I worked in a little mini-A-frame thingy that was about 4 x 6 called The Unidog. Fuckin’ Bees Backward “R” Them.
How creepy and sucked out is that? I’m picturing you (Smithers) and Mr. Burns in some musty mansion. You’re dodging verbal abuse and contemplating hard-to-identify poisons and he’s all paranoid thinking you want to kill him, which is so perfect.
“Fuckin’ Bees Backward “R” Them” Huh? 
Did the waitress bit once but it was temporary (me and my friends paid for our “town festival space” by helping at the bar downstairs during said festival’s peak hours) and we were allowed to slap customers if they got too feisty. One grabbed my ass but made the mistake of doing so when my metal tray was empty… what, you mean a tray doesn’t count as a “hand extension”? So it wasn’t very bad but I always knew I didn’t mean to keep that job. This was in Spain, at a time when “sexual harassment” had not yet entered anybody’s vocabulary but people considered that a woman could decide who grabbed her ass and who didn’t.
The worst jobs I’ve had haven’t been so much a matter of job description as of lousy bosses. Right now for example the boss I have would be ok if my immediate superior didn’t insist in staying at the office for 12 hours even though a) we do not bill by the hour and b) half the team doesn’t have anything to do and it’s the customer’s fault. It’s his (and the job’s) biggest defect, though. Nothing compared with that Quality Manager who started her day by threatening the Warehouse Manager with “ripping his head off”…
Y’know…like Toys Backward “R” Us?
What does it say about my previous jobs if Wal-Mart is the best job I’ve ever had? There are times each day where I just want to kick whatever customer comes through my line, or when they just do… all of those tiny things that bother me, although if I listed them here, you’d think that I was complaining about horribly petty things. (You’d understand if you had spent time behind the counter, though…)
Worst job: Walgreen’s. I’m the only cashier there, and have a huge list of stuff I have to do. When I get my only break for my 8 hour shift, the photo guy comes over to relieve me and then yells at me for going on break because now all of his 1-hour pictures are going to be made late. And then there were the similar “closing” procedures to the Target ones provided earlier.
And then there was the dress code. Ridiculous. We had to wear ties… but we could wear them with polo shirts? With casual button-downs, so that it looked ridiculous? Yes.
Sorting dirty linen at an industrial laundry. They laundered dirty linens and towels from restaurants and butcher shops, which were picked up twice a week. By the time they got to the laundry, the moldy linens were soaked with food residue and meat juices reeking of decomposed food. Nothing like emptying a sack of linen on to your sorting table and realizing it is alive with fat, white, wiggling maggots. Plus, it was 110 degrees in there due to the big dryers running all day. I developed an infection in the cuticle of one finger, it looked like a tumor. I did that for a couple of months before I was promoted to driver. That job sucked for a whole 'nother batch of reasons, but at least the maggots stayed in the sacks, for the most part.
Worst jobs I’ve had in no particular order:
Direct care staff at a center for developmentally disabled adults (most had dual diagnoses). Duties included changing adult diapers while trying to overcome resistance of the wearer, recording the number of times during a half-hour interval that a guy regurgitated portions of his lunch (while trying to eat mine), and restraining violent people who had no idea what fair fighting is about. Don’t get me started on cold and flu season there.
**Rat care at a place where they tested chemicals on animals. ** Large, angry, rats. Most didn’t like to be handled. Many had tumors. And most of the other employees and supervisors were jerks. I quit after a couple of weeks.
Personal injury lawyer. For a guy who signed and filed every case that came in the door. I was low man on the totem pole, so it was day after day of embarrassment as I had to defend my boss’s idiotic legal theories.
**
Bagger at local grocery store.** The floor managers thought they were drill sergeants. I still cringe when I remember one of them telling me that I had to get something “as clean as the proverbial baby’s ass.”
**
Worked for my dad. ** Mom worked there too. I had an office with a glass wall so she could keep an eye on me. Nuff said.
Ok, mine are nowhere near as bad as some other, but two do come to mind:
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Worked at a laboratory. It was a temp job, and basically some experimental drug was being recalled by the FDA. So some days, boxes and boxes of this drug would come in, and each box had 16 little vials in it and we had to count all 16 vials. That’s what we did all day.
Some days there was no work to be done except copying, if you were lucky. I took to copying random things out of sheer and utter boredom. I quit after a month, it was horrible. I also quit the temp company and never forgave them for giving me that job when they had promised me office work. -
When I was even younger, I worked in the specialized drinks section of the local movie theatre. This entailed making frapucchinos and whatever for customers. We were in a small area, that was a step down to get into. And there were three girls working on the weekends. So it was crowded, then drinks would spill, and it would acucmulate on the floor, so by the end of the evening there’d be puddles. And you had to wear company-provided slacks, and your own nice shoes, and I’d be forever washing the slacks but your shoes would get disgusting.
And the prices were ridiculous, so customers would complain and bitch and moan.
I bought a knife from a friend selling Cutco because I felt sorry for him. Most pathetically excruciating read-from-the-book spiel I’ve ever experienced. I bought the cheapest knife they had: $65 plus $12 shipping.
Damn good knife, though. Too bad I’m afraid to use it because I don’t want to take a chance on breaking it.
Library book shelver, or “page” as they were called. Just boring, boring, boring, eyestraining work, and on your feet for hour after hour. I got fired after a couple of months, only time I ever lost a job that way.
Next up would be ledger clerk, working one summer for a magazine distributor (second-class porn…ever hear of Adam or Player?). I would sit there all day entering credit memos into a large ledger with a red pencil. At least I was sitting down, but god it was monotonous! I had to be careful not to look out the window during the afternoon, because then I’d see how little–how very little–the shadows had lengthened. The people I worked with were OK, though.
I don’t think first jobs are ever very enjoyable.
I had one other office grunt job, as a file clerk for a smallish law firm, but it actually wasn’t that bad. There were enough different tasks I had to do that it didn’t get too boring for what it was.
You probably didn’t do him any favors. I don’t think the salesmen get commission. They were on campus here a few weeks ago and it looks like they still pay $10 or $12 " per hour " which is really just $10 or $12 per sales appointment.
Waiter: Alfred’s on Beale Street, Memphis: The customers were drunken idiots, my fellow workers were thieves and backstabbers, and I once worked a 12-hour shift and walked with $12. I have worked some pretty good restaurant jobs, but that wasn’t one of them.
Hospital Maintenence Worker: The good part was I learned to patch drywall, a lifeskill that has come in handy. The bad part was that I had to run the medical waste incinerator.
Roving Flower Guy: I had to put on a tux and try to sell flowers to people at nightclubs, bars, and restaurants. I was alone driving around in my own car all night and even got to smoke pot the whole time, and it sucked so bad I quit after one night.
I worked through a temp company for a summer, and wound up as a data entry clerk for Wells Fargo Bank. Stuck 2:00-10:30 in a windowless room transferring numbers from paper to computer. And the good times were the times I was loaned out to the crazy Iranian conspiracy theorist to stuff envelopes for him. I really don’t know how people stood doing this job full time - the other data entry clerks were all older and demoralized because in few weeks everything, including their jobs (but not them!), were going to be moved to Phoenix. Jeez, I hated that job, the aura of malaise permeated the place.
Ha, the Mysterious Ad Generation Engine has decided that the readers of this thread really want to buy… picture frames!!!
I’ve had some great jobs, but these weren’t them:
Roy Rogers at 16, frying chicken & mopping floors, in summer. It was a good 110 near that fryer. The worst was the unavoidable grease splatters, no matter how careful you are (and you really don’t have the time to be too careful). Constant tiny burns on the forearms, and management’s method of dealing with this is to have you stick your arms in the flour (for public consumption) to draw off the grease.
Telemarketing - about 6 months of that after college until I found my first “real” job. We also did surveys, which are exactly as an earlier poster described them; no one believes that you really aren’t selling anything. Also if you get 35 min through a 45 min interview before someone finally hangs up it counts for nothing…
I had a sort of tour guide job with a bottom-level tour operator for high school groups. Did Philadelphia, NYC & DC (and in one memorable misadventure because I had been there once in my life previously, New Orleans. Know how much there is to do with 17 year olds that they want to do which is also legal? Exactly…) Actually that job’s worth its own lengthy post, might wrap things up here at work & post from home later. Let’s just say that when you’re working mostly for tips & the tour co. gives people the impression that they’re going into when in fact you probably don’t have the ability to do much beyond letting people see the outside of the White House things are going to be bad… also didn’t help to have a (really quite nice; my best group ever) British group who were apparently not told or had impressed upon them I was working mainly for tips (Americans knew this) and getting not one penny from them although they seemed to really like me, in fact more than the American groups who did tip me (reducing the job to something like $2/hr for 7 12-hr days); I still do have the coffee table book they gave me on Birmingham though.
Had a couple of awful temp office jobs, one lasted for 2 weeks in which I literally had nothing to do for either week until the 4pm of the last day (a Friday evening), when someone had the bright idea to have me spend 3 hrs stuffing envelopes someone in the office didn’t want to before I could get my timesheet signed off on… I wanted to kill.
Also had a long-tem office temp job for another painfully stupid woman who managed to somehow stumble her way into being a VP (everyone at this bank seemed to be a VP of something…). Incredibly, monumentally thick person… which didn’t keep her from talking down to me as if I were a learning disabled pet.
Spent about 6 months in a job translating pharmaceutical study after pharmaceutical study after… The reward was another box of them. And another. Then another. They were grouped by company and each company would follow the exact… same… format… I literally jumped with joy at the opportunity to take a job in a landmine-ridden area of Bosnia to get myself out of there (and that turned out to be one of my all-time best jobs, a subject for another thread…)
One was a temp job working at a factory that made cores for paneled doors when I was about 18 or so. Having to be there at 6:00 in the morning was the most pleasant thing about it. I’d get long rails of 1.5" square wood that had to have the knots cut out of them. The table saw used to cut them up was pedal-operated. The saw blade popped up out of a slot in the middle like a jack-in-the-box when you hit the pedal. After only about two days, I started having nightmares about having various body parts cut off by the damn thing. It was hot in the warehouse, you had to wear ear and eye protection, the sawdust got into every nook and cranny, and the pay sucked.
I called in “sick” one day after having a dream about shoving my face into the table saw. I’m cursed with too much imagination sometimes. Since the plant opened at 6:00 and the temp office didn’t open until 8:00, I called the plant. That was a no-no according to the temp agent, and I got fired. Suited me just fine.
I had a couple of encounters with sales, including Cutco, which was mentioned above. They do get a commission, but you have to start out-earning your starting stipend to earn it. Good knives though. I still have my demo set. The worst encounter with sales was when I had a “group interview” for an “office manager” position at an “import-export firm.” What you were really going to be doing was selling knock-off perfume in imported bottles. I was mad that they’d wasted almost two hours of my life on that crap, and I was more upset at myself for being too polite to just walk out as soon as I found out what a steaming pile they’d fed us.
One job at an office wasn’t bad as far as the work went, though there wasn’t enough to keep me busy most of the time. The office environment, on the other hand, was one of the worst social situations I’ve ever had to deal with. I was the only male in an office of 10 middle-aged to menopausal women. They were constantly bitchy, backstabbing, and gossipy; embodiments of the worst stereotypes of women in the workplace. The only way I could survive was to ignore just about everything I heard, diplomatically turn away attempts to recruit me to one side or another in the constantly shifting office politics, and keep myself busy for my few hours a day.
For the last 3 months or so, I had to share an office with a professional counselor who desperately needed mental health services herself. She did about 5 minutes of actual work every hour. She had no time to do any work when she was making constant calls to her husband to nag him about anything that happened to pop into her bird brain at the moment. “Hi, honey. I just wanted to check and see that you remembered to tell Tyler’s babysitter that he doesn’t like broccoli. Thanks honey, I appreciate it.” Five minutes later, “Hi, honey. Did I remember to turn the stove off. I know you were there after me. I did? Okay, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.” Five minutes later, another fucking phone call, and another. . . I can’t imagine what kind of human being could have married her and not wanted to throttle her like a captured Rebel captain on a daily basis.
She ignored any social cues that anyone had about when conversations were supposed to start and end. She talked constantly. I started turning my back on her because I couldn’t find any other way to stop “conversations”. She would keep chattering, even when I didn’t make any acknowledging grunts. The other women were an improvement on her, but not much of one.
I’ve had more physically unpleasant jobs (loading trucks in 115 ºF heat), and I’ve had jobs that gave me nightmares (see above) but due to this experience, I will never, ever, work in a predominantly female workplace again.
Ice cream truck driver. We had to buy our stock in the morning, then buy the dry ice to cool it. We had to sell the remaining stock back to them in the evening. The “profits” that we made selling the ice cream barely covered the cost of the dry ice. In addition, I kept getting stopped by the cops because a bunch of the guys were selling drugs as well as ice cream.
Programmer for a small oilfield equipment company. The job wasn’t all that bad, but I dreaded having meetings with the boss, because he was an arrogant asshole with breath bad enough to knock over a horse. You could literally smell his bad breath if you were walking past his office in the hall; you were just SOL if you had to have a meeting with him. I started keeping a jar of Mentholatum in my desk and if he called me in, I would load up my nose before I went.
But I guess the worst of all was door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. 'Nuff said about that right now.
The worst, most soul sucking jobs I’ve had were in temp agencies, placing the temps. Nevermind that all bosses in this field are nasty bitches and that they did all kinds of illegal stuff like changing bonus policies midstream and coding applications for age and race. Nevermind that not even the bosses were trained to know anything about the jobs they were filling and that if I knew about computers (this was more than 10 years ago) I sure as shit wouldn’t be sitting there placing temps but since I didn’t know anything it was the blind leading the blind. This is an industry where someone is always screwing someone over. Temps would steal clients. Temps would hold you up for a raise if they ran across the agency’s bill while on the job and couldn’t understand that we had to upcharge by a certain percentage just to break even and that we were in it for a profit. Many were people who had lots of experience with receiving government services and so thought that we were obligated to help them get work. Then there were people who didn’t get that we couldn’t really “promise” office work or whatever and certainly didn’t get that there weren’t an array of assignments out there to choose from. They didn’t get that being picky put them on the bottom of the list either and that it wasn’t me that put them there but my boss. There were temps who would steal or work drunk or high. There were crazy applicants who threatened my life. But the worst was having to place people in shitty jobs. I never actually lied about a job but begging and coercing was part of the job. I would totally lose sleep thinking about how I was robbing the poor of their dignity by sending them to jobs way beneath them. The middle aged men, especially, just killed me.
Been a soul-sucked temp, carried all kinds of rancid grease and garbage, worked in kitchens, dishwashing etc… All of this nothing compared to picking tobacco as a young teen. 20/day for 12 or so hours of the nastiest, tarry craptacularity. We sat on a machine seated in the rows between the plants and broke the leaves off and sent them up a conveyor belt. .05 taken off for every leaf we dropped. Each row was 45 minutes long, and the pace was hectic. At the end of the row, we’d get a 30-or so second break while the machine turned around, and drink some warm water out of a rusty canister.
The tar soaked into your soul, and you could not really sleep at night because of the smell. Your clothes got so nasty, it was pointless to even change them from day-to-day. So every morning you’d step back into those hardened shoes and jeans and, before the sun was up, be back in the field.
The labor laws didn’t apply to agriculture, so it was the only way to make $100 a week under the age of sixteen. Two summers of that is how I paid for my first car.
Oh, Cutco is good stuff. My parents have been using theirs for over 30 years. If you break it, they’ll sell you a new one for half price. The problem for me was their sales method. I just couldn’t bother people like that.
I also have discovered that a straight edge knife and a sharpening stone go a long way, and for a LOT less.