So now, here is a piece I write in wonderment (I think I just made up a word). After being put to the task of following my dog around and waiting until she did her business so I could look through it and find a piece of a necklace she had swallowed a few days ago, I put this at my number #1 most hated job, but I’m sure plenty of the Dopers around here have had worse.
Yes, fellow Dopers. It’s time to take a bumpy and painful trip down memory lane and tell a short story about your most hated job.
How about most hated tasks from a job?
Worked in a correction center, these were the worst things I’ve had to do (in no particular order)
Request a urine specimin from clients who were late or appeared to be under the influence. There was an element of danger about this, since if they were truely f***** up, they’d be upset/worried about being caught - there were more than a few times I was worried about my safety (although the only times I got hit weren’t about this)
Taking the urine specimins - female clients, I had to observe them peeing into the cup, pouring it into the container and then take it from them. yeck. It got pretty intense, too, as the years went by and we got more sophisticated about getting the actual specimins (I won’t go into how they scammed it).
3.Packing up and inventorying their property if they were arrested, ran off or whatever. I had to list all pieces of property. Which included, say, the box full of extremely dirty clothing. I had to reach into every pocket to make sure there wasn’t something in there as well. Really, very disgusting.
I don’t have to do any of that now.
I used to be a janitor in my high school days, and I had to clean the toilets and urinals. Sometimes the considerate kids would leave little presents for me to pick up, which I won’t mention further. Plus, I had to spray the mirrors with a solution of (I think) 60% ammonia, making my eyes water and my lungs cough spastically. To this day my sense of smell isn’t what it used to be, thanks to that ammonia. And I got all of $3.35 an hour for this job!
Back when I was younger times were hard and I took a job as a (I hate to even say it) telemarketer. But this was no ordinary telemarketing job. No, we didn’t call up and disturb people at dinner, we called businesses only. Sighs. Not just any random place either, I had to call Adult Video stores and attempt to sell them porn. They also ‘encouraged’ us to take videos home and watch them so we could discuss them with prospective buyers. I think I lasted the two-week trial period, but I wasn’t able to sell anything so they let me go. I was never so happy to be fired before.
My worst job with out a doubt was working at a fast-food/coffee place. There were only a few guys that worked there, so we got the dirty work like baking, dishes, garbage. They paid us next to nothing. But since I had no car and it was the most steady work around, I got stuck working there for about 6 months until I could afford a car and get out of there. The worst part is they made you wear a beret. Ugh.
I worked as a janitor at a hot-tar roofing outfit. I spent 6+ hours a night on my hands and knees scrubbing little dollops of tar off the linoleum in the locker room and lunch room with Varsol. It was a real treat driving home at 2 AM, half baked on Varsol fumes. I did this for 1 summer (4 months) to save money for another year of University tuition. Hardest $3000 I ever earned.
Department store. I think everyone should be required to work in a retail store for three months of their lives, and realize how much it sucks, and how they should stop being mean to people who do work retail jobs. If, for example, Mercutio ever worked reatil, he would not have caused this scene at Best Buy.
If I used smileys, I’d put one here.
I played the drums at a hoochie koochie bar in Bostons combat zone to pay my way through college. I tried to study by reading my books while playing, trust me, you get tired of the view. I had to be careful while reading not to miss a “bump and grind” and throw in some drum beats and cymbal crashes to go with the move. If you missed a “bump and grind” or a “thrust” the dancer wouldn’t cut you in on her tips. The place had “hostesses” going around and taking men to the unlighted back booths for some “conversation”. The dancers snorted coke and shot up in the dressing room, most turned tricks before and after work. The guy that ran the place, Vinnie, told us that if we crossed him we would be lobster bait.
This was my worst job.
Telemarketer. Sort of.
As a warning to any college students in the Boston area, do not apply for a “marketing internship” with WZLX radio, unless you can actually get course credit for it. I applied thinking that I would be working on their summer promotion campaigns. Instead, I had to call random people at their homes during dinner and ask them questions about their radio listening habits (nothing to sell, though). All the while working under a jerk programming manager who never referred to me as anything but “Hahvud boy” (“Hahvud boy, go make so copies.”) I quit one week later after having to listen to DJ/prima donna Lisa Traxler throw a tantrum in my face.
This, however, has not made me feel any great sympathy for telemarketers. I know it’s a shitty job, guys, but once I say “no, thank you,” the conversation is over. Good-bye.
Retail workers, though, get my full support. I’ve been there, too, and it’s no fun.
–sublight.
Hmmm without a doubt working at a nursing home was by far the worst job I’ve ever had (it even beats the job I had as a MIG welder where I caught on fire). I didn’t even really work with the patients. All I did was cook the food bring it out to them and clean up after them. The fact that there was urine and feces on the floor sometimes didn’t help. Needless to say there was a management change sometime after I left. I heard they cleaned it up a bit. I still shudder whenever anyone mentions nursing homes.
some copies. Sigh. :rolleyes:
–sublight.
Wring, did you get the “I have to take my tampon out” story ,too?
1. Detassling corn You Midwesterners know what I’m talking about. Man, it sucked. Total child labor, man.
2. Pet Store employee The owners could not have cared much less about their “product” (that’s what the animals were called)…if the animal was sick or unattractive (losing hair, injuries, etc), it was pulled from the floor and left to the abyss of the back room…where it was, essentially, left to die. Puppies and kittens were left in travel kennels for–and I’m not exaggerating–weeks, yipping and mewing pathetically, awaiting either healing or…if their condition was chronic…a return to the puppy/kitten mill, where they would most certainly be destroyed. I took a sheltie pup out of one such kennel (she has collie nose, an unattractive but harmless condition where she loses patches of fur around her eyes and nose). She was about to be returned to her “breeder.” Instead, she’s my dad’s companion and a completely happy five-year-old dog. 
Yes, in addition to the “I just had sex, so it’ll be full of cum”; “I have to have a BM, too”; “I always pee green”; “how did that get in there?” (referring to the string that was floating); “what was that?” (referring to the bottle that dropped into the toilet and made a loud KERTHUMP!; the “I only pee once a day and you just missed it”; and, of course, the woman’s who’s test came back positive for alcohol at 1%. Not “point one”, one. She told the (male) hearing examiner it was 'cause she was on her period (he apparently believed that blood somehow can change into alcohol), asked for more information, I wrote my rendition of “taking urine drops from females, 101”; but at the next hearing the hearing examiner was female and she rolled her eyes and said “puh-leeze”, found the client guilty and moved on.
Like I’ve said “ya can’t pay me enough to do it again.”
Well, this sorta pales, but…
I worked as a leasing agent for an apartment community one summer. I also dealt with residents. It reduced my rent (the company managed my complex, too) in addition to regular pay. . Generally speaking, it wasn’t such a bad job to have. However, a few things made it suck.
** One of the maintenance guys was nuts. Incompetent, lazy, moody, paranoid. He was always looking for ways to make me look bad as a preemptive strike. He kept getting in trouble for incompetence (nothing to do with me), and towards the end I was wondering if he’d come in with a gun sometime and kill me. Seriously.
** The accounting manager for the company was a witch. They never gave me any training on the software for managing the rental payments, etc. They didn’t want leasing agents (whom they assumed were too damned dumb) to TOUCH the computers. However, my boss was lazy and didn’t want to come in and close out the books each night, so she gave me some half-assed training on how to do it. Whenever there was an error or irregularity, the accounting manager come on site would make loud comments (designed for me to overhear) about how leasing agents always ruin everything.
** The company had some strict policies on late fees, etc. Also a policy that air conditioning malfunctions did not constitute an emergency. So if your A/C went out on the weekend, you had to wait until Monday. Or, you could scream at me (the leasing agent) on Saturday. They made us relay that policy to the residents when problems came up, but gave us no support or backup for enforcing it. (BTW, this makes me have new sympathy for gate agents and flight attendants of airlines, who are often in the same boat on policies). It was awful, and I was nearly attacked by an irate resident on time.
** We were a two-person office at our site, so any day I wanted off, the manager had to come in. She was counting days to retirement and didn’t want to come in. Ever. I never got time off.
** One time I had a great lead on a rental. However, the manager reviewed her app and asked me not to follow up with her because “she wouldn’t fit in well in their community.” The fact that she was black and had two teenage boys was why. In our town, you can’t discriminate on the basis of family status (not to mention race). I wanted to report it but I needed the job.
At this job I understood, for once, the attraction of unionizing. They ate up employees and spat them out without a second thought. I was in grad school and had worked in professional, salaried positions before, so I knew how sucky they were treating everyone. UGH! I was so happy to leave that horrible place.
Both of my worst jobs have to do with tobacco.
Harvesting it in the field is awful. But so is the cigarette factory. My Mom used to tell us as we started the second acre with hoes in hand, “Study in school so you don’t have to do this all your life.” She was right. We did study and we don’t have to hoe tobacco fields anymore.
Did any of your worst jobs teach you some valuable lessons?
warning- definitely not for the weak
originally posted by wring
The gross part was, it wasn’t really a tampon (and it tested positive anyway).
I had a summer job cleaning tractor trailers. To get the road grime off of the sides, we used a high pressure hose, which was fed from a barrel of highly acidic liquid.
When I got home from work at the end of the day, I had holes in my shirt from the back-splash.
Didn’t stick with that job very long…
Man, I know people that would have killed for that job.
You wouldn’t have to ask me twice! 
as long as they were the -ahem- “right gender” that is
Setting Trap - This was a job I had as a teenager at a shooting club. My job was to sit in a concrete bunker partially buried in the earth in front of a row of surly types holding shotguns. I would place clay pigeons on a machine with a metal arm which hurled the pigeons violently when the shooter called “Pull.” It was about 120 degrees in the bunker during the summer, and if I had to urinate, it was into a glass jug as fast as possible between rounds. We trap setters had our fun though. By cutting portions of the rings on the clay pigeons off with a knife, you could cause them to fly wildly instead of in a straight line. Also, during nightime shoots, we would occasionally scrape all the paint of the bird so that it would fly out and then quickly disappear into the night sky. We could tell when we pissed the shooters off though, as they would shoot at the bunker, and we could hear the shot bouncing off the concrete.
Washing dishes in Yosemite Lodge - The worst job ever. Go into work at 3:00 in the afternoon and wash dishes from the cafeteria and two restaurants. About ten in the evening, all the pots from the cooklines would come in. I’d get off about three in the morning, covered in stinky gunk and soaking wet, and head back to my tent cabin in search of a shower. It was nice living in Yosemite though.