It’s Friday, so I want to know — what was your worst job?
My worst job was working for Big John’s Hot Dogs and Beef Express in Palatine, Illinois. I worked there for six months in 1991 — as a cashier — but I was often asked to work in the back and assemble hot dogs. A Chicago-style hot dog is served on a poppy seed bun with mustard, onion, sweet pickle relish, a pickle spear, tomato slices or wedges, sport peppers, and a dash of celery salt.
Sport peppers can go bad. Very bad.
You assemble hot dogs for $4.25/hr and you start to understand what really matters in life.
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I have a tie for last place. As a freshman in college I worked for a frozen yogurt place in Phipps Plaza – the upscale Atlanta mall. It involved a really dorky outfit and some dubious cleanliness practices. Plus the customers were obnoxiously snotty. The second was my first “real job” after college. I was the assistant manager at Blockbuster video. 3 months later I joined the Army. Basic training was a vacation after slinging VHS…
Worst job ever? I took a weekend job to help promote the Parade of Homes in Raleigh, NC, years ago. I had to dress as a clown,stand at the entrance of the featured home subdivision and waved at cars as they went by. Eight hours of waving in a red clown nose,fuzzy blue wig and stripped socks on Saturday. Eight hours on Sunday. Longest 16 hours of my life. Made $100.
You’re right. I did a lot of reassessing that weekend.
Selling knives door to door. Loved the knives, hated going into near strangers homes with them.
Early ’80’s – 12 years working on call 24 x 7 paged (remember pagers!) at least 2 or 3 times per night / day.
Not allowed more than 20 – 30 minutes away from a telephone for emergency response (ie no biking, skiing etc)
Was lucky to get 5 or 6 hours sleep a night
45 thousand miles per year on the car
vacation did not include the weekend (ie started Monday AM, and back @ work Friday night)
You get the drift ….
I won’t identify the place, but the Union was so brazen they threatened to take me to arbitration after I removed several people from the schedule who all had the same Alien # 98765432. That was my first week and it went downhill after that.
When I was a kid, most of time our fundraisers involved selling candy bars or running a car wash. I didn’t like it but what was worse, was selling out of a catalog. Yeah, give a kid a catalog of bric-a-brac and knick-knacks and have him go around to his neighbors. Or the time they had us selling pizza kits. Not worth it.
Oh, and working at a fast food place. Wouldn’t be so bad if so much of the job weren’t cleaning and washing.
Snow removal. 14 hours straight overnight (7pm to 9am). All shoveling and salt-slinging. The road salt went right through my heavy snow gear down to my skin and completely destroyed the gloves that I’d borrowed from one of my parents. I got to watch the sunrise while shoveling out a stairwell that sunk into the ground (so it involved standing in a hole, picking up shovels full of snow and hucking them a foot over my head out of the hole). Exhausting. Then I went home, slept for about 4 hours and got up and went to my regular job at a comic book store (coincidentally, one of my favourites ever).
Really makes me appreciate the people who do it for whole seasons every year.
I was a promoter for a State lottery game. Texas had just introduced their pick 3 games and hired a bunch of college kids to promote them in stores, malls, etc.
I ended up standing outside every gas station in south Texas telling people I would give them a free t-shirt if they spent 4 dollars on lotto tix.
I even cut my long, beautiful hair for that job…
Growing up in the midwest in a farming community will thicken your skin for horrible jobs. By far the worst was working bean fields. I cleared bean fields of weeds with a machete. You had to be ready and in the fields by 4 am because you had to get a full days work in before the sun got too hot. It sucked. However….. it did mean that quitting time was around noon AND they paid cash.
Carpet Outlet – counting thousands of rolls of wallpaper for inventory … that they planned to throw away. Then spending hours dusting Sauder furniture. Once they ran out of work they sent me to clean the boss’ extra rental apartments.
In order to get this job I had to go through 12 interviews and an intelligence test…
I’ve gotta say that I’ve been lucky enough to not hate any job that I’ve ever had. (Which translates – I’ve never worked in the fast food industry) However, since everything is relative:
Toys ‘R Us – Schaumburg, IL
Sounds like it might be fun, but try cleaning up the Barbie aisle after an extended hours Xmas rush. Not fun. The thing that I hated the most about it was I told them that I could only work weekends (didn’t like working school nights) when I applied. Yet, they regularly scheduled me for Tuesday and Thursday nights. After my register came up 25 cents short for the third time in 1 year, they decided that I had screwed up enough and cut me loose. My loss was my gain.
Bea Dyke Swimwear
Seriously, Arthur Dyke was the owner, Bea was his late wife.
This was both one of the best and worst job. All of the swimsuits were in cubbies behind a counter. As a sales person you had to ask questions to determine what suits to pull out and share with the customer. I learned to read people at the age of 18.
The worst part, helping the general population of women with what is usual the worst shopping experience one can have. It could be some pretty draining harsh conversations.
How about another one?
Right after college I joined a Federal Social Service Organization (I won’t name it… cuz).
I had to types of external clients: People who desperately wanted to work but could not as a result of a significant injury. The other type desperately wanted to never work again and I had to explain that a hangnail was not a permanent disability. This was my normal day… not uplifting in the least.
I quit one day when I finally realized the job was killing me in bits and pieces. A lady came to my desk with a pink kerchief over her bald head. Cancer patients tend to be open and shut cases. I asked her a few questions so I could fill the forms out for her and it turns out she has terminal pituitary cancer. She said this with a profound calm, even while her young daughter sat next to us.
Imagine my surprise when I found out the people she had worked for all these years had never contributed to her benefit account. She had nothing. She was dying and I could do nothing to help her. I quit right after I stamped a rejection over her form.
I sold cars after that and was so much happier!
Caddy. Not nearly as fun as Caddyshack would have you think. No gophers, no quirky grounds keeper, no Baby Ruth’s…
The worst job i ever had was working in my college library, the archives division. It was the weirdest thing I have ever done. Picture a basement with no air circulation, very weird, creepy people looking to find deeds from an indian nation to the US government from the 1700’s. My boss looked like the professor on Back to the Future, but a zillion times more creepy.
Working at a tanning salon. Smelling the “burned skin/sweat” combo all day. Having creepy guys hit on me (I was 16) and ask me how I got so tan (I’m Indian. I don’t tan.) Having to clean sweat and various other bodily fluids out of tanning beds (don’t ask.) Oh, and this is after the bodily fluids were made HOT by the bulbs. Having to check and see if an old man died in a tanning bed by pulling his toes (he was just a hard sleeper). Dealing with fellow employees that were high, drunk, or highdrunk. Selling tanning “pills” for $75 to women with too much money. “They help you tan from WITHIN.”
Yeesh.
This will show how old I am, but my worst job was some kind of book-keeping job in a supermarket. I’m still not sure exactly why we did what we did, but we sat in a long narrow room in rows and tallied up invoices on calculators (no computers!). Then we entered all the numbers into a big book, tore out the page and sent it with the invoices off to some other mysterious office.
I fought my mother, who wanted me to go to college, and took that job instead. After 3 months, I decided college was preferable and quit. Sometimes we have to learn our own lessons!
Gig as the ICEE Bear for a GEMCO Opening in a nasty, smelly old costume, carrying around a tray with little samples of ICEEs in a huge fake bear head whilst little children pulled on me and teenagers kicked and groped me….
Becoming an Enrollment Advisor for an online university. They made it sound like I was going to actually advise and help and enrich people’s lives. Instead I got 2 weeks of training on the correct method to ask the right questions and sell. I became a glorified telemarketer, making 200-300 calls per day. We were told that these were people who had expressed interest in getting an online education. Instead, I was calling a database of incorrect and disconnected numbers, and people who threatened to call the cops on me if I bugged them again (“You f****** people keep calling my house 20 times a day! I WILL FIND YOU!”)
I had 2 weeks of training, and made it a whole 2 weeks on the phones. When you wake up every day and you are already crying and nauseous from being so stressed and DREADING your job, it’s time to go.
Singing Telegrams in college…what a girl won’t do for beer money! I can’t sing, and I’m not fond of hospitals or large groups of small children – how I ever got hired – or better yet, why I ever applied, is beyond me. But there I was, singing “Happy Birthday” and “Get Better” songs in stupid costumes with huge bunches of balloons in hand. On one particularly busy day, I was in a Kermit costume, driving my ‘72 bug, (full to the brim with balloons) and I got pulled over for speeding. I got out of my car – an obviously very stressed out frog….trying to explain to the cop that I had sick kids to attend to….he gave me a ticket anyway. Hmpf. No sense of humor or compassion in that officer, and obviously a sign that I was heading in the wrong vocational direction!
@Tammy – Did you explain to the cop that “It’s not easy being green?” lol
The very first paying job that I had was at a local resort in Northern Minnesota. I cleaned the fish that people caught. After you gut them,the must be washed, dried and wrapped for freezing. I did this for an entire summer.
Let me tell you to this day the smell of a fish market makes me queasy.
Sophmore yr of college, worked three weeks between semesters in a corrugatted box factory. I am still sneezing that crap out 25 yrs later…talk about a caustic environment…
anyone need a box?
M
I got a job through a temp service one summer. First we had to sit through a week long osha training (unpaid) in a nasty hotel conference room where everyone was smoking. Then the following week we went to the work site. An old garbage dumb that they were cleaning up. It was toxic, so they had removed as much toxic material as possible but then they covered the ground with about 10 feet of sand and then a platic tarp over the top of that to prevent water penetration. My job was to follow a tractor as it unrolled the tarp and lay out sand bags to keep it from blowing around in the wind. All day long we would fill and carry hundreds of sand bags up and down the huge peices of plastic in the blazing sun.
Didn’t want to go to college out of state (I was in love with my 37 year old loser druggie boyfriend), so mom made we work in the kitchen of a local hospital as a dishwasher. A doctor came by one day with a dirty, yucky blender for me to hand wash. He had pureed a human heart in it. No problem. I got it all suds-upped and was ready to wipe it out, and I drop the damn thing and it splashes all over my bare legs (we had to wear uniforms). I developed the worst skin rash ever. We also weren’t given proper lunch breaks, so we would gooble uneaten food off of patients’ food trays while working in the 120 degree steam dishwashing room. Hey! They were perfectly good tuna fish sandwiches, and the cheesecake was to die for!
Off to college I went.
I would like to see funny stories about the worst managers people have ever had (of course we will all post anonymously).:)
I worked in high school selling cemetery plots door-to-door. Or really, selling an appointment for a sales man to talk to the owner. Horrible. I was paired with another high school girl, and we were supposed to work each side of the street while keeping an eye on each other. She kept finding houses with kids inside who would invite her in for a little partying, while I found old ladies whose husbands had just died and burst into tears when I mentioned the reason for my call. Makes me shudder today to think about it.
It’s a tie between the telephone company that has “A” and “T” in its name, which used to limit the number of minutes you could have an (ahem) “biology break”….
….and a convenience store I worked at. It was an eye-opening lesson in being the minority; it was an African-American family-owned store, and I was the only Caucasian on staff.
I was treated by family members with incredulity and suspicion. When one of my co-workers, who claimed to be a “minister”, stole funds, I was blamed for it and fired on the spot. Good times.
My worst job was repo-ing cars in Knoxville, TN for a used car lot called The Great American Wheel Ranch. The things people will do to hide their vehicles when they are late on the payments! It was seriously nuts, and it only paid $40 per vehicle. Not quite worth risking your life for forty bucks. That silly repo show on TruTV? Yep, it was kinda like that.
Well, at first I was going to say working at a video store that also rented dirty movies. We called it the Shower Curtain Room because it was cordoned off with a shower curtain. I can’t tell you how many pants tents I saw – and yes, I would brazenly look. If you’re gonna look and not rent just to raise half a flag up the pole, I’m gonna look at that sad sight and sigh at you.
But, I think I have to say working in a florist for an alcoholic owner. When he threw a bunch of lilies at me and called me a stupid C-word in front of a shop full of customers I took off my apron, threw it at him, and told him to find someone new to abuse when he went on a bender. Dick.
I should have gone to college right out of high school. Working FT in retail jobs for 10 years was worse than moving out at 19.
Jackbuilt
I sold nylons/pantyhose over the phone the summer I was 18. Weekdays we called offices (I had the yellow pages of Chicago to go through) and asked for the “girls” in the office (hello 1982!). On Saturdays we called homes. We had to determine the right shade of hose over the phone based on some ridiculous racial-profiling techniques they taught us.
I went through days of interviews and testing to land this glorious job. I started on a Monday with a class of 10 other new hires; I made it 7 days and was the last one standing from my class.
ALL YOUR JOBS SUCK.
@finkenwalde I worked for blockbuster, too. Sigh, it was horrible.
@Dawn Oh no, that’s not worth $100!
@majigail That’s like a horror movie waiting to happen.
@ElliotRoss You’re like Denis Duffy on 30 Rock. Selling pagers? Hilarious.
@Corey Ugh, immigration issues.
@David T This is why I hate eating at fast food restaurants. Who wants to clean??
@Ian Anything with snow is hellish. Yikes.
@guajardoforesight Lesson: no job is worth a haircut.
@HR Chick My brother pea-vines on these big machines. It makes you appreciate John Deere and Caterpillar!
@Leanna I have Sauder furniture in a guest bedroom. Cheap & collects lots of dust. I’ll think of you.
@HRputer The Toys R Us by Woodfield? Oh god, that place is a shit hole.
@nelking OMG, dyke swimwear. I love it.
@HRPuf Did you drink your way through caddying? That’s the only thing that could make me survive.
@teresahrgirl Any job in a basement = hell.
@Lalli Do they help you get skin cancer from within, too? Yuck!
@Louise Fletcher This sounds like a job for a chimpanzee who is good at math. I’m glad you went to college.
@HRUnderling I want to see pictures!
@meredithelaine I want to stab University of Phoenix in the face!! Now I know that was you.
@Tammyb37 I’ve never had a singing telegram. Weird!
@Ali Uh, gross.
@Mark Oh man, that’s a class action lawsuit waiting to happen!
@Nick Oh well thank god for that awesome OSHA training.
@Kathy Oh geez, that’s sick. The manager idea is good. I’ll do that, next week.
@Linda What? No way! Everyone dies. You don’t need to go door-to-door looking for customers.
@Patrick You look guilty.
@Stef You only got $40/car? For real?
@Jackbuilt Boy, both those jobs suck. That’s a tough call.
@roolvoel This just confirms that the 80s were the worst decade ever. Totally.
Selling cars was my first job out of college. It sucked and I quit. Nuff said.
For real. It was awful.
Trade show bimbo. Standing on concrete in hot pants and hooker heels for 8-10 hours a day. Smiling and being charming at socially inept, pot-bellied, fat-fingered middle managers from Iowa in pleated Dockers and cheap golf shirts who don’t even bother to form coherent sentences while they drool down your cleavage.
@david Yuck!
@Elise Whoa, that job sucks BIG TIME.
it’s a tie between
1) A men’s clothing store I ran in a bad mall where I was held up by gun point for not giving a dude my number, robbed by a crack head, and flashed out by a creepy dude that pretended to be in a wheel chair.
or
2) My first job at a cafeteria where I had to wear a nurse like white dress (not sexy nurse, grandma nurse) with a flowered apron, support hose, and a hairnet. I was 15 so I had to walk to work every day in that hideous outfit. Scarred me for life.
After reading the stories above, I conclude that I haven’t had any bad jobs.
The one I disliked the most was cashier at Wal-Mart. I stuck around for about 9 months, and moved on shortly after the holiday season. In a way, it inspired my career path – it was obvious that corporate tried to do things right and they had neat little posters everywhere that said they cared but in practice they got it all SO wrong. Of course this was like 10 years ago so hopefully things have improved a bit by now.
@Eva Wow, isn’t self-awareness so interesting? If Wal-Mart wasn’t so bad, UR DOIN IT RIGHT.
@Amanda Ho. Lee. Shit. Those are horrible stories.
My current job.
Every job I have disliked before I had been able to quit, happily. This one I am chained to by the economy, responsibilities, and debt, an evil trio of no remorse or compassion.
I’m a city clerk, that acts as a secretary, receptionist, administrative assistant, executive assistant, and expert research analyst. I get paid the least, out of almost all the city employees. Even water meter readers get paid more than me. I worked here 6 months, and then they hired a girl for the position right above mine, who was a friend of an ex-employee. She just graduated from college with a degree in English (this is a business job.. I have a BS in Management). She is a chatty cathy and her office is across the hall from me. I have to answer to her; questions usually are “How do you change the jug in the water cooler?”.. this was a month ago.. her year anniversary was last month.
P.S. – most satisfying job was working as a parking attendant at a County Fair. I stood on a dirt field, all day and all night, in the sun listening to music and talking with people, had water and food delivered to me. Perks included free admission to the fair and a cool bright orange shirt. Made $8.25 an hour, usually soaked in the tub for an hour everyday after work and had more of a dirt tan than a real tan.
But at the end of the day, it was fulfilling.
Collections/data entry. Some kind of medical records company. Calling doctors and lawyers to try and get money I’d never see, while switching to whatever desk was available since they didn’t have one for me and trying to not inhale smoke from the other office workers. Then trying to input whatever payments I did get from scraps of paper and check stubs because the boss didn’t trust anyone to actually handle the checks before they went to the bank.
It probably seems worse because on Day 4 my grannie died and they didn’t want to give me the day off, so I never went back. I never even learned my co-worker’s names.
2nd worst was serving at Shoney’s. Either that or the Cat in the Hat gig…
@Jill I love the story about the parking attendant job. Seriously, it sounds awesome.
@Jenn Collections v. Shoneys? That’s a tough call.