I’m not talking about the best paying job you ever had – although you can certainly factor that into the equation if you find it relevant. I’m not talking just about amazing coworkers – although we might find that a certain type of personality and intelligence is drawn to certain types of jobs. I’m not necessarily asking a question just about those jobs that simulated you mentally, physically, tested your mettle, where you found your calling, or even where you met your first love. Not any one of these yet all of these could be a part of your answer. — So, what job gave you this total package. That’s right — I’m looking for your subjective opinions regarding the best overall job you ever had. In my subjective case — it would be the job I’d want if every job paid the same — I worked for a summer with disabled children – at minimum wage. So – as a prospective job hunter – what’s the best damn job the world has to offer? In your humble opinion – of course. 
I really enjoyed selling custom wheelchairs. It was trying at times, but the results were (almost) always a big improvement. I went into nursing and I think this is the best job I’ve ever had on several levels.
The best job I ever had was delivering pizza in college.
I got to drive around on my own most of the night. I got tips, which sometimes added up to a nice little sum, especially when I delivered to drunk folks who just handed me wads of cash in a, well, drunk, manner. Plus, I got a certain amount for every pizza I delivered on top of my hourly pay.
When I got back from deliveries and there weren’t any more to make, I’d wash dishes, clean tables, make ranch dressing, and what-not, but the second a delivery came up I was out of there. And washing stuff wasn’t any big deal because I’m a bit of a clean freak, so I liked to take dirty stuff and turn it into clean stuff.
Now I sit in an office all day and do whatever folks tell me to do. My job now is pretty intellectually challenging and I like that, but I’m never going to really be free of a “boss,” just th identity of the boss will change (from partners to clients). I’m currently working on ways to once again be my own boss (but with a wife and a mortgage and a cat to take care of, I’ll need to make more than I did delivering pizza).
Oh, and I’d snag pizza rolls to munch on all the time, which was cool. You just try to find a spare pizza roll in a law firm.
For me, it’s a toos-up. My dishwashing jobs were heaven. The kitchen was a furious, profane and funny place. If I did my job, everybody, waiters, busboys, chefs, loved me. I could get beer, hell, my second one I drank beer on the job. I was entirely happy, and washed dishes for a long time before becoming qa cook.
About ten years ago, I was the grammar instructor at the Oakland College of Court Reporting (long closed). Court reporting is very demanding, and one of the many things you have to be good at to be successful is grammar. The student body was 99.5% young women. I could do the gig standing on my head. I had just moved from Mass., and all of a sudden I was surrounded by beautiful young ladies of all races, colors and creeds. I can still remember their names… sigh.
I worked at my best job ever for three years. I was a machinist and I made cool things out of aluminum and steel.
Sadly, I realized that my future in that field was not so great: the total number of such jobs has been decreasing for quite a long time and this caused the market to be full of very experienced machinists who would accept low pay (it beats unemployment!).
I have been a computer geek for the past decade or so, and the only “things” I can make with my hands at work are computer programs – I do feel great pleasure after writing a particularly well-done bit of code, but it just isn’t the same. The days when a factory worker could buy a home and raise a family on his home are long gone, so I am likely here to stay.
There are days when I wish I could be back in that machine shop, standing in front of a Bridgeport milling machine taking a thousanth or so off the surface of a shining block of aluminum with a flycutter.
This one.
I work for a computer game company. It’s stressful and fast-paced, but if you ever get the chance, it’s fascinating.
This one.
I come up with ad ideas and write copy for things like catalogs, annual reports, and product guides. It’s fairly easy and the pay is great.
The only downside is one thoroughly unpleasant co-worker, but even his BS has ceased to bug me so much once I found out how miserable (by his own making) his home life was.
Communications Technician in a Central Office Switchroom. I was in charge of the office that served a major portion of Silicon Valley. Many of the early voicemail companies ran their testbeds out of our switch, and ISDN was just getting started up. I learned new stuff everyday, and worked unsupervised. I could pretty much work my own hours, and came in off-shift (time and a half!) to install the new equipment with various vendors. It was a sad day when downsizing and my lack of seniority forced me into the “Center”, a cubicle world that came to inspire “Dilbert”.
I spent 2 years working on a farm milking cows. And I loved it. The people I worked for were friends of my family and they were truely awesome people. Plus all the steak I could eat.
After that, i worked for a year as a bowling alley mechanic. That was fucking awesome too. The people there were just truely great people. The boss bought us all lunch on weekends. He was a great guy.
For two summers in college I was lucky enough to work on the African Queen Boat Ride in Busch Gardens, Tampa. It was a lot like the Jungle Cruise at Disneyworld, except all the animals in the attraction were live, not animitronic (sp??)
There were multiple boats that held about 15-20 people that went around a circular track while the “boat captains” told a story about a lost scepter accompanied by perfectly awful jokes (“don’t come on bored, come on excited!!”)
There were some really interesting animals: rhinos, chimpanzees, alligators (“What do alligators eat out of? Gator bowls!”), crocodiles, lemurs and maribou storks (“those are the storks that bring the UGLY babies”).
The ride started by going through some animal exhibits, an African water front village (“water front CONGOminiums”), a crashed plane, a gorge with waterfalls, a skull island, a shipwrecked boat (“looks like they got a piece of the rock, and now they’re all washed up”). The highlight was the African village, where the male “boat captains” took turns wearing a tribal mask and jumping out with a spear and “threatening” the boat (“looks like a pretty sharp character, I guess he wants to get his point across”)
Real macaws perched on the back of each boat. These macaws were rejects from Busch Gardens’ famous “Bird Show” and could do some simple tricks. Some were cranky and untouchable, but some loved to be petted. I have a great story of the time one of the birds “Sunshine” fell into the water and I had to jump in and save him.
The African Queen was a perfect ride for families, the elderly but it was deemed not exciting enough. Sadly, the African Queen was shut down in 89 and replaced with the “Tanganika Tidal Wave” one of those big log flume rides where the highlight is creating a wall of water that splashes observers on a bridge.
The job had a lasting effect on me, I lost all fear of public speaking and I discovered I really liked to be “on stage” and performing. I still use those skills in my current, well-paying job as a corporate trainer I still remembe the African Queen fondly, it was a wonderful job at a really wonderful time in my life.
I took a ton of pictures of the Boat Ride, but they were lost during college. I did some googling, and here’s a picture of my beloved ride:
Simple… Being a mom
It’s the best and the hardest too…
I worked at a resort hotel in Palm Beach. I was the relief attendant. In other words, I gave everyone their days off. I was the pool lifeguard two days, the beach guard two days, and the beach attendant one day. The beach was great and I really enjoyed the people I worked with. I lived in Lake Worth and rode my bike up A1A every morning. It was grand.
Hrm. A few years ago I would have said driving the payphone route for a lot of Chicago bars. Easy work, got to hang with a cool co-worker, and got a lot of interresting bar stories.
A year and a half ago, I’d have said Playtester. Yes, the game sucked ( http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=1715 ), but it was fun to be able to just troubleshoot a video game all day, and to harrass my boss about just -how- sucky the game was going to turn out. 
Now? It’s a close one. I’m freelance writing, and I love it. Now if I could just get -more- work out of it…
The best job I ever had was working for a summer in the Youth Conservation Corps. I was a teenager working for minimum wage, but the sense of satisfaction from seeing each project completed made it the best thing.
It was hard, physical labor, but the camadarie between the members of each crew made everything easier.
Mine was working the Admissions/Emergency Room Desk at the Naval Hospital In Gtmo Bay, back in the 50’s.
With all the action you get in an ER, even in small hospital like ours was, there was hardly any sense of time. You show up for work, and the next time you look up, your shift is done.
Gtmo had an elaborate housing program for married swabbles and jarheads. One night the base beauty (and, uh, renowned easiest-bang-on the-base) was wheeled in. In a moment of guilt over cheating on her husband she’d swallowed a couple of handfuls of pills.
This called for for a stomach pumping. You pass a catheter through the patient’s nose, down the throat and into the stomach. Then through the catheter you inject hypodermics-full of potassium permanganate to neutralize the toxins in her tummy.
Well that night we had the hospital hack as the Medical Officer of the Day. This idiot couldn’t even do his own specialty (Ophthalmology) properly, much less general medicine.
So the woman is woozy, but sitting up on the ER table, while Dr. S-Hole fumbles egregiously, trying unsuccessfully to introduce the catheter. It was mortifying and scary at the same time.
Taking my ass firmly in both hands I (a mere 2nd Class Petty Officer) sidled up behind him and said, “Doctor, do you want me to try?”
I swear to God, it was like a grade B movie. “Yes!!” He sputtered. In a friggin’ panic, he turned, flipped the catheter to me and retreated to the back wall of our little Emergency Room.
Now I had no sweat with this procedure. I had been doing it in the Cuban Infirmary during the day, for a few weeks, to extract stomach juices from our Cuban foodhandlers - Cuban nationals who worked in the various commisaries on the base. We’d send the stomach samples to the Hospital lab to check for the tuberculin bacillus (if I remember correctly).
OK, so now it’s kinda like magic. I step to the patient and suddenly it’s just her and me, even though the room was filled with the ambulance crew, a couple-three Navy Nurses, the womans husband, etc.
The patient is conscious so I quietly tell her what I’m gonna do and how it won’t hurt, and so on. Then I said in a slightly louder voice to no one in particular, “Could we have a glass of water here, please?”
Zap!! Bang! There it is almost instantaneously, placed, by one of the Nurse, right on the instrument tray. To the oatient, “You take this glass and when I tell you to sip you sip. When you swallow I’ll slide this tube down your throat a little.” She sipped, I slid, until the catheter reached her somach.
Now, somewhat self consciously, “Uh…could I have a syringe?” Bang! A different nurse slapped it into the palm of my hand like I was a surgeon in the OR.
And we completed the procedure, got her up and walking about and admitted to the hospital for the night.
Anyway…
This marked the day I fell hopelessly in love with Navy Nurses. It mattered squat to them that I was a lowly White Hat and they were Officers. They just focussed on the task at hand, gave me the same courtesy they would a doctor, and together we saved that woman’s life.
Secretly, I felled rather pleased about myself - until I heard of another feat by a buddy of mine, a fellow corpsman at the Hospital.
Because of all the dependants living on the Gtmo base, we had an OB ward at the hospital. A doctor pronounced an infant dead - in front of the baby’s mother. But going off in a quiet corner and using CPR, the corpsman restored that baby to life.
If all has gone well, that “kid” is now around 48 years old, and probably has no idea of just how lucky he is.
Did either of us corpsmen get any commendations? Are you kidding? How would it read? “Thank you for offsetting our hack MDs!” LOL!
NOTE: I encountered very, very few bad Navy doctors in my experience.
And one doctor - with whom I worked the Gtmo Cuban Infirmary - is my all time hero: Dr. Sam Moschella.
My absolute favorite job of all time: Working as a microbiologist for a chemical company that produced mostly antacid products. It was a one-microbiologist lab, meaning that I was all by myself; it was just me, the samples and the bugs. My manager worked in an office in another building; she’d call me on the phone in my “office” for test results, or come in and sign stuff in my lab notebook, but basically I was on my own. This meant I had to do ALL the work with no help from anyone – prepare the culture media, maintain the stock cultures, set up the tests (microbial limits on the product/raw materials, plus water testing in the plant), count the plates, isolate and identify microorganisms and even wash the glassware/inventory supplies: if I needed supplies, I had to give my manager a list.
Needless to say, this job kept me busy as hell (to the point where I had to work late once or twice a week, and even go in on a Sat or Sun a couple times), but I loved the work and I especially loved the independence and no people part of it. It was nice and quiet, no micromanaging boss constantly hanging over me, no coworkers to bother me with inane conversation or making me listen to a radio.
And – it was only a 15-20 minute drive to get there.
Problem was, it was a temporary position (3 months), I was still in school and the manager wanted the permanent person not only do be able to do the job as I’d done it (she used to compliment me on how well I did and said I should use her as a reference, which I did), but also to already have his/her degree.
My current job: teaching schoolkids in national parks. I get to work and live in parks like the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Yosemite, I get paid to hike and teach and play games with kids, and I’ve got some amazing co-workers. The pay’s not great, but the job satisfaction more than makes up for the fact that I’m making less money.
Best job I’ve ever had? This one. Director in a small construction firm, in a city with explosive real estate growth. I basically run the company, with only major decisions (and cheque signings) left to my boss, the owner of the company (who is a real good guy!). It’s not really mentally stimulating, especially compared with what I could have been doing given my education, but it does leave me pleasantly satisfied at the end of each day. And it helps that the pay is much better than what I’d be earning as an engineer in India.
Best job I never got to do? Part of a team that road tests cars in the final stage of development, for Karmann in Germany. Cold weather testing in Scandinavia, etc., hot weather testing in Mexico, Australia, etc. Plenty of travelling, plenty of driving, plenty of travelling, plenty of driving. Surrounded by like-minded petrol heads, and the money as pretty good too. Pretty much my dream job. And then 2 weeks before I was to sign on the contract, 9/11 happened, and my job was one of those cancelled (tighter budget, because the bulk of those cars would be heading for the US, which everyone thought would head deeper into recession).
Well there she was, knealing in front of me…
Best job? Working as a temp at the Royal Bank of Canada’s Sydney office in the spring of 1998.
I started out as a general admin assistant in their bond dealing room (a very small operation; the entire company only employed around 80-100 in Sydney), then moved to a less glamourous office where I was sat with a couple of traders doing non-stop data entry of paper F/X deal tickets. Absolutely menial work, no web access, no windows or perks, but the nicest bunch of people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. The joking and bantering made it a great place to be, and the lack of responsibility that comes with being a temp meant it was a work-to-the-clock job and I could shut down and hit the town at 5.30pm prompt.
I miss it.