My worst job had to be working for Olan Mills Portrait Studio in the mid-70s. I applied thinking that I was going to be a photographer, but I ended up being the “driver” instead. They used telemarketers to sell portrait packages and I had to drive out to drop off the membership package and collect the money before people could change their minds.
When I first moved back to St. Louis from Dallas in '03, I got a job at an optical facility making glasses. I was assigned to run 5 “Edgers” (they cut lenses to the shape of the frame they’re being mounted in). My job consisted of:
Edger #1: Scan ticket, insert left lens.
Edger #2: Scan ticket, insert left lens.
Rinse, repeat, to edger #5. Return to edger #1.
Edger #1: swap left lens for right.
Edger #2: swap left lens for right.
Rinse, repeat, to edger #5. Return to edger #1.
Edger #1: scan ticket, insert left lens.
10 hours a day, 5 days a week.
I cannot stand mindless, repetitive work.
Way back in 2003 a guy named Mike Rowe came with a couple of cameramen to the plant where I was a manager. They were filming up the street at a local fish cannery and wanted to see what happened to all the fish guts, heads and entrails after the filets were taken off the fish.
We were turning the fish guts into fish food that would be fed at the salmon hatcheries in the NW and I thought the show would make us look like fools. I was wrong. Very nice guys and the show turned out to be a success. The camera man wore black tape over his nostrils and puked a couple times and we all laughed because we were immune to the smell of truck loads of unrefrigerated fish guts.
It became a segment in Pilot Number 1 of a show called Dirty Jobs. I was trying to find our segment but can only find the entire show, must have been pre-youtube. It is in the Bat Guano Scavenger episode.
Even though I was a manager, I did almost every job in that plant at one time or the other. I’d still be there if the plant hadn’t closed down.
Heh. The summer I was 12 I worked at a local amusement park outside of Oklahoma City called Frontier City. I sat in a kiosk from 10AM to 10 PM selling soda, popcorn, and snow cones. My boss wouldn’t let me bring a book so slow periods were mind numbingly boring. However, he did let me have a little AM radio. God, I got to know the Top 40 line up for 1969 intimately. Even now when I hear “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies (gak), it takes me right back to the smell of popcorn and snow cone syrup.
Ha, I worked for RGIS too! My ex-husband was a team leader or something and our house was chock freakin’ full of bags and scanners and tags. It was a pretty crappy job for him but fortunately all I did for them was some “secret shopper” things.
Back when I worked for McDonald’s, my brother and I took a day off to deliver phone books. We worked our little asses to the bone that day, and made almost as much as if we’d gone in to flip burgers. 
That is the coolest thing ever.
I had that same job! I had to drive into really sketchy areas late at night and then you had to go into their house and use their phone to call the office to find out your next stop. I remember one stop in a really bad area… it was in a trailer park of the sort where there are cars on blocks everywhere you look and all that. They had “beware of dog” signs up because of their rottweilers. The guys looked like bikers and when I went in to use their phone I asked them what happened to their clock (it was broken) and the guy said his buddy got drunk and shot it. Yeah. That kind of neighborhood. Anyway, when I got the next address the guy looked at it and said to me “whoa, that’s a bad neighborhood. Do you want to take one of the dogs with you?” It was like 10pm by the time I got to the next house and nobody ever answered the door, so I got out of there as fast as I could.
One bonus of the job: those portrait package certificates just needed my signature on them to be valid. I admit several of my friends got free portraits taken at Olan Mills courtesy of me. Hey, I was 18 and they just gave me a totally uninventoried stack of the certificates… I admit it was bad.
Right after college I took a job selling art that I found in the newspaper. I figured that I could sell art, right? Wrong. This job involved driving to the warehouse where you’d be confronted with people who seemed to have been snorting meth off of the cover of a copy of How To Win Friends and Influence People all morning. They’d give you this huge pep talk about how you were going to make enough money to buy a Ferrari and how you have to be determined to make money, and then they’d load your car up with shitty Successories type framed prints and send you on your merry way to walk into random offices and try and sell them to people for $20.
The first day I went with a dude who actually managed to sell out within a few hours. The second day I honestly tried for 8 hours and managed to sell three of them, for which I got a total of $30 in cash. I told them I wasn’t coming back after that.
I have had to take a couple-different types of sales jobs, and hated them so much I have left after a day or three even though I couldn’t afford to. Uck.
I have cleaned a month’s accumulation of fish guts from underneath a gutting machine, and that’s the most disgusting PART of any job I have ever had, but sales is worse. Far, far worse.
ETA: Also, I worked in a physical rehab hospital for about 3 years, and dealt with all the attendant poop-jobs that come with that kind of thing.
Still better than sales.
Go Broncos! 
Ugh, that kind of rings a bell now that you mention it. Only difference was that I was actually scheduled for an “interview”, which turned out to be some low-rent Tony Robbins jackass in a warehouse who promptly piled me and two other oblivious teenagers into his car and absconded with us for an entire day. He “briefed” us during the ride and then shoved us out to cold-call in some crappy section of Springfield, MA. WTF? :eek:
:mad:
I remember being so confused and pissed off. Obviously, none of the kids involved had any idea of what to expect from a job interview so we didn’t object. Also, we’d risk being stranded miles from home we did. Needless to say, once I got out of that car back at their headquarters, I never looked or went back.
In 1978, I ran the tongue saw at a slaughter house…
Food service. It doesn’t really matter which company, for me, all food service sucks.
Working for a temp agency back in '94 in Bath a nasty stomach bug broke out at the local hospital. Unfortunatly it killed several people and had quite a few of the medical staff out of action. One of the remediation efforts was to draft in some temps to go around all the hospital toilets and the doctors residences and clean the bathroom and toilet with bleach every few hours. My friends got drafted to the hospital toilets and were given charge of a giant steam cleaning device, I and others were sent off with a pair of rubber gloves, a cloth and a bottle of bleach to regularly wipe down the residences toilets (these were regular houses scattered around town rented by the hospital). On two occasions I was interrupted from my scrubbing by a doctor bursting into teh bathroom, dropping their pants and then they proceeded to jet away on the can. Being a UK house bathroom there wasn’t much room to get out the way, and time appeared to be of the essence for the affected doctors so I was left standing in the bathroom as well. Not much could be said other than, “better out than in”. Thankfully they were not in a conversational mood and just staggered back to their rooms leaving me to the clean up. Admitedly my initial reaction was “Arsehole, they could have at least waited to let me get out of here and do some preliminary clean down themselves.”
Fast forward 2 days and all was forgiven as I was in the same state. It was one of those stomach bugs that gives you about 3 seconds before mr anal sphincter adopts a used car salesman persona and decides everything must go NOW NOW NOW. If you drink a glass of orange juice and 10 minutes later the bathroom smells of freshly squeezed orange juice, well frankly, that just isn’t right, and it certainly wasn’t worth the 2.75UKP/hr wages.
Working at a wild west town should’ve been so, so much better…
When I got hired on, I was supposed to work the nickelodeon movie theater they had there for tour groups. So far, so good. Summer work in the A/C. What I didn’t know going in was that the owners (a family) of the ‘town’ were at constant war with each other, and all workers were pawns; nothing more.
So, I’m given a script to read to the tour groups, talking about the history of film and the like. When it’s done, I run to the back of the theater and turn on the projector, show 'em a short, then hustle 'em out of the place. Then I rewind the film, re-thread it (the owners REFUSED to use any video system. Just a junky old projector.) and go along with the next group.
Problem here? Several. One, the script I have. Family member ‘A’ wrote it, and thinks it’s oscar-worthy material (it wasn’t.) Family member ‘B’ thinks it’s boring, and wants me to ‘spice it up’ a bit. So I do. Family member ‘A’ comes down on me like a house of bricks and insists I read his script and nothing else.
Second problem? I’m supposed to run the projector, rewind and thread it, and give the speech. Difficulty became higher when it became obvious that the tour groups were being rushed in as quickly as possible. Time to rewind / rethread? No! I should be giving the speech says ‘A’. I should be rewinding and re-threading the film says ‘B’. I cannot have an assistant says them both. The person they had do my job when I was sick had a nervous breakdown during her shift. Fun, huh?
So… I learn about the ‘pawn’ nature of it all as I hear that each ‘section’ of the town is going through something similar. Each area is being told conflicting, impossible orders from various family members. If anyone speaks out, they’re fired. If you -don’t- speak out, they’ll realize you’re desperate and pile more work on you.
…So I got moved from the nickelodeon. And called incompetent with it (by ‘B’). Moved to the saloon.
Saloon wasn’t -so- bad. I served drinks to folks, chatted, swept the place up. It had A/C as well, and was something of a sucker trap due to the hot weather and overpriced beer.
Until the pawn-nature snuck in again. Now we have family member ‘C’. ‘C’ decides that she wants to show that the saloon, a favorite of ‘A’, isn’t worth keeping open. So, on the hottest day of the year, she puts out free coolers of bottled water all over the place. Then cites that, surprise, the saloon made very little money that day. The next day, she rags on -me- for not being ‘friendly’ enough to the customers. I point out the obvious- people will take free water over expensive beer any day. She literally storms off in a huff. I am never scheduled for another hour in the place.
Orderly at a state run mental facility. The staff treated the patients like crap, the patients treated the staff like crap and managment treated everyone like crap. The patients were suppose to be there for treatment, for many of them they were being warehoused till other treatment options became available. As the new guy, my job was cleaning up the crap, piss, vomit and other surprises the patients left behind. I lasted 3 days. Couldn’t get myself to go through the gate on day 4. Turned in my badge and went home.
I can’t decide which was worse. You tell me:
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Nurses’ Aide in a nursing home - Feeding people with dementia, cleaning bedpans, wiping butts, giving baths, changing poopy sheets (with a patient in the bed), changing dressings, emptying catheter bags, lifting big heavy men out of bed or chairs and putting them into bed or a chair (I’m 5’ 2" and 110 lbs. but I can get a 6’ 90-year-old farmer with Alzheimers to sit down to pee. :D) It was difficult physical labor and all the messy nasty jobs fall to the aides. I couldn’t get the smell of poop out of my fingernails for an entire summer, despite scrubbing out with alcohol X3 after every single shift. Bleargh.
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I worked in a steel muffler factory from 11 pm to 11 am Friday and Saturday nights. Had to stand next to a 2000º oven and inspect tiny little steel mufflers as they came out, to ensure the braize melted properly. Long hours, mindnumbingly boring work, low pay. I lasted all of 3 weekends before I bailed.
Two worst, both in summer breaks during college:
Meat Packing plant (large frozen patty company outside Cincinnati): Unloaded 60 pound boxes of frozen beef from the trucks, stacking pallets, and then sampling. Sampling meant taking one box off every pallet, going into the grinding room and drilling 5 holes in each box of beef, collecting the scraps in a large bag to be sampled for fat content. Then later in the day, I would usually help load up the big grinder.
Telephone Books: I proofread telephone books. These weren’t your regular yellow pages, these were more the business oriented type yellow pages that went to other businesses. You’d get a section, and had to check every entry with previous entries, check for real addresses/phone numbers, that sort of thing. Eight hours a day. Just mind-numbing in its boredom.
Subway sandwich artist. It actually wouldn’t have been that bad a job if I hadn’t been working at the busiest location in the state. We constantly had lines out the door, we were always out of stuff (I remember the night we ran out of BREAD), and people kept quitting left and right. Not to mention I could never leave my shift on time because every time I thought the line had died down, I’d look out from the back room and see that there was yet another line.
I got so stressed out that I had to force myself to eat, and eventually I stopped even that. I thought I was getting by, because my energy level was still fairly okay–but then I started losing weight. I got down to 125 pounds, which is okay for my height, but I didn’t want the trend to continue. So I quit, and never looked back.
Another corn pollenator here. The work itself I didn’t mind that much, despite being short enough to have real trouble reaching the tassels. Unfortunately for me, I’m allergic to corn pollen. Hives covered my body, my sinuses flooded. Somehow, I stuck it out the three weeks.