Worst. Job. Ever.

It seems like the latest fad on talk shows and the like is to put stay-at-home moms on the top shelf as having the hardest job in the world. That's a lie. Anybody who IS a parent not looking for a Munchausen handout knows that being a stay-at-home parent is NOT as hard as morons make it out to be, though it's not easy either.

I KNOW what the hardest job in the world is, because I did it for three years: flatroofing. The hardest physical labour job you could possibly think of that has no military association. You work with either hot tar which is six times hotter than boiling water, or you use rolls and propane torches, which heat up over 3500 C. By the time lunch rolls around, in -30 winter you'll be working in your t-shirt. PLUS it's back-breaking in a way the words cannot describe. PLUS the old roof you tear up may have "pitch" in it, which is corrosive to human skin. PLUS you work with the worst people on the face of this earth. PLUS the pay is shit. PLUS you come home filthier than a chimney sweep with a deathwish and even after you shower your eyes are shadowed from the tar sticking to your lashes so you look like a Pirates Of The Carribean cast member pretty much all of the time. PLUS tar follows you into your car, home and everywhere else you go. PLUS there's about three thousand ways to die horribly on the job. I could go on until infinity ends.

Flatroofing is the Voltron of everything that is shitty about work. Stay-at-home parenting is the toughest job in the world? What person with suffering from a stroke thought that up?

Focus: What is, by and large, the worst job you've ever had? What about it made you despise it more than any other place that you've worked?

 

I will never work in the food industry again, most especially the waiting part.
I did that for almost two years, and it was pure torture. The worst part was trying to kiss peoples' asses so I could get tips, when I actually wanted to tell them to fuck off.

I think I'm better off working with machines. That's why I'm a mechanic now.

 

I'll say this and get it out of the way.

Military service is NOT that bad.

It definitely used to be. Back in the day, (The Day being around Vietnam or so) infantrymen died like flies and could easily lay claim to the Shittiest Job In The World title.

These days? More military men die from motorcycle accidents, flagrant stupidity, and non-PTSD suicide than combat (Source). And yes, deployed troops live in the dirt, eat MREs, and get shot at. But for every field operation, there's ten times as much time spent sitting around in garrison, cleaning weapons, cleaning your living space, filling sandbags, training, standing guard duty, etc. And that stuff really isn't that bad. Sure, it's not fun, but I would definitely rather get double-tapped for sandbag duty than subject myself to the shit that the flatroofer guy just posted.

One guy on Terminal Lance said it best - "If you're deployed and your wife is stuck for seven months by herself with a newborn, SHE is the one who deserves a campaign ribbon."

Interestingly enough, the worst military job I've ever seen is working in the chow hall. A lance corporal working in an undermanned chow hall works 14-hour days, 6 days a week, in 120-degree heat, with no breaks. I'd rather get shot at.

That being said, I have one of the easiest, most skating jobs in the military. But honestly, flatroofing sounds a hell of a lot more terrible than anything that any soldier could have to deal with.

 

The job isn't that bad, but made exponentially worse because of the owner and manager.

Valvoline. By itself, pretty easy; just simple mechanic stuff. Add in an owner that doesn't pay bills so there are no rags, no clean uniforms so your drenched in oil, and 115 degree Arizona heat? Suck.

 

I used to take care of the elderly and the infirm. Ever wipe an old lady's vagina? I've done that. Ever have to clean diarrhea off a grown man's balls? I've done that too. All for 10 bucks an hour. This job is a tie with housekeeping at a hotel, and expediting at Cactus Club, and maybe even working in a rock quarry. Bartending has it's moments too. I'm a sucker for punishment.

 

I spent the summer after my freshman year of college working for the Street Department in my hometown. The asphalt patching, sealcoating, and concrete work wasn't too bad, chipping brush daily was pretty fucking awful, but what really takes the cake was the septic sewer work I got to do.

For $7.50/hour I had to blast debris loose from the sewer line with a giant hose we lowered into it and then remove whatever it loosened up with a giant vacuum. All the while, we were in the middle of a road with dumbass drivers swerving around us too. There were a few times I got covered in shitwater sprayed up from the sewer or dripping from a loose vacuum connection.

I hope to never have a job as shitty as that one again. Fuck that.

 

When it comes to physical jobs I don't have much to say, I just didn't have it that rough. The worst job I had was as a general handy man, sometimes that meant doing very difficult things in high heat, but nothing worth getting worked up over like CR posted.

Mentally I can't think of anything worse than working in the claims department of a call center for a large medical insurance company. I mean my call center experience sucked, but the majority of the calls I got were respectful professionals looking for general information, maybe 1 out of 10 calls sucked and 1 out of 50 were seriously rage inducing (which is still about once a day). But in a claims department you're usually not getting called unless shit hit the fan and someone is standing to lose a lot of money for reasons they don't understand.

Add in the fact that the person calling probably waited at least 5 minutes to get to you, the fact that you have no power to do anything unless it's an easily correctable clerical error and you're not allowed to retaliate if they're being unreasonable, it's the perfect trifecta of suck. Basically your job is to take shit from people because of problems you aren't even remotely involved with. You barely make enough to get by, you're constantly busy, your time is tracked to the second, you get treated like a five year old by your superiors and everyone else in the company looks at you as a bottom feeding nuisance that's wasting their time.

 

The worst job that I have ever had was my first job: working in the kitchen at a nice restaurant during the Summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school. The owner of the restaurant was a chef himself, so naturally he was extremely anal and impatient. He always found something wrong with what I and everyone else in the kitchen did, and he was always on you to work faster. He gave me bullshit time constraints on all of my chores that were impossible for someone with no past experience to meet. The chores (washing pots and pans, cutting vegetables, cleaning the floors, etc.) sucked as it was, but this guy made it way worse. Even the good chefs who worked there said that the owner was worse than most of the ones who they had previously worked for.

My dad got me the job because he got to know the owner from us eating there a good bit, and the he always seemed like a nice guy. It was one of my first forays into the whole "people are not always what they seem" thing. The only good thing that came out of it was that the retail jobs that I had afterwards seemed like dream jobs in comparison.

 

The thing about a discussion like this is that it is all relative. I had a construction/landscaping job the summer after my freshman year of college that was miserable. Waking up and getting to work at 630, doing shit like clearing debris from construction sites, digging fencepost holes when once you got below 6-9 in it was a gravel base and not topsoil, stuff like that was hell. But thats because I had just come back from school and had lived a semi-charmed prior 9 months being a delirious college student and now I was getting up 3 hours earlier and doing this shit...ON MY VACATION. So yeah, it was miserable cause I was basically spoiled.

The only thing that truly sucked was clearing a wooded area for development. The big boy machines would come out when actual lots would be cleared, but we were clearing out the initial road to get trucks back there. During a period where it had rained a bit, we were cutting trees and pulling out stumps with a Bobcat. During this 2 week process, it would rain at least every other day which means we were slogging through knee deep muck making a hard job even harder. I would wake up in the morning with a sense of dread. Ughh.

Its funny how in the white collar world, some jobs are even worse than what you thought was possible with your worst summer job. I worked for a logistics company out of college. And while that's actually not a terrible job, the managers I had and the management overall was miserable. There was a heavy emphasis on dishonesty and deception on the phone and lies started from the first day in regards to compensation, expectation, and overall support, it was the worst.

But the worst, the WORST, was my time working for a diamond wholesaler. First off, it did teach me that alot of misconceptions about the diamond industry are actually a result of bad jewelry store experiences and not the diamonds/industry itself. Oh and its about 1/10th as glamorous as people think it is. Diamonds are a product, a commodity (though not standardized priced like commodities). Our office was dingy and the diamonds were kept in small paper sleeves in plastic trays. If not for the millions of dollars of inventory in the office, you would just assume it was the backroom at some manufacturing firm. But that isn't why the job sucked.

The company had around 15 employees and every meeting circled around our "revenue" numbers. Now that number was largely worthless because margins on wholesale diamonds were usually only around 15-20% at best, sometimes as low as 10%. So hearing the company made $20mm in revenue is way less impressive when you realized they probably only cleared a gross of around $3-4mm. So the company wasn't drowning in cash, but that doesn't excuse the behavior of the owner. His head of HR/VP/3rd in command was a woman who he was having an affair with despite being married for 30+ years and being an outwardly extremely religious man. She was basically just a sycophant and would act like your best friend but at the end of the day was a mouthpiece for an asshole because he was too spineless to do anything himself. I started there at a pitiful salary with promises of promotions and bonuses which I was forced to take cause I was out of work.

After a year, I had completely restructured their customer tracking system and decreased turnover time by about 30%. I implemented a new more efficient system (when I arrived, NOBODY knew how to use excel and were using printouts from the DOS program they used for inventory) and saved the company $100K in assorted overhead costs in 6 months. Around my 1 year anniversary, the company had just wrapped up its most profitable year in 5 years and had just purchased the office to expand next door. I approached HR slag with the numbers I mentioned, and a well reasoned and thought out explanation of why I would like a raise. She smiled and said she would get back to me. The next day she brought me in, said she agreed with everything I said, I made great points...but they couldn't afford to give me anything. NOTHING. The next week was interesting. 2 days later she lazily and stupidly left out a printout detailing everyone's salary and most recent "bonus" (i put it in quotations because I received $100...before taxes. fuck you, might as well give me nothing, thats just insulting). I saw that she made double the next closest employee and $10K less than the president, a man with 30 years experience who had been shoved out of a family firm unfairly and they got for a song and was underpaid. The head of main operations in the back made barely over $50K despite being there for 20 years, being responsible for a large chunk of the sales/revenue creation, and having a degree from Northwestern. So immediately I knew something was massively wrong, and 2 days later from that I was let go because I was blamed for 2 diamonds disappearing (a common occurrence due to the disorganization of the idiots in the back room, shit got thrown away by accident constantly). In reality it was because I had rocked the boat with a raise request.

I came to realize that the salaries of the entire firm probably totaled under $600K while the owner took home easily in the $1-2mm dollar range annually, drove a Mercedes, and had floor tickets for the Bulls. Why did he get away with it? Cause he was an orthodox Jew as were the majority of his employees so they needed a workplace that allowed them to leave early for the Sabbath as well as keep a kosher kitchen and give them all high holidays off. So they had very few options. The rest of the employees were Hispanic who were brainwashed early on that they had a great opportunity. There was only one other girl my age who didn't fall into those categories. Thinking about how that place operated still makes me sick.

 

I've done just about every job under the sun. In terms of actual measureable awfulness, none of them were legitimately the worst thing in human existence. Except for one.

Fuck. Factory. Work. Holy Christ, if I had done it much longer than I did I would have thrown myself into a woodchipper. Doing the same repetitive task for hours on end is probably the easiest way to destroy your soul. You try to keep your brain active and make a game out of it, see how fast you can do it, whatever. That works for about 8 minutes, and then it's the pits for 9 more hours.

 

I can't decide if my worst was working for a scam that posed as a magazine company or working stocking shelves at four in the morning.

The scam place was a horrible work environment and the owner was most likely bipolar. There business model consisted of creating online magazines, then selling advertising at print level prices and blackmailing their clients into giving them their vendors list. They had around 12 or 13 online magazines. An unpaid intern did all the writing for each and everyone of them. Their basic hiring model was bring someone on as an unpaid intern for three months, then pay them slightly below minimum wage for another three, then give them benefits after the sixth month, and by then they'd leave or be fired and they'd hire another intern to do that job. Ethical kinda. My job was basically to look at rival magazines, see who advertises with them, then track down the managers in that company and then the attack dogs, I means sales team would take it from there. I also did other lead generation. Our lead generation consisted of recent college grads scouring the internet for potential and guessing people's emails. We would sell those leads at premium prices. The last project I did for them was we got access to a site called Redbook, which is a leads website. My job was to copy and paste every lead on that site into an excel spreadsheet. We stole an entire sites content. I would literally hit copy and paste several tens of thousands of times a day for about two weeks. I was on my add meds back then and even with that I couldn't keep up.

The other job I did resets at grocery stores. My days were Monday/Tuesday, then Thursday/Friday. We didn't work a five day week because they didn't want to pay us full time. I had to wake up at 3, drive an hour to a random grocery store get there by 4, then I'd clear off my section of the store, take everything down reorganize it and restock it. We worked at a different store everyday. The worst thing about that job was one of my coworkers was a brown man who didn't shower. I remember one day I ate McD's for breakfast and as such had indigestion. I was working and thought that the smell in the isle was the result of that. Nope. The guy smelled so bad its almost indescribable. The hours were difficult to get use to and having a college degree I promptly became college boy to my coworkers. If we got done with our reset early we'd then go around the store looking for expired items to throw out. Fuck that, that wasn't my job. Having to take that job because I couldn't find anything else was a huge shot to the balls. Fuck this economy, I still can't find a job.

 

My worst job wasn't nearly as bad as some of the other ones here (roofing sounds fucking awful), but it was still terrible enough for me to encourage none of you to ever, ever do it.

I lasted all of 1.5 days canvassing for Environmental Action.

On the bright side, I was using my charm and charisma to make a real difference in the environment, raising much-needed funds for political lobbying efforts and doing my part to save the world. On the other hand, it looked an awfully lot like me just standing on the street with a clipboard, mumbling a poorly worded sob story to try to get fast-walking strangers to give me money.

So basically, the only difference between me and a homeless person was a clipboard and a few rough months.

I don't really like talking to strangers, especially those who seem like they don't want to talk to me. Even the most magnanimous of them are going to balk a bit at giving up their personal information to a nervous-looking sixteen year old, and I was told to push hard to get credit card subscriptions.

In those 13 hours, all I made was a single $5 donated by a kind, kind lady, out of what I can only assume is pity. That was probably, psychologically, the worst part -- in all that time, I wasn't actually raising any money for anybody. And, considering that my pay was based entirely on commission, I wasn't making any money for myself either. Out of the $5 I raised, my cut was a cool $0.

I declined to return for the third day. I think everybody involved was ok with that.

 

Nom, you weren't one of those people that asked "Do you have a moment for the environment"? At CU they were everywhere and they were always annoying.

 

Worse than you can imagine. Know how flat roofs are covered in hot tar and then gravel? Know how that gravel gets up there? I do.

Even worse than that was putting the roof on the new terminal at the airport. Bent over at the waist with a screw gun in my hand facing sheets of bright, shiny, very reflective corrugated metal. So the sun beats down on your back and you get the reflection in your face. It was like working inside of a microwave.

 

Sweet jesus, these people coat the streets of Chicago in the summer. Amnesty International, Red Cross, Equal Rights, Environmental Nonsense Organization, The Human Fund. In a way, I begrudgingly respect them cause that shit is HARD. But I also hate them. If I'm looking down at my phone or not paying attention to you, do not leap in my face with some chipper opener. If I committed a crime and was given the choice of a month in minimum security white collar prison or a week on the streets doing that job, I'd likely take the jailtime.

 

I worked fast food. At a Wal-Mart.

 

I was also one of these. Except to make it even worse, I went door to door in suburbia, going on people's private property and bothering them in the comfort of their own homes.

As you may expect, a lot of people told the environment to go fuck itself that day. I was not asked to come back for Day 2.

I was also really close to working for Cutco, that company that tries to get you sell really sharp knives. Except since you're a dumb 18 year old and your friends don't need kitchen knives, it becomes "how many knives can you guilt your family into buying?"

One time during my two year stint at Dunkin Donuts, a man threw a hot muffin at my face from point blank range.

I had a job at a factory that made "custom tile and stone mosaics." Which means they cut up and arrange the stone, tile, and metal for the designs you see on fancy floors, walls, etc. The first day, the guy showed me the waterjet that they used to cut granite, etc. And then he showed me the finger that was missing part of the last joint, because waterjets are serious fucking business. Also, in case you weren't aware, stones are fucking heavy.

The highlight of that job was when I asked the guy who looked like a hobo lumberjack how far he lived from the factory, and he said "About two beers away. Three if they're light beers."

 

I'm going to chime in on the stay-at-home mom gig.

While not THE hardest job, it is certainly fucking hard. My experience is being my niece's surrogate father while her dad was deployed. My sister was the one with the job, so I was at home with a toddler all day long.

Let me tell you, that shit is DRAINING. The mental taxation of trying to think of activities to occupy every hour of the day will wipe you out more than trying to learn a new language from scratch, and on top of that you are on constant alert for danger to the kid, which becomes physically painful after a while. Then comes the monotony of doing the same thing to entertain them day in and day out, which further depletes whatever energy you had to begin with.

After you've developed horribly tense muscles from the insane vigilance you now have to employ for another human being, you are further taxed by the incredulity of human stupidity (you fed your lunch to the dog again and you're still hungry? NO FUCKING SHIT). You are miserable by the repetition of inane tasks that could be circumvented by any semblance of common sense, but toddlers don't have common sense. And you don't have patience anymore because you can't remember the last time you had a real night's sleep. You mechanically pull yourself through doing the dishes because the breadwinner doesn't have any time to do them after earning all your guys' money, and now you hvae no sense of pride for the house you live in or any of the tasks you're doing because you contribute nothing other than raising a child, and how does one quantify how well you're raising a child?

Now you're sleep-deprived, mentally and emotionally unstable, your sense of self-worth is demolished, and you have to figure out a food to feed this child because even though you're certain they just ate, that was three hours ago and you can't just feed them corn dogs all day. While you're contemplating this vortex your life slipped into, they are screaming because they just fell off a chair and you want to put them in a sound-proof box and put yourself in one too.

But instead you walk over and pick them up and hug them, and they smile and say you're the best, and you have the ten seconds of reprieve that makes it all worthwhile.

The hard part about taking care of kids is there is no break, ever. Not during the day, not when you go to bed at night. Maybe they have nap time, but anyone who has watched a kid knows how ephemeral that time is, and how fleeting. You can never say, "Awesome, quitting time," and go home to recover. Your job is 24/7, and it is painful. Your time is no longer your own and neither is your life. It's terrifying, gratifying, horrible and awesome all at once.

While I love my niece and would kill for her, I was never more glad than when I moved out of my sister's house and got my life back. It made me certain that I would never be a single parent, ever, and if I had a partner, we would be splitting the child-raising, because being a stay-at-home anything is a horrible prospect I wouldn't wish on anyone.

 

Concession stand worker at a drive-in movie theater. A rat-infested concession stand at that. And one that became a murder scene when the theater manager shot and killed his concession stand manager wife. I told her she was putting too much salt on the popcorn.