Please, do tell. My morbid sense of curiosity wants to know what some of these things left behind were.
I’ll definitely keep an eye out for that. It sounds interesting.
I did retail inventory for a little over a year as a second job, and I didn’t think it was bad at all, though Home Depot was definitely the worst of the jobs. I was amazingly dirty by the end of that one. I much preferred doing the bookstores and Victoria’s Secret - clean, neat, and well-ordered merchandise that was easy to count. I guess I thought it was an OK job because 1) you don’t sit on your butt in a chair all day and 2) you are busy from the time you start until the inventory is over, so the time goes fast.
Oh, and you wouldn’t believe how much stuff Sears has. Most of their inventory is in their back storage areas. It took all the inventory personnel in our metro area two 12-hour days to count all the stuff at a single Sears location.
Hands down, the worst job I ever had was working for (insert name of a certain Pittsburgh moving company, here). We had to be there at 7am, often were there until 8, 9, or occasionally even 10 at night, and had to call in to a phone line every night to see if they wanted us to work the next day. Sometimes this meant we didn’t work for three days straight. Sometimes it meant working back-to-back twelve-hour days.
While we were being trained, we were told that we would get a chance to see the country (on long-distance moves), that we might get tipped, and so on. It seemed exciting, to start. Sometimes it was, even. I actually did get to go out of state…once…in three and a half months. That, however, wasn’t even all that bad.
One day, we were called in to move this one lady out of her apartment. We get there, and her house is pretty dirty. Most of her stuff is in garbage bags, and there’s a lot of stuff laying around, anyway. We start taking stuff out, occasionally brushing insects off things, and then go to pick up the couch. We try to lift it and roaches start fleeing from inside the couch itself, coming out wherever they find a tear in the fabric. We put it down as quickly as we can and do our best to keep from running outside. The guy in charge of the move calls in to the home office and asks what to do (as roaches, once they get into the truck, will almost definitely infest it). The home office says to take the job, so we do. We come back inside and tell the lady, who is talking to the constable as he’s putting her eviction notice on her window, and she says “damn…I just bombed that b**** yesterday…”
After some doing, we finally get all of her stuff onto the truck, drive over to the new place, and begin unloading. We get there before they do, and the guy who’s there to open the door for us does so. The place itself is over a hardware store, so there’s lots of stairs to haul things like refrigerators up. He apologizes for us having to do this, and spends a good half hour screaming at (I think) the lady from the first part at the top of his lungs. We finish moving everything in, one of the ladies pays with an unnumbered credit-card check (which bounced the next day), and the lady whose stuff we moved refuses to so much as thank us before we left. I got home and quickly learned why punching a wall isn’t the best of ideas. My hand healed about two days later.
And that was the worst day of the worst job I ever had. It helped me appreciate the value of education like you wouldn’t believe, tho’.
bamf
Working the “Lung Gun” at a chicken processing plant.
You grab the chicken carcass with one hand as it comes down the line and place a tube inside it that sucks out the lungs. If you catch the fat going in, it sounds like a giant trying to get the last few drops out of a cup with a straw.
Cold, smelly, noisy and on my feet. Carcasses moving too fast. Giant sucking sounds. Getting yelled at for “missing a lung”.
Other fun jobs that can be had in a chicken plant that I never had the pleasure of doing.
Live Hanger- Grabbing live chickens by the feet and hangng them on the hooks upside down to go into the killing machine.
The Killer- If a chicken raises it’s head above the V shaped blade of the killing machine at the right moment, it’s head must be cut off by the killer.
Worst one? That’s easy.
Most of you all went with physically discomfortable jobs or jobs that deal with repulsive tasks. Mine is a bit different.
I had spent 5 years getting experience in a certain area. I liked the job and company but the pay was low and didn’t look like it was going any higher. I convinced myself I needed to move on.
One of my prospects I wasn’t initially interested in kept coming back and back. On paper I was a good fit. Finally, the owner of the company (about 100 people) personally called me and asked me to meet him. We met and he told me that the area he needed me for was in trouble, told me I had his blessing to make huge changes and offered a salary over double what I was making currently.
Wow.
I took it.
BIIIIGGGGGGGGGG MISTAKE!
In hind sight, I could have done better in the beginning. I should have made sure that I reported to him directly. I should have insisted that the authority he was investing in me to be known company wide, like in a managers meeting. I should have insisted on budget details. Many, many things that, through inexperience, I just did not think of.
I reported to work and immediately found out I was:
– Reporting not to the owner but to a lower level manager. Over the next few weeks, I found out she was extremely conservative/resistant to change and fought/over-rode everything I tried to do
– My 8 employees had extremely low morale and ‘status’ in the company. This was discussed in my meeting with the owner before I started. When I found out their salary my jaw dropped. The position required a college degree in a math-favorable major and paid VERY poorly. It was actually seen as a ‘sub-entry’ level position in that failed applicants for other no-experience entry level positions could start here and ‘move-up’ to the entry level position. The morale and caliber of these people, though not as bad as you might think, was not high.
– No increase in budget. In my pre-employment meeting with the owner I used the analogy of the Hoover Dam. Before the could build it, the had to divert the river. In order to revamp the department, resources need to be increased so that current work could be done AND the building of a new sytsem can be done at the same time.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm… ‘not good’ feelings in my stomach.
As the job went on…
2 people quit within 2 months. I was not allowed to replace them and the salary money stripped from my budget :eek:
Work load increased…working 50 hours per week just to maintain required duties plus 20 trying to revamp.
1 more quit. Allowed to replace but at a salary of $23,000 per year…yup…you read that right. Couldn’t find anyone.
My boss, getting tired of my trying to continue with the revamp (FOR WHICH I THOUGHT I WAS HIRED) decided that overloading me was the best way to thwart me. She added more and more items to the load. Finally, she added the responsibilities OF A FULL TIME POSITION (someone who quit) to my load.
I was working 90+ hours a week and not making any headway for which I was fired.
Appeals to the owner went unresolved. He was a ‘outward looker’ and needed other to ‘look inward’ to keep the shop going. He couldn’t be bothered.
I DID THIS FOR NINE MONTHS before I went in to the owner with the demands that I should have made clear from the beginning…higher budget both for higher salaries for my dept and for hiring people to maintain current responsibilities and get the revamp done…plus reporting to him instead of Mrs. Conservative that was my current boss.
He refused and I quit.
Now I have this freakin job in my background and have to explain it every time I go on an interview 
I think I was near a nervous breakdown. It took a YEAR before my heart didn’t race when I came into work (new job) and saw my message light flashing (meant someone was calling in sick and today was going to be more hellish than usual)
I was working 90+ hours a week and not making any headway for which I was fired.
…
HIRED, not FIRED.
sigh…
Working 60 hours a week salary as a Graphic Artist. I literally worked everyday for almost 2 years including holidays. The kind of job where to sit out in your car before work and having to mentally prep yourself to just be able to walk in the door. I was getting physically sick and was wasn’t sleeping at all. Some nights I was so stressed out I couldn’t and didn’t sleep.
I had essentially 3 bosses, all of them part owners, and I was hired to help them out. Each one had their own way of doing things and I always had to skirt around it. There was alot of things wrong with that place, one week of vacation after a year, no sick time, shitty benefits, and horrible unpredictable hours. The last straw was when one of my bosses bitched me out in front of everyone. Not just a scolding, but he was calling me an “F**ker, MF’er”. Didn’t let him think that it pissed me off and went right back to work, but didn’t come in the next day, or the day after that…and the day after that. He finally called me and apologized and I told him I would be in the next day. Of course I didn’t. Didn’t ever hear from them again thank god.
Working 60 hours a week salary as a Graphic Artist. I literally worked everyday for almost 2 years including holidays. The kind of job where to sit out in your car before work and having to mentally prep yourself to just be able to walk in the door. I was getting physically sick and was wasn’t sleeping at all. Some nights I was so stressed out I couldn’t and didn’t sleep.
I had essentially 3 bosses, all of them part owners, and I was hired to help them out. Each one had their own way of doing things and I always had to skirt around it. There was alot of things wrong with that place, one week of vacation after a year, no sick time, shitty benefits, and horrible unpredictable hours. The last straw was when one of my bosses bitched me out in front of everyone. Not just a scolding, but he was calling me an “F**ker, MF’er”. Didn’t let him think that it pissed me off and went right back to work, but didn’t come in the next day, or the day after that…and the day after that. He finally called me and apologized and I told him I would be in the next day. Of course I didn’t. Didn’t ever hear from them again thank god. Seriously, he’s the only person in the world that I would HONESTLY consider running over with my car if he walked in front of me.
Well, if you must make me dredge things up from so many years ago…
Mostly it was lunches. You know, sandwiches, chips, candy, drinks. And you know what happens when you leave lunches in a locker for weeks on end? They turn into slime, and then come the…
ROACHES!!!
Imagine the horror of prying open a rusted locker and having these things come tumbling out at you.