OT: Your worst job ever...

[tbonezone]

i used to be able to boast i was the lowest paid babysitter in town. minimum wage. 60 + kids. i worked at an outdoor municipal skating rink. after closing i routinely would have to hang out until around 2 am in sub freezing temps with a hose in my hand putting down ice for the next day. between ice coats i would retreat to the shanty and read dostoevsky by the propane heater, nap a little and wait for my girlfriend to show up with some hot tea and nastiness.

 

[ROCcuse]

The worst job as far for me, in terms of manual labor, is when I worked for a cable contractor in the North Carolina heat during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. It paid well, $80 a day. That said, I would work 12 hour days sometimes and I essentially just dug holes and put in cable boxes (more labor intensive than I had originally thought). It would be around 105 and 100% humidity and I'd ask how far down this time, they'd say, oh, only about five feet. Of course it never rained so the ground was essentially rock. Despite all that, I actually enjoyed working outside and I had a good lunch break and was allowed to leave whenever the work was finished so some days I'd be off in 4 hours. I also worked with my cousin so I enjoyed that. I learned numerous expletives in Spanish. Only one day was really bad and it was when I had to pull 1200 yards of cable through conduit that went up and all-around due to the rock underground so pulling it was almost impossible. I had to call in help for 7 other guys just so we could grab the end and pull with all our might just to slowly move it. And it was in front of Time Warner so we had to do it all flawlessly. Never heard more expletives in a 4 period than then. I did like the job for the most part though.

The job that I hated the most was McDonalds during the summer of my sophomore year in high school and the beginning of junior year. My managers were the dumbest SOB's ever. It was a brand new place and it opened off a populated road. I worked my arse off and it was disgusting. I still refuse to eat McDonald's food. I saw my manager drop a burger on the floor, pick it up 20 seconds and send it on its way and she just turned and said you saw nothing. A couple times they made me take the burgers off before they were fully done. They were still raw in the middle and bleeding and they would slop it on the burger and give it to the customer. It's truly a repulsive place. I avoid most fast food at all costs. Not to mention the burgers frozen double as hockey pucks. I never quit or was ever fired. I asked off for Thanksgiving weekend because I'd be out of town and gave multiple notes of notice a couple weeks leading up to it. The town idiot, my manager, put me on the schedule every single day. I told him I wouldn't be showing up and he was like you have to! it's on the schedule. All I said was you better find someone to come in because I will not be in town. The next week I had no hours when I showed up to check and I never went back in that store. I still cringe driving past the place when I come home and haven't been in it. NEVER EAT MCDONALD'S!

This wasn't the worst but I didn't like umpiring like I thought I would. I made $25 a game so it wasn't terrible pay. The parents just sucked beyond belief. It made me hate all adults at sporting events. I'll never heckle a referee in any youth sport as long as I live because of it so I guess it was a nice lesson of sorts to learn. I had parents threaten me and call me every name in the book and tell me they wanted to fight me. And I have always been a big guy so I was about 6'4 and 240 then (I was in high school) and they would tell me to see them in the parking lot and all I could do was just laugh at them. I wanted to knock so many of those yuppy parents out. It made me feel bad for the kids especially. I had an incident where the kid on the mound (probably 7, 8 or 9) was pitching really badly. He was the coaches son and he was visibly distraught because I can't call a bouncing pitch a strike and he was walking everyone, all the while his dad was berating him. The kid wet himself, on the mound, and burst out crying. I had to call times and the kid went to the port-a-john and came back. The dad got a tub of water and poured it on the kid and said, yup you're ready, go back out and pitch. The kid was having a full-blown panic attack, it seemed, while pitching and the father did nothing. That specific incident ruined it for me, I did a couple more games but then quit due to the insane parents and some of the inept other umpires who had no grasp of the game that I got paired up with. Every parent thinks their kid is the next amazing athlete.

sweet pic bruh

 

[gocraz4dasu]

sweet pic bruh

Likewise, my man.

 

[swish7]

Great thread. I've had a lot of bad jobs. None compare to the worst in this thread, but all compare to the jobs just below the worst. Here are some of my worst jobs:

1. I worked for Marcellus Nursery one summer in HS. My over-helpful sister "set me up" on a blind date with the owner's daughter. I was a sophomore or a junior. When I picked her up, I was shocked to see that she was roughly an 8th grader. I do not know what my sister was thinking. I took her to a movie at Camillus Mall, and we hit the arcade, but man, that was awkward. Anyhow, that was not the job, the job was working at their mulching plant over in Solvay. They had a huge mulching tub with two rotating grinders on the inside. Each grinder has about 8 bars, arranged in a tube. Each bar has a row of metal "teeth". The grinder apparatus resembles a gatlin gun. The guns rotate the teeth round and round, the tub then spins, forcing all the wood to the middle. The mulch would drop onto a conveyor belt at the bottom. My job was to keep everything on the ground running. Dump trucks would drop off loads of broken pallets, and other wood-based detritus. My job was to remove any non-wood from the huge piles. In between checking in the dump trucks, I had to keep the conveyor line clear of the ever-growing piles of mulch. But, the worst part was the "manager". He spent the whole day rotating on an excavator, dropping wood into the tub. The grinding was loud, and he was miserable for it. He would rotate with his back to me, but when he was dropping wood into the tub, he would be facing me in the yard. If I was not moving non-stop, he would grimace, and I would catch hell. To this day, I don't handle well. I'm constantly too nice to people who don't deserve it.
2. Being a country boy, I did my time at the top of a hay mow stacking bales. Humidity, heat, cramped, dusty, sweaty, not much save for roofing compares to that. That said, it was satisfying work.
3. Picking drops at apple orchards was pretty awful. You got paid by the bushel. It would take me all day to fill on. You started around 6 a.m., and being the fall in CNY, it was cold and dewy. This was before gore tex, so my boots would be soaked through. I was otherwise unprepared with no hot drink or sufficient lunch. It was cold and miserable.
4. My first job out of college was through a temp agency in Denver. My job was to alphabetize stacks and stacks of documents. I did this for a couple months before I got on a decent career track.
5. I did two weeks at the Wendy's that was/is across from Green Hills. It was disgusting for all the reasons stated in this thread.
6. I delivered pizzas and managed pizza shops through college at SU and Albany. The only real negatives were getting mugged. We would rotate deliveries between SU students and the brick city ghettos. I got mugged at one of the ghettos. To balance things out, I also got mugged up at LeMoyne. Otherwise, I made good money as a delivery person.
7. Another high school job was insulating pipes. I did much of the work at Carousel Mall, and it's interesting now, having been in that place when it was a skeleton. The worst part of this job was after you'd slap on the pipe insulation, fiberglass fibers would poof out each end. This would get in your skin and pores and was incredibly itchy. Because of this you had to wear coverage from toes to fingertips, which was awful on a hot summer day. Even worse, one time I insulated some kind of steam drum at a papermill in the north country. This equipment was running at the time, and it was one of the hottest environments I've ever experienced.
8. I bussed tables at the Shore & Country Club in Norwalk, CT, and the Old Oaks CC in Purchase, NY. It was hard, satisfying work. Occasionally, you'd encounter the douche customer. I remember at one wedding, this one guy was putzing around the buffet tables. The evening was long in the tooth, but protocol was you could not start clearing up until the guests were away from the buffet. I sort of engaged him to see if I could scoot him along. He asked me in a snide way if I could guarantee if this one snack was "any good". So, I took a bite and told him it was. He was shocked, and finally left. I walked back into the kitchen and got a huge round of applause from all the busboys, and even a nod and a wink from the GM, whom also, correctly, reprimanded me.

All this hard work has I'm sure taught me something. I have never been able to find the "job I love". I've had moments, weeks, months, or projects, where I enjoyed what I was doing, but the drudgery of inept management, or my naivete about corporate politics always seems to level off those feelings. I feel meant for something that I just haven't found.
Again, cool thread.

 

[Jeepers]

Have had a few awful jobs, but none as bad as the ones above. I do have an SU related story, though.

Was my first office job out of school. Our boss was a real passive aggressive guy. Kind of like the TPS reports boss from Office Space. He would tell us not to do something, and then you'd see him doing the very things he told us not to do. Really frustrating. Anyway, one day I bought one of those sweet SU basketball court mouse pads. I brought it to work. He comes over and is like "Oh. Did you go to Syracuse?" and I'm thinking sweet, I can talk about SU sports with someone! He slowly puts his hand on the mouse pad. Slowly sliiiiiiiiiiiiides it to the side. And says "take it home." He was such an anal jerk that we couldn't even stray from the standard ugly green mouse pads they had. I ended up quitting not much later after that.

 

[themole]

My first job out of college was working at a tiny community newspaper. I was one of a staff of five. The work wasn't bad but our boss was nuts. I mean really nuts. The sort of thing where my dad, who is rational as can be, for the first month figured I was exaggerating but then finally realized it was not a good situation. She would change her mind constantly about what she wanted, had no concept of what any of us did and therefore had absurd expectations, was extremely micromanagey, etc., But the main thing is she did weird things. Like she asked us to look at her legs and see if we thought she had vericose veins, told us not to laugh while in the office because it was a professional environment, left me a note in my paycheck once asking me to please buy a new pair of shoes, told me I had to shave every day, etc. Her longest-term employee had somehow lasted there two years, then told her he was leaving in six weeks to begin grad school. She told him he had "betrayed" her and fired him on the spot. What?? This was right before we were launching a new product and the rest of us on the staff had a combined two months of experience. His plan had been to stay long enough to help put out the first few issues, but nope, she saw to it that that didn't happen!

She often fired people after two or three days on the job. She went through employees like Kleenex. One woman she fired after a week for no given reason, so she wouldn't get sued, but the reason was that this woman she hired A) had some medical issue that required time off now and then, and we were only given one sick day a year, and the woman used hers after a couple days on the job; and B) my boss was convinced she was a lesbian because she wore a beeper. Why?? "Well all the lesbians wear beepers, its how they can tell who is who." (This was 1998)

Thankfully I got out of there after four months. I'd have up and quit but my parents really wanted me to find a new job first, which I did. Sometimes I wonder what happened to her. She eventually sold her paper and moved to Texas.

 

[tee1222]

Have had a few awful jobs, but none as bad as the ones above. I do have an SU related story, though.

Was my first office job out of school. Our boss was a real passive aggressive guy. Kind of like the TPS reports boss from Office Space. He would tell us not to do something, and then you'd see him doing the very things he told us not to do. Really frustrating. Anyway, one day I bought one of those sweet SU basketball court mouse pads. I brought it to work. He comes over and is like "Oh. Did you go to Syracuse?" and I'm thinking sweet, I can talk about SU sports with someone! He slowly puts his hand on the mouse pad. Slowly sliiiiiiiiiiiiides it to the side. And says "take it home." He was such an anal jerk that we couldn't even stray from the standard ugly green mouse pads they had. I ended up quitting not much later after that.

What a punk!
SU mousepad?
Such a petty move.

 

[themole]

That reminds me of one of my friends, whose father worked at New Process Gear, and thus he was able to get him in for temporary summer work. The rest of us would be slaving away for $8-10 an hour, and my one friend would make just an enormous amount of money for an 18 year old (e.g. upwards of $40-50 an hour if working a weekend shift)... for completely unskilled labor. We were so jealous.

Yeah -- my dad worked at Crucible for years and for a time they had summer program for children of employees. One summer during college I worked for nine weeks or so doing yard labor, painting, sweeping, that sort of thing. I sweat my ass off wearing jeans, a helmet and steel-toe boots every day in the heat and in hot steel-filled buildings (in a few you had to even wear a mask cuz of the chemicals) and made a somewhat ridiculous hourly rate compared to the minimum wage I'd gotten at the ice cream shop the year prior. We had this awesome lady in charge of us. She was union to the core. When it was break time, it was break time. Once we were sweeping a yard and she decided we were working too fast and she ordered: "JUST STAND THERE!" lol