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

[CoTex 1160]

40 minutes ago, Slacks said:

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. 

Now we're getting somewhere.  Summer of '94, the Wash Tub car wash on Broadway, in San Antonio.  Get the little red towels, dry the car, windex the windows, collect your dollar tip, repeat.

When you see that black suburban coming down the tunnel you had better make yourself scarce.  The surface temperature of a black suburban in San Antonio in July is greater than the temperature of the fryer grease at Corndog 7.

When people talk about having spiritual experiences in sweat lodges, I can relate.

 

[markstanco 12571]

Road construction, mainly on FM and state highways.  I flagged, drove the water truck, picked roots when dirt was being leveled, basically the crap jobs.  

We finished up a job and me and another guy were tasked with putting mailboxes back up one day.  And I can still remember, it was 74 mailboxes.  At 6AM we are loading up the truck with the gas powered auger, and the 70+ year old owner looks at me and says "boy, what are you doing with that auger?"  I tell him setting mailboxes.  He says "that thing is brand new.  Grab some post hole diggers and sharpshooters."  F me that was a long 2 days that could have been half a day. 

[mooseoutfront 3643]

For a mom and pop environmental lab in San Antonio.  I ran semi-volatile and volatile organics by GC-MS for them.  Neither of the two owners were chemists nor had they ever operated analytical instruments in their lives.  I have no idea how they've been in business for 30+ years.  A complete shit show.  The stress and angst from that job was literally making my hair fall out.  I felt physically ill whenever I'd walk through the lab door in the morning.  I'd rather dig ditches. 

[msucolt45 4056]

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/

I actually went to their site. Thank you. It’s been 30+ years, but I put my name in anyway.

Hook’em!!!

[GopherRock 1765]

Grading standardized writing tests.

I'd rather impale myself on a stake than do that shit again.

[Biff Tannen 45665]

Most mundane: Temp job in Dallas where I would literally tape white out strips over barcodes on reverse mortgage packets for 8 straight hours.  Got to listen to podcasts all day while I did it.  There were three ladies there in their 40s and this was their real, actual, long term job.

Worst because of circumstance: Working for Brown Distributing restocking beer in grocery stores.  I was 19 and it paid $7/hr, 6am-9pm, Thurs-Sun.  I would get home and all of my friends would be partying and I had to go to bed to get up at 5am and do it all again.  I lasted a month and a half.

Worst mentally: If anyone has ever seen the Telemarketers documentary on HBO from this last year, it was basically that.  Cold calling companies "on behalf of various associations" trying to sell them ad space for thousands of dollars on a website.  If anyone asked about the site, what kind of traffic it got, or who was behind it, we were not able to give that information.  A bunch of ex-UT baseball players were employed there too.  This was near Irving in Dallas.  I hope the owners of that "company" are in jail now.  I lasted one month. 

[Jiggy-Z 3432]

Worked for my dad's construction business from age 12 to 15 along with my twin brother.

One summer we pulled nails from a pile of lumber that was as big as a house.

Dad would make us go into the crawl spaces of houses with Jack's to level them up due to us being smaller.

Worst job was putting wet drywall into a dumpster.

When I was 15, I lied about my age and got a job as a busboy at a Mexican food place in the ac. I was so happy. All the other hs kids bitched about the work but I had a super good attitude for some reason.

Thanks dad. RIP

[GringoSalado 1651]

My very first job was a refurb of a Legg's plant, my part was removing some spray bars from an open-air dye pit with an oxy-acetylene rig. I had a few pallets to hold my oxy-acetylene rig because the pit was far from dry, about 2' deep of chemical dye-mud, so I would cut one section and then trudge through the muck in galoshes lugging one pallet to the next pipe-stand, and then retrieve my torch from the other pallet, repeat.

On my lunch break I would barf.

I was too young for payroll taxes so it was cash-money, and paid for my first car before my Freshman year (got my license at 15). But whoever was in charge of that shit, c'mon man.

Edited December 16, 2023 by GringoSalado
brain damage, obv

[GhostOfTomJoad 9323]

7 hours ago, Dennis Taylor said:

I worked at a college as a janitor even though I was smarter than anyone that went to school there. Sometimes I'd see a equation halfway done on a professor's blackboard and I'd just figure it out

It's not your fault.

It's not your fault.

 

OK, fuck that. But in the summer of '88--3 days after I'd graduated from HS--I got a job a summer job as a custodian at the company my old man worked for. They had a program where HS grads and college students could get a 3 month job doing the shit that's now farmed out to subs across the land: mailroom, cafeteria, security, janitorial, etc. You pretty much had to be at least a sophomore in college to get the security gig which was the best: highest pay, plenty of OT, get paid to do homework. I didn't start UT until the fall so I was stuck cleaning floors and emptying the trash. Which wasn't so bad, really.

But I came on about 6 weeks before their new, massive campus was opening up just north of Tumbleweed hill. Which was out in the middle of BFE back then. 1.2 million square feet of still under construction R&D space. Our first job? Clean the bathrooms. All 32 sets of them. This is when I discovered that construction workers can apparently piss and shit anywhere, at any height or angle imaginable. They didn't care that the plumbing wasn't working. If there was a urinal, commode, sink or fucking water fountain it was a repository for bodily fluids. Additionally, they liked instructing the foremen they hated the most how they should suck their dicks, fuck their mothers, and eat shit & die in english, spanish and/or spanglish by writing it on the walls...in their own shit. Quite a feat, actually.

I was 18, 6'1 and 165 lbs soaking wet and I couldn't wrap myself in enough Tyvek and gloves. We used every industrial strength cleaning chemical known to man to try and clean that shit. There were 2 or 3 other kids like me, plus a handful of "professional" janitors who were probably about 35 but looked like they were 90 to us. They'd walk into any spot without a fucking bit of PPE on because that would make it harder for them to smoke their cigs. 

I spent a solid month scraping, cleaning and washing away shit. On the bright side, I was making $9/hr which was a king's ransom for a HS kid with a fake ID in those days. The place had multiple locker rooms (which we cleaned first and were kept spotless). We'd work 3P - 11P, clean up,  and could get from Four Points to Pearls in 15 minutes. 6th Street wasn't much longer of a drive. 

In retrospect, that might have been my best job. The shit I dealt with then was a lot more honorable and direct than the corporate bullshit I spent the following 35+ years being covered in.

[KaiserSoze 998]

Summer between 9th-10th grade in Houston with full heat+humidity in an unairconditioned warehouse- working manual presses in gutter factory, bending sheet metal into drip-edge forms and gutter all day up until the day Football 2-a-days started. What a beating. That said, I needed $$ and it provided. 

Sophomore year at Texas Tech I worked as a night stocker at Albertsons (4th/Slide), 10pm-7am four nights a week. After that I'd go to class from 8am-3pm, get home, study, sleep, then back to work.

Those were the "worst" jobs I've had, and I have plenty of entertaining stories from each, but overall they contributed to my appreciation of how fucking easy I've had it since then. Good times. 

Edited December 16, 2023 by KaiserSoze

[deadshank 24652]

1 hour ago, KaiserSoze said:

Summer between 9th-10th grade in Houston with full heat+humidity in an unairconditioned warehouse- working manual presses in gutter factory, bending sheet metal into drip-edge forms and gutter all day up until the day Football 2-a-days started. What a beating. That said, I needed $$ and it provided. 

Sophomore year at Texas Tech I worked as a night stocker at Albertsons (4th/Slide), 10pm-7am four nights a week. After that I'd go to class from 8am-3pm, get home, study, sleep, then back to work.

Those were the "worst" jobs I've had, and I have plenty of entertaining stories from each, but overall they contributed to my appreciation of how fucking easy I've had it since then. Good times. 

Who was the S/M fabricator?

[AUS-97HORN 11757]

I had 2 that come to the top of mind and 3rd that probably technically qualified, but I ended up ahead of at the end.

 

First was my soph year at UT. '94  Jester floor-mate met a guy that was paying $10/hr cash to hand out free carpet cleaning coupons door-to-door. We got picked up on speedway along with 10 other guys, jumped in one of those 15 seat vans, and were driven to a neighborhood in North Austin... could have been Pfugerville. he and I were given a 2 min spiel about how to offer the coupons and to get the homeowners to fill in the forms.  told to meet back there in 4 hours and the van drove off dropping off the others in another neighborhood.  He and I then knocked on door after door. got a few people to give the spiel to.. then a smart dad flipped over the form and at the bottom of the other side, it said it was a marketing request to have a rainbow vaccum sales rep visit.... Dad cussed us the fuck out and told us to GTFO off the street... he followed us for 4 blocks. At that point we realized we had been left out high and dry to be a marketing agents lead generator.  Both of us said fuck that... but then had to wait like 3 hours until we got picked up because we had no fucking idea where we were and couldnt even have given directions if someone was nice enough to let us use their home phone and call a buddy. And of course no real way to get back to Jester, we then sat on the street corner for 3 hours.  and then got picked up... Marketing guy was super pissed at us only having like 5 or 6 leads, told us we werent going to get anything.  I just wanted back to Jester. Had the marketing guys phone number and knew he was recruiting others for the next day... told the fuck that he had lied his ass off about the job and that I had done 5 hours of work for him. I was going to meet him at the same spot and if he didnt have $100 in cash for me and the other guy, I was going to tell all of his suckers getting into the vans that it was a scam and he wouldnt get any leads that day... fucker paid me. and as i walked away, i still told the suckers it was a scam....but only half the morons got out of the van...

 

2nd was after I moved back to austin in 09, needed some funds since I didnt have a real gig yet. worked at a call center that sold repo home/car/ govt auction lists.  It was a script, that I had to follow to the WORD. no ad-lib.  It was a horrible job, basically we needed someone to give us a valid CC so they could get the list monthly ( and pay for it monthly),  EASILY 90% of the folks who gave us a card # were declined fora $30 charge. and of those another 90% were declined  for the minimal charge of 1 month cost of $2.99.  I got paid cash after every shift based on the number of approved cards I got.... lasted 3 days and had to leave. 

 

3rd was while I was in High School.... managed to apply for a job listed in the paper for Cutco Knives... I paid for a "salesman demo package" that cost like $100  (gullible I know- lesson learned)  sold a few knives to neighbors and then didnt get the commission they had promised me... went in to talk to the "manager" right after school with my empty book bag. he told me tough shit.... but the moron left me in the room that held the previous weeks orders of knives that would be delivered to customers that week.... I had an instant moment of clarity,  grabbed 10 of the big knife sets, put them in my bag and left.  Those were like $200 sets.  Kept a few for myself, sold the rest to the neighbors who I sold to at half price and for cash.   didnt even care that I had technically committed grand larceny, fuckers had lied to me and I took it out on them. 

[Knoxtnhorn 5971]

Dirt poor.  Second year at UT.  I come across an ad in the Daily Texan for environmental activism or somesuch.  Pays up to $300 a night.  I like green things like trees and money so, let's do it.

I show up at 4PM.  The job was essentially raising money from door-to-door.  About 8 of us get picked up in a van.  They drive us to some semi-rich burb south of Austin.  I'm to follow another person around for 2 hours, then go it alone.  I watch this guy occasionally bag $20 here and there.  The rest of the time he's getting door slammed in his face.  IIRC, there was some catch where you could earn $300, but that was if you raised $700.  7PM arrives and I'm off on my own.  First door gets slammed in my face and I'm all, "F this".  I find a small community college library and hang out there for a couple of hours.  Van ride back sucked.

Could have been worse.  I picked this ad over a salmon fishery in Alaska.  

[Knoxtnhorn 5971]

5 minutes ago, AUS-97HORN said:

I had 2 that come to the top of mind and 3rd that probably technically qualified, but I ended up ahead of at the end.

 

First was my soph year at UT. '94  Jester floor-mate met a guy that was paying $10/hr cash to hand out free carpet cleaning coupons door-to-door. We got picked up on speedway along with 10 other guys, jumped in one of those 15 seat vans, and were driven to a neighborhood in North Austin... could have been Pfugerville. he and I were given a 2 min spiel about how to offer the coupons and to get the homeowners to fill in the forms.  told to meet back there in 4 hours and the van drove off dropping off the others in another neighborhood.  He and I then knocked on door after door. got a few people to give the spiel to.. then a smart dad flipped over the form and at the bottom of the other side, it said it was a marketing request to have a rainbow vaccum sales rep visit.... Dad cussed us the fuck out and told us to GTFO off the street... he followed us for 4 blocks. At that point we realized we had been left out high and dry to be a marketing agents lead generator.  Both of us said fuck that... but then had to wait like 3 hours until we got picked up because we had no fucking idea where we were and couldnt even have given directions if someone was nice enough to let us use their home phone and call a buddy. And of course no real way to get back to Jester, we then sat on the street corner for 3 hours.  and then got picked up... Marketing guy was super pissed at us only having like 5 or 6 leads, told us we werent going to get anything.  I just wanted back to Jester. Had the marketing guys phone number and knew he was recruiting others for the next day... told the fuck that he had lied his ass off about the job and that I had done 5 hours of work for him. I was going to meet him at the same spot and if he didnt have $100 in cash for me and the other guy, I was going to tell all of his suckers getting into the vans that it was a scam and he wouldnt get any leads that day... fucker paid me. and as i walked away, i still told the suckers it was a scam....but only half the morons got out of the van...

 

2nd was after I moved back to austin in 09, needed some funds since I didnt have a real gig yet. worked at a call center that sold repo home/car/ govt auction lists.  It was a script, that I had to follow to the WORD. no ad-lib.  It was a horrible job, basically we needed someone to give us a valid CC so they could get the list monthly ( and pay for it monthly),  EASILY 90% of the folks who gave us a card # were declined fora $30 charge. and of those another 90% were declined  for the minimal charge of 1 month cost of $2.99.  I got paid cash after every shift based on the number of approved cards I got.... lasted 3 days and had to leave. 

 

3rd was while I was in High School.... managed to apply for a job listed in the paper for Cutco Knives... I paid for a "salesman demo package" that cost like $100  (gullible I know- lesson learned)  sold a few knives to neighbors and then didnt get the commission they had promised me... went in to talk to the "manager" right after school with my empty book bag. he told me tough shit.... but the moron left me in the room that held the previous weeks orders of knives that would be delivered to customers that week.... I had an instant moment of clarity,  grabbed 10 of the big knife sets, put them in my bag and left.  Those were like $200 sets.  Kept a few for myself, sold the rest to the neighbors who I sold to at half price and for cash.   didnt even care that I had technically committed grand larceny, fuckers had lied to me and I took it out on them. 

Coincidentally similar stories at similar time frames.

[Baboontyme 2809]

I spent a summer working at a place called Rouge Steel building a conveyor in that tube pictured below. We had to wear CO detectors and as we would get towards the top of the tunnel above the pot they would start going off and we would have to run back down. I spent the next 6 months with black boogers. One day during our daily safety meeting the steward on the job threw in Yeah yesterday afternoon Joe Smith fell to his death from up 6 stories. He was a good ironworker. There's a coffee can in the break room if you want to donate to his wife and kids. I got better grades the next semester. 

 

[TwiceHorn 31439]

8 hours ago, Guadaloopy said:

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.  

Down on Polk Street?

That was a fascinating facility.  When they moved up to the Woodlands, it lost all its character.  And asbestos.

[52-80 19147]

10 hours ago, Jiggy-Z said:

When I was 15, I lied about my age and got a job as a busboy at a Mexican food place in the ac. I was so happy. All the other hs kids bitched about the work but I had a super good attitude for some reason.

Doing food service was one of my favorite teenage jobs. Super cushy. Only thing cushier was working in a library. That was free money. 

[Underdog 28581]

On 12/15/2023 at 5:35 AM, 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. 

Greenleaf Nursery off Ben White one summer, had me start out back planting trees in tree beds for sale and the others would each have 10 planted to my one.  Owners moved me inside to water plants and load up customers cars with plants/fertilizer.  All around good people there. 
 

Anything I did associated with Dell sucked but GD there were some hotties that worked there. 

Edited December 16, 2023 by Underdog

[Thetexashammer 1062]

Husband.

[honolulu horn 6158]

I worked for a couple of years as a psychologist in a maximum security prison, and believe me that place was hell on earth for reasons I won't go into. Imagine the worst things you think of, and then double it. Seeing just how terribly human beings can treat each other (inmates, officers, admin, every single person there) changed me forever. 

But on a more light-hearted note, my best friend and I worked at the Captain's Club out at Lake Travis for its opening weekend. We started as busboys on a Friday and the owner said he couldn't pay us much money but we could eat all the food we wanted. As high school seniors that sounded good to us. Sunday it was shut down following the worst food poisoning outbreak in Texas history. Literal sewage in the water.  Goodbye innards. We had a backpacking trip in Colorado a few days later, celebrating graduation, and we left every gas station bathroom between Austin and Denver a shit-covered hellscape. 

 

 

[RPM 26317]

At least you didn't zipline.

[Incredulity 11654]

22 hours ago, deadshank said:

when considering the lily-white, soft and out of touch know-it-alls on this board

 

literally perfect 

[Guadaloopy 10960]

11 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Down on Polk Street?

That was a fascinating facility.  When they moved up to the Woodlands, it lost all its character.  And asbestos.

Yep.  Polk St FTW.  My Dad worked there for 25+ years.  

[DigglerontheHoof 21182]

On 12/15/2023 at 8:21 AM, Prepuce of Doom said:

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!). 

 

 

Holy shit.  Had this exact job in the 80s while at UT.  Came here to post about it and walla.  My second worst job was also at UT one summer.  A buddy of mine and I put out flyers on cars and houses.   I think we got paid 50 bucks for every 500 or so flyers we littered the streets w/.  I fucking hated E Austin area days.  Dodging pitbulls and shit.  Plus, fucking summer in Texas and hotter than balls. 

[tfoolry 8202]

20 hours ago, Zepol87 said:

Helping uncles from Mexico do roofing in the summer was hell but it was better than spending it at the family lumber yard or watermelon farm in Munday. That shit sucked 

Roofing in Texas in summer is serious work.  Props

[CHIEF 5078]

My worst job was a short stint at a plant, in Waco, taking summer classes at MCC. If you ever cut open a hollow door, the interior is braced by corrugated cardboard that is glued together to form a lattice work. The facility was a non-a/c, non-insulated metal building that averaged about 115 degrees. It had automated glue guns, and band saws. The glue guns ran a little "rich" and would spill glue on the floor where it would promptly stick to the bottom of your shoes. This would create a situation where it was unavoidable to step on random small sheets of cardboard, and cardboard dust from the bandsaws, so you were constantly having to clean your shoes. 

There were many middle aged people stuck in this dead end hell hole.They were way too old to be doing this kind of manual labor. Being the youngest there, by about 15 years. I got the worst job, loading the lattice frames onto pallets at the end of the assembly line, we produced several thousand a day. They came off the conveyor in groups of five, and fast enough that you would have to rotate about three feet every 2-3 seconds, from a bent over position. I could do this for about 30 minutes straight before my back would give out. They had six other people that could make it about five minutes each. I would rotate to their positions for 30 minutes to give my back time to rest, then it was back to being crouched or bent over stacking again. I did this for about a week before I had enough and went to work at a full service gas station.

CHIEF 

[nnm 36352]

Worked ranchlands for a number of years in HS. Fencing, mowing, baling, bucking hay, fixing roads, cleaning corrals, etc. Dogging corner post holes through caliche is no fun, and neither is stringing Barb wire in the summer heat.  Bucking hay in the summer is no fun. But I worked with buddies, picked up some good life skills (I can kill a rattlesnake with a shovel like a boss), and put some muscle on. Though hard, it was a good gig and I enjoyed it. 

Worked for a couple of months as a waiter at Chili’s on University in FW.  I was a terrible waiter. I wouldn’t put up with the bs from customers. I did get an appreciation for how hard waiters/waitresses work, and usually tip well as a result. 

[WithoutAClue 15341]

I worked as a Rainbow vacuum salesman for about a week. Sold one, got my commission check and promptly quit.

I am not cut out for any type of sales job.

[Biff Tannen 45665]

6 minutes ago, WithoutAClue said:

I worked as a Rainbow vacuum salesman for about a week. Sold one, got my commission check and promptly quit.

I am not cut out for any type of sales job.

Why are there so many Rainbow vacuum references in this thread?  I've never even heard of them.  But sounds like the sales process starts out as a carpet cleaning ruse?  Is it also a cult?

[Crapinon 2253]

I started mowing lawns when I was like 8 years old. I've done warehouse work in the Texas heat, lawn care (where I literally bathed in Round up and had to weed eat a one acre 70 degree incline hill), crawled under trailers for Southwestern Bell installing phones and coached HS football for about $ 1.00 and hour for the season. But the worst jobs I've ever had was selling PPE in the early 80's. Safety equipment had just been mandated a few years earlier and most of the safety supply companies were small local companies with some of the most crooked owners I ever met. Bribes to purchasing agents were a daily occurrence at dozens of companies. One guy out of Dallas actually hired a whore as a salesperson and she would go to a steel plant every Friday and screw/blow the guys who made buying decision in their offices for orders. Most of the owners  would steal you blind on commissions. But the crookedest and worst job was with Alamo Iron Works out of San Antonio. The old owner should be in jail for all the cheating and crooked stuff he pulled on customers and salespeople. I told my wife that if we're ever in the hill country and I start kicking the shit out of the 80 year old fat man that used to own it, don't try to stop me. It will be worth going to jail just for the personal satisfaction. 

[956 Worldwide 34702]

In between my final year of college and grad school I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I took a job as an admin type person for a husband-wife law practice. Mostly working for the wife, who was crazy as hell and just really unhappy about most things. They weren’t friends, exactly, with my folks. But they were friendly and the husband, who was OK, occasionally had business with my dad who was bit older and more established. This will be important later. 
 

Anyway, the lady I worked for was crazy as hell and was a shouter. She assign me stuff and then come by and yell at me, or she’d yell if I’d ask for some time to talk about an assignment. It turned out I’d been hired because her husband’s good paralegals and secretaries all told him they’d quit if they had to work for her, too. 
 

One day she’d assigned me to do some pretty simple math, this was in the mid-2000s.  I grabbed one of those old style adding machines with the paper strip, like this, from her husband’s desk and added away:

After I finished, I went and put it back. Three or four days later she came and asked me “Where is Mr. Poor Bastard Who Married Me’s Adding Machine.” I told her the last I saw it was when I put it on his desk.  She melted down and started bawling me out in public, and said I better not have taken and sold it or she’d call the cops and make sure I’d have this on my record.  A fucking desktop calculator! Also, she was in her late 30s and made me call her and him “Mr. and Ms.” 
 

I went and moved a folder and found the damn thing and brought it to her.  She harrumphed and said she didn’t believe it was really on his desk. 
 

A few weeks later, I got a call really early in the morning from my folks: their house was on fire, dad had fallen and broken his arm as they rushed to get out, can I come help. So yeah, I raced out to their place, calmed down dad as the firemen did their shit, took him to the ER, told mom I’ll be back as by that time neighbors and church people are showing up to help.  
 

This clown lady calls me at the ER and before I say a word she’s chewing my ass out, how dare I not call if I’ll be late, my professional ethos is shit, and if I want that job I better be there in half an hour and that I’ll be expecting docked pay.  I just say “yes, I’ll get there soon.” Finish with dad, bring him back to the house.  
 

Drive to work still in shorts and a t-shirt, sit down, type up my resignation and walk it down the hall and hand it to her.  As she’s reading it, her husband pops in, sees us and says: “I heard your folks had a really bad fire, are they OK and can we help?”  His shitty wife turned white as a sheet. He later apologized on her behalf and asked me to work for for the last two weeks and I did. She later just left law practice, I understand because she got angry and shouted at a client. 

[CoTex 1160]

Worked for a law firm at 610 and the bayou one summer.  That all glass building on the east side of 610, one or two exits north of Westheimer.

I would track my hours on a piece of paper, and turn it in both as my time sheet and billing records.

At that time the Harris District clerk was the slowest government office in the solar system and so most of my time was .2 drive to clerks office. 1.2 wait in line .2 drive back to office, for various files.

The lady office manager handled payroll and so on payday I would turn in my time sheet/billing and get paid.

I would hand it to her and she would grade my paper.  “Oh, this shouldn’t take that long,” or “we can’t bill for this.”

She would mark down my time and then pay me.  Basically discount my time card by 20%.
 

 I was trapped.  Only needed that job for 10 weeks so, quit to make a few extra bucks or take it.  I took it but as revenge I kept my parking card when I left which, according to them, cost them a $40 deposit.  
 

I did learn from it though.

[nnm 36352]

23 minutes ago, CoTex said:

Worked for a law firm at 610 and the bayou one summer.  That all glass building on the east side of 610, one or two exits north of Westheimer.

I would track my hours on a piece of paper, and turn it in both as my time sheet and billing records.

At that time the Harris District clerk was the slowest government office in the solar system and so most of my time was .2 drive to clerks office. 1.2 wait in line .2 drive back to office, for various files.

The lady office manager handled payroll and so on payday I would turn in my time sheet/billing and get paid.

I would hand it to her and she would grade my paper.  “Oh, this shouldn’t take that long,” or “we can’t bill for this.”

She would mark down my time and then pay me.  Basically discount my time card by 20%.
 

 I was trapped.  Only needed that job for 10 weeks so, quit to make a few extra bucks or take it.  I took it but as revenge I kept my parking card when I left which, according to them, cost them a $40 deposit.  
 

I did learn from it though.

I worked as a runner for a law firm in FTW for about 3 years in college. I had a 1983 mustang with no A/C (didn’t need it in Northern NM where I bought it). Running errands all over DFW in the summer, with no AC, is no bueno. They were resurfacing 30 at the time. I remember sitting there, stopped in construction on newly-laid pavement, in 105+ summer heat. Oof. 

[Scheiss Meister 8407]

I worked hanging overhead garage doors the summer before my senior year in high school.  Mostly not too bad, but I was the one who was sent up in the attic of new homes to pull the wire for motorized door openers.  Unfinished attics in July and August in Texas can get to 160° F, and I came close to heat exhaustion more than once.  We once got an order for a couple dozen doors, and I got to be the one in the workshop moving the panels around by hand, drilling and cutting for hardware, and bolting on said hardware.  That shed was damn hot, too.

Reading water meters in January is only marginally more comfortable that reading them in July and August.  Hot, cold, wet, you have to get them read on time.  You learn how to handle people and dogs real fast.

I had to change out a meter for a pharmacy once.  The meter was about 80 years old and not reading correctly, so the pharmacy was being way under billed.  I let the lady at the counter know that I was turning off the water to change the meter and that the water would be off for 5 to 15 minutes.  As I reached to turn off the water the owner of the pharmacy comes screaming out of the door pointing a pistol at me, promising to shoot the shit out of me if I touched that meter.  I backed off and called it in.  Later that afternoon I was there with the Assistant Chief of Police and an officer who stood overwatch while I changed the meter.  That was a pretty fucked up day.

[Surly Bevo 24908]

Worked for a staffing agency summer after Sr year of HS.  Had some good and bad

The first gig was Alamo Rental Car out at DFW for about 3-4 weeks.  Working the car wash days sucked balls in the June heat. Vacuum duty had you crawling around sweating your ass off inside filthy ass cars for hours on end.  The flip side of the gig was that on some days our assignment was to move cars between DFW and Love Field or return cars that had hit mileage limits to an auto auction place in Fort Worth.  Now they won't let you rent a car at 18 but they had no problem letting me and my buddy haul ass around the Metroplex taking these things from place to place.  

I then worked in an office downtown for about a month doing spreadsheets and shit, so nothing bad there.  But late July/early August that assignment was over and I get sent to this place that put together repair kits for hydraulics on cherry pickers based on orders from their clients.  There was nothing particularly brutal about the work, but my god the fucking stupid people I was working with.  Couple dudes from The Combine, one from Pleasant Grove, etc.  The dumb ass ignorant stuff that would come out of these guys mouths over that assembly table was astounding. I generally kept my mouth shut to avoid dipping in to politics, economics and stuff which these guys clearly had no knowledge of but a lot of opinions about.  The ender though was  when two of these fuckers started in on Reba McEntire being the hottest woman that ever lived.   While I had avoided what I thought were the bigger hot button issues I THOUGHT, "well this is a safe enough topic for me to say what I think".  And what I thought was, "come the fuck on, Reba McEntire? hottest woman that has ever lived? Are you fucking kidding me?  I can sit here and start naming hot woman randomly and it will be a long damn time before Reba hits the list.   It almost came to blows....these dumb asses, without the apparent aid of alcohol were ready to fight to defend their "Reba McEntire is the hottest woman that ever lived" opinion.  My week ended and I was never so happy that I was headed to UT.  While I have worked around plenty of dumb fucks at times in the finance world, nobody has ever touched the brutish stupidity you find working with the unwashed masses.  

Edited December 16, 2023 by Surly Bevo

[RPM 26317]

Was the Pharmacists' name Mr. Gower?

[Scheiss Meister 8407]

2 minutes ago, RPM said:

Was the Pharmacists' name Mr. Gower?

Lol, no.

[RPM 26317]

5 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:

"come the fuck on, Reba McEntire? hottest woman that has ever lived? Are you fucking kidding me?  I can sit here and start naming hot woman randomly and it will be a long damn time before Reba hits the list. 

Truer words have never been written. Besides, she's gouch eyed.

[Scheiss Meister 8407]

6 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:

Worked for a staffing agency summer after Sr year of HS.  Had some good and bad

The first gig was Alamo Rental Car out at DFW for about 3-4 weeks.  Working the car wash days sucked balls in the June heat. Vacuum duty had you crawling around sweating your ass off inside filthy ass cars for hours on end.  The flip side of the gig was that on some days our assignment was to move cars between DFW and Love Field or return cars that had hit mileage limits to an auto auction place in Fort Worth.  Now they won't let you rent a car at 18 but they had no problem letting me and my buddy haul ass around the Metroplex taking these things from place to place.  

I then worked in an office downtown for about a month doing spreadsheets and shit, so nothing bad there.  But late July/early August that assignment was over and I get sent to this place that put together repair kits for hydraulics on cherry pickers based on orders from their clients.  There was nothing particularly brutal about the work, but my god the fucking stupid people I was working with.  Couple dudes from The Combine, one from Pleasant Grove, etc.  The dumb ass ignorant stuff that would come out of these guys mouths over that assembly table was astounding. I generally kept my mouth shut to avoid dipping in to politics, economics and stuff which these guys clearly had no knowledge of but a lot of opinions about.  The ender though was  when two of these fuckers started in on Reba McEntire being the hottest woman that ever lived.   While I had avoided what I thought were the bigger hot button issues I THOUGHT, "well this is a safe enough topic for me to say what I think".  And what I thought was, "come the fuck on, Reba McEntire? hottest woman that has ever lived? Are you fucking kidding me?  I can sit here and start naming hot woman randomly and it will be a long damn time before Reba hits the list.   It almost came to blows....these dumb asses, without the apparent aid of alcohol were ready to fight to defend their "Reba McEntire is the hottest woman that ever lived" opinion.  My week ended and I was never so happy that I was headed to UT.  While I have worked around plenty of dumb fucks at times, nobody has ever touched the stupidity you find working with the unwashed masses.  

Working night shift at my first wastewater gig, I could go up on the roof and do some stargazing during my meal break.  A coworker from the day shift saw my star atlas at shift change and asked if I had sent them my address to the publisher of the atlas.  I asked why I would do that and he said so that they can let you know which stars fell after a meteor shower.  Rendered me entirely speechless for a minute.  There were other examples of his ignorance and stupidity, such as when he took a gun to go talk to his soon to be ex-wife in violation of a restraining order, then telling the responding cop that he took the gun to shoot her if she didn't agree to reconcile.  I honestly don't know how he remembered to breathe.

[ClubWhatever 12120]

I can't decide if it was being on the portable toilet cleanup team or holding a sign in a chicken suit outside a Church's

[956 Worldwide 34702]

All through high school and college I kept my lifeguard cert and then added cert to teach the whole lifeguard course, first aid, and swimming. That kept me out of shitty manual labor jobs in the summer and out of school, the pay was good and the atmosphere great. A few times while teaching the course in the evening, I’d have the keys to the facility and I’d stay with one of the girls in the class to practice what we’d learned after others went home. 

The shittiest job was opening up the city outdoor pools back at home— one big Olympic size and the other was 50 yards.  Both 12 feet deep. You can’t drain them in the RFV, the water table is too high and they’ll pop up. The city was cheap as hell and just let them sit all winter and spring and they were sludge pits come May. 
 

So first you’d shock the hell out of them and run the pumps with a lot of chlorine to kill whatever the hell was in there.  After a few days when the tests showed the balance was almost healthy enough for people, you’d work. 

They were next to parks with seagulls. A LOT of shit, mostly chicken bones but also whatever fell and died or got thrown in, built up.  That will clog the vacuum so you go in and swim down and hand scoop it up. 
 

Algae got up, including black stuff that algaecide won’t take out unless you treat for weeks.  It’s cheaper to pay high school kids to scrub. Those long poles offer no leverage to get it off the walls and floors.  We’d tie a cradle around a diving brick, tie the other to our waists, and you’d spend a few days basically underwater with a wire brush swimming back up to catch a breath, then back down to scrub more.

Then you’d take the same brushes and some Ajax and hand scrub every gotdam tile.  Then finally you’d rebalance the chemicals and run the pumps and it would be ready for summer.

And high school kids had no business getting near the drums of acid and chlorine you used.  That shit would slosh all over.  One day after a weekend of pool duty, I was sitting in English class and saw a bubble in my hand, and peeled off a few layers of skin from my palm and fingers in one sheet. I also got an ear infection every damn year. 

[956 Worldwide 34702]

21 minutes ago, Scheiss Meister said:

Working night shift at my first wastewater gig, I could go up on the roof and do some stargazing during my meal break.  A coworker from the day shift saw my star atlas at shift change and asked if I had sent them my address to the publisher of the atlas.  I asked why I would do that and he said so that they can let you know which stars fell after a meteor shower.  Rendered me entirely speechless for a minute.  There were other examples of his ignorance and stupidity, such as when he took a gun to go talk to his soon to be ex-wife in violation of a restraining order, then telling the responding cop that he took the gun to shoot her if she didn't agree to reconcile.  I honestly don't know how he remembered to breathe.

The stupidest mofo I ever met was senior to me at that pool.  One year we found that a possum had taken up residence in the chemical store room back under some shelves.  Animal control told us to fucking deal with it, it was hissing and snapping as we tried to hassle it into a bucket with a stick.  
 

That guy, a manager, went to a car and got a lighter and the grabbed a can of WD-40 and said he’d spray it like a blowtorch and burn it out. In a room full of fucking chemicals and shit, all toxic and many flammable. 

[RPM 26317]

6 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

That guy, a manager, went to a car and got a lighter and the grabbed a can of WD-40 and said he’d spray it like a blowtorch and burn it out. In a room full of fucking chemicals and shit, all toxic and many flammable. 

Edited December 16, 2023 by RPM

[956 Worldwide 34702]

4 minutes ago, RPM said:

lol, we told him he had the dumbass. We left the possum for the day, and a buddy went home, got a possum trap, and set it up. Next day, possum was in the trap and we let it go outside of town.

[nnm 36352]

A few years after I got out of high school in NM, I got a part-time job as an assistant cook. The head chef was a nice guy but really started down a dark path. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when he slipped a Mickey to the son of a girl I liked. He ended up buying the farm with a bunch of nazis and I moved to Alaska. 

[CoTex 1160]

3 minutes ago, nnm said:

A few years after I got out of high school in NM, I got a part-time job as an assistant cook. The head chef was a nice guy but really started down a dark path. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when he slipped a Mickey to the son of a girl I liked. He ended up buying the farm with a bunch of nazis and I moved to Alaska. 

You should have hired a lawyer.

[Atxracer 797]

Worked construction on the weekends and summers in high school and freshman year of college in Houston mainly doing renovations.  
 

there are three days that still stick out.  
 

first is I spent an entire day hand scraping glue off a kitchen floor. 
 

second was at the San Luis in Galveston. We had molding that wouldn’t fit in the elevator. So I spent the day going up and down a spiral staircase while holding the molding in the center of the spiral staircase. 
 

last was an entire day digging a trench in a backyard in the summer. 
 

Good part is that shit made college much more appealing.  Fun fact, the guy I worked for doing construction, who is now a really good friend of mine, is renovating my house.  

[nnm 36352]

9 hours ago, CoTex said:

You should have hired a lawyer.

I did!  He freaked out and left town. I heard he gave up law altogether and manages a Cinnabon in Omaha!

[InkaUtexas 25868]

Pest control. Climbing under trailers looking for a dead possum or some other critter during the summer sucked. But the owner would hand me a joint and a beer at the end of the day.

Another was working for a group in Dubai and find out the VP was stealing all the money for Kosovo hookers he brought into the company.

[52-80 19147]

So all you guys who had shit jobs, have your kids done shit jobs, and/or would you want them to?

I don’t know how to tread the spoiled vs tough love line when mine turns of age. 

Edited December 17, 2023 by 52-80