Aluminum foundry. Hot a fucking all hell, doubly so in the summer. Ruined clothes, burns, and damn horrible stink from sand cores and burned lubricants that penetrated clothes and followed me home. Oh yes…oily residue on boots and pants that transferred to anything you walk or sit on. I suppose it was dangerous, but nobody died there that i know of.
Like a few people here, the industrial size dishwasher.
I was on the extraction end, as the dishes moved through the machine on a conveyor I had to stand at the outlet among clouds of steam and retrieve the scalding hot plates, containers and utensils and stack them on the appropriate trolley.
The heavy rubber gloves and apron helped but you still ended up with small spatter burns.
This was in the basement of a hospital, in summer, in Australia.
No fans or AC, at best they would leave the delivery doors open to let a slight breeze blow through the place on the rare occasion the wind was right.
The people who worked there were a pack of assholes who treated temp or holiday workers like crap.
Lasted two and a half days. Went to lunch on the third day and just kept walking.
I spent my senior year of high school working in a place that made printed circuit boards, the old fashioned way. Nothing in that place was automated, except perhaps for the pantograph-style quad drills that two tough-as-nails middle-aged ladies used to manually drill the holes in stacks of boards.
The bad parts: circuit boards are made of Fiberglas, and they use nasty chemicals on the plating line.
I worked at a big bench router, trimming the edges of hundreds of boards, one by one. We all brought portable tape players to listen to music through earbuds stuffed in our earmuffs—even though I kept mine in a ziplock bag, I managed to kill a fresh Walkman every few weeks, from the dust. I wonder what that did to my lungs.
There is no way to get used to the annoying itch of Fiberglas. The guys told me to wash up with dish detergent, but that barely helped.
And there still was the issue of all of those pleasant chemicals used in the plating process. The boss must have felt bad about exposing a mere child to such things because he never put me back there.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, The Worst Job I Ever Had. Audio only, but not remotely SFW.
Around 1997, I worked for a pager company—remember when the pagers that could receive text messages were all the rage? I was the operator who answered the phone and typed in the messages. We were perennially short staffed, and management was awful, doing whatever they could to prevent people from ever getting a break or lunch.
And the customers were abominable as well. Everyone thought they were first person ever to think how ‘funny’ it would be to make the operator type something nonsensical or objectionable, but we weren’t allowed to type obscene language, which inevitably resulted in the customer cursing me out instead.
By far the two most common messages I had to type every day though were :“Where you at?”, and “Bring home milk.” Rarely did we get anything even remotely interesting.
I suppose if management hadn’t been so awful, the job wouldn’t have been worse than any other data entry job, but few people lasted more than a few weeks there.
:eek: :eek: :eek:
How heavily did they have to sedate the horses beforehand? 
The dozens of horses I’ve worked with over the years didn’t mind it, as long as you had small hands and the water was warm.
Working in an old fashioned electroplating plant was the worst. Nothing was automated. It was hot and humid from the tanks, the air was full of chemical fumes, and we were wearing rubber aprons, gloves, and boots. The racks of parts weighed about 10 pounds each and we were expected to handle them two at a time (one in each hand). We moved dozens of them through the tanks daily. There were frequent electrical arcs when moving racks. There was the occasional hydrogen flare up. Acid splashes were frequent. Acid would get down inside your gloves or boots and bite at you all day. In the evening, I would get home and hack up pieces of my lungs. I joined the Army because it was a much easier and safer job.
Same here, except it was for a nickel a bale. If the barn was close to the field, we could do 1,000 bales in a day. A more typical day was 600-700 bales. I still remember, 35 years later, the stacking pattern for stacking 50 bales on a pickup truck bed.
We had a couple of regular customers that stored hay in old abandoned houses. I hated those. You had to back the truck up to a window, one person threw the bales through the window, and the other picked them up and walked with them into the back rooms. No air circulating, plenty of dust.
Plumbing (new home construction). My summers as a junior and senior in high-school I worked putting in water, waste, and gas lines for minimum wage. It was difficult work, and I had to be constantly on the alert for inspectors, because I was doing the work of a master plumber. The guy I worked with was always rushing me so that we could quit early and head for the bar (where I got served!).
You obviously don’t have strange enough friends.
Working as an EMT had the highest highs and the lowest lows. I’m glad for the experience, but I took the first opportunity out of there and never looked back.
Who needs strange ? Two words : milkmaid handjob. Oh yes.
Several weeks in the summer of my sixteenth year were spent as general labor on a egg-producing poultry farm. Up before dawn, gathering eggs from the battery cage system, loading trucks, assisting deliveries, shoveling poultry litter (excreta/feathers/parts of dead birds/broken and rotting eggs), general labor such as painting, hauling garbage, mowing grass, cleaning up carcasses of birds killed by raccoons, possums, foxes, etc, using pellet guns to try to thin out the veritable plague of rats, processing the eggs every other night which took until well after dark, the seasonal moving of the birds by hand from one staged hen house to another… Ball-breaking work and crappy pay. Truly sucked. It did render me mostly impervious to disgusting things however, which has served me well in life…
But…did they have large talons?
Nastiest was a summer job with the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County (IL). Primary duty was fence removal of ancient (for suburban Chicago) barbed wire fencing from Forest Preserve properties. Hot, grimy, and every day was a new rusty cut waiting for tetanus. On the odd days we’d help the river crew out by fishing logs, weeds, basketballs, diapers, etc out of the DuPage River that ran through the county. In leaky waders and filthy river water.
Not so nasty, but funny/sad: A temp job after college in Colorado Springs, taking ID pics for all the brand new Air Force Academy cadets on their first day in the Academy. My station was the immediate next stop on the cadet assembly line after the shearing station. Every cadet to a person came to my station with a horrified look on their face as they were rubbing their newly-shorn scalps. It was all me and my fellow temps could do to not laugh throughout the day.
A urologist in a city where I used to live prescribed PRP syringes, which are for impotence…and must be injected directly into the penis. With a needle. :eek: We had a pharmacist, a married woman in her late 30s who was kind of strange (I won’t go into why) and she could not dispense them because she would invariably crack up laughing in front of these men who felt bad enough as it was. However, it never bothered me.
Oh, and none of the men I ever encountered who used this looked anything like the men in the Viagra or Cialis ads. Think along the lines of a reverse mortgage ad. 
I’ll take the liberty of posting four worst-tacular jobs:
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Sorting cherries during my teenage summers. We were housed in a giant tin shack, no air-conditioning, backless stools. I had to run my hands over the cherries as they came down the conveyor and pick out stones, dead birds, quick and dead caterpillars, and, once, a snake cut in half.
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Busgirl at Grand Canyon National Park: the kitchen and its accoutrement were a flight down from the restaurant and I had to schlep huge loads of dishes up and down 7,645 times in a shift.
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Logistics manager at a corporate events company. The two owner-operators were alcoholics and frequently had besotted, screaming, profanity-laden fights in the very small office space. Charming!
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Clearing brush off trails for the National Forestry in a rattlesnake infested area. It was like chain-gang work without the chains.
This one just sticks in my head as the worst …worse than my summer job of cleaning out the dairy and deli trash compactors in the local supermarket
In my 30’s I did custodial work at a prestigious college in Saratoga Springs, NY. I cleaned the dining hall, specifically the bathrooms. It appeared that every co-ed used the 2 finger weight loss program, since nearly every stall and toilet were caked with vomit, after every meal.