I made the most $ as an injection molding machine operator.
Litterally…my job was to make the “$” button for what I think was a postage meter.
My worst job wasn’t bad by most objective standards. Nice office, decent pay, mostly good people, at times even lots of fun. My boss, however, was Evil. Not just standard run-of-the-mill bad, but backstabbing, lying, cheating Evil-with-a-capital-E Evil. The job involved a fair amount of travel, and my parents told me that they could tell when I was calling them from the road because I sounded happy, but I sounded awful when I called from home.
I found out some of what he was saying about me (and my co-workers) behind my back, and that combined with some of the stupid things he was doing convinced me I needed a better career. 12 of the 14 people that worked for him quit within a year; two of them even quit without having another job to go to, and when he expressed surprise at that, they each told him that they’d rather be homeless and indigent than spend another day in the same building as him.
My worst job was doing Accounts Payable for a medium-sized pharmaceutical company. I stayed there 3 years, during which I gained 60 lbs and ground my molars down to nothing. My boss was really great and the pay/benefits were quite generous – it’s just that I’m not cut out for routine, predictable work. Every day was the same. Every day was the same. Every day was the same.
I was terrified of quitting, my Hubby was in school & I was in charge of Income.
Runner-up would be the 3 months (+/-) I spent working for Harry and Bob, the Telemarketing Birdfeeder Kings. This job immediately preceded my A/P work, and somewhat explains my reluctance to leave it (despite being miserable).
What Harry (Company President) and Bob (VP) never did figure out is that they were selling at a loss. After he’d paid for shipping his samples, buying merchandise and covering his salemen’s commissions, he lost money on almost every sale. I was 25 yrs old & had never taken Accounting, yet it was obvious to me. But Harry was committed to his salesmen’s commissions, being an old salesman himself; he’d only gotten into this business to help out his friend, Bob, who hadn’t been paying for the birdfeeders and had been informed that his legs were going to be broken soon.
I thought I was going to be the office manager for Harry and Bob, but you just know that before it was over I was on those phones myself, selling various junk to Ace Hardware stores all over the country.
These guys tried to cut corners by making all of their employees “Independent Contractors” (this happened before I came on board). Enough of them wised up that Harry & Bob had to give up on the notion; they told me later what a great deal these employees had passed up.
Their biggest seller, an ant killer, was banned by the EPA on my first day of work. Hence the birdfeeders took the (coveted) top spot.
We also sold an odor-fighting chemical called “One Drop”, which really did work. Probably b/c it, too, was toxic as all get out.
In an effort to drum up business, Bob devised a scheme where he mailed blister packed samples to hardware stores all over the country – and shorted the postage about a nickel. Ooooh, that’s some business acumen. I still remember the postman bringing back a crate full of dripping envelopes and explaining that they weren’t going to be delivering them until we’d added an extra $.05/ea. Never mind that these samples were in GLASS bottles, which promptly BROKE. This is pre-9/11, of course.
I decided that one of my responsibilities would be to pursue old Accounts Receivables - basically, calling the stores who hadn’t bothered to pay for their merchandise. There were quite a few of them. I think I brought in $50k or so within a short time. Harry took this to mean business was booming. He decided not to dock my pay for Thanksgiving, traditionally an unpaid holiday. Truth is, he couldn’t figure out how much he paid me each day & I sure as hell wasn’t gonna tell him.
Harry invited a banker in one day to talk about additional funding for expanding his empire. Their plan was to copy the design of the wooden birdfeeders they’d been selling so successfully, and have them cast in plastic instead.
It so happened I knew this banker, a woman. So I spent most of the day hiding under my desk. I did happen to walk by his office and see them - Harry leaning back in his chair, with his feet on his desk, while this woman in a suit squirmed on a folding chair.
Harry did make good on his promise to promote me to Office Manager by hiring a minion to do lesser tasks (such as typing his correspondence) (all of which started “I don’t know what happened” and ended “Please advise”). So he had me place an ad and pre-screen the applicants.
Did he hire the nervous woman in a grey suit who’d recently graduated from secretarial school?
Nope.
Did he choose the middle-aged matronly one in the sensible brown dress?
Nope.
Harry settled on the 22-yr-old blonde in the shiny magenta jumpsuit who happened to mention, during the course of her interview, that she “wanted to party with him.” As I recall, she was very quick with the filing, as she stuffed everything into the folder labeled “J”.
I am not making this up.
Stacking used railroad ties in bundles of 25 and then putting a big steel band around them so they could be sold to landscapers. You constantly scratched yourself and the creosote from the ties got into the wounds. It was in the summer in eastern Montana so the temperature would get above 100 degrees in the afternoon.
The only benefit was that I had the banding equipment in my car when I went to a party. This kid was being a jackass so before I left I “banded” his car all the way around and through the door handles. He had to get a hacksaw to cut it off.
whistlepig
The worst job I ever had
I had to eat shit out of a bucket
The second worst job I ever had
I had to use my face as a shovel…
Worst Job - David P. Smith
I spent three months running a line of Edgers for a mid-sized local optical company. Edgers cut a pair of prescription lenses to the size and shape of the frames they fit into. It involved scanning the job ticket at machine 1 to call up the job; insert left lens; close cover; press start. Go to machine 2, repeat. Go to machine 3, repeat. Go to machine 4, repeat.
Go back to machine 1, remove left lens. Test fit to frames. Adjust settings and recut, if necessary. If not, insert right lens; close lid; press start. Got to machine 2, repeat. Go to machine 3, repeat. Go to machine 4, repeat.
About the most mind-numbing job I’d ever had. Mnagement was okay, but not the best I’d worked for (that was actually at Wal-Mart Optical; best job I’d had, because my supervisor and Dept. Head were outstanding people; an absolute pleasure to work for), and like most production jobs, you’re practically chained to your assigned work area, and no matter how fast you are, it’s never fast enough.
While doing internet technical support for a poorly-run ISP was bad…
…Oh, so bad… Ooooooohhhhh so bad… The constant ring of the telephone, people wanting us to support Word, people not clear on the need of having a computer to access the internet, all the horror stories are true…
…Ahem. The absolute worst job I have ever had was doing telephone surveys.
Not telemarketing, mind you, we weren’t SELLING anything, we did surveys to find out how people felt about their insurance, political feelings, if they have, are, or ever will be considering buying vinyl siding, you’ve all gotten the calls. Sorry, by the way.
Naturally, us poor phone jockeys were INSTANTLY accused of being telemarketers. “No, no, we’re not trying to sell you anything, Mr/Mrs/ Whatever, it’s just we have in our records that you recently bought a Bingo-Brand Electric Dog Polisher recently, and we just wanted to know how you felt about it.”
“I ALREADY HAVE ONE!!!” {click}
Even worse was when the sample (the group of numbers we had to call) was random but the survey was for people who had recently done something very specific. Ferinstance, I was the only person assigned to a survey commisioned by a local Volvo dealership to talk to people that had recently bought a Volvo and ask a few nice basic questions. Except that the sample was random, so NO ONE I called had bought a Volvo EVER.
After an hour of “Oh, I’m sorry to have disturbed you”'s, I went to the supervisor and asked, pretty literally, “WTF???”
“Well, we have to work with the sample we’ve been given or it invalidates the results. Keep calling!” 
I slogged through THREE DAYS of that crap. THREE DAYS and not ONE. SINGLE. PERSON. HAD BOUGHT. A FREAKING VOLVO.
Oddly, I did very well on the surveys for some private airplane insurance company…
Hated that job, though. Absolutely despised it.
I packed dog food into display cases for a couple days on temp work. Wow, that was monkeyl level stuff.
I worked at a failing mortgage bank (it did eventually fail), and then at the bank that the president managed to jump to and carry most people over to. He never paid me on time, he never followed through on his promises, he was on psychotropic drugs and would go 3 weeks being reasonable and then flip out and scream at people in the most unprofessional way I have ever heard.
When I got my grandparent’s inheritance, I told him that either I could go to a livable salary, or I would work at Taco Bell as I found a teaching job. He immediately raised my salary. About 2 weeks later, as I ran out of things to invent for myself to do, since I didn’t have the $2500 it would take to do the projects he had given me, he laid me off. Good riddance.
I got a job once selling knives of a certain brand that I won’t name.
I began having 2nd thoughts when I was asked to provide a list of my friends as possible clients.
I ended up quitting after the 2nd day of training.
Gather round, everyone, for a tale of horror.
The summer after I graduated high school, I got a job cleaning out the house from Hell.
I’m not kidding. This house had been lived in by a brother and a sister, who were both stricken with obsessive hoarding. They collected junk for 30, 40 years before finally getting committed to a nursing home. And then after they were gone, hobos broke in and lived there for a while.
First of all, it was July in Utah. It got above 100 degrees outside, which meant that inside was punishingly hot, since all of the windows were boarded up. The front door was kept open as much as it could go (blocked by junk), and eventually we forced the back door open as well.
Secondly, the entire house was full. Of junk. Mountains of trash, higher than my head, literally filled every room. You could see the progression of the madness, on the top would be multiple pairs of shoes, multiple nativity sets, etc. In the middle were endless numbers of ducks of any sort, from decoys to kitschy plastic things. On the bottom were the remains of a normal household. Every day we’d fill a 15’ dumpster with useless junk.
Everything was flithy–covered with a layer of dirt–and stank. Stank like stale air fresheners, with an underlayer of unwashed human. And of course it never really got aired out, because we had to board everything back up again because people kept trying to break in and steal stuff (what, I don’t know. There wasn’t anything worthwhile). The worst day was when my coworker pried open one of the refrigerators, and exposed us all to the evilest stench known to mankind: an utterly putrid burrito. It was the closest I’ve ever gotten to vomitting outright just from a smell. We all ran in terror from the wavefront, like running from the shock wave of a nuclear blast. It was so bad, even dollar store “rose”-scented air freshener was preferable.
Speaking of smells, I still have a horror of the smell of Irish Spring soap. That’s what we’d use to clean off our hands in order to eat lunch. And every day when I got home, I’d fling myself in the shower and scrape–I’m not kidding, scrape–the black coat of filth off of my skin.
Some highlights:
I had to clean out the brother’s room. It was filled with layers of shitty underwear. Instead of doing laundry, he’d just fling it on the floor and buy new clothing.
The bathroom had been used long after the plumbing ceased to work, as in the floor was covered with fecal matter. I’m guessing that was the fault of the hobos. That part probably should have been handled by professionals.
The basement was oozingly damp, and smelled like cat food. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
On the plus side, it payed $10 an hour, and I found a nifty bookbag, and I met Jerry Sloan, the coach of the Utah Jazz. I guess this is what he likes to do in his spare time. One day he tripped over a three inch pile of dirt.
Ginsu?
It had to have been Cutco. A friend of mine in college got pulled in by that scam too.
It’s a tie between telemarketer and door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.
Summers from college-asst. manager of a local marina. actually not too bad, except for the 9ocassionally weird people that had boats there). I fould that there are two classes of boat owners:
(1) working class guys who do their own work (in violation of the rules-you were supposed to hire a yard mechanic). Working class guys who own boats usually came every weekend and lived on their boats-rarely took them out 9gas is expensive). Cheap-they barely had enough money to pay their bills.
(2) Rich guys who never took their boats out. One guy 9think he was a bigtime divorce lawyer0 had a boat that needed an engine replaced-he actually hired a couple of illegal aliens to install the engine-they dropped the 400 lb. engine bloch into his boat-causing massive damage. and another time an angry client yelled at me-he was mad because some guy was watching his boat with binoculars 9and snapping pictures). the voyeur was an FBI agent!
What amazed me was the huge amount of money spent on boats-and the pitiful amount of time they were actually used!
Correct. I got a letter about it just about the time I finished high school. On the bright side, I got out after wasting only 2 days of my life.
Maybe some people do well in that, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.
There are two I can think of:
::cue music:: Carwash!: A summer job at minimum wage, cleaning the inside of cars as they went through the semi-automated carwash. The only automated part of it was that it was dragged by a mechanism and there were blow dryers at the end. I had to leap into the car just after the Two Mexicans finished scrubbing it down, but before it entered the rinse, and hopefully escape prior to the dryer. Otherwise, I’d start getting behind and the foreman would scream at me to hurry up. After a summer of using that squeeze bottle, I could crush cans without a problem. I felt sorry for the Two Mexicans. They washed the cars with steam wands and with mitts. Their hands were immersed in hot, soapy water for eight hours a day and were always cracked and bleeding. Tips were all grabbed by the guys at the end of the line who wiped off excess water with rags. They never shared unless threatened.
Carpet cleaning: Slave fucking labor as well. This was before all the equipment made the job relatively easy. The cleaning was hands-and-knees with chemicals and sponges. The boss would leave after 15 minutes to “take care of some things”, then come back and bitch at me about the poor job (I was 17, for cripes’ sake), even though I’d had a minimum of training and no experience. I quit after three weeks.
As an adult, the hands-down worst job was while I was in the military. I ran a crew of misfits, guys who were awaiting courts martial or captain’s mast or administrative discharges. They turned into a good crew, but that’s a story for another thread. The job was to install a five-mile-long double line of chain link fence, buried six inches in concrete, and topped with barbed wire and razor tape at the Naval Magazine in Guam. The ditch had to be 12" deep for the concrete. Since Guam is about 99% coral, the ditch had to be dug first with jackhammers, then shoveled out. The work was brutal in the 110 degree heat and drenching humidity. To make matters worse, nobody cared about these people in the least, and my boss least of all. Gaining simple concessions like shade and cool water nearly cost me my career, since I had to go to the mat in order to get anything at all.
I can’t believe this- it is pretty obvious. Search also for a golden rivet.
Maybe not the worst job, but the one where I was unhappiest: I worked at a chain restaurant as a janitor/hostess. I would come in at 8:00 and bust my ass polishing brass, scrubbing toilets, washing windows, mopping floors. Four hours later, drenched in sweat, I’d change into my hostess outfit, put my hair in a ponytail, and show people where to sit. The thing is, during the janitorial part of my job, I was under direct and constant personal supervision of the nitpickiest, most anal-retentive, micro-managing little son of a bitch it has ever been my misfortune to know. I never managed to clean anything well enough to suit him, and though I tried, I could never quite finish all the tasks he wanted done. I’m telling you, this is one restaurant where you could have actually dropped something on the floor, then picked it up and eaten it without fear. It was clean!
As for the hostessing part: All the servers in the restaurant were college students…young, free, upwardly mobile. I was an old married lady with kids. I was invisible to them for the most part, although some of them wanted to know how I could be “friends” with the aforementioned son of a bitch. Apparently I was considered his friend because no one else had ever managed to work with him for over a week.
I was so very, very happy to leave.
Just to provide a bit of contrast to the gloom, I’ll mention a job that I guess some might consider bad, but that I truly loved: hauling mulch for a ‘nursery’ outside of Pottstown, PA. Actually it was just a roadside reseller of potted plants that were trucked in from elsewhere. They delivered within a 15-mile radius.
I mainly worked weekends during the spring rush. Basically I’d show up in the morning, get a list of deliveries for the day (usually eight or ten), fire up an old Bobcat, load up a beat-up Chevy 1-ton with mulch, then get on the road. Two or three deliveries were other stuff such as plants, trees, pallets of rock, etc. If no one was home when I arrived, I’d dump the materials wherever the delivery ticket said to (usually in the driveway). If the customer was home, I’ put the stuff wherevewre they wanted, as long as I could get the truck in there safely. In between runs, I’d use the Bobcat to load mulch for customers who brought their own vehicles.
The place was all about sales volume, and everyone hustled like their pants were on fire. I rarely could spare more than about 15 minutes for lunch. The plants (trees, really), were heavy as hell and although the truck bed could accept 12 yards of mulch, it was seriously overloaded and a handful to drive at that volume, not to mention having to keep an eye out for roadside weigh stations. Customers would also sometimes want the load dumped in peculiar places that risked getting the truck bogged down or seriously chewing up their yards.
Despite all that, for some reason I absolutely loved the job. Maybe it was the fact it was only two days a week, maybe it was the chance to mess around with machinery like the Bobcat, maybe it was the fact that I was left on my own to get the job done without some idiot micromanaging everything, but it was a blast. Actually, I know what it was: every single customer I ever delivered to was overjoyed to see me. There’s something about seeing a truckload of landscaping materials arrive that just makes people optimistic and happy.
Yep, I was perfectly happy to be the mulch man, and I’d do it again in an instant
What I hate about CutCo is they don’t tell you who they are until you get into the interview. I was interviewing with Vector Marketing until I found out what the job really was. I knew my friends and family weren’t going to sell out their friends and family to help me build a client list, so I left right then.
I did a stint delivering newspapers for a while in college. The work wasn’t so bad (except the days there were tornado warnings and biblical-scale deluges and I still had to deliver the paper), but the hours were a little rough. Especially the one week we were interviewing for officers in an organization I was in at school, which meant I was doing that until about 2:30am, then going to toss papers, then going home for about 2 hours of sleep.
But I did that for a few months. I only lasted 2 hours at a “phone survey/appointment setting” (really telelmarketing) job for a water filtration company. I finished the triaining, but I couldn’t make myself go to the phones. I told them not to pay me for the 2 hours, but they insisted – so a few weeks later I got a check for like 10 bucks or whatever.