What's the worst job you've ever had

Lots of goodjers worked at Burger King, and so did I. That place was hell. I worked with a bunch of stoners who had zero pride in their work. They would skip frozen beef patties off the greasy floor like stones on a pond. The drive thru chick was working the milkshake dispenser and watched as a large housefly landed in the cup as it was being filled with milkshake. She handed it to the customer without batting an eye. One manager smoked dope with her employees in the dumpster courtyard on break.

I freaking hated that place for all 3 months I worked there.

Telemarketer.

oldmanscene24 wrote:

Telemarketer.

Theres a special place in hell reserved for your kind...

doubtingthomas396 wrote:
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?

Like Quintin said, I worked at Parata. It might have been a very early RDS, I believe the company was around back then, and the description sounds right. Orange cartridges?

When I worked at Burger King, I got to unplug all the toilets, change the fryer grease, and manually compress all the trash in the dumpster. They called me "Mr. Shit."

That's what you get for telling the manager you're going to college.

* Door-to-door perfume sales (got suckered in for the free travel and the girls)

How does that work, in reality? Do lonely women actually answer the door and flirt?

MudderFudder77 wrote:
oldmanscene24 wrote:

Telemarketer.

Theres a special place in hell reserved for your kind...

I know. I only did it for three weeks and it was almost 20 years ago. I really needed the money.

KrazyTacoFO wrote:

My first job was working at Long John Silvers. I did all the cooking and cleaning. I hated it. It can burn in Hell.

Same did a stint at LJS. Worst experience ever. I worked there for a month with 50 hr weeks. (a lot of a HS kid) realized that I've been moved up 3 times in the "chain" and the position that I was currently working was supposed to have a higher pay according to the employee handbook. So I asked for the raise. Was told to fill out a ton of paperwork twice. Submitted it and never got a raise.

So I quit and the manager refused to pay me my last check. Eventually I asked for his supervisors name. He told me he had no one above him execpt God. Now I know that LJS was a franchise and there was a regional manager. I met him once. So eventually I drove to the other LJS and asked them for the contact information and made a call explaining my situation. He told me to return to the store and pick-up my check. The regional manager was nice and hand wrote a check on the spot.

I noticed a month later that the store manager was no longer there.

Alien13z wrote:
* Door-to-door perfume sales (got suckered in for the free travel and the girls)

How does that work, in reality? Do lonely women actually answer the door and flirt?

We worked businesses, not residences. It was more the fact that I was working with hot girls and we'd drive to other cities a lot and just get one hotel room to save money.

Definitely a temp job I had back in my younger NYC days... at a dialysis ward in an upper east side hospital. They had mountains of negligent paperwork with regards to treatments and drugs administered to patients over the last several months, and wanted me to go sheet by sheet, track down the appropriate doctor, and prod their memory for medications they might have given to a specific person on a specific day, say, two months earlier. The task itself seemed impossible, but it was the weird hospital smell and the sad room of people hooked up to blood circulating tubes that did me in. I had never tried to get out of a temp assignment to that point, but I called up my rep and straight up begged her.

Thin_J wrote:

Toys R Us.

Me too, back when I was in high school. Maybe one manager in the store was worth their salary, and as added bonuses:

·Someone had a tantrum every day, and it usually wasn't a child.
·There was a strong possibility that vomit or urine would be made available by one of the kids.
·The company tended to treat it's floor staff more or less as commodities.

There was a lot of theft too... Fortunately now I have a cushy job managing analysts at a bank. Hooray for college degrees. : )

I worked for a small, upscale ice cream and sandwich shop one summer. The owners were the most curmudgeonly, penny-pinching bastards I've ever encountered. They classified their workers as waiters so they only paid $2.05 an hour instead of minimum wage, saying that we'd make it up in tips. Sure. I never made a tip. I worked a barbecue festival for them which ended up being a 12 hour day in the glorious Pensacola humidity and they paid me $25 and expected me to be grateful. I got flim-flammed by a con man that hit the area -- I'd never even heard of it or suspected such a thing before then -- to the tune of something like $40. Of course they took it out of my pay. I hope it burned to the ground and that it gets proven to be arson perpetrated by the owners so they don't see a penny of insurance money.

Soccer ref for nine-year-olds. Threats from parents were bad enough without the coaches and boss consistently trying to not pay me.

Compared to that, business school tech support was a cakewalk.

When I was 15 I worked as a "page" in a library in the inner city area of Edmonton. My job duties basically consisted of returning books to the shelves, making sure books were in order, checking people's books out, and any other odd job that needed doing.

That in itself would not have been too bad, but the location made the job suck. Essentially for 20 blocks in each direction, you had the poorest of the poor and the scummiest of the scummy. Whoever thought to put a library there was obviously insane. Here are some examples of the things I had to deal with:

- Drunks and hobos using the library to sleep in.
- Vomit in the aisles from the above.
- People masturbating to the sex-ed books in the corner.
- Crazies who like to come in and tell you why the government is following them.
- Crazies who like to come in and start destroying books, shelves, etc.
- The bathrooms. They were basically right inside the front door, meaning anyone could walk in and use them without the staff seeing them. We found needles, feces, used diapers and stuff that I couldn't even name all over the place.
- Explaining all of the above to the police who we called on almost a daily basis.

I did that job for 3 months before I left to work in a concession stand in the local NHL arena. A couple of the librarians I worked with there had been at that location for 10+ years. I have no idea how they stayed sane.

I worked a season in a small-town construction crew. We subcontracted a lot of gigs for other crews. Basically the crap jobs they didn't want to waste their crews or hardware on. The crew-boss was an alcoholic, the other main guy on the crew was an enabler for the crew-boss, and the other grunt that started about the same time I did was a carbon copy of the sleaze-ball character from American Pie... I forget his name... either one for that matter.
One of the jobs we were contracted to do was a roof-repair on a hog-confinement. There is something magical about working over a concrete pit filled with hog crap in the heat of summer. There is something special about sitting on the re-used rafters, staring at the cracked wood interspersed with the occasional new board where they couldn't recover the stuff that blew off in the first place, forty feet over the previously mentioned pit, and noticing that the drunken bastard had run the air-hose for your nail-gun parallel with the concrete slats below and that a good third of the hose is now slowly sinking into the filth below. Guess who would get to fish that sucker out at the end of the day. I remember smoking 3 packs a day just so that I would have something else to smell while I was working. I remember laughing my ass off when the drunken enabler nailed his hand to a stud. I remember blowing insulation without goggles or facemasks. I remember Mr. Alco lying to his wife about the 24 pack in the cooler. I remember meeting the bigger crew we were subcontracting for and enjoyed watching my boss getting treated like a whiny kid when he complained about the crap jobs they were feeding him. I remember spending a good month at that job when any other crew wouldn't have wasted a week.
I loved working, but I hated that job. Wrong boss, wrong crew, wrong assignments. Tying a ladder into the scoop of a tractor because you couldn't get anyone to loan you boom-truck? Priceless.

I haven't worked anything bad. In high school, I made some money building computers and providing PC upgrades for the office my mom worked at for cheap. In college, I worked a couple of campus jobs. And after college I started a little bit of web development on my own before taking the web dev job I have now. (Though the computer science major in me still considers web development "p*ssy programming", but let's face it, that's where app development is rapidly moving...)

The worst job I ever had was a job that I didn't take. It was sitting in on an orientation for a help desk job. I had applied for a job in the advising offices on campus, but they were slow in getting back to me. I then applied for a couple of help desk jobs (one on-campus, one in some unmarked building in a grocery store shopping center that I had driven by many times). After those, I called the advising job and basically pressed them into giving me an answer ASAP, and they hired me.

MudderFudder77 wrote:
oldmanscene24 wrote:

Telemarketer.

Theres a special place in hell reserved for your kind...

I did that too. I didn't know whether to feel worse about the fact that I was selling people things over the telephone or the fact that I was for some unholy reason incredibly good at it.

souldaddy wrote:

noooooooo comment.

Elaborate.

93_confirmed wrote:
souldaddy wrote:

noooooooo comment.

Elaborate.

IMAGE(http://www.h4x3d.com/feat/themes/fresh-apple.jpg)

I'm guessing either that or he worked as a stall cleaner at Dreamers.

Bartender

Oh, not just a bartender, as that's actually kind of a cool job. I was a bartender at the Congo Bar in North Lawrence. Actually, they had renamed it the Riverside just before I started working there to try an clean up its image. Which didn't work, because it was still referred to as the Gun and Knife Club by most folks. Mst people in Lawrence have no idea this place even exists. It's in its own dimension.

This was the kind of place where at 7pm, there might be 100 people and it feels like a freak show, but by 8:30 it would be 6 guys having a beer. Then at 9:30 we have 75 people screaming aqnd carrying on. Eleven o'clock comes and it is crickets chirping. Then at 12:30 it's a nightmare. It was a truly psychotic experience.

Highlight include the bat shit crazy cook letting me know that he doesn't worry about the fights and stuff. He keep a load gun with him, and if he fires it off a few times, people will scatter.

Then there was a chick fight I broke up (for some reason chicks fought in the place way more than guys. By, like, a lot.) They were finally throwing pool balls at each other. As I was breaking it up and trying to pull one girl off the other, her sister began beating me with a pool cue screaming, "You just hit my {ableist slur} sister! (seriously, that's exactly what she was yelling. It was surreal).

Then there was a the crazy vietnam vet guy that didn't really seem to talk much. He the first time he ordered a drink from me he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash, crumbled it up in his fist, and slammed his fist down on the bar, looking at me like he was deciding if I should live or not. when I asked for the money, he would look at his fist, and then at me (This guy was crazy, and probably shouldn't be drinking. But the other crazies seemed to like him.) So a standoff was underway as I tried to figure out what to do. Part of the problem was that I was viewed as fresh meat from the crazies, so I never knew what was real, or what was a put on. Eventually I reached over, pried his fist open, and took his wad of cash. I made his change and gave him that back to him. He seemed pleased. That was became the ritual for the this guy.

Then there was one particular loud asshole that made my life, and everyone else's miserable. Just a real POS. He got so drunk that he finally passed out in the floor. Mind you, this is the kind ofg place that while he was out, only one person asked me if I noticed him. And this was a busy night, with 50-100 folks. I just said i was glad not to have to deal with him for awhile and let him lay.

But this guy wasn't done. After about 30-45 minutes he began to move. for about 15 minutes he worked on getting up, holding onto a pole, and then using a chair to get to his feet. this went on and on, until he finally made his way to the bar, and ordered a drink! I told him I couldn't serve him because he was drunk. He started calling me a lot name, and I just didn't want to deal with it, so I served him, hoping he just pass out again.

Was there more? There was the horrific scene one afternoon while a real POS got his drunk on, all the while berating his 7-8 year-old-son about how dumb he is. How he thought he was smart, but he was just dumb, and would always be dumb. Talk about watching the circle of violence and misery in action.

One last anecdote. This was the capper, and I finally quit. It had been one of those crazy long nights , but it was 15 minutes to last call, and it was quiet. I had just reached that point where I could start to feel relieved, as I spent most of the night wondering where the next fight was going to be. But then these two girls got into a fight at the end of the bar. One of them finally busted a beer glass on the bar and stabbed the other girl in the temple. There was freaking blood everywhere. This guy I had been talking to most of the night really responded well, and helped the gild and get the bleeding stopped while I called 911. While they were taking her away in an ambulance one of the officers came over to me, and started going off on how drunk everyone in this bar was, and if he came in and saw this again, he would charge me with serving drunks! That's just great!

I worked at this place for about three weeks.

I've had a lot of jobs, but nothing even comes close to the crap I've seen in this place. Complete madness.

LiquidMantis wrote:

I already mentioned my worst job, but here's my job history:

* Hardware store - 13 years old, managed to get a job as a store hand.
* Dairy Queen - started as cashier, moved to cook
* Dish Washer at a Mexican food restaurant
* Packaging and processing at a small goat cheese factory
* Lumber yard hand at a small hardware store
* Door-to-door perfume sales (got suckered in for the free travel and the girls)
* Out-of-the-trunk cheap car stereo sales (just for one day)
* Kentucky Fried Chicken - cook
* Construction crew - mainly poured concrete slabs, I also got to go with one of the other guys to dig graves.
* Nursery hand - moved plants between houses and on Fridays we had the oh so fun job of making dirt.
* Telemarketer - I "lucked" out and worked the AT&T account so I called people and offered them money to switch long distance providers. I picked up an extra shift once and got stuck working Fingerhut and found out just how much better it is to call and offer people money than call and ask for it.
* Coffee house - awesome job, at the bitter end I was the only one working there though and put in way too many over-caffienated hours.
* Coffee house - worked at another awesome coffee house once the other one closed.
* Mom-and-Pop Computer Shop - Worked for a Vietnamese couple doing mostly repair work and beige box builds.
* Dell Computers - tech support
* Network/System Administrator - current job. Actually had this one for 9 years now.

Sadly, that list pales to the number of jobs I've had. I may work on a list for later. My brothers and I were talking about old times and jobs one night, when his wife finally asked me how man jobs I've had. My brothers started giggling and we went on for what seemed an hour. They were bringing up jobs I had forgotten I had.

Jayhawker wrote:

They were bringing up jobs I had forgotten I had.

Yeah, I forgot my temp job as a network cable jockey.

painthappens wrote:

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.

Sure the minimum wage part sucks, but I would've loved to work in a foundry.

I already mentioned my worst job, but here's my job history:

* Hardware store - 13 years old, managed to get a job as a store hand.
* Dairy Queen - started as cashier, moved to cook
* Dish Washer at a Mexican food restaurant
* Packaging and processing at a small goat cheese factory
* Lumber yard hand at a small hardware store
* Door-to-door perfume sales (got suckered in for the free travel and the girls)
* Out-of-the-trunk cheap car stereo sales (just for one day)
* Kentucky Fried Chicken - cook
* Construction crew - mainly poured concrete slabs, I also got to go with one of the other guys to dig graves.
* Nursery hand - moved plants between houses and on Fridays we had the oh so fun job of making dirt.
* Telemarketer - I "lucked" out and worked the AT&T account so I called people and offered them money to switch long distance providers. I picked up an extra shift once and got stuck working Fingerhut and found out just how much better it is to call and offer people money than call and ask for it.
* Coffee house - awesome job, at the bitter end I was the only one working there though and put in way too many over-caffienated hours.
* Coffee house - worked at another awesome coffee house once the other one closed.
* Mom-and-Pop Computer Shop - Worked for a Vietnamese couple doing mostly repair work and beige box builds.
* Network cable jockey - pulled and terminated cable. I got to sort and organize racks like the wiring horror pics you see on the net.
* Dell Computers - tech support
* Network/System Administrator - current job. Actually had this one for 9 years now.

Another job of mine wasn't exactly bad, but it was definitely the most disappointing job I've ever had.

I worked for 3 months as a co-op student at the Institute for Research in Construction in Ottawa, writing programs for one of the researchers in the institute's Fire Research Program. Directly across the hall from my office was a warehouse-sized room containing several enormous furnaces used for testing the effects of fire on load-bearing structures: there was a furnace for walls, one for floors, and another for burning massive support pillars. Each furnace had a series of jacks that could be used to simulate the weight the object would be carrying if it were part of a building. Let me reiterate: this was a room where they burned parts of houses just to see what would happen.

The disappointing part? In the three months I worked there they didn't perform a single burn test. I sat in a cubicle writing crappy VB6 + MS Access applications right next to some of the biggest and coolest research equipment I've ever seen and I never got to see it in action.

Switchbreak wrote:
MudderFudder77 wrote:
oldmanscene24 wrote:

Telemarketer.

Theres a special place in hell reserved for your kind...

I did that too. I didn't know whether to feel worse about the fact that I was selling people things over the telephone or the fact that I was for some unholy reason incredibly good at it.

I was, too. It's pretty sad.

93_confirmed wrote:
souldaddy wrote:

noooooooo comment.

Elaborate.

Souldaddy's actually a woman. She lives in Mexico where she works as an escort. Her worst job was that she recently had to "entertain" Mex.

I keed, I keed.

LiquidMantis wrote:
93_confirmed wrote:
souldaddy wrote:

noooooooo comment.

Elaborate.

(cut apple image)

Maybe this?

Or this (start at 6:50, to 8:00)?

Hands down worst job in my life is when I moved from the Lake Elsinore to Corona, CA and I could not find a job for the life of me. Because I was low on cash I walked into the Walmart and demanded to see the Manager, 30 mins later I had my Walmart tag. Most degrading job in the entire world. I died a little when I was forced into doing the walmart dance, EVERY FREAKING DAY.

Needless to say the one good thing about Walmart is that my resume skills where sharpened into the fine knife they are today as I was spending 4 hours DIRECTLY after work to find a new one. That job lasted 6 months till I found a part-time sysadmin job for a school district that was an hour drive away, where the kids yelled "THE COMPUTER GUY!" when I walked into the room and more than one teacher threw herself at me.

My current job is fun but sometimes it turns into a grind which sucks.

Pharacon wrote:

That job lasted 6 months till I found a part-time sysadmin job for a school district that was an hour drive away, where the kids yelled "THE COMPUTER GUY!" when I walked into the room and more than one teacher threw herself at me.

Christ, good to know I'm not the only one people are a little too happy to see sometimes. There's been a few times I wish I had St.Hillary with to hide behind. The worst I've had to date was a one-day thing being a "brand ambassador" for Playstation. Yeah, when I got the gig I did a little happy jig.

But, it was in a Toys 'r Us, in a _horrible_ location, the people were.... interesting. I was supposed to be displaying Singstar 90s, and the Buzz! games. Now, I don't mind the buzz games, in fact, I rather liked screwing around with them being bored off my ass. However, I couldn't do demos of singstar, because the shitty TV they put me on had no sound (or function period, half the time). Not to mention standing in one place, with no access to the bathroom for 4 hours. Doing nothing for two of those. (2 hour demo of Buzz, 2 hour demo of singstar.) I can't just stand there and do nothing. It drives me insane. So standing in some godforsaken little corner with the manager breathing down my neck was almost enough to make me run for it. Though, I was afraid my legs would cramp up from not moving, and I'd fall over.

Though most of why it sucked so hard was just crushed expectations.

Dishwasher / Short Order Cook at Lums Restaurant: I'd smell like a burnt, greasy piece of lard after my shift there.

Foreman of the Grass Crew: Cutting the lawns of the rich and famous in the hot summer sun. We'd time our lunch breaks so we'd be at homes that had a pool and nobody home.

Security Guard for Burns Security: Not as bad as some jobs, but not the best.

Telemarketer for Dial America: Selling magazine subscriptions to folks in the evening. I was good at it, but it drained my will to live. No head sets or auto-dialers, we had to hold a hand set to our ears and hand dial from lists. Beep Boop Beep Beep.... I still have to hold a phone away from my head when I dial. I can't stand the noise.

Driving Instructor: Never failed that some student would try to kill me at least once during the day. The kids were OK, it was the old widows who's husband just died and they had to learn to drive so they could go to the grocery store. They were utterly terrified to be behind the wheel.