Worst job you ever had?

xjwmx

xjwmx

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Actually this is the worst job I was ever offered and turned down, none I've had to accept were really bad, by my standards...
A guy wanted me to help make sensors for a gas which is used in sterilization of medical materials. The gas is odorless and colorless. It's also harmless except that it's guaranteed to cause cancer. The guy was very competent, but at the same time it was easy to picture him leaving a tank open or forgetting to tighten a fitting. It would have been us two basically -- and things like that demand strict procedures that are enforced from on high. Real, real strict procedures actually, knowing that people are going to take little shortcuts when it's convenient.
 
Worst job I ever had was cleaning every single window in a large auto body shop, when I was about 11 years old - for $10.

It took me a week - but we were going camping out west and I wanted some spending money.
 
I was working for a temp agency and they assigned me to the local Pepsi bottling plant. My job was to keep the 2ltr bottle line stocked with bottles and a couple other duties. By the end of the shift I was exhausted because of the speed the line went. Of course the other duties were across the room, not close to the line. I told my boss at the temp agency to never give me that assignment again.
 
Worked at a lawn mower factory for a short time back when I took a year off high school. I liked grade 12 so much I did it twice.

First job there was to clamp the lawnmower handle in a jig and grab a ribbed rubber sleeve that had to be pulled all the way along the long leg of the handle so it that was on the horizontal grip portion of the handle. To make it easy these ribbed rubber sleeves were soaked in hot soapy water. By the end of the day my hands looked like 2 pounds of ground round. Gauze, ointment and tape every night, hard to hold a beer.

Didn't stay there too long. Sure was happy to get back to school the next year.
 
MaxPete said:
Worst job I ever had was cleaning every single window in a large auto body shop, when I was about 11 years old - for $10.
Click to expand...

Ha! I forgot about those jobs. When I was about that age I got hired in Pigeon Forge to cut down a sign that was on two maybe 6x6 lumber posts, using a dull axe. LOL. The joke was on them though when I friend of a friend drove by and stopped to ask what I was doing. He was a college football player and he just did a lineman move on each post and broke it off. When I went back to the office, the guy was so mad! He'd been watching from a distance, probably with some buddies.
 
My Dad was a high school electrical shop teacher and later a Vice Principal. He always told the parents of unruly kids to help the youngster get a really crummy job for the summer (his phrase was "Put him to work on the business end of a shovel") as a means of "encouraging enhanced diligence" upon a return to school in September.

He also advocated making any teenager in his house pay room & board while working. That was also a tactic to limit the number of available dollars (i.e. available for spending on cars/bikes/girls/BEvERages etc.) and encourage enhanced study habits....

....and I think it worked. Dammit.

I wish he was still here - what a wise and cool guy.
 
azman857 said:
I was working for a temp agency and they assigned me to the local Pepsi bottling plant. My job was to keep the 2ltr bottle line stocked with bottles and a couple other duties. By the end of the shift I was exhausted because of the speed the line went. Of course the other duties were across the room, not close to the line. I told my boss at the temp agency to never give me that assignment again.
Click to expand...
I worked for a temp agency in a pop bottle factory. They put things that were like thick plastic test tubes into a mold and compressed air and heat turned it into a pop bottle. It was loud as hell in there. My job was to load pallets with finished bottles. I was on sort of a tower and you put on one layer then some cardboard and hit the button and the pallet would go down about a foot, and you'd repeat until the pallet was on the floor, then the forklift came. Sometimes the pallet would snag on something and when you hit the button it would dump ten layers of bottles. Everybody would come over and get it put back together real quick. All in a days work.
 
xjwmx, I worked at the Pepsi Bottle making plant too. I too was on a machine that racked the newly made bottles of all sizes. Never had to remake the stacks because the whole stack was plastic banded and maybe plastic wrapped too. We could see the machines that took the clear plastic test tube shaped supply and out came the bottles. The bottling plant was a block away.
 
^It seems like there was some arrangement that automatically put bands around the stack and that held it to the pallet. It probably knocked the stack over sometimes too. Can't remember. Also worked in factories making books, and Camry seats.
 
azman857 said:
I was working for a temp agency ....
Click to expand...
Worst jobs I ever had was working for a temp agency up in Seattle area back in the 80's.
Mostly warehouse work unloading containers and palletizing boxes.
Unloaded about ten thousand boxes of Panasonic dot matrix printers and cases of whiskey and beer.
(There were always crushed cases of booze in the containers and they reeked of rotten beer and every single bottle had to be accounted for.)
Spent a week at the Toys R Us warehouse unloading rail cars full of cases of Fisher Price toys and diapers by myself.
Shoveled sand for a week at a cinder block plant.
Worked in pulp mills doing industrial testing on the boilers and the paper machines.
Had to crawl all over the paper rollers which were covered with wood pulp that itched like fiber glass.
Had to work on holidays and nights because that was the only time the mill would shut down.

After about a year of being barely employed in a string of shiatty jobs my Dad asked if I wanted to go back to school.
(I had dropped out of college the year before.)
I said hell yeah!! and went back and got a degree and spent 27 years in the semiconductor industry,
 
My worst was my first real adult job, as a welder doing heavy equipment repair for the copper mines in Az in 1974.
Safety regulations were non existent. Guys were maimed and killed there on a regular basis. One job in particular stands out in my memory. The mechanics pulled the motor from a D9 Caterpiller bulldozer for rebuilding and they just drained the oil out on the ground, nasty black diesel oil, I don't know how many gallons of the stuff, but it left a pond of oil about 3" deep underneath the Cat. Then they found cracks in the frame and they called their naive 18 year old welder ( yours truly) over to weld them up. I spent 8 hours laying on my back in a pond of black oil welding cracks underneath that damn bulldozer with a mechanic stationed on each side of the bulldozer with a fire extinguisher just in case I suddenly burst into flames. I had to throw my clothes away, and it stained my skin for weeks.
I only worked there 9 months and looking back I'm amazed I never got seriously hurt there. I could tell you one story after another of injuries and deaths that happened there in just the short time I worked there.
 
Mailman - so....not as much fun as installing those danged carbs on and off and on again 28 times..?

Cycleranger - see - my Dad's plan worked perfectly!

AZman - those plastic bottles were made of PET. I helped startup one of the first high speed PET preform molding systems at Husky Injection Molding System in about 1984.
 
The upside of working really crappy jobs when you are young, is it makes you so appreciative of the better jobs you get as you get older! In my present job working for the Post Office I sometimes work with people that have worked for the Post Office for virtually their whole adult life and when I hear them bitching about how hard their work is, I always laugh to myself and think " You have no idea! "
 
Indeed. I'm a university prof and some of my colleagues have always had nice clean office jobs - and they really have no idea how much of the world lives and works. If only they knew....
 
MaxPete said:
Indeed. I'm a university prof and some of my colleagues have always had nice clean office jobs - and they really have no idea how much of the world lives and works. If only they knew....
Click to expand...
That deserves a book, or several volumes. I had a full scholarship to a state university for a long time. I have enough hours to have a couple of master's degrees, but they are so disorganized I don't have a bachelor's. I've been fortunate to have two careers sort of -- one a serious big money career of programming and engineering, and the other consisting of semi-skilled or menial jobs, and I continue to switch between the two, depending on my frame of mind. It's aided by the fact that there is a solid tradition of developers not being degreed. In major positions. Employers are just interested in demonstrated skill. I was inspired or felt excused by Buckminster Fuller, who dropped out of Harvard to see what could be accomplished without a degree. The agents of change in society have not been people with degrees. When you experience both social stratas you see there's a good reason "then let them eat cake" is such an iconic quote.They really are clueless and they like it like that.
 
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the only Good job I ever had was owning my own motorcycle repair shop.... but it didn't pay too well
the worst job I had had to be the pealing Logs in Hamelton MT..... for a log home out-fit.
I arrived at 6:00am 1" of snow on the ground and -6 degrees outside the logs were frozen solid
and you sharpened your own draw knife.... I learned fast and you were paid by the foot something like 20 cents a foot
each log was 30ft long and the rack you rolled them up on was about 18" off the ground when you tried to cut the bark off these logs it was hard to do because they were frozen , not like a normal pine log, I think the best I ever did was 8 logs , the other guy could do 20
i dunno how ! .... but it was Hard back breaking, gut wrenching work that went on and never ended the only good thing was I could quit and go home when ever I wanted to .... the worst part was having to ride my Suzuki 90cc bike all the way there about 20 miles or so
in the -6 degrees.... I was so cold when I got there i couldn't feel my hands or feet and it took an hour to get the feeling back
going home was worse after a hard days work I arrived home and if my wife hadn't helped me off the bike and into the house I would have fallen over dead..... from that day on I took the car to hell with the gas milage ! and at the end of the week I found I didn't make enough money to pay for my gas alone.... so I quit ! .....
at the time I was care taking a Ranch way out on skalkaho road..... so next thing to do was hunt for food..... I got a Pheasant was all, cottontails were too wary to be caught in the open, and the area was hunted out in the 1950's I was a crack shot with my 22 and it's scope but there just wasn't anything to shoot !
hunting for your dinner isn't all it's cracked up to be boys ! 90% of the time you'll go hungry !
that was a long time ago ( thank God ) and made me appreciate warmer climates ! LOL
the next worse was Walmart ! unloading trucks and working in the pet department..... after you unloaded 2- 18 wheeler trucks then you went and put the stuff on the shelves, hot tired sweaty and being paid minimum wage and then your supervisor comes by and starts bitching at you for not going faster...... after I threatened to stuff her ass in a dumpster out back she fired me !
the funny thing is I told them I will work hard but I cannot stand to have any one riding my back.... they evidently didn't tell the supervisor or manager ! I complained to the manager and she complained that I smelled of sweat ! ..... and really should use a deodorant !
and I said that happens when you work me like a damn mule ! ...didn't phase'em at all !
...... LOL
Bob.........
 
Mailman said:
My worst was my first real adult job, as a welder doing heavy equipment repair for the copper mines in Az in 1974.
Safety regulations were non existent. Guys were maimed and killed there on a regular basis. One job in particular stands out in my memory. The mechanics pulled the motor from a D9 Caterpiller bulldozer for rebuilding and they just drained the oil out on the ground, nasty black diesel oil, I don't know how many gallons of the stuff, but it left a pond of oil about 3" deep underneath the Cat. Then they found cracks in the frame and they called their naive 18 year old welder ( yours truly) over to weld them up. I spent 8 hours laying on my back in a pond of black oil welding cracks underneath that damn bulldozer with a mechanic stationed on each side of the bulldozer with a fire extinguisher just in case I suddenly burst into flames. I had to throw my clothes away, and it stained my skin for weeks.
I only worked there 9 months and looking back I'm amazed I never got seriously hurt there. I could tell you one story after another of injuries and deaths that happened there in just the short time I worked there.
Click to expand...
Damn !!
That reads like a scene from a Clint Eastwood movie, but it actually happened to you.
 
We talking stress or just physically crappy?
Most stressful was doing radio tower maintenance and construction..
Yea,,, those wired ones that are hundreds of feet tall. It's awesome to see the sun come at those heights but there is some testicular curling involved.
The other one was a HONEY DIPPER.
Get it? hehhehheh
 

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