Worst job I ever had was an assembly-line style position which entailed breaking down used computer parts and writing up reports for them. Normally I don’t mind menial tasks, as long as they’re left-brain only (thus allowing my right brain to wander away and entertain itself until the closing bell) but this particular assignment forced me to use both sides of my brain – thus, my mind was trapped in a never-ending sea of boring computer parts, one after the other, one after the other.
It got so bad that I asked my temp agency to reassign me ASAP – but a few days later, the company moved me to data entry (left brain only) and eventually hired me full time. Moved up to customer care, and had a shot at becoming assistant manager…until the factory shut down and my position was outsourced to India. :mad:
The temp jobs I had as a kid were the worst. I worked in a car wash one summer: brutal work for minimum wage. I worked for a carpet cleaner briefly: all hands and knees scrubbing, and then the fucker wouldn’t pay me. Raking leaves in a yard that was nothing but trees: I ended up with a leaf berm that was easily 30 feet long and three feet high or so. It was back-breaking and the guy was never satisfied, so I had to keep doing it over and over again. I wore out two rakes (they just fell apart).
In high school I spent summers doing new home plumbing. I was supposed to be a “plumber’s helper” and was paid minimum wage. In reality, the guy I worked with had me putting in copper, waste lines, and gas lines by myself after about two days of training.
I had to keep an eye out for inspectors, since I wasn’t legal.
Surely all you midwestern people remember summers spent corn detasseling as a teen? My worst job is a cross between that and the one day I spent at an airline food plant in Charlotte, NC- I came home crying and miserable.
Brick layer’s assistant. I had to mix the mortar by emptying 50 pound sacks of the ingredients into the mixer, then pour out a serving into the wheel barrow and wheel it over to the brick layer.
Once he got off of the ground, he’d set up scaffolding so as to access the higher parts of the wall, so it would then become my job to climb the scaffolding while hauling a 5 gallon bucket of mortar.
When I wasn’t making or delivering mortar, I’d have to deliver bricks. I have no idea what it was called, but there were the lever-like things where you’d slide it around a set of bricks, then pull up on the lever, so you could carry 6 or 7 bricks at once. I’d have to climb the scaffolding while holding one of these loaded with bricks in each hand and deliver them to the brick layer. I lasted only a couple of days until I woke up one morning and couldn’t move because my muscles were so locked up and sore.
That was far the physically hardest job I ever had. The hardest mentally was probably working in a pet store… Being required to sell animals to people who obviously had no intention of treating them correctly has to be one of the hardest things I ever had to do. Not to mention that the store bred it’s own feeder rodents and wouldn’t feed them enough so they cannibalized each other daily. I lasted around 5 years there and I have never forgiven myself for it.
My worst job was during my senior year in college. I worked for Harris, of Harris Poll fame. I was one of those poor schlubs who call you at 7:00 PM, just as you’re sitting down to dinner, to ask you some inane question about something you couldn’t possible care less about. I think I made $2.65 an hour (it was back in the early '80s). After being cursed at, over and over, for 5 hours, I wanted to slit my throat. I think I lasted 4 months.
A timeshare sales office It rapidly became clear to EVERYONE I was not a salesperson and I took over the as admin to the owner. He was such a great guy, to this day I can’t understand what he was doing in that industry. Of course when I met and worked for him it was his first timeshare project - I’m sure he either changed or got out of the business.
I detassled corn one summer. It was the worst job I’ve had. It was 3 straight weeks of walking through corn stalks all day. Seven days a week of freezing in the morning from the dew on the plants and burning up when the sun came out because the dew turned to steam. I think I got $180 for 21 straight days of work after being told I would make an easy $1000.
Telemarketing. You know, people who call your house about your existing credit card and offer the credit protection feature. This was between my first and second years of college, while I was home on summer break. I lasted less than a month, half of which was spent in training. I mean, I wanted money, but not that badly.
Heh…been there. I was the seed company’s field checker that got to walk all the fields to see whether the detassling crews had done their job. I suppose I had it a little better than the crews, at least I got paid a little better, but I was quite possibly the most hated man in the countryside.
The crews hated me because I was forever making them go back in and “do the job right this time, dammit!!” The farmers hated me because it cost them big bucks to call a crew back in. And if I screwed up and signed off on a field that wasn’t done right, my boss hated me and made ugly threats.
SS
My worst was working with a company that covered a number of semi-related construction disciplines: asbestos and mould abatement, fireproofing, firestopping, sprayed polyurethane foam, and HVAC cleaning. Basically, all the jobs they did were labour-intensive, itchy, hot, and miserable. The good part was that I was the assistant field manager, so I got to spend around half of my time in the office pushing paper, but the field work just sucked.
On one occasion I was sent on my own out to Vulcan, AB on the hottest day of the summer (about 35C/95F) to do asbestos removal in an active mechanical room, which was much hotter than the outdoor temperature from all the machinery running. Plus, I had to build a containment to make it even hotter and wear two sets of disposable coveralls that don’t breathe (the containment and coveralls are per legal requirements for asbestos removal). I got about 2/3 of the work done over about a 6 hour shift there before they closed the building and sent me home. I knocked back around 6L of water while I was there and still felt pretty dehydrated and ill at the end of it.
But the worst was always the duct cleaning, which was usually kitchen ventilation systems. Scraping and mopping up thick gobs of animal grease in tight, confined, hot spaces, while using nasty industrial-strength degreasers, is not a fun time. It’s miserable, gross, and doesn’t pay particularly well either.
I was eventually moved into more of a sales capacity in the company, which was a dismal failure, since I’m a lousy salesman, and then let go six months later because I’m a lousy salesman.
Mine was just a psycho boss. I liked the work well enough–it was a fabric store–but the boss was horrible. If she got mad at you, you were in for a ten-minute tirade and she didn’t care that the customers could hear. She was awful at scheduling and held grudges. When I was hired, I told her that we had a trip planned for certain dates, and I understood that she might not want to hire me. She assured me everything would be dandy, and then ‘forgot’ all about it and got angry when I told her I couldn’t work all that time she’d scheduled me for. She left me entirely off the schedule once I was back, didn’t let me go or anything. I got a different job.
I was a janitor at an airplane hangar once, but that was fine.
Onomatopoeia: Feeder rodents are mice/rats sold as snake food.
My WAG about how you can tell if the customer might not treat the animal well is buying too small of a cage, buying inappropriate bedding, incorrect food, and then rejecting advice on appropriate care, mentioning how quickly the last (whatever pet) died, talking about how their big dog loves barking at/their cat loves popping off the cage lid and tormenting past little pets, talking about beating another animal for destroying property or having an accident in the house, etc.
