1/2 day at a refrigerator repair place. The owner insisted I let the phone ring 5 times, no matter what I was doing, so the caller could “think real hard about why they were calling.” Uh, buh-bye.
3 days as a clown at the Ground Round restaurant. The cooks started taking their clothes off in front of me so I scrammed.
3 days at a dry cleaners. Had to empty disgusting pockets full of snot rags and cheesy matchbooks with telltale phone numbers scrawled on them.
of course I meant after about an hour or two of having people turn me down. I seemed to have lost a couple of words in my last post.
1 day- serving subpoenas in bad parts of DC. “3+1/2 hours” is probably a more accurate response.
1 week- I got a job with a construction company during summer break from college. The job was to tear out and replace the refrigeration room at Catholic University. The original refrig. room was built circa 1900 and used cork as the insulation. So over the past 100 years condensation would form behind the metal walls and rot out the cork. I could deal with the rotten cork. I could deal with the dead rats we found trapped in the walls. What I couldn’t deal with was the stench when we hit the sewage line while tearing up the floor- I ran outside and vomited. I told them I was quitting, finished up the week, and got a job at a xmas tree farm for the rest of the summer.
The first real job I ever had was as a telemarketer for a home improvement contractor. I sucked at convincing people to hire our services and quit after two days.
As a temp, I was assigned to the Coca Cola warehouse in Springfield, VA, for a week. I didn’t sort cans quick enough and was told not to come back in the morning.
Three days.
It was a second job (my real job was full time) and I told my boss I would be working part time as a waitress in the evenings to make extra money. (My real job which I adored didn’t pay shit.) He put up with me leaving a half hour early for three days, then arranged for me to get a job in another restaurant where the night shifts started later, so I wouldn’t have to leave the FT job early.
That was actually a nice thing for him to do, considering.
“3 days as a clown at the Ground Round restaurant.”
—A restaurant with clowns? I can’t imagine anything that would make me less hungry.
51/2 Weeks
This could go in either thread. I worked for a credit card company doing verification upgrades. If this had been all, it would have ben great. But no, I worked with cliques from hell which had nothing to do with me, but did effect where I sat. Twice a week I’d come in to find that my manger has moved me to a different location in the cube farm, to settle a dispute.
The other problem was that we were to sometimes handle Customer Services calls when they had overflow or tech problems. According to the guy who hired me, this is something that would happen 3-4 times a year. Yeah right! Third week there we were fielding all the C/S calls. “Yeah budy I personally refused your charges at that fancy meal last night, feel free to swear at me.”
The fifth or sixth time he was about to move me I told him not to bother.
I worked as a temp for a few years, so I had some pretty short gigs. Most of them were for a few days to a few weeks long…but I think the actual shortest one lasted a day. They wanted me for longer, but it was so god-awful boring that I barely made it through the first day, and declined to come back. Stuffing envelopes. Ugh. I almost walked out two hours into it, but I managed to get through the day by telling myself “okay, just make it to break time”…“okay, I’ll just work until lunch”…
Oh, man, I completely surpressed my very similar one-night experience with the DC PIRG (it might have been called US PIRG, I don’t remember; they’re not worth looking up). Was Texas Watch an affiliate? Sounds like the same formula.
I am not a fan of the PIRGS, since the more I talked to people the more I found out how much they seem to have operated on a cult of personality: originally that of the hysterical, vain, self-righteous, manipulative prick Nader, but by the late 80s it it had moved on to some lesser acolyte.
The New York PIRG, which apparently was pretty professional, largely split off on its own.
Eve, it was a pretty stupid job. I had to stand out by the road and clown around, the object being that I would draw people in. Then, I would go inside and blow up balloons, do some more clowning, and pass out chintzy plastic toys to the children. But it payed really well (this was '71 or '72, and I was making $2.50/hr). But, alas…my career in show biz was less than glamorous.
For about two weeks after freshman year of college, I worked a temp assignment at a potpurri warehouse. Every day I drove about 45 minutes at about 5 am to an industrial park to spend 10 hours at a conveyor belt putting french vanilla potpurri into plastic bags and tying bows to them.
It was a Japanese company and in the morning (like at 7) and once in the afternoon, we would do calisthenics, just like in that movie Gung Ho.
I finished my two week stint there and never looked back. The scent of french vanilla still makes me want to retch. What I couldn’t believe is that on the line were people who had been working there for 15 YEARS OR MORE. The mind boggles.
“I had to stand out by the road and clown around, the object being that I would draw people in.”
— I would think the idea was that people would try to run you over. I once saw a guy up in New England, dresed as a piece of cheese and dancing around maniacally in front of a cheese shop. That had to have been a pretty bad job . . .
Setting: Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, 1996.
External: Daytime. A greenhouse in a Chicago suburb. Customers everywhere. Busiest day in company’s 30-year history.
Cast: Plavacek, as Joe Cashierman, the newly hired ringerupper.
Hoardes of angry customers, baking in abnormally warm conditions, anxious to get home and start planting, as themselves.
Plot: 1) Joe Cashierman doesn’t know how to work a cash register. 2) Joe Cashierman was hired to water the flowers. He thought it would be a suitably mindless job, a $6.25 to wander around and water ain’t bad. 3) Prices aren’t marked on flowers. There really isn’t a place to put a price tag. 4) Joe Cashierman doesn’t know where anything is in the greenhouse, and cashiers are a prime point of contact for customers needing assistance.
Running time: 5 hours.
I lasted twenty minutes or so at my first job ever. I was seventeen, agonizingly shy, and supposed to be a temp receptionist. My supervisor spent approximately five seconds explaining the phone system, disappeared before I could ask any questions, and fired me the first time I made a mistake. As I didn’t have a car, I had to stand around the office waiting for my mom to pick me up while the supervisor called the temp agency and asked them to send somebody “who isn’t A COMPLETE INCOMPETENT.”
The experience left me with an intense fear of employment which took the better part of two years to get over. (Come to think of it, in some ways I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten over it.)
It’s a two-way tie. One day each:
Slinging pizza assembly line style. I’d cover these boards with cornmeal so that the dough wouldn’t stick and pass them to the next person who’d put on the dough and the next person would put on the sauce, etc, etc. Well, after a few hours of this I started getting bored, so I started drawing silly faces in the cornmeal with my finger trying to crack up the dough-putter-onner girl. It worked too, but the boss gently suggested I shouldn’t return the next day.
At a frame shop. My first day’s job was to cut down board on one of those big Gillotine-type cutters. Turns out somebody’s “Les Miserables” musical poster (autographed by the entire cast no less) had gotten slipped into the pile. Ker-Chunk!!
Recent one!
5 days at Vector Marketing. The manager spent 3 days getting us psyched up (read- Mind controlled/hypnotized) into selling knives, then I actually did it for 2 days, got next to nil in terms of references, was politely asked by relatives not to bug them about this again. This was this last week. I still have to turn in two small orders before I’m totally free of Cutco’s “Big Brother” presence.
3 days working for the Census Buerau. I was trained for 3 days, then told they’d call me when they needed me. They never called. At least I was paid for the three 8 hour days of training. At 15.50 an hour, that wasn’t too bad 
45 minutes. My first job.
I was a hostess at a restaurant. My job was to seat people, fill the salt & pepper shakers between rushes & put together all carry-out orders.
My first carry-out was for fish & chips. There were no utensils in the coleslaw so I asked a waitress where they were kept. She said “don’t worry about it” & stuck the hand she had been serving people with into the coleslaw & stuck some in a small plastic container. I refused to serve it to the customer, so she did. I called the manager to quit & finished filling the salt until she arrived. When she got there, I left.
The were later shut down by the department of health.
I wonder how that happened?
2 weeks:
Scraping crud off of trays in the school dining hall. Gross, but the parts that bugged me were that I had to eat dinner at 4pm and everybody around me only spoke Portuguese. The hunger pangs and isolation finally got to me.
3 weeks:
Marketing intern at a Boston radio station. Turned out my job was to call people at home and ask survey questions, which they would use to check the data coming in from the professional market research consultants. Since I’m not in-your-face enough to be a salesman, I particularly disliked being a borderline telemarketer. It also didn’t help that my boss loved to point out that he now had a Harvard student who had to do everything he said (“Hah-vuhd boy, copy these forms. Hah-vuhd boy, refill the coffee pot.”). When one of the DJs decided to take out her meltdown hissy fit on me and two other interns, that was it.
I think I had the job of titular head of my family at one stage, but lost it about 15 seconds after the wedding ceremony 
In 1984, I was hired to work as a dishwasher in some elite private boy’s school in Katonah NY, a job I’d landed through a placement agency. It was a live-in position and I had been shown around and issued my living quarters and told what time to show up the next morning in the kitchen.
I bought a vending machine sandwich, finished it, and needed to dispose of the wrapper. No trash cans in the hallway. I saw a door with a glass window and through the window spotted a trash can. Opened the door, leaned over, and threw my wrapper away and glanced right to see the Board of Directors or the Convention of Original Founding Families or something of that ilk staring at me in significant irritation.
Later that evening I was summoned and told that I would not be working there after all.