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What is the worst job you've ever had in your life?

goodiemob

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52-80

52-80 19377

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A string of bad ones.
 

Cashiered at walmart through about 3 paychecks. Coldest experience i ever had: “trained” on a computer software and then worked at the till basically nonstop for the shifts. Had about 5 minutes of total human conversation the entire time. 

5 yards from my checkout till was a tiny in-walmart pretzel shop. They put up a Hiring sign so i peaced out of the walmart apron and literally walked into that job. 1.5 weeks in, i showed up to get the upcoming schedule and the place had shuttered.  Whoever ran/owned it literally disappeared.  I did as much sleuthing as a 16 year old could but got nowhere.

Later that summer I went for a “tryout” at a drycleaner. The work environment was basically 100 degrees with 99% humidity. Obviously didnt stay. They finessed me for a free day of labor. 

 

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Dbeasy

Dbeasy 15561

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Went to work for a landscaping company, with no real description of the job. My first day they put me in the back of a trailer with about 15 other illegal Immigrants and drove us into the hill country in the middle of nowhere. We got out, they pointed at miles and miles of tres and told us to pick up every rock we saw and bring it back to the trailer. Lasted one day. 

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college and high school worked at a Seed place, as in Hybrid corn, sorghum, and grass seed when CRP programs were just starting.  There was the owner, secretary( owner's wife,) a book keeper, a foreman, about 7-8 'seasonal' employees, if you catch my drift, and yours truly.

Processing the corn and sorghum was mildly to moderately dusty and not a bad gig. The product would flow over a series of 15'x15' tables, much like a seive, and then the good stuff would finally flow to a converyor belt to the bags and we sewed them up and palletized them.  That whole process wasn't bad at all.

The grass seed was Satan's fucking chores.  Some of it, like blackwell switch grass was very smooth and easy to get the chaff and bullshit out.  Other varieties like Indian grass or Giant Blustem was very 'hairy' around the seed and you had to run it through a machine that had baffled blades in it that tood the "hair" off.  It was dirty and dusty, loud as hell, and hotter n' fuck in the summer.  Even the 'seasonal' dudes refused to run that machine if I was around.  I got longer breaks because it absolutely sucked.

Then, if the farmer needed a grass seed mix, which was about 95% of the time to comply with CRP; we used a large feed truck like you might see at a feedlot, but where the feed would come out on the side, 2 guys had to hold bags and the foreman was in the cab running a conveyor to fill them. Then we would hand the bags off to the side where other guys would sew them up and stack. We wore goggles and a simple mask, very much like Covid masks.  It was ridiculously futile.  I had black crap impbedded in my skin from February through june.  Lava, stell wool, kerosene( not really)  none of that shit took it off.  I would get home and basically strip down at the back door and go straight to the shower.  There was always a black line of grime around the tub, and your nose would be full of shit always.

One benefit to having a driver's license was getting to deliver the product all over a 4 state area; but when I wasn't on a run, I was doing the shit work.  I was dating the boss' daughter, he slipped c-notes every once in a while which were huge for a college boy; and his favorite gift to hand out was handles of Weller.

It wasn't all bad; but wholly fuck the work sucked.

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Prepuce of Doom

Prepuce of Doom 21285

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Setting up "carpet cleaning appointments" for Electrosux, er, Electrolux vacuum salesmen by cold-calling people out of the phone book. 

The carpet cleaning was secondary - it was really just a means of getting a high-pressure salesperson inside the homes of the gullible in order to sell them vacuum cleaners, so I had a lot of leeway in bargaining down the price, throwing in extra rooms, etc., in order to set an appointment. 

The "call center" was the utility room in the back of an office in a dumpy strip mall. The room itself was probably 3'x5' - just enough for two chairs and two small tables, each with a phone and a phone book. If nobody else had checked off a number, it was fair game. There were two phone books, so some lucky people got more than one call from me and my coworker, a former chemistry PhD student with a drug and alcohol problem and multiple DUIs. We each chain smoked in that tiny, unventilated room for an entire summer. 

It paid remarkably well though, something like $10/hr, plus $20 per appointment set, which was pretty solid pay for that kind of drudgery by mid-90s standards. We could each average about an appointment an hour, and I have no idea how they managed to keep paying us both, because some of those appointments were never, ever, going to turn into a sale. 

The most enjoyable part of the job was occasionally calling the people who would go ballistic on telemarketers and deliberately provoking them, or just making juvenile prank calls (sorry, Livshits family!). 

 

 

Edited by Prepuce of Doom
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deadshank

deadshank 24654

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Lugging hot asphalt and  then shoveling gravel onto a roof top conveyor doing commercial roof work for the old man. 
 

“Hey, dad, it’s awful hot out here.  Mind if I get a sip of water and take a break?”

“Not today, boy.  Water will cramp you up.  Get back to work.”

Edited by deadshank
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MissingInAction

MissingInAction 25552

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Worked with a framing crew for a week. I didn't know shit so I just ran supplies back and forth. 

At the end if each day I was so fucking worn out I'd sleep for 10 hours.

Got suckered into a pyramid scheme vacuum cleaner sales job for exactly 12 hours. Wasn't paid a dime, but I was so fucking pissed I took a vacuum for myself.

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Dennis Taylor

Dennis Taylor 19343

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21 minutes ago, MissingInAction said:

Worked with a framing crew for a week. I didn't know shit so I just ran supplies back and forth. 

At the end if each day I was so fucking worn out I'd sleep for 10 hours.

Got suckered into a pyramid scheme vacuum cleaner sales job for exactly 12 hours. Wasn't paid a dime, but I was so fucking pissed I took a vacuum for myself.

You should have teamed up with  @Prepuce of Doom

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Pescado_Rojo

Pescado_Rojo 19581

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Worked at a fence company in Port Arthur, Texas the summer before my senior year of high school. The place was owned by a father/son that were like the odd couple. The old man sat in his office and chain smoked and did all the accounting and yelled at anyone that interrupted him. The son handled sales, drove an old "Thunder Chicken" Trans-Am, and was probably a sex pest. I spent the first couple weeks knocking around the shop sweeping floors and helping move freshly welded gates and stuff around. TXDOT was just starting construction of the Veteran's Memorial Bridge between Port Arthur and Bridge City, and they got the contract to set up all the temporary fencing around the construction site. I spent the rest of my summer in the SE Texas marsh sweating and covered in mosquitos, standing in the bed of a pickup with a hand held pile driver hammering about 5 miles of fence posts into the mud, then stringing chain-link fence, then topping with barbed wire, all for minimum wage. We had two "crews" (4 people total) that worked that job on and off all summer. If we got a few days of rain, we would have to go do residential jobs or something until the ground dried up enough out there that we didn't get the trucks stuck. I might have had the highest level of formal education of that whole crew as a rising HS senior. Best part of the job was my partner would buy me beer at the stop and go on the way back into town every day, and he'd stop at the liquor store every Friday afternoon and buy me a bottle of whatever I wanted, and I'd buy him a pint of Jim Beam as payment. You could have made a pretty goddamn funny reality show about the goings on in that place. OSHA would have shut them down 5 minutes into an inspection if they'd ever shown up there. 

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Davis Lane

Davis Lane 6002

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I've poured concrete, moved dirt with a shovel and painted more houses in the Texas heat than I can shake a stick at.

But none of that compares to working in a call center for one day when I was between jobs.

Indeed it was a call center that was contracted by various hardware companies, one being Asus motherboards, but they also provided data entry service of some sort.

So for eight hours I had to input information from a carbon copy of a handwritten receipts into a database.

Actually it was probably an Access "database".

Anyway, people all around me were getting calls for tech support for various computer related issues and there I was doing data entry.

I did that shit for 8 hours but it seemed like an eternity. 

Talk about watching the clock moving slow as fuck.

I called the hiring agency during my afternoon break and informed them I wasn't going back. 

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High Plains Drifter

High Plains Drifter 11186

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After my freshman year in college, I told my dad I didn't think college was for me. He got me a job with a contractor friend of his shingling roofs in Austin. I lasted a summer, then my ass was back in school for the fall semester. 

Pay was good for the mid 80s-- ten buck an hour under the table straight cash on Fridays, plus lunch daily and a cold beer on the drive home. Same pay the illegals on the crew got. I'd drive to the boss's house in the am, we'd go pick up the rest of the crew--same two or three other guys every day on 1st street, north of the river, a few blocks west of Congress (I think it was about where the city hall is now). Worked 50- 60 hours a week. Even at 19 or 20 years old, working on a roof in august in Austin almost killed me.

I have nothing but respect for guys who work construction outside in hell holes like Austin now. 

That job motivated me to stay in school and get a degree, and then a masters, and now I mostly work outside anyway, but not shingling roofs. 

 

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TrashMaster G

TrashMaster G 18067

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4 hours ago, Dbeasy said:

Went to work for a landscaping company, with no real description of the job. My first day they put me in the back of a trailer with about 15 other illegal Immigrants and drove us into the hill country in the middle of nowhere. We got out, they pointed at miles and miles of tres and told us to pick up every rock we saw and bring it back to the trailer. Lasted one day. 

You're an illegal immigrant?

 

7 minutes ago, txduck87 said:

Whataburger fry cook. 1982. Junior in high school. The brown suit and hat with acne breakouts from standing over a grease pit for hours a day made me quite the ladies man.

I flipped burger at McDonald's the summer after high school. Same experience.

After reading some of these stories, it wasn't so bad for a worst job.

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Incredulity

Incredulity 11873

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22 minutes ago, High Plains Drifter said:

 

After my freshman year in college, I told my dad I didn't think college was for me. He got me a job with a contractor friend of his shingling roofs in Austin. I lasted a summer, then my ass was back in school for the fall semester. 

Pay was good for the mid 80s-- ten buck an hour under the table straight cash on Fridays, plus lunch daily and a cold beer on the drive home. Same pay the illegals on the crew got. I'd drive to the boss's house in the am, we'd go pick up the rest of the crew--same two or three other guys every day on 1st street, north of the river, a few blocks west of Congress (I think it was about where the city hall is now). Worked 50- 60 hours a week. Even at 19 or 20 years old, working on a roof in august in Austin almost killed me.

I have nothing but respect for guys who work construction outside in hell holes like Austin now. 

That job motivated me to stay in school and get a degree, and then a masters, and now I mostly work outside anyway, but not shingling roofs. 

 

Similar experience, but before starting college.   Wanted to make money and chase women.  Roofing provided the money, but the utter exhaustion limited using that money for said purpose.  There are guys that could do that(surely with the help of Bolivian marching powder) but I never really partook of that.

Great motivator to get an education.

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52-80

52-80 19377

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29 minutes ago, Davis Lane said:

So for eight hours I had to input information from a carbon copy of a handwritten receipts into a database.

Actually it was probably an Access "database".

Anyway, people all around me were getting calls for tech support for various computer related issues and there I was doing data entry.

I did that shit for 8 hours but it seemed like an eternity. 

Freshman year at college my friend had this wealthy’ish guy in south austin for whom he did all sorts of random odd jobs. (Super weird arrangement, i never understood it…). 

Friend asked me if i wanted to do a data entry job. I was a really fast touch-typist so why the hell not?

Show up at this dudes house in the evening. He sits me down in front of a computer and an audio tape recorder, and my job was simply to transcribe the recording to the computer.  

I dont at all remember what was the actual content of the recording, but I remembered it being completely fucking banal and nonsensical — like *why would anyone need  **this** totally  random bit of audio typed up*.

Then he left. The house was eerily quiet and empty (of people). And I just banged away at it.  If you saw the netflix show Archive 81, it kinda felt like that.  I still dont understand the whole thing til this day.

Anyway, I ended getting it all done, and atleast unlike the drycleaner “tryout” I got my $50 out of it. 

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deadshank

deadshank 24654

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Reading the posts about construction jobs, the low pay and physical exertion toll always brings a smile to my face when considering the lily-white, soft and out of touch know-it-alls on this board and out in the wild that complain about construction guys getting paid to much for their work, saying it can't be that hard and they're entitled to low, low prices but deserve the finest workmanship in these United States.

 

Every human with a sack, hanging or not, should work construction for at least one hot summer or cold winter.  Working with your hands and back is a good gauge for the rest of your life.  

 

Edited by deadshank
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RPM

RPM 26614

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Subcategory - Worst job that turned into the best job.

In 1976 I was 15 with a restricted daylight only hardship license to feed cattle. My Dad got me a summer job cleaning up the truck yard in Houston at 59 & 610 for the company he was leased to. I drove my '67 F100 300 miles to Houston. The job was loading old tires on a flatbed that would be hauled to Galveston to be used on tugboats. It was summer, it was Houston, it was hard work and it was hot as fuck. I sweated my ass off pulling old tires out of the weeds, loaded with mosquitoes and snakes, rolling them to the trailer then getting them on the trailer and stacking them.

It sucked hard.

After 3 hours of this bullshit my Dad's buddy that ran the yard came out and asked if I could drive a truck. Does the Pope shit in the woods? He told me to get in this sweet needlenose '66 Peterbilt and take a trailer another driver fucked up to get it fixed a few miles up 59. Now remember I'm 15 with a hardship license. I had no business behind the wheel of an 18 wheeler.

Carpe fuckin' diem.

I hooked up the trailer, delivered it and returned without a scratch. I never loaded another tire that summer. From that point on I was the local delivery driver running trailers back and forth from the port. Every other weekend I would haul trailers to and from Heil Trailers in Huntsville to get refurbished. I was also nightwatchman and slept in the portable office building listening to gunfire all night. I'd get a motel room twice a week that the company paid for. I was able to drink in the motel bar, they thought I was old enough because I was a truck driver. I was big for my age and living the life! 

Then the guy that owned the company found out and it all came crumbling down. But man, it was a sweet couple of months running loose around Houston in a badass Pete with a pocket full of cash and KLOL blasting. 

Edited by RPM
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msucolt45

msucolt45 4227

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Post - Desert Storm’s air/ground war, I was assigned to “burn shit!” No pun intended, as we finally had “portable” wooden latrines that basically sat over cut up oil drums for the shitter.

Nothing like pouring diesel into drums and stirring SHIT with camo poles to keep it going! My lucky day was when my Uncle (Colonel with the 1st Armored Division) drove up to check on me, as my MLRS Battalion, assigned to them was roughy 5 miles away the whole time. His driver came to my area, saw the “smoke” coming out of my groups camo poles, and he basically said, out of his Humvee window, that I see you and your crew are “gainfully employed,” so we’ll call your Mom (his sister) another day and he left!

Hook’em!!!

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Pescado_Rojo

Pescado_Rojo 19581

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2 hours ago, Incredulity said:

Similar experience, but before starting college.   Wanted to make money and chase women.  Roofing provided the money, but the utter exhaustion limited using that money for said purpose.  There are guys that could do that(surely with the help of Bolivian marching powder) but I never really partook of that.

Great motivator to get an education.

Yep, my Sr year GPA was waaaay better after a summer of manual labor in the Texas heat. 

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Sbbruin

Sbbruin 22142

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Working as a construction grunt in college.  Digging ditches, sweeping and cleaning up job sites, and any other shit task that needed doing.  I would party every night until 12 or 1, and get up at 5 am for work.  I was comatose on the job half the time.  i vowed then that I would finish college.

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Hook1997

Hook1997 5502

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Got a job at a place that made portable buildings one summer.  They put me in a tin building with no windows and a list of measurements a table saw and a ton of plywood to cut into said measurements.  The second day at lunch I got a call offering me another job I had applied for and I never went back.  The other job was stacking plastic oil bottles on pallets and was a huge upgrade. 
 

A good one was the summer after high school at Kasper Wire Works.  They made newspaper machines, metal parts  and casters (wheels for shopping carts, ect) back then.  I got assigned to the engineering depart and evidently one had just quit that was in charge of testing all the casters.  They decided they weren’t going to replace him until after the summer so I basically was his temporary replacement.  Watch wheels go around over bumps in the ac and did reports and other tasks in my office.  A lot of guys my age would car pool from a town away and would go eat lunch together.  They would be covered in filth and sweaty while I was in dress clothes. 

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Guadaloopy

Guadaloopy 11128

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I worked the summer before college at Hughes Tool Co. as part of their internship program before starting at UT in the fall.  Overall it was a great job for an 18 yr old  heading off to school.  Paid $9.25 an hour in 1990 and there was always OT if I wanted it.  

The downside - I was absolutely the low man in the hierarchy and everyone in the shop knew I was headed to college in a few months, so every single shitty job in the shop fell to me.  The two worst:

1. We had an automated system for metal waste removal that ran through the floor of the entire shop.  It was a chute with a conveyor and water jets along the sides that carried metal shavings out to a huge waste bin outside.  It would get clogged several times a day, and yours truly always got the call to find the clog and work it out.  They never turned the system off, so I had to avoid getting pulled into the conveyor mechanism while pulling and untangling razor-fucking sharp metal shavings to work out the clogs.  Fucking sucked.

2. In the middle of July, the shop foreman decided that the waste incinerator that hadn't been cleaned in probably a decade need to be scraped clean from the inside.  No clue what tools it would take, just go figure it out kid.  I spent two days in that fucker scraping the walls with garden rakes and hoes that I found around the plant then shoveling and removing all of that built up ash.  It was incredibly hot in there - July in Houston inside an enclosed metal structure.   The dust mixing with my sweat covered me in black mud.  I've never been that filthy in my entire life.  They literally hosed me down at the end of my shift.  No telling what had been burned in there and what I breathed in through the dust mask they gave me.  I was farmer blowing black shit out my nose and hawking black loogies for a week after that.

The really good thing about that job is that because of that experience, I never once considered dropping out of college.  Fuck. That.  

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Hook1997

Hook1997 5502

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1 hour ago, msucolt45 said:

Post - Desert Storm’s air/ground war, I was assigned to “burn shit!” No pun intended, as we finally had “portable” wooden latrines that basically sat over cut up oil drums for the shitter.

Nothing like pouring diesel into drums and stirring SHIT with camo poles to keep it going! My lucky day was when my Uncle (Colonel with the 1st Armored Division) drove up to check on me, as my MLRS Battalion, assigned to them was roughy 5 miles away the whole time. His driver came to my area, saw the “smoke” coming out of my groups camo poles, and he basically said, out of his Humvee window, that I see you and your crew are “gainfully employed,” so we’ll call your Mom (his sister) another day and he left!

Hook’em!!!

Isn’t there a class action lawsuit with that now?  

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Slacks

Slacks 7044

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a car wash... Houston summer at a car wash. 

 Taco Bell. 

Airport baggage handler (Houston summer again) 

Credit card 'sales' (auto dialer cold calling 4 hours a night) 

Box maker at Dell. 

 

Every one of those jobs had adults who worked there for a living...

Getting Texas McCombs degrees was worth every cent and sacrifice. 

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MissingInAction

MissingInAction 25552

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Guadaloopy said:

Pretty sure you need a comma in here.  But we are talking about worst jobs, so maybe not.  No need to clarify.  Let's all just move along.

Don't try to tell me what I type.

Take your , and shove it way up your Fucking B hole.

I kid

Edited by MissingInAction
I kid
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Hook1997

Hook1997 5502

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23 minutes ago, msucolt45 said:

I think there is, basically from driving through Iraq/Kuwait’s burning oil fields. 30+ years later, I’m fine physically, just the memories of the past experiences.

Hook’em!!!

No the shit pits, not from oil fields burning.  I mean if you have asthma you might qualify lol.  https://www.sokolovelaw.com/personal-injury/military-burn-pits/

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