What's the worst job you've ever had

Burger King and Papa John's were actually NOT my worst jobs. By far my worst job was the one summer I worked selling Cutco knives. I'm not much of a salesman to begin with so I only managed to sell just enough to break even with all the driving I did and the "conferences" I attended. That job was a complete joke.

Summer job at my college in the grounds crew. Being the fresh meat, I got assigned to drive the garbage truck. Every day I cleaned out all the trash rooms in the cafeterias (and other trash around campus) and drove the truck to the county landfill and dumped it. You'd think that garbage man at a college in the summer would be pretty easy...ha! There were always events going on with lots of people and food being served. Let me tell you, large kitchen trash rooms are full of some of the foulest, smelliest, maggoty goo you can possibly conceive. A landfill ain't no flowery park either. I burned my clothes at the end of the summer. On the upside, it definitely made me appreciate why I was going to school.

When I was 14 or 15 I worked for a fairground one hot summer shoveling horse crap into the bed of a truck, climbing into said truck and sitting in crap almost up to my knee, then dumping said crap into a big pile about a mile down the road. Repeat for 8 hours. Oh, and when the wind blew, crap dust flew into your eyes and nose, and I was covered in what looked like dirt, but was crap.

Worked as a Baker at Schlotzky's Deli when I was in college, but working as a cashier (often in returns :P) at a Lowe's in South Jersey was worse. Still better than shoveling crap, though.

Mine would be working in the meat department of a large grocery store. I wasn't 18 yet, so I wasn't allowed to use any knives or do anything that could remotely be considered interesting. So, instead I'd wrap/weigh/tag meat as it came out on a small conveyor belt from the butchers. All. Day. Long. I would literally stand in one spot all day except for my 30 minute lunch. It was the most mind-numbing, boring, repetitive work. I lasted one summer before I couldn't take it anymore.

My worst job was when I was 15, I worked at Rocky Point (amusement park in Rhode Island) in the hamburger stand. I remember it being over 112 degrees in there, and it was awful. I quit after 3 days, and it scarred me so horribly that I didnt work again until I was almost 19!

Oh, so Dr_Awkward thinks its incredibly funny to refer to me as a "carny"

I too have had quite a few jobs. Worst job would have to go to the dishwasher job I got @ 13(illegally). Hours were horrible, the other dishwashers were horrible, just couldn't stand it. I walked out after 6 months when another guy called in 'sick' and showed up halfway through his shift that I was working for him stoned out of his mind.

Missy9579 wrote:

My worst job was when I was 15, I worked at Rocky Point (amusement park in Rhode Island) in the hamburger stand. I remember it being over 112 degrees in there, and it was awful. I quit after 3 days, and it scarred me so horribly that I didnt work again until I was almost 19!

Oh, so Dr_Awkward thinks its incredibly funny to refer to me as a "carny"

I LOVED Rocky Point. Sucks about the job though.

AmazingZoidberg wrote:
Missy9579 wrote:

My worst job was when I was 15, I worked at Rocky Point (amusement park in Rhode Island) in the hamburger stand. I remember it being over 112 degrees in there, and it was awful. I quit after 3 days, and it scarred me so horribly that I didnt work again until I was almost 19!

Oh, so Dr_Awkward thinks its incredibly funny to refer to me as a "carny"

I LOVED Rocky Point. Sucks about the job though. :(

I enjoyed going there, we lived in walking distance, and I had 3 older brothers who worked there as ride operators, so I spent many summers there.

Lucky! I used to get to go about once a summer, until they closed. Thinking back on it now it was a dinky sort of place, but I was so young at the time that it was the greatest place on earth.

/derail

Yeah, so jobs suck.

Brennil wrote:

Answering phones for Fedex in a call center. The most soul killing experience I've ever had.

haha.

Internet Tech Support for Comcast. I don't know which is worse; getting to work at 7am to get yelled at for the next 9 hours, or getting to work at 5pm to get yelled at by drunk people til 2am. At least some of the drunk people were funny. And by that I mean 'so stupid you couldn't help but laugh'. After midnight you got the lonely crowd, too. 1 guy was infamous in the call center. He'd have the same 'internet problem' every night and you'd end up stuck on the phone with him for an hour while he told you about his neighbor's new lawnmower and the kid that cut him off at the grocery store.

It was, as stated, soul killing. Not all of the calls were bad, though. I had one of the best, most enlightening conversations I've ever had in my life with a man who was hit by a car while jogging. It broke both of his legs and he was in a wheelchair for 2 months before he could graduate to crutches. I'm not going to share, but it was good.

Then there were some calls that were crushing. Like the woman who accidentally deleted Firefox from her computer and the shortcut would go nowhere when she clicked on it. Her husband was going to be home any minute and I could tell in her voice and by the way she spoke that she was terrified of what would happen if he came home and could not get on the internet. She didn't know much about computers and (even though we weren't supposed to deal with 3rd party programs) I helped her get online with IE and re-download Firefox. She thanked me profusely for helping her fix it before he got home. I wanted to hint to her to get some sort of help...but alas who knows how she would have taken it.

Worst Job, Has to be a beverage machinery salesman, shipping, and web site designer for a company that paid me 8 dollars an hour. I was a tool. lol

Worst job would be when I worked for Whackenhut as a security guard. They had me walking a 12 hour shift in downtown Birmingham, Al around Children Hospital in a 2 block area. Got to watch all the fancy pants leave work, and the same fancy pants coming back to work the next day. Very rarely did any of the medical people wave hello back or make eye contact with me. I can't really blame them my uniform was butt ugly with blue black striped pants, white button shirt with the plastic cowboy hat to tie it all together.

The main reason the job sucked was the dregs of society that wandered around at night drunk, or drugged out of their mind that I had to shoo away with my walkie talkie. Back off man before I call for some back up! Don't make me call for back up!

Walmart. *shudder*

All time worst was baling hay. I knew I had seasonal allergies, but it also turns out that when fresh hay is directly exposed to my skin I break out in hives. Second worse was summer janitor/whipping boy at a Days Inn. We never had any business, but the owners insisted that the entire lot be swept 3 times a day in 110 degree heat. I worked long enough to cover my dorm fees for the next semester and quit.

McDonald's every Friday night and Saturday day between 1990 and 1992. The break room (the only place you were allowed to eat your lunch) was thick with cigarette smoke, and I hate people smoking when I'm eating.

I haven't touched any of their food since.

I'm going to sound like a complete pessimist here, but hey, whatever. Every job i've had has been the worst job. I'm still young, and I can count the number of jobs i've had on one hand but they've all been about the same. Even my last job, which I thought was a dream job compared to the others i've had, began devolving within 3 months of working there; I was recently canned at the beginning of the month from a combination of both hypocrisy and factors completely out of my control. I'm currently looking for a new job, anything really, I don't hold hope to get a good job at this point. I'd really like to get a "brainless" rock working overnight preferably.

working as a security guard in college. Mostly, I guarded the UNC-TV building in RTP, which was a pretty good gig. But after a while I was moved to other jobs, which were much more problematic. I have three main memories from that job:

1) Walking up to three guys who were drunk and stealing from a construction site, and realizing that if any of them were armed, I was screwed (I was unarmed, too young to carry). Scariest thing I've ever done in my life.
2) Working 36 hours in one weekend.
3) Falling asleep while patrolling the construction area in the company truck, and being woken up by the truck hitting the curb as it careened directly towards a port-a-john. Fortunately fast reflexes avoided a potentially messy situation.

Three years working as a pharmacy tech in the busiest Rite-Aid in Buffalo, NY. And it only got worse after Rite-Aid struck the exclusivity deal with Blue Cross, which meant dealing with an awful lot of pissed off old people who didn't understand that it wasn't our fault they couldn't go to CVS anymore.

It was so busy the wait for new prescriptions was frequently over 20 minutes, and every. Single. Person took it out on us. You don't like it? There's another freakin' Rite Aid six blocks up that road. Go there.

They installed a robot to help us dispense the pills, but the damn thing was always either broken or empty, and the little bins it dispensed the pills from weren't big enough for our most popular products (antibiotics are freakin' horse pills). The only thing it was good for was for being a large wall that we could hide behind for a few seconds to catch our breath.

I quit after three years to work as a lab assistant in a freshman computer science class in my college. It was a pay cut, but the hours were good and watching 18 year olds failing to undersand Excel was amusing.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

They installed a robot to help us dispense the pills, but the damn thing was always either broken or empty, and the little bins it dispensed the pills from weren't big enough for our most popular products (antibiotics are freakin' horse pills). The only thing it was good for was for being a large wall that we could hide behind for a few seconds to catch our breath.

That didn't happen to be a Parata RDS, did it? I used to work there. If so, you'll be happy to know the new machine has *much* larger bins.

I worked in a metal foundry at 16. For minimum wage... pouring metal. You know how at 16 you can't even us a knife? Well I used power saws, drills, knives, powered knives, blow torches, oh and a Metal kiln. You know the kind that are like 2000 degrees. Yeah that wasn't very legal. I worked there for about 1 year then quit when I realized that I could make $2 more at walmart in the Electronics department. (hey at 17 that 10% discount was nice).

I once was on a Vacuum truck crew and had to clean out the underside of a waste water treatment plant. I was literally knee deep in an underground cavern of human filth. Sometimes when work gets so bad it becomes interesting to think that you are willing to do something so f*cked up and that it somehow sets you apart (for better or worse is debatable). I guess thats some sort of coping mechanism...

after years of hard work i'm now in a cushy web design job =D

I take back my entry of Burger King and Pekins and woudl liek to re-enter with

bailing hay, picking rock, and worst of all Bean Walking.

Bean walking is much like the corn jobs mentioned earlier except I was doing it with my evil brother and my sister. Mom would drop us off at a field with a sack lunch and a bunch of water. We would then start walking up and down rows of soy beans picking any weeds that were sticking out. Did I mention that the fields that we were walking were so full of weeds sometimes you couldn't pick out where the soy beans began and the weeds ended. The worst part about the whole thing though, I didn't get paid. We walked the fields in order to receive free Hay for our horses. It was not very uncommon to hear my mother say this after we complained about how we were spending out summer days..

"If you like riding those horses, you better get out in those fields."

Stupid horses. Stupid Beans. Stupid Weeds. The worst part is, now they have all kinds of fancy machinery to do all that manual labor. I don't think they even bean walk any more.

Worst Job: KFC in high school. Fried chicken, lots of it. Large vats of cole slaw, big enough to hide a large dog or a child. Fryers spewing chicken toxin into the air. Patrons speaking a dialect of english I'm not familiar with. Minimum wage pay. Burger King is a close second.

Most interesting job: Butcher at a Wal-Mart (seeing a woman walking around with a block of velveeta and eating it like a candy bar is an image I'll not soon forget). Decent pay for a college student, and the unending appreciation of my boss for being intelligent enough to not cut one of my fingers off.

Most Fun: Working the deli appe-teaser at Randall's Supermarket in high school/college. Shattered a glass case full of deli meats as I took airborn a 10lb piece of Boars Head Honey Maple ham. The ham hit a sign hanging from the ceiling, the sign broke lose and swung down onto the case. Initially I was told I would have to pay for the case, but they later dropped the threat. I was later told by my manager that I had stolen christmas presents from under her childrens tree because she lost her bonus over the incident. Good times.

Aetius wrote:

That didn't happen to be a Parata RDS, did it?

It was similar, but not quite the same. The pills went into cartriges, not much bigger than a VHS tape really, except maybe longer and a bit thicker, and the robot arm moved the vials under whichever cartrige held the designated drug.

I remember we nicknamed it based on the model number, but I can't for the life of me recall what the nickname was. It was decade ago, after all.

Jimeny Jilleckers! Have I been out of college for almost ten years?!

Aetius wrote:

I used to work there.

In Buffalo? I was in store 1910. Where were you located?

I was a giant pickle for an afternoon.

It was summer break and I had signed up for a temp service. The lady from the service called and talked me into walking around Pioneer square here in Portland dressed as Sargent Pucker, the Steinfeld Pickle company's military representative.

Unfortunately I was a bit too tall for the outfit so the eye holes where actually at nose level for me, limiting my eyesight to the ground 3 feet in front of me. The outfit was heavy plastic or some other material. I just remember it being really heavy and uncomfortable with the straps cutting into my shoulders.

After being helped into the outfit I was left on my own in the square for a few hours. I guess it was mascot day or something because there was some other animated food stuffs walking around, along with a load of grade school kids. At first the kids were great, shouting "Mr. Pickle! Mr. Pickle!" and asking all sorts of weird questions, but eventually they turned on me. A few realized that I couldn't see very well and would play the game of coming up behind me and kicking the back of my suit. They emitted squeals of joy when they saw me lumber around, trying to get them in my line of sight. They would then duck back into my blind spot and the beatings would continue. After a few minutes a chaperon, while suppressing a laugh, called them off, telling them it wasn't a nice thing to hit the pickle.
For the rest of the afternoon I wandered aimlessly around the square, waving at nothing in particular and doing my best to keep my back close to a column or wall. Eventually the company guy came back and helped me out of the suit and jumped on the bus home. The agency called back several times after that saying that they loved the job I did and would I like to do it again. I declined.

While working in a White Castle was terrible, my worst job is a tie between working on a farm at 14 (or 15, I can't recall how old I was) and working at Bungie Foods Factory.

The farm was broken into 3 types of jobs depending on how close we were to harvest. The first month was walking up and down rows of planted onions and pulling weeds. It was hot and I smelled of onions for hours after my shower. The second month was painting the barns and general farm upkeep. Not too bad. The third month was harvest and working the "shaker," a large machine that shook the onions that were harvested of most of the dirt that the combine pulled up with it. We would sit next to it and pick out large rocks. The smell of onion permeated my entire body. To this day, my soul still has a tint of onion essence and I find myself putting onions on everything now.

Bungie foods was a summer job between freshman and sophomore year. They made butter and other grease related products like cooking oil and the stuff inside of twinkies. For a month and a half, I folded box lids on 50 lb boxes while staring at the one clock on the floor and counting down the seconds in my 8 hour shift. Later, I stacked pallets with product and worked the remelt room, where we melted down any product that touched the floor regardless if the package broke. Imagine a small room filled with steam the comes not from water, but a mix of shortening, vegetable oil, and margerine. I wore only one pair of jeans and two shirts to work that entire summer. I would shower and the water would bead off my skin and I would stay dry.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:
Aetius wrote:

That didn't happen to be a Parata RDS, did it?

I used to work there. :)

In Buffalo? I was in store 1910. Where were you located?

Nah, he means he worked at Parata.

Edwin wrote:

GameStop.

Yea here is the one up to that I worked for Software Etc. back then it was a blast to work there. After it changed to Game Stop it all went to hell. I wish that place would implode on every conceivable level.

Grenn wrote:

I would shower and the water would bead off my skin and I would stay dry.

I recommend soap.

My worst job was bagger at Food Lion (grocery store). Standard duties included bagging groceries (back when paper bags were the default), fronting (moving items to the front of the shelves), collecting shopping carts from the parking lot, sweeping & mopping the floors after closing.

One particular day I came in and a couple of people were standing together. I definitely got an odd vibe. My manager told me he had something he needed me to do and the others with me gave me these significant looks. Manager led me into the men's room where in one stall, some guy's ass had exploded. Literally shit all over the stall walls, toilet, and floor. And as low man on the totem pole, I got to clean it up.

I never technically "quit" that job, I took a leave of absence when I started college and never went back. My next job was at the Ace Hardware right next door to the Food Lion and it was heaven in comparison.