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Worst job you've ever had?

Duck Rodgers

Duck Rodgers

Well-Known Member
I think we had a similar topic here a few years ago, but there are a bunch of new guys, people have had more work, maybe reflections on old experiences have changed, and nobody remembers what anybody else said last time anyway etc. etc. But the "tips" topic and the Bill Maher leaf blower quote brings this to mind. Not that all tips jobs are bad or anything.....


Mine was busting trucks at a Big Box store; we had to be there at 4 am, $8/hr, our "team leader" was this ex-military ultra butch lesbian that took her job way too seriously, they would force us to take mandatory breaks and then bitch when the truck was only half unloaded at the end of the shift and these trucks were massive. If anybody hung at the job for more than probably a few months, guarantee you they probably injured something. Huge boxes were always falling on you, and all of their hires were mostly female college students, or guys on drugs that couldn't lift jack.
 
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I can relate. I moved furniture for a couple years. My back has never been the same since, and I am painfully aware of that now that I'm in the middle of a move.
 
I worked at a bottle recycling depot for a few months when I was 15. Terrible. They paid us about 5.5 bucks an hour(minimum wage in Alberta back then), they made us stay for an extra hour to clean the place up every day without paying us, and I came home reeking of stale Budweiser every day. Oh, and you'd get stung by a bee or a wasp at least once a month because they all converged on the depot due to the sugar in pop.
 
At the risk of being further hated on .. I've never had one. I got into sales immediately, did well, and never had a bad job since.

Wait, actually, I went undercover (sort of) after selling a company and decided (for whatever reason..) to go be a car salesman. I could NOT believe how belittled the sales force was by mgmt. It was disgusting. No idea if that's an industry wide thing, but if so, no wonder the turnover.
 
PKM said:
At the risk of being further hated on .. I've never had one. I got into sales immediately, did well, and never had a bad job since.
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Some people would rather work bad jobs than sell their eternal souls.
 
My worst job ever? Easy. I cleaned a slaughter/butcher shop in the evenings when I was 15. If you could get right in and start it was the best. All the fat and blood hadn't had time to congeal yet. First you had to put on your rubber boots as you started out by wading in up to several inches of slimy fat and liquid blood. Since the floor was an uneven cement slab the goo would puddle up in various places. You could use a large squeegee to push most of the crap on the floor towards the drain. The liquid would go down the drain and the drain trap would catch all of the floating cow and deer pieces and fat tha was starting to set up. Cleaning out the drain trap, that was nasty. If you waited too long, or during the winter when the cement floor was simply cold all the time, everything would start to set up and getting it cleaned off the floor was a nightmare. You also couldn't just wash it down the drain. You had to scoop it all up and dump it in a waste receptacle.

Then there was the refrigerator floor. There was no floor drain so as the blood drained from the freshly butchered carcasses it would gather in large puddles several feet across. As there was no fat in this blood it stayed in it's liquid form. You have to get a mop and simply sop up the blood until it was gone. There were nights when I would dump out several mop buckets full of blood.

Then there was the equipment. You have to disassemble all the saws and grinders, soak everything in hot water and soap, scrub them down, rinse them off and put them back together.

I'll be shocked if anyone can top mine.
 
Scat said:
My worst job ever? Easy. I cleaned a slaughter/butcher shop in the evenings when I was 15. If you could get right in and start it was the best. All the fat and blood hadn't had time to congeal yet. You could use a large squeegee to push most of the crap on the floor towards the drain. The liquid would go down the drain and the drain trap would catch all of the floating cow and deer pieces. Cleaning out the drain trap, that was nasty. If you waited too long everything would start to set up and getting it cleaned off the floor was a nightmare. You also couldn't just wash it down the drain. You had to scoop it all up and dump it in a waste receptacle.

Then there was the refrigerator floor. There was no floor drain so as the blood drained from the freshly butchered carcasses it would gather in large puddles several feet across. As there was no fat in this blood it stayed in it's liquid form. You have to get a mop and simply sop up the blood until it was gone. There were nights when I would dump out several mop buckets full of blood.

Then there was the equipment. You have to disassemble all the saws and grinders, soak everything in hot water and soap, scrub them down, rinse them off and put them back together.

Yes, I can say that there are not many worse jobs out there and I'll be shocked if anyone can top mine.
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Winner. Sorta.
 
Scat said:
My worst job ever? Easy. I cleaned a slaughter/butcher shop in the evenings when I was 15. If you could get right in and start it was the best. All the fat and blood hadn't had time to congeal yet. First you had to put on your rubber boots as you started out by wading in up to several inches of slimy fat and liquid blood. Since the floor was an uneven cement slab the goo would puddle up in various places. You could use a large squeegee to push most of the crap on the floor towards the drain. The liquid would go down the drain and the drain trap would catch all of the floating cow and deer pieces and fat tha was starting to set up. Cleaning out the drain trap, that was nasty. If you waited too long, or during the winter when the cement floor was simply cold all the time, everything would start to set up and getting it cleaned off the floor was a nightmare. You also couldn't just wash it down the drain. You had to scoop it all up and dump it in a waste receptacle.

Then there was the refrigerator floor. There was no floor drain so as the blood drained from the freshly butchered carcasses it would gather in large puddles several feet across. As there was no fat in this blood it stayed in it's liquid form. You have to get a mop and simply sop up the blood until it was gone. There were nights when I would dump out several mop buckets full of blood.

Then there was the equipment. You have to disassemble all the saws and grinders, soak everything in hot water and soap, scrub them down, rinse them off and put them back together.

I'll be shocked if anyone can top mine.
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Creepy - I had the same exact job at 18 - worked at a meat packing plant in Brooklyn. I remember getting to work at 7am on a Saturday in the dead of summer and working in a freezer all day. And loading and unloading trucks in the winter.

Having to clean the equipment at the end of the day sucked - getting all that crap out of the blades in the bandsaws.

I guess technically it was my worst job; but it wasn't all bad. Made some good friends. We used to party after work on the weekends all the time. Banged a couple of girls that worked in sales. Could have been worse.

Most of all it taught me back breaking work is something I defintely don't want to do for a living. I remember my co-worker Warren used to tell me when I'm sitting in the class room at school - think about having to do this when you're in your forties. I've never forgotten it.
 
candrew said:
Having to clean the equipment at the end of the day sucked - getting all that crap out of the blades in the bandsaws.
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It wasn't just the blades. The "sawdust" particles would stick to everything and there would be goop stuck all over in the blade housings as well.
 
My senior year of HS I worked at a new local seafood restaurant that had just opened up. I was a Busser/Washer and it sucked hard because the kitchen was way too small for the capacity of the restaurant and management had **** for brains. I walked out one night at rush hour during the opening night of the bar because they had yet to fix the dishwasher that had been broken for 2 weeks.
 
Scat said:
It wasn't just the blades. The "sawdust" particles would stick to everything and there would be goop stuck all over in the blade housings as well.
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Believe me I know - I remember talking the owner's son into buying one of those power hoses. I'd used to open up the blade housing and just blast the crap right out of them. I 'd get it all over me but it was better than having to get in there to clean it.

BTW - how did you get that job at 15? You'd think it be illegal working with all that heavy equipment. I applied for the job about 3 weeks before my 18th birthday. They initially turned me down and told me to come back in a month.
 
My paper route was pretty crappy too now that I think about it. Section 8 housing and trailer parks. I remember some guy telling me to get off his garden or else he was going to shoot me. His "garden" was a pile of rocks in front of his trailer. People were constantly harassing me on that route. Nothing you can really do as a 10 or 11 year old. I hated that route so much that I just threw the papers away in the church dumpster and didn't actually deliver them most of the time.
 
Telemarketer. Hours felt like years, 120 phone calls a day, 90 of which were abusive and if you made 4 sales in a day, you were a superstar. It was brutal.
 
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