I worked one day at a place that made Formica counters, bathtubs and sinks.
When I came back to the states after teaching English in Japan, I signed on with a temp agency and threw applications around to bring in an income rather than burn through what I had saved overseas.
The temp agency sent me to a company that delivered bottled water to businesses – one of many competitors in the Sparkletts and Culligan industries. The owner and the delivery route manager met me as I got out of my car and greeted me with enthusiasm. The job was to sit in a tiny office above the main warehouse, read customer info on a printed page, and enter it into an Excel spreadsheet. I was the third person to be sent to this assignment; the previous two weren’t accurate enough. I glanced at the printed pages – a six-inch thick pile of the old tractor-fed green-bar fan-fold pages with about fifty customer entries per page, all in dot-matrix print.
Mind you, this was the mid-1990’s so computers weren’t new. In fact, while I was in Japan, the Internet went from being the exclusive toy of the Military/Industrial/University complex (with dial-up BBS access being local-if-you-were-lucky) to being a full-scale commercial phenomenon. The dot-com boom was just beginning!
The owner pulled out a chair in front of the desk and, as I sat down, I mumbled something like, “Gee. You’d think if you could print all this data, you could feed the bits to a file instead of the COM port and then dump that file into Excel.”
The boss looked at me with a mixed expression that combined You’re speaking Telegu and I only speak English and Yiddish and What would a stupid kid like you know? but diplomatically said, “Yeah, sure. We’re working on that, but we need this stuff done quickly so the sooner you start the better.”
I shrugged and started to work, picking up where the previous temps had left off.
After two pages I was nodding off and understanding why my two predecessors had trouble staying accurate. The company delivered water to doctors’ offices and other office suites so there were a lot of almost-duplicate entries with subtle differences, making the repetition boring as hell but making a multi-row paste-and-update less trouble than it was worth. After four hours I was bored to death and hungry as well so I waved to someone and went off to lunch.
When I came back from lunch, the boss and the route manager were there again and I thought they were really nice for greeting me whenever I arrived. As I headed for the warehouse door, the route manager said, “Welcome back! You’re done!”
“What?” I asked as I slid to a stop on the dirt-crusted pavement, “What’d I do wrong?”
“You didn’t do nothing wrong.” the owner assured me, “I took your comment to my IT manager and he worked on it all morning. While you were at lunch, he got it to work. All of the accounts are in Excel now.”
“Wow!” was all I could say. I hadn’t thought he was listening when I mumbled.
“Yeah.” the route manager nodded, “You just turned a four week data-entry job into a four-hour computer exercise.”
“Well…” I started realizing the implication, “So you’ll pay me for the month?”
“No.” the owner laughed, “But I will pay you for the whole day.” And they escorted me inside so I could grab my jacket and sent me on my way.
The water company (and I) thought I had done something great. I saved tons of time getting to the end-goal with greater accuracy than most people can achieve. In contrast, the Temp agency was angry because I reduced their bill-able time. :dubious:
–G!
You did do something great. Good story.
Sounds a lot like mine experience. Got hired by Pinkerton’s as a security guard. Got licensed and everything. The first job I was sent on was to “guard” a cement plant. On the graveyard shift. Lasted one night (my training night.)
I had been unemployed for a little over a month and was unable to find a job in my field when I answered an
ad for a delivery truck driver. I had the impression that this was not a good place to work because they ran a help wanted
ads in the paper just about every other week. But I figured that any job was better than no job. Two weeks had passed
after my interview without a call back when I noticed the ad in the paper again. I went down to their office, said that
I was still interested and was hired. They told me I would be working from about 4 to 9 in the morning and would not
get paid the first night. I wouldn’t have to do any work - just ride along and then at the end of the shift let them know
if I wanted the job or not. I hate doing nothing and ended up helping the driver with his deliveries. When we returned
to the warehouse the driver was asked to do an emergency run another customer. I unloaded the truck myself,
turned in the paper work and told the supervisor that I would take the job.
When I got home I found an reply on my answering machine from a company I had interviewed at few weeks earlier.
They were offering me a full time job in my field and wanted to know when I could start. After calling them back and
agreeing to start the next day, called the delivery company and told them I was quitting. A few weeks later an envelope
arrived in the mail from the delivery company. Enclosed was a check for my one 5 hour long day of work.
I’ve never had a really short job that was intended to be permanent. I’ve had a couple one day jobs with a temporary agency but those were intended to be one offs. I once did landscaping in Florida in the middle of the summer with a temporary work crew for two days and they offered to have me stay the rest of the week but I declined, as my other job started the next week and I was sick of working in the Florida sun.
My shortest job in the IT field was 6 or so months as a temp. Then I got laid off with 2 weeks notice, and then the last couple days they changed their minds and asked me to stay, only to have the last place I interviewed with call me back for a permanent offer, which I took.
It was supposed to be a permanent job, but as it turned out I was employed for a day and never actually worked. I was hired to work in a activity hut where you sign up to go on dive or snorkeling excursions. The day I was to start was the day Hurricane Iniki trashed Kauai and destroyed my little hut. I never even got to see it. There wasn’t much of a tourist industry for awhile after that. I ended up working for the state on a temp basis assessing damage and interviewing residents of state managed property. I think that gig lasted about six weeks.
I’ve had a few.
There was the time I was a delivery driver for a local florist. The place was family-run, and if you weren’t a part of the family, you didn’t exist. They literally had a liaison between non-family employees and the family; if you had a problem, you asked the liaison, not the family. The place was also intensely haphazardly run; I’d get sent out on an order 30 miles away that had been ready for ten minutes, with instructions to run that one before the one that was blocks away and had been ready for hours. And worst of all, the [family] employees all smoked on the job! There they were, cutting and arranging flowers, while ashes fell onto the tables from their lit cigarettes. WTF. After a day at that I decided the job wasn’t for me.
A temp agency sent me to the town newspaper’s call center, where I was to field calls and direct them to billing, subscriptions, editorial, whatever. I learned within about ten minutes that newspaper customers don’t make a call to the newspaper unless they’re downright furious, and nine times out of ten it’s about something exceptionally minor. Hand to god, one old lady called me full of piss & vinegar because The Family Circus wasn’t funny that day, as if anyone at The Joplin Globe had anything to do with that. Called the temp agency and told them thanks but no thanks.
And then there was the job that I’m going to describe in these next paragraphs. It lasted longer than most of the jobs described here (a few days), but my god was the situation weird. Basically I was to shadow developmentally disabled adults on the job, helping them with job skills, keeping them on-task, etc. I completed the training, and then was sent to a hotel to shadow a guy who worked in the kitchen of a hotel.
DAY ONE: A few hours in, I get a phone call from the boss: there was an unspecified complaint against me, and I’d have to go home while they investigated. Called back that afternoon and told the complaint was unfounded, and to return to work the next day.
DAY TWO: A few hours in, I get a phone call from the boss: there was an unspecified complaint against me, and I’d have to go home while they investigated. Called back that afternoon and told the complaint was unfounded, and to return to work the next day.
DAY THREE: Same thing. Only this time I told the boss that I couldn’t work at a job where I was only going to be on the clock for a couple of hours at a time before being sent home under mysterious circumstances. Hire someone else. Goodbye.
ABOUT SIX DAYS LATER: I get a phone call from the boss’ boss. “Why haven’t you been at work for the past week?” I explained that it was because I’d quit six days ago. It’s like she didn’t hear me at all, because the next thing she said was, “If you don’t go back in tomorrow, I’m going to have to fire you. We really need someone at the kitchen.” I told her it was going to be hard for her to fire me inasmuch as I’d quit days before. Goodbye.
ABOUT THREE WEEKS LATER: I get a call from the manager of the hotel kitchen, wanting to know why there hadn’t been a job coach with “Keith” for the past three weeks. I told them I didn’t know, to take it up with [the agency]. Manager asks “Weren’t you Keith’s job coach?” I responded, “Yes, for like two days.” He then said, “Can you be here tomorrow? We really need somebody here.”
Night doorman at an upscale apartment building. The job was advertised as a security position. When it turned out to involve parking cars, carrying groceries, and otherwise acting as a servant for the residents, I began to have doubts. When the building manager made it clear that ass-kissing the residents was not just expected, but demanded, I quit. That was not quite halfway through my first shift. I agreed to remain and only watch the door til the end of the shift.
I once lasted half a day as a waiter at a restaurant. This was in college, many years ago, and I don’t remember many details, but there was just a lot strange about the job. The main thing I remember is that we weren’t allowed to keep our tips. They paid us an okay hourly wage to make up for that, but the strange part was that we weren’t supposed to tell the customers that we didn’t keep the tips, which meant the tips went to the owners. There was other weirdness about the job and the owners, and halfway through the first day I realized I wasn’t going to stay, so I just walked out.
The worst part was, it was a pretty good restaurant I’d eaten at and enjoyed many times before that day, but obviously I could never go back after that.
Was a substitute teacher for 4 years and worked temp jobs for Manpower in the summers, but I knew those jobs were of short duration, so I don’t count them.
Shortest for one I was hired for was at Red Lobster. Reported, was put to work busing tables, 9 hours with no break, no meal, no interaction with the manager. Never went back.
In grad school I got to know a guy who was part of a CIA funded project doing ESP research. They had already proven to themselves that the ESP worked, and this guy’s job was to do experiments to investigate the putative physical mechanism. This guy was a brilliant engineer, but I knew the project was loony. He hired me to read some physics papers by famous physicists who went off the deep end after their Nobel prizes. I figured, what the heck, it should be fun and he’s going to pay me. He’d give me a couple papers and come back a week later for my verbal report. We had two sessions. In both of them I explained that I could not understand most of what was in the papers, and what I did understand was crazy. He fired me, but with no hard feelings.
Ever see Married with Children? Yeah, kinda like that… only with the added benefit of a sense of smell.
https://theferkel.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/al-bundy.jpg?w=480&h=720&zoom=2
As a teen I had a job at Taco Bell for, I think, one day. It was in the middle of our town’s festival, and that day SUCKED. I got a call from another place doing busboy work and jumped at it.
In high school me and some buddies would work the overnight at the small gas bar up on the old highway. It was just a couple of pumps with a small heated shack.
There were usually 2 of us, and it was boring! Every once in a while a truck or car would pull in and we’d take turns going out to pump gas but mostly we’d spend the night drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and watching an old black and white TV with rabbit ears until all the stations went off the air. Then we’d play cards and shoot the shit until dawn.
We eventually all got let go after one idiot friend (while working alone), staged a robbery and pocketed all the money from the till instead of putting it in the floor safe. It was fine by me anyway as I hated being drunk and hungover after every shift.
The only thing I have that comes close to any of these was when my ninth grade geography teacher hired a half dozen of us to come rake her yard one Friday afternoon (it was a really big yard). Apparently, she did it every fall for whoever her current class was, so it was always only a one-time gig.
Worked for pay as an extra on a couple of educational TV films later in high school. A few hours each time (for one of them, I got to play video games the whole time).
As far as real jobs go, I’m pretty sure my shortest ever was the two-ish months I worked as a file clerk for a law firm the summer between high school and college. Fun fact, that’s also the only non-disclosure agreement I’ve ever signed. I still can’t tell you what I was doing, decades later!
Years ago, I took a temp-to-perm job for a small family-run company. The company and the temp agency who placed me there specified it was clerical work, like typing and phone answering and filing. After I had been there a few days and the company could see that I was a competent employee, they offered to take me on full-time. Then, on my first full-time day, I was shown what the job really entailed: construction accounting. The company was trying to get accounting help for the price of a receptionist by going about hiring through this circuitous route.
I’m completely math-phobic, which is the reason I’m a legal secretary/word processor type. I took one look at the nightmarish piles of ledgers (this was pre-Excel days), went home to lunch, and never returned.