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What is Positively the Worst Job You Ever Had?
Posted by LynneaUrania • 1/06/09 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: absolute yuck!, bad employers, bad jobs
Most of us had jobs that we couldn't stand...dirty, slimy jobs that make us look like we were slapped in the face with raw meat before the day was out. Or we had bosses who we swear should have had warrants out for their arrests long ago. Perhaps the corruption was so bad you were pulled into the mire to survive. Maybe the sexual harassment was such that you wanted to hide instead of considering it a benefit...yet the offenders covered their political tracks too well.
Here's your chance! What are your icky job confessions..the jobs you loved to loathe?
User Comments
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I had a job cleaning out hydrostatic wells in a dry dock of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. This was an 8-week job in smoky, humid conditions with most of the microscopic flora of the planet wafting through the air. I had to use my bare hands in salt slime with a light that could short out and electrocute me any minute. To this day, 40 years later, my hands still have a terrible time from peeling.
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I was an insurance agent. It was positively the worst job ever. It wasn't hard or demanding, but downright dirty and underhanded. I lasted only a few weeks before I quit. I couldn't stand the sneaky, underhanded, cutthroat politics, customer and ethics dodging, and doing things "just inside the law" to make higher profits.
Blech.-
I went to an open day seminar with a view to applying for a job in insurance, I quietly slipped out the door yuk -
I am with you, Anok. I had a job for about 2 months as an "interviewer" for a life insurance company. I had to call up applicants and ask questions the underwriters had about their health.
I couldn't help but feel the company was constantly digging for reasons to deny coverage. It was an awful job. -
Good news for you is that those unethical insurance companies are most likely out of business now.
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KennelMaid at the Racetrack in the Northeast of England. I had to clean out the greyhounds kennels, walk the dogs (I loved the dogs), clean the dogs, brush their teeth, weigh them before the race, catch them at the end of the race, feed them (food was made in a locked room and heavily supervised due to fears of sabotage). I never trusted the quality of the food they served us for lunch or whether I was getting horsemeat or regular meat. I didn't like how some of the dogs were treated by staff or owners, especially when a dog was retired (in those days they were just put down). I didn't like the races, and the pay was so bad I had very little left after paying for bus fare to work. I lasted a less than two months. -
best buy because of the brain-washing
or
mcdonalds for the full out reverse racism
not sure which one is worse:
telling me that selling someone a 24k-gold printer cable IS a value
or
telling me I'm not doing any work and how horrible I am when I am actually doing ALL the work...
thank god for my degree.-
The word on the internet and sites like consumerist.com say best buy is the worst job to have, far worse than mcdonalds. Its funny you mention the Cable scam. Monster cable is always under fire for something these days, they even try to sue the competition away and anyone who defames them.
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Most ironic job I've ever had: stapling insurance claims for repetitive strain injury, a job I left because I developed repetitive strain injury!
Worst job was working as a waitress in an Italian restaurant. Didn't mind it at first but after about a month all the staff who had been working there when I started left to go back to their universities in Europe and they were replaced with Polish prostitutes who didn't speak a single word of English! I literally mean prostitutes... And then all the kitchen staff got deported because it turns out they were illegal immigrants from Brazil claiming to be Portuguese! The new lot were also illegals from Brazil, and having nowhere to stay they slept in the restaurant! So I'd come into work at 11am and find people sleeping in cupboards...and then when customers arrived I had to do literally everything myself as the girls couldn't communicate with the customers or the kitchen staff! If that wasn't bad enough, the manager...who had employed they Polish waiting staff and had them all staying at his house and occasionally took one upstairs to the toilets... used to take money from the till and go to a betting shop, and to cover his stealing he would add items to the bills of big tables with the hope they wouldn't notice...and as he had gone I had to take the flack from people who wondered why their bill was twice as long as it should have been! A really lovely Turkish guy was hired as a deputy manager and when he complained to head office about the way the restaurant was run he was sacked by head office! And the manager promoted one of the Polish girls to assistant manager even though she didn't speak English!
I suppose it's a fair indication of how bad the service got as when I started we were getting £30 tips each a night and by the time I left there were not only no tips, but no customers!
Advice: never eat at an ASK or a Prezzo when you are in the UK...-
Yikes! And most prostitutes I had for friends never pretended to be anything but. I should count my blessings, even with such "friends."
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I worked with a Russian pimp once.
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@Anok ....I so want to hear that story!
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I presume that means you didn't work FOR him. Otherwise we would have to find a way to rescue you.
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LOL! no, I worked with him, as he had a day job LMAO
He and another coworker were lower level goons in the Russian mafia where I lived, and they ran a pimp and car stripping gig on the side He used to come in with champagne and roses, and ask me to "accompany him" and "his ladies" every so often. I feigned a language barrier and politely declined
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As a teenager...a supermarket cashier. I never smiled and they wanted to fire me for that.
Give me something to smile about is what I had to say.
They did me a favor because I landed a much better job afterwards with benefits.
I should have sued them, imagine getting fired for not smiling. WTF.-
You got by lucky. I remember one job where I supervised a maintenance crew for a seniors complex in a mostly black area of Oakland. I was in trouble because I didn't spend enough time socializing! Ain't that the straw?
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INDEED.....how silly
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I've been fired from jobs for that reason too, either I wasn't cheery enough or I didn't get along with the other co-workers. I said "Hey asshole, I'm not working here because I want to, why should I smile, hm? Will you pay me more money if I smile?"
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riverstyxxx....To top it all off and not to brag, I was a real good employee
because the employees that they kept would go into the aisles and open up the peanut butter jars, spit in them and reseal them.
This was way before security protection labels were placed on certain items.
Now peanut butter, yogurt, ice cream and etc has security labels on them and if you see that the labels are broken, you should not purchase that product as it could obviously be tampered with.
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My first job was in a shoe shop and I hated it. Mainly because I could never find anything in the stock room and the assistant manageress was a cow! I was so miserable there and left after six weeks. The Assistant Manageress said something really pleasant like "You won't get another job." (I was sixteen and impressionable but still I didn't believe her) Within a week I had one of the favourite jobs I ever had - in a garden centre - it was great! -
Hands down, working in a fish processing plant. Extremely long hours some days, standing on a cement floor, being damp and cold all day, machinery brrrzzing in my ears cutting fish. Its a very stinky job and also very monotonous. YUCK!!!!!!-
Now the song, "I wish...I wish..I wish I were a fish," sounds truly creepy!
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I'm hearing you there I did that for a week after I first left school, it is definitely the worst job in the world. -
YES!!! Finally someone who understands the horrors of fish processing plants, standing there for hours on end, popping the heads off shrimp, over and over and over again -
My fish processing job was not near as bad as my mink farm job. Did you know they really just skinny mean skunks?
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Zayre. It was a discount department store like WalMart, only smaller and tackier. The job itself wasn't hard, but it drove me crazy because no one would tell you anything--any time you asked a question, someone would snatch whatever it was out of your hands and say, "I'll do it myself!", so the next time it came up, you still didn't know how to do it.
The store was right down the block from my house and my mother had always complained that the clerks there didn't know anything...but when I went to work there (for one very long summer, during which I also worked two other jobs), I found out why.-
I had experience of that kind of service today, I was in a big store I had bought a pair of combat pants that wouldn't scan and it took four people ten minutes to work out how to type the price into the till and then they put all my stuff in a big brown paper bag and I'm on my way to my appointment they made me late for and the handle just rips off the side of the bag and I end up going to my appointment holding 2 pairs of jeans, a pair of combats and 2 jumpers like some runaway shoplifter.
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As a schoolie on work experience I worked in catering-scrubbing pots, but the people were nice if a little rough
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If that's the worst job you ever get, then you are truly blessed.
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Being slave labor as a child for mom's mafia b/f, which exposed me to rape, stole years of my life & didn't even pay.-
That is certainly hard to beat in terms of bad jobs. Hugz, dear.
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Goddamn, you take the cake for worst jobs.
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Auntie Anne's pretzels in high school. that was back when that lemonade was handmade and not from concentrate. Lemme tell ya, nothing was more annoying than slicing 36 lemons, juicing them all, measuring out 6 cups of sugar and so forth. Plus when I quit, I went to bavarian pretzel company ( I really liked pretzels) and Auntie Anne's sued me (at 15) for violating a non compete clause. Lol Lesson learned-
How did that lawsuit pan out in the end? What happened?
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I was a "go go" dancer in a club in Boston's Combat Zone in the late 60s. All the clubs in those days were mobbed up, but I was pretty naive and didn't know. On payday the boss expected us to perform sexual favours before he would give us our pay envelopes. I was so dumb I had no idea what he wanted and just stood there holding my hand out for my pay. I didn't last long at that club, but by the time I moved on to another one, I had it figured out...and how to get around it.-
SweetViolet you may be happy to know that developers knocked down and cleaned up most
of the combat zone in Boston and now there is high priced condo's available for sale there. -
I never understood how someplace so close to the Common was such a low-rent district!
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SweetViolet....Yes I agree, the area is much better now, minus the afternoon drunks.
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My first job teaching was at a really rough high school. The teacher who ran the class before me got fired because a girl gave a boy a blow job in the classroom. In my first week, a kid started a fire in the room. There were gang fights in my classroom. A kid threatened to accuse me of sexual harassment if I wouldn't quit (I didn't and thankfully he didn't.) My boss did her nails with one of the other teachers in her office and was in general a lazy twat. It was horrendously stressful. I finished out the year and left.
I still wonder about the kids though. -
I worked for a very short period of time at a factory farm for chickens and turkeys. Coming from a rural background where all poultry and stock lived healthy and happy lives prior to slaughter, the factory farm conditions were so inhumane and disgusting that this brief few days changed me forevermore.
I had never before witnessed poultry where their upper beaks had been removed so they could not peck and whatever they scooped up with their lower beaks had to be swallowed. I had never before witnessed injured birds that were not removed from flocks and treated to assist them to recover.
We are what we eat and I will not eat meat from these horrible places of torture where animals that are all genetically identical are kept in confinement, medicated and treated like objects rather than as living beings. I donated the entire proceeds of my paycheck to the SPCA. I changed what I eat and I'm cautious about where my food comes from now.
I continue to be haunted by the horrible things I saw at the turkey and chicken farm, but most of all I continue to be haunted by the inhumane attitudes stemming from a lack of compassion of the people who worked in them.
www.freewebs.com/mycatmaggie04/poultry.htm
I eat meat and/or fish about 3 times weekly and I know the farmers and the stock that I eat. I see them lead healthy, normal and happy lives prior to slaughter. I am thankful that I have sources of organic locally produced meats, and I grieve that fact that we don't all have this.
I'm incensed that our governments subsidize these evil corporations that own factory farms and I do whatever I can to help all animal rescue operations that I can. Every government's responsibility is to protect and preserve the land and the animals required for providing food to it's citizens. Ours have sold out our access to healthy food to corporations.-
I am a meat eater but if someone started a boycott to force these industries to be more humane I would join in, live transport and stuff as well. c'mon let's start a B.C. boycott.
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If you stop eating that kind of meat and only eat free-range and organic meat you are boycotting them.
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In California we recently passed an initiative that required that all hen houses, etc. allow animals to have room to stretch their limbs. It isn't the best we can do, but it's a dent at what is a pretty mean industry.
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"In California we recently passed an initiative that required that all hen houses, etc. allow animals to have room to stretch their limbs. It isn't the best we can do, but it's a dent at what is a pretty mean industry."
I voted in favor of passing that law
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Checking in dirty laundry to be washed - piece by piece - at dry cleaners. -
Well, I'd written a humor post about one of them-- my babysitting for a hyperactive 7-year-old dog-tackling nudist!
cabbages-n-kings.blogspot.com/2008/12/oh-yes-they-called-him-streak.html-
This is one very funny blog post.
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I made sandwiches for a cafeteria - it was long long time ago -
Why, Keren! That's a comment I might have expected from Mr. Cheeseburger!
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Hands down - My first full-time job which I just quit last 2 weeks..
Still have yet to settle.. Am still on it..
Full story here.. then you can understand howw bad it is..lol!
purple-cashmere.com/blog/100th-post-career-crisis/ -
Fast food closing shift
Dirty, greasy and mindless
Icky coworkers-
Did you have to clean the grease trap and the overhead filters over the stove each week? I do remember that from Sambos!
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Working in the sewing room for a theatre back in Finland. The job itself sounds fabulous, but the designer was a grade school teacher, who had no idea of dress making, and the leader of the wardrobe had never sewn a stitch in her life. The cutter had no idea of equal seam allowances, and the whole place, even though it was one of the most prestigious theatres in the country, was a mess. But I learned something: You can't possibly ruin a dress to a level that it cannot be made into a dress. -
Now we know the TRUE inspiration behind most of our patterns!
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Photocopy repair man (prior to purchasing my convenience store). People jam more than paper in those infernal machines!!! -
My sister once worked for McDonalds as a teenager and she always came home smelling like french fries.
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after a while you get repulsed by the smell of french fries even the good ones... -
Correct.....finally a man who understands me
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Somehow, the idea of "Freedom Fries" just doesn't fit any more.
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I worked at the k-mart photo studio as a teenager from the end of halloween until I decided I had had enough three days before christmas.
I also managed a fast food restaurant in college and if there is a more thankless job in the world I am not sure I know what it could be. I took to going into san francisco three days a week and begging with a sign that said "I am a college student and poor" while I did my homework. My average take was $25/hour averaged over 25-30 hours a week and I only occasionally had to talk to people and the bum across the street was a burnt out hippie with 3 phD's. despite the fact he was crazy as could be he was a lot better than dealing the early morning customers at a fast food restaurant.-
I love hippies with PhD's. They often are the most sensible people I've met, even if they are crazy. But usually I find them in colleges with coffee mugs talking about girls. I think they are crazier than waiting to bum $25 and hour in change? Why? The hippie you met understood people. the college hippies didn't understand women.
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I can't say I've had any really bad jobs, because I learned something beneficial from them. Experience. -
I'd say grocery bagging was a pretty unrewarded job. My job at a UPS Store was not the fun either, especially during the holidays! -
Well I won't call it the worse but it was close. I blogged about it.
chaoticallycalm.blogspot.com/2008/06/changing-positions.html
I also worked as a water ice scooper one summer in the blazing Philadelphia heat and humidity which lead to more than a few fainting spells.-
Interesting. But please don't morph into Condi Rice. We love you the way you are.
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I made organic sauerkraut in a hippie sweatshop while I was in college. They paid us under the table. All the hippies wanted to do was smoke and listen to the Grateful Dead, but the boss was there so he would not let them while he was there and they would grouse. It was pretty weird. -
Easy, a band I played with played a venue at 1 in the morning. It was advertised as All You Can Drink For $18.
Our drummer never turned up, he met a new lady. We were playing funk, sort of Aretha Franklin and other stuff, we had to follow a Heavy Metal Band on because we were headlining. We ended up borrowing the drummer from the metal band, oddly enough he was classically trained and could handle 80% of what we were doing.
At about midnight i wandered across the dance floor, it was absolutely covered in broken glass and the audience were paralytic. It sort of was, more than you can drink and even more for $18.
I spent ten minutes with the drama queen lead singer of the metal band, screaming in my ear... you stole my drummer, you stole my drummer. Being diplomatic< i occasionally said, thanks for loaning your drummer, we paid him, you're very lucky to have such a good player, we are grateful... you stole my drummer... you stole my drummer.
The venue was closed down a week later. I have no idea who the other band was.-
Yeek...that's enough to make it hard for any red panda to keep that smile.
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Life as a rock star aint so glamorous after all then..
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Field Engineer in Oil Well, it was in remote area and jungle-
My first jobs were in the pipe trades. That really is pretty grimy work that leaves you smelly into next week no matter how many times you shower. And the grime that gets into your pores will take even longer to get out. Hats off to men on the oil wells!
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working in the shoe dept at a chain store in the crappy part of town. next to the tweaker motel. every weekend was the same. mothers come in with their dozen children in tow and allow them to pull things off the shelves, leave them on the floor everywhere and just completely destroy everything. i wanted to strangle the children and scream at the mothers. i hated that job with a passion. -
Shriekers near the sneakers at the tweaker's.
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Wish I could be more specific. But in short, i worked for a man who was a giant in his field, and who wanted to try his hand at another field.
The problem is that he was in hindsight probably the least qualified person to ever attempt that particular endeavor.
On top of that, he was also without contest the worst leader, manager, and boss i've ever had, not to mention even witnessed. And considering my career that says a lot.
I was out of there pdq, and the whole thing went @ss over tea-kettle soon after. -
Being a personal housecleaner when I was a teenager, I had to clean up adults dirty laundry, shovel dog crap, clean windows, but worst of all the couple would leave used condoms, and soiled garments around I had to clean.-
Of course, most jobs do consist of shoveling someone else's c___ of some form or another.
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My old job as proofreader ruined my eyes and gave me a permanent migraine headache. One time, I proofread negatives containing science illustrations with German characters. I had to do the proofreading on top of a stripping table, the one with a glass top and a light bulb under. After doing this the whole day, my world would turn black and white for several hours before it returns to normal. I had that job for weeks, months at a time. Looking back, I can't imagine how I managed to stay a long time with the publishing company. I wasn't even paid the minimum wage back then. Now, the damage to my eye is permanent.-
That's a real danger. I did a lot of close work on blueprints as a construction estimator. The eyestrain was trememdous. I never needed glasses before then. Now I always need them to read.
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CSR for a washing/drying machine company. The whole day consisted of listening to people complain alllllllll day long. -
Cleaning fish in Alaska for 18 hours a day.
I could be sent to prison, be forced to make license plates, and even then I would think to myself "well, at least I'm not cleaning fish in Alaska."-
That's a third vote for cleaning fish.
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IHOP. Never work for IHOP. Never even eat there and try to avoid eye contact if you see one from the highway.
I worked there after I turned 18. My dad moved us out to the middle of nowhere in texas, wouldn't let me finish high school and made me get a job. I met some retired military guy (Who turned out to be a pervert and made advances at me) who got me the job as a dishwasher on the graveyard shift at IHOP. Place was horrible too, I didn't even know what my hourly wage was and when they finally fired me a month later, it took over a month just to get my first and only paycheck.-
I know that the 2 times I had eaten at IHOP I became ill.
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Waitering. Even working on my friend's farm before the crack of dawn was more fun.-
Plus the feeling that you accepted a job that requires the public's generosity to pay your salary doesn't help. I covered this topic a long time ago, in four parts.
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Telemarketer, hands down-
I did that too..Oh im sorry, i was a "Market Researcher" or "Phone Surveyor" That job was shit.
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I was a bus boy in high school that was pretty crappy. Also I worked construction one summer for my Uncle's construction company and they just had me do crappy stuff to teach me a lesson like "move this entire pile of rocks from one side of the site to another" and the next day I would move it back.-
The Nazis had death camps where they would make the prisoners do the same thing.
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I probably should have said altar boy but I'm just not feeling like want to go there today
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OMG, altar boy! O I hated that! I know you got it far worse.
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KFC was an absolutely horrendous job for me. The smell was unbearable (worse than some of the cadaver dissections I've been to). I could never eat their chicken again without smelling that same disgusting smell of raw chicken parts and god knows what. -
De-veining shrimp as a salad prep girl at the Holiday Inn -
I worked as a legal secretary for a arrogant son of a **** of a lawyer. Nothing I did was good enough for him.-
O I do hate those kinds of bosses...or clients. One was an architect for whom I had won a metal decking job...on an elementary school built over a parking lot. It was worth a third of a million so the company held onto it for dear life.
But the detailer flubbed out on shop drawings. She saw that the architect and structural engineer wanted the subs to design certain areas for them. I ended up finishing the shop drawings myself. It was a headache with RFI's (Request For Information) flying almost every day. By time it was over the General Contractor, not my little subcontractor, was ready to file lawsuits against the architect. That general was hopping mad. But my firm still finished ahead of schedule and under budget. Whew!
I never did an estimate for that architect again.
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Wrong place...
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One summer when I was in High school, several girlfriends and I decided we were going to pick watermelon for extra money. I live in Florida, which extremely hot and humid in the summer. It was dirty, hard work, and every time the water truck came around, it seemed we never made it there until after the water was all gone. As a result, we busted open watermelons to get the juice. Anything to wet your lips. I still love watermelon by taste, but to this day, it is very hard for me to eat any. -
I used to be a lifeguard.... Until some blue kid got me fired.
Larry the Cableguy -
really, how come you got fired? sorry to hear that
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My worst job by far was back when i worked at Tyson Foods or the "Chicken Plantation" as we called it. The job had horrible working conditions and long hours. It really didn't pay enough for the labor that was performed. I worked in the stocking department and also on the kill line as it was called. The stocking department was a huge freezer and it was always wet and you were lifting heavy boxes of chicken for hours with only a half hour break. The kill line we had to kill live chickens and endure when they scratch and claw, excrete, and blood and guts. Very horrible. -
By far the worst Job I ever had was at a Temp Agency when I was a kid, the first Temp job was in a mail room.... Please shoot me. Great post. -
Raking leaves in a cemetery.-
@jackpayne...YIKES
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMja9C6Htts
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folding tissue paper in a factory
we had to fold 8 sheet per minute-
Ya, know, that really doesn't sound that hard on the surface. But I suppose you have to handle that tissue a certain way.
And I suppose being bested by Puffs or Kleenex must be truly humiliating.
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Auditor at Arther Anderson before Enron. -
I was a perfume salesman once and it sucked. I went walking about three miles trying to sell a bottle of perfume and only sold one the whole day. That scored me $10 for one day. The job was supposed to lead up to a managemnet position but I wouldnt think so. It seemed like one of those cons. -
When I was 16 years old, I worked at a Livestock Auction, and my job was to chase the animals off the scale after they had been weighed. The scale held about thirty sheep or pigs, or about ten head of cattle. The scale was covered in fresh poop and I had to tread across it all to chase the animals out. -
I worked for a female lawyer for 6 years who was a nightmare. I had fantasies of blasting her with a machine gun. I went into therapy because of her. I still have nightmares about that job.
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