Jobs You Hated

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Much discussion of jobs on the board lately. It might be fun to recount what jobs we've had that we hated the most.

My first job ever (as a teenager) was at McDonald's. That was fairly dreary, but much worse was the job I got washing dishes in a local seafood restaurant the next year. I arrived at 4 in the afternoon. The first thing I did was throw out the garbage. This was more complicated than it sounds. The garbage was packed in huge bags that were so heavy I couldn't throw them straight into the dumpster. So I dragged them out back, tore them open, stuck my arms into the trash (mostly food waste) up to the elbows, and shoveled the contents into the dumpster with my hands until the bags were light enough to throw in. So as the dishes came into the kitchen to be washed, I was already filthy. We worked till way past midnight and would drink jugs of water and soft drinks to cool ourselves down, but it was so hot and we sweated so much that I never had to whizz during the long shifts. Also, many of the people working there were jerks. The headwaiter was an abusive SOB, a typical petty authority figure who enjoyed berating those directly under him. All this for minimum wage.

Two other lousy jobs taught me to avoid any job which required me to constantly make phone calls to perfect strangers. Years later I had a temporary job at a place that sold popcorn in various fancy packagings. My job was to take orders over the phone. I lasted a week. I simply couldn't stand talking to all those obnoxious people who were ordering popcorn from all over the country. Granted, most of them were reasonably polite, but if 1 caller out of 5 is rude, and you take over 100 calls a day, that's a lot of rudeness you have to deal with.

A similar awful (temporary) job involved calling up people to do phone surveys. We were asking people questions about their vacations and free time. They had three basic reactions. Some were suspicious that a complete stranger was asking them questions. A second group consisted of people who were immediately hostile ("If this is a sales pitch, I'm gonna be one pissed-off guy"). The third group was people who actually wanted to talk. I suspect most of the last group were just lonely or bored, and appreciated the opportunity to chat, even if it was on a boring topic ("how much did you spend on your last vacation?"). Some of them wouldn't shut up. What made things worse was that the head of the project was another petty tyrant, the sort of guy who got suspicious if you went to the bathroom once too often.

Luckily, none of these jobs lasted very long. I suppose the experience was worth it, as an insight into the world of drudgery most of us try to avoid.

[karlhenning]

The several times I wound up working in a fast-food joint, I actually pretty much enjoyed myself . . . a short-lived Mexican food chain in Bergen County, NJ . . . a Burger King on Rte 23 in Passaic County, NJ (where I still remember first hearing the inaugural Cars album) . . . a Hardees in Weatherford, OK . . . a McD's in Arlington, VA (a summer when I worked the breakfast shift at the restaurant — it still feels funny to me to call a McD's a restaurant, but, hey — and then had sort of a long break before working an evening shift at a nearby Waldenbooks).

Many is the job I've worked which was humble enough, though that of itself never bothered me.  Probably the only job I hated, and it was more the dynamics than the work itself, was a week or so when I drove a cab. (Yes, I was drawn to it by the amusing thought that His Glassness had been a cabbie.)  The thing I coulodn't stick was that the dispatcher (who was a former schoolmate, so I thought I deserved better from him) would call some other can for a pick-up, more than once when I was actually idling at a location nearer to the pick-up.  That sort of nonsense, I don't take.

[Scarpia]

Worked as a phone interviewer for several summers.  Mostly asking shipping managers about whether they like Burlington Northern.  Not a good group, those people were busy.  Not much fun, but it increased my classical LP buying budget by an order of magnitude!

[Lethevich]

My last job was at a frozen food supermarket called Iceland. Unsurprisingly, stacking boxes by hand in -1c freezers all day was something that made the later transition to the dole feel like a respite, although the worst thing about it was the uniform. I may be doing a horrid job, but why do I need to wear the polyester-business-suit-meets-motorsport-pit-crew getup. It had extremely tight and bulky elastic around the waist and wrists - it felt like something I might be prescribed by a doctor to correct a spinal misalignment. It always rode up, needed constant correction, and made me feel like crap before I even got out of the locker room.

[mahler10th]

Worst job I had was in a poultry processing plant in Yorkshire, 1994.  When I got there I was given white wellies, a white jacket, a white hairnet (I'm bald, was it needed  ) and a healthy supply of hygenic white gloves.  The task I was given was to put labels on the chickens in their packaging as they came alone the coveyor.
I lasted 2 hours, but still got paid £18 for it.
Best job (and most challenging) was teaching Italian kids English at a London Summer school in 1998.  Fabulous.  Soccer World cup was going that year, and I shared the Italian Grand Prix with about 30 enthusiastic young Tifosis. 
I still think it is 1998.

[bwv 1080]

One summer in college I worked for a temp agency - one job was a 10 hour shift in an un-airconditioned Blockbuster Video warehouse stuffing those little Styrofoam things in the videocassette boxes for display in the stores

[owlice]

Summer day camp counselor. I lasted maybe two(?) days. The job consisted of getting kids to run around in the heat by running around the heat with them, the better to exhaust them so they'd be dead tired when their parents picked them up, thus making the parents assume the kids had had a fabulous time. Even as a kid the age of our charges, I didn't have that much energy -- and certainly would not have expended my energy running around in the heat -- and for a college student whose natural rhythm was more in line with swing shift, the job started much too early.

I've had some jobs I liked made miserable by bosses who shouldn't have been bosses -- the stupid, the mean, the unethical, the grabby (and once, all four rolled into one) -- and worked one place where a subset of my coworkers were just downright nasty (though others were very nice, and looked even kinder in contrast to the vipers), though the work ranged from tolerable to interesting.

It's jobs like these that make people stay in school, if only to avoid having to work such jobs again!

[knight66]

Part time work at Woolworth. I swept the floor, but the worst aspect was rather like the description at post 1 above. The rubbish baler. It was a large machine and we had to climb into it at various stages to jump up and down on the rubbish to compress it downwards, then get out press a button and it was all thrust forward to compress it sideways.

The next stage was to thread metal twine right round the compact, tie it up using pliers and then push another button to thrust the bale out of the machine. It was at this stage that, because of the crap quality wire Woolworth bought, about a third of the time the bale fell apart and you had to start all over again.

Mike

[karlhenning]

Had a similar machine/task at a toy store in whose warehouse I worked for about four months, but 1) it was just cardboard, not rubbish (garbage, as we'd say here in the states), 2) it didn't involve entering the machine, and 3) everything worked as it was designed to.  For those reasons, that was actually a fun part of the job.  Which in general was a fairly pleasant job, anyway.

[matti]

Telemarketing was a nightmare, quite literally, I soon started selling magazines also in my sleep. I took rude rejections as personal insults and developed a nice little depression in the two weeks I worked for the company.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Telemarketing was a nightmare, quite literally, I soon started selling magazines also in my sleep. I took rude rejections as personal insults and developed a nice little depression in the two weeks I worked for the company.

I can relate to this, based on my tele-surveying job. The experience made me more sensitive to the people making the calls. I suppose if I HAD to do such a job, I would develop the necessary thick skin. But it would certainly not be much fun.

It was a large machine and we had to climb into it at various stages to jump up and down on the rubbish to compress it downwards, then get out press a button and it was all thrust forward to compress it sideways.

Did anyone ever press the button when someone was inside? I've read about (accidental) cases of such, in the book Fast Food Nation for instance. Some workers have been decapitated or crushed by such machines.

[knight66]

It was a dangerous machine. I should think it would not now be allowed. There was no health and safety training.

Although the rubbish was supposed to be cardboard, in reality, all but glass or tin went into it, including the slops from the canteen. It was always very smelly, esp when you were inside it. People could tell from the smell on you what job you had been doing. We tended to take it in three hour stints.

Mike

[Sergeant Rock]

Worst job? Cavalry scout (Armor Reconnaissance) with the 5th Infantry Division Mechanized in Vietnam. For $180 a month I was expected to lead a squad into hostile territory and deliberately find people who wanted to kill me. It lasted six months...until the day they almost succeeded.

Sarge

[The new erato]

Worst job? Cavalry scout (Armor Reconnaissance) with the 5th Infantry Division Mechanized in Vietnam. For $180 a month I was expected to lead a squad into hostile territory and deliberately find people who wanted to kill me. It lasted six months...until the day they almost succeeded.

Sarge

I think you just won this thread. Anybody posting after this will seem like whining whimps.

[knight66]

What are you on about....I had broken fingernails!!!!!!!

Mike

[karlhenning]

And niffed a bit.

[knight66]

That too.

Mike

[MishaK]

I think you just won this thread. Anybody posting after this will seem like whining whimps.

Seconded!

I've had some jobs I liked made miserable by bosses who shouldn't have been bosses -- the stupid, the mean, the unethical, the grabby (and once, all four rolled into one)

This is key. I don't think I've had any job I downright hated as a job, but the people on any given task made all the difference. I would add to your list of vices those unable to delegate, the micromanagers, the congenital procrastinators who cause last minute clusterfucks, those who blame their own shortcomings on their subordinates, the paranoid/schoziphrenic who think everyone is out to get them and are therefore incapable of teamwork, the inept communicators who expect people to be mindreaders, and finally the insane workaholics who impress superiors so much with their suicidal overproductivity that they ruin life for the rest of us by making our bosses force the rest to work as insane hours as the workaholics.

Prior to law school I had all sorts of odd jobs. For two summers I manned a little snack bar in the departure hall at Düsseldorf airport - a job that started out fairly shitty due to some of the characters described above, but got much better once my bosses realized I'm reliable and put me in charge of my own little snack bar. Despite having to get up at 3:30am, I prefered the early shift because one didn't have to clean up the whole place at the end of the day as you would if you did the late shift. For a while in college I worked part time in a used bookstore and also did technical translations. One summer I worked in the preservation department of the university library - a job that at involved searching out books published between 1870 and ca. 1950 which due to the then pervasive use of certain bleaching acids would have paper so acidic that it would likely have gone brittle by now, and if found to be brittle to search online catalogs for available replacements. "Brittle-testing" involved taking a corner of a page and bending it back and forth. If it broke after two tries, the book was too brittle an needed to be replaced.  Another part of that summer involved reinforcing paperbacks with cardboard. Sounds like a really stupid task, but it was actually fun thanks to a decent group of people. Some kids there even had eclectic musical interests. We always had the stereo on in the shop while we were gluing cardboard onto the inside covers of new paperbacks. One summer I worked as a temp secretary for a cancer research institute. The previous secretary left very precipitously, I forget why, and none of the doctors/researchers there had any idea how anything worked. That was a quite improvisational job.

[mahler10th]

I once had a job as a Kitchen Porter (don't know if they're called that in the US) at the World famous Gleneagles Hotel.  I LIKED IT.  It was not demeaning in any way, and I took a certain pride in being very good at what I did and peer respected for it.  They moved me into the Lounge as a waiter, I LIKED that too, met many famous people including a hero of mine, Jackie Stewart, but ended up getting pissed on duty - from where I was shuttled into the Stores as Assistant Head Storeman - not bad considering there were only two storemen, me and the head guy, but that was the title I was given.  I hated working in the stores, and sought another job, being trained and started by Albany Life as an Life Assurance salesman.  I am not a salesman, in two months I didn't sell one policy.  And that really WAS a job I HATED.

[jowcol]

Worst job I had was in a poultry processing plant in Yorkshire, 1994.  When I got there I was given white wellies, a white jacket, a white hairnet (I'm bald, was it needed  ) and a healthy supply of hygenic white gloves.  The task I was given was to put labels on the chickens in their packaging as they came alone the coveyor.
I lasted 2 hours, but still got paid £18 for it.

I can't take credit for this, but an ex-cousin in law of mine had a minimum wage job at a turkey farm as a poulty semen collector, which is a manual processes.  (People called him the Turkey Jerker...) 

I must admit I didn't like the guy, as he was both an alcoholic and wife beater, so I never got to ask him the questions like:
Did you get a cigarette after each one?
Did you have to talk dirty to them?
Suppose you picked the same one twice?
Did you have insurance coverage for repetitive motion injuries?

As it turns out, he ended up on the wrong side of the law, and went into prison, where hopefully his talents made him popular.

Sarge has us all beat, but my worse was my last of many food service jobs where I was a short order cook, and just about to get my computer degree. I'd already interviewed with the company that was about to make an offer to me.  That night there was a very rude obnoxious waitress that caused so much trouble that all of us cooks were yelling back at her.  Later, around closing, her drunken husband came back into the kitchen, saying he had a gun and wanted to setttle things with the man that insulted his wife.  (Which was all of us).  I stood there, knees knocking by the deep fat fryer, promising God I'd quit the food service for good if I could get through t the night.  Two of the managers talked the guy out of there, and I turned notice the next day.