When I was 15, I got a job working on a deep sea fishing boat, cutting bait and baiting hooks for yuppies on team-building exercises. My friend got me the job - his Dad owned the boat. The pay was shit, the job was even harder and dirtier than I expected, and the yuppies were complete assholes to me. 3 hours into the 6-hour excursion, I wanted to quit, but my friends Dad (the skipper) had given his standard speech to all new bait cutters: “If you don’t like the job, you don’t have to finish the day, but you’ll have to swim back to shore.”
So I stuck it out and finished the day, but told the skipper I wouldn’t be back. He ended up stiffing me on my salary. Yeah. He just never paid me. I mentioned it a couple times to my friend, but nothing ever came of it, so I just dropped it. It was only something like $21 (or about $15 after taxes).
Drycleaners. You have to pull disgusting used kleenex out of people’s pockets and touch their b.o. clothing. Not exactly a picnic
Appliance Repair. The boss was an idiot and the office was set up in his dingy basement. I lasted til Lunchtime.
**Waiting tables. ** Some folks are born servers, some aren’t. I’m not. Anyone who’s chosen this field and was not good at it can understand where I’m comin’ from.
I had a summer job working at an order fulfillment center after my senior year of high school. It was mostly taking Bath & Body Works products and putting them in really fancy-looking bags. The pay was pretty bad, the environment was oppressive, the factory was hot, most of the other people there were making a career out of it, and they piped in the local soft rock station, just to add insult to injury. It was horrible, and as a result, I never even joked about dropping out of college.
I tried the waiting tables thing once - like Kalhoun, I’m not suited to it. I’m also not suited to answering phones, but I seem to get stuck doing it, to some extent, at nearly every job I’ve had in the last 15 years.
Working the 11pm to 6am closing shift for Burger King when I was 19 was undoubtedly the worst - a filthy, greasy, strenuous job cleaning all the equipment and the store, and I am not a night owl. My first night, I got home from work exhausted, went to bed - and within an hour, discovered that work crews were doing repairs on the water lines in my front yard. No sleep for me. I didn’t go back the next night.
I’ve also had a few jobs where I loved the work, and even some of the coworkers, but the boss/supervisor made it hell for me.
When I was in college, I took a semester off to recover financially (and get a break from it all). I got a job through a temp service that I had hoped was office work. It was a company that makes liquids into powdered versions. They usually made things like powdered milk, but the week I started, they had a contract to test their equipment on lemonade mix. So, they’d get these huge vats of lemonade concentrate, heat it, pump it through a machine that would spray hot, sugary goo onto a conveyor belt. The belt went through hot dryers which converted the goo to powder. Someone had to stand at the end and break up the large chunks of lemon concrete into the powder it was supposed to be, and fill up barrels with the powder. At the end of the day, that same someone would have to climb into the machine and knock all of the stuck powder-goo off of the ceiling, onto themselves, into their shirt, etc. That someone was always me. We had to wear heavy rubber boots, a hair net and thin pants that they provided. Basically, any amount of moisture on the body would attract the powder and form a layer of concentrated citric acid against the skin. The room was extremely hot, and the clothing made sweating pretty constant. I would go home and shower and me-flavored lemonade would flow down the drain. To make matters even worse, they had the worst secretary voice in history come over the P.A. every few minutes and hold the “a” in her pronunciation of “operator” uncomfortably long, “So-‘n’-so, would you please call the operaaaaator.” I lasted two weeks. The worst day of all was my last day. I was about to collapse from exhaustion when the boss, who had been sitting on his ass most of the day, went to fix one of the machines. I was sitting down when I saw him going to fix it and I thought “Gee whiz, I bet he wants me to follow him,” but I decided I’d wait for him to come get me. He did. He immediately took me aside and told me I was fired. So I smiled and said “Can I leave right now?” “Yep.” Worst job ever. And it took me about a year before I could drink lemonade again, or use lemon-scented cleaners.
One summer when I was nineteen I took a job working at my old middle school. I wanted something outdoors, a little physical, so that I could lose some weight and get some sun. Well, my job mostly consisted of picking up trash, mowing, sweeping, and scraping the gum off of the sidewalks. It wasn’t horrible, but the janitor thought he was my boss but the principal didn’t agree, so when I was asked to do indoor stuff like filing or preparing packets for the kids, the janitor would accuse me of being lazy. Kinda didn’t like that guy.
Oh, and I took my lunches in the teacher’s lounge, along with several of my former teachers. It was a weird summer.
Warehousing ice cream for Meijer. I did this for two months total between my undergrad and my graduate degree. Most people lasted somewhere between 2 and 4 hours on the job.
Temperatures stayed a balmy 0 degrees Fahrenheit inside while it was 90 degrees outside. On Sundays, when they switched the enormous fans on, it went down to 30 below, not counting wind chill. Since it was during the summer rush, 6 day weeks were often mandatory and usually we were pleasantly surprised to finish a day in less than 10 hours.
The job itself involved taking printed orders, filling as many carts as necessary to fulfill the order and then loading said carts onto trucks. Which would, occasionally, have freezer malfunctions and melt, requiring you to stay and redo the order. Each cart would typically weigh several hundred pounds. The other part of the job involved management bitching at you for being too slow, no matter how fast you really were. Plus, if there were a dead time, they’d make you go outside and pick up trash. In your freezer gear. In summer. All my friends would be complaining about getting sun burn on the job–I’d have stories about coworkers going home with frost bite.
After those two months, I had a rather insane amount of muscular definition (I looked like the Crow ) and a huge amount of money from all the overtime. Still not worth it. One gorgeous summer day, I was sitting on my porch, eating breakfast and…just didn’t go to work. Just couldn’t do it anymore. Happily for me, I had enough money saved up that I took well over a month off before I felt the need to go find more work.
Radio Shack. Horrible, horrible, horrible. I see there is a whole website devoted to how bad it sucks to work there. “Radioshacksucks” dot com. Read it and weep (or laugh!). Pay special attention to the “Golden Shower” section. Fort Worth’s grand idea to take a shit job and drag it even further down.
My beef? Horrible scheduals, disgusting co-workers, constant transfers, substandard products, unrealistic expectations from upper management, etc. etc. Oh yeah! I nearly forgot the patheticly low wages. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore.
I did steal enough batterys to keep me powered up for years however.
Jeez, posted too soon. I would say the job I had the hardest time with was working in the comforter department of a sewing factory. I started working there when my daughter was maybe six weeks old. I was going through horrible post-partum depression, and I would have to go behind my machines several times a night just to cry. The factory had more work than they could handle, so we were working thirteen days in a row and only had off every other Sunday. I was barely getting to see my baby, the work was hard, and I felt like I lived there. If it hadn’t been for the great people I worked with I would have quit or gone crazy.
After a year of that, I took a paycut to go work in the bedspread department because they had three-day weekends. The work was easier, the people were still nice, and I got to be with my daughter a lot more.
That’s why that job didn’t leap to the front of my mind; it was only bad in the beginning.
I worked one night as a Dishwasher at a restraurant. It was terrible. It was suppose to be a two person job and I was by myself as a first timer. I spent 4 hours and said the hell with it.
They stiffed me off course, I wasn’t real worried about it.
I worked at a snack shack in an amusement park near Oklahoma City the summer I was 12. The shack was barely large enough to hold a soft drink dispenser, pop corn maker, and snow cone machine, with absolutely no room to walk around. I worked from 10 AM to 10 PM in that little shack with no air conditioning. Sometimes there was hardly any business, but you weren’t allowed to read. However, the boss did allow a little AM radio, so for 12 hours a day I listened to AM Top 40.
Even now, when I hear “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies, I can almost smell the popcorn.
When I was 15, I worked for a textile company during the summer. They made wool coats. I carried thousands of coats in the wilting factory heat up and down storage rack steps and later onto delivery trucks.
It was hot, dusty and physically draining. And the people I worked with were very scary for some reason. We hardly ever spoke and I would always eat lunch alone on the loading ramp.
You were allowed to work a 12 hour day when you were 12? :eek:
I can’t even comprehend that. Was this under the table or was that allowed in Oklahoma in the late 60’s?
Oddly enough, being a video game tester was probably the worst job I’ve ever had–at least for the first few months. I was working 12-hour days, 7 days a week, with occasional swing shifts (work a few hours, go home for a few hours, come back and work for a few hours) on a terribly broken game with a one-hour critical path playthrough. I was the only female in a small dark room with a bunch of rowdy guys and everyone whispered behind my back that I was a bitch, having an affair with the boss, etc. We had to clock in and out on a time clock (I didn’t even have a real time clock when I was working in food service!) and they got terribly upset if we were two minutes late clocking back in after a break… oh, and we weren’t allowed to go in the kitchen to get coffee without a supervisor. We had to line up outside the kitchen door and wait for our boss to unlock the door for us. On 9/11, they did not send us home from work, and I was reprimanded for reading a newspaper during my working hours–“Read that on your break!” Good times, good times.
I telemarketed. I worked at McDonalds for almost a year. I picked up garbage at costruction sites. The worst job ever was installing carpets. Actually, installing the carpets wasn’t all that bad other than the fact that carpet is fucking heavy and you want to avoid seams so you have to carry the entire rooms worth all at once. Removing the old carpet was horrible. You could remove it in smaller chunks so the weight wasn’t that big of a deal but old carpet is some of the nastiest stuff you can imagine. Years (sometimes decades) worth of cat pee and parrot shit and old food and grime all settles down to the bottom no matter how much you clean it. I didn’t have gloves so my hands got cut up. My boss was a psychotic unreasonable speed freak dickhead who constantly yelled at me. That sucked.
Washing test tubes and beekers in a laboratory…as a favour to a friend who ran a temp office company which I did work for. The regular guy was going on vacation and no one in the lab wanted to do his job so they hired it out. He was very careful to tell me exactly what time to do everything the first day which was kinda weird since no one really worked on a schedule in the 8 hours.
The first day he was off and was working at my usual, quicker than him, pace, I discovered why: at 12:30 in the afternoon, I was standing there with absolutely nothing to do until 4:00. And the lab tech’s wouldn’t speak to “the dishwasher”. :rolleyes:
Stuff the dishwasher with all the little tubes in the appropriate places; wait for the cycle, put all the tubes into the deliver buckets, deliver them to all the tech’s stations, back to the dishwasher with the next load…and on and on and on.
Should have stole some of the beakers - they would have made awesome martini glasses!
) and a huge amount of money from all the overtime. Still not worth it. One gorgeous summer day, I was sitting on my porch, eating breakfast and…just didn’t go to work. Just couldn’t do it anymore. Happily for me, I had enough money saved up that I took well over a month off before I felt the need to go find more work.