Worst non-journo job you've ever had

I look back at it with sepia-toned fondness but my first job was brutal. I was a "sand rat" at a small aluminum and bronze foundry in the part of town where the junkyards and auto body shops were located. I was 16, all of 130 pounds, and I basically shoveled black sand all day everyday into a machine that screened the sand for the molds. I rode a bike back and forth every morning and got chased every morning by the junkyard dogs, keeping them at bay with one of those cylindrical tire pumps. I made the then-minimum wage of $2.50 an hour and got a little brown envelope every Friday with $100 minus taxes. But it was my first real job, so I loved it. The best part was that the older guys used to give me beer at the end of the shift and even passed joints to me when we occasionally went out on the truck somewhere to collect scrap aluminum. I felt like a man. I even liked filing my first income tax form the following spring.

 

The worst job I should have had -- but weaseled my way out of because of seasonal allergies that I oversold -- was corn detasseling. A bus would come to my high school and take a bunch of teenagers out to pull the tassels off the tops of corn stalks. My brother would come back every day, exhausted, with his arms sliced like he was on a massive heroin bender.

 

The dad of one of my friends owned a bunch of plum/prune orchards and he paid migrant workers $90 per crate to pick them. The crates were massive, but my friend and I, in our 12-year-old arrogance, figured the two of us could fill one per day. His dad let us do it, but said we had to do it for a full week. There was a wink and a nod to my mom that obviously said, "Let's see how these two are after a week of real work."

The two of us filled two crates in five days. It was probably 50 hours of work for $90 each. Lesson learned.

 

I worked as a counselor for an overnight summer camp for rich kids. The following happened:

* We were told that we would get one day off a week. But once we got there, we were told that didn't apply to the first week so the kids could get used to the camp and to all of the color wars. Which meant we lost out on half of our days off.

* We took a field trip to the county fair. Sounds awesome. Until we found out that us counselors, for the privilege of supervising the kids, would have to pay the $15 or so to pay our own way in. It took the threat of all of us walking off the bus and heading to the bar across the highway to spend our $15 for the camp director to relent and pay for us.

* Color wars. What a fucking nightmare. We end up having three of them in seven weeks. Kinda dilutes the impact, doncha think? They were basically the same thing each time, although the camp would be split up into different teams each time, with different team names per color war (one used Native American names, another college team names, the third was just colors).

The thing was, you had your gung-ho jackasses who kept thinking that these color wars were the be-all and end-all of their existence. There was the assistant camp director, who I got into a nice argument with because the guy wouldn't let me end a softball game with a tie and split the points. The clown wanted the kids, who were back at their bunks cooling off, to go back on the field in 90-degree heat until there was a winner. Even the camp director though his assistant had lost it.

Then there was the singing. The ridiculous singing. The gung-ho counselors would take a song, write their own lyrics to it, and make everyone practice. For hours in a day. I can't hear "Plush" today without screaming. You know how I mentioned that points get awarded? Well, the singing competition was worth more points ... Than all the other events combined. I shit you not. Your team could destroy the other team(s) in every event, but fuck up the song, and your team lost. How dumb is that?

So the gung-ho counselors made us kids and counselors sit out in an open field for hours at a time and sing. And when we sounded like crap, they would scream at us. One fellow woman counselor screamed at me for not getting the kids more excited. I pointed out how long we'd been there and that frankly, already been on one winning team, didn't give a shit if we won or lost. You'd have thought I'd slapped her in the face from her reaction. She wasn't the worst one. The worst was one guy, who, when I suggested the kids sit in the shade, said he would only allow it if the kids sang the song correctly, twice. This was who I had to work with.

I will admit, on the last night of camp, that we killed it with our own version of Dan Fogelberg's "Leader of the Band". We made the other kids and counselors on other teams cry. Still, it wasn't worth the aggravation.

* And speaking of the last night of camp we counselors decided to do something nice for the kids and have a late-night pizza party after the singing competition. Now, we had been warned by the camp directors that we were not allowed to leave camp grounds, upon penalty of firing. Which sounds silly, until they pointed out that our pay wasn't $1,000 for the summer, it was $500, plus a $500 bonus which we had to make it until the final day.. When I got home, I looked at my contract and there was no mention of half the pay being a bonus. But that night, we were told they would look for any excuse not to pay it.

So we order the pizza, and the deliveryman comes right up to the outside of the gate. Another counselor and I step out, pay him, and come back. We were literally maybe five feet from the gate for no more than a minute. We step back inside, start walking up,the hill, and the camp director comes out of a building, says that he saw us go outside the gate, we violated the rules and that we could bring the pizza to the bunks, pack up,our stuff and sleep in the nurse's station for the night. The other guy and I threw a fit, pointing out that technically, we weren't off the grounds because the parking lot was across the road. Director didn't care.

So we troop back to the bunk, tell everyone what happened, they were all shocked. My supervisor goes down to talk to the director. Meanwhile the owner shows up, all happy about camp until he saw me packing my stuff up. When I told him what happened, he rolled his eyes and shook his head. He motored down to the director on his golf cart, came back a few minutes later, and told me I could stay and that I would get my bonus. When my supervisor came back, he told me the owner ripped his director a new one and told him that, by saving the $1,000 in bonuses from me and the other counselor, that he would be costing the camp $5,000 per kid if word got out about how stupid he had acted.

Of course, we were all told that we would be invited to work for them next year. I took the letter they sent me that winter and tossed it in the trash.

 

A packing line at a ready to assemble furniture factory. It would get 115 degrees inside the factory, the line moved insanely fast and you had to pick up about 10 tiny parts with your fingers and arrange them perfectly in a box in half a second. My fat fingers could not do it. I had nightmares about assembly lines that summer.

 

I take it you were not one of the gung-ho counselors.

My worst non-journo job experience was actually still newspaper-related.

While in college, I had an overnight delivery route of a major-metro newspaper -- but only lasted a few days doing it.

A close second was the closing shift in the bakery of a major grocery store. Basically all the work from the previous two shifts that didn't get done got backed up into the third shift each day, so that, even though everybody else got to just leave at the end of their shift, all the work still had to be done by the end of the night, so the leftovers from the earlier shift were not appreciated.

After finishing whatever had been left undone by others, I still had to do the stuff that was considered part and parcel of the night shift, too. That included baking all the loaves of daily dinner-special garlic breads and bags of cookies, putting any nightly deliveries of goods into refrigerators/freezers, hand washing/scraping upwards of the 100 or so baking sheets/pans that got used throughout each day, tagging/pricing the next day's goods, tagging/bagging outdated/expired goods for donations or trashing, cleaning all the display cases, wiping down counters and doing all the janitorial-type work needed at the end of the day like mopping the floors and cleaning the restroom.

That was one job that was not at all what I had hoped and anticipated it would be when I happily took it over another job offer I'd had at the same time.

 

Removing asbestos from basements in houses at Camp Lejeune during summer break from college. Had to wear an astronaut-like suit with gas mask. During lunch break on my first day, the lady of the house served us lemonade and oh by the way had we encountered any snakes? I peeled off my suit, handed it to the supervisor and left. I don't do well with snakes.

 

I hauled hay for a day. Had nasty blisters on my hands, and it was absolutely the hardest physical work I've ever done. But it wasn't the worst job. Money was pretty good actually. My first job was at a grocery store. Hated it.

Looking back, though, the job I've had that makes my blood boil the worst was also the one I've held longest. Nine years as a call center operator taking insurance claims and compliance reports. The work is soul sucking. The operational model has you under the gun for every second. And the worst part, the part that pushed me microns from a fit of homicidal rage, was that when I quit, they didn't pay me for my unused vacation time. I gave two weeks' notice. They tell me that unless I had the vacation time scheduled and approved to immediately follow my last day, they won't pay it. I'm so much better off now, but my blood still boils thinking about that job.

 

I washed dishes at a TGI Friday's for about eight hours. I also worked retail for the Washington pro football team for about three months. Easily the worst employment experience of my life.

 

I also stuffed papers overnight at the Podunk Daily for about four months so I could move. It was boring as hell, but it could have been worse. Will never forget the colleague I had who was missing her eight front teeth. Made me appreciate what I had.

 

Excellent story. Congrats on your 999th and 1k post.

 

Worked at a dry cleaners after school, every day, Monday-Saturday, for a year and a half. No a/c, in the middle of Kansas. I would take two 32 ounce Powerades with me to work in the summer to keep hydrated during my shift. It was nice and cozy during the winter though. (It has to be said that the atmosphere was the worst part of that job. The fact that I could do my homework at the desk and interact with the people of the town was the best part of that job.)

Last year, I had a job hostessing at Applebee's. The managers couldn't schedule for shit and kept conflicting with my work schedule. I was on my feet for hours, which is not good on my back. And I didn't make enough money to justify me spending my time and energy working there. Lasted six weeks. Was told on my last night that I needed to keep good contacts there "because I might need them for a reference one day." Um, I'm 28 and I have a resume solid enough that this job doesn't even get a blip on it.