Jobs at which you worked less than a week

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m sure lots of us here have worked at a few jobs which didn’t last for very long, either because you went into the job with better expectations, encountered difficult bosses, co-workers, other unsatisfactory conditions, or just took the job out of desperation knowing you’d hate it, but needed the money to get by until something better came along, which it did. Share your short-term employment stories here. I’m not counting jobs which were only meant to be temporary anyway with a fixed term, but jobs which are meant to be worked on an ongoing basis.

Here’s my story, which I will try to make brief. I had a two-day stint as a general laborer for a large commercial construction company. I had been a fast food manager for a couple years and wanted out of there anyway for several reasons. When a new owner took over the franchise and shafted everyone I was especially motivated to leave, and several of us did. I took the construction job after a fellow manager took the job himself and recommended it to me. The hours were long (6 10-hour days a week) but the lure of more money (overtime pay) convinced me to take the job, especially after not getting this kind of compensation for the extra hours I put in as a salaried manager. I was also sick of dealing with stupid/rude customers. I thought I would work 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM each day as my colleague was doing, hoping to get away from the late night closing shifts of fast food, but I got stuck on the swing shift instead (4:00 PM to 2:00 AM), which I wasn’t prepared for. I realized that I would have virtually no contact with family or friends on this kind of schedule, having only Sundays available to see them. I figured I could handle the work itself since physical labor was nothing new to me, but not for ten hours a day. The noise, dirt, mud, dust, etc. were more than I could handle and I just wasn’t suited for this kind of heavy toil. The other workers could probably tell that I was out of my element here. The second night, a Saturday, was a shortened shift, thankfully, getting off at 10:00. I was ready to walk off the job as I just hated it. On Monday I didn’t show up for work and voluntarily went unemployed for three days before taking a job in retail and dealing with customers again. This lasted for about six years before I took the job I have been in for about a year and a half, which is testing printers and is far more suited for my aptitude.

2

Back when I was in college, I worked part time at a packaging company for a day. I was working in the carpenter shop, never having used a hammer before, trying to build a crate for this rather large piece. After about 2 hours of f*cking up, my supervisor came over and asked me “Boy, how long have you been a carpenter?” I answered, “Would you believe all morning?”

Apparently, some people don’t appreciate smart-asses.

3

M’Kay, I’ll play.

Right after I was graduated from college, I had decided to move to Florida from Ohio, but I had no money. So I worked for six months, living with my momma, until I had enough cash scrabbled together to pay for gas and a hotel room for my two-day solo pilgrimage to the Sunshine State. That summer, I had three jobs – but one of 'em lasted only three weekends.

It was in a steel muffler factory in Ohio. They made tiny little mufflers – about a foot long – for some other product, which escapes my memory at the moment. My job was to stand on the line – from 11pm Friday night to 11am Saturday, and then again 11p Saturday to 11am Sunday – shining a penlight inside the little mufflers to make sure all the braize melted properly. The muffler-ettes were really hot, as they had just rolled out of a 2000-degree furnace. For about $6.00 an hour – and 12-hour middle-of-the-damn-night shifts… I decided there was no way that job was worth it. I had dropped several on my bare arms already and still have the scars to prove this little adventure.

So on the third weekend – I had in all of six shifts, so I think this counts as less than a week – I called in sick, forever. Funny part was the boss’ response: “Well, Dogzilla, I don’t think I can give you a good reference.” LOL

To which I responded, “Dude. I just earned a degree in journalism, including the completion of two internships with major organizations. I have a very full and well rounded resume already, (even though I was still just a puppy-zilla). I sincerely doubt I’m even going to tell anyone I worked here, let alone put you down for a reference. Please give my job to someone who needs it worse than I do.”

I hope to never have to work that hard again.

4

Until just a few years ago, my record was three days- at McDonalds.

I was 16, I believe. It was my first job. I wasn’t there ten minutes before they put me on the registers… with no training, and just as the rush came in. After I struggled my way through that, they had me go out and clean up after the rush.

I guess it was a trial by fire. Fine. They won. I did it for three days, then said that I just couldn’t take it.

A few years ago, though, I soundly trounced that record. I’d just been laid off by CompanyX, where I’d been doing tech support for Windows95 (two weeks before Christmas, Bill Gates came to town and put 350 employees out of work… thanks, Bill!). I’d been a mentor, basically a supervisor/answer guy. I had a good amount of friends there, and I was proud of 'em and the work we did. We’d been through hell together, and were a good team.

Once we were all laid off, though, a lot of us went over to CompanyY to do basically the same type of work. The first day, we were told by some Corporate Nazi (I think that was actually his job title), that we were now CompanyY employees, that we would do things the CompanyY way, and that basically we were all newbies who didn’t know a thing… all this despite the fact that we’d been doing EXACTLY the same sort of work for about a year. A lot of us were, understandably, upset.

I was 99% sure that I had a much better job lined up (I’d taken the job at CompanyY just in case of that 1% chance)… so I decided to take one for the team. At lunch I drove home and changed into one of my CompanyX t-shirts. Then I drove back to CompanyY, and told Corporate Nazi, in front of everyone (AND his supervisors), that he was: a) an asshole, and b) not worthy of working with such fine people as the team that he’d been blessed to have dropped into his lap. Then I told him to get stuffed, and walked out, after letting him know that the ONLY reason CompanyY wouldn’t be getting my skills was because of his backhanded insults and general ineptitude.

Total time on the job: four hours.

I understand that Corporate Nazi was massively chewed out by his superiors, and transferred to a different section as a result.

5

The worst job I ever had that I think lasted about a week was during X-mas break in college. I was working for a shipping and packaging company. I worked on a assembly line putting instructions in computer games, I think at the time it was 7th Guest. It was BORING, real boring. That was the worst part of the job.

The other part of the job was actually pretty intersting, well compared to the other half. We put labels on packages for a Tax program. It was really intersting to see all the different names, I remember a few James Bonds.

I don’t remember how long it lasted but I know it wasn’t long, gee thanks for brining it up again.

6

I lasted a few days at a Potato chip factory until an employee fell in a vat filled with hot cooking oil. It was waist deep.

Apparently he was cooked to the bone from that point down and he died within a day. Surprisingly, he was able to make it 100 yards or so with help to the infirmary.

I was on a different shift, but it was enough for me to realize I didn’t want any chance of the same thing happening to me. Please note that I’ve censored the details of the horrific incident so that the thread can be more “upbeat” ;-).

7

Right out of high school, I worked for about a week for a place that was running a scam.

They sold home water-filtration systems. 30 of us answered the ad and went to a non-descript office (the new offices weren’t finished being built yet). We went through two days of training on how to sell these things. We wouldn’t be cold-calling or selling door-to-door, we’d be supplied with contacts who had already expressed interest in the product.

After the training we then had to go to five friends or family members to test our selling techniques on them. Turns out it was not a test, we were expected to actually make a sale. Herein lay the scam. However, I was only persuasive to my aunt, who bought one.

Then we did nothing for a couple of days, as they had no contacts for us to go to yet. Here my suspicion grew. Finally I got two contacts to go to. Huzzah! However, I got lost looking for one of the addresses, and when I called the person to ask directions and explain why I was late, they had no idea who I was or why I’d be coming to them. I didn’t go to that one or the other one.

The next day I went in expecting to ask a lot of questions to the guy in charge. First thing he tells us is that he needs to get the sales kits from us because they’re training another group. I said, “Hey, what are these guys going to do? There’s already not enough contacts for this group.” I don’t even remember the answer. I game him the kit and left, the scam now completely revealed to me. I left realizing that my walking out was part of the intended process - after all, you only have so many sales kits, so you don’t want idiots thinking they’re actually sposed to sell something hogging them.

The sad thing was, my aunt loved the filter she bought, and said they had a good product that they didn’t need to scam people to sell.

8

Synthesis- Oh. My. God. That’s terrifying. I would’ve been gone, too.

I may never eat another potato chip in my life. :eek:

Legomancer- I found EXACTLY that same situation about ten years ago- but mine was selling vacuum cleaners. The shame of it was that the vacuum cleaners were actually VERY good products, and if I could afford one, I’d buy it. I sold one, to a friend of mine, and she loves it- but I never even got my commission, since we weren’t allowed to “close the deal”, but rather had to have the home office do it for us, over the phone. They sweetened the deal for my friend- with my commission. I worked there a week.

I should’ve realized what a scam it was- every time the office answered the phone, they didn’t say the name of the company. All they gave was a very guarded “Hello?”.

9

Lightnin’–that vacuum company didn’t rhyme with “Derby,” did it? :slight_smile: If it did, I sympathize. I answered one of their ads in college and ended up attending this scam-o-matic presentation where we had to fill out this long questionnaire and afterward they’d tell us which of us were salesperson material. Most of the folks there were either college students like me or middle-aged women. There was one middle-aged guy in a suit. After we got a good look at the questionnaire, the guy in the suit and I got up and left. Everybody else stayed.

That doesn’t count as a job, though, because I didn’t work for them and they never paid me. My short-term job (for one day!) was working as a cage cleaner and all around caretaker-type at a world-famous (at least in cat circles) cat breeder’s place in my home town. I was 15 and as much of a cat lover as I am now, and this lady bred really cool rare cats (Singapuras) so I thought it would be a great job. Unfortunately for me, she wanted the person there at 5:15 in the morning. There isn’t much on earth that will get me up consistently early enough to be on a job and coherent at 5:15. I did my first day’s work, loved the cats, and apologized to the lady at the end of the shift, telling her I couldn’t manage those kind of hours all summer. She was very nice about it.

That job had unexpected benefits, though–just a couple of years ago when we were looking for cats, I remembered the lady and her beautiful kitties, and contacted her. We didn’t end up getting our Singapura boy from her, but she gave us some great recommendations.

10

That’s the one, Winterhawk11.

I don’t recall a test, though. Maybe they realized that the test was scaring people off, and stopped using it?

11

This would have been probably around 1986-87, so it’s possible they ditched the test after that.

12

Three days at BK after my sophomore year of college. They assigned people to different jobs based on seniority, and as the newest hire, I spent my time feeding Whoppers into the flame-broiler, and seeing them come out only half cooked and being told to put them in the steamer anyways:eek: .

When I wasn’t dealing with burgers, I had to wash the stacks of dishes that accumulated, and mop the floors. Day three, I found out that I would be stuck doing this crap all summer, as they had no plans to hire anyone else. I left halfway through my shift, went home, changed out of that nasty polyester uniform, and brought it back to them and said that I quit.

13

I like comedian Rocky La Porte’s declaration that he…

“…Boxed in the ring, for a couple of…minutes”.

14

first off: Lightnin’-- fucking beautiful story! you da’ man!

i don’t know if this qualifys, but here goes: dickweed big-name company gives me the shaft, so im looking for work. i interview for a sales job answering phones and taking catalog orders. the job would have rotton hours and a MISERABLE commute. they made me take tests of all sorts including drug testing (no prob- don’t use em)and said they would do extensive background checking, yada, yada, yada, all for a $7.00/hr job. well, they offered me the job and i said yes, i’ll start next week…

logged on the internet after the interview, found a cool-ass job right down the street from dickweed big-name (where my wife still worked), made a phone call, sold myself hard, and faxed a resume. met them the next day and interviewed.

waited. waited. waited. called back monday morning and the guy in charge asked it he could call me right back. i had to be at the suck-wad job by 11:00am. started to drive to suck-wad…cell phone rings as i exit the freeway…offered job!!!

i walk into suckwad, 4 minutes late, thank them for the job offer, but respectfully decline, as something has just come up, literally!

i love my job!

15

I can type over 50 wpm, so when I was between real work, I’d often take temp jobs, some for only a day or two. A couple stick in my mind:

  1. A job at a legal firm. It was my job to type up papers to be served (this was before word processors). It was wild – the lawyers would hand me a sheet and say, “OK, include paragraphs 1, 6, 17, 25, and 32.” These paragraphs, BTW, sounded awfully stern. I’ve since had people get upset about being served legal documents, and I just say, “That’s just paragraphs 15 and 18.”

  2. A typist at a local weekly newspaper. Interesting, but the second I finished up, they said goodbye, not even letting me finish the day.

16

I was a janitor for a few days.

The job was easy to get, and I was just beginning college. I thought “What the heck, am I proud?”

Turns out, I was.

I had zero problem with the work. What was unexpectedly nasty was having quite civil students treat me like I had leprosy (while I was on the job, at least). Nothing like having people suddenly stop in their tracks and walk three feet around you with a look that they just smelled something outrageous. Women seemed to be worse about this, or maybe it was just my sensitivity to their reactions. (I’m male.)

After that, I went for jobs where I could wear Italian shoes and expensive sweaters. And now i’m, never, never rude to janitors.

17

Well, I have three.

First, while living in Florida I lost my job in a fast food place. A friend worked on a fishing boat and got me a job. I lasted three days. The boat went out at 4 am, started fishing at 6 am and docked about 4 pm. The fishing was bad, drop a net, circle the net then hold it up while the boat picked up the fish[#1]. The part that got me happened after docking. That’s when you got to sort a couple thousand pounds of fish that had sat in a hold for hours in really hot weather. I couldn’t stand the smell. On the third day I quit as soon as I got to the dock. A bonus, in 3 days I made almost $1000.

The next one was a job only a purely evil person could do. I got a job as an assistent manager at a rent to own place. Half way through the first day I figured out the job was to basically strong arm poor people into buying shoddy crap at insane prices and then call them every week and harass them till they paid. I delivered the last piece of the day, drove to my apartment and parked their truck, called them up and told them I quit and where the truck could be picked up. The manager was pretty pissed off. Oh well.

The last one was at a “tech support” outsourcing firm. Basically phone support. The company gave three weeks of training. An hour into the first day of training I realized that I already knew everything they were going to train us on (I have a whole lot of experience in the area, in fact at my last job I created the training materials among other things). During the lunch break I went to the HR woman and told her I wanted to skip training, take the tests now and hit the floor. She was ok with it and called in the trainer to see what he said. The trainer was a) a complete fool b) thought he was a guru and c) had a MCSE cert, which in most cases, proves that the individual is a complete moron[#2]. Well, the trainer didn’t like the idea and said something like “You probably don’t even know what TCP-IP stands for”. I rattled off Transmition Control Protocal-Internet Protocal and asked him if he knew what the 7 layers of the stack were. He gaped for a couple seconds and then said “What’s a stack?”, the HR woman laughed and I said “And he’s a TRAINER?” and walked out.

Slee

#1. While hold up the net the other crew were taking the unwanted fish out and throwing them a good distance away. I started to pull out the unwanted fish but felt it was cruel to toss the fish. I mean, they had had a bad day so far and tossing them seemed sort of mean. So I tossed them over my shoulder. I soon found myself surrounded by fish who were using me as shelter, hiding under my legs and swimming straight into me. I figured out why everyone else was throwing the fish.

#2. For any MCSE’s out there, no insult is intended. It’s just in my experience 90% of MCSE’s don’t know a damned thing, the other 10% are really good. At my last job I worked for 3 MCSE’s and they couldn’t figure out how to schedule a tape backup on an AIX machine. On my first day I did it in 10 minutes never having touched an AIX box before with nothing but the manuel.

18

No, that’s not one of the worst. I spent four years working in the payday loan business. Essentially, people “pawn” their checks for cash and pay a “fee” (called interest in some states, and that’s really what it is) - typically $15-25 per hundred received for about two weeks. Any wonders over why states finally started to regulate these things?
To the topic at hand, I once had a job that I never actually showed up for. It was at an Arby’s, and I really didn’t want to be working there at all. So I never showed up for training. But I doubt that truly fits what the OP was looking for.

19
      • It’s over a week, but my other jobs are measured in years, so I’ll say- I spent two weeks driving for a courier service.
  • I moved back to my home area and needed a job fast, and didn’t want my previous night-job back. They asked me on the phone if I basically knew the city-metro area, and I said I did even though I didn’t live in it, but I wasn’t totally lying. They showed how to look up street addresses in a utility book and handed me a based-cellphone. You got paid partly by load weight, but mostly by how many runs you made, and businesspeople often people tipped, which wasn’t insignificant either.
  • You had to use your own vehicle, and I had a covered pickup truck at the time, and I eventually got lots of runs carrying construction equipment/supplies from the middle of the city, to luxury homesites out in the almost-rural areas 45 minutes away (that’s 45 minutes one-way). I was spending $100+ a week on gasoline; the first week I made $75 total, and the second week I made $175 total. I backed partly over some lady’s lawn ornament in the rich part of town and the courier place had to pay for it (she had a huge mansion with a driveway four inches wider than my truck, and I had to back out). I quit after working the second 40-hour week, with only about $50 to show for both two weeks. I lucked out and didn’t get ticketed or towed in that time, probably the only good luck with the job that I had. I found out later that the company was hiring because they were a new company, and they were charging customers only 2/3 and paying drivers only 2/3 the normal going rate. - DougC
20

My shortest job was at Central Park Hamburgers. You know, the little drive up shack?
After three hours and about six grease burns, I flipped my last batch of fries.
I never even went back for my paycheck.

I also had two sales jobs where I never made it past orientation, but that was because they seemed somewhat…shifty?

I work for a temp agency that deals with public schools now. I had one assignment with a class of children that were near catatonic. My job was to feed, diaper, feed, and ship off to the bus. I just couldn’t deal with it more than two days.