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What's the worst job you've ever had? (4 Viewers)

Worked a small stint during college at a credit card payment processing center. Basically running envelopes through a machine and taking the check/statement out. Holy #### was it boring. I would get all excited when someone would staple their check to the statement, or send cash, or anything to break up the monotony.

 
Worked a small stint during college at a credit card payment processing center. Basically running envelopes through a machine and taking the check/statement out. Holy #### was it boring. I would get all excited when someone would staple their check to the statement, or send cash, or anything to break up the monotony.
:lmao:

Classic

 
Air Quality testing up in the smokestacks at powerplants. Nothing better than sitting a couple hundred feet up on the catwalks of a stack right on the Ohio River in West Virginia. In January. For 16 or more hours at a stretch.

Well, except for having to climb down via ladder when the stupid stack elevator malfunctioned.

 
i worked at a farm where i ran a bobcat to scoop up cow manure in a fenced in area they ran the cows into before they brought them in to the barn and the crap got so thick that was the best way to get it out of there that was not a lot of fun and i also washed parts in a tool and die shop in a wash tank and every day even if you wore the gloves they gave you my arms were all red and swollen up from the solvent that was a doosie but you have to do what you have to do to keep food on the table and the mortgage paid that to the bank brohans
Dude, you got to drive a Bobcat!
brohan trust me driving that baby was pretty sweet but hey when you are using it like a glorified honey wagon it sort of takes a little bit of the shine off if you know what i mean take that to the bank brohan
Wasn't my job - I didn't get paid to do chores - but in h.s. I shoveled #### every week for six horses. By hand, pitchfork & shovel, pickax in the winter when the piss froze solid. Bobcat would have been a sweet gig. :lol:
bromigo there will be a lot of stuff in this thread but i am not sure many will get close to swinging a pick at frozen pee take that to the bank

 
Worked at a ice factory that made and bagged those bags of party ice you buy at grocery stores.

Worked there over the winter and you were either outside, in the factory part which was open air or in an ice truck.

Oh yeah, never use that stuff in your drink. Not the most hygienic of places.

 
We've got it pretty damn easy. My dad and a couple of uncles went out to central Nebraska a couple of Summers and threw hay bales. Stayed in the old Army barracks. $ .01 per bale and dad made enough to buy a car. That's a lot of bales. He could only do that because his younger sisters were old enough to milk the cows while he was gone.

No wonder he could still kick my ### at 70 years old.

 
Air Quality testing up in the smokestacks at powerplants. Nothing better than sitting a couple hundred feet up on the catwalks of a stack right on the Ohio River in West Virginia. In January. For 16 or more hours at a stretch.

Well, except for having to climb down via ladder when the stupid stack elevator malfunctioned.
I did this kind of work for about four years. It wasn't the worst job that I had, in fact it was pretty interesting and involved a lot of travel, I was a project manager, and one of my jobs was the US Steel coke works in Gary, Indiana.

Now, the people that worked at that place every day?...... Some of the most bitter people I've ever met.

 
Trapping and skinning nutria for $2 a pelt.
Kept me warm when I was a kid, saved me from death once. God Bless you sir. :bowtie:
Seriously?
I'm black and from Detroit, a relatively marshy and cold place. If your first job was molding government cheese, I would have said the same thing.
You owned something made of nutria and wore it? That's awesome.
Remember the hat Elaine bought in battery park? Negligible. :shrug:

 
Worst job after graduating college? Gotta be New Years Day inventory at the Michigan Liivestock Excgange.

All audited companies have to conduct an inventory at YE observed by their outside auditors. I started out my career with PwC (nee Coopers. & Lybrand), and junior associates got last pick. Couple samples: climbing to the top of a grain elevator to drop a weighted tape measure. Doesn't sound bad, right? January 1. 20 below wind chill. Repeat six times.

ETA: I'll try to explain how we did an inventory of the livestock...but I don't think I can articulate it. They ran the herd down a shoot, and I looked through a site glass that was half covered up. Every other second the half covered up part lifted up and I'd have to write down how many heifers or pigs were in view. When I got done I added them up and ran an algorithm that calculated the estimated number that had just filed past.

TL;DR - animals & manure.

 
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We've got it pretty damn easy. My dad and a couple of uncles went out to central Nebraska a couple of Summers and threw hay bales. Stayed in the old Army barracks. $ .01 per bale and dad made enough to buy a car. That's a lot of bales. He could only do that because his younger sisters were old enough to milk the cows while he was gone.

No wonder he could still kick my ### at 70 years old.
Baling hay is hard ### work but that's a job you can have fun doing. You come back for fall practice all blown up, and the townie sissies want to know what gym you were at all summer.

 
Air Quality testing up in the smokestacks at powerplants. Nothing better than sitting a couple hundred feet up on the catwalks of a stack right on the Ohio River in West Virginia. In January. For 16 or more hours at a stretch.

Well, except for having to climb down via ladder when the stupid stack elevator malfunctioned.
I did this kind of work for about four years. It wasn't the worst job that I had, in fact it was pretty interesting and involved a lot of travel, I was a project manager, and one of my jobs was the US Steel coke works in Gary, Indiana.Now, the people that worked at that place every day?...... Some of the most bitter people I've ever met.
It was definitely interesting, and I vividly remember things like amusing ourselves by flinging fudge stripe cookies from up on the stack, watching some dude spend all day in a tree stand in a field across from the plant, intently staring at the same patch of land while a veritable parade of deer walked behind him out of is sight, but not ours, "accidentally" knocking the grounding cable of the pitot probe loose so the guy working the probe would get a massive static shock...

But...the hours and the driving sucked, the towns around the power plants were some of the most depressing sites ever, and spending 2 of the 3 days we averaged off a week hacking like a carton a day smoker and clearing up just in time to go to the next plant got old quick. I fulfilled a 6 month contract, and got out for the "healthier" environs of a gravure printing, chemical etching/plating operation.

Now that I think about it, I dumped a beaker of hexavalent chrome in my lap at that job, and the environmental testing still came to mind first as my "worst" job. Probably because I got to zip around the warehouse on a three-wheel forklift to pitch in if the dock guy was absent.

If I ever hit the Powerball, I will buy a forklift and just drive around my neighborhood picking #### up all day.

 
Roofing. Worst job ever. Work was hot and nasty.
I roofed for two years before college. My first day, I was helping put down felt on a 3 story apartment complex. Eventually, I got used to the heights.

The guy I worked for had few rental houses. One August afternoon (when it was too hot to roof), he had us remove sod in the front yard at one of the houses. The sod was heavy and we had to cradle it against our body. By the time we were done, the front of my pants were full of mud.

 
Roofing. Worst job ever. Work was hot and nasty.
I roofed for two years before college. My first day, I was helping put down felt on a 3 story apartment complex. Eventually, I got used to the heights.

The guy I worked for had few rental houses. One August afternoon (when it was too hot to roof), he had us remove sod in the front yard at one of the houses. The sod was heavy and we had to cradle it against our body. By the time we were done, the front of my pants were full of mud.
Oh no, then what? :o

 
Roofing. Worst job ever. Work was hot and nasty.
I roofed for two years before college. My first day, I was helping put down felt on a 3 story apartment complex. Eventually, I got used to the heights.The guy I worked for had few rental houses. One August afternoon (when it was too hot to roof), he had us remove sod in the front yard at one of the houses. The sod was heavy and we had to cradle it against our body. By the time we were done, the front of my pants were full of mud.
Oh no, then what? :o
My thoughts as well. Mud oh the horror

 
Rental TV Delivery guy in college around 1980. We had a really ####ty van in our fleet. It died on me while on the 605. I glided onto the off ramp right into the 76 station and left the van there.

 
I was unemployed during the beginning of the worst part of the recession. Back when the DOW would drop like 300 points a day. Summer of 2008 I believe. I applied for hundreds of jobs, rarely even got a "no thank you" e-mail. I registered with a temp agency and they would find little jobs for me between 1-4 days long. Mostly office stuff.

This one job was for a medical supply company. They made catheters and wheelchairs and random stuff like that. It was a big time of year for them as they were finalizing their annual catalog with all of their new products, prices, etc. I didn't know what the job was, just knew it was expected to take 5 days, and that was fine by me.

I turn up, and the task is quickly explained to me. It was pretty simple. The catalog was pretty much done, but when they put it together, they didn't keep track of what was on each page. They had a table of contents, but it was such a big ####### thing, they needed an index too. So the lady I worked for had gone home one day (or maybe it took her several days, I don't know) with a tape recorder, and went through the magazine page by page, and just said what was on each page. And she couldn't just say "Foley catheter" or whatever, she had to say it in every way that someone might look for it in the index.

So for example, for one product, she'd say something like this:

"Page 54:

Catheters

Foley catheter

Catheter comma Foley"

"Page 54:

Stethescope

Red Stethescope

Stethescope comma red"

My job was to LISTEN to this ####### tape, and enter what she said into Excel. They would use what I typed into Excel to create the index. Why she couldn't just have gone through the magazine and typed it was she went instead of recording it I will never know, but I guess I just should've been happy that she didn't since it gave me some work.

They gave my these headphones to listen attached to an old tape recorder, and I mean a TAPE recorder. It was connected to a foot pedal so if I had to pause or go back if she was talking too fast, I could just do it...with my foot. The headphones they gave me were from like 1983, the ones with the big black foam balls over your years, and I couldn't change them out for post-industrial revolution headphones because they were connected directly into the ancient tape recorder.

It took me five days.

The worst thing about it was that not only was it incredibly boring, but it was structured in such a way that I had to actually pay attention. I had to type every word that she said. I couldn't zone out. I couldn't even listen to a podcast or some music, for obvious reasons. It required 100% of my attention, but less than 1% of my brain.

The only interruptions in the monotony were when something different would happen on the recording. This one time, someone knocked on her door, and her dogs went nuts, and she had to calm them down and answer the door. It was a delivery of some kind, she didn't turn off the recorder. This other time she was yelling at her kids. It was about something at school, I forget, but at the time, it was incredibly interesting because it was different.

I didn't talk to anyone the whole time. I just sat there, with my foot on the ####### foot pedal, typing things into the spreadsheet. I had no idea how much I had left to go at any point.

I can't even write about it any more.

 
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Summer job during college when I came back home. One of my baseball teammates was pretty high up at a construction/plumbing company who got me the job. Promised me I'd make thousands. My position was essentially a canvasser, where I was suppose to wear nice clothes and deliver "coupons" door to door to the neighbors around a job site - and at any chance talk to the homeowner about some work that needed to be done and set up an appointment with our sales guy (and if he sold I'd get a commission). My team was supposed to be an older guy who knew the ropes and two hot chicks.

Unfortunately, first day on the job my "buddy" tells me te two hot chicks took jobs elsewhere. Two days into the job the "sales guru" who was supposed to be showing me the ropes got fired for leaving work early. Needless to say I had no clue what I was doing and spent my days getting doors shut slammed in my face.

It also grew worse because the company was actually doing well and was swamped with major jobs. So, on the occasion id get a potential customer, the sales guy would blow off the call screwing me on the commission. The owner of the company realized my position was essentially so instead of letting me go he basically made me the workers' ##### for the second half of the summer at just over minimum wage (what I was making before sans the decent commission). So, I spent several weeks being bossed around by plumbers and maintenance dudes and listen to then screw people over.

But none of that was nearly as bad as one of the last weeks I spent there. We had a huge rainstorm one weejebd which caused some flooding. This flooding caused a sewer to back up and exploded into a bank. Talking something out of a movie where the bank toilets turned into feces volcanoes and the entire inside of the bank, including the vault, was covered in feces.

Company got hired for emergency clean up. I was sent. I spent the next week, wearing clothing completely lacking in protecting my health, assigned the job of jabbing at feces covered carpet with a pick to try to pry up the carpet. I got sprayed several times. Vomited at least once a day. Ruined my only ever pair of work boots I've ever owned.

So my worst job ever is the time I was paid like seven dollars an hour for an entire week to literally clean #### up.

 
The worst thing about it was that not only was it incredibly boring, but it was structured in such a way that I had to actually pay attention. I had to type every word that she said. I couldn't zone out. I couldn't even listen to a podcast or some music, for obvious reasons. It required 100% of my attention, but less than 1% of my brain.

The only interruptions in the monotony were when something different would happen on the recording. This one time, someone knocked on her door, and her dogs went nuts, and she had to calm them down and answer the door. It was a delivery of some kind, she didn't turn off the recorder. This other time she was yelling at her kids. It was about something at school, I forget, but at the time, it was incredibly interesting because it was different.

I didn't talk to anyone the whole time. I just sat there, with my foot on the ####### foot pedal, typing things into the spreadsheet. I had no idea how much I had left to go at any point.

I can't even write about it any more.
:lmao:

I do voiceovers and some of it can be very boring. Can't believe they left that stuff in the recording.

 
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Air Quality testing up in the smokestacks at powerplants. Nothing better than sitting a couple hundred feet up on the catwalks of a stack right on the Ohio River in West Virginia. In January. For 16 or more hours at a stretch.

Well, except for having to climb down via ladder when the stupid stack elevator malfunctioned.
We've got it pretty damn easy. My dad and a couple of uncles went out to central Nebraska a couple of Summers and threw hay bales. Stayed in the old Army barracks. $ .01 per bale and dad made enough to buy a car. That's a lot of bales. He could only do that because his younger sisters were old enough to milk the cows while he was gone.

No wonder he could still kick my ### at 70 years old.
My father worked at a power plant with smoke stacks tall enough that they required blinking lights for low flying aircraft. Every several months, the bulbs would need changed. I don't remember how tall he said the stacks were, but it was about a three hour climb. Every so often, there was a 3'x3' landing off the side of the ladder that you could step off onto to rest.

Climb three hours up, take two minutes to change a light bulb, climb back down.

 
Roofing. Worst job ever. Work was hot and nasty.
I roofed for two years before college. My first day, I was helping put down felt on a 3 story apartment complex. Eventually, I got used to the heights.The guy I worked for had few rental houses. One August afternoon (when it was too hot to roof), he had us remove sod in the front yard at one of the houses. The sod was heavy and we had to cradle it against our body. By the time we were done, the front of my pants were full of mud.
Oh no, then what? :o
My thoughts as well. Mud oh the horror
Yeah, I know. I didn't get cows blood on my clothes, that would have been really bad.

 
My first job was working in my dad's sawmill. At 10 I was mostly sweeping floors and cleaning up sawdust that the vacuum system didn't catch. By 12 I was driving a hi-lo (and tipped over a forklift when I was 14 :lol: ). Mostly did bustass grunt work - lots of heavy lifting of 8x8 cants - until I became a headsawyer at 17, a skill learned from a woman who had been doing it for 40 years. Lots of stitches, bruises, broken wrist and severed finger (reattached) along the way.

With that as a first gig, I was pretty much ready for anything life threw my way. You can put up with anything in the short term if it means putting food on the table. Plus ####ty jobs are great motivators to succeed - when you've had to do the worst to survive, you'll do whatever it takes to ensure you never have to take a job like that again.

 
We've got it pretty damn easy. My dad and a couple of uncles went out to central Nebraska a couple of Summers and threw hay bales. Stayed in the old Army barracks. $ .01 per bale and dad made enough to buy a car. That's a lot of bales. He could only do that because his younger sisters were old enough to milk the cows while he was gone.

No wonder he could still kick my ### at 70 years old.
Baling hay is hard ### work but that's a job you can have fun doing. You come back for fall practice all blown up, and the townie sissies want to know what gym you were at all summer.
exactamundo brohans you just nailed it i got a penny a bale to i guess that was the standard but hey back in the day if you worked a few days and got twenty bucks that was a hell of a lot of baseball cards take that to the bank brohans

 
Oh, I also "cut" tobacco one year. You cut 6 tobacco plants and place them on a stick that has a sharp cap that use over and over again. The tobacco "stains" that I got on my hands made me so sick. The next day we hung the tobacco plants in a barn full of wasps and assorted spiders. I was 13 at the time standing on 4" beams and easily could have fell 40 feet to the floor. Where was OSHA?

 
Oh, I also "cut" tobacco one year. You cut 6 tobacco plants and place them on a stick that has a sharp cap that use over and over again. The tobacco "stains" that I got on my hands made me so sick. The next day we hung the tobacco plants in a barn full of wasps and assorted spiders. I was 13 at the time standing on 4" beams and easily could have fell 40 feet to the floor. Where was OSHA?
Haha, I was going to comment on that. I didn't live on a farm, but grew up in an ag community so did a bunch of odd jobs on farms. Cleaning out hog farrowing barns with #### dust so bad an OSHA inspector would have had a heart attack. No masks and just regular work clothes other than boots because you walked through 6" of hog #### all day.

Castrating hogs was also not a lot of fun. Ear piercing squeals. Poor guys.

It did give me incentive to do well in school and get a white-collar job.

 
a long time before i was on this rock southwest wisco used to have major tobbaco farming because of the up and down terrain and the mist would roll up the coulees and so on which made for great leaves and they would use them for the outside wrappers of cigars but anyhow they used to depend on the cash crop so much that they would shut down schools on a dime when it was time to harvest and rack and all that not really related to a job but hey there is your history lesson of the day brought to you by the old swcer take that to the bank brohans

 
a long time before i was on this rock southwest wisco used to have major tobbaco farming because of the up and down terrain and the mist would roll up the coulees and so on which made for great leaves and they would use them for the outside wrappers of cigars but anyhow they used to depend on the cash crop so much that they would shut down schools on a dime when it was time to harvest and rack and all that not really related to a job but hey there is your history lesson of the day brought to you by the old swcer take that to the bank brohans
What part of Wisconsin you in GB?
 
I pulled dead animals out of sewers and picked up road kill when i worked for my dad.

i loved that job

 
Maintenance at a community pool including cleaning toilets and whatever things floated in the pool.

Drove van load of dirty diapers from Chicago to Cincy in the summer.

Bought feminine products by the cart load for market research.

At my last company, I didn't do this, but I managed guys who did hands-on demonstration of erection devices on men who needed such devices.

 
Corn detastling. You just walk down row after row of corn pulling off the tops. I mean WTF dont they make machines that do this? Back in the day it was all young kids. I suppose I was 13 or 14. I only lasted a few weeks.
:goodposting: Did this the summer I was 14.. the worst was when you were in the field and the bleeping farmers decided NOW was the time to start up the watering.. Trouncing through mud in 90 degree hot humid weather was NOT fun..

Not to mention that you couldn't wear shorts or short sleeve shirts as the Corn stalk leaves would slice you like a paper cut.. :rant:

 
Corn detastling. You just walk down row after row of corn pulling off the tops. I mean WTF dont they make machines that do this? Back in the day it was all young kids. I suppose I was 13 or 14. I only lasted a few weeks.
:goodposting: Did this the summer I was 14.. the worst was when you were in the field and the bleeping farmers decided NOW was the time to start up the watering.. Trouncing through mud in 90 degree hot humid weather was NOT fun..

Not to mention that you couldn't wear shorts or short sleeve shirts as the Corn stalk leaves would slice you like a paper cut.. :rant:
The shark move was to walk barefoot.

 
Besides Corn De-tasling .. When I was 16 I worked at a Granola Bar factory for a month or so.. Started out on the sorting line where you grabbed the granola bars off the assembly line and put them in the boxes.. Very boring so when I was given the chance to "move up" and make the bars I jumped at the chance.. WRONG move.

I was responsible for making the chewy granola bars which required measuring out the flour from 50# bags and also measuring out the sugar and marshmallows from large boxes/bags.. There was no way to do this without causing a dust storm..

I remember going out for break with a friend that was still on the line and he called my the Pillsbury dough boy.. Took a look in the mirror and I was covered in white dust from head to toe. :lmao:

walked in the door after finishing the night shift and my Mom about lost it laughing at me.. :bag:

 
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While a plumber's helper isn't always a horrible job, it was when I worked with a certain mechanic who had a route in some really bad parts of Brooklyn in the early 80's. Fixing sinks and toilets in roach infested apartments wasn't fun. The worst was when we spent a good part of the day working in the bathroom of what was a heroin shooting gallery. Any time I had to go to the truck for something, I'd have to carry a pipe wrench in case someone started something, mostly outside since everyone inside was just laying around wasted out of their minds. That was about as nervous as I ever was on the job although there were plenty of other bad situations.

 
Oh, I also "cut" tobacco one year. You cut 6 tobacco plants and place them on a stick that has a sharp cap that use over and over again. The tobacco "stains" that I got on my hands made me so sick. The next day we hung the tobacco plants in a barn full of wasps and assorted spiders. I was 13 at the time standing on 4" beams and easily could have fell 40 feet to the floor. Where was OSHA?
I was coming in to post the same thing. Handling that crap was enough to keep me from ever having the first cigarette. Good money back in the day, though. Straddling those beams in that barn to hang those racks was miserable.

Had a friend in college who was offered (and didn't take, obviously) a job as a field tester for a company that made land mines. I **** you not.

 
1. Fish cannery in Alaska. It was a hard enough job normally with 100-110 hour weeks during peak season, but one time we had to run through the cannery a couple of hundred thousand lbs of rotten salmon, as the tender boat's refrigeration system had gone out. But we were told we had to get it into cans, where it was promptly thrown away, so the cannery could write it off. People were throwing up all over the place. We had another episode like that, when a tender boat's refrigeration leaked so all the fish were soaked in ammonia. I think my eyes watered for a week after that. The other brutal part was working the blast freezers during halibut season, wheeling in carts filled with 100+ lb halibut and climbing up a ladder to stack the fish on shelves by hand. If you dropped one you had to slide your legs under it quickly so that it wouldn't freeze to the floor, and then lift it up and onto the shelf.

2. Group home with dual-diagnosed (schizophrenic/autistic and developmentally disabled) adults. The job was to help integrate the residents into society as much as possible, so I'd have to do things like take a paranoid schizophrenic to the movies, where he decided we had to sit in the front row. That went well as he kept turning around and yelling at all the other patrons, "STOP STARING AT ME!". I got punched and bit and scratched all the time. Sometimes I had to restrain a resident on the ground in public, while putting their helmet on to keep them from hurting themselves banging their head on the ground. That was particularly fun when I took one of them to a concert on campus during college surrounded by my peers, as she was an 80 lb female (with the strength of an elephant).

3. Women's shoes department at a department store for exactly one shift 2 days before xmas. I think that was worse than the two above. There's a reason Al Bundy was so miserable.

 
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Man...some of these. Oof.

Not at the same level but my first job post college was selling bold listings in the white pages. I called businesses (75-100 dials a day) in the white pages and tried to convince them to buy a bold listing in the white pages for like $5 a month. It was awful but there were those glorious rare days where you sold someone a red bold listing. ### #### that was sweet. I stuck it out for about 3 months.

 
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a long time before i was on this rock southwest wisco used to have major tobbaco farming because of the up and down terrain and the mist would roll up the coulees and so on which made for great leaves and they would use them for the outside wrappers of cigars but anyhow they used to depend on the cash crop so much that they would shut down schools on a dime when it was time to harvest and rack and all that not really related to a job but hey there is your history lesson of the day brought to you by the old swcer take that to the bank brohans
What part of Wisconsin you in GB?
milwaukee center of the brohknown universe bromigo

 
I've got 2...

When I was 12 I worked at a Flea Market pushing this ####ty cart with broken wheels through dirt roads filled with ice and soda in 90 degree heat. They hired young kids because we couldn't get work elsewhere and nobody else would do it. We got paid based on how many sodas we sold. Something like a quarter a soda. Once you sold like 50 for the day it went to 35 cents. Looking back, you prob averaged $4-$5 an hour for awful miserable work, this was mid 1990's, so prob right around minimum wage for the top earners.

 
I've got 2...

When I was 12 I worked at a Flea Market pushing this ####ty cart with broken wheels through dirt roads filled with ice and soda in 90 degree heat. They hired young kids because we couldn't get work elsewhere and nobody else would do it. We got paid based on how many sodas we sold. Something like a quarter a soda. Once you sold like 50 for the day it went to 35 cents. Looking back, you prob averaged $4-$5 an hour for awful miserable work, this was mid 1990's, so prob right around minimum wage for the top earners.
Thank goodness, YOUR kid will never have to endure something like that!

 

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