My current job sounds like a dream job for a somewhat geeky guy and at one point, I did enjoy it. I own 1/3 of a home automation/AV company. We started our business in 2004. Construction was booming, we wired houses for upscale builders and sold the toys to the buyers. The business was closely tied to the construction industry, which came screeching to a halt a few years back and all of our builders went out of business. Since then, we’ve branched out a bit (commercial work, travel) but the work is much more unpredictable and being the owner, if all you’re doing is service calls for a month you don’t get paid. That’s strike one.
Speaking of service calls-turns out I’m good at troubleshooting, so my role in the company has evolved into doing mostly that. I go to some client’s house who’s pissed off because they’ve spent anywhere from thousands to a couple of hundred thousands of dollars and their crap doesn’t work. And then I figure out why it doesn’t work and whether its warrantied or not. That’s not terrible every now and then, but it gets very dispiriting after awhile. Strike two.
Strike three is the worst one: my partners have no concept of a balance between personal life and the business. They’re on the go 24/7 and expect me to be available too, and since they agree and make up 66.6% of the company, I’m perpetually outvoted. Final straw: one of them was pissed because I wouldn’t abandon my Father’s Day plans with my 76 year old father (whom I don’t see as often as I should) because some asshole couldn’t watch TV on his patio. Apparently, HIS dad was an ace businessman back in the day and would have understood. And it was Saturday and Father’s Day wasn’t til Sunday anyway. I’m executing my exit plan as we speak. Wish me luck.
By contrast, the jobs I had that sound the worst -riding around in a van in the middle of the night mopping ghetto grocery stores and washing dishes in a really busy restaurant- were a blast in comparison.
For a summer job, I painted wrought iron birdcages that were imported from Mexico. The first summer, this was done by pouring paint into a kiddie pool and then rolling the cages in the paint. Keep in mind the cages were about 5 feet tall, 3 or 3-1/2 feet in diameter. One of the messiest jobs ever.
Back when women wore nylons and garter belts instead of pantyhose, some poor schmuck had to stand in a broiling room putting nylons on upright aluminum legs and send them through steam machines to press them. I did that for about a month. I thought that must have been the worst job ever, until one of my bosses told me she used to be a chicken de-beaker.
I worked for the street department in my home town suburb of St. Louis during summers. For the most part I recall it fondly - cutting all the public grass on these big riding Yazoos that looked straight out of Road Warrior, backfilling / tilling / compacting / laying sod, creating streetsigns, replacing traffic signal bulbs, night street painting, tree trimming, etc. Hard work but I worked with a lot of characters and it was rewarding and somewhat enjoyable. Of course I would never let anyone know that, as I was busy being a complaining teenager.
However, one brutal month stretch had me paving tar. In St. Louis in the summer, around 90% humidity. I spent the time standing on extremely hot asphalt in extremely humid weather working my ass off spreading tar around. I think I lost twenty pounds.
A few years of desperation temp work gave me perspective on what to avoid…
I did house roofing for a couple of summers. Sweat, sunburns, shingle burns, tripping and falling through rafters, stepping on nails, carrying heavy awkward loads up rickety ladders…no thanks.
QA inspector of medical test samples, spending all day in an arctic parka in a barely above freezing warehouse. Lamb foreskin #73…check. Pig fetal tissue #97…check.
Industrial sandblasting, hot sweaty rebreather mask, thick unwieldy gloves, bad repetitive ergonomics leaving me either numb or cringing in pain.
Medical X-ray machine maintenance, schlepping noxious 10 gallon buckets of developer chemicals in and out of old buildings with awkward stair access, with all of the joyous seared lungs and rashy hands to show a good day’s work.
The day I finally landed a white-collar keyboard jockey job was the happiest day in my life.
I had a summer job in college where this company was paying people to go around to people’s houses and put door-hanger-style flyers for the company on each person’s door. So essentially we were paid to put garbage on people’s doorknobs.
I lasted half a morning at that job. Did get 20 bucks out of it though.
I did an entire summer, 3 months, 6 days a week during college “robo-dialing” people for 8 hours a day telemarketing trying to sell everything from coupon books to mobile “scooters”… worst summer of my life 
In a typical 8 hour shift, auto-dialers would feed us 200-500 calls of which about half were hang ups, go to hells and other choice words.
So very bad, but at the time the 9 bucks an hour seemed like a gold mine!
I bet the pay was awsome 
Bought my first car with it, which was the point… but I was not cut out for telemarketing.
Just out of curiosity, what do the reviewers say is so bad about the company you will be working for? Is it shit that people hate about working everywhere? Or do you think it’s specific to that company and possibly your role there?
I had similar concerns about my current job, based on Glassdoor reviews. Then again Facebook has a review of 4.6 out of 5.0 and I have no doubt I would hate working for a bunch of nerds worshipping a 29 year old dork who looks like the dumbest analyst on my team at my old job.
I once worked for a temp agency that sent me to an insurance company, where I spent a summer highlighting names in the phone book (for cold calling) because they couldn’t come up with anything else for me to do to fill my day. Apparently everyone else they’d ever had in that position was incompetent, and I got through the daily workload by about 8:30. This was 1996, and I didn’t even have internet. 
The following winter, I was living out of my car and bumming around Florida when I got a job where I was assured I would not be telemarketing, but instead calling people who already used the product the company made, and asking them for the names and numbers of their friends and family who might be interested in buying it as well. I had about half an hour of training, then was asked to work a split shift–noon to four, and then again from eight to midnight. I did not return at eight because I was so demoralized by what I was doing.
My early twenties were kind of a string of office temp jobs that were each terrible in their own way, but at least I was inside and I rarely had to mow, tar, or build anything.
You had a phone book! I took a temp job testing Pitney Bowes postage meters. My job was to sit is a big room full of envelopes and manually run them one by one through one of the meters. At the start and end of the day, I record the number on the counter.
According to the reviews on Linkedin and some other sites they are extreme micro-managers, the company has insanely high turnover, and every department from sales to development to customer service all said that the product they work with is quickly becoming obsolete (which is absolutely true, as best as I can tell) so there is no room for growth. At this point I don’t particularly care what they do or how they do it, as long as it isn’t morally questionable. I can handle being yelled at for a few months by persnickety bosses in a company that is going nowhere if it gets me back to work, but it seems like this is probably going to be an unpleasant experience.
In college I spent a year doing the early morning shift at my local Taco Hell. I deep fried everything they needed for the day. Hard shell tacos, taco salads, cinnamon crunchy things. God was I just a grease ball at the end of the shift. I have a sweating issue too, so I walked home drenched and slippery. Thank God I didn’t have a car. Unlike other fast food stories, I don’t have a problem eating there now.
Working in a factory that prepared CDs for market. There was an assembly line and each couple seconds you’d put a CD in a jewel case, or an insert in a jewel case, or fold a CD case, etc. You’d end up doing close to a thousand an hour. I lasted one day.
I signed up to deliver penny saver newspapers in my neighborhood when I was in college. I figured it would be easy money, because 90% of them were to my apartment complex and the route only took about an hour. And it would have been, if they had paid me, which I figured out after the 3rd or 4th week that they weren’t.
On a working holiday in Australia, I spent a few months driving an ice cream van, for a company owned by a lunatic. The actual driving and selling bit was OK, for the most part, though I did get a lot of complaints about the music being too loud- it had no volume control, and I wasn’t allowed to choose the route, so sometimes I was going to the same place day after day until the locals were really fed up of it.
Mostly though, the problem was back at the depot, in the form of the boss. He was in the process of handing the company over to his elder son, and literally screamed abuse at the staff at random- and took a particular dislike to me, while his wife and son were being perfectly pleasant and cheerful. It was really, really weird- like:
Wife: ‘Well, how did your first week go? All OK? If you need help with anything, just let me know’
Nutcase: YOU’RE THE WORST EMPLOYEE WE’VE EVER HAD, GET YOUR STUFF AND GET THE FUCK OUT, RIGHT NOW!!!
Wife: ‘It’s just starting to get in to the season, so it’ll probably be busier next week- the forecast is hot, but you’re picking it all up fast, so I think you’ll be fine’
Nutcase: 'DON’T BOTHER COMING BACK IN TOMORROW YOU PIECE OF SHIT, AND DON’T THINK I’M PAYING YOU ANYTHING EITHER, YOU HEAR???!
Wife: ‘Anyway, I’ll let you get home. See you tomorrow love!’
I stuck it out for a while as I needed the money- he was never there without someone else, as he had a heart attack the week before I started, his family made sure he was never left alone, but it was still really disturbing.
Back in the day my friend was hired at Taco Bell. His first job was to stir a gawd-awful amount of hamburger in a gargantuan pot on the stove.
Around 10:30 that first morning he was told to take the trash out. He heaved the garbage into the dumpster, then got in his car and went home. Thus ended his Taco Bell career.
mmm
Did you ever sell anything?
The big call center in my town somehow got my resume when I moved here last year, and one day, they called to offer me a job, obviously not having read it at all! What kind of place just offers someone a job that way? Oh, yeah.
I distinctly remember this happened in 1985, and the job wasn’t really that bad, but you know the “SHAZAM” logo, featuring an S with a lightning bolt through it? I had a temp job where I had to stuff envelopes and do other things with that company, which at the time was brand new. Interesting that they haven’t changed their corporate logo in 28 years! Their graphic artist must have done something right.
I’d rather forget the worst job I ever had as a pharmacist, and basically have, but yeah, I had one job where I considered not coming back after lunch the first day, and really should have. I knew I had to quit when I considered suicide on the way to work. :eek: I worked there for 7 weeks, and hated every minute of it, except for the customers, most of whom were nice people. The other pharmacist was a total jerk (and AFAIK still works there, 17 YEARS LATER) and a couple years later, I was interviewing for another job, and the boss called that store just to confirm that I had worked there, and the store manager, who was not a pharmacist, gave this guy a total earful about that dude: “Pompous ass, etc.”
I also had another job that was so bad, I briefly considered surrendering my license. A few years after that, I was asked in yet another interview why I left Hospital X after 4 months, and I hemmed and hawed a bit but the interviewer said, “You can tell me the truth. I’ve been told many times that Hospital X is a very difficult place to work at.” Two years ago, when I considered moving back here (which I actually did in 2012), I applied for a job and withdrew the application when I found out I would be working with the reason that place was so difficult to work at - even though I would have been his boss! Weird thing is, I think I saw him earlier today. He’s probably retired by now.