This could lead to a whole new discussion, Giff, so I think I'll split it off as a separate topic: namely,
what's the worst job you ever had?I've got about a dozen stories myself, but I'll start with what I think is the
absolute worst and go on from there.
I'm looking forward to some really entertaining contributions here, so let's all get to it!
"Fact'ry's no place for me,
Boss man, leave me be!"—Captain Beefheart, "Plastic Factory" (1967)
This happened back in the early 90's, when the company I'd been working for suddenly declared bankruptcy and folded, leaving all of the employees without their final paychecks. But that wasn't the
real disaster.
Forced to look for a new job on very short notice, I combed the want ads and applied for anything that looked even remotely likely. The first interview I got was for a position as an outside salesman for a small office supply company. They had a retail store, about two dozen outside accounts, and had just changed hands.
The new owner was a man from a Middle Eastern country which will remain nameless. Hint: it's right next to India, mostly Muslim, and they have nuclear bombs. So, I interviewed with his daughter, who was managing the retail store, and got the job. The old man, it turned out, was probably the
least qualified person I've ever known to run a business. His English wasn't so bad, but the problem was that he didn't bathe. Apparently, where he came from, you take a bath in the Sacred River once a year whether you need it or not— and due to the condition of the river, you're dirtier when you come out.
It wasn't long before I found out that his son-in-law had bought him the store just to get him out of the house. There was nothing they could do about the fact that he was (literally) an odious pain in the ass, but at least they could set him up in business so he could be a pain in
someone else's ass, not the daughter and the son-in-law's.
Man, did he stink sometimes! I mean, he was
ripe. One day, I was visitng one of the outside customers, and the guy said to me, "I only needed a couple of rolls of packing tape, and I didn't want to bother you just for that, so I walked over to the store. What a smell in there! It smelled like someone had farted, only it just wouldn't go away!"
I replied, "Oh, that's Mr. Abbagabbah, the new owner. Maybe you'd better call me instead, even if it's a really small order." One time, I came back from my rounds, and when I walked into the store, the smell was
so bad that I started to choke, and I had to turn around and walk back out into the fresh air!
My theory about his ignorance of personal hygiene was this: if you live in a place where everyone smells equally foul, then no one notices. Doesn't that make sense? It's only when you move to a country where they have soap and clean, running water that you get in trouble.
On top of that, he was given to long, incomprehensible monologues about his past, none of which made any sense, but I had to listen to them because he was the boss. Once, he went on for half an hour or so about a civil service position he'd held in some African country or other. At the end of his interminable, heavily-accented spiel, I still had only the vaguest idea of what it had all been about.
He also would blow up at the employees for no reason at all, shouting at the top of his lungs inside the store where all the customers could hear it— this didn't help the atmosphere any. Not to mention that the place was badly in need of remodeling; the carpets were absolutely filthy and should have been replaced (they were beyond cleaning), and the paint on the ceiling was heavily flaking off.
Sometimes, though, his unintentional buffoonery was hilarious. After Easter, he was left with a lot of unsold Easter cards, so he took a pair of scissors, cut the words "Happy Easter" off of as many of them as he could, and put them back on the shelves. "We sell them as birthday cards instead!" Pure genius! In other cases, where he couldn't cut the line off without obviously defacing the card beyond any hope of selling it, he put stickers over the "Happy Easter," so the card might read, say, "Happy Air Mail" or "Happy Fragile, Handle With Care." No, I'm
not making this up. Who could?
To cap it all off, he had an impossibly ugly old wife who could hardly speak a word of English, and he'd put her to work behind the counter sometimes. Her normal facial expression was such that she looked like she was glaring at you with unexplainable, deeply-held hostility, even though she wasn't. She was so homely, I thought, "too bad this isn't a tobacco shop, he could put a feathered headdress on her and a bundle of cigars in her hand and stand her outside."
Well, the upshot of all this was that the business lasted for less than a year after this clown took it over. By that time, I'd long since moved on to a better job... but obviously, I've never forgotten that experience.