My father worked at a dry cleaner for two years. The job featured noxious chemicals, uncomfortable heat no matter the time of year, and terrible pay. The upshot? He can iron a pair of pants, a shirt, or a jacket with the cheapest iron on earth, and it looks professionally pressed. Useful skill for out of town weddings, funerals, and everyday life in his later career.
I flipped burgers, stuffed tacos, and made pizzas. I did all of this on the ass end of the payscale. But as a result I can make sure all the food is done for a small to medium party at exactly the right time. If it all has to finish together it will. If it has to arrive in stages it will. And it will be ready when I say it will be, so showing up on time is not optional. This is a useful skill twice or so a year, but on those two days it is usually appreciated.
So what is the good you have distilled from the crap?
The summer of my senior year in H.S. I worked as a packer in cantelope sheds from McAllen to Presidio to Pecos. They’re graded by size and each requires a certain ordering for a box and always stem print up. You’re paid by the box (14 cents back then) so it behooves you to pack fast. Essentially you become an expert at lifting an object with your left hand and flicking it to your right hand waiting inside the box and having it land perfectly oriented for placement.
Where could that be applied now? Heh, you should see me unload the grocery shopping cart onto the belt. Most everything flies from one hand to the other, one after the other and without looking. Cracks the kid right up and gets a big smile from the cashier.
Scooped ice cream at a nightmarish establishment. Terrible job. But damned if I still can’t produce perfect scoops of ice cream and masterwork sundaes. I do this a lot at birthday parties and other occasions where ice cream is present, and it gets a lot of oohs and aahs. I don’t know why.
I waitressed for three years. I can carry four plates at once, sometimes five, multiple glasses at once, and I can deal with people being stinky, picky snots about food with no trouble at all. It’s very useful now as I serve up dinner every night to multiple children who like to be stinky, picky snots about their food.
I also worked as a line cook in a restaurant so I can do the everything done at the same time thing as well. I’m used to having my dinner ready all at once, and it drives me crazy to go to dinner somewhere where they haven’t figured that one out yet. No part of a dinner should be room temperature. blech!
I painted houses one summer and for the most part I have lost my fear of heights.
I washed dishes in a restaurant for a couple of summers and now I can pick up anything bare handed.
Last time that came in handy was after my friends bachelor party when he vomited in the shower at the hotel. I had to manually clean out the chunks or the vomit water wouldn’t drain, didn’t bother me at all.
I’ve volunteered for years at a dog shelter, and like Sitchensis, the only time I’d consider gloving up for a nasty cleanup is if I had an open cut on my hands or similar. I’m fairly unfazed by various biological effluvia.
I can make frosting, wrap it up and write your message on a cake with it. I can pick out the best ripe melon from a group, strip the meat out of a pineapple, and pick out exactly X pounds of fruit. I’m a whiz at alphabetizing, a skill that is probably not much valued here but impresses the heck out of people.
Same here, but I learned how to scoop a hollow spiral of ice cream that fits perfectly into a parfait glass so that (a) the glass looks full but only contains about half the ice cream it can actually hold and (b) there’s plenty of room for the toppings to run attractively down the inside of the glass.
Mall cop for 4 years. Since mall cops can’t really do shit, I learned to talk anyone down from an unstable situation with just my words and without violence. I no longer get an adrenaline rush from dangerous situations (after having a few firearms pulled on me while I had nothing better from pepper spray, you get used to it). Also, since I was in charge, I learned how to inspire people to do their job for the fun of it instead of having pay be a factor. (to be honest, I yelled like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket and my guys loved it)
For all the shittyness of that job, the skills I learned there have proved to be invaluable in my current position with Children’s Protective Services.
Me too! I once amazed (well, mildly amused) some friends with my ability to plop scoop after scoop onto a kitchen scale, each one weighing almost exactly 6 oz. Also, we were allowed one “scoop” of ice cream at the end of our shift - I can still manage to fit well over a pint onto the end of a scoop.
I was an “assistant” at a construction company one summer in college. If anyone ever needed anything trivial but time-consuming (running machine parts to a mechanic, delivering contracts to a client or sub, or moving piles of crap around the yard), I was the guy who did it. It was a lousy job, but I learned to prioritize tasks and say “no” to people when I wouldn’t be able to do the things they were asking for.
Most of my secretarial work has given me the ability to turn my brain off (or send it off to daydreamland) and do repetitive tasks accurately and quickly for hours on end.
I can also fold a sheet of paper to perfect thirds instantly.
Skill 1 - I worked one summer at a beef processing facility, you know, a slaughterhouse. I came out with a new immunity from obnoxious smells and sights. You have anything gross, smelly or nauseating to get rid of, call me. As a side benefit of the job, I have a large collection of stories that can clear a table in thirty seconds flat.
Skill 2 - In my youth, I spent several years delivering newspapers. Folding and throwing a hundred or more papers every day for years on end gave me forearms like Popeye and I developed pinpoint accuracy in my throwing. With no wind to screw up my aim, I could get the paper in the mailbox at twenty yards.
I worked as a telephone installer many, many years ago.
I have fixed phones in various offices–usually simple problems. Rewired rooms to accommodate computer setups at home. When the cable guy said he couldn’t put it downstairs and we should hire an electrician? I don’t think so.
It’s very useful to know how to fish a wall.
I used to do actual electricity, too. But nowadays I hire an actual electrician for that, because I like stuff to be done to code (although it never is, in the houses I buy, for some reason; I seem attracted to houses with weird electricity).
I may have learned useful things in other jobs, but they didn’t carry over into real life.
I worked retail at a theme park. The uniforms belonged to the park. Good: We left them to be cleaned instead of being responsible for them ourselves. Bad: At shift change, you had a couple hundred people all changing into or out of uniforms at once. You learned to skin out of one outfit and into another in about thirty seconds, with another thirty seconds to arrange either your street clothes or your uniform in the garment bag. I may be exaggerating a bit.
That job where the boss greeted me with a look up and down and a “let’s see how long this one lasts” was made a bitch by the bitch in question and by the upper level management in general (of which she was the lowest rung), but I learned a lot about rubber and rubber-like products; it is also a neverending source for examples of How Not To Do Things, which comes in handy in my current job teaching people how to do their own jobs (they explain to me how they do it now, I design the new processes using the system they’re paying me to install, then I teach them these new processes).
The short internship in a hospital wasn’t crappy as such, but I wasn’t officially there and I knew that most people would rather I hadn’t been in at all. Dad worked in that hospital; I was studying ChemE and the lab manager (double degrees in Medicine and Chem) wanted to see whether the reputation of my school was deserved or not. I learned a lot about my own capabilities (greater than I’d thought going in); I also learned that what’s considered “nasty, stinky and dangerous” by someone with a certain background is “routine and uninteresting” to someone else (the assistant tech I shadowed treated poo and pee as routine and I didn’t; I treated concentrated acids as routine and she touched the bottles like they would grow spikes if held tightly).
The job trying to teach math to people applying for government jobs (specifically as firemen, EMTs and cops) went a long way towards helping me be better at explaining things to the Really Slow, but I’m still working on it. They were supposed to be able to perform the four basic operations on fractions and word percentiles: only one could give a decent explanation of what a fraction is and add them up. For the rest, I had to say “ok, forget about the book for a while, you can’t cram for the test if you don’t even understand the questions in it”. One asked “but how can I learn anything without the book?” “From what I explain” “But how can you explain without the book?”…
From working in a toy store, I can wrap any object of any shape or texture in a neat and tidy manner. I don’t have any particular flair for decorative or craftsy gift wrapping, but if you want that plastic brontosaurus wrapped without putting it in a gift box first, I’m your woman.
I think you just solved a mystery for me. I am uncoordinated and clumsy. Can’t catch a ball or a frisbee most of the time, trip on smooth sidewalks, etc. BUT I can toss something from my right hand to my left hand without looking and without missing, and I do this constantly without even thinking about it. I was always mystified about why I could do this when I can’t do anything else that requires that type of instant unwavering physical accuracy. It must come from bagging groceries - something I did for years in HS and college - back in the paper bag days. Unfold the bag, stick your left arm in, toss things from the belt into the bag using your right hand, catch them with your left and place them in the right spots in the bag to produce a fully loaded, well-balanced bag of groceries.
