What's the worst job you ever had?

In My Humble Opinion
41

They had no idea how to care for the animal and were looking for the cheapest of everything and only the minimum that would be required to keep it from dying over night.
For example, if they bought a bird, they’d get the smallest bird cage in the store, no matter what they bought.They’d also buy the cheapest food we had, no matter if it was for another specie of bird.
People who would buy reptiles wouldn’t be willing to purchase things like UV lights or cages/tanks big enough for them to move around in. They’d only buy whatever the over-the-counter dry food is that they sell, which isn’t a replacement for fresh vegetables/fruit and live prey. They wouldn’t buy the vitamin supplements that the reptile would need, nor a book on how to take care of it. It was especially bad with cheap reptiles like Iguanas, Anoles, and Geckos. They’re cute and they’re cheap so people buy them on a whim, not realizing that they need to spend 15 times the price of the animal just for the initial setup, then another couple hundred a year in UV light bulbs and fresh food and new cages/tanks as they grow. (Very few people realize that the adorable little 6 inch long baby Iguana will grow to be 5 feet long and live up to 20 years.)

Don’t get me wrong, some people truly did know how to care for their animals and would do anything needed. But the majority of people just thought they were “neat” and wanted to get them and not give them the time, effort or expense required for a living being. They were little more than novelties or toys. I’d be surprised if a tenth of the animals I sold over those five years lived more than a year. And that year was probably a living hell for them.

A mouse or rat that is used to feed reptiles, large fish and even some mammals (Sugar Gliders are rather fond of a pinkie mouse every now and then).

Edited: Ferret Herder is on the right track. There are plenty of warning signs.

42

My worst job was in the TA days, mentoring a girl who was teaching High schoolers. Loved the girl, hated the high schoolers. Geneb’s horror tales of his work at the pet shop beat mine out of the water, though.

(We did get one good thing out of him working there: a golden gecko, whom the neighbors of his original owners brought into the pet shop. Original owners wanted to flush him down the toilet after losing him in a garage for several months and finding him again. Some people just don’t deserve to have animals…)

P.S.
The gecko’s being properly taken care of now, thankyouverymuch.

43

One summer I signed up with a temp agency – Manpower, I think – and the first assignment was to fill in for an unarmed bank security guard who was taking a vacation. The job entailed keeping an eye on things, and as all security guards are supposed to do, keep aware of the time. So I couldn’t ignore the clock, which otherwise can be an effective strategy for people dealing with boring repetitive jobs. Of course, for that to work, you have to have some tasks that you actively perform–running a copier, filing papers, and so on. The guard’s job really consisted of doing nothing, and was excruciatingly boring.

When Manpower showed up the next day and said there was a mistake, and that somebody else was supposed to take the assignment, I was relieved.

44

Crap, I had some awful jobs, especially as a temp. The worst may have been trimming trees and brush at a factory. I was throwing branches into a dumpster and saw a pair of brass knuckles and a couple of syringes mixed in with the other trash. The chain saw I was using had a dull chain.

I was trimming tree branches standing on a wall on the outside of a fence, about 10 feet off the ground. The guy I was working with said something about getting some extra money by sending his wife out to turn tricks.

Others included door-to-door sales. The worst of those was vacuum cleaners…it was a Compact brand, although I can’t seem to find it via google. But the office had a cardboard sign in the window with “Compact Systems” hand-written in black Sharpie! I actually stayed there for a day and a half, but knew there was no way I could sell an $800 vacuum cleaner.

I also tried selling tropical plants door-to-door. Out of the back of a van. That was fun. I “rented” the plants every day from the company, and sold them for as much as I could, then paid the company $10 for each plant. If I sold a plant for $11, I made a dollar. If I sold it for $100, I made $90. One guy made $700 a week, and that was in the late 80s. That lasted about a week and a half.

Then there were the assembly line factory jobs (around the plant selling days), and now I’m in an office. I’m much happier these days than I was then.

45

Working as a food service drone at my uni’s busiest dining hall during dinner, the busiest meal. It was an AYCE buffet, and we had different little “stations” depending on what you wanted (burgers, asian, indian, pizza, salad, pasta, beverages, desserts). They just charged you per “meal” (1 card-swipe) to get in the door, you could stay and eat all night if you really wanted to.

This particular dining hall was the newest and largest. Everyone wanted to eat there every night, and it fed several thousands of people at dinner. And the university didn’t care who ate where, you could travel across campus and eat at any of the 8-ish residential dining halls. So people often traveled to come to mine. We employed a hundred people (all students, many on work study) on any given night, and of course not everyone worked every night–this place had a massive staff.

The Americana stand was where I worked. We were responsible for producing all the greasy food (burgers, fries, chicken patties, wings), and it was easily the most popular station. So imagine, if you will, how many hamburgers and cheeseburgers and chicken wings and french fries are eaten at a buffet by thousands of college kids on a nightly basis. I worked there, and I can’t imagine it. I don’t want to.

The job wasn’t the worst at first. It sucked because it was hot and greasy work throwing stuff into fryers and flipping a bazillion burgers all night, but it was tolerable. My third or so day on the job, it was time to do the weekly cleanout of the grease hoods (I’m sure you can see where this is going). For some reason I was assigned to clean them out, even though there were strapping young men every which way but Sunday.

One of the student managers took the 6 massive hood compartments down and lined them up in a “neat” little row. I was provided with a large bucket of vinegar and one rag. No gloves, no barf bucket . There is no picture to describe how MASSIVELY FUCKING DISGUSTING these things looked. I tried one tiny little swipe and the vinegar bucket instantly filled with a massive cloud of lumpy, meat-chunked greaze. Not grease… greaze.

I did not bother to clock out. I did not tell anyone I was leaving. I booked it the fuck out of there before I lost my cookies on the floor. I never quit, but I never went back. I never turned in my uniform or hat. FUCK THOSE GUYS.

46

Corn detasseling wasn’t so bad. I did three seasons of that. What nearly killed me was hay baling- picking up and putting the bales on a trailer, then stacking them in a barn. I found out that day I was allergic to hay- my eyes were bloody little slits and I had welts everywhere the hay stuck me and I felt like my breath went no deeper than my larynx. I got through one day.

The non-agricultural job I had that I hated most was dishwashing, night shift, at a snack bar called the Dugout at BSU. Totally ruined my social life that year, it did.

47

You realize, however, that people who are educated about care of a certain species would not, generally, be shopping in a pet store.

48

And yet they still do.

49

Well, that’s not necessarily true. I would expect that most people who want a small pet wouldn’t have any idea where to get a fish, newt, anole, hamster, etc. outside of a pet store. My husband and I got our ferrets, with one exception, at a local pet store with a good reputation; the exception was a questionable pet store, but I really felt compelled to rescue that poor little ferret. And yes, I know that doesn’t help matters, but this was years ago, and considering the behavioral issues that poor guy ended up having, we were probably his best hope.

We’ve since changed to being rabbit owners, and did check shelter options, but couldn’t find ones that we thought would work for us, and decided to start with baby rabbits to make the transition easier for us, rather than start off with a rabbit that might have problems from a previous owner. We went to an area mom-n-pop, one-location pet store that has decent reviews on their small animal and fish facilities. Future rabbits will almost certainly be from a shelter now that we’re more experienced rabbit owners.

50

I had a minimum wage job at a chicken abattoir. I was in a large, extremely hot and humid room by myself. Hundreds of dead chickens were going around the room hanging from a wire by their feet, they entered the room through a hole in the wall after just being killed. Massive metal casks were constantly filling with giblets and my job was to wheel them to a hole in the ground and empty them in.

At one point a drop of hot liquid landed on my lip and I instinctively licked it off. I’m sure it was chicken blood (the white coat I was given was splattered in it). A few hours after I left I started vomiting. The next day I had terrible stomach cramps and diarrhea. I lost over a stone in weight in a week and have never felt so bad before or since. The only good thing was that my gp eventually gave me liquid morphine to stop the pain and reduce the diarrhea. It felt nice…

Unsurprisingly I never went back after that first day.

If I ever get a job again where I’m asked to sign a form saying that I won’t sue if I get any from a long list of illnesses I won’t take it!!

51

Since I’ve been aiding in the hijack, I might as well add mine. I think it was the plastics factory I worked in where it was hot as hell, with you on your feet all day, few pads on the concrete floor to stand on, and the decorative leaf bags for Halloween (looked like jack-o-lanterns) that caused my skin where I’d touched them to react like I had a severe rash.

One of the more soul-crushing jobs was working graveyard shift in a payment processing company. We handled payments for companies like GMAC, DirecTV, etc. The place ran around the clock during the workweek, with us even getting shipments of mail at the loading dock late at night, straight from a USPS distribution center. I had to run stacks of envelopes through a machine that would slit them open and pull out the contents, and sometimes you’d have to clear jams by hand. Occasionally those happened because pissed-off customers would rig the envelopes to be a pain to deal with, like stapling it closed repeatedly, stapling the payment slip to the check repeatedly, cramming a lot of other paper into the envelope (junk mail pieces, typically), that sort of thing. Well thanks, you didn’t even hurt an employee of your car loan’s company; you just ticked off some worker drone for a totally unrelated company. Then there were the letters from people who sounded on the edge of desperation, scrawled over the surface of the bill or enclosed on another slip. I did give one to a supervisor, saying I was worried and maybe Customer Service for that company should talk to this guy. I just ignored the “you guys suck” notes. The company doesn’t see those anyway; everything got scanned right into computers and keyed in at our site.

It was really depressing, the combination of dealing with the stuff that customers write or did, plus working graveyard shift and not really coping well with the sleep schedule change.

52

:eek:

53

My worst was that one where my immediate boss was the Queen of Hearts, the one who’d start off each day by calling the warehouse manager into her office and threatening with ripping his head off. I still hold the record as “the person who put up with QoH the longest”.

Middlebro wasn’t giving much thought to college; it’s not like he knew what the heck else he wanted to do, either, but studying just was so… tiresome. Then he got a summer job picking peaches. On the second day, he borrowed several bandannas from me. At first, his coworkers laughed, “do you think you’re a cowboy?” - but once they saw that having them on helped keep some of the peaches’ hair outside of clothes, and wetting them helped avoid roasting, they all started using them. Funny part is, bandannas are a part of traditional clothing in many parts of Spain (they’re called pañuelicos in our region, cachirulos next one over - most people will have some at home): people just seem to have forgotten how to use them when they moved out of the farm.

Peaches used to be one of his favorite fruits - used to. And after one week on the job, he told Dad “I AM going to college. No idea what for, but I am not going to spend my life in jobs like this!” Dad said “sounds good to me.”

54

Well, I have worked a large variety of jobs, and a few times worked 2 or 3 jobs at once to make ends meet.

Well, I worked in a boiler room screening entries in a drawing, for a timeshare operation. Honestly it really wasn’t that bad, it was a couple dollars over minimum, and inside, in air conditioning, and I got paid in cash :eek: I was a bit upset when I showed up for work and found police tape barring the door :frowning:

I worked in a legal boiler room selling advertising to businesses for a newspaper insert that ‘highlighted’ local businesses. We passed them off as having been written specifically for the business, however we had a huge book of boilerplate and a yellow pages and we would flip through the boiler plate and find one for example a generic gift shop specializing in Lladro crap if the next sucker up was a yellow pages entry for a gift shop selling Lladro crap. It was ok, but I just did not like basically lying to the people as we were not allowed to tell the people that it was basic boiler plate and not custom written stuff, and we weren’t the newspaper, just an insert put out for profit.

Restaurant kitchen. I hated mopping floors, really hated veggie prep when I had to deal with mushrooms [allergic, even the smell is nasty to me and I had to wear latex gloves I had to bring myself, this being the early 80s and before the glove fad we have now] Hot line sucked in the summer, but I really loved working in pastry and baking even though I had to work godawful early in the morning for baking. To this day, baking pastries and breads is how I relax if I am upset. Since I cant eat the desserts, it leads to drive by desserting of friends occasionally :smiley:

Picked tomatoes and strawberries one spring and summer sharecropper style. Hot, dusty, backbreaking labor. Never again.

Hazmat - long boring hours waiting, and short moments of terrifying, and more than a few incidents of being gassed by various chemicals, or burned by various chemicals. No matter how good your precautions, accidents happen.

55

Technically, this won’t count, because I didn’t take the job, but I once looked into becoming a cab driver. I declined when I saw the application had a space for “Identifying marks or scars”.

56

Pony ride and petting zoo attendant. Weekends spent heaving sticky little kids up on sweaty little ponies and then counting 10 times around the circle and then helping the kids off the ponies and do it all over again.

I had to help with set up and tear down of the pens for the petting zoo animals and the wheel for the ponies. I had bruises up and down my arms and legs so bad my boyfriend was worried people were going to think he was a wife-beater. Not sure how I was getting them, but they were impressive.

It was mostly weekends - 12 hour days out of town with no accommodation provided. I slept in my car or in the trailer with the ponies. No showers and nothing but expensive and greasy carnival food to eat. Corn dogs and fries get old quickly.

I think I lasted a month or so before I just couldn’t do it anymore.

57

I worked at a language school in Korea. Like most language school, they treat teachers like workers, not teachers. Teachers usually expect to teach less than 8 hours a day. A “full” day for a teacher is usually 5 classes or 5 teaching hours or less. Most language schools treat teachers like workers, so they teach 8 hours per day and 40 hours per week.

In Korea, however, a “full-time” worker generally works 10 hours a day with a half-day Saturdays. My first class started at 7am and I had classes all the way until 12pm. Sometimes, I had a 1pm class as well. Then, we would get a weird 4-5 hour break and start again at 5pm until 9pm. On average, I was teaching 6-7 classes per day.

Then, part of the job was to go out with students. For every class (of the 6-7 classes per day) I had to go out with the students. Since I worked all day, the only chance was on weekends. 6-7 classes means I often had to go drinking with two classes in the same day.

Also, as most teachers know, the reason most teachers don’t work 8 teaching hours per day is the need to prepare lessons and handouts. On Sundays, my only off day, I was usually preparing 30-40 lessons for the coming week. If I was lucky, I was teaching the same class again and could recycle lessons. If not, I was usually making lessons from 1pm to 12 am.

The pay averaged out to around $6 per hour, not including prep time. This was when minimum wage in the US was $6.25. In Korea, however, this was 3X the minimum wage there, or about $2 per hour.

I finished the 1 year contract, but a lot of teachers just ran away in the middle of the night. My owner told me that on average, 50% don’t complete their contracts.

One anecdote that illustrates how bad it was was during the winter, when it was ~0C with a -5 wind chill factor, the owner refused to turn on the heater. He instructed the teachers to take off our coats during class and pretend it wasn’t cold so the students wouldn’t complain. We said, what if we’re cold? He said, if you believe you aren’t cold, you won’t be cold.

When I came back, I had several health issues related to the drinking, pollution and stress. I think staying there another year might have killed me.

58

I’ve worked as a nurses aide too, straight midnights. It it not the worst job i have had but what bugged was that i was always late getting out because a lot of my people didn’t want to get up early sometimes, and I couldn’t blame them. I had a bunch of other chores that i couldn’t finish because i needed a lot of time on rounds, an hour and a half as compared to one lady who has hers done in 20 minutes.

I got hassled because i couldn’t do rounds and dress people in the morning. I tucked one man’s shirt in and another aide untucked it. I’m not the best at making beds, putting the pillows on top, rather than tucking them under the blankets, because i can’t make it look nice, and that is how i make my bed at home anyway.

I liked my people but my coworkers are a whole different post. Thing that pissed me off the most was how i was always being called to come in early, as often as 4-5 times a week.

The worst job was as a telemarketer which i am ashamed of… but i couldn’t sell a damn thing. I was trying to sell people on this byzantine travel club program where you got coupons and had to save your receipts for rebates. I got cussed at, hassled, and a bunch couldn’t understand what i was sellling. In three weeks i had 3 sales. The last saturday i was there, i burst into tears and by Tuesday i was canned… :stuck_out_tongue:

The quality of my work will not improve when i spend 12 hours a day here. For me, I don’t need breakfast in bed but don’t try to get me out of bed before 9AM.

59

I worked for a high-end boarding kennel in central CT. They liked to bill themselves as a resort for your dogs, a real luxury hideaway for Fido when you’re in Key West. Not surprisingly, they weren’t. Just the same as other kennels - cement runs, regular food (as opposed to the “gourmet food” they wrongly advertised, too many pets & not enough staff to give the “personalized attention” they claimed. There was also a hideous manager woman who was a massive control freak about the animals. I saw her pick a midsize spaniel up by his ears and shake him because he growled at her. Yeah, I get pack rank and dominance training, but that’s completely over the top, and not exactly in line with their luxury front.
They also piped in music, usually Lite Rock, throughout the place. For the animals.

One of the jobs that had to be done daily was cleaning every run, inside & out, which took many, many hours as there were about 100 runs in a giant T-shaped complex. During the winter, cleaning the outdoor runs meant donning unlined Wellies, jacket & gloves, arming yourself with an ice-chopper and hot water hose, and going from run to run, chipping the frozen turds and diarrhea from the cement before washing it into the runoff trough with the hot hose. You might think that frozen dog shit doesn’t smell very bad, but that hot hose cooked it up to the perfect temp to steam the poop smell right into your nostrils, even when it was 10 degrees out.

That song by Billy Vera, “At This Moment” was getting a lot of airplay at the time, and I still think of it as The Frozen Dog Shit Song.
*WHAT do you think
I would give at this moment
When you stand here before me
With tears in your eye-hi hiiies…*Phew, poop.

60

Another former corn detassler chiming in. I did it one summer when I was in middle school. Hated it. Got corn rash all over my forearms (I’d wear a flannel shirt in the mornings, but generally took it off when it warmed up), got my shoes filled with mud (had to throw away all the sock I wore on that job), worked rain or shine.

And our boss was a major douchebag who got off on bullying his teenaged workers. I got fired after telling him, among other things, to go fuck himself.