Were they #1 in the #2 business? 
As for the animal jobs, Mike Rowe’s done 'em all on “Dirty Jobs”.
Mike Rowe did everything on Dirty Jobs - which is probably why the new episodes ended. They just ran out of jobs.
(But I always regret we didn’t get to see the “whale autopsy technician” segment listed in the opening credits of the show. If memory serves me right, it seems that it was indeed filmed as part of the pilot but never aired.)
I hope he washed his hands first.
Probably the worst part was seeing Krustylu Studios next door and not being able to go.
Cafeteria worker at a college dorm. A huge kitchen in a huge dorm. It was a summer job.
When I wasn’t peeling 30 dozen hard boiled eggs or chopping 10 cases of head lettuce, I ran a gigantic industrial dishwasher and stacked clean dishes for the next onslaught.
The “cake” job that everyone fought over was dishing out food on the serving line. Every time I see a chow line in a prison movie, I have flashbacks.
I’d always wanted to see that one too; shame it never made it onto the air. Even so, what a great series that was.
I can’t imagine they even scratched the surface of crappy jobs. They may have run out of ideas, or of willing companies, or of Mike’s willingness to subject himself to danger & noxious chemicals.
I also suspect the various low-life reality shows cover much the same demographic and cost far less to shoot. As they ramped up, Mike got off-ramped.
If this was meant to be funny, it’s not. if you’re serious, it’s still not.
I’ve had some awful jobs, especially during university.
The one that I hated the most was driving the delivery/pick-up truck for a TV repair shop. I was given a list of addresses to go and pick-up customers TV sets all over the city. I realized on the second day, that I wasn’t helping people but taking their TVs back to the shop where they were held for ransom until the charges for the estimate, pick-up and delivery, and the repair were paid. I quit after the second day and debated calling the police because it was almost criminal.
The worst job I ever had was cleaning out the house of an elderly cat lady who lived alone and had passed recently. The stench was unbearable just outside the front porch. We wore suits and masks and it still made your eyes water!
There were old bowls of food and saucers of old milk on almost every surface.
There was cat urine and feces scattered all over.
But the worst was that there were dozens of cats, inside and out, dead and alive… everywhere! I lost count of how many carcasses we found locked in bedrooms, or under couches or beds, in the back porch, or under the front veranda.
Apparently, she would take in stray or local cats regularly, feed them, and never let them out again.
I worked for Residence Life at my alma mater one summer. Never again.
The university rented out some of the dorms as hotel space for conferences held on-campus during the summer sessions. My job was supposed to be data entry clerk for the check-in forms, plus some part-time hotel desk work.
It was not.
To the best of my knowledge, only one of my co-workers was even remotely competent. Some of the rest of them might have been, but I wouldn’t know; they took second or even third jobs over the summer, and fucked off to work them when they were listed as being on-call and absolutely, positively NOT supposed to leave the building. I was woken up at all hours of the day and night, because I was the only one who could be reached. We were given room and board, and a small weekly stipend, as our pay. It would have been fairly pathetic had the job been what was promised, but what they actually wanted me to work, it broke down to far under minimum wage, even taking into account the inflated prices of both housing and the meal plan.
My (student) supervisor was getting married at the end of the summer and could not have given a shit less what our working conditions were, or whether anything was going to plan.
“Go through and strip the bed linens after checkout” turned into them trying to get us to do janitorial work for which we were neither trained nor qualified. I managed to avoid doing anything that OSHA would have objected to. Barely.
Our first guests were a load of Dutch kids who turned up for a television production workshop, answered “twenty-one!” in chorus when asked their age, drank heavily the entire time, took off for Las Vegas at one point, and checked back in a week later, even less sober than before. They were our favorites. While they left us about a million beer cans to clear out when they left, they were considerate enough to leave them in a giant beer fort in just one of the rooms. Quite elegantly constructed, really.
Other highlights included: orchestra prodigy camp (plus bonus entitled stage parents); a building full of 12-year-old soccer players (noisy but otherwise reasonably well-behaved); a conference full of middle-aged women quilters who quibbled over room assignments; and the absolute last straw, the Explorers.
The Explorers are an organization where law enforcement officers mentor teenagers who want to someday be law enforcement officers. They were hands-down the worst load of miscreants we had through the building the entire summer. They landed a helicopter on the soccer field right outside my window at 8am one morning. The teenagers ran rampant up and down the hallways all night long. They decided, for reasons unknown, to steal a shopping cart from the nearby supermarket, and block me into my suite by wedging it against the door. I did not learn until they were checked in and had begun their “workshop” that, contrary to university policy, the adults were allowed to keep their firearms in their rooms with them :eek: instead of having to check them in with the university PD and store them in a locker like residential students were.
We were contractually guaranteed a(n inadequate) number of days off at the beginning of the summer. My supervisor had made it clear she did not intend to give any of us any of them until I marched into her office and informed her that if she did not give me mine right now, I was going to have a very loud, very public nervous breakdown in her lobby, in front of absolutely everyone. She caved. I don’t think it was sympathy so much as the fact that, as a university, they could have gotten into enormous amounts of legal trouble if they hadn’t given me “reasonable accommodations” once I made it clear that the discrepancy between the job they promised and the job they actually wanted me to work was killing me.
Working conditions were similar in all of the other “hotel” dorms, I was told. One of the other girls with my job at the other end of campus quit with no notice after three weeks and went to stay with her parents. I would have done the same, had I anywhere else to go.
Compared to that, the year+ I spent stocking shelves overnight at a department store was bliss.
Damn, I was getting 15c a bale (NZ money so roughly 7.5c US) for that back in the early nineties.
What really sucked was when the loader would break, and I as the youngest guy on the truck, got to run round the paddock and chuck each bale up onto the truck from the ground. Especially if it was pea hay, which was at least 25% dirt. Got me pretty fit though.
During college I worked in the kitchen of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant over Christmas break, spring break, and summer break for a couple of years. Since pretty much everything they sold was fried, the kitchen was extraordinarily greasy. By the end of a shift, my clothes, shoes, hair, and pretty much everything else I had on me smelled like greasy fried chicken. If I stayed until closing, I was washing dishes. By hand. With all the grease, they used some pretty potent soap. With water spraying all over the place, I got pretty soaking wet, every single time. If I closed a lot, my hands inevitably began peeling from all the water and soap; sometimes I lost big sheets of skin from my palms. I tried wearing dish gloves, but water spraying everywhere meant that it always got into my gloves, so they didn’t help at all.
I quit after a couple of years, but for maybe four years after that, my hands remained sensitive to water/soap exposure; if I washed a significant amount of dishes by hand, they would dry/crack/peel again.
Tibby or Not Tibby, you sure those giants weren’t just aliens, observing how humans respond to nonsensical directions?
My worst job was when at university. The job was in a printing factory, taking bundles of shopping magazines and brochures and stacking them onto a pallet. The magazines had just been printed and cut so the paper was very sharp, and the physical motion meant I was bent at the back and/or knees for the full shift.
It started at 7PM and finished at 7AM, was so noisy you couldn’t speak to anyone, was as hot as hell and we only had a half hour break around 1AM for a bite to eat. Many of the other, permanent, workers were obviously speed-freaks and would start the evening smiling and gurning, and waving at each other manically. By the end they looked the worse for wear, paranoid and very unsmiley.
I’ve been lucky but Miss DrumBum worked a summer at a horse stables, which meant moving bails of hay, feeding the horses, and “mucking” out the stalls ( shoveling horseshit ). The worst task she had was cleaning the sheath of the male horses. The “sheath” as you might have guessed is the foreskin. :eek::eek:
I don’t understand what the horrible part of this is. It’s not like you had to actually do the insertion as well.
Summer job as a “trash man”. Nothing like emptying metal trash cans (no one had plastic cans in those days) into the truck in 90 degree heat all day. Especially when the homeowner puts dog poo in the can and it gets good and baked in the sun. No plastic bag or anything, just thrown in there. I can still smell it.
My worst job wasn’t as horrible as some that have been mentioned, but I think it is interesting. I was in high school at the time, in a rural area and wanted a summer job so I answered a newspaper ad for someone to milk goats at a nearby farm. I didn’t expect the job to be easy, but I loved animals and was open to learning new skills. I quit at the end of the first day.
The farmer paid something like ten cents a bucket, and I managed to collect thirteen buckets of milk. The goats hated me and kept stepping in the bucket, getting dirt, hair and feces in the milk. (And yes, those went into the vat along with the clean milk the experienced people got.) The other milkers entertained themselves by teasing me about how inept I was. It wasn’t awful, but in hindsight and adult maturity, I think they should have acted more like mentors than a hazing fraternity. It was when the farmer handed me $1.30 for my day’s pay that I quit. Minimum wage at the time was $3.25/hour. He ranted about youth of today who were unwilling to work and blah, blah, blah.
I am, however, glad that I learned how to milk something. It’s a mad skill, would make for a great party trick except my friends don’t often invite goats or cows to their parties.
Oooh, that reminds me of a fun tasker - though it wasn’t a job per se, as I wasn’t so much as paid to do it. My parents bought a country house from the laziest fuckers on planet Earth. Among the numerous items we found post-sale that just made us shake our heads in disbelief, the guy had raised horses on and off but evidently didn’t believe in cleaning out the stalls. He’d just tossed more straw on the shit, for years.
So my sister and I had to do what these stalls had stopped dreaming of : uncovering the floor again. I’m not kidding when I say there was about 50 cm’ worth of packed shit in there. In geological stratas. You had the fresh-ish apples on top, with the moldy straw. Then a layer of dry rot and *thoroughly *packed old shit, fit for building houses with (or bend shovel heads…). Down in the depths you reached a gooey, putrescent mush the stench of which I can’t even describe. Over the course of our efforts, I’m afraid some vomit was mixed in.
It was funtimes, lemme tell ya.
I worked for the sleaziest contractor in the state of Wisconsin. I did all sorts of things for them, but the worst was when a co-worker and I were sent to clean out a house that they had just purchased. Turns out, it had been liven in by a bedridden old man and his insane son. When the old man died, they shipped his son off to somewhere and the house was just as they had left it. It was the filthiest place I’ve ever seen.
The old man’s bed will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life. The sheets hadn’t been changed in years, they were safety-pinned to the mattress and had holes worn in them, along with dozens of interesting stains. The most horrifying moment, however, was when we picked up the mattress; the box spring came with it because they were stuck together!!! :eek::eek::eek:
The son’s room had a closet full of dog shit, and a dresser drawer filled with about 150 extremely cheap Rambo-type knives complete with vinyl sheaths. In the basement we found more dog shit and a stack of ~600 porn mags.
I have done road construction in 100° July heat, baled and stacked hay and straw, milked cows at 4:30 am, and hauled an entire horse barn floor’s worth of concrete by hand in wheelbarrows, but all of them pale in comparison to that fucking house.
Substitute seventh grade teacher in a really bad neighborhood. Some of the little bastards threw the textbooks out the window. I really wanted to throw them out of the window.
It’s a shame there wasn’t a stream nearby you could divert to wash it all away.
No. I actually might have gotten into that.
The worst part, though, was explaining to them face-to-face how to use them. :o I should have expanded on that part. They seemed embarrassed, so I felt embarrassed. Especially knowing I had hand made and wrapped them.