I worked at The Onion Newspaper selling advertising space to small businesses (bars and restaurants mainly) on a 100% Commission. Some of you may love the Onion, small business owners don't give a fuck. It was a tough job, especially with the Chicago Tribune distributing a free paper that absolutely crushed our circulation and popularity. Sometimes my paychecks were the normal amount, and sometimes my paycheck for 80 hours of work was 150-200 dollars. It's happened before. The more clients I have, the more I have to make sure they pay. If they don't pay and it gets to 60 days, the Onion took the money out of my paycheck. On top of that I only got 12 days off the entire year, sick days, vacation days everything. Manual labor and cleaning shit is bad, but not being able to know if you'll be able to pay your rent or have any fun because some douche bag bar manager or restaurant owner wants to avoid your calls and emails is the fucking worst. Every job I've had since has been easy as shit no matter how bad it gets because at least I know my rent will get paid and I have money to leave my house. Not being able to spend money because of not knowing when a rough patch is coming is emotionally paralyzing.
None of my jobs have been horrible, but I've had to do some pretty disturbing things within the context of my current job. I can sympathize with ec88, in that pulling used condoms and feces (some of impressive length and solidity, i might add) out of a fishing net isn't a lot of fun. Nor is making your way through a dark basement with cobwebs festooned from the ceiling like draperies, dead rodent carcasses scattered about and fungal growths the size of an area rug taking up part of the floor.
I'll just copy & paste my entry from the last thread.. Spoiler My introduction to the working world was at the tender age of 12 when my step mother hooked me up with yard care jobs. One of these jobs was for a musty smelling old lady in a 75 year old house whose yard hadn't been tended to in years. It didn't help matters that I lived just outside the area of the continental US that recieves the most annual rainfall (Just south of Seattle.) There's all sorts of horrifying things that grow to astonishing sizes in weather like that. Things you don't want to deal with. I rolled up to this old lady's yard with my lawnmower and knew right away my little 2.5 horsepower Briggs & Stratton mower was overmatched. Some how she had managed to teleport an Amazon rain forest into her yard. I slumped my shoulders in defeat before I even knocked on her door. I left my mower at the curb and slowly trudged through the chain link gate and briars to knock on her door. Her perfume arrived before she did. The door opened and I was greeted by Keith Richards with tits. Old, ancient, unbridled tits that swayed back and forth like a cow's udder while the aforementioned cow ran across a field like it was being pursued by UFO's intent on surgically removing it's favorite organs. It was almost hypnotic. I DID NOT want to see what was under that flowery tent she probably refered to as a dress. What ever was under there even doctors didn't want to see and they got payed good money to deal with this kind of abomination. I was just here to mow her lawn. "Uh, hi. I'm toytoy...I was told you need some yard work done?" "Oh yes sweetie! I know it's pretty bad, but I'll pay you $5 an hour." It was about then that my spirits perked up. This was 1975 and $5 an hour was pretty good money for a 12 year old and I quickly agreed to tame her yard. In retrospect, if I could be 12 again, I'd tell her very firmly to go fuck her big, fat, smelly self. That over powering perfume wasn't fooling anyone, she hadn't showered since the Kennedy administration. She smelled like cats, loneliness and Avon. Her yard was about an acre in size and the "Lawn" was about 2 feet high. And by "Lawn" I mean it was green like a normal person's yard, but you shouldn't end up with cuts all over your body and ripped clothing because of thorns dealing with a lawn. That was not a lawn. It was pretty much akin to a jungle safari. I worked for 16 hours over 2 days making her yard look good. Everytime I finished off one little project dealing with this unholy mess she and her perfume would appear like a frightening, pungent ghost with yet another job for me. "That looks wonderful! I forgot how nice it can look! Could you weed this patch over here...I want to plant some flowers." The last time that woman had planted flowers or tended a garden humankind seriously thought the moon was made of cheese and that if you went 60 MPH your head would explode. Thank God I was able to dodge her trying to hug me. I'd bob, weave, duck, and yell "Hey look! It's Ringo!" and she'd be distracted for a moment thinking a Beatle was stalking her yard and I'd scurry off into the welcoming arms of briars and thorns. I kept telling myself "$5 an hour dude, $5 an hour." So continued to do her bidding. I squashed a Bannana Slug in my bare hands as I weeded her yard, and to this day that still gives me the heebie jeebies. I was reaching blindly in the mound of weeds she called her flower garden and suddenly SQUISH. I looked down at my hand and saw what had formerly been a huge slug oozing between my fingers. That's just fucking disturbing. Finally I was done. Her yard looked like someone actually lived there and gave a shit about the place. I calculated that I would get paid $80 for all my hard work and I still wasn't really convinced I wasn't being underpaid. My poor lawn mower that I'd worked my ass off to buy was ruined. I had to creep up on knocking her yard down...I needed to make 3 passes over her acre and lower the blade each pass. The engine on my lawnmower was sputtering, I'd sharpened the blade so many times there wasn't much of it left , and even after showering I could still feel slug guts all over my hands. I knocked on her door and proclaimed the job done. She stepped out on the porch and looked at all my hard work. I really didn't expect what happened next. "Well it certainly took you long enough, here's $20. You don't deserve any more then that." I was 12 and not ready for this rude awakening to the adult world. Some people are assholes. To this day I try to tell myself "She was old, she was someone's mom, and she didn't mean to be a bitch." Then I have to remind myself that some people are assholes from the get go and there's probably a reason her own kids didn't help her out with her yard. Probably because she talked to her cats and smelled like something that had died quite some time ago and didn't have the good grace to go lay in a hole somewhere. In the end she did teach me a very important life lesson at a very young age..."Don't trust anyone and speak the fuck up when someone screws you over" I walked my broken lawnmower home nursing my wounds with $20 in my pocket and resolved never to let that happen to me again, so I guess I should thank her for being a such bitch on wheels to a child. Since then I've worked for all sorts of horrible bosses while trying to make a living. I've been a dishwasher, heavy equipment operator, cook, musician, carpenter, body guard, electrician, plumber, human forklift humping appliances, glazier, cook, mechanic, IT God, owning my own buisness, along with all sorts of undescribable jobs in between. It may be wrong, but it warms the cockels of my heart knowing that bitch is dead, forgotten, and was quite possibly eaten by her cats. Sadly, that wasn't my worst job. The worst was a few years ago after I'd pretty much retired and I agreed to help a buddy out by working in his hardware store. 90% of people that walk into a hardware store are as clueless as a rhesus monkey frantically furrowing it's brow at a puddle of mud. They have some vague idea of what they want to do and they expect you to figure out how to bring their bat shit idea to fruition. I spent almost an hour trying to explain a molly bolt to one guy and he finally responded "So I put a hole in the wall and put the whole thing in?" Exasperated, I finally told him "Yeah that's it. Then you get a hammer, beat a hole in the sheet rock at floor level, pick up the molly bolt and ask God why you were born this dumb." My buddy that owned the store frowned at me. I swear I got stupider and more jaded every day on that job. I was the unlucky recipent of a phone call one day from a guy that wanted some weed killer. I calmly explained to him what we had in stock and that the most effective thing was a consentrated Round Up product. "I don't want consentrated," he bellowed "It's already full of water!" I explained to him that consentrate means that you add water to bring it to the desired strength, it doesn't have water added to it initially. I used the analogy of orange juice...you buy condensed orange juice and add water to it. He put his phone down and went bumbling off while I pondered what the fuck he was doing. He finally came back and screamed at me "I just checked my orange juice and it said it's not made from consentrate!" I swear I lost a couple years from the time I've been given to walk the Earth as my body tried furiously not to have a fucking stroke. Another day a woman came in and wanted paint for the interior of her chicken coup. I asked her the most reasonable question that came to my mind..."You...want...what?" She then informed me that she and her husband had just moved to Idaho, bought a bunch of chickens, and now that they were done sheet rocking the chicken house they were ready to paint it and wanted paint that was safe for the chickens. She wanted the chicken coup pretty for the birds. (For those of you unfamiliar with raising chickens, chickens love eating sheet rock and everything sheet rock related.) She was insane and I was beyond caring at this point so I sold her 3 gallons of pink paint that the original customer didn't want. At least she didn't come back and bother me about her chickens pooping pink, so I suppose that's a bonus. And then there was the inquiry I heard every week..."How do I keep deer out of my garden?" The simple answer is "You don't", but these morons wanted a better answer, one that would protect their 1/20th acre of precious, organic, hippy carrots. So I came up with an answer to their liking. I'd tell them to go to the local slaughter house, get a couple gallons of blood and pour that around the perimiter of their garden. It will most certainly keep the deer away, but they would then have a much bigger problem when the bears, wolves and coyotes are drawn to it,. But at least they won't have deer munching on their greens.
Also, I would like to say that I think being a veterinarian is the actual hardest job, because you spend the majority of your time killing animals when all you want to do is help them.
Serious question - if you keep shooting them, will the survivors eventually get the message that your precious organic hippy carrots aren't worth the blood price?
I have only had one job I absolutely dreaded going in for. I was desperate for work, and took the first offer I received. That was an associate at OfficeMax. After sitting through the online "OfficeMax University" training program, I was given my headset and radio and released into the wild. The work wasn't the worst part, as it wasn't difficult in the slightest. They constantly pressure you to sell insurance plans on chairs, printers, computers, pens, etc. And they get pissed when the customers don't purchase them. You would get pulled aside if you failed to upsell a customer on a $99 gold plated USB cable. The worst was the headset, and the phraseology used on it. EVERY time a customer comes in the front doors, or relocates to a new section of the store, they need to be approached again by an employee. So, every five seconds you have the manager, or other kiss asses transmitting on the thing with phrases like "Has someone engaged the customer in printers?" "Yes, he has been engaged" "Someone please engage in ink" "Engaging customer in furniture". Don't even get me started on the Black Friday briefing we had. I would have thought we were preparing for Normandy. Fuck OfficeMax. Or better yet, fuck retail.
My first "job" out of college was selling Medigap policies, cold-calling door-to-door in rural Georgia. Fresh out of MU, I moved to GA and started working commission only, hard-selling to the elderly. Determined not to fail at my first post-collegiate job, I put in 70 hour weeks and spent a small fortune in expenses to fall flat on my face. In a city where I knew no one, going broke right out of college really, really sucks. To this day, a decade later, I still have a particular distaste for geriatrics.