worst job ever

[SilverPoly]

Sitting here at work waiting to get out... was just thinking


What was the worst job you ever had?

If you can make a buck, make a buck... I guess mine was my first job - locker room attendant at a community pool when I was like 14, handing out towels and you know what else.. geez. Don't even ask what my other duties were.. haha I can look back and laugh about it now.

The best - when I was 19 and I tried out for the County beach lifeguard job and I got in! To get paid and work at the beach. That was a great time.. now why did I give that up again?

[JavaBrewer]

Worked production in a machine shop. Nothing like standing in front of a lathe for 10 hours doing repetitive tasks with kerosene/oil lube spray in your face. Talk about watching the clock!

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Originally posted by dmoolenaar
Worked production in a machine shop. Nothing like standing in front of a lathe for 10 hours doing repetitive tasks with kerosene/oil lube spray in your face. Talk about watching the clock!

Holy crap, I did the same thing. "High flashpoint cutting oil." Yuck. Had to dip my arms in mineral spirits up to the elbows to get that crap off. I started off on an index table that drilled and tapped set-screw holes in electrical fittings. Next I got put the setscrews in! Then I graduated to a New Britain automatic screw machine. A little more interesting (more moving parts) but still ridiculous.

Shop owner didn't believe in A/C either. Probably violating more than a few OSHA regulations!

[Moses]

Get ready to cry me a river boys.

My dad was very old school. At one point I was offered a summer job as a lifeguard. My dad wouldn't let me take the job because it wasn't "real work".

Starting at age 13, I spent every summer on a road crew laying asphalt. It was a small company with a crew of 6. No way to hide and avoid labor for a few minutes. The older men ran the heavy equipment while us youngsters manned shovels all day. No gloves were allowed because of the fear of getting caught in machinery, so my hands bled for the first two weeks of every summer.

Asphalt comes off the truck at 280 degrees. When you walk on it, it will melt the glue in your shoes. Summertime temps were usually 90-100.

When I was 16, a truck driver dumped his load in the wrong place. My friend and I shoveled 6 tons of hot asphalt back onto the truck in 4 hours.

To this day the smell of asphalt makes me sick.

Got to thank my dad, though. He forced me to see what my life might be like if I didn't achieve success in school.

[JavaBrewer]

Originally posted by Moses
Get ready to cry me a river boys.

My dad was very old school. At one point I was offered a summer job as a lifeguard. My dad wouldn't let me take the job because it wasn't "real work".

Starting at age 13, I spent every summer on a road crew laying asphalt. It was a small company with a crew of 6. No way to hide and avoid labor for a few minutes. The older men ran the heavy equipment while us youngsters manned shovels all day. No gloves were allowed because of the fear of getting caught in machinery, so my hands bled for the first two weeks of every summer.

Asphalt comes off the truck at 280 degrees. When you walk on it, it will melt the glue in your shoes. Summertime temps were usually 90-100.

When I was 16, a truck driver dumped his load in the wrong place. My friend and I shoveled 6 tons of hot asphalt back onto the truck in 4 hours.

To this day the smell of asphalt makes me sick.

Got to thank my dad, though. He forced me to see what my life might be like if I didn't achieve success in school.

So how's that job as a roofer working out?

[Moses]

Originally posted by dmoolenaar
So how's that job as a roofer working out?

You know, I did roofing for about two weeks a long time ago. That sucks too.

[targa911S]

I can see why you went into lawn care now!

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Hmm...I always thought Moses was into sheep herding and the Dept. of Water Resources.

[dc914guy]

This doesn't beat hot asphalt by any means... But

Best Buy.... Had a sweet job as a PC tech, then my sup. got busted stealing and they moved everyone who was on duty when he got busted, I had to spend the rest of the summer unloading the trucks and selling appliances next time you pickup a box at Best Buy remember some poor high school kid had to move it out there..

The true silver lining... I stopped in to pickup some DVD's and bumped into the manager who demoted me, 4 years later at the same store in the same position.

~Eric

[nostatic]

two bad ones I can remember:

#1: worked on the assembly line at Ektelon making raquetball raquets. Went something like this: take a 5' long thin steel rod. Wipe it with wax. Take 7 different pieces of fiberglass, kevlar and graphite fabric and lay them out in a certain pattern. Put the rod down and roll the fabric pieces around the rod. Repeat.

#2: Masking cars at an auto body paint shop.

I also did singing telegrams for awhile, sold guitars, tropical fish, drugs (oh wait, strike that one), contruction laborer, bike mechanic, cable tv installer...

[widebody911]

I worked in a truss yard for a while. The crappiest task I had was to climb on my hands and knees out on to the 'table' - a huge slab of steel on which they built the trusses - and use an angle grinder to remove the welded-on jig stops to prepare for the next batch. This was in the central valley, where it would get to be 100+, and that slab of steel had be 9000 degrees.

[Moses]

During college when I was desperate for cash, my cousin got me a job setting chokers in Oregon for a logging crew.

I showed up, watched the work being done and decided I'd rather starve.

I lasted 2 days in Oregon and never set a choker.

[nostatic]

I thought that about the cable TV gig. I got the job thinking, "oh cool, I go into the house, plug in the box, and be on my way." On my first day the supervisor drove me out to meet up with one of the other installers so I could ride with him. As we pulled up, he was putting on his gaffs, and proceeded to climb the pole to do a disconnect at the tap.

I'm afraid of heights.

I was bumming.

Actually lasted about 1.5 years at that job. Only "burned" one pole (my gaff hit a crack and I hugged the pole rather than fall 20 feet...splinters in my arms and chest. Creosote makes it even better!

[dd74]

1) Serving subpoenas. A horrible existence of the "Don't shoot the messenger," vibe. I always got the blue collar garbage that lived in San Bernardino or near Electric Avenue in Venice (CA.). Wasn't a good way to meet women, either, unless you're into hyped-up blonds who put bleach both in their hair and on their needles.

2) Gas jockey at a Mobil station in Westwood, near UCLA. Worked with a crew of bros from Belize who loved to handle the nozzle after having a good smoke o' da herb. The idiots would saunter out to the pumps with lit cigarettes and proceed to fill 'er up.

The mechanic was a real treat: a Morrocan maniac whose brother was a hash connect. His default specialty was to pressure-spray a gas solvent on car undercarriages WHILE forgetting that the hand which held the sprayer also held a lit More cigarette.

What a crew! I was only in it for the Wilshire Boulevard executive secretaries and the occasional (but never cute) female FBI agents that stumbled up from the Federal Building.

[Adam]

When I was in high school, I worked for a family friend who owned a garden supplies company. He put me incharge of assembling and packing soil pH testing kits. Sat in the workshop, listening to the radio, inhaling all kinds of crap while making those little kits. I wasn't even allowed to change the radio station...

Later, while I was at University, I had a job sitting behind the counter at a quiet little Gas Station. I worked the late night shift, never got robbed and the store policy was for staff to take their pay (cash) straight out of the register! I just used the hoist to tinker on my car and over summer I re-did all the suspension bushes on my old Volvo-beater.

[Doug Zielke]

I have just retired from 34 years in electrical construction and engineering. You might say, "pulling my wire" got me through school!
But before that I worked as a DJ in a 1kw radio station for 8 months. All I could play was f'in country music, and I hated that *****. The station manager did have a good lookin' daughter, however......

[Moses]

I swear this is true. I have a friend who grew up in Brooklyn. As a favor, his uncle got him a summer job in a blintz factory. His job? Mixing the blintz batter. He leaned over a 100 gallon stainless steel tub trying to mix the batter with a wooden canoe paddle.

After 15 minutes, his arms were burning and he was sweating buckets. After 15 more minutes he was completely numb and eyeing the exits.

At that point, the owner walked by and said, "Faster, boy! Faster! Vee must haff air in the batter!"

Needless to say, he didn't finish the shift.

[Jack Olsen]

Moses, the asphalt gig definitely wins it.

I once was the overnight guy at a Kinko's in a poor part of Connecticut -- something like six bucks an hour to mostly try to talk homeless guys out of sleeping on the floor.

But it can't hold a candle to the asphalt.

[DonDavis]

I was 16 and my Dad got me a job at his friends nursery.


Does anyone REALLY know how heavy a 40 pound bag of peat moss or manure or potting soil weighs when it is on sale EVERY STINKIN' WEEKEND???

If I had a nickel for every bag I loaded, I could fill my head with nickels.

heh heh, have you seen my head?

Oh, BTW, the nursery is directly across the road from Bristol Motor Speedway.

[tabs]

I worked for a large Grocery Chain in LA as a warhouseman...one night a Brother wanted to go by me with his pallet jack and said, "Get the fk outa my way." He was an Orginal member of the Crips, hated white boyz, extorted money from them in the trailers, was an ex Golden Gloves Boxer whose hands looked like hams and was 6'2" of pure muscle, and when his brother was going to be fired managment called him into the office to explain why they had to fire his brother.

Anyway I made a a typical Tabby comment as he went by.."obbbba aaalllllaaa walllaaa".

A couple of aisles later when we had several pallets in between us he said, "I could shoot you right between the eyes, go home watch cartoons and laugh my head off." He was serious.....So boyz after receiving a death threat, go ahead and ban me some more..LOL.....

Oh and another time at the Warehouse...There is a white boy, who would only talk to a couple of people who were known gun lovers and nobody ever said much to him or bothered him. He just did his job. In the break room he could turn a newspaper page without making a sound. He was also a known to carry a a S&W 44 Mag pistol under his jacket. He thought I was crazy, and would talk to me a bit because he knew I liked guns as well. After a while he told me that, "If they had fired him from his job before he found the Lord he would have gone out in a blaze of glory."

And then there was the son of an Espiscopal Priest, old Tom nearly had a degree in engineering..he and his crew stole hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise from the company. They would change the number of boxes on a pallet creat false tranfers of merchadise have someone in the main warhouse unknowing load the transfer and ship it to their warehouse. They would even red tag a forklift ( saying it needed repair) ship it to their warehouse use it to unload the merchandise and when they were done ship it back to the warehouse as being fixed. He once was even was talking to the VP of Distribution for the Company as a trailer of his was leaving the yard enroute to his warehouse. The reason he never got caught was that he wasn't in it for the money, but for the challenge, to see if he could do it. He could come up to you and talk to you for half an hour only to find out the answer to one question. If he didn't find out the answer a member of his crew might come up to you and ask the same question a day later. Once to warn off an another employee he unlocked the guys car put a 50 b bag of dog food in the car to frame the guy for stealing. Tom is a TRUE Sociopath...and to this day has a pallet of sugar in his garage that was part of a heist..becuase he wanted to make some kind of experiment with it.

That boyz is where I learned my trade.... I talked more ***** an jive than any man alive.. it makes what I do here look like he picture of sanity..I WAS the craziest mtherfker there....an the old timers still talk about me after all these years.