Your worst job

[Jiri Hrdina]

Flip of the other topic. What's the worst job you've had?

A couple for me come to mind:
- My first real job was telemarketing - trying to book sales appointments for a home security company. We would be given sheets out of the white pages and told to get calling. I made $6/hour and worked in a small call room with about a dozen middle aged folks all who would chain smoke the entire day
- Later that summer I changed and started telemarketing for a music studio - setting up sales appointments again. It got me out of the smoke filled room, but instead I was placed in a single room for my 7 hour shift, with a small table, copy of the white pages, a highlighter, chair, and rotary phone. Ugh.
Those were long days
- I also worked at the zoo, in the gate/gift store department during my first year of Uni. That was a cool job unless you were hung over and got placed at the weird little gift kiosk in the conservatory. It was so hot and humid and you would sit there and sweat out all your hangover stink through the day.

[undercoverbrother]

Army, which at times was also the best job I have ever had.

[Weitz]

I roofed for a summer in High School.

Pretty ####ty job I thought. Work all the nice days of the summer and off all the ####ty days of the summer. Guy I worked for hated tarping up roofs so we would start real early and finish late to get the job done in 1 day.

Only redeeming factor was a lot of the home owners were real nice and would give us things like lemonade and treats.

[Fuzz]

I'm not sure I could classify one as worst as I enjoyed most of them, but one of the worst moments was bar-tending, and being the new guy, having to unclog a toilet, and clean up the mess, in a basement night club at crush capacity, in Brighton, UK. *shudder*

[Cali Panthers Fan]

Easy: Dishwasher.

I was trying to work after school to make some extra cash of my own. I had never worked in a restaurant before and this was a pretty busy one. They knew I had no experience.

The training consisted of a 10 minute conversation with the executive chef and a 2 minute demonstration of the job. No discussion of how the restaurant operates or what my specific responsibilities were. No discussion of best practices. The work wasn't especially hard, but I often had other people yelling at me to do this or that with no clear expectation communicated to me ahead of time.

The hours were terrible. I'd start at 5 or 6 and stay until after closing, which is fine, but they would often have me do the deep cleaning and set up for the next morning which meant I would be there until 2 or 3 in the morning...on a school night. I think I was making less than $5 an hour at that time. Just not worth it.

The absolute worst part was that the menu consisted of a lot of food that had cheese melted over it or onto the plate. When you are trying to spray and scrub that off, there is a distinctly awful smell that results when lots of hot water is sprayed onto cheese stuck to a plate. It took a long time to get off, and so the smell was there for a vast majority of time on the job. I still have flashbacks to that experience.

Needless to say I didn't do it long, perhaps a few weeks. Just an awful, awful job. I feel for people who do that kind of work every single day.

[White Out 403]

I worked for a little pub in the NW for a short while. It was awful. The guy who was training me was really gross and farted a lot, and was super rude. On my first shift after closing when we were closing up he farted and loudly exclaimed "ooooh my #### stinks".

[topfiverecords]

Working for a forestry guy in BC. One part of the job was bagging pine cones at the tops of trees, so beetles wouldn't eat them. I'd climb over 100ft tall white pines, no ropes, no spikes. It was terrifying.

My buddy came with me, but I was significantly more terrified of heights than him. The thing is, the cones are at the top, which means climbing to the spindly floppy bit. I didn't like to get that high. So my boss, Rod, would say "just a little higher, Larry." And I would climb another whorl. "Nope, nothing here Rod". "Little higher, Larry, I can see them." One more whorl. The whole floppy bit starts leaning over on me and I’m sure this thing is going over any second and that’s the end of me. "Just about there, little higher!" Uggg, what the hell are these pine cones for anyways?

Rod was a crazy mother####er. He was up one tree, and climbing down and back up another tree was a good hour loop. So he had finished one tree, and saw another one about 10 feet away. He asks if there are cones in it. "Yup, Rod, that's a good one," my buddy says. So he's 100 feet up, and starts this tree sawing back and forth. Then he leaps through the air like a goddamned flying squirrel, and somehow doesn't die.

It was an incredibly physically challenging job, filthy, sticky sap, it could be cold and wet..I hated every single second of it. Rod said he never had a helper come back for another year but my buddy went back again. What a nut! I did not.

[SportsJunky]

When I was just out of high school I worked as a temp for a company that supplied guys for manual labour.

We had to take all the theatre seats off a semi truck, walk for what seemed like forever across a blocked off parking lot and into the Sunridge movie theatre. That's about as sore as I've ever been.

[pepper24]

Any job with a union.

[Nufy]

DE-bridging Fish Storage Silos...

I worked in a plant that converted offal to a powdered meal type product.

The offal (left over fish bones / skin / guts etc...) was stored in an unheated silo until i was brought into the facility via screws / conveyer.

In winter time the product would freeze and form a fish bridge over the screws so nothing would enter the plant.

Depending on the level of product you either had to drop in from above via ladder or crawl in through a hatch and physically move the product to de-bridge the silo.

Happened sometimes in summer as well

You can imagine the smell while standing knee deep in fish guts trying to move it around with gardening tools...Rakes, shovel etc...

It was before the "Dirty Jobs" show with Mike Rowe but it certainly would have qualified.

[Puppet Guy]

Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan

Easy: Dishwasher.

That was my first job. Everybody should have a job like that once in their life. It drills humility into you for good.


My worst job was at a university used bookstore. The manager had a habit of showing up hungover (or not showing up at all on account of still being drunk), and just plain couldn't manage a thing, and my dealings with the students made me wonder just how high the school's admission standards were.

[JR449]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

I'm not sure I could classify one as worst as I enjoyed most of them, but one of the worst moments was bar-tending, and being the new guy, having to unclog a toilet, and clean up the mess, in a basement night club at crush capacity, in Brighton, UK. *shudder*

Better love story than Twilight

[Scroopy Noopers]

Subway

- every customer who was a semi-regular thought they were some VIP
- Worked with a 60 year old woman who absolutely hated me for no reason, and found nothing but negatives things to say or complain about.
- that smell doesn’t come off your clothes. I still get nauseous from Subway smell 20 years later.

[Buff]

Like my best job, I was also around 15 years old. During the summer I helped out with a livestock place while people were on vacation. It was only three weeks but it was the longest three weeks of my teenage years. I can't remember what it was called exactly. Farmers brought their hogs in, we unloaded them and put them in pens, then we loaded them onto a truck that would ship them off to the place that turned them into food.

It was stinky and messy and long hours. Just simply was not for me. I couldn't cut it as a farmer.

I also worked fast food, but that was MUCH more enjoyable than working with livestock.

[Buff]

Originally Posted by Scroopy Noopers

Subway

- every customer who was a semi-regular thought they were some VIP
- Worked with a 60 year old woman who absolutely hated me for no reason, and found nothing but negatives things to say or complain about.
- that smell doesn’t come off your clothes. I still get nauseous from Subway smell 20 years later.

Fast food was not my worst work experience but that is where I found most of the worst people I ever worked with and a couple of the older people were the worst of the bunch!

[Huntingwhale]

I worked for my cousins' grandfather at a catering place after I graduated high school. The guy was a nazi. A literal German nazi. Although he wasn't old enough to have lived in Nazi Germany, he would always ''reminisce" about the Reich and what could have been. He wasn't shy about talking about it out loud since he was a pretty intimidating guy and I was too young to really stand up to him.

He was a complete POS and made coming to work painful. He would degrade employees in public in front of each others. In particular one sweet little old lady he would call her stupid and other degrading things. Literal verbal abuse. He did not take health precautions when making food. No joke, one day I saw him drop a bucket of egg salad on the ground and use a dust pan to scoop it up and then sell it afterwards. He was a complete cheapskate on top of it. Things like taking a package of pepperoni sticks that were to be sold in the shop, but to cut the bag and take out 1 single stick, rewrap the package and gather up the single sticks to make a full package.

He was also scamming me from my paycheck. I was making $7/hour and getting something like 50% net pay from my paycheck, the rest going to ''taxes'' on his handwritten paystub that that no breakdown of deductions. Just gross total - tax = net pay. I only worked there for 3 months but never got a tax form to submit with my T4.

After I quit he must have forgotten to deduct his usual 50% from my paystub, only taking off what looked like the correct amount. He actually wrote me a handwritten letter (not even a phone call), asking me to send him the money. I ignored it and he wrote me another letter a couple weeks later asking again.

#### that guy so bad. I literally wanted to beat his ass one day, but the only thing stopping me was that he was my cousins' grandfather and I love them so I held back. But it was a good day when I gave my 1 day notice and walked out. Was an even better day when I found out his business went under a couple years after I left. I saw him at a couple family events years after but we just gave each other the stink eye and never spoke.

[wwkayaker]

Roofing. To this day, the smell of asphalt makes me feel anxious. We worked long days which were tough. The worst day was a 19 hour day in 39C and I lost 16lbs. The routine my mom and I had was pretty awesome though. When I got home, she had a 2 litre jug of cold juice for me. I would drink this, go shower, come back to the kitchen and she would have a second pitcher ready for me. That job had some entertaining moments. One roof we did required us to get an aluminum boat and a dozen toilets off the roof. Another time, I fell through a roof into a ladies change room. The drinking was horrible though.

[Ahuch]

No brainer, Superstore. Pretty self explanatory, lol.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Scroopy Noopers

Subway

- every customer who was a semi-regular thought they were some VIP
- Worked with a 60 year old woman who absolutely hated me for no reason, and found nothing but negatives things to say or complain about.
- that smell doesn’t come off your clothes. I still get nauseous from Subway smell 20 years later.

I've never worked a Subway, but can't stand that bread smell. It's so bad. That must have been traumatizing.

[habernac]

Had a job recharging fire extinguishers. The water ones were fine, but the powder ones.... we had crappy PPE and the dust got everywhere.