Worst non-journo job you've ever had

I worked at a Target snack bar for about a month in high school because I was trying to get in a classmate's pants.
My "boss" was the biggest fkin burnout I have ever worked with. Just a total waste of carbon.
When I finally quit he told me it would "upset my references."
I laughed and walked out of the store.

 

Shoving Popsicle sticks into the ground every 15 feet, up the side of a hill, at a Christmas tree farm.

Lasted one day. My back (now complete with Titanium and screws) couldn't take it.

 

Honestly can't say I've ever had a bad job. I have had bad bosses, though. One of them is infamous on this board.

I guess the worst of the good jobs I've had, though, was driving truck for the paper while I was in college. It was only bad in the dead of winter. Otherwise it was a cool job. You're out on your own in a van or a Chevy Suburban dropping papers off at carriers' houses and stores. The job paid a prescribed amount of hours, and you could finish in less time and still get the full pay.

 

In high school and college, I spent three summers installing underground sprinklers. Minimum wage. It was brutally hot, and you had to wear jeans because you spent so much time kneeling in the mud. Also couldn't wear gloves because in order to get the pipes to fit together at every elbow, you had to use glue (or some super solvent) and it was too delicate to perform properly unless you could feel the pipes. So you'd get glue, inevitably, smeared on your hands. And then dirt would get stuck to the glue. It was such powerful shit, is have to scrape it off with a knife every night. Some nights, after 8-10 hour days in the sun, I just wouldn't have the energy to spend an hour over the sink scraping off glue/dirt bits.

Didn't get a lot of dates those three summers. An important experience though. A good lesson on how hard it is to make a living working with your hands, and how I wanted something better.

 

For a week during winter break one year, I had to put white stickers over the holes in three-hole punch paper. They were military documents that were being copied on to CDs and if the holes weren't covered, there would be shadows on the images.

 

Night manager at Long John Silver's told high school me, after a few weeks on the job, that I'd never amount to anything if I didn't improve my work ethic. Luckily, my inability to properly clean the grease traps didn't hamper my future prospects.

 

Overnight stock at a super market. It was OK until they stuck me in frozen foods. After day one, my hands were completely numb and I took winter gloves to work from then on. It was tolerable for the 70 cent/hr extra I was getting for working overnight.
And then about three months in came the word of cutbacks and I got shoved off on a day-side gig in the seafood section.
And then they started cutting back everyone's hours. I went from a steady 40 hr/week to 15-20 if I was lucky. Some guys were dropped to 0. They weren't 'fired' or anything, they were just never given any shifts from week to week until they got the hint that the company didn't want them around.
I left there about a month later.
It paid more than the TV gig I landed a couple months later though.

 

One day cleaning up an oil spill. Pay was good. Sunburn and oil stuck on the skin not so much. Still it was a good experience hanging out with a bunch of guys who felt like they hit the lottery, felt like I was in the middle of a Steinbeck novel.

 

I hauled hay for one day, and later that night the doc in the emergency room confirmed I had a grass allergy.

 

Cleared brush and rocks, up to and including mini-boulders, from hiking trails and trout streams in Poconos for a resort. Water was always cold. real, real cold. Lots of fresh air for 1966 minimum wage, though/

 

Hauling hay sucks without an allergy.

 

I delivered office furniture for a summer. It paid well for a summer job and wasn't terrible other than the times where something was too big for an elevator and you had to carry it up an insane amount of stairs. There was only one office building where this was the case, but it had just opened that summer and we had deliveries there every other day. The building had seven floors and the stairway was not air conditioned, which makes things even more extreme in Northern California.