What was the worst job you ever had?

[rasczak]

my worst job also happened to be one of my best jobs. the physical side of things was a nightmare to say the least, but being out in the Bering Sea was one of the most spectacular things I could have ever done. i worked 12 to 15 hours a day, basically getting 6 hours on, 6 hours off with a kick shift where we had 3 hours to sleep and worked 9 hours straight on a trawler fishing for pollock and longlining for cod. the scenery though was awesome. near the north pole, i've seen walruses sitting on icebergs and some weird ass fish. waking up in the morning looking over the horizon and seeing the sunlight peering over the water was a sight to see. the smell though, was horrendous and the living arrangements for my wife (thenGF) and I we're horrid, having to share a bunk with person from a different shift. all the testosterone got out of hand at times and my wife was harrassed quite a bit (one of four females on board out of 200 ppl total.) luckliy there was great people there too.

as a side, it was also kinda cold.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

Working diary in walmart granted only did it for 3 weeks and it's not really awful. I guess ripping up a few hundred square feet of grass and laying out a few tons of stone was the worst, but that was for family.

 

[rudder]

Delivering furniture. Not the crap stuff you buy at rooms-to-go... but the high quality stuff like henkel harris. Crap was heavy... but I was young and it made me buff.

The actual worst part of the job was the clientele... lot of overpaid government workers who would bitch about walking on their grass.

 

[Kyle]

Standing at a conveyor belt sorting through cherries and picking out the bad ones for 8+ hours/day (depended on how many cherries were picked that day- could be 10+hrs, we had no way of knowing...)

 

[Farang]

As an assistant to an electrical estimator at a small contractor. Low pay, high stress, and no sense of accomplishment. This was at the height of the recession so I knew all the work I was putting into bids was likely for nothing, competing against so many other contractors. The work itself wasn't creating anything, just pricing other people's creations. I felt like a middle man, not really contributing anything.

Then there was the environment itself. Some house in the middle of nowhere, 2-3 other people, and an owner who was never around and didn't care because he was selling the business.

Taught me a lot about what kind of work I enjoy (or rather do not enjoy), though.

 

[brblx]

current job.

never, ever, ever work for hertz.

ever.

 

[geno]

Circuit City. 12 hour shifts on the most dead day of the week were torture. Not to mention the genius who was scheduling us would have you work until 10pm one night and have you in for another 10 hour shift at 8:00 the next morning. Great, I love going home with just enough time to get to sleep, wake up and do it all over again. I also hated being pressured to pressure customers to buy gold-plated USB cables, ugh. I have no problem selling something I believe in, but I'm not a good liar so I was never good at justifying the gold plated crap they wanted me to push.

 

[KeithTalent]

Worked at Wendy's for a week in High School. D:

Fortunately I found a job at a real restaurant a few days after I joined Wendy's and had no qualms ditching Mr. Wendy to go to the other job.

KT

 

[dr150]

Telephone Bill Collector

I think I lasted 2 weeks at most.

 

[daw123]

Two jobs spring to mind. Both of them were temp. summer jobs during University:

1. Cleaning and sorting supermarket pallets. After handling a few wet pallets, your gloves and clothes are wet. You then became cold because the warehouse wasn't heated. God, I hated that f*cking job.

2. Emptying an old railway signalling office. The office didn't have a lift and it wasn't near a road, so all the fixtures / fittings had to be man-handled to the removal truck.

 

[FoBoT]

one time in college i went to the state govt. job office to look for work
they sent me to a farm to shovel horse shit out of a barn

i only lasted one hour

the old guy was pissed and paid me with a check , like $4 or whatever min. wage was back in 1985

 

[wheresmybacon]

Assistant manager at a restaurant. I was just out of college and had no experience. An acquaintance got me the job, and the crew was a disaster. One chick was addicted to heroin, and it was a coin flip on whether anyone would show up for work or not. Actually the heroin addict was one of the best employees; she’d come to work, but would use in the bathroom.

One day the manager – who was training me – just stopped showing up, then the next day the dishwasher was AWOL. I washed dishes for 13 hours that day, then promptly quit the next morning.

This experience cured me of any desire to ever be involved in food service in any capacity ever again.

 

[Imp]

Office temp doing data entry to update a few thousand entries for the invitation list of the company's Christmas party. They didn't even invite me to it, or acknowledge jackshit. My supervisor was awesome though, treated me pretty well and we got along. Everyone else was a bunch of engineers/technicians with sticks slightly up their ass. But the job isn't what made it the worst, it was the fact that they were doing renovations on the 2 floors below me. From the start, I had to endure the contractors' smoking habits all day long during the winter (closed windows), then came the floor wax fumes and the paint fumes. I bitched and complained to my supervisor, she forwarded it to the "health & safety" coordinator, then one of the partners. Ya, nothing.

 

[chitwood]

for 4 days I worked at an ice packing factory, I stood there for 9 hours and took bags of ice off a conveyor belt and built pallets with them. The work was boring and awful enough, didn't matter what shoes you wore, by the end of the shift your shoes socks and feet were completely soaked and ice cold. Final straw was the 4th day, the idiot driving the forklift goes to pick up one of the pallets, picks it up totally crooked and half off the lift, of course it topples over and spills 80 bags of ice all over the warehouse floor... and everyone blamed me for building the pallet crooked. Bastards

 

[gimmewhitecastles]

tech support for credit card machines. usually tech support is bad enough but for credit card machines is too embarrasing to even brag about.

*sticks head back into shell...

 

[mattpegher]

Worked my way through undergrad. First year at pizza hut, doing dishes, and cleaning then moving on to short order cook. Low pay, and you have to hustle all day long.
Then had summer stint as assistant to master carpenter, installing custom kitchens. Learned a lot, not bad at all. Then did Roofing for a few weeks, heavy, hot, sweaty, and relatively dirty, but the pay was better.
Then I did the dirtiest, physically hardest job I ever had. Asbestos Abatement. It payed well, especially union jobs. However, you were always hot, covered in dirt, wearing a respirator and paper jumpsuit, crawling above drop ceilings, into crawl spaces, down holes removing dangerous material. Had to be certified by the state. Worst episode was when we had to remove pipe covering off of active steam pipes in a tunnel under the street. 150 deg F, when you got the insulation off it seem to get even hotter. Could only work for 15 minutes in the hole before switching, and spending 30 min out, 3 teams. Drank 6 litres of water that day and didn't have to pee once.

 

[CraigRT]

Call Centre. Pressure sales. Garbage.. Have to have piss poor morals to be good @ that job.

I also hate my current job, but it pays a lot more than the call centre did!

 

[mcvickj]

Spent one summer working as part of a cleaning crew for a minor league baseball team. Probably the worst job was trying to wrangle a high pressure fire hose to clean the aluminum bleachers.

One night we were moving these large bins of used cooking grease with a golf cart & trailer. Misjudged the clearance when driving down this narrow walkway and one of the trailer wheels caught the railing. Was covered in used grease for the shift with no change of clothes.

 

[Train]

When I was twelve working as a farm hand for $3.10 an hour.

I think I've got you beat, when I was 12 (or about that age) I worked a summer at my Uncle's poultry farm for only $2.00 Might have been $2.15, not sure.

They had kids collect the eggs from these coups that had like a million chickens each. The adults would never do it, it was way too disgusting.

Despite jet engine strength ventilation, the place stunk like you wouldnt believe. You'd have to go 5 miles from the farm to escape the flies that spawned in the mountains of chicken crap that piled up every day. Took about 4 hours in the morning to collect, then after lunch another 3 to go through again.

 

[shortylickens]

Call Centre. Pressure sales. Garbage.. Have to have piss poor morals to be good @ that job.

I also hate my current job, but it pays a lot more than the call centre did!

I would hate telemarketing. Indignity beyond belief. Thats why I no longer shit on them when they call me. I used to get mad, then I realized I get called once a month, they have to make dozens if not hundreds of calls a day.

Also, my mom worked in the complaint department at Amway. She recieved at least a dozen threatening, nasty, evil calls every day. And then a hundred more a day were just normal miserable.

 

[CraigRT]

I would hate telemarketing. Indignity beyond belief. Thats why I no longer shit on them when they call me. I used to get mad, then I realized I get called once a month, they have to make dozens if not hundreds of calls a day.

Also, my mom worked in the complaint department at Amway. She recieved at least a dozen threatening, nasty, evil calls every day. And then a hundred more a day were just normal miserable.

It sucked.... I want to say its' worse than most jobs, but maybe not. It really depends on someone's respect for others. I have some of that, and its hard to argue with people as to why they should stay on the phone with you. I actually didn't get fired because I made better sales than a lot of the training group I was in, but I ended up just kinda going home one day and never going back. I hated that job. I also wasn't allowed to take a day off, which I filled out paperwork for a week in advance (my first day off there), because I was on a "performance improvement plan" due to low sales (think late 2008/early 2009 economy)

That along with coming in at exactly 8:30 and being labelled late, was the last straw.

I argued with the sales director that if he wanted me there before 8:30, he should make the start time before 8:30.

I don't miss that job at all (aside from some great folks sadly who should not be doing such a job)

 

[mattpegher]

Just ask any nurse for her worst, poop or puke story. You have no Idea how bad, bad can get.

I will say the smell of mellena (digested bloody poop) is the worst.

 

[ahenkel]

having sex with Oprah on the 50 yard line at the super bowl.

 

[dainthomas]

Drive-in theater in high school. In the morning I had to pick up all the garbage people dumped out of their cars the night before. I wish bee-filled soda cups were the worst thing I had to deal with. Barf.

 

[KMFJD]

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