Crappiest job you ever had...

[SoCalDem]

For me it was something straight out of a Lucy show..sort of.. I worked at hallmark cards.. I am my "partner" sat facing each other as this "arm thingie with a glue bottle on the end" raised and lowered at a measured rate.. we would have to grab cards to our side and place it under the glue thingie and then attach the glitter, feathers,paper inserts..whatever to the card and pass it on ...BEFORE the glue thingie came down again...


and the sadistic PIC (person in charge) could speed up or slow down the "line" depending on the capabilities of the "team".. My partner was much faster when I first started, so I usually went home thoroughly glued..sparkled and tremendously annoyed..

ps.. sorry to any of you who bought a messed up Hallmark card back in 1969.. It was probably one I made.. although, I think a lot of mine ended up in the reject store downstairs in the Hallmark plant :)

[flamingyouth]

1. I worked in a rat-infested construction company office

Ironically, years after I left that job, they were remodeling the building and it FELL DOWN. So, you get the idea about how great they were about their construction quality (very scary).

My dad's first job (at age 15) was wrapping boxes of Kotex pads in plain brown paper. LOL - I think that has to be about the worst job ever. He was so naive, he didn't even know what they were or why they had to be covered in plain paper.:)

[onebigbadwulf]

2. Managing a painting company...oh god its the worst

Varsity student painters is the worst company on the face of the Earth.

They hire out college kids to work as managers under the promises of lots of money and great experience. Basically work us 80hrs a week under salary pay, making us find houses to paint, sell contracts, hire workers, and complete the projects.


Luckily I quit half-way through the summer. After about 400+ hours of work my take home pay was around $1000. My travel, phone, and work expenses went up to about $1500.


So for 6 months of work, sacraficed weekends, 80 hour work week summers, I lost $500 dollars. The job still haunts me to this day.

[bookfreak]

3. I worked in a rest home

Graveyard shift, just me and 24 residents from midnight till 8am. Starting at 5am I had to do the whirlwind morning routine which consisted of waking everyone up, giving sponge baths to about 8 of the residents who were unable to cleanse themselves properly and tended to become "soiled" when using the toilet, assist those who could not independently dress themselves, give all 24 people their morning meds, prepare and serve breakfast to everyone and do all of the dishes. Damn I hated that job x( .

[SoCalDem]

4. Bless you for DOING that job

O8)

I don't know HOW people do jobs like that. It's one thing to do for family, but taking care of sick people is the hardest job around.. and most undervalued.:(

[bookfreak]

45. Hear, hear

"I don't know HOW people do jobs like that. It's one thing to do for family, but taking care of sick people is the hardest job around.. and most undervalued."




Yeah...I've been working with the developmentally disabled for 17 years now. It's challenging and rather low paying work (though not entirely unrewarding). I've said many times to my co-workers, "we do work that most people don't want to do for wages most people wouldn't work for".

[franmarz]

19. Graveyard shift

Hi-I have worked the graveyard shift for about 40 years-off and on, because I consider myself a "night person" I like the quiet of it all.That doesnt mean that all was beautiful, I worked hospitals, nursing homes, clinics and private duty. They all had their rough spots, and also their humorous times. But all in all, I liked the environment of the health care setting. Crappy bosses always go with the territory, but its the good things you remember most, and the people that really did appreciate what you did for them in their time of need.

[bookfreak]

48. re; Graveyard shift

Indeed, graveyard shift isn't all too bad. I have two full-time jobs now and one of them is graveyard shift, which is good because it is nice and quiet most of the time. My boss is a real freakazoid, but fortunately she is going to be gone any time now. The only thing I have a real problem with is sleeping during the day...my body just doesn't seem to adapt no matter how many years I do it.

[R Hickey]

5. I used to spray rust-coating on cars.

We were told to smear vasoline on our faces and the rust coating would get all over us anyway, even in our hair. I lasted about a week.

[WindRavenX]

6. Burger King

Nothing beats frying french fried for 8 hours a day for 3 months.
And getting sexually harassed by creepy older co-workers...:scared:

[shawcomm]

10. That's part of the job requirement of fast food, isn't it?

"getting sexually harassed by creepy older co-workers..."

My worst was part-time work for a company that processed onions sold to Campbell's soup. Sort, clean & cut onions over and over and over. The tears actually stopped sometime after the first three weeks.

[JSJ]

7. unloaded freightcars n/t

[Bundbuster]

8. Roofing

2-handed "hod carrier" up a standard lean ladder in the hot sun. Ahh, the memories...

*edited to add another:
Interstate road construction, phase 1
a) Follow the bulldozers on initial cut to remove boulders by hand.
b) Cut, pile, and burn trees & brush, almost daily arousing and fleeing from irate wasps & hornets.
1967 pay - $1.75/hour minus union dues & taxes

[Tom Kitten]

9. several...

Cashier at the old Newberrys at Lloyd Center, especially at Christmastime....for minimum wage you were told if you saw shoplifters to run out the door and apprehend them yourself! I was shortchanged once $40 and realized it seconds after it happened, alerted management but they were gone...I was told I had a choice...pay the store back out of my own paycheck or get fired on the spot...I took off my tie and said, ok that's it, but was talked out of it by a sympathetic asst manager in training...they took 10$ out of my meager paycheck every week but I quit soon after (3 armed robberies in a week in the store made my mind up)...After I quit I got a check in the mail from from for the money I had paid out of my own pocket plus a note "Perhaps this will teach you to be more careful with other people's money"...

Dishwasher at infamous Poor Richard's Restaurant in NE Portland...16 waiters and buspeople would drop busboxes full of dirty dishes, often metal steak platters with uneaten food piled on top of wine glasses (many of which were broken as a result) onto a conveyor belt that would enter your little niche in hell...If you got behind it was a living hell, a growing mass of uneaten food and dirty dishes and silverware...Plus, we were responsible for replenishing the salad box, waiters would ring a bell if the salad supply ran low...we were to run in the walkin and scoop salad from trash cans full of tossed salad made in advance into boxes for the waiters to sccop the salad bowls in, and needless to say there was no time to wash your hands between chores!
After a while if you survived that you could move to other tasks, like buttering garlic bread (slices of stale French bread buttered form another trash can full of whipped garlic butter kept in the walkin, to keep it nice and hard!) Stupid asst. manager once actually stood by me with a stopwatch counting the number of pieces of shitty bread I tossed in a bucket to see how well I met quota (I happened to do so that time, "Good job, Brown!" he said, yes they called you by your last name there, which always rankled me also...All I can say is they are still in business after over 20 years since I been there, don't ever eat there!

Those 2 jobs from hell make the days at the microfilm company seem like a picnic in retrospect!

But I've had some good jobs too...many a topic for another time...
especially since it looks like I've killed yet another thead!

[DebinTx]

27. Holly s**t!

I was one of the unfortunate ones that had to make that salad. Had to be 18 or older to operate machinery - can't tell you how many times fingernails and fingertips landed in the lettuce.

[Cuban_Liberal]

11. Dispatcher for a trucking company

The man who owned it, my boss, was a meth-using psychopath with a short temper and a penchant for physical violence and handguns. I lasted 6 1/2 months, and just walked out one day when he threatened a driver with a .22 caliber 'Saturday night special' right in front of my desk.

[Misunderestimator]

12. Working for my father (a pathologist) emptying old specimen jars.

I was about 14 years old when I started working for my dad. Each year the old specimens that were sitting on shelves for a certain number of years would get disposed of, since they were no longer required to be stored. The fumes from the formaldehyde were torture enough... I usually held my breath, unscrewed the lid and didn't look at what came out of the jar. One time, I emptied a jar, looked in the sink and screamed at the amputated gangrenous foot that I had just emptied. :puke:

Now THAT was a bad job. Every job I've had since pales in comparison.

[onebigbadwulf]

15. Oh god pathology! I had no idea what that was until...

I went to med school. Pathology is probably the most dehumanizing and depressing specialization of them all. I'm glad you and your father turned out normal!!!!!!!!!

[Misunderestimator]

16. Who said we turned out normal?

:D :bounce:

All it did was convince me not to be a doctor. As for my dad... at least he's voting for Kerry this year (he just admitted to me that he voted Bush in 2000, after four years of thinking he had voted for Nader).

[onebigbadwulf]

20. Haha. Well at least he sees the light now.

Actually, I guess the good thing about pathology is that it can't be outsourced like surgery!

[Wcross]

13. Soooo many from my youth...

A company that painted components for copiers. My job was to pull racks of parts into a 350 degree oven then remove them. It would cool down to 275 when you opened the door but it was still hot when you went in.
The car seat frame company- my job consisted of putting small metal tubes into larger tubes for 10 hours a shift (5:30pm til 3:30am) in the middle of a Tennessee summer. I stayed a month as a temp. I only stuck around because I was to get two weeks pay (vacation) after I put in the month of work.

Security guard at a sewer construction site at night. I had to make my rounds every hour which included walking into the dark tunnel. It was creepy. After two weeks I was supposed to be paid, they called me up and told me I had to work at a mini-mart in a BAD part of town stopping shoplifters. There had been a guy shot in the store a month before that. I refused and they refused to pay me for the hours I had put in at the construction site. I had to file a claim with the labor dept and I ended up getting about half of what they owed me.
Mr. Falvo of Rochester N.Y., You are a dick.

[Beware the Beast Man]

14. Eat N'Park

A restaurant, similar to Denny's for those outside the OH-PA-WV area. Filthy working conditions, asshole co-workers, bad scheduling. I hated it there.

[Bog Frog]

17. I delivered phone books on foot, house to house.

Blech.

[zanana]

18. I was a "pickle pounder"

About 20 years ago, I worked for a Heinz pickle processing plant. (Try saying that three times, fast). My job was to take the jars full of Dill pickles that were coming down the conveyer belt and pound the protruding pickles with my fist, until they were well below the rim of the jar. I lasted two weeks.

[AngryAmish]

21. So was I in college, but I changed...

oh, nevermind.

[SoCalDem]

22. Naughty naughty pickles:)

[BigMcLargehuge]

23. all of them from the same temp agency

I only walked off one site... but here are the worst in descending order from almost worst to worst -

"Kitter" at a circuit board manufacturing plant. Kitting entained putting two small screws, two long screws, a sheaf of label stickers, a front plate, a back plate, and three plastic clips into a tiny ziplock bag, affixing a lot # sticker to the bag, and putting the bag into a box. 10 hours a day, everyday. The only good thing was scheduled breaks and lunches that they NEVER asked us to work through. It was monotonous to the point of insanity. After two monts (on the second assignment there) I cracked and called the temp agency to get me out before I went mental.

"Moving office furniture" at an electrical manufacturing plant. I was supposed to spend 1 day moving an office from one room to another. When I got to the plant they didn't have the office ready. Instead I was walked to the empty part of the factory and told to stand in a gas expulsion sump and smash a series of porcelain fittings with a 20 lb sledgehammer THEN cover the entire sump with individual cast iron plates. These were 2 inches thick, and 2 foot square. They weighed approximately 120 pounds each. I moved 75 of them. The rules of the temp agency were that I wasn't supposed to lift more than 50 pounds at any given time. Once I completed that task I was given an enormous pry bar and vibrating tile stripping tool and given a hallway to strip of tile.

"Following up on mailers" at a business-to-business telemarketing company. Just me, and a phone, and a list, in a cubicle. It was pretty bad, but not terrible, when we were doing the business to business stuff, and it wasn't cold calling. However, they expended their business just after I started to include cold calling banking customers. I had a crazed fundie as a cube mate who made it her personal mission to "save me". This was the job that ended my temp career. I decided I would be better off working at a supermarket or something rather than telemarketing.

"Screwing tops on spray bottles" at a packaging plant bottling window cleaner. I would have been fine if it was ammonia based, but this stuff was acetone and butyl alcohol based and gave me an instant, almost crippling headache. The plant was build inside an old gymnasium, the assembly line was in an old raquetball court ventilated by a single residential box fan. I read the MSDS affixed to the drums of the cleaner and realized we were supposed to have gloves and resperators when working with it. Neither of which were provided. Worse, as I walked to the line I noticed that every fire door was blocked by a stakc of these empty solvent drums. I called the temp agency and lunch and told them of the conditions. They took the packaging plant's side! I walked off the job at lunch.

[redqueen]

24. Jumping Jehosephat!

You should have called OSHA in on that last one... kripes!

My worst was long john silvers - RUDE customers. I lasted one day.

[Commendatori]

25. Little League umpire

No matter what you did, you were hated.

I remember having to call out a kid who hit a grand slam because he failed to touch home and the opposing coach noticed. Can you say "Public Enemy #1?"

[yellowcanine]

26. Steam cleaning the inside of rendering trucks. Fortunately - I only had

to do this once, while working at another crappy job - pumping fuel and fixing flats at a truck stop.

[davsand]

28. Will Pitt posted one a long time ago that I never forgot.

I have had jobs I hated. I have worked for incompetent boobs and paranoid freaks. I have worked places that were just a trip to hell, but Will Pitt posted one a long time ago about cleaning out latrines at a summer camp that grossed me out just reading about it. I DO hope he posts it again.

It makes me realize that no matter how I feel on Monday morning it could ALWAYS be worse.


Laura

[GiovanniC]

29. Telemarketing

God, I hated that job. I hated myself for having that job.

I've never been yelled at so much in my life.

[redqueen]

31. Didn't you get just a *tiny* bit of sadistic pleasure out of it?

C'mon... I'll never tell anyone...

[GiovanniC]

34. No... But I'll Tell You Something

I learned ALL KINDS of really great ways to deal with telemarketers.

For example, one guy said he was interested in the product I was selling, but he needed to ask his wife because she handled the checkbook. He asked if I would hold. Our rules were that if the customer was interested, we would hold for as long as necessary. The guy put me on hold and left me there. I was stuck on an empty line for upwards of 15 minutes or so. He then finally came back and said, "I see you're still holding. I've now wasted as much of your time as you would have wasted of mine."

That was brilliant.

[Misunderestimator]

35. LOL... Thanks I'll be using that one.

:D

[redqueen]

40. Yes, that's another benefit

I had one guy engage me in questions about the magazine I was selling for about 20 minutes... finally said all his periodical needs were covered at the moment.

[bookfreak]

47. Blowing off telemarketers

I really hate telemarketers but have always had such a problem being rude to them. I'd listen to them babble on then politely decline. Of course they can't take one "no" for an answer so I'd have to listen to more babble, say "no" a few more times, and then finally get done with them. Over the years I got tired of this and got to the point that I'd just hang up on them.

My friend Mike isn't so subtle. Once when I was eating dinner at his house the phone rang and he answered it. There was a pause for about 30 seconds and then he said, "I'd love to hear all about that, but my boyfriend is waiting for me to f- him up the a-". I swear I about spit my food all over the table!

He's done some other real zingers to telemarketers in the 8 years I've known him, but that is the most memorable.

[gollygee]

30. My husband was an industrial waste inspector - like going down manholes

and testing the "water" - ugh.

Mine would be good ole Mickey D's

[Infomaniac]

33. NFL Training Camp Housekeeper

I was a housekeeper for an NFL team training camp. Worst job I ever had. There were more passes in the sleeping halls than on the fields. More than 20 years later and I still get skeeved at the thought of it.

[ceile]

39. Dallas Cowboys Camp

Was at my college until a couple of years ago. I still don't think the dorms have recovered. I didn't know grown men could smell like that.

[GingerSnaps]

32. Pre-School Teachers Aid

Fresh out of High School I took a job to train as a Pre-School Teacher.
I had to change diapers and dirty pants for 6 hours straight.

I lasted one day.

[SnohoDem]

36. Maintaining a small sewage treatment plant

in northern New Mexico.

[sus]

37. selling advertising for a newspaper

the first time i have ever left a job two hours into it... it just felt WRONG.

[Awsi Dooger]

38. Handicapper for a Las Vegas telemarketing sports service in '87

They asked me for about 15 picks per week, plus all the major primetime games like Monday Night even if I didn't have a clue. Our sales crew of about eight had every sort of ailment and vice, which meant only three or four would show up on a given day. They would spew any type of bullshit to sell a package of selections, then wheel around and, at random, select three of my picks from the back chalkboard and act like they were the locks of all eternity. Near the end of the week the boss' son would tally which games had not been given out very much, and the salesman were told to load up clients on those games.

The only satisfying aspect for me was a Missouri lawyer who refused to pay in advance, but actually drew up a contract saying he would pay $1500 if we hit 57% or better thru the Pro Bowl. I called him myself and gave him only the cream selections, and made it by a percent or two to spare. There were also several mom and pop little bookmaking operations who we would call to pitch games, then they would tell us they were "on the other side" and ask us to give them line updates every day. One guy in Alabama sent me a $500 bonus when I told him QB Billy Joe Tolliver of Texas Tech would miss the FSU game that week. He said all his big clients tried to load up on FSU, but he already had pulled the game off the board.

I quit when the head of the phone room, the guy who hired me, pulled off two shameless stunts in about a week. He knowingly collected twice from a husband and wife when the husband was out of town and called offering a payment after a winning weekend, literally minutes after the wife already paid. Then he intentionally gave the opposite side of our three best games, trying to get rid of a very nice elderly client who would call every afternoon, just to chat.

[ceile]

41. Trying to get people to join Nader's PIRG

Door to door in the summer in Houston. And your pay depended on how many new members you signed up.

[DemWitch]

42. telephone soliciting for a dance studio...

it was awful. Went to lunch and never came back...

[miss_kitty]

43. i worked in a dental plate lab that he no plumbing in some exam rooms

i hate bad teeth. worse, i hate NO teeth. plus this building was and still is on a little island between to busy streets leaving downtown in a hurry.
the best part of the job was watching people using the window with the mirror stuff on it as mirrors...i was a laugh riot sometimes, people doing make up, popping zits, and one of us 2 inches away from them on the other side of the glass making chimpy faces at them...i avoid walking past that building when ever possible.

the worst part of the job was always gettin my gag on.

[Merrick]

44. Moving company owned by a junkie in Los Angeles - details within

Actually, it wasn't the crappiest (actually I sort of enjoyed it), but it makes for a much more interesting story than Subway sandwiches.

While in college I worked for this funny little German guy who ran a small moving company in Gardena. Some highlights:

-While moving a couple out of a filthy hovel in Watts, we informed the owner that there was a dead dog in the alley behind his house to which he responded, "Don't worry, he won't bite."

-The funny little German, who lived out of a room that was down the hall from the office of the moving company, would shut himself in his room for days and days without coming out or responding to knocks or inquiries for directions we should take re: payment of bills that kept piling up, fines for unpaid bills, etc. The only evidence of his continued existence were little notes he'd leave in the night for us.

-Then, on one occasion, our secretary caught a glimpse of the inside of his room and said it was strewn with heroin and meth paraphenalia and pornography.

-We finished the last couple of jobs we had lined up without his knowledge despite the fact that the trucks we were using were parked right beside his room and made a lot of noise in our coming and going. Since we knew he was done for (he'd incurred huge fines on top of his bills for mis-representing himself as a corporation despite lacking certain qualifications) we told our last client our story and asked him to pay us in cash (a job that came to $1,200 or something), paid ourselves out for that job and one previous, and used the remainder to pay the secretary (who was a mother of two and happened to have just found out that she had cervical cancer) the $500 or so junkie man was stiffing her on. Then, to our surprise, he came out of his room as we were getting ready to leave (oblivious to the fact that we'd been working all day), and with the quivering hands of a man suffering withdrawls paid us what we were owed for the previous work he was aware of (which we accepted as severance lest we expose the fact that we'd done the extra job which would have cost the secretary her cut)

-One night after a job, I agreed to have a beer with funny-German-junkie man (before I was aware of his problems) and in retrospect I think he was sort of coming on to me.

anyway, it was an interesting 4 months.

[enigmatic]

46. Cleaning viewing booths in an adult bookstore...

Boy, was THAT a mistake...

[bookfreak]

49. Ugh...the horror!

I can only imagine. At my weekday job one of the residents moved out and when the staff went to clean his room prior to the new guy moving in they found semen all over the walls near his bed. Gah! I can't even begin to think what disgusting nastiness you had to clean up at your job :puke:

[enigmatic]

51. I lasted a week..

And it was as surreal a week as I've ever had....

[pfitz59]

50. Stripping smoke-saturated rock wool insulation......

from the walls and ceiling of my fire-bombed high-school. Stuff was horrible. Got inside my coveralls, mask and eye protection. Have you ever eaten glass splinters? Never work with fiber glass or rock wool insulation. I was one big rash for over a month....