink that was right next to my lab hood - just set all of my glassware down in the hood, leaned over, and chucked my breakfast right into the drain. Then I went back to my glassware. And each day when I came home, I would shower, then my roomies would smell me, and if it was still all stank-ass mercaptan smell, into the shower I went again. We'd end the day drinking beers on the roof of our house - with me downwind from everyone else.

  Holy shit, I was glad when I could go back to regular dye chemistry.

  by Xray the Enforcer on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 04:04:54 PM PDT

•  Heh heh.

  There are so MANY of these stories for me.

  Right after college, following a woman to D.C., I had a job as a waiter in a restaurant on Capitol Hill. Used to play a lot of bridge. Had an incredible hand one night where I made a 7 clubs grand slam. Told my manager about it. A week later, the Washington Post published a bridge column that had a hand almost identical to what I'd had. The next time I saw the manager, he fired me for being a liar, because he saw that bridge column and assumed I must have made up my story in past time or something!

  Worst job for me of all time was working for Brown and Root (now part of Halliburton, I think) at a big shipyard, in the summer before college. At one point I was ordered to crawl into a 36 inch diameter pipe that stretched down about 300 feet into the side of a dry dock to push mud out with my bare hands. That was about the closest to an explosion of insanity I ever experienced.

  MANY more! I've supported myself since age 17. I've had a LOT of bad jobs. Heh.

  by Timaeus on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 04:13:45 PM PDT

•  splitting and peeling

  shrimp at Red Lobster.  I used to come in early in the morning to split 50-100 lbs of shrimp, and then peel the shells off.  They were kept around 40 degrees so it became painful, but mostly it was just incredibly boring, and low paying (although at 17, it's still a thrill just to have your own money).
  

  by rsheridan6 on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 04:53:45 PM PDT

•  Never, ever do this

  Never sell cars.  Ever.  I mean, EVER.  That's all I'll say, because I don't feel like remembering it that closely right now.

  It sucked hardcore rocks and balls.

  by Raybin on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 04:53:58 PM PDT

•  don't ever ask "so whatcha in for?"

  Worst job ever -- During a summer break from college, I was a phlebotomist at a medium security prison in rural Florida. A private company operated a series of plasma donation centers in the Florida State Prison system in the early '80s.

  Imagine grandma and grandpa goin' in for heart surgery and getting plasma from murderers, rapists, and thieves. Nobody was screening for HIV back then and if you accidentally stuck yourself with a needle, you got a big 'ol gammaglobulin shot in your butt to ward of syphillis or worse. Yummy.

  Tip to the wise: bank your own corpuscles and plasma if you EVER need surgery.

  by em dash on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 05:26:27 PM PDT

•  Economic Development Planner

  Facts were window dressing: Everything I told people was a lie. If it wasn't the lie they wanted to hear, I was expected to make up another lie that made them happy.

  by White Buffalo on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 05:27:37 PM PDT

•  Server and Network monitoring

  The key in the phrase was monitoring.  That's about all I did: monitor.  What can I say, the programmers were pretty good there and only rarely did I have to do any thing.  What you say?  That's the perfect job.  Ohhhh contraire!  Imagine this: sitting in front of a monitor watching green boxes to see if they turn red.  That's what I did.  8 hours a day.  Midnight to 8 a.m.  Boring does not describe that job.  Nooooo.  Torture is much closer to the truth.  

  by Bryce in Seattle on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 05:34:05 PM PDT

•  I can't compete

  Man, I thought my worst jobs were bad until I read this thread.  

  So, my lame by comparison contributions:

  Teming at a factory where they printed bottles for pool chemicals.   It was me and two other people there for the evening shift.  Spent most of the time standing around, not doing a damn thing.  I think we ran maybe one or two groups of stuff.  The other two folks working were mother and son and ingnored me.  Made it through one night.

  I also was a "mascot" (can't think of a better word) for a book sales company.  It was a one day thing, at a teacher's convention.  I had to wear this costume and hand out flyers in an exhibition hall.  I don't remember much about the day except for being very, very hot and eventually vomiting in the suit (couldn't get to the bathroom fast enough) and having to suffer through a ride home with the woman I was working for, totally embarrassed.  

  by Mrs Pastor on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 05:53:21 PM PDT

•  My worst ever

  legal temping, doc review. The most brain rotting experience ever (but it does pay well).  You can feel your braincells committing suicide as you slog through the paper generated by corporations looking for something, but only after having been asked to leave your brain at home.  Abandon all hope ye who enter here should be engraved over the top of any doorway where these doc reviews are held.  

  by LionelEHutz on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 06:11:04 PM PDT

  •  Temping for lawyers.

    Ugh.  No offense to all the lawyers out there, but they are the worst people to temp for.  

    My experience:  Give you bad instructions, leave out key things like time needed and how many copies of what.  FF 1 hour to when they're complaining about how slow you're going.  Then the speaking. to. you.  like.  a.  child.   Add insult to injury:  "Do you know anything about California Missions?  My kid's diorama is due tomorrow.  Take some petty cash and get the stuff.  I want receipts."

    Never again.  When I temp I say no data entry, no lawyers.  Funny thing is that all my lawyer friends honestly don't realize they do that.  

    by fabooj on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 07:55:58 PM PDT

    •  It's even worse when you yourself are a lawyer

      and you realize that you have more of a clue than the people you are temping for.

      by LionelEHutz on Sun Jan 30, 2005 at 11:38:18 AM PDT

•  Worst job I ever had.

  Cashier in Wilmington Dry Goods store in Claymont, DE. This store was the precursor to Wal-Mart, I swear.  They used to lock all the cashiers in the store and you were not allowed to leave until inspection of the store was made and the manager gave his okay. Even if your section was cleared you had to stay until all the sections were cleaned and stocked.

  I remember one night my shift was over at 10:30 and the bastard refused to okay the store because a sale had decimated the children's section. That son of a bitch kept us in there, locked in with a guard at the door, until midnight. I quit the next day.  They went belly-up eventually but Wal-Mart reminds me so much of WDG that I get ill being near one. And I've only been in a Wal-Mart three times in my life. The last time was the very last time. Ugh. Just, ugh.

  P.S. Not being a people person it amazes me how often I came in contact with them with the jobs I held when I was younger. Oh wait, it was after the experience of those jobs (mostly retail)that I decided that most people sucked.

  by mentaldebris on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 07:14:22 PM PDT

•  this is obvious, but... dishwasher

  I feel like I have to post this because I've spent so many of my formative years in the hell that is food service in upstate New York... really, I experienced hell while scraping half-eaten plates of french fries into the trash with ungloved hands (for speed, of course...).  And the waitresses got all the tips, while I got what would have been insult-worthy pay (minimum wage, $4.25/hour) if I hadn't been in high school...

  I'm a nine-to-five desk girl now, though, with few complaints -- but many memories.  Maybe that's why  I'm such a raving liberal :)

  by fictionaldepth on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 07:34:42 PM PDT

•  Oh, I have several-

  Several medium to awful, and one that still gives me nightmares.

  Brief stint in high school, waitressing for a chronically depressed, chainsmoking owner/barkeep/cook in a little neighborhood restaurant. Four days and not worth it.

  I shared an Avon route for a couple of years with my mom, it was rural and we only had one car so I walked. In Western Washington- which meant being chronically wet, as well as having to outrun dogs.

  6 months as morning receptionist/office girl for a chiropractor. He was a crook, had me doing things to the books that I knew were wrong, but I was young and my (then)husband was out of work, and I had a baby to feed. The Dr was also a fair amount more 'touchy-feely' than I liked. I was relieved when he let me go.

  3 weeks doing retail in a fabric store- with the worst employee morale I've ever seen. The HR head called me in one day and dressed me down with a long list of complaints- no one had ever expressed any problems to my face, but there were a couple of things that were inconsequential remarks over lunch, personal things, and then I realized that someone, several someones, had been spying on me. She told me to go home and think about it. I called in the next day and told them I wouldn't be back. I would always wonder who would stab me in the back, and I can't work that way.

  But the big one- the killer, the one that landed me in physical therapy for years, and in and out of court for a couple of years- was when I worked night shift in a convenience store near Portland. It was a local chain, they advertised for help, and they had a couple of locations not far from where we lived. Again, the husband was having employment problems, and we had a toddler and a newborn. I was still nursing, so I took graveyard hours while the kids were asleep, and was home during the day. No, I didn't get much sleep.

  In some ways, it wasn't bad. I was the one who did most of the stock work and cleaning, since traffic was low. I got to read the paper when it first came out. And people bleary-eyed on their way to work are generally polite, and appreciate a smile. I kept the forms and such properly, sorted cans and bottles, and pulled outdated dairy goods, etc. Not too bad.

  The bad part was that I was alone, often for long periods of time. The store I worked was on a busy highway, but even that was pretty much deserted in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, I was not the only one who knew I was alone.

  One of the 'regulars', a guy who was in three of four times a week, one night came in a little earlier than usual, looking really unhappy. He bought a couple of the 32 oz bottles of beer, muttered something about having a fight with his girlfriend, and left. About 4:30 am he came back in, now smelling to high heaven of alcohol, and really talkative. He followed me around as I worked, chattering, and after I was done with the sweeping and mopping, I excused myself and ducked into the cooler to move some stock. I was feeling weird about something, and the hair raised on my neck when I heard the door open and close again behind me.

  He followed me into the cooler, said something about wanting to help, I insisted that he had to go out, only employees were allowed in back. I turned to set down the case I was moving, and suddenly he had me around the throat, told me not to scream. He dragged me out into the bottleroom and threw me on the floor there.

  You can guess what happened next.

  A couple of guys came in a few minutes later, he shoved me out and told me not to say anything. I didn't , but you can bet I hit the emergency button when I got to the register! As soon as the customers left, this creep started this weird conversation about how he had something for me (he tried to give me money, and was pissed when I wouldn't take it) and he kept saying 'this wasn't a rape, you know'. And when the sheriff's car pulled up and the deputy got out, he tried to step around the deputy and make a break for it.

  Cop told me later that he had no guilt at all for being a bit rough while arresting the guy. He also told me that when they searched the guys apartment, they found pictures and such that indicated that the guy'd been stalking me for awhile. Cheery, ain't it?

  He got 12 years, served 2, was out on parole when he did it again- the next woman got it worse, as he actually used his knife on her. He's back in the state pen, gets out in 2016, or as early as '07 if he's a good boy.

  I spent four years in physical therapy, thanks to back and neck damage from being thrown around on a concrete floor. I still have quite a bit of pain. Several years in counseling, and the beginning of the end for my marriage. But the company gave me nothing but grief. First thing they wanted to know was if the money was still in the till and had I done my drop yet?

  But what can I say? I'm alive. My kids are ok. And I have a college degree now, so I have a few more options. But one fewer option when it comes to junk food- because I'll never set foot into that chain again.
   

  by Lainie on Sat Jan 29, 2005 at 08:05:05 PM PDT

  •  Oh my

    That's horrible.  That sounds so hollow, but that's so horrible to have to deal with and to have the company be so complacent is just icky.  I'm glad you're in a better place now.

    by fabooj on Sun Jan 30, 2005 at 07:06:52 PM PDT