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

hmmmm..... worst job....? I think I've had one or two jobs which I bolted from after a couple days, but I can't recall what one of them was.

This one hurts to even tell...but I worked as an expo at the Red Lobster... the thought of cheddar bay biscuits makes me sick to this day.

The day they put me behind the fryer and handed me an oversized hairnet, with my neighbor being a former gang member who constantly stole liquor from the bar and got so wasted he flicked grease on me - I was out of that hellhole.

Wow, livingthedream, that sounds soooo bad.

My worst was as a gofer for the Democratic Party in Tucson,AZ. The job was going to people who had promised to make a contribution. I would drive all over town, picking up donations. Occassionally, the people got angry and swore they had never promised to donate and started looking at me very accusingly. I, at seventeen, was mortified. To top it off, the guy who ran the fund raiser was seedy and loved to leer at all the girls working there. I didn't trust him at all.

The little set up was in a wealthy woman's house. She used to enjoy talking to me once in a while between pickups. When I had been there about two weeks, she called me in and asked me to watch the manager closely to see if he was skimming money off the top. I should explain here that she was disabled and remained in her bedroom most of the time. The day after she expressed her suspiscion about the manager, he fired me, saying that i was no longer needed.

I've always wondered about that poor lady and the sleazy character who had taken over most of her house.

There are only two things that scare me .... cabbage and ..... carnies!

Let's see, water guy

Worked for about a week one summer in a storm window factory on Long Island. One of my tasks was to spray the sides of the windows with some kind of sealant in a heated room. Anyone who's spent time on LI in the summer knows that you don't want to be in a heated room...The sealent fumes were no joy, either.

I once had a summer job where I was sent to a tough neighborhood shlepping a 16-mm projector and small screen. I had to knock on doors, talk myself in, and convince residents to view a short movie of commercials some of which had appeared on TV the night before. The people had to indicate which (if any) they remembered.
Because of doors slammed and numerous nasty comments, I didn't last the day.


(I didn't read mre than a few pages of the previous posts, so if the following appeared, I apologize. I also had a job circumsizing elephants! The pay was lousy, but the tips were tremendous....)

Plumbers apprentice.

I was a cock teaser at roosterrama.

I worked at a job microfilming -- I'd sit in this chair and feed thousands of pieces of a paper into a feeder. I remember one of the clients was Harvard Univiersity.

Not only was it boring, but I worked with 3 women (2 of those woemn had become mothers in their mid-teens) who were heavy smokers, they were always dieting except when they would go pick up some ice cream sundaes every other day.

It was real bad.

I could have sworn I was gonna win the worst job competition but so far I think this and dishwasher might be tied.

Nevermind I just read the rest of the jobs on this thread.

Amigo, there's more. The whole day they played the Top 40 radio station on a tinny little radio-- Awful stuff, from the late 80s. That wretched song from that hideous movie-- "Dirty Dancing" playing again, and again and again.

I had a temp job for 3 days. It was at a chemical mfg place that made insecticide for the fed gov't. I was on the final 'assembly' line. The guy ahead of me would fill 6 of those old style rectangular gallon sized containers with the bug juice. My role in the operation was to screw the caps onto the cans. Yes, I was a professional cap-screwer. I'd wait patiently with my caps in hand, ready to pounce on each group of six cans as they came down the belt. I could screw those caps like nobody's business. The person after me was the labeler - she'd slap a black & white label onto each can. That was it for 8 hours a day.

They wanted to hire me on permanently, but after 3 days as a temp I'd had enough (plus I smelled of bug juice 24/7, much to the dismay of my future wife.) Several years later the place was shut down and was designated a "superfund" toxic clean-up site.

After serving in the military, I returned to my hometown and began to look for work. I had dropped out of high school and joined the military to avoid going underground in the mines. Cold, wet, dirty and dangerous work in a dark world. No thanks. Working on a cattle ranch may seem romantic, but it pays less than minimum wage, and consists of long lonely hours of backbreaking labor. Even so the call for ranch-hands is almost non-existent where ranchers can hardly afford wet-back labor. There just aren't many jobs of any sort available in the small towns along the Mexican border, but I finally landed one.

I reported to a cotton field before dawn, and stood around waiting for someone to tell me what to do. The foreman came and asked me how much experience I had picking cotton and then assigned me to work with a bunch of kids, the oldest of which was maybe 14. We each drew a long sack and began picking cotton down what seemed like endless rows.

The cotton plants only stood about waist high, so to find and pick the bolls the picker has to walk bent over from the waist. You find the cotton, and try to pull it free of the husks. The husks are hard, and sharp. I worked steadily for about half an hours struggling to find and pick all the cotton on each bush, and avoid having my fingers repeatedly stabbed. My back was killing me from the strain. I stopped and looked up. The little kids were just finishing up their rows while I was maybe 50 yards up my own.

The foreman came out and asked what the problem was, and showed me how to pluck the cotton out. "You've got to work faster than this, kid. You're paid by how much the cotton weighs in your tow-sack". My sack was still depressingly flat though it seemed to me I was dragging around 30 pounds of anchor. "Let's see what've got", the foreman asked. He looked, sighed and told me to go back to the truck and dump all the cotton that was stained with the blood from my fingers. That was most of the cotton I had managed to pick. I noticed walking back to the truck that a whole lot of cotton still remained on the plants that I had so carefully already picked. I dumped the bloody cotton, turned in my sack and went on home to a cold beer.

Vowing I'd never take such a terrible job again, I continued looking for work and ended up working at a chili packing plant. Chili was brought to the plant by truck, unloaded, roasted and ground into the chili powder that you can buy in the supermarket. Out in the fields the temperature in Southern Arizona can reach 105 degrees, but you get used to it. In the chili packing plant the furnaces burned night and day under a tin roofed shed. Even without walls the temperature could top 120 degrees, even on a cool day. The worker's pores open up to discharge rivers of cooling sweat. Arizona is a dry climate so dehydration is a constant threat. A byproduct of grinding chili fine is that the air is always filled with chili dust. It gets into your hair, your nose and eyes, and into all those open pores. No one can work long in such conditions. Fools pass out, but most folks take a break every ten minutes or so. We would go out and sit in the shade of the boss's pickup to recover, enough to go back and earn somemore of those minimum wages. The job had one really fine benefit, the boss each day brought cases of Mexican beer for the workers. American beer wouldn't do because it doesn't taste very good warm, but good Mexican beer (at the time it was also cheaper) was designed to be drunk warm. We had a dispensor for ice (?) water, but everyone preferred the beer. Though it sounds as if the chili packing plant was a bad job, I stayed with it for several months. It was good crew and we got along well with one another and the boss was alright. We were all young single men and on our days off we drank and fought our way through some pretty tough cantinas along the border. A pretty good job althings considered if you leave out the fact that there was no future in it at all.

My worst job I had ever had was being employed in a factory picking stalks off a conveyer belt from Dehydrated beans for 12 hours a day 7 days a week...the stalks and the beans looked exactly the same!! never again.

In a plating shop, making handles for O'Keefe & Merrit stoves. I don't think anyone who worked there (in 1952) is still alive, at least not if they stayed there (I put up with it for seven months). The acids on the floor and in the air were super corrosive (as seen in the holes in our t-shirts and the chronic coughs). No government safety regulations in those days.

I worked in a grease and oil company one summer and filled 55 gallon barrels with hot grease you know like the grease for grease guns? and when not doing that I sat at an assembly line, one job was patting down the curly that was left when grease was injected into the tube then the other job was putting lids on the tubes. that place was so hot

Asherman. Great stories! Thanks.
When I was perhaps 14 or 15, I picked apples and peaches after school and on weekends. 25 cents a bushel as I recall, but I may be wrong. I wore this apron thing that had a sort of sack in front. Pick the fruit and put it in the sack until you felt you might fall off the ladder. Then climb down and empty it all into the basket. In both cases you couldn't just grab and pull. You had to twist the fruit slightly and then pluck the stem with your thumb. If you didn't do it that way, the branch would be damaged and wouldn't produce buds and fruit the next year. The foreman watched for careless picking.
Picking peaches was the worst assignment. We almost had to lay the fragile fruit in our bags and transferring it to the baskets without damage took away valuable picking time. We were not paid for bruised fruit.
And peach trees and peaches have a "dust" that is very irritating to the skin.
Picking apples was a bit easier, but it all depended on the variety you were assigned to pick. I forget all of the types. Sometimes I would get assigned to a big one (Red Delicious?) and you could fill a basket in ten minutes. Sometimes you would get a cooking apple, smaller than a tennis ball, and it would take twice as long to earn the same 25 cents a bushel. On a good day I could turn in 100 bushels. This was 1960.

The title of this thread is something like "The worst job..." No, I would say that, excluding Vietnam, it was the hardest I ever had to work, physically, but in a way it was fun. A bunch of folks tried it for a day or so and disappeared, so there was this core group that kept coming back for 25 cents a bushel. Right before dark on weeknights and at lunch and right before dark on weekends, we would go down to the pond and go skinny dipping to remove the dust. Some of the folks, not johnboy of course, would smoke a bit of pot.

There is an old expression, Asherman, I think pertaining to the combat military, that goes something like: I wouldn't go through that experience again for a million dollars; but I wouldn't exchange that experience for a million dollars, either. Does that make any sense?

the worst job i had : picking hops in bavaria !



had to be on the field by six o'clock in the morning. lunchbreak and work on until six p.m.
we were paid 50 pfennigs for a bushel basket - and those buggers are small ! we had no gloves and are hands were not only stained but tanned from the tannic acid.
slept in a barn graciously provided by the farmer.
but since we were a bunch of teenage boys, we had fun after all. hbg

i still have some pics that make me look like the woman in the picture !

hamburger to much info - LOL