Worse Jobs You've Held?

[Armistead]

What's the worse job you've ever held, low pay, dirty or simply hated the boss.

I remember my first job, I was 14, plucking tobacco. My brother worked for a farmer that told him to hire people to pluck tobacco and get up hay.
The farmer paid brother to pay us. My brother hired me and a friend, paid us $20 a day for 10 hours...Guess late 70's. He also charged us both $5 a piece to drive us there, even though he was going anyway.

Worse job was hot tar roofing when I was 18.

[Onkel Neal]

Both of those jobs sound awful.

[BossMark]

The one I have got now I am a technician and I make plastic milk bottles, the job isn't too bad but the bloody management make the job harder than it should be, and they are totally bloody useless they couldn't run a bath or organise a piss up in a brewery. Most of my fellow workmates are OK though

[Jimbuna]

That's a good question because I've never done a job I didn't enjoy but met plenty of people I wouldn't give the time of day to.

[Tchocky]

Systems support for an unnamed telecom network provider. Great people to work with.

Awful hours, conditions and absolutely no support from management. Turnover of staff was amazingly high

[Skybird]

Kitchen of a beer garden in summer, during my university years. 300 guests, a cramped kitchen the size of a mobile fastfood stand, room temperature due to the heating stoves and a court verdict to not open windows (due to the neighbours complaining about the smells) always near or above 40°C, a choleric chief at the bar, stress without end, service time 1900 to 2400, coming home after midnight, drowning in my own sweat and stinking like hell from all the kitchen smell (you hardly get that smell out of your hair even when using truckloads of soap under the shower). I gave up after 6 weeks - and then had to fight for my payments. I admit this was the one job that totally and hopelessly overburdened me. A nightmare.

Vegetable market, again during my university years, in the night and early morning, over the winter months. They needed a muscular guy like Schwarzenegger. Instead they got me, figure of a slim (back then) fencer. Extremely exhausting job.

Best payed job was overseas, as scout and security for TV crew. More money in one week than with any of my other jobs in several months. But more risk involved, street crime, and two occasions when i had to see really nasty things, a massacre site in Algeria, and a Kurdish village that Turkish artillery had rolled over the day before. The best and the worst of my job experiences - this one had it both. But it gave me the money that I later needed to buy my current flat.

In my studied profession (psychology) I worked only unpaid always, and in contracts of limited time. Sooner or later that pissed me, and so I turned my back on it - plenty of compliments and requests to continue are flattering, yes - but it does not pay bills, and when I am of value for somebody and passed their testing time, then I want something valuable in return, not just cheap words.

All in all I had I think 13 different paid jobs since end of my schooltime, and 5 unpaid voluntary engagements in my life. Paper boy, truck loader, market worker, shop salesman, cashier, counselor, meditation teacher, martial arts trainer, cook, guard, factory worker, psychologist - I think I covered quite a wide spectrum. I am not obsessed with defining myself through work only, and so today live by modest family savings and relatively withdrawn, also due to health issues. Life is for once only, and I saw too many old people near their death who deeply regretted that they wasted so much of their time for fame and job, and spend so little time for what they really were interested in: hobbies, family, friends. Most people do not have the luxury to really love and be filled by feelings of achievement and self-realization regarding their professional jobs, most people are stuck in useless, boring treadmills killing their lifetime and wasting their spirits. If you do not really love what you do, I see it this way: work professionally as much as you must, but as little as you can afford. All in all I found in my life my balance between moderate living standards that I can afford and can still live with, and time invested in paid work.

Work as a fetish like it is today, and work-related diseases and burnout as a status symbol? Our society is sick, I say. We were not born to serve factories' needs. Again my advise: work as much as you must, check your demands on living standards and see if you can tweak them and still be happy, do not work more than necessary, as long as you do not really love your job. No man on Earth has any claims to make for you and has no demand that you should serve his interests, as long as you do not live at his costs and do not spend what is his.

And if you do not know what to do with your time if you must not work, and have no interests of yourself, then you have a big problem, me thinks, and you may want to talk with a counselor on that.

Time when you are happy and are absorbed by what interests you, is living time well spent. May be hobby, may be work on your farm, may even be your profession if you are lucky, may be whatever it is. Time when you count the seconds until your shift is over is a waste of life. Maybe needed to make your living, but nothing that gives meaning to your life. Cut it as short as you can afford, for you will not get back that time.

[fireftr18]

College years job in a grocery store. The people (customers, co-workers, management) were good, but the pay was awful, the hours bad and sometimes long, and constant working in a hurry with no real break.

After that, I started with the fire department and haven't worked a day since.

[Wolferz]

Picking bunch beans on a truck farm. All day on my knees in the hot sun. I was paid by the bushel. I'm glad it was only a summer job.
Stripping tobacco isn't much better. Did that for my grandfather one year.

[Herr-Berbunch]

Never had a bad job. If I had to pick one it would be working in the offices for a double glazing company* when I left education, but only because the pay was a pittance.

All my other jobs, and that one, have been great for me but as with Mark the downside is the hierarchy.

Edit: *the factory staff, most of the office staff, and the fitters were excellent. The managers left a lot to be desired (the company went bust about six months after I left), but the least trustworthy bunch of bitching, back-stabbing, barstewards was the double glazing salesman. I only liked one, who was a bit quiet, almost wet! Luckily I liked him as he's the husband of one of the doctors at my local surgery.

[WernherVonTrapp]

Maybe I'm different in this respect, but I never considered any job I've had to be "the worst". I always felt blessed to have a job and I've never had more than 2 weeks of unemployment between full-time jobs. My first job was at the age of 10 where I sorted the Sunday Papers for a couple of hours at a local Deli for the sum of $1.00.00. When I was 16, I worked part time (summer work) in a local lumber yard.
Right out of High School, I worked 6 days a week (full time) at a Church owned cemetary for about 2.5 years (guess how much the church pays?).

The most physically demanding job I had was when I worked for a Municipal Water utility company full time. There, I worked my way up the ladder from manually digging ditches and using a Jack-Hammer to being a senior plumber. I was then in charge of the workmen under me who did the digging I once did. During this full-time job with the municipal utility company, I also worked part-time both as a Tiler and Landscaper. I would work at the water company from 7:30 to 3:30pm, drive to my part-time landscaping job and continue working until about 9:30 to 10:00pm at night. On my days off (Sat. Sun., holidays, vacation days), I did my part-time work as an assistant to a Tiler from 8:00 to 4:00pm. One year, between full & part time work, I worked full time every day of the year w/o a single day off (except Xmas).
I always felt blessed/thankful to have a job when others didn't, no matter how hard my work was.
As a municipal water worker, I had been inside most of the homes/businesses in the three major cities of Paterson, Passaic and Clifton New Jersey. I got to see how some people lived, in homes where I could see sunlight through the cracks in their walls in the dead of winter, graffiti sprayed across kitchen walls and refrigerators, homes heated with a box-fan on the door of their kitchen oven, ottomans pushed together to form a bed. After seeing all that, I found it hard to complain about anything ever again.

Oh yeah, after all this, I also worked for over 25 years as a law enforcement officer. I saw enough during my tenure as a cop to realize, nobody should complain about their lives.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Work as a fetish like it is today, and work-related diseases and burnout as a status symbol? Our society is sick, I say. We were not born to serve factories' needs. Again my advise: work as much as you must, check your demands on living standards and see if you can tweak them and still be happy, do not work more than necessary, as long as you do not really love your job. No man on Earth has any claims to make for you and has no demand that you should serve his interests, as long as you do not live at his costs and do not spend what is his.

And if you do not know what to do with your time if you must not work, and have no interests of yourself, then you have a big problem, me thinks, and you may want to talk with a counselor on that.

Time when you are happy and are absorbed by what interests you, is living time well spent. May be hobby, may be work on your farm, may even be your profession if you are lucky, may be whatever it is. Time when you count the seconds until your shift is over is a waste of life. Maybe needed to make your living, but nothing that gives meaning to your life. Cut it as short as you can afford, for you will not get back that time.

We may not see eye to eye on a few things, Sky, but I can't disagree with you on this at all. After all, at the end of the day, you can't take it with you.

In regards to me and jobs, honestly, I've only been in three different paid jobs, and whilst none of them have been particularly earth-shattering they've also not been terrible, so I mustn't grumble.

[soopaman2]

My second most horrifying job I ever held was as a tele marketer, thought it would be an easy gig selling PBA stickers.

I got a talking to on the first day, when I didn't Rebut (or push my sleazy sticker.) to people who sounded obviously older then dirt, who stated nicely, "I am on a fixed income"

I was yelled at the first day, Despite me selling 1k$ worth of the stupid stickers the next day, I was fired for not giving rebuttals on all my calls. They expect constant pressure, and I felt like dirt pushing on the elderly, as most of the calls I did were.

I was expected to be heartless, and couldn't do it.

I quit and went and earned my CDL, that crap job showed me that I better go and learn something, other than pot smoking and bar hopping.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Armistead

plucking tobacco.

Opposite end of the same job. I once had a temp agency assign me to unload a boxcar full of boxes of cigars on a hot summer day. I don't know which was worse - the heat inside the boxcar or the smell it generated.

Likewise cleaning up a train wreck in the middle of the desert wasn't a lot of fun.

I also spent a couple of days at a brick factory taking bricks of the molds and stacking them on pallets. That got old real fast.

[Ducimus]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Opposite end of the same job. I once had a temp agency assign me to unload a boxcar full of boxes of cigars on a hot summer day. I don't know which was worse - the heat inside the boxcar or the smell it generated.

Likewise cleaning up a train wreck in the middle of the desert wasn't a lot of fun.

I also spent a couple of days at a brick factory taking bricks of the molds and stacking them on pallets. That got old real fast.

I wonder if pulling insulation bats from a ceiling and loading them into a trailer to be reused later on a hot and humid summer day counts as one up on that one. That was an... itchy job, and i was coughing up "hairballs" at the end of the day despite wearing a dust mask. Still though, i think i hated the retail job i had more.

I must be odd, I'd rather bust my ass in a ditch or do some kind of manual labor then deal with workplace politics or customer service. It's much more honest and straightforward.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Ducimus

I wonder if pulling insulation bats from a ceiling and loading them into a trailer to be reused later on a hot and humid summer day counts as one up on that one.

I don't think "one-up" counts. If you had a job you absolutely hated it counts for something.

I must be odd, I'd rather bust my ass in a ditch or do some kind of manual labor then deal with workplace politics or customer service. It's much more honest and straightforward.

I like customer service work, but I haven't had a CS job yet that didn't ask me to lie to the customers in one way or another. For this reason I'll never own a Sprint or Verizon phone, and I'm very reluctant to have a credit card of any kind.