I did that too for one whole day when I was 16, for NYPIRG. The issue was something about fish. They managed to do the whole interview and training in the previous two days without ever telling me that what I would in fact be doing is being dropped off in the middle of nowhere and going door to door asking for money. In retrospect, I find that skill impressive. If you take the whole customer service/working with the public aspect out of customer service jobs, I really don't mind them. While boring, I never minded being a cashier, and working in an ice cream place was fun. But as soon as I had to deal with appeasing people, I hated it. But, what was always the worst part was any time I had to become any kind of salesperson. I actually kind of liked working at Blockbuster in college and talking to people about movies and getting a lot of free movies, but whenever there was some kind of promotion going on where I'd have to make a pitch each time I rung someone up, it was the worst. I hate that stuff. And I very briefly tried selling ads for a magazine that was just starting: awful. I am not a sales person whatsoever. I don't like bothering people. But I think my hardest job was the one right before this one, where I was still on the phones and dealing a lot more with making appointments. My emotions would swing wildly from being depressed to enraged to frustrated to every now and then feeling really good, but that was usually shrouded in one of the other emotions. Something from work would make me cry at least once a week and it was exhausting. I didn't even realize how much of a toll it was having on me until I switched to this position and got to focus on the educational part and not have to talk to them so I could yell at them to their faces but not really their faces. Even when the chats are sad, there's still that helpful barrier of talking online and feeling a bit more emotionally distant from them, rather than hearing them crying or talking with total panic in their voice.
The summer between my senior year in high school and my first semester of college, I worked for a guy who did septic system repair. Usually leach lines. Leach line repair isn't cheap, so people notice the wet spot in their yard but put off repair until they absolutely HAVE to do something before Child Services take their children away for unsafe living conditions. Imagine a job where you know for a certainty that the first thing you will do every morning is wade out into a shallow pond of human waste with a shovel and start digging to find the septic tank. If you work hard you will be knee or hip deep soon instead of just ankle/shin deep in someone else's shit (I don't know exactly why it's worse that it's someone else's, but it is). During the summer. In Mississippi. Fuck that noise. Also, fuck roofing to death. Absolutely the most physically demanding job I have ever done. Something they don't tell you is that there is temperature, then there is the heat index (which in MS can be as much as 25 degrees hotter) and then there is the "roof index" which is usually 10-15 degrees higher than the heat index. My boss kept the water cooler on the ground. The rule was if you went down to get water, you brought two 90 lbs (115 lbs if they were architectural shingles)bundles of shingles back up the ladder with you. All for the low, low price of minimum wage ($4.25 at the time). Not to mention that almost everyone you work with is an ex-con or a tweaker. Every time I get a shitty job, I tell myself, "I could be roofing". It helps.
Your boss sounds like fun. I think my worst memory from shingling roofs was working with a city crew and sitting down on a nail (pointy end up) after a lazy bastard was told to sweep off and left a few. It puntured my Carhartts and someone had to yank it out of my ass cheek with pliers. I am really glad I have only shingled roofs here in Minnesota where the temps never get too high, even in August.
And thus began a new hobby. None of my jobs could be considered "The worst job ever" as they ranged from working on a farm, to Resort maintenance to accounting firm, nothing overly crazy, so my vote goes for at home parenting. When my second was born my wife didn't want to take the full year off (Mat plus parental in Canada) so like a sucker I said I'd do 6 months. "I'll bond with the kids" I said "It'll be fun" i said, 1 month in "Fuck me" I said. IT was fun in a way, but I wouldn't do it again, luckily I got fixed so that better not be an issue.
Five whole dollars? What you should've done was on the 3rd day ditched the whole environmentalist angle and just gotten yourself a piece of cardboard and a sharpie and straight up begged for spare change like a vagrant. Then when you collected more money that way you could've gone back to your superiors and told them that your scientific analysis indicates that people would rather give money to a homeless person who will probably spend the money on alcohol or drugs than support the environment.
That. Plus, God forbid you are on a continental shift. That's a 12hours 7am-7pm and you get a about an hours worth of breaks combined. What I had to do also involved some sort of coolant liquid which you had to wear gloves and goggles for. Not only that I worked in what was pretty much isolation as my station was away from everyone elses. Doing the same thing over and over and over again...for 12 hours. That's not the worst part though. The worst part was that you would work 2 weeks 7am-7pm and 2 weeks 7pm-7am. You have no idea how badly that messes up your entire system. Especially the first few shifts during the change where you work on barely any sleep because your internal clock is all fucked and you can't get to sleep despite your best efforts. I had to do that one summer and it is by far the worst job I've ever had.
Nice work capturing the stay at home parenting gig. The original post is using "hardest" and "worst" interchangeably...I don't think anyone out there is claiming SAHP is the worst job...it's hard, but hopefully no one who's done it thinks it's completely horrible and w/o any merit. Also, the level of difficulty depends on the kid...I've babysat my fat little baby nephew and it's as difficult as caring for a goldfish. On the flipside, there's colicky demon babies out there that can literally make your life hell. I've had really hard jobs that weren't horrible (see: military) and horrible jobs that weren't hard (see: factory work, covered nicely by Ssycko). And it's really endearing that Nom and others did the petition-signing thing.
I too did residential roofing when I was 16 for a total of three weeks and I only quit because of the lack of saftey. I was hired to drive the dump truck (a 1989 f-350 with a dump bed on the back and a stick) so I arrive the first day and I'm told that the master cylinder on the dump was fucked, and to leave myself lots of room when stopping. So as I make my first stop at 80 km/h I put my foot into the break and there's nothing, that whore went right to the floorboard and I wasn't slowing down. So that t-intersection is comming up quick and I`m still not slowing down. I panic and drop it from 4th to 2nd to slow down enough to do a rolling stop, the exhaust was fucked so I'm sure you could have heard me for a good mile or two. As I get to the job the foreman jumps out of his truck yelling at me saying if I ever geared down like that again he would fire me. I found out to actually stop that piece of shit you had to be going under 40 kmh which sucked because the foreman never told us where we were going, and he was always running red lights and speeding, usually 30 or 40 kmh over the speed limit. The guys there were all losers, I was between grade 10 and 11 and I had the most education there, everyone dropped out of high school early there. The only reason I got the job was because the other loser got a DUI. The last week I worked there he didn`t show up because he got drunk and beat his wife the night before and was sitting in jail. Slinging 80 pund bundles up a 30 foot ladder sucked so bad though, it`s a filthy job and the smell of the hot asphalt shingles will cling to your nostrils so even when you get home you smell roofing. To this day when I have to do shitty jobs at work I always remind myself it`s better then working.
I've done a lot of roofing, which had a lot of miserable moments, when it's 90 degrees on the ground and six thousand degrees on the roof. You'd have to be incredibly masochistic to do that shit for minimum wage. That wasn't as physically taxing as the job I had clearing brush and trees from under the high tension wires, though. The boss would drop us off, we'd get a 40 pound sprayer full of herbacide, a 15 lb. chainsaw, and he'd wave at us and drive off. We'd proceed to walk for mile after mile, cutting down the softwoods and spraying the hardwoods. Since they're high tension wires, there isn't a spot of shade, and large sections of it were covered with horribly sharp juniper bushes, briar patches, or other miscellaneous sharp-leaved plants, as well as poison ivy (so even if you weren't allergic, you had to watch out in case you had been torn up by the aforementioned pointy bushes). We'd cover a dozen miles in a day sometimes - and, being in New England, it was never flat ground. That work was by far the most exhausting thing I've ever done. After a few months, though, I was in the best shape of my life and (being pretty fair skinned) I had the best tan I'll probably ever get. I also had an incredible amount of temporary scarring from the branches, thorns, rocks and leaves we had to walk through. Oh, and the oldest guy on the crew took a sick pleasure in hosing down any pot gardens we came across. I sincerely hope nobody ever smoked any of those plants after he got done with them - they'd get saturated in half a gallon of herbacide. The worst job I ever had, though, was a cushy office job with 8 women, whose combined IQ likely did not break into the triple digits. I'd do a flat roof any day over working with those heinous, miserable bitches.
I posted this a while ago in a similar thread, but here it is again. Back in the summer before my freshmen year of college I worked at a wastewater treatment plant as a summer hire. Most days weren't too bad, just a lot of odd jobs out in the heat trying to fend off mosquitos and looking out for rattlesnakes, but the main reason they hired myself and another kid was to clean out a tank full of waste at the end of summer. The tank looked somewhat like this: We had to wear cheap biohazard suits and get into the tank that had about 2 1/2 feet of feces, condoms, needles (anything flushed down a toilet), and use a vac-con truck to suck all of the shit out of the tank. It took about a week in 90+ degree weather to get the job done. After that, I couldn't get the smell of shit off of me for a few days no matter how many showers I took.
I briefly tried my hand as a collection agent in my late teens for one of those seedy independent agents that would buy up old debts for pennies, then set off to harass/threaten the shit out of anyone they could actually find. People screaming at you, crying, threatening you, telling you their sob stories ... all day long. We worked on commission and were given scripts with scare tactics that were out and out lies. Lies like telling them we had a signed judgement to garnish their wages at the source and would be contacting their employer. Another popular one was to tell them you could settle a $2k debt with some offer like .25¢ on the dollar with a credit card payment and the debt would go away. Except it didn't. It just would be put in the "sell" pile and sold to another agency. Yeah I know ... pay your bills. But a lot of these debts were really old and some were just outright bullshit. Like maybe a $100 phone bill turned into $700 debt because of (fictitious and/or inflated) interest. I lasted one week and made exactly $51 after deductions. I also made at least three people cry like I just threw their cute little puppy into a pot of boiling water in front of their eyes and had quite a few death threats uttered at me. It was about the most depressing thing I've ever have ever done and about one step above the bottom feeders in my spoiler below. On a mildly related note: Spoiler Here's a shit (and illegal) job - some people will do anything for money. The Windows Security tele-scammers are making the rounds again. I had one little snappy fellow today. I strung him along for about five minutes until I got bored. I called him a scammer, told him never to call me again, then hung up. The guy called back! He didn't like that I called him a scammer. Took it rather personally actually and told me he was going to keep calling me everyday, three times a day ... bla bla bla. Me - *CLICK*. That determined little fucker called back a third time too! But by then I had downloaded this neat little app for my cell phone called AIRHORN and it is fuckin' awesome! There is an app for everything.
I never tried roofing. For a couple of weeks, I was a Brickie's mate - which is to say the dipshit who stands on the ground and throws bricks up to the brick layer on the second or third floor while building a brick house. That job consisted of bend over, pick up a brick, throw it up in the air, hope the guy you're throwing it too can catch, if not duck, then bend over and repeat. Every now and then take a rest, and by rest I mean go and get another load of bricks to throw. I fucking near died from the physical exertion, and I don't have fantastic aim at throwing things even when they aren't fucking bricks, so everyone was happy when I decided it wasn't the job for me. In high school, I was a wobble boarder for Dominos. That job involved standing by the side of the road with a sign to wave at traffic. Sign must keep moving at all times to draw the eye of passing traffic. I had competing pizza chain drivers honest to god try and run me down, to the extent of diving for my life, screaming bloody murder at the guys manager until the police were called and then filing a police report and then arguing with the cops when they wouldn't arrest the cocksucker. The worst was when they decided I needed to wear the mascot - a giant styrofoam domino, a blue track suit, foam shoes and giant foam mickey mouse gloves, in 95 degrees plus, 90% humidity weather, while standing in full sun. Like several other people mentioned, whenever my job feels a bit shit, I remember that it could be worse.
This a million fucking times. I would rather suck trucker dick at a rest stop than ever have to work in a factory again. For 3 years I packaged screws, nuts, bolts, etc. for individual sale. It involved dumping 60 pound crates, weighing the proper amount into a box, attaching a sticker, then putting all the small boxes into a bigger box and stacking them on a pallet. It was almost impossible to wear gloves while I worked, so I got metal and wood splinters, and my hands were always cracked from handling cardboard. I didn't have prints on the tips of my fingers because they were worn smooth. Sometimes the screws were galvanized and I had to attach a sticker that said "The state of California has found that this material may cause cancer....blah, blah, blah." That was super reassuring. I did all this in the comfort of a massive concrete and metal warehouse with no windows, no heat, and no a/c. I shivered so hard in the winter that I could barely label things correctly. In the summer, my boss would keep all the dock doors closed to keep the cool air in. Except there was no cool air and it would frequently hit 110*F. The girl who worked next to me was around my age, had no teeth, didn't wear deodorant, and insisted that she and her boyfriend were selling cat/rabbit hybrids from their trailer. I guess the cabbit business wasn't booming, because she was there when I started and there when I left. It was piece work and I could work really fast, so I usually made around $650 for a 44 hour week. I never would have stayed as long as I did, but I was trying to help support my nephews and keep my parents from losing their house. Plus, I was 17 and dumb and thought that everyone hated their job enough to fantasize about burning the place down. The day I quit was honestly one of the happiest days of my life. I also worked a single 4 hour shift at a shitty mom and pop gas station. I knew the job wasn't for me when the owner handed me a spring-loaded baton and told me that sometimes the neighborhood kids would demand money from the register and then get aggressive if you denied them.
Anyone had the pleasure of installing fibreglass insulation? While you're sweating? Wonderful, wonderful adventures. Like you ran through a poison oak orchard and swallowed fish hooks at the same time. I've also had the pleasure (while roofing) of ripping up the old (now illegal) and very-much-feared yellow fibreglass insulation. Aside from causing burning rashes, the fibres on it are BARBED so they like to "stick around", so to speak. As said before: NEVER AGAIN. That goes double for spraying acid in concrete tunnels.
That has to be a rough job. We service alot of factories in our area and all the line workers oddly start to look the same. If you stood a 20 year old, 30 year old, 40 year old and a bunch of 50 year old women side by side they progressively get to the same level of haggard. They are strange folk too, in the lunch room there will be anywhere from 20-100 people sitting down, some are talking but most just sort of look at the floor 10 feet ahead of them with this really weird blank stare on their face. This is in every factory, same look. I think it's the look of "where did I go wrong in my life."
Yeah, but California thinks that everything from oxygen to rainbows may cause cancer. FOCUS: Nothing nearly as bad as described in most of the posts so far, but I've worked some mentally torturous jobs. The hardest physical labor I've ever done was inventory/moving shit around for my dad at a truck parts place. Pulling 1.5 tons of fenders around on a skid was fun in a way. I've had a bunch of crappy food service jobs, but I'm not going to go into detail because there isn't any good story in any of them. But all of those were heaven compared to the seafood place. Pretty sure a few people have ranted about the suckage of this particular chain on here, and they were talking about the customer experience. I've posted about this at length before, so in short: I worked on the pantry station, which meant that for every one item any other cook was responsible for, I was responsible for an average of three. When they were active, I was flying. When they were slammed, I was bleeding from my ass. I was one of maybe two BOH and five people in the entire store who was not constantly fucked up on something. I watched managers drop bags of weed from pockets or chug stolen beers, saw or heard plans for drug deals on a nightly basis, and walked in on a guy who made a shitton more than me snorting Xanax off of the dish machine. The exec chef was an ex-gang member Latino who probably would have been fucked if anyone had called INS, the previous exec was rumored to have a coke habit (I don't know shit about cokeheads, but the guy was a bit off), and the place was just a giant shithole. That chain was actually bought out a while back, in January I think. It was a long-fought hostile takeover that ended in a once-minority shareholder taking over. The day after he took control, he fired the entire board of directors. I only hope he was smart enough not to stop there.
Luckily I never had to work a manual labor job except for the one day my psycopathic politician boss decided we should join the people on Parole in clearing a wooded area of the park. Yeah, that happened. But, working in a political office was absolute hell. 1. You are told to flat out lie to everyone who comes in. No matter what a constituents problem was and no matter how incapable we were of handling it we were always told to say "We're working on it." If after we did our cursory BS of sending out a letter to the proper agency and getting the expected response of "No." We were told to never tell this to the constituent and keep telling them we're working on it. We had one guy who came in every day for 6 months asking about recieving government funds for his youth program. Despite his request being denied 6 months prior we had to keep telling him we were working on it, no one was working on it. So you get yelled at by the constituent, who then complains to your boss, who then yells at you for not resolving the issue...despite him knowing the issue is unresovable and told you to lie in the first place. 2. The people you work with are either there because of 1. Lazy and incompetant and usually only hired because of pure nepotism 2. Paranoid nuts who think everyone is out to steal their jobs 3. People just desperate for a job and willing to take the abuse. 4. People looking to just get in the system and wanted to advance to other government service jobs. The first would try to dump work off on everyone else. I remember this guy dropping 300 blank envelopes on my desk telling me I had to label them and stuff them in an hour for an event that was the following week...they were the invitations that should have been sent out 3 months before. After doing this, he then bitched that he didn't like how they came out and asked me to redo them I refused. This led to a grown ass man saying to me "Do you know who my daddy is?"(his father was a State Senator) I told him I didn't give a shit who his daddy was. The second category were all backstabbing bastards and if they were your superiors thought you were trying to steal their jobs and if they were your coworkers thought you were looking to rat them out, then would rat you out for any minor offense. Came back from lunch 5 minutes late? They would email the boss. Take your tie off in the office because it is 110 degrees in the office? Email the boss you're not appropiately dressed. The third category I legimately feel bad for because they were stuck there in a cycle of abuse. The folks in the 4th category routinely got sabotaged by the 2nd category because they didn't want anyone to succeed and leave, bosses would refuse to write letters of recomendation and I knew of times when they would even call the agency they were trying to transfer to and telling them not to hire the person. 3. Get screamed at on a constant basis by everyone for everything. The State Senator I worked for would routinely yell at us "I own you! You're my slaves!" We would also get yelled at for doing our jobs if it interfered with another job we were supposed to do. Get told to go to an event during office hours? Sure thing. As soon you got back to the office you would get yelled at for not answering the phone in the office while you at the event. 4. Be instructed to perform flat out illegal tasks. As a political office we weren't allowed to handle anything resembling campaigning in the political office. Legally we couldn't talk about campaigning at all. This didn't stop the bosses from hosting campaign meetings in the office, demand we go campaigning and collect signatures and handle any campaign matters that come into the office. Of course, if anyone got in trouble they would then be thrown under the bus. 5. Last, but certainly not least and what pissed me off the most while working there. They didn't give a shit about anyone and one time that stands out more than anything else is they were having a fundraiser for the SOLDIERS SERVING IN IRAQ. We basically spent a month collecting magazines, books, toiletries, candy bars and the like to send as care packages to the soldiers deployed overseas. The day the stuff is supposed to be sent they have a big press conference, the media comes in takes pictures of the Senator and the boxes and us packing the stuff up. They take half the boxes and I at least believe they mailed them out. Honestly, they could have trashed them for all I know. The other half stayed in the office with the promise they were going to come back for them after they brought the first batch to the post office. They never sent out the second half of the collected goods. 10 boxes of stuff sat in the office for 3 or 4 months, and the bosses kept claiming they would send them out any day now. Finally after 4 months they told me they had no intention of sending them to Iraq and to get rid of them. I asked them if I could bring them to an extremely poor Church that would give the items directly to the community, after a week of them making their "decision" they decided that wasn't in the Senator's best interest and instead I should throw everything in the trash...the trash by my house though, not the trash by the office in case anyone sees. I took the boxes to the church to let it be given to the poor. That's not even counting the shit the general public would put me through, but I rather have the craziest member of the general public bust my chops any day at work than deal with the people who actually worked in the office.
I lasted a total of two days at a construction job once. I had just quit my job in Hawaii as an IT support engineer and moved back to Washington. I couldn't find anything. Luckily for me, my step-grandmother's nephew ran a construction business right where I lived and took my brother and I on as a favor to her. Quick sidenote. I've never lifted so much as a hammer in my life. My experience with tools started and ended with a screwdriver. So naturally, I'm tasked with drilling concrete with something that's three feet high, two of which is a razor sharp bit. By the time the day was out, I was physically and mentally exhausted. My snot was slate gray from the concrete dust I was inhaling and I couldn't make a fist with either of my hands. I ended up working as a security guard at the sketchiest strip mall in the town I was living in until I got the job I have now. I'm not even 100% Caucasian, but I was easily the whitest guy in a 2 mile radius of that place. You know you're in trouble when you see signs prohibiting the flying of gang colors.