What's the worst job you've ever had?

managing 150 union guys double my age in an operations role in a contract year. My record is 11 grievances in a day from 1 guy.

Fueled by Caffeine wrote: managing 150 union guys double my age in an operations role in a contract year. My record is 11 grievances in a day from 1 guy.

You sir must have one big swingin' piece o' meat to generate 11 grievances from the same person in a day. Does said individual wear Depends now?

Absolute worst was a job cutting the ends off of jumbo onions at the Anchor Foods onion ring processing plant. I lasted one whole 8 hour shift. On top of that, I had to ride home on my motorcycle through a hail storm wearing only jeans and a thin t- shirt. That day really sucked, but gave me alot of motivation to stay in college, so all ultimately ended well.

Second worst was picking cast piston rings out of a 4' x4' x4' cardboard box to hang on a pegboard rack at a Federal Mogul plant. More "stay in school" motivation there.

telemarketing or the week I spent in a precast concrete factory making parking garage decks. In august. They were both pretty terrible jobs.

Telemarketing for a vacation time-share, the summer after 11th grade. I did it for a week before finding another job

It's hard to say. All my jobs had some pretty E36 M3ty aspects like working outside year round, coming home tired, hurt and filthy or stuck in dangerous or bizarre situations but most of the people I worked for were good people and I learned how to handle pretty much anything I've run Into. My current job is beginning to become the most frustrating and soul crushing of them all thanks to some interesting management and my inability to walk away from something that needs to be done.

In reply to Wall-e:

Take that walk, you personally can't fix everything. Ask me how I know.

I do primarily concrete for a living and started my own business because of the idiots I worked for.

During the boom I was basically a hired gun finisher. The pay was great and work was everywhere. The downside was a lot of these companies sucked to work for. One job was in a high rise and they refused to let us go down to use the bathroom, even chained the fire escapes closed so no one could get down. We were told that if you had to use the bathroom.....go to the floor below and find a corner.

I have never been afraid of walking away from a crappy job, that one was no different

While it wasn't dirty or demanding in the same sense as most of these, my worst one by far was working as a telemarketer selling boxes of trash bags for some - most likely illegitimate - charity for the blind. Getting yelled/cussed at and having the phone slammed on me(this was almost 30-years ago) didn't bother me too much, but one(of only a couple) sales really pushed me over the edge...

I remember when I called & asked for whoever it was by name, the kid who answered said "Ok I'll go get my dad." Then I waited, for what seemed like an enternity...it was easily 2 or 3 minutes...and the whole time I'm thinking This guy is going to be pissed when he picks up and realizes it's a telemarketer! Finally, he gets on the phone, I go through my script - and he starts doing math, calculating how much each trash bag costs. I don't remember exactly, but they were expensive something like $0.70-each...in 1989 money!

After all that, he says "Ok, I'll take two boxes." and I've never felt so guilty.

Two summers during HS plus a few random holiday breaks, I worked in my buddy's (family) machine shop. They manufacture tire molds for several passenger, truck and race tire companies. The best days were driving aluminum molds around with the "shop" stake bed F350 (for hard coat treatments, scrap recycling, etc).

Worst job was prepping tire molds for sandblasting. It went like this:

Every vent hole on a tire mold [i.e. the rubber nubbies you see on a new tire] needed a wire plug inserted by hand. One at a time. The wires, each about the size and thickness of a straightened paper clip, prevent sand getting stuck and blocking the vent holes (later, when the rubber is injected into the mold).

Each wire is wrinkled, to create friction and keep them from blowing out during sandblasting.

After the mold sits for about 10 minutes in a rotary sandblast cabinet (sandblasting puts the matte finish on the tire).. each wire has to be pulled from the vent holes, by hand. Sometimes you could grab a couple at a time but it was mostly one by one. If pulled straight, they come out relatively easy.

Tedium defined. Feels like arthritis.

I remember waking early for Long summer days in the hot shop.. watching the clock between catering trucks and coffee breaks. And being filthy. All the time.

Tough call. Either my second dishwasher job or my time on a factory/line job.

The second dish job was at a dysfunctional small restaurant for four months. Pay was irregular, boss was on vicaden, hours were insane(when mixed with classes), and the looming threat of the IRS siezing the place. It drove me to a mental breakdown and destroyed my semester. If I wasn't in school, had discovered Monster, and the place was even a bit more stable, my friend and I would have stuck it out longer.

The next job was in the bindery at a magazine printer. I was brought on at the end of a mass hiring. By then only positions in the bindery were left. It was lower pay than the rest and the only non union section. My drug test came back Wednesday morning and they called me in to start that day. I made through Friday. Come Monday I called out to try a shift at another restaurant. It worked out and Tuesday I called in that I quit. Same pay even.

oldtin wrote: Hot tar roofing in Texas the year it was over 100* for over 30 days straight.

Temperature wasn't quite as hot in MD, but the tar was just as hot. Summer job when I was teaching. I was the guy who took the 5 gallon bucket of "hot" off the lift and carried it over the pot for the guys spreading it out.

Both the worst (heat, smell, exertion) and one of the best summer jobs I had. The business owner would estimate a job as taking X number of days. If he estimated the job as taking 3 days and we (crew of 4) got it done in 2 days, we still got 3 days pay for the job. Fortunately the boss always estimated it so we got at least an extra 1/2 day on every job.

My sister worked for a small garbage company and the owner needed kids to do some painting so she called me. Hot day and scrapping rust off the outside of the dumpsters sucked - stinky giant steel dumpsters that had a million areas to scrape. Since I sucked at it the owner made me pick up garbage around the facility. One day.

secretariata wrote:

Fueled by Caffeine wrote: managing 150 union guys double my age in an operations role in a contract year. My record is 11 grievances in a day from 1 guy.

You sir must have one big swingin' piece o' meat to generate 11 grievances from the same person in a day. Does said individual wear Depends now?

That dude was fun. He filed grievances for everything. Once I had to Sit through one because he felt threatened by a safety guy who removed a file from his booth with a broken handle. The paper literally had the words "brandishing a file" written on it. Sometimes I think the old guys would just sit around and figure out how to waste time and screw with the young guys. Actually that's all they did.

My second suck job was as a production supervisor for a fiber optic cable manufacturer. They were always failing QC and I was always struggling with getting orders out the door and I never understood the product. The bosses were tools.

Temp job with a painting company that was repainting the inside of a factory as a teen, mid 70's during X-mas shut down. The "factory" stripped off gold plating from watches etc. that didn't pass quality control. They had me up in the rafters scraping the beams of build up from stuff evaporating out of tanks at floor level used for stripping. I asked what was in the open tanks below I was perched high above. "Cyanide based solution" was the answer. Well with it now apparent why there were shower stations all over and knowing what I was scraping (with no mask or other protection) I walked off the job, only time ever.

Buss boy. It wouldn't have been as bad if the managers weren't shiny happy people. The business didn't last too long anyway. In fact all the businesses that family owned went under. I recently saw the owner of that restaurant working in a massage parlor as a receptionist. I had a good laugh.

At least I love some of the work I do. The other work I just like...

Worse Job I had was as foreman over a locomotive truck repair facility in New Orleans.

Gees where do I start. The company was a German firm and the guy overseeing it from their side didn't speak English well and his girlfriend was the procurement manager. In reality, they didn't do anything except sift money off the top into their bank account. The inspection manager was paid by the number of inspections he did so he didn't pass anything and blamed my guys for doing a crappy job. The whole operation was a joke. Between all that and the non air conditioned shop in the middle of the New Orleans summers and the long work hours, It was the only job I ever just walked off of.

Honestly, it was being an auto technician. I loved cars and enjoyed fiddling with my cars at home. Went to the local tech school and got all my ASE certs and really enjoyed the school. Once out in the real world my opinion changed. When you wrench on cars for 40 hours a week, the last thing you want to do when you get home is look at a friggin car. It completely deflated my car passion for a year or so. Plus having a terrible service advisor was not pleasant, nor good for the paycheck when you're on flat rate.

while working for my uncle doing high tension power, we were in Michigan at Deer Island. My uncle and the big boss are set to go look at some towers that need work. The rep from the power company hands them full coverage hazmat suits.. we are looking at each other wondering what was spilled on this pristine looking island.

An hour later when the two of them came walking out of the woods, their white suits were black.. with ticks

Worst job? Two of them. While in college, worked in steel mills. Worst was an early winter day, 4-12 shift, loading rail cars with billet, 4x4x20'. Hooking the chains, guiding the crane operator. Started to rain, then freezing rain for the balance of the shift. Next worse was given the opportunity to pull a double on Labor Day. Double time and a half. Hell yeah! Except the job was underneath the main shaping rollers, where red hot steel slabs were shaped. Shoveling steel flakes (HEAVY!) in a hot cramped space. I enjoyed the paycheck.

Before I worked for 3 years on an assembly line making windows, which sucked, I worked for a temp agency, which had some real treasures. The one that has stuck with me as being a low point after all these years, was the 2 days I lasted working at the chicken plant. My job was to grab a tray of day old chickens off a rack, pick up each chicken, hold upside down just so, and clip the little warts off the backs of their legs that would otherwise grow into spurs. Put them in another tray, load onto another rack. Repeat. Holy berkelying tapdancing E36m3. Been self employed for almost 30 years now... think I'll keep it that way.

Once I had to clean bathrooms at a private school for volunteer credits so my son could attend. That was pretty bad, the girls were much worse than the boys.

My crappiest job (literally) was at a very good pharmaceutical company known for treating it's employees very well. Work consisted of cleaning animal plastic cages (mice, rats and rabbits) dumping used bedding, loading, unloading and stacking and then putting them in the autoclav before preparing them for use again. It was loud, hot, wet and smelly. Not to mention how bad the rabbit cages, they didn't use wood chip bedding or whatever, they had these plastic and diaper material that had to be removed from the pans and folded. Oh, and every other Friday or so a truck would come and two guys would have to go into the freezer and load trash bags full of carcasses into a cart and then transfer into the truck. The fresh ones were not in there long enough to freeze and sometimes the bags would rip. Once I found a live one. Fun times.

I didn't feel the urge to quit, having just had my son and really, the management and coworkers made it not so bad. Every day I went home physically tired (which I liked) and stank to high hell. A lot of bending and lifting, including filling water bottles into crates, ended up doing a number on my back.