What's the Worst Job You Ever Had?

I never had a bad job... A friend recruited me to a polymers compounding company 10years ago. He wanted me in R&D but the only way in was through the factory floor. I operated a recycling extruder. We took industrial cut-offs from the diaper and adult diaper industry and shredded, heated and extruded pellets (all in one machine) to feed as filler into one of our products. This was fun, interesting and challanging but when there were no bales of diaper scrap I would be called into other rolls. One of our products was "Sheet goods". 1/8' thick sheet used to mold package trays (that shelf under your rear window in a sedan) or load floors (SUV or Sedan trunk floors), door panels etc. Anyway, absent diaper material I would get called to a sheet line. Imagine a 2 1/2' x 4' hot sheet rolling out of the extruder every 20 second or so. Stack it perfect, count out 50 or 100 stack, pallet wrap it and stack it in the warehouse all night long. Crazy thing was there were guys who loved working on the sheet lines.
These sheets for package trays have to be perforated with holes for stereo speakers. That's done one at a time in a big 100 ton punch press. Getting sent over to the punch press (140db) sucked.
I only spent 3 or so months on the production side and it was educational and I made a ton of contacts which made my R&D function easier later on.
 
When I was still working in pet food automation I had to regularly visit a customer in Lincoln, Ne that made pet food ingredients. It was basically a slurry of the foulest things you can think of pumped into plate freezers and frozen into large uniform solid blocks. Since there is no FDA or USDA for pet food its a largely unregulated business and manufacturers are not held to many standards. This particular manufacturer had very little taste for things that wasted time like cleaning. The smell upon entering the building was awful, it normally took about 5-10 minutes to stop retching and get to work. I was typically out of commission with some sort of stomach condition for at least 12 hours the day following a visit to this site. I would stop at the Walmart out side of town and buy coveralls and boots and throw them in the dumpster when I left every time I went there. I refused to take that foulness home and get my wife sick having to touch and wash my clothes. I had to do this 2-3 times a year to swap a large Brevini gearbox on a large high speed slurry emulsifier. To make matters worse the emulsifier was on a mezzanine with very little room. I had to assemble large aluminum gantry with 2 legs on one level of one mezzanine and 2 on another, it did not sit flat... The last time I did it the gearbox (nearly .5 ton) broke free from its housing before I got a shackle on it and it crushed my tool box and nearly pinned me against the railing. If I never see the inside of another pet food plant I will die happy.
 
Worst jobs I know of I never had to do;
City Farm prisoners were trucked to the thoroughfare to cut grass with push mowers in the summer. (1965-75).
Men and women convicted of drunk driving would be transported to areas of the city and made to pick up trash on the side of the highway. The whole time they were made to wear a big sign on their safety vest, "I was a drunk driver." (2003-2013).
'TT'
 
When working as a pipe layer/timberman, I was down a hole one day guiding the backhoe operator to scrape the sides so the guy up top with a sledge could whack the timbers down. When doing this job in confined spaces, like through peoples back yards, the footprint has to be minimal so as not to destroy everyone's back yard. So, using a backhoe, the operator digs down, as the hole gets deeper it also gets wider, to stop the hole getting too wide, timbers are sunk vertically on either side. Keeping them together is a couple of long timbers, running horizontally. Keeping the horizontal and vertical timbers on either side of the hole apart are short pieces of timber called Toms. Around 2' long, one at the top and one at the bottom.

Toms must be kept level and square to the trench, if not the Tom pops out and the timbers collapse inward, squashing anything between. to enable the sledge swinger to whack the timbers down, the backhoe bucket scrapes the sides of the trench and a guy with a shovel guides the backhoe operator, then scrapes the dirt below beach timber while the guy up top whacks each timber down.

On this particular day, I was down the hole, back against the Tom, guiding the backhoe bucket. The operator misjudged the length of the hole, and every time he scraped the bucket forward it hit me in the midsection, forcing the air out of me and my back pushing the Tom off square, every time I raised my arm and cried out for the operator to stop, the bucket would hit me, muting me.

Fortunately the sledge guy saw what was happening and raced over to the backhoe operator and stopped him. I hurriedly climbed out of the hole, amid the squeaks and groans the Tom was making. Once I was out, the backhoe operator stuck his bucket in the hole and tried to straighten the Tom, no go, the Tom popped out, the timbers collapsed and the hole caved in. The hole was about 8' deep at the time, so had I been down there when it collapsed I would have been pretty darn skinny.

On another occasion, I was down a rather large square hole with another guy, the Toms started slipping, so quick as a flash we both raced to the ladder, I was closest so got there first. Halfway up, the guy behind me overtook me, climbing over the top of me and out of the trench. The guys feet kicked me in the face, I lost my grip and fell back down the hole, which was around 12' deep. Fortunately, the hole didn't collapse, but I refused to work with this guy again. Talk about heroes!
 
Spent a dozen years working in a pork plant. I was maintenance. Half kill/cut/rendering half processing sausage/bacon/deli hams. Killed 7200 pigs a day, small operation.
Anyway when I thought I was having a bad day I would go to the mezzanine above the kill floor and watch the production workers below. After watching them for a minuet or 2 I would feel better about my day. Could you imagine being the guy that had to cut the tongue out of a pig every 6 seconds.
 
Everything is bigger in the US

Killed 7200 pigs a day, small operation.

Is that not needing much traffic say they come by truck 50 pigs in one
7200 / 50 144 trucks a day in.
8 hour day --> 18 trucks an hour for the pigs only In and then trucks out
 
Probably my worst was in ‘93 when I moved to Michigan from Texas. I had been working as a Carpenter and had joined the Union on my arrival. My first call-out was for a scaffolding company that did set-up and tear down inside the boilers at the Fermi Power Plant for cleaning. We had a two night job doing an 8 story tear down inside one of the main power boilers and we formed a “daisy chain” handing down components to ground level. The steel scaffold planks or picks were about 12’ long,18” wide and weighed probably close to 100 lbs each. They were just long enough where two guys could work them easily and as the upper guy got close to the end a third lower guy would grab it just as the upper guy released. Sounds easy but I had a guy above me that would release right after the guy above him so I was fighting the weight by myself for over 3/4 of the length. That and the fact that everything was covered in scale rust from the boiler cleaning that fell on your head as the parts were passed down didn’t help. I did this for 5 hours straight before finding the guy during a break that was above me in the chain. I explained to him that his lazy ass was going to get someone killed cause I was barely able to hang on to them by myself by that time. I explained the situation and added that if his laziness caused me to have an accident, the first thing I was going to do was throw him over also. He changed positions after that to my happiness but after a 10 hour shift of that I had had enough. I never worked for a scaffolding company again after that.
 
Who else read about the culling of chickens due to the avian flu outbreak. The workers were sent in to the chicken coops after they were closed off from ventilation. The chickens suffocated and died in the heat enclosed in the coop. These had to be dragged out amid all the waste and feathers and smells, and they didn't get to quit. They got laid off when the job was done.
'TT'
 
Somebody ought to get their ass handed to them for treating workers like that. I'd be royally pissed!
Maybe they were illegal border crossers, or modern day slaves. Maybe I shouldn’t go there, but it seems we may have talked about this at breakfast.
 
Packing on a plastic sheet making machine of sorts. It was thin, card stock like, white plastic that came off in a continuous sheet that was cut into about 6, 8.5" x 11" pieces and it doffed off rapidly. On this job there were many varieties of plastic sheets that required many different sized pallets to be packed and banded. The kicker was you had to BUILD your own pallets to the size you needed for that particular job. The plastic sheets just dumped onto the floor while you were building your pallet at the pallet station in the far corner of the building. Me trying to get caught up after securing a new pallet looked like an episode of I Love Lucy....lol. Luckily I found something else within about two weeks.
 
Makes no difference.
You're right. My point was that many companies treat employees like crap and as long as there are compliant people (illegals are not going to run to the authorities) they will abuse them. There is no disincentive for these companies to not do it, very few ever get caught hiring illegals and when they do the penalty is relatively light. They look at fines as the cost of doing business.
 
You're right. My point was that many companies treat employees like crap and as long as there are compliant people (illegals are not going to run to the authorities) they will abuse them. There is no disincentive for these companies to not do it, very few ever get caught hiring illegals and when they do the penalty is relatively light. They look at fines as the cost of doing business.
Back in the early 2000's the Georgia Bureau of Immigration cracked down on illegals at the chicken factory and the carpet mills. It hurt business here in Tennessee an awful lot, dropping the income of laundromats and convenience stores by as much as 40 per cent. The policy of the Government this administration seems to be more honorable toward the illegals than in the previous two decades since 9/11.
'TT'
 
Don't know about the worst but the hardest was a brick layers helper for a contractor that built multi story buildings.
Each day would go home, shower, eat and lay on the living room floor with my head under the sofa end table and fall asleep. Dad would nudge me awake each morning with his toe. Then I would work the kinks out of my fingers to start the next day.
 
Don't know about the worst but the hardest was a brick layers helper for a contractor that built multi story buildings.
Each day would go home, shower, eat and lay on the living room floor with my head under the sofa end table and fall asleep. Dad would nudge me awake each morning with his toe. Then I would work the kinks out of my fingers to start the next day.
Not personally happened to me but it was a story heard when i worked at building sites
At times there was few bricklayers available and there was talk of Builders paying appearance money for a bricklayer to show up
Do the work .. was talk about 2 months pay up front Cash in a Brown envelope Under the plaster tub 7: 00 Monday Morning Perhaps not true but that was the word I do believe it did happen. Delays in finalizing the building project could have contractual costs that would hit the builder.

Back in the day the bricklayers were big Men at constructions sites They did not do anything No Nothing besides
stack up the tiles Someone else mixing ---is it plaster in English
Did not touch a broom ..Nothing besides the bricklaying

So they had a bricklayer that was good but was impossible to work with treating everybody like Heinrich Himmler treated Jews.
That was a problem a good bricklayer nobody wanted to help
So they found a young laid back Hippie type allegedly interested in smoking things that was not sold legally neither then nor now
Lets try this ... see what happens he wont get angry...quit

First day at work the Übermeister start to Shout orders as usual. Yelling like a sergeant in the Army as usual.
Here is where the tile shall be Placed And here the tubs shall stand ...him Shouting like maniac.
And kid said
" So where the hell is the Bricklayer gonna stand "
Everyone laughed including the Fuhrer Bricklayer.. The standard was set and it was a working setup They could cooperate.
 
at a meatworks processing feral goats in back blocks of australia , being wild they had a lot of deaths in the holding paddocks due to stress so every couple of days someone had to go and load the dead ones into a loader bucket to be buried ,couldnt be scooped up but picked up and toss into bucket , after even one day in the sun at 40-45c was bad enough , it was a matter of hold your breath , pick up and toss and then still almost spew plus was always a couple still living that had to be put down which was done manually with a knife , that part didnt mind to much as it was putting them out of their pain
 
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