Six weeks, a telemarketing job.
I was the worst telemarketer.
Ever.
I always took no, for a legitimate answer.
I made zero sales.
I quit before they were gonna fire me.
I don’t know what was taking them so long, I was getting $9 an hour for basically not doing my job.
Update: The hotel that fired me in March called me back in to work. Seems my replacemetn had ‘lost’ several thousand dollars of the hotel’s money and needed someone to show them how things should have been. You can bet I got a raise, benneys and a big apology from the owner before I agreed to it
I thought I killed this thing?
Couple weeks at a market research company (calling people to ask them questions… worked there all of a month $8 an hour)
About 4 months after I wanted to leave a job I was still working there because I needed spending cash. The store closed down though so I decided to stay and get as much as I could outta them before finding something new.
Eight years in January. I do, however, have an interview this Thursday. It’s a job working for a local hospital in their billing department (dealing with HMO’s & insurance companies, not directly with patients). I’d be working with a guy who used to work with me at my current job.
Just over six years, in a hospital job that turned out to be very menial, very overworked, and with poor pay. Good benefits but whenever I took any of those copious vacation days I got so far behind in my work that it didn’t seem worthwhile. I was laid off at the end of June, and started a new job (which so far I think I’ll enjoy) a couple weeks ago. Someone from the old job E-mailed me after I sent out notes about my new position, congratulating me and saying that I deserved to escape from that “godforsaken place”.
3 days. It was during a strike at Boeing in 1989. Needed a job and was hired for graveyard shift at an AM/PM. Between 1 and 4 am each morning, the store was a magnet for every bum, druggy, sick, psyco, and and just plain ignorant people within in a 10 mile radius. They wanted everything for free, especially the booze, and thought nothing of grabbing stuff and walking out of the door with it. At 5 am on the third day, after a night in which I was slapped by a whore (wouldn’t sell her wine after 2 am), had 2 display racks dumped by a punk 15 year old because I would not sell him cigarettes, and had some guy shit outside the front door because I would not let him use the restroom, some idiot thought he could stick a knife in my face and rob the place. From about 5 feet away, I threw a 12 ounce wine cooler at the guy and hit him right in the forehead. He went down and before he could get back up, I whacked him a couple more times with a baseball bat that was behind the counter. The police were called and the guy was picked up and hour later. When the manager walked in at 7, I handed him the keys and never came back. To this day I can’t understand how people can work at those kind of places.
Seven months, in the kitchen of a high school. God, I am so sorry for all the cracks I made in school about the lunches and the lunch workers. Some of those kids were awful, and the lunchroom, after they were through with it, looked like a pigsty. And I had a co-worker, someone I worked with directly, who didn’t like me, and pissed and moaned about having to do more than her share. Not sure what I did to upset her, but boy was I her target.
Six Months - I was working at a small printing/copy shop. My boss was an Megomaniacal ASSHOLE, the pay wasn’t very good (the money I was making went to daycare), and I felt like a drone - the boss wouldn’t let me use my skills and knowledge. Thank goodness I came too my senses and found a better job, that I have been at for almost three years.
5 years now. Been here for almost 6, the first year was kind of fun: new, semi-interesting, lots of stuff I hadn’t done before, but the past five have been awful.
Why am I staying? incredible benefits (see a previous thread about keeping a job just for the benefits), lots of autonomy, and, mostly, because I don’t know how I could afford to do what I’d really like to be doing. And looking for a job is almost as bad as having one you don’t like.
sigh.
If the marriage were fine, I could deal with the job.
If the job were great, I (think) we could work out the marriage.
Right now both suck. I’m depressed.
4 months as a ticketer for a private parking lot company. It was ‘real’ fun when I worked Christmas Eve at -30C and got called Scrooge by some guy, whose Jag I’m just ticketing, who was too cheap to put an extra buck in the meter. “Thanks, Buddy! I’m sure grateful that you told me I was a Scrooge. I wouldn’t have know otherwise. Just because I get paid only by commission for every ticket I write and it works out to minimum wage if I work real hard at best and you drive a Jag and work in a nice comfy office, I can certainly see the similarity! Have you ever read Dickens, you Moron!?”
The two best jobs anyone ever had are the one you had before this one and the next one. The worst one, of course, is right there in the middle.
~730 days till retirement~
Last job I had, I worked there for 5 years. However, it was only during the last 3 years that I started to hate it. Too many changes, always for the worse, made it a thoroughly miserable place to work in. However, I stuck it out, trying to convince myself that things could only get better. Wrong. They always got worse, even when I thought things couldn’t possibly be any shittier.
Four months ago I quit; my boss was badmouthing me behind my back, incorrectly thinking it wouldn’t get back to me. That was the final straw, so I handed in my notice and left two weeks later. Four months on, I’m still looking for a new job - nothing suitable has appeared as of yet. Even so, I still don’t have any regrets whatsoever. I’d much rather be poor and bored than wake up each morning feeling ill at the thought of going to work in that place.
15 months.
Actually, the first 6 months or so weren’t bad. After that, it just became miserable: increasingly unpleasant situation, awful boss, long periods of tedium occasionally interrupted with urgent bouts of “Do it right now!!!”
When I finally left, I thought that I should have done it months before; I would have saved myself from a whole summer of depression and anger and simply hating to get up and go in every morning.
Six months tomorrow. Planning on staying another year and a half. Hate it with a passion. Monday mornings make me cry. So do Friday afternoons, because I know I have to come in and do it again next week.
God, this place sucks.
One year. It was my first job out of college. The job market was terrible at the time and it was the only offer I had, so I took it. Programming job. My coworkers were a bunch of dullards and the guy who ran the place was, well, don’t get me started. He had bought the source code for an inventory management system and then rewrote it himself. Since he graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering around 1970, his stuff read like assembly code. Not his fault, that was probably all he’d ever used.
He got too busy to maintain code, so he hired me to do it. Problem was, he A) didn’t trust anyone to do anything themselves and B) couldn’t read my programming style. So it degenerated into me writing code and him literally standing over my shoulder saying things like “What does that do? Why’d you do that? That doesn’t make sense, I’d write it like this…”
AAAAArrrrrggghh!!
After a year of that I was so desperate I would have taken almost anything. Then a job offer came along from another company that was as desperate to hire as I was to leave. I accepted, gladly, even though I had never written a line of code in the language they were using. I told them that, and they didn’t care. It was an ugly, complicated job managing a bunch of widely-distributed, badly outdated, and poorly maintained servers running custom-written spaghetti code. It was a BIG improvement over the previous job.
One year. It was also my first job out of college. My boss was very abusive to the staff and I ended up crying every day I was there. I quit with no other job to go to. I ended up working three part time jobs to pay the rent and one of those jobs turned into the position I work today. I love my current job, but the pay is so bad I’ll have to start job hunting soon.
It took some distance to see that that first horrible job taught me to be resilient, to stand up for myself, and to take risks. It was a trial by fire, but I learned I could survive almost anything.
Right out of college I couldn’t get into mfg right away (production mgmt) …
So I managed a retail store for 2 and 1/2 years.
Pure living hell. Idiot customers. Idiot employees.
I worked in fast food for 6½ years. As I look back on it I don’t see how I survived it, but I did. I worked there all through college and then ended up working for another two years as a manager after I graduated because there were no jobs available in my field. Everything sucked about the job: low pay, long hours, late night shifts which were followed by early morning shifts (which I don’t mind working as long as my schedule is consistent, which at this place it wasn’t), weekends, the overall working conditions and shitty work involved, the high turnover resulting in being short-handed and always having to call people in to fill shifts, and above all, dealing with crabby, rude and just plain stupid customers. While some days were better than others and some of the managers were cool to work with, several of them were total pricks. The worst time was a period of several months when there were three asshole managers working there and only one cool one, and unfortunately the only cool one left for another job (couldn’t blame him). Once I became a manager myself I knew how not to treat employees and I was liked and respected, and many of the employees under me did their jobs well because of how I conducted myself with them. Still, the job itself sucked and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. It was eight years ago as of yesterday that I officially left that hellhole once and for all.