Worst job you ever had

As a teenager, I worked on a shrimp boat and later bailed hay. The only advantage to shrimping was that you worked all night and slept all day, leaving home for 3 week stints off Texas and Louisiana. I was the only 14-year-old with rolls of money in my pockets, but my hands still bear the scars from it. Bailing hay is hot, nasty work roasting under the sun.

Another job I had as a young'n was as a bagger at a Food World. Had to clean up a bathroom where some animal had smeared poo on the mirrors and the walls. Yes, smeared.

When I was in the military, I had to work in the scullery, which is the dishwashing compartment. The industrial-sized dishwasher steamed the entire compartment with walls of stainless steel and the temperature hovered in the 110-degree range. Our cooks on my ship were so incompetent they would burn dishes on the big pans so badly you needed a needle gun to get the carbon crust off them. Another fun job was needle-gunning the deck to break up non-skid coating so the area could be sanded down to bare metal and a new non-skid layer applied.

In college, I worked at a rental car agency cleaning cars. The cars would come back trashed, one after a Fraternal Order of Police convention filled to the trunk sills with empty, smelly beer cans. Once, I had to turn around (completely clean) 40 cars in five hours.

But yet, the life of a small-town sports editor isn't much better.

 

I, too, started out as a bagger at Winn-Dixie. And the best part was getting the carts because it meant not having to mess with mean-ass customers. One of my shifts was almost always the 6 a.m. - 2 p.m. Sunday shift and the people who shop at Winn-Dixie during those hours aren't always so pleasant.

Plus, the last minor -- who could work until 10:30 p.m. -- had restroom duty. Women are nasty.

I was thankful for my $0.10 raise to become a stock boy, which wasn't bad unless you got stuck with the soup aisle (and, I'm sure, baby food). No way could you hit the quota during that shift.

A manual labor job I enjoyed was my two summers for my municipal parks and rec department in Florida before college and following freshman year. Mindless 7 a.m. - 3 p.m. labor meant you could pretty much go without sleep, get a nice tan, tone up, and still go to the beach after the shift. And because most of the lifers there had DUIs, I was given keys to city trucks.

The fun: lining the baseball/softball fields; emptying trash barrels at each city park (simple, and a lot of driving). The not so good: cutting and poisoning within seconds the Brazilian pepper trees, and the seemingly endless weed eating.

 

None of the jobs I've worked were that bad in comparison:

- Dishwasher/busboy at a Friendly's restaurant. People I worked with were pretty cool and it didn't suck as bad as some of the other dishwashing horror stories on here.

- Cashier at Jamesway. This was back in the mid-late 80s, summer before senior year in high school, pre-barcode scanner, where you had to enter all the sku numbers by hand. Never had to deal with a jackass customer. Only time it got embarrassing was when I was out to eat one night with my dad and younger brother after working a day shift and while we're waiting in line for our table a family comes in and the little kid says "that's the cashier from Jamesway"

- Dietary aide at a nursing home. Just had to take dinner orders from the old people and bring them their trays and helping to clean the dining room afterwords. No big deal or problems. Just needed to have patience to deal with the elderly.

- Computer lab tech in college. This was in 88-89 and I just had to sit in the lab make sure nobody acted up, that the computers worked properly (assisting anyone who had a problem) and making sure the dot-matrix printers didn't jam and were loaded properly. Job came in handy because one professor always loaded his exams onto the network. One time I discovered he loaded the final for a class onto the network the day before the exam. That night the entire class had a group study session that night.

- Substitute teacher. Just had to deal with obnoxious junior high and high school kids.

 

My worst job was working in a Safeway when in high school. I was a stocker, but at the lowest level. I did the bread and dairy.

The bad part was my job was also to clean up any of the messes. And the stockers who thought they were hot shit, loved to shovel the baby food jars in, and if a couple fell and broke, they would just call me and smirk while I mopped up their mess.

I worked there for six months and did not change the mop water once, though.

 

One hasn't lived until working at the front desk of a hotel. God-awful, and you have absolutely no control over anything.

Had a woman come in one night, paid cash for a room so she could "get some sleep" before driving to the beach.
An hour later, she came and checked out.

Three days later, same thing. And she didn't remember that I was the one who assisted her the first time.
Cops were notified, and she was busted for prostitution.

And no, she wasn't a 6.

When I first started in the biz, I was unloading FedEx trucks from 4:30-8 Tuesday-Saturday mornings and pulling phone duty at my rag from 7-midnight those same nights, making $9/hour for FedEx and minimum wage at my rag.

Get home from FedEx just as the Mrs. was heading out the door for work, and it was myself and our newborn until she got home.

Still not sure how I continued to pull those crazy hours for more than 10 months with so little sleep until I was able to quit at FedEx when I started picking up regular freelance assignments at my rag.

 

Bailing hay sucks. God it sucks.
I did that a few times. Often, as the smallest, shortest guy, I got stuck in the barn loft.
Fuck I hated that work.

 

I didn't mind front desk. At least there, everyone left you alone.

At one point, the managers — who I'm pretty sure were running a front for something, because we had packages coming in from Pakistan every week that were addressed to all sorts of "businesses" I'd never heard of — decided to "promote" me upstairs to the sales department, where I was ordered to make 100 cold calls a day. Now that was soul-sucking. I begged them to send me back downstairs.

My worst front-desk story:

Around 1 a.m. one night, I got a call from someone purporting to be a truck driver. He gave me a convoluted story about his truck catching fire, needing a room for the night, losing his wallet, etc., etc. Sounded like bullshit, but we had an agreement with some of the big transport companies giving them cheap rooms and their drivers came in fairly often so I didn't protest too much.

When he showed up, his hand was all burnt and he smelled horrible. He had $50 in cash so I found a discount code to give him a room at that rate. He asked me if I could open the phone lines — this was back in the days when you could only make local calls for free — so he could make some calls and get back on the road quickly. I obliged.

My shift ended at 7 a.m. and I went home. Showed up for work the next day to find a shitstorm. Apparently this guy had racked up a couple hundred dollars in phone charges and he still hadn't checked out. But nobody could find him. Dozens of papers strewn out all over the bed and the room. The truck company he had told me he worked for was fictitious.

They locked out his room card so he couldn't get back in, but as far as I know, he never did show up again. After two days of no activity, they finally cleaned out his room. I have no idea who that guy was or what the hell he was doing. Or how he burnt his hand. He paid his $50, so if he was trying to scam us, he didn't do that good a job. Weirdest damn situation I ever dealt with at the hotel.

 

It was dark and I needed the money.
'Nuff said.

 

My brother owns a floor-covering business (carpet, tile, hardwood, et cetera) and I worked for him off and on every summer from the time I was 13 until after I graduated college.

The last time I worked for him he got a bid on a new apartment complex — eight apartments in each unit, eight units — three hours away from home so we stayed in a camper at a campsite.

Four grown guys in a camper after working 12 hour days in the summer in Mississippi is not fun at all.

I arrived to the site about a week after the rest of the guys. I pull up to the camper after they had finished for the day all chipper and ready to go to work.

No one was talking. They were just sitting around drinking beer, occasionally rubbing their hands, which were already beat up from handling tile all day.

That should have been a sign.

Well, I go into the camper and realize that the bossman, my brother, has the only bed in the joint. One guy has already claimed the sleeper sofa, another said he'd sleep on the floor (curled up like a pretzel) on an air mattress in the kitchen and I got the kitchen table bed, which was about four-feet of stretching out room (so, I was too curled up like a pretzel).

There was no hot water in the camper, so after working 12 hours in the Mississippi heat we came "home" to a cold shower — which really felt good most days.

The apartments were newly built so there was no electricity — except for a plug coming off a pole, yet and certainly no air conditioning.

We'd would work 7 a.m. to 7:30 or 8 in the evening each day on our hands and knees laying or grouting tile.

The worst was stocking the units with the mortar and tile, which we did for a full day, carrying boxes of tile that weighed 50 or 60 pounds ( I can't even remember how many) to every apartment — four upstairs and four downstairs.

After my first day on the job site, I realized why everyone was in such a foul mood when I pulled up. It was an absolutely hard way to make a living and all you wanted to do after getting done was have a beer and rest in silence. Certainly, not talk to the guys you just spent the whole day with. Hell, nothing changed. You had all been through the same shit.

There was not a part of my body that didn't ache. At night, I shit you not, we'd put Preparation H on our hands to soothe the cuts left by the tile throughout our day.

I thought they were joking when they brought it out, but I bought into the idea after day two.

I should also add that this job was the first and only time me and my brother (who is nine years older than me) ever came close to an actual fight. Not just punch each other in the arm or push kind of thing, but wanting to bust each other in the head with a piece of tile kind of thing.

It was the conditions and work I know.

Man, it was tough.

Anyways, me and my brother were eating at our parents house after we had gotten back and the apartment job came up.

I said, "I'm never working for him (my brother) again."

"Why, was he mean to you?," his wife asked.

"No, he doesn't pay enough and there is easier ways to make money," I said.

"Good, you went to college for a reason," he said.

Six years later and I've never worked for him again, and he's never asked me to.

 

My parents have been working on a golf course since I was 3. I've done everything there is to do on a golf course from working the register to picking the range (which includes walking around and hand shagging balls in the deep grass) to mowing and laying irrigation. Led me to believe that school was a terrific option for me.

Worst non-family job I've had was working as a graphic designer for a software company. Sounds okay, right? My direct supervisor was gone my first week on the job, leaving me very little direction of what she wanted me to work on while she was gone. She comes back, rips apart the work and then unceremoniously fires me after less than 2 weeks on the job because "I wasn't working fast enough." I had already had a job in the journalism industry, so working on deadlines isn't a problem for me. Apparently, she wanted me to be able to read her mind and know when she wanted things to be done without telling me. Aside from the fact that it was the first (and only) time I've been fired, I'm not sad at all to be leaving a job where they treat their employees like that.

Honestly, most of my jobs have been from great to okay. Even working double shifts waitressing wasn't that bad, because I liked my co-workers and my bosses were great.

 

My worst job was between SID gigs when I worked for my brother's laundry company that serviced nursing homes. Seven days a week, 12 hours a day. The items would come in at one end of the building and be sorted out. They would come across adult diapers with massive amounts of excrement. I wouldn't even go to that part of the building.

I had to oversee the workers, who all spoke Spanish and little English and tried to get away with anything they could.

We washed personal items for the nursing homes guests so we had three people hanging clothes all day. For three weeks, people would just quit without saying goodbye. One girl was doing a good job, took a break to go to the bathroom and was later spotted driving away. I ended up having to fill in this department for about a month. Awful work.

If my brother wanted somebody let go, he made me do it.

I'd tell you more, but my anxiety is coming back. I need to call my therapist.

 

The one thing you realize about working low-level jobs is that no matter the job, there is always a "hierarchy," - it's fun to observe in a detached way.