Wasn’t the pay pretty good, though? I knew someone who worked her way through school doing this during the summers. It could have been a canning boat, though.
Yep, the pay was good – that’s why I went back for a second summer. Hard to find somewhere else to make a semester’s room & board in that short a time. I’m glad I did it, actually, but never again.
professional bra fitter :: shudder ::
Graphic Designer. Nothing like spending a whole week designing something and having the customer hate it. Also, nothing like argueing over what “red” is.
Environmental Consultant. Did it for two companies. Went out on field jobs to nasty, nasty locations. Had to deal with idiots like security guards at chemical plants. Once had to take soil samples where people had gone outside the door and pissed (no, urine was not the contaminant we were looking for). Got sprayed in the face with carcinogenic compounds while doing a pump test. Had to work in 90 degree/90% humidity conditions in full Tyvek, and sometimes an air filtration mask. Had to deal with field equipment that didn’t work. Wrote weasel-worded reports. Didn’t get paid shit either job.
The first company wasn’t so bad. I got into a bit of marketing and had enough success that people were happy with me. Most of the people weren’t bad at all.
The second company was a bunch of assholes. They fired me after six months, for which I’m eternally grateful. Never again.
Wise Guy Huh?
“Salad Girl” at a crepe restaurant, about 30 years ago. It was 8 hours a day of standing at a metal counter pulling the stems off spinach leaves. Oh, and the bad part? Just about all my co-workers were acolytes of a 14 year old guru du jour.
I lasted 17 miserable days.
I spent a mind-numbing year in the Health and Beauty section at Chez Target. Those of you who have worked in similar big-box style retail or grocery stores probably know the horrors of “front facing,” in which you fill all the gaps in merchandise displays by pulling items from the back of the shelf to the front, plus generally neatening up the area by taking torn or damaged goods off display, fixing signs or busted shelves, yadda yadda. If you finish your area early, you have to go and help your co-workers finish their areas, and you all go home when the store passes muster.
No argument there – it’s all about teamwork and getting the store set up for the next day, right? Except the managers used to lock the front door and prevent employees from leaving until the entire store was ready to go. Not only that, but the fire doors were always blocked with pallets and bales of merchandise, so if there’d been a catastrophe I guess we would all have burnt to death in Housewares.
So, in theory, I worked the 6 to 11 shift. In practice, I worked the 6 to “whenever the manager decides to unlock the front door” shift. More often than not we did not get to leave until 2 or 3 am. This was in high school, mind you. I didn’t have my own transportation and my ride often ended up having to wait two hours or more to pick me up – this was in the days before cell phones were so prevalent – because the operator went home when the store closed and we weren’t allowed to use the store phones to call out. And the pay phones in the breakroom were all permanently out of order.
The only good part of that job was that I was allowed to wear headphones after the store closed.
I also worked a grand total of one day at Baskin-Robbins, but I wasn’t tall enough to scoop much more than the very top ice cream out of the containers behind the display. We weren’t allowed to take the stool out of the freezer and use it behind the counter because it might “cause an accident if someone trips over it.” Fine, I’ll take my height deficiency elsewhere!
I used to work in a grocery store and had to do a solitary four hour “facing” shift … at 3pm on Thanksgiving :smack:
Asshole boss.
I worked as a personal assistant for a crazy guy once.
I answered an ad for someone seeking a “researcher and writer” interested in “socail justice.” I was fresh out of college and over the moon. The pay was great and I’d be doing meaningful work.
Well, I get to the office and discover it is a home office. I’m instantly assigned some random but interested personal assistant type tasks- researching investments, dealing with financial affairs, reading mail, making phone calls, etc. It seemed okay. The “meetings over breakfast while he wears a bathrobe” part was uncomfy, but work is work. Then we got to the book he was writing. The book about how the banks and the government and the hospitals all conspired to murder his father.
That part wasn’t even so bad. I took his crazed time-cube style rantings and had basically a free hand to fashion something coherent out of it.
But then came the rest. Stuff like planning a party on the other side of the nation for his elderly mother, and then calling her to say my boss wouldn’t go to the party unless she testified in his bullshit “lawsuits” against the “conspirators”. Or calling literally thousands of lawyers to get one to work on the past-it’s-statute-of-limitations and crazy “case”. Added to the fact that my work was insane, he yelled at me. A lot.
Once he assigned me to find a caterer. In Florida. I researched and found a few, got some quotes, and presented a little report. He wasn’t satisfied with estimates for meat and cheese plates (“who eats just meat and cheese!” he screamed) so I called them all and asked about shrimp plates. And then he thought of something else to ask. And something else. I called those poor people at least ten times.
Eventually I discovered that I didn’t really have a job. He pays young people outrageous money to stay with him (in shifts) from when he wakes up to when he goes to bed. He then sets them up on wild goose chases to confirm his own delusions. I was nothing more than a breathing prop to his sick madness. And the feeling of spending all day working- and accomplishing nothing- to nuture the freaky emotions of a dirty old man was making me crazy myself. I wasn’t the first to walk out. And I’m certain I wasn’t the last.
Customer Service and Sales Consultant for a large manufacturing company, 'cept that we didn’t make anything. We were supposed to, but we didn’t. At least, never on time, or never enough of them, nor the right size, nor of the proper materials.
My phone rang constantly. It would ring in my hand as I hung up from the last call. Each caller was (rightfully) demanding to know where the parts were that I assured him would be shipped last week (since that’s what Production has promised me). I had to tell him that it wouldn’t happen for another two to three weeks.
People swore at me, threatened me, and questioned my heritage and my parents’ marital status a lot.
It got to the point that I would get sick to my stomach as I walked out of my house each morning to get in the car.
One time the General Manager asked me if I had a problem with my job. I said, “Why?” He said, “Because you’re climbing out of third gear before you clear the parking lot.”
Then, Oh! Glorious Day!, the order came down from the headquarters in Cleveland that each section had to lay off one person. There had been a couple of people hired after me, but I shot up my hand and said, “Me! Me!”
They took me up on it. That was the only thing good about the whole experience.
Mine doesn’t seem so bad now…
After graduating high school, I worked at that same school for one summer in the library and textbook room. Library inventory–tedious is not a strong enough word. Clearing out the lockers–we’re talking lunches from months earlier, hordes of bugs, filthy folders and more. Repairing textbooks so they could be used again and again even when they were well past their prime–lots and lots and lots of tape.
mm…jayne mansfield…
god, i’m too young to know who she is, let alone lust over her
…or at least who she WAS
I was a door-to-door fundraiser for a political action committee. In February. My last day, it was raining in the early evening. When night fell, the ice storm started. I was not aware that my army field jacket could actually, literally freeze. I was so cold I couldn’t write any info on the forms we had to fill out when we received donations but that was moot because most of the forms had disintegrated in the rain. Fortunately, that night I met the nicest man who was smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer in his garage near a space heater (his wife apparently didn’t let him smoke in the house). I spent about an hour shooting the shit with him until it was time to be picked up to go back to the office. Curiously, this PAC was an enviromental group that loaded its canvassers into the back of three or four HUGE Suburbans, telling us that the only fuel efficient SUV is one full of canvassers. Whatever that means.
Before that, I was a census taker and handled only those who had not yet been contacted or who had refused to particpate only twice before. Apparently, you have to refuse three times to get the census off your back. People can be huge dicks when you’re asking them how much they make each year and if they’re Asian. It wasn’t too bad, though; I got lost an awful lot because some of the places were extremely hard to find. Mostly I just drove around in the country and listened to the radio, fruitlessly trying to locate some place that probably didn’t exist.
Before that I was a telemarketer. For three hours. I echo what others have said about that. Horrific job. Just so…soulless and deadening.
I had one 14 hour day delivering ice to businesses (grocery stores, convenience stores, etc.). Another guy drove while I delivered the ice. Nothing too bad, but neither the driver nor I knew the area (we were delivering ice in Gary, IN). All day, he wouldn’t let me look me at the map to figure out where we were. I never went back. I did keep the work shirt they had let me borrow, though: it had their polar bear logo on one patch and the name Keith on another. My name’s not Keith. I really liked that shirt.
I worked for a pyschopath who imported and exported musical instruments to and from Europe. He would have us unload a semi container of furniture and sousaphones and reload it the next day, with the exact same items. He would scream and rant about how the government was out to get him, which was probably due to him not paying taxes for the past ten years. Mostly, though, I packaged musical instruments that sold on Ebay. That wasn’t too bad and I was really good at it.
I think that’s about the limit for working as a telemarketer. That’s exactly how long I lasted; I went out for a cigarette and didn’t come back.
I have about the same story, except I was in high school and the job was my “second job” as a pastry cook (after doing a full shift as “fry guy” or on the grill line). To this day I have no affinity for sweets or confectionaries.
I’ve done that, too. A major suck, and nobody cares how hard you work until some speck of residue appears on a glass, and the you’re the Devil Incarnate.
Yeah…I’m never going to open up that restaurant that people keep encouraging me to start, mostly because I’d never ask anyone to do those jobs.
Stranger
In high school I busted concrete with a sledgehammer for the princely sum of $4/hour.
It was more of a volunteer thing than a real job.
I love kids. and babies especially. I adore them. I’m in my perfect world when I’ve got a baby in my arms. Because of this, I often babysit for people who can’t really afford a babysitter. I don’t mind the lack of being paid becuase I enjoy hanging out with little kids.
My mom teaches some classes and one of her students a couple years ago had a little baby. He was the sweetest little thing. I just adored him. So naturally, I was overjoyed when his mom asked me to take a job watching the little guy at her house on Saturdays.
The first day, I got there and his mom starts giving me instructions… “the diapers are here, the bottle is there, don’t put the baby down on the floor becuase there are cockroaches, don’t open the fridge becuase it’s broken, don’t open the door or go outside. I don’t want you or my son to get shot. Don’t answer the phone. You can sit on the couch, but don’t put the baby on it. The antenna on the TV isn’t working, but you can watch movies.”
oookay. So she leaves and the baby is happy as a clam. He sits on my lap and I play games with him, I find some toys from his crib and eat up some time, but eventually he and I both get bored. So what can I do now? Normally, I’d put the kid on the floor and play with him there or give him a toy and watch him play, but the floor is off-limits. So I scoop him up and peruse the videos. There’s not one movie rated less than R. don’t know how much an eight-month-old baby would pick up from an R-rated movie, but I don’t watch horror movies while babysitting. It just doesn’t seem right.
And then the kicker. There’s a knock at the door. I look out and it’s nobody I recognize. So I ignore it. The guy knocks again. And again. And won’t leave. so I call the baby’s mom and she describes the guy and says he’s her boyfriend and I should let him in. So I do and he reeks of alcohol and is all mad at me for not letting him in. He ruffles the baby’s hair and says, “hey, brat.” He grabs a horror movie and puts it in and plops down on the couch.
At this point I’m really uncomfortable. I don’t get to leave til mom comes home, so I take the baby over to his crib (in the dining room.) and play with him there. He gets fussy, so I start walking him around. Boyfriend slurs, “hey girl, come here.” I go over. “you gotta nice ass.” he says, and reaches aound and gives it a squeeze. “please don’t touch me again.” I say, and take the baby back to his crib and pray for time to go faster and mom to come home.
She finally did, and after I asked my mom, I told her that I’d be happy to babysit for her son anytime, but it would have to be at my house. The baby came to my house three or four weekends and we had a blast every time.
Right off the bat, two come to mind. One was telemarketing, which lasted two days. I could just not be cursed out one more time by an irate stranger on the phone. The other was a temp job I took where they wanted me to lift sides of beef off of meat hooks inside a refrigerated truck, hung seven feet up (I’m 5’8"), drop them on the truck floor, slide them to the edge, get them off the truck and carry them inside the back of a grocery store and lift them up to hang them on tracks. I’m sure the damned things weighed more than I did. The next day, I was so stiff I could barely move, and stayed that way for about a week. Never again!
I worked as a Baker for one of the warehouse retail clubs, and could not, for the life of me, schedule time off. My wife (then girlfriend) was moving, and of course I was going to help. I told my supervisor a month in advance, three weeks in advance, two weeks in advance, a week in advance, then the schedule came out and - you guessed it - she had scheduled me to work all weekend. When I confronted her, she said I had to fill out a form to make the request “official”.
Me: Why didn’t you tell me that before?
Her: HR should have told you.
I didn’t bother to remind her I’d been telling her for weeks that I needed the time off, and that if she knew I hadn’t filed the form (which she did), it would have been nothing but a God Damned courtesy to let me know. To this day, I still can’t comprehend why she didn’t just tell me I needed to file the form. I mean, we had at least 6 or 8 conversations about the weekend off thing. She never once even hinted that there was anything I needed to do, other than telling her. God Dammit. I’m getting pissed just thinking about it, and it was 9 years ago. Grrr. But I digress.
Me: So what should I do?
Her: They are your shifts - if you can’t work them, you’ve got to get coverage.
So I asked the three other people that I worked with if they would pick up my shifts. No, no and no. Back to my supervisor.
Me: What now?
Her: Well, I guess you’re going to have to work.
Me: Well, what if I call in sick?
Her: That would be bad. Very bad.
Me: Like, you’ll fire me?
Her: Let’s just say it would be very bad.
So I called in sick Saturday and Sunday, they called me the following Tuesday because it was my next scheduled shift, and I didn’t show up for it - I presumed I was fired. Never showed up for that Tuesday shift, or Wednesday (they called again); didn’t show up Friday (they called again). Finally, Saturday morning, I went in around the time my shift was scheduled, and told them that I wasn’t their employee any more, and they should stop calling me for shifts. They tried to guilt trip me into working the shift anyhow, since there wasn’t anyone else to work. :rolleyes: