What was your worst lowly job?

[cj]

Donheff wins. No further discussion is necessary, LOL! Good grief!

 

[arky]

Roughest job (unpaid to boot) was helping my uncle unload his milk truck at my school (all grades at one location) every school day for my last three years. He had a heart condition and my mom (his sister), insisted I do the heavy lifting for him. That was back when the crates were metal. The hard part was getting up at 5:30 AM every school day.

The "yuckyest" job (at least I got paid for this one) was working for the city the summer before going off to college. I patched roads, cut right-of-ways and even did a stint on the garbage truck. Talk about an incentive for getting an engineering degree!

 

[Sarah in SC]

Donheff wins. No further discussion is necessary, LOL! Good grief!

I dunno, Grumpy's might be even worse for a person like me! Both an animal lover yet definitely creeped out by rats. Yaaahiiiiikes!

But Don wins the gross factor completely. I had buddies on the rally this summer who chose to take the southern route through Ed's home city of Baku and the filthy ferry to Turkemistan. 96 hours on the boat with no working toilets. They just overflowed and the floors were covered. The Canadian girl describing this to me was a far more durable sort than me--I think I would have paid for a helicopter evacuation at about 50 hours. Seriously.

 

[anethum]

"Chicken exports" - I had to place grown chicken in crates to ship them off to a slaughterhouse, 25 chickens per crate. We had to do it in the middle of the night on the theory that chickens are less active at night. (Of course, people are too, so that made little sense to me.) We were told to push 2 chickens together, then lift them up and drop them in a crate. The chickens would pee on us, crap on us, and peck at us. We each had to gather a few hundred chickens. Toward the end when there were few chickens left to gather, we had to chase them around the coop.

 

[Fermion]

Working with chickens is pretty nasty. My brother's father in law had a few commercial houses and I helped him pick up culls (dead chickens) one time. The stink in that place is something to be remembered. I guess when you have 30,000 chickens in one place, they tend to poop everywhere.

 

[Gumby]

Same as gumby, except I stated at McDonald's at 15 (lied about my age). Disgusting job--would come home after the shift and stink of crappy grease. Could not get the grease smell out of my hair. Terrible polyester uniforms. The good news is that it pretty much killed me on fast food: I still gag when I think about McDonalds.

Disgusting is a charitable description. But it did convince me that I needed to go to college.

 

[travelover]

I worked in a zinc die casting shop after high school. Liquid zinc would be forced into a die at high pressure, the part would be molded, then the die would open and the part would be removed. Occasionally the die face had flash on it so it did not seal and everyone in the area would be sprayed with liquid zinc (790* F). The old timers were all scarred up. I wore long sleeves even though it was nearly 100* F in there, even in the winter. I asked why they didn't put a guard around the die to prevent the spraying. The management said it might slow down any needed repairs.

Also the fork truck had no brakes and there was standing water on the floor all the time, about an inch deep. The zinc came in bars that were stored on the floor (some in the standing water) and my job was to add zinc bars when the melting pot got low. If you accidentally added a wet bar, it would literally explode from the steam created and splash molten zinc in every direction.

My job was to run a hydraulic press, which trimmed the molded parts to shape. It was operated with two push buttons to ensure that both hands were out of the way of the press. One day one of the buttons failed, so they just bypassed the switch and told me to run it with one button. I recalled hearing of a guy on another shift getting his hand cut off, so I quit on the spot.

Sure miss that place.

 

[Alan]

Working in my Uncle's scrap wood business. I was really grateful for the money and worked there from age 12 through leaving High School, but it was extremely dirty, hard work, sawing logs, chopping sticks, filling said logs and sticks into old potato sacks, loading them onto his truck then riding in the back of the truck in all weather around the streets selling the bags of sticks and logs door to door.

 

[Midpack]

There are no bad jobs, only jobs done badly...

 

[Brdofpray]

I worked one summer as a laborer in the construction of a grain elevator in Iowa. This was a continuous concrete pour with 12 hour shifts, in the summer heat. It was the most physically demanding job I have ever worked. But it taught me why I was in graduate school, and it taught me great respect for those that do that kind of work for a living.

 

[fisherman]

Growing up on a small cattle farm there were many. For extra money one summer I cleaned out barns. Yes shoveling you know what all day. The heat, smell, and flies are not good memories. I sure worked hard in college to get an engineering degree after that!

 

[H2ODude]

Just remembered a short term (OK, one day) assignment I "volunteered" for. Was director and we ran sewage, landfills, and water plants. Landfills won the United Way competition for donations, so they got to assign me for one day. It was to audit a truck load of hospital waste. As in, suit up and go through the unloaded 15-20 tons parcel by parcel looking for un-autoclaved human bits, needles, and anything else that violated the rules. This was done periodically particularly on one hospital's loads that were often in violation. It was a very unpleasant day for me, but the folks who usually did it enjoyed it immensely. There were violations. Ugh. They gave me a photo album dedicated to the day, still have it 23 years later.

 

[Sue J]

I have enjoyed my summer job as an usher at an outdoor concert venue. There is a covered pavilion and a lawn that holds an additional 13,000 people.

The worst part is after a rock, pop or country show we have to go pick up all the trash on the lawn. There are about 40 of us with large trash bags and gloves and we just pick up everything that all these rowdy, drunk concert goers leave behind. It's mostly beer cans, half eaten trays of nachos, food wrappers, broken sunglasses, tarps, blankets, an occasional used condom, many single flip-flops, phones, keys, hats, etc. Some ushers have found cash, but not me. Anything that someone may be looking for gets turned in to guest services. I turned in a nice new iPhone last month. Some ushers didn't want to participate but after a concert the traffic can be so bad that you can't get out anyways so you may as well get an extra hour of pay cleaning up the lawn.

Near the end of my first year at the concert venue the Parking Dept needed a few extra people so a few of us ushers were "volunteered" to work in Parking. It was a Dave Matthews Band sold out show and we stood in the rain in a muddy field used for overflow parking. I was near the road waving a flag to direct cars into a "grass lot" where actual parking attendants directed them further. A lot of these folks were already drunk or high before they even got into the venue.

Compared to some of you working in dirty, dangerous industrial jobs I feel lucky that these have been the worst things I can think of!

 

[steelyman]

I worked as a dishwasher one night.

I thought "are you out of your mind?".

I never got paid, but washed a few dishes.

 

[BobMax]

Door to door magazine salesman at 13. However, the rejection experience served me well when I got old enough to ask girls out on a date.

 

[fishnfool]

In High School I worked at a convalescent hospital. I did janitorial, maintenance, laundry and worked in the kitchen for a short time. I was there for 4 years. It was a very interesting job and I learned that i'd hate to ever end up in a rest home. They are very sad places to spend your last days IMHO.
Like I tell my DW...."These are our Golden years"!

 

[Janet H]

Hands down the crappiest job I ever had was as the director of a for profit day care center (140 kids). It was the only job I could find in a small university town (DH was in grad school) that would pay the bills. I was expected to fudge staffing ratios, sweet talk inspectors into favorable reports and cut costs to the detriment of little kids. It was a horrible, shameful job that caused me to lose sleep and hate myself. I eventually left, contacted state authorities and swore that my own kids would never spend time in such a place.

 

[photoguy]

My first job was as a janitor at a gas station. I was too young to pump but they still paid me the $4 and change / hour that the pumpers got. It wasn't the most enjoyable work but there was no stress at least.

 

[scrabbler1]

I once worked in the kitchen at the local golf course's cafeteria as a summer job after my freshman year of college. It was also connected to a catering hall so if I worked the evening shift I cleaned up the seating area in the cafeteria then in the kitchen for a party going on next door. That part was not too bad. It was the weekend shifts which were bad because I had to be there around 5 AM because the golfers were signing up to tee off then grab breakfast. What made things worse was at 1 PM when I expected to leave after an 8-hour shift they wanted me to stay longer and I was just so exhausted. It wasn't like I was going to sleep at 9 PM the night before.

When I worked the day shift during the week I had to get there at 7 AM, which was better than 5 AM on the weekends. But the same deal about not having a defined departure time (I was exhausted and ready to leave at 3 PM) irked me. Then the health department inspectors came in one day hovering over everyone and I did not see that as a good sign.

I lasted a whole 10 days there and was glad to leave.

 

[bjorn2bwild]

Agricultural work is pretty tough.
The worst job for me was plastic wrapping and heat sealing cauliflower off a conveyor in the full sun.
Next was hand sorting tomatoes -#'s 1, 2 & 3, again off a conveyor belt.
Finally picking cherries. They are so small it takes forever to fill a bucket. All you could eat though.

 

[Nemo2]

When I was 18 I skinned kangaroos, (for pet food), for half a day.....said "enough of this"......didn't get paid, (didn't expect to).

 

[plex]

First real job was a golf caddy when I wasn't even fully grown yet, also for awhile had very non-waterproof shoes, so most of the time my shoes would be sloshing with water within an hour from the very wet grass, and would stay like that for the rest of the day. Also often got paid nothing, especially early on, because you had to sit there for hours staring at nothing hoping to get selected.

 

[Walt34]

Kind of a toss-up between Janet H and donheff. I think Janet's was worse though.

My worst was unloading trucks at the underground loading dock of a large department store for a period just before Christmas right after HS and while I was deciding whether to enlist in the military or go to college. The job itself wasn't all that bad but I've never been treated worse in a work environment. In the caste system of the store the guys unloading trucks were lower than janitors. The salespeople were mean, nasty, selfish back-stabbing bloodsuckers and that was on a good day. The manager asked me to stay on after Christmas and I declined, by then having found something much better.

 

[HFWR]

"Chicken exports" - I had to place grown chicken in crates to ship them off to a slaughterhouse, 25 chickens per crate. We had to do it in the middle of the night on the theory that chickens are less active at night. (Of course, people are too, so that made little sense to me.) We were told to push 2 chickens together, then lift them up and drop them in a crate. The chickens would pee on us, crap on us, and peck at us. We each had to gather a few hundred chickens. Toward the end when there were few chickens left to gather, we had to chase them around the coop.

Had a similar job... Chicken mover for an egg "factory". And, yes, when you reach into a cage, grab a handful of hens by the legs, and transfer them to a roll-around cage, they do indeed crap all over you. TG for orange gloves!

Lasted four days...

 

[donheff]

I don't think I win for the worst job since as a whole it was great. Maybe, grossest single assignment. But this thread got me thinking about the job I overall disliked the most. That was a telephone solicitation call center that a buddy of mine and I found through the paper one summer. You cold called phone numbers one after the other and read a script trying to get whoever answered to buy a subscription for something I can't remember. I lasted one morning and didn't come back after lunch. The boredom was soul killing. My buddy returned because he was hoping to get paid but he gave up after two days. Neither of us got a dime - I think that was the staffing concept.