I forgot this one: I trained to sell encyclopedias. After 2 days of in-house training, we were taken out to neighborhoods, each of us paired with an experienced salesman. The supervisor who shuttled us all out was pretty openly contemptible of our potential customers. The guy I went with was a douche, he didn’t sell anything, and we stayed out long enough I missed my bus home and crashed on the douche’s couch. I got my bus home in the morning and never went back.
Hm, went on an interview for a receptionists job, they were actually recruiting for a sales position - camera film and developing - targeting young guys in the Navy [this was in Norfolk VA.] I actually was doing quite well, but my rather abusive fiancee at the time objected as it was bringing me into uncontrolled contact with young men. I lasted 3 weeks, made ok money. I personally would not hve preferred taking the job, I really hate sales but I needed something fast to shut up fiancee about financial matters.
Right after I left him, I got a job selling advertising to businesses - in the format of small articles about their business in an insert in newspapers. We had boiler plate, and were calling to ‘confirm’ the details in the article were correct, usually by reading out the article and sticking what we thought was the right stuff in the blanks in the boilerplated article. We found the businesses in the yellow pages typically. Again, I did well, but I really dislike direct sales, especially if I perceive the process to involve more or less lying.
Then I had 2 jobs at once - security guard walking rounds at a bank operations center which I loved, and working in an illegal boiler room setting appointments using those entry forms for a weekend getaway to a resort, selling timeshares. They filled out the entry form, we were mainly confirming they qualified - had a job, were married/engaged/living with someone [they wanted couples] and were both over 21. Good pay, but we were treated like slaves. We had to make a certain number of calls, get a certain number of appointments, and they timed our pee breaks. That job segued into working for the local daily newspaper doing telephone surveys. I liked the job except for the people we called - hang ups, blowing whistles into the phone, swearing at us. All we were doing was literally calling the subscriber list on an opinion poll, not selling anything. After the fourth or fifth time someone blew off one of those mini aerosol can airhorns in my ear I quit.
I really hate phone work - but if those are the jobs available, then I did phone work. I did try to make sure I was not doing sales after a while. I worked for State Farm in a call center her in CT, but they decided to close it, and while I did get offered a job in an agents office, the way the agents work is that in spare time you do occasionally work the call lists. [I am still very friendly with the staff in my agent’s office, I got to know them and my agent when I worked in their satellite office temporarily while they were moving agents out of shared offices into solo offices.]
I’ve had some crappy jobs. Corn detasseling has been mentioned by another poster- it was hot, wet, muddy hell sometimes. Unloading semis full of 50 lb bags of cow manure and 2 gallon barberry bushes was the worst part of a job I had that usually was fairly good.
However, none were as lousy as being a fry cook/dishwasher in a college snack bar. The fry cook part was fine- it was the dish washing part that sucked. That, and the hours- 9:30 PM to 1:30 AM Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday nights. That job really killed my social life that year.
Standing at a conveyor belt with asparagus going by and picking out bad ones. I think I lasted two days before I found a better job… or decided to start looking harder for a better job.
Worked at a strip club in The City as a janitor/security/gofer and one of my duties was mopping and cleaning the cash operated viewing booths. Guys would sit down, insert some cash and a window would open to a view of a girl or girls dancing. Needless to say those booths got saturated with genetic material. That particular chore was pretty nasty but there were err…perks that made the job bearable
This company is now out of business, but they really did exist once, and in just this way
*This story works best if you play “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones right about now. Just Sayin’. *
It was my first job out of college & nobody was hiring. The ad said I’d be an auditor, so I went for it. The audits consisted of counting cars and counting COs at car dealerships & making them match. The dealers were nice to me, but I knew they were just blowing smoke my way & I always kept them at an arms length professionally. Among of the dealers were the first people i ever saw going to work with ankle holsters that weren’t cops. But the company said I was “too good” and forced me inside to a branch desk to do auto loan collections (resumes went out that night). It was an eye opener and it got worse because if I couldn’t collect on an account over X-number of days past due, I was expected to go out and repossess the car.
Skills learned: Personal confidence. That I had to run after work nightly to keep in shape. How to walk silently, but with confidence. How to smile well. How to steal cars well. How to disable cars (if i couldn’t get them started) until the flat bed arrived.
(cue another round of resumes going out)
My boss was a [del] guy who should be in hell[/del] hell of a guy. He made Joe Pesce’s toughest character look like Daniel Webster. He had been banned from working in the auto finance industry in PA, but this was NJ so evidently that didn’t matter. He didn’t shop for Christmas; he just stole stuff out of the cars he repossessed. And he didn’t buy cars; he just drove around the cars he repossessed. Often, even if payments were made on the arrears, he’d still repo the cars, just to steal the aftermarket stuff he saw installed. He liked to drive around Newark at 2AM asking people directions, and if they were black, he’d call them “boy” or the N-word.
He was the boss who [del]goaded[/del] invited us all to go drinking with him after work at a local bar / dance club. He got sh-t-faced and started bothering girls. I had the nerve to ask him for his keys because he was drunk and he screamed to anyone who could hear him that he’d have me fired for it. When he did leave, he drove home drunk, in a repossesed car, and ran down a speed-limit sign on the way back to the office. That man totalled at least 2 repos that hadn’t made it to the auction yet before I left that company and to this day the only way I can explain how he managed to keep his job is that he must have had polaroids of Lee iococca with sheep.
When I put in my 2-week notice because I’d gotten a job elsewhere, this is the guy who shipped me out to do an audit on the other side of the state on my last day, just so I couldn’t say good-bye to people and attend my own good bye party.
People I knew who stayed said he wrapped what was left of the cake & took it home.
I heard a few years later, through people I met working there, that he died of a heart attack. I can’t say that I was surprised…but I also can’t say that it was much of a loss.
One of the best jobs I ever had was as a deputy sheriff.
But at the end, the situation around the SO had deteriorated so badly that we made jokes about how our contracts had been renewed for another eight hours. And when I was finally fired, I heard about it on an AM radio station first.
Couple come to mind. Working at a Raspberry cannery during high school, watching raspberries go by on a conveyer belt for eight hours while picking out earwigs, dirt clumps and twigs.
The summer before my trade school started, I was a janitor at a fiberglass plant. They made pipes, tureens, tanks, all industrial sized. That fiberglass threading mixed with the resin gets everywhere, in your hair, your clothes, your skin.
One of my jobs was to clean out the acetone tanks used for fixing mistakes on the line. One day I opened the top while i was inhaling and got a lung full of that stuff. Woke up a few minutes later on the floor, scoop still in my hand.
No one noticed. I just got on with my day.
Lost my job as a waitress, just married and about to move out of state, so I took a job as a phone solicitor. Pure hell.
Another one: worked as a field hand on a geological survey team west of Alice Springs. Part of the job was backpacking sample tins into test sites.
Simple right?
Except the geologists were intersted in gas-field surface seepage so the sample tins were filled with distilled water and rock samples were placed inside so our packs got heavier as the day went on. 
When I was studying I had an evening/night job which went from 9pm until 3am (money was crap but it was good experience). Mondays & Tuesdays were bad for a while. Monday classes went from 9am to 9pm, had an hour break to get to work, home about 3:30am and back to class Tuesday morning at 9am for classes until 4pm –> work from 5pm until 1am.
Several years back I tried getting a job for a local grocery chain as, I think it was called a “casual order selector”. Basically I rode around a frozen-foods warehouse on a motorized pallet fork (not a forklift, one of those things where you have to stand and steer). You had to go around and stack a pallet 8 feet high with frozen food cartons, and the system was all computerized so you had to wear one of those radio headsets. The system would tick off an alpha numeric code on the radio ID’ing which warehouse bay you had to go to, you’d scoot over there, you’d repeat the code on the radio, the computer would tell you how many units to load onto the pallet, you’d load them and repeat the quantity on the radio. Repeat the previous 4 steps ad nauseum. When you get a full pallet (which was supposed to be about 8 feet high, but for me it was usually closer to 9 1/2 feet since I don’t really stack things well) you’d shrink-wrap it and send it off to be loaded on the trucks, and start up your next pallet.
The funny thing is, I could tolerate most of the job really well. I didn’t mind the cold. I didn’t mind the repetitiveness (although I’ve been told I was shouting out random numbers and letters in my sleep at the time). I really wouldn’t have minded the pay and (had I qualified for them) benefits. There were two things, though. One was the stacking; I already mentioned I wasn’t particularly good at it and I did lose my temper (a couple of brief streaks of obscenities when pallets collapsed) a couple of times. The other was making rate; you had to get up to a certain rate of work by the end of the 30-day probation period to catch on full time. I’m sure you may have guessed this, but the trainers delivered the proverbial coup de grace to me about two weeks in.
Graveyard shift at the local newspaper loading the advertisements into the machine that added them to the middle of the papers (mostly the big once-a-week giant stack of ads on Wednesdays or whatever.) It was hard, repetitive, boring, and left me smelling like newsprint constantly. I quit after a week.
I did the same thing for about a year and a half. The difficulty and boredom didnt faze me too much, but the loudness and danger did. Granted you could just not reach into the machine and wear earplugs and no one thought the worse of it, but if you forgot then that’s another story. No injuries on the job that I know of thankfully.
The part of it I hated was stacking them into their delivery crates after they were all done, because sometimes the inside people had different ideas about how many crates they needed for a given run than the outdoor people in their trucks did and they’d both tell me I was doing it wrong. Plus I got stuck with that job a lot because I was an in shape 20 something, stacking ~30 lb stacks of paper all day. I learned the value of a back brace.
I, too, baled hay and worked in a car wash. I liked both.
The hay was just easy for me. As a small woman, I just stood on top of the truck and stacked the bales as they were tossed up. I did the same in the barn.
The car wash kept me in weed and pocket change!
The worst job I had was day labor. You had to show up and sign in at something like 4:30 in the morning and hope to get picked for the day and then had to scramble to find a way to get to the job ASAP. Hopefully, a couple of folks were going to that job and one of them would have a car. Rarely did the agency get us there.
The pay was so low, I volunteered at a food co-op at night to get discounted food. The jobs were dirty and/or deadly dull. We cleared a warehouse full of slimy, stinky, rotten cabbages, swept the floor of apple scraps in an apple packing/processing plant (or screwed lids on to bottles of apple cider vinegar- all day- because that part of the assembly line was broken), and unpacked boxes and boxes and boxes of blue jeans in a shipping warehouse to staple just one more tag to the pocket and re-box the pants.
I worked retail in high school, but I think my college job was crappier. I worked in a biology lab and had to do various dissections. Poor froggies.
Crappiest job my husband ever had was using a sledgehammer to break up sand castings. Kinda puts my crappy jobs in perspective.
In a time long ago and far away, a relative of mine managed a “Hawaiian-style” restaurant deep in the midwestern hinterlands. (Quotations because I don’t believe most of the people involved had even been to Hawaii).
The book Hawaii had recently been published, and the author, James Michener was attending the restaurant’s grand opening. A high school friend and I were recruited to make leis for the guests. Hundreds of leis.
We were excited to make some cash that didn’t involve babysitting, but found out too late that the job required that we sit inside a walk-in refrigerator and hand-string flowers flown in for the occasion. No lasting damage, but never have my hands been so cold for such a long time. I could not bring myself to read that Michener book until well into my adulthood.
I had a number of really crappy jobs.
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Dishwasher at a Bill Knapps Restaurant:
This was probably the worst job I ever had. Servers would bring in tubs of dishes and I would have to spray them, run them through the dishwasher machine, then stack them, and wash cooking trays and utensils as they were brought to me. In addition to that I also had to do some food prep work (in the same area where I was washing dishes… isn’t that illegal? Its certainly not safe for the food). I was also responsible for emptying out the “Garbage room”. This was a room where all the bags of trash would be stored until it was full. Then I would have to empty it into the dumpster and squeegee out the room. It was the worst smell I ever experienced and I loathed doing it. I also was expected to do this while keeping up on the dishes that were brought to me. The job of actually washing the dishes was tough, but what made it worse was very busy nights (which was almost every night) where bus boys would literally be bringing in tubs of dishes every 2 minutes… way too fast for me to keep up… and I was the only dishwasher there. They rationalized not giving me my breaks by saying that if I stopped, I would get behind on the dishes. I was 17 and naive. I didn’t know any better and just kept trying to work the job as best I could, but it was tough keeping up with all the dishes that would come back. They had a policy that if I worked 8 hrs or more during a shift that I could get a free meal. They would schedule me for 7.5 hrs and that way I wouldn’t qualify for the free meal.
After 3 months, I quit. I swore I would never work in food service again.
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Telemarketer:
I’ve written about this job before. I worked for about 6 months at a telemarketing company that sold tickets to community events that vital service organizations (Police, firefighters etc…) would put on to connect with the public. At least that’s what this company told me I was doing. In reality, what they did was go to a police or firefighters organization, sell them on the idea of putting on a “community event” to connect with the public, then they would make up a fictional name for us to do the “Selling” under (Example: “Good evening. I’m calling for the Portage Police Officer’s Association.”) In the 6 months I worked there, I called for 2 different events. One actually did happen while the other I’m not so sure of.
This was before automated robo-callers, so we would get lists of phone numbers on cards and have to manually call each number. Success rates for actual sales were around maybe 2% if that. The pay when I started there was $5 per hour or commission, whichever was greater. The pressure by management to make sales was incredibly high, so high that they took away our hourly pay and made it so we only worked on commission. There was one week where I walked away with a paycheck less than $10. Then, of course, there was the constant litany of people cursing us out and hanging up.
I quit after 6 months and got a different job that turned out to be one of the worst experiences ever…
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Restaurant server:
I left being a telemarketer to become a server at a Big Boy’s Restaurant. You might be asking, “Didn’t you swear never to work in food service after your dishwashing job?” Yes, but I was seduced by the amount of money my college roommate was making (he was able to pay for his college tuition and his apartment rent.)
Not only was the pressure terrible(tables of people waiting to be served, getting the orders right, correctly tallying the orders since we didn’t have a register to do it.) but the management was a bunch of chauvinist pigs. They would go out of their way to let a waitress go home early if she had something going on, and then pile that extra work on me, and If I had something going on, they would always give me the excuse, “We are short staffed as it is.” I hated the work, I hated the people, and I hated the pressure.
They let me go at the end of the semester. I was glad they did.
I did this job manually (inserted the sections into the funny pages) in 1985 for a local newspaper/tobacco store that was the distribution point for a couple of North Shore towns worth of the Boston Globe. Wasn’t a bad gig for the 6 months leading up to turning 16, when I could get a ‘real job’ at the local supermarket. It gave me 4 hours on Saturday afternoon after a 6 hour shift at the local fish market. I usually went home smelling like an old fish wrapped in a news paper.
The problem with the job was that the location where the papers were stacked to await the “front page news section” which would be loaded in the small hours of the morning blocked the emergency exit to the store. So I was left with a pile of dry news paper in front of one door, and a store full of newspapers, magazines (good smut to be found though), books and tobacco (and these were the days where you could smoke everywhere). I dreaded a fire breaking out.
My local NPR station has a locally produced show every weekday, and last week, they were doing a call-in show where they wanted to talk to people who had done, or were currently doing, temp work. The only people who had positive things to say were independent contractors; the people who worked for agencies had nothing good to say about the experience, and were more likely to use e-mail that directly calling in.
My worst problem with the ad insertion biz is that it was seasonal – work less than 20 hours in the summer, but nearly (but usually not over!) 40 in the holiday season.
This was a problem because I had a second job as a dishwasher – which I also didn’t hate, but then again we weren’t shortstaffed. But it was also seasonally variable work and between the two jobs I could work 70 hours a week in December.
Oh, and the last year I did this, my car broke down and I couldn’t afford to get another one, so I biked 7 miles to my first job, then 7 to my second, then 7 back home. Which again wasn’t that bad if you weren’t also working 70 hour weeks!