The guy who picks up or cleans port-o-potties after a big concert.
I heartily second all of those… Other jobs I wouldn’t want:
Accountant – I suck at math and would be incredibly bored.
Sales – any Sales job. When people say no, I just shrug and say, “okay, sorry to bother.”
Nurses’ Aide – just like an orderly, equally disgusting and messy
Crime Scene Investigator – too gorey
Asphalt guy on a hot summer day
Roofer guy on a hot summer day
Laundress (worked at a dry cleaners once, and those are the clothes that aren’t nearly as funky as washables! And it sucked)
Pedicurist (I don’t even have the nerve to get my feet done)
One of those guys that works in a freezer all day
pearl diver - deep water scares me
In Calgary a few years back, a radio station had a contest to see who had the worst job. The winner won a trip to Cabo or Mazatlan or somedamn thing like that.
The guy who won had a job jerking off pigs or something like that for some animal research/fertility lab.
Gynocologist.
Driving instructor, I think it would be * terrifying*
Somehow these two do not appear to me to be mutually exclusive.
Carry on.
The military trains people specifically to tell loved ones if a soldier has died or been injured. They’re called Casualty Assistance Call Officers. I don’t think it’s anyone’s full-time job just to knock on peoples’ doors and bring them bad news, but that would no doubt be the worst part of the job.
A friend from high school has spent the past 27 years working at a sewage treatment plant. He says you get use to the smell. I couldn’t.
My buddy used to work at a slaughterhouse. His job was to shave the bristles off of dead, decapitated pig faces.
A bad job, but better than the guy wearing hipwaders who worked inside the vat of pig guts, jiggling them with a pole so they would flow smoothly. That has to be the worst real job I have ever heard of.
Reminds me of a summer job I had once. I worked on a fish processing boat in Alaska. Every job on that boat sucked big time, but the worst was when you got assigned to be the ‘brailer’. Brailing (not sure about the spelling) is when you stand hip deep in bloody fish gore in the bottom of the hold of a refrigerated boat (one of the boats that carries the salmon from the actual fishing boats to the processing boat) and then, while the boat is swaying side to side in the waves, you take a two-foot diameter vaccuum hose and bend over and try to suck up the last of the salmon from the bottom of the boat: Dark. Smelly. Wet. Unbalanced. Very terribly smelly. Heavy. Awkward. Yucky. Awful fish smell. Disgusting pieces of fish floating around in their gore. And it really smells bad.
Then when you’re done, everyone kind of laughs at you, glad they’re not the ones picked for the job. And the captain of the boat orders you to go back down into the hold because there might be another fish in there that you missed.
But at the end of the week (we worked 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week), you could wash your clothes, if you didn’t mind missing some sleep, but they didn’t want to ‘waste’ fresh water on the crew’s needs, so the washers were directly supplied with salt water from the ocean.
But at least I didn’t have the experience my friend did: he woke up one night to discover that one of his roommates (who had gotten very drunk that night) had awakened and, rather than walking to the bathroom down the hall, had begun urinating a copious hot smelly stream directly onto my friend in his sleeping bag.
That was a bad job that summer.
That’s my Uncle Joe. He has his own port-o-potty business, and he says that it’s really not all that bad. He doesn’t have to touch anything nasty, and actually, the stink is at a minimum. There’s a hose that sucks out the poo container which attaches simply and neatly, and he uses a high-pressure disinfectant sprayer to clean out the inside from a distance.
My vote for “Worst Job” goes to store clerk/hotel clerk/resturant worker or any job in the service sector. I think any job that deals constantly with the general public should be highly paid. I swear to God, I’d rather starve to death than ever work with the public again. I’d rather be knee deep in pig guts, because at least the pig guts don’t verbally abuse you.
There’s a weather station that is manned year round at the top of Mount Washington. Since the highways there close in the winter, they’re pretty much cut off from the rest of the world all winter. The winds there hit 100 mph today ( http://www.mountwashington.org/ ), and me? I’m terrified of winds over 25 mph. On top of that there’s something called “the presence” in and around the station that is suppose to freak out people who venture up there, and that there’s supposed to be a Native American legend about. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a web description of it (It was described in detail in Passing Strange by Joseph Citro) but whatever it is, not a ghost but something, it’s ‘caused’ more than one person to be overwhelmed by paranoia and try to run away, which resulted in them freezing to death. Even though odds are 99.9% that there’s nothing strange up there, I’m already predisposed to thinking about it, and suggestion is a powerful thing. So…that’d be the worst job I can think of - this would be my idea of hell.
As I have pointed out in other threads, being abused is not something that I encounter regularly as a telemarketer. The vast majority of those who say “No” do so incredibly politely…even going so far as to apologise to ME for their reluctance! Honestly, I can count on one hand the number of times when I have been seriously abused: it’s not something I expect to occur on a normal day at work (which is why I guess it IS so upsetting when it DOES happen). But 4 or 5 times over 10 years (or 3yrs equiv. full time) is not exactly an occupational hazard.
And you might be surprised about what percentage of people DO donate to the charity I solicit funds for (I’m a telefundraiser rather than a salesperson, although there is technically little difference in approach). Rather than your estimate of ‘dozens and dozens’ of dud calls before a successful one, on most days my rate is 1:4, with a good day being 1:2 and a VERY good day being 1:<1 (OK, I’ll admit to having bad days sometimes as well…my worst ever day was 1:7).
But yes, I do hate calling people when they’ve just got home from work, or are preparing/eating dinner or are kicking-back relaxing afterwards. So that’s why I try to avoid working the evening shift if I can possibly manage to.
So, while it is not my life’s ambition to remain a telemarketer for the rest of my life, it is certainly not the worst job in the world either. IMHO, that title would be reserved for being an Infant-School Teacher. OMG that would be awful.
Sounds like a description of the Wendigo.
Being alone in a lonely place can make you go stir-crazy.
For several years, in my " I’m going to start a business that will revolutionize a sector and help me gouge big mula out of lazy yuppies" dream phase, *this * was the top job that *created *.
Everyone laughed at me for such an off the wall idea.
As for a job I could never do: Librarian. There is *no music * to break the monotony of silence. That would drive me nuts.
Explosive Ordnance Disposal.
Have we mentioned front-line Iraqi soldier?
I can’t believe no one’s mentioned the various dental fields yet. I couldn’t even be a dental hygienist. Scraping people’s teeth with a metal tool? Not for me, thanks.
The last time I was in there, I struck up a conversation about this subject (limited somewhat on my end to “Err? Unh! Uggr!” due to her fingers in my mouth.) She told me that the worst part about the job is those people who don’t brush their teeth before they come into the dentist’s office. Their logic is that they’re having their teeth cleaned by a professional that day, so why bother to brush in the morning?
Sanitary bin cleaner. Erk!
Max.