The worst job you ever had?

I've had all sorts of jobs over the past 4 decades, grocery store (stock shelves, unload trucks, mop floors, chase carts, run checkout, slice deli meats, etc.), dig clams from a skiff, deliver stuff on campus, paint roofs on large commercial metal roofs, financial analyst for a large finance outfit, etc.

But the worst was a work-study job to put back library books under the library of congress filing system in a large university library. Nothing came as close to sheer boredom as that job.
 
Summer job working residential construction when I was 15 and 16 , we framed the house and dried it in , did roofing and dug ditches.
Had heat stroke when roofing once...
 
How about three in order done:

Catfish farm
Aluminum pipe press
Oilfield roughneck

Depending on which day … any of them worst job
 
Originally Posted by ZZman
Paper boy


Yeah, mainly because after eating all my profit in cokes and candy my belly hurt, LoL
 
I worked at a smelter while in university for a total of one week. I couldn't take the extreme heat but totally respect the guys who could. Ended up getting a much lower paying job but something that ended up being another stepping stone to my lifetime job.
 
Probably my first job working at Radio Shack one summer.

Had to sell a minimum amount per hour to make enough commission to exceed your base pay, otherwise you only made minimum wage. Some yutz decided to "borrow" that expensive color TV over the weekend, and now wants to return it for a full refund Monday morning with no reason given? Guess what, that comes out of your sales for today (and lowers your commission) because you were the unfortunate soul who sold it to him originally. Oh yeah, and now you've got that opened TV that nobody wants to buy now, so you'll probably have to discount it.

Don't get me started on having to ask customers for their name, address, and phone number if they came in to buy a battery for their car remote because they are in a hurry and they are locked out of their car. Didn't matter what they were buying or how they were paying for it, we had to ask. They don't like being asked that and they hated us for asking. If we don't capture that data, it shows up on our sales reports and then we get lectured about it. If our boss notices we didn't ask, then we get grilled on why we didn't ask.

Even if you're current studying electrical engineering in college, you've tinkered with electronics and radios since your youth, and you're an amateur radio operator, that doesn't matter. The customers assume you know nothing and they are the experts. Okay sir, taking the audio out from your CD player directly to a set of speakers is not going to work. Oh? You think otherwise? We sell these things called "amplifiers" that actually take the low level signals from the CD player and boost them to the level to drive the speaker, because the CD player can't drive the speakers directly. Yes, I know it's more equipment you'll have to buy. Okay, just don't come back complaining when it doesn't work.

Nope, don't miss working retail. Radio Shark made sure of that.
 
For two years when I was a college student.. grocery store janitor, evenings and Sundays (back when stores closed on Sunday). I was the only one in the store, and the boredom of the work and no social contact really got to me. I'm not a super social guy, but I found out then that I didn't like working completely alone.
 
Worked at a [censored] hole called wheatland tube company, making conduit and gas line. Nasty, greasy, stinky, and little pay. Boss was a real piece of work, since the turnover was so high, he didn't give two cents for anyone. Sad thing is, after awhile I actually got used to it, and just accepted it until another opportunity came in my lap. Never again.
 
I have been blessed to never have a job I could not manage to a positive outcome, either the work itself or the coworkers and supervisors. Of course some tough times on occasion, but that's life.

Probably the most brutal job was one year prior to college working the coke ovens at U.S. Steel in Gary. I not only survived, but took away some great life lessons and enough money to pay my entire college career. But yes, it was brutal, somewhat dangerous, and not healthy (coal dust and fumes). I can't imagine how some of those guys put 25 years in there.
 
Before becoming a white collar worker, I thought a seasonal farm laborer was my worst job with no health and safety or labor protections. But as a white collar worker I've had two jobs that we're far far worse. They just squeezed everything I had and left nothing.
 
Worked 6 months at a Concrete Batch Plant. I was trying to break into running heavy equipment. What I did was shovel rock for 7 hours a day and run a loader for 1 hour while the regular operator went to lunch.
 
I worked at a Perkins restaurant as a dishwasher for one month during junior year at high school. I told them what hours I was available due to school. You get wet/damp while doing this and I had to walk home after work. This was in MT...in the winter, so anything that was moist...froze. The place was always greasy and you had to walk around carefully or you'd lose it...which I did. Hit a spot while carrying a rack of those red plastic cups that were standard for drinks.
Plastic cups bouncing all over the place! Manager wasn't happy about the noise...lol! Anyway, the reason I left: they said I'd have to start working grave yard shift on Friday and Saturday nights. Didn't care that I was in school and ignored when I was available. Bye! Got a better job at Safeway a few months later and had that until I graduated high school.
 
I've had all the usual crappy jobs as a teen like flipping burgers and pumping gas, then later some physical jobs like warehouse and lumberyard work (which I actually miss) and now I work in IT supporting a big scary defense contractor.

But the worst job I had, while being an important first opportunity with a big company, was doing IT support for a small remote office full of salespeople. IT and sales attracts personality types on the extreme opposite ends of the personality spectrum. And while I did meet a few great people, I also had to deal with certain coworkers who I wanted to murder on a daily basis. They had absolutely no idea what I did or acknowledge that it was as important as it was. If you weren't sales, then you were beneath them, a peon. Everything was focused on sell sell sell and anything else was someone else's problem. I had four supervisors in three years and the last one was an incompetent management-wannabe stooge. He was the last straw. Management pulled a fast one, HR got involved and I was gone. This was years ago and it still raises my blood pressure thinking about it.
 
In high school, working for the only manufacturer in our rural South Dakota town. They made eyeballs (pheasant eyes, which morphed into all sorts of eyes--eland eyes, jaguar eyes, you name it) and Quonset hut rafters-- can't make that stuff up.

I worked in the Quonset hut end of it. Dirt floors, no a/c, a guy on hand who had been to a chiropractor once and "learned the moves", in case a limb was crushed or mangled. All I can remember is that you had to glue several pieces of wood together, put them into a bending device and put the final product into a planer to get the rough parts off. Been almost sixty years.

I came in through the eye factory one time, was blinded by a welder, got my leg in a bucket of epoxy and walked through a container of eyes, wish I still had those pants. Anyway, shortly after I was told that cutbacks were in order and I was being laid off. Think I made $1.25 an hour, a big improvement on the four bits an hour my previous jobs paid.
 
IT Executive in healthcare was the most dissatisfying job I have ever had (from a professional aspect) and it was also the most stressful.

A few reasons for this:

-- Everything is an emergency even when it is not--Dr. X's iPad not working is more important than a whole nurses station losing the network connection. The teams suffer long term from "priority fatigue" because when everything is a priority, then nothing is and the levels of stress that are induced are not sustainable.
-- Politics and "fifedoms" are rampant--I have been in very large organizations that did not have as much "tree marking" and kingdom building as in healthcare with all of its "chiefs" and "in-chiefs".
-- Progress is incredibly slow and can best be described as: a team rotates the wheels of a train a two revolutions, the next team welds them to the tracks, the next team grinds them free, the next team rotates them backwards one revolution.
-- Despite the external façade that healthcare has technological advancements, they are typically referring to the medical side of the house and not technology as a whole. I know of two major healthcare organizations who are running Windows 7 on 20,000+ machines today with no clear path to upgrade. Another example is fax machines are a critical workflow component and instead of centralizing into a SaaS solution (which could create digital copies), they have hundreds of them scattered with dozens of people sorting and scanning faxes.

I did it for about 2 years and I can easily see why healthcare costs so much in the US (not trying to make a political statement here). The day I left, it felt like I could fly due to the weight lifted off my shoulders. The mission in healthcare is a good one, but there far too many negative aspects from a professional point of view that supersede that mission.
 
out of high school I worked delivering appliances for maybe 5 years .. tore up my back so bad i'm still paying for it today at age 65
 
In the '60's I had a summer job working for the PA Dept of Highways. The crew I worked with was repaving secondary roads. A truck would spray tar over the road, another truck would spray gravel, then the rollers went over it. After the truck truck sprayed gravel another truck followed full with gravel. Workers would shovel gravel onto spots the other truck had missed. I was one of those guys with a shovel. When I got home I had to scrape off inches of tar and gravel from the bottom of my shoes with a propane torch and a putty knife. I think it paid $1.71 an hour. That was good money for a summer job.
 
Back
Top