Topic: What's The Worst Job You Ever Had?

[Pilsner Panther]

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.

[Giff me dat fill-em!]

I've had a similar "person-from-the-past-who-hailed-from-a-no-bathe-country" experience, back in my engineering days. (Before 9-11 when I was an electrical designer [NOT engineer] for an airport baggage conveyor company).

I took a part-time job at a company that built crane-hook hoists (the ones that run on rails in a factory and can lift many, many tons of product at a time) just to supplement my income for a few months. The owner of the company heralded from the same country as the smelly engineer/employee, but had the good sense to "Americanize" himself and his wife after he became his own businessman, and did not reek.
We used to flip a coin to see just WHO would go into "Mahatma's" office to speak to him about anything, because his English absolutely SUCKED, and he bathed less frequently (I suspect) than the smelly fellow Pilsner worked with. He even had a sweater (literally) that he wore EVERY day, no matter the time of year - you could even recognize the same ink stains and streaks from days and days before on his sleeves.
I suppose that, since he had no way to get to the Sacred River for a bath ... then, by golly, fooey on it!

[JazzBill]

Without a doubt the worst job I ever had was being a teacher at a driving school. If the student was young it usually worked out OK. It seemed like the older the person was, the harder it was for them to learn. My last student was an older guy who couldn't drive a straight line to save his life.  He kept on saying it was because the car had power steering and it moved too easy. After day's of this I finally took him by my house got my personal car ( 1966 Chevy with no power steering ). I told him to try driving this one. Well it was the same thing, he just couldn't go in a straight line . I finally told him. Look, some people just aren't made to drive. I told him he was probably never going to get the hang of it, and that I hated to see him waste his money. Well this guy gets pissed off at me and complains to the company. The company calls me in and says I'm an idiot and should of kept taking this guy's money for as long he wanted to give it to me, then canned me. But I didn't give a shit, because the job really sucked.

[shemps#1]

I actually worked as a janitor at a Wal-Mart, before hiring illegals to do such work became the in thing to do. The worst part of the job was a "customer" known as the Phantom Shitter. This guy would take his shit and smear it everywhere: the toilet, the stalls, the walls, the floor, the ceiling. No one wanted to touch it during the day so I was the one who had to clean it up.

I stayed for the 90 day probational period, then turned down an offer to stay on longer.

[Pilsner Panther]

I actually worked as a janitor at a Wal-Mart, before hiring illegals to do such work became the in thing to do. The worst part of the job was a "customer" known as the Phantom Shitter. This guy would take his shit and smear it everywhere: the toilet, the stalls, the walls, the floor, the ceiling. No one wanted to touch it during the day so I was the one who had to clean it up.

So, then, you and Eric go back a long way...

 

[Bruckman]

It was 1989, and in one of my less intelligent moments, I'd chosen to move to Florida, where my mother had recently retired, to see how I liked living there. It wasn't long before I decided living in Florida wasn't to my taste, and my m.o. switched from earning enough to live on to earning enough to save up and get the hell out of Florida. In an effort to increase my income (Florida, due to the influx of immigrants legal and illegal, has a very low standard of incomes: professionals make a fair bit, but the scale slides downward rapidly the closer you come to the non-skilled side).

Anyway, I went to work selling bogus cruises for a land developer, for the sum of 6 bucks an hour plus bonuses, a pretty good wage for southern Florida at that time. The scam was this: the developer sent out postcards to likely suckers (culled from lists he'd purchased) telling them they'd been selected to receive a discounted cruise/Florida vacation package. If they called the 800 number provided, it was my and the others' job to get them to pony up then and there their credit card info. We didn't tell them that once ashore from their cruise they'd be subjected to an onslaught of developers' pitch men, hauled on board a bvus, and driven around all day to look at real estate (the bus was affectionately known to us as the "sucker bus"). The owner of the development corporation, a corpulent man with a perpetual golf course sunburn and many tales about his leisure fishing down in Marathon, who had an office but was seldom to be seen in it, was prone to coming in and putting a twenty on yr desk with the words "Sell to that guy you got on the phone and this is yours." If you didn't make an immediate sale, he went on to the next desk, and so on, until someone claimed the twenty, or no one did.

My first day, I had trouble following the script (it was 3 densely typed pages long and you had to follow it word for word) and kept omitting paragraphs and having to back up. A woman of some authority hauled me into a back room and hollered "Can't you even read?"

"Yes," I replied, "in fact I'm working on my master's in English lit."

She didn't have a comeback for that but gave me a "what-are-you-a-wsie-guy" look of disbelief.

I lasted about 3 months at this before heading back to Canada, grad school, and the dubious pleasure of earning my keep working "security" on weekends (trans: I was a bouncer) and picking up spare bucks as a sparring partner (trans: I was a punching bag for boxers more skilled than I was, and usually bigger, too).

The Florida attorney general closed down this bait and switch about 6 months later. Employees showed up at the office one day and found it locked. The boss man had gotten wind of the impending action and absconded, leaving them with worthless severance paychecks.

Pils' comment about how if you're in a country where no one including yourself bathes, that's one thing, is like treeplanting was in the old days: you all stunk from work and lack of showers, so you became used to the smell. When you returned to civilization, though, you found the reek of your unwashed clothes doggone near overpowering. Treeplanters commonly smelled like a swampy compound of moss, sweat, pine needles, muskol bug dope, grungy wool socks, badly-cured marijuana, dirt, and rancid fruit.  But you became so accustomed to this funk that when you finally did have the chance to shower, you immediately noticed you smelled differently, and it took a day or two before your olfactory nerves stopped registering this new, clean scent. I was informed, on good authority, that mosquitoes were less likely to bite you if you were grungy; anything sweet-smelling seemed to attract them.

I did have an odoriferous office manager once, but he stayed only 8 or 9 months, which is, I guess, long enough, but I seldom dealt with him.

Shemps' has just given me a new parameter for the shit job of all shit jobs.

[jrvass]

House cleaning. Although the pay was OK and my best friend owns the company. He had just bought a franchise territory with his "college fund" almost 30 years ago.

Fun was cleaning smoke-damage after fires. And joy was cleaning water losses after burst pipes were repaired in the winter.

But nothing compares to cleaning animal-urine from wool carpets and rugs on a hot, humid day in Detroit. The smell just intensifies when you get it wet. Every room jammed with furniture that had to be stacked, moved, cleaned underneath, and moved back. If my friend (the co. owner) wasn't suffering with me, I would've quit!

But the homeowner gave us a tip! We each got a bottle of Champale. 

One job I was happy to not have gone on was a suicide cleanup. His father helped him. Greg's dad is hard of hearing and always breathes though his mouth. Something to do with being a sailor during the war led to this condition.

Anyway a high-school aged kid swallows a load of shotgun pellets in the bathroom. After the top of his head, the bathroom ceiling takes the most damage. The family and the cops are in the next room as they were cleaning up the mess. Greg's dad is on the ladder cleaning the ceilng, before the next insurance crew could patch the holes & paint.

As Greg's dad is cleaning, a piece of "something" drops from the ceiling into his mouth! He spit it out so fast he didn't know if it was a pellet, bone, or brain. And the thought practically has him retching. Greg was having such a hard time trying to keep from laughing at his father (with the family in the next room) that his sides were about to split!

This was before AIDS, and biohazard-cleanup rules were legislated.

The best thing about a bad job, is that it gives you a motivation to find something that sucks less. 

James

[Pilsner Panther]

Suicide cleanup? Okay, I never had to scrape anyone's brains off the ceiling, but my father worked for the N.Y.C. Coroner's office, so I've heard a number of stories like that; and at the dinner table, too, which made dinner kind of unappetizing sometimes.

For example, Dad was part of the forensic team that identified the body of 1960's modern jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, whose extremely dead, late, deceased, dearly departed, non-breathing, waterlogged, and expired corpse was found floating in the East River in 1970— he was deader than even Monty Python's parrot. The case is still unsolved, but I think I know who did it... the music critics!

Not that I blame them, since they did a good deed by sparing future audiences from any more of Ayler's undisciplined, unmusical squawking, squealing and honking on the tenor and soprano saxophones. I'd post a track of his here, but I'm not that malicious.

 

Unlike Bruck, I've never worked for a living in the dear old piney woods, but I've spent some time hiking and camping in both the forests and the deserts of California and Arizona. Once, I was asleep in a tent north of Lake Shasta, Ca., when I felt something poking at me. I thought it was my tent-mate rolling over in his sleep— but it was a huge lizard, which apparently liked my sleeping bag and wanted to move in!

From then on, I've stayed in hotels, like a good city boy should.

 

[Gorilla Watson]

Long story short, I worked in a Bob Evans restaraunt where some co-workers (possibly a clique) decided they didn't like me and used the strict sexual harrassment policy to get rid of me, continually accusing me of touching male and female employees alike. So I got canned, but I never gave anyone who asked the details of why I left that job. I just mentioned that there was a conspiracy.

What made matters worse was this young, homely waitress who was crappy to me. The first time, I was only halfway paying attention to her and I thought she could've been talking to someone else. I can't really remember what it was all about anymore.

The next time, I was squatting down to gather the dirty dishes and silverware to wash at a time when the waitresses were very low on clean silverware. I was falling behind in my work and it was a busy time. I got to the dirty silverware as soon as I could. So she yells "Hurry up, butthead!" I looked up at her, giving her a dirty look. A nice, older waitress that was also standing there, said, "She was talking to me." I decided to just drop it and get back to work.

The last incident was almost the last straw for me. I felt like I was coming down with the flu. I must've looked as crappy as I felt. The manager on duty took me off the floor (busing tables) and put me at the dish tank. My job still required me to venture in plain view of the customers every so often, so the manager saked me to take the trash out and said I was free to go afterwards... 1 or 2 hours early. When I got done and I clocked out, I called for my ride. No answer. So I grabbed a coke (employees always got free drinks) and sat at the counter with my arms crossed in front of me and my head laying in my arms. Pretty soon the manager comes to the counter. The young waitress was there too. There must have been talk between the manager and the other employees concerning me and I how I looked, because the waitress spoke up, loud enough where I could hear, and asked the manager, "Can I go home early? I don't feel good." The mangager told her no, and I looked up at her with a dirty look.

I decided that the next time something happened, I'd take her aside and settle things, but I got canned before anything else happened. Over the next couple of years, I found out that the whole staff was one big, dysfunctional family anyway. The guy that trained me (already notorious for getting drunk at company parties) went to jail, some people got fired, some left on bad terms. It was probably a good thing I got out when I did.

[JazzBill]

Actually, the worst job I ever had was when I was a "Phantom Shitter". I used to go to all the Wal-Mart stores and spread shit all over the bathroom walls.  Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk   

[Weasel]

I was 17 years old and worked during the summer in a textile mill, which manufactured blue denim.  My job was to take the rolls of cloth off the belt in the finishing department and separated them for the inspectors.  It was about 100 degrees in the department (or hotter), and the rolls never stopped coming down the line.  It was another guy and me and we had to take breaks and lunch at different times so the belt wouldn't overload and shut down.  It was terrible, and at the end of the day when you spit or blow your nose it would be blue colored, same as the denim rolls....Nasty!  We were always soaking wet with sweat and worked like dogs all day long.  The supervisor would never pay us a compliment even when we kept things neat and in order, he would only criticize us when things got messed up....those 3 months seemed to go on forever. 

I was glad to head back to school after that adventure!!

[Pilsner Panther]

Textiles! I had a similar job once, working at a big fabric company in the New York City garment district; I took a warehouseman job because I just needed the paycheck— I was 20 years old and already on my own. So, I found myself carrying 50 to 75 pound rolls of cloth around on my back, and I'm not a really muscular guy, I'm on the tall and thin side. There was a very rough crowd working there, ex-cons and the like. I remember one old fabric cutter saying that he thought he might rob a bank and let himself get caught, so that he'd have a roof over his head in his old age... prison!

Just like that denim factory, there was always a lot of fabric dust in the air, and if you breathe that stuff long enough (over a period of years), you can get lung disease. However, it turned out to be a good outfit; after I'd been there a couple of months, one of the company executives noticed that I was intelligent and articulate. He said to me, "You sound like an educated guy, so why are you working in the warehouse?" Me: "Well, I just needed a job... have to pay the rent, you know." So he promoted me to a customer service position (from blue collar to white collar!), and I got a couple more promotions before I finally left four years later.

So I can't really call that one of my worst jobs, but working in that warehouse was certainly... uh, interesting.

 

[Bangsmith]

Worst job I ever had? That would be assembling giant wooden spools for electrical wires at a company in East Providence, RI called Sonoco, back in 1994.(Nothing to do with the oil company.) The job itself wasn't so bad, but no-one there spoke any English, including supervisors! Due to the fact that I couldn't communicate with anyone there,(Try learning your job correctly under those circumstances!!!) I lasted seven business days!!!!

[Danl57]

The worst job that I ever had was in 1978.  I cleaned and rust-proofed cars.  I hated it with a passion.  I had a good job working for the county but I left it because I was young and dumb.  If I would have stayed, I would have been retired with full pension and benefits.  But thats OK, I really like the way things turned out. 

Moe: "Free meals, free uniforms, free room & board and free cigarettes"
Larry: "Oh boy, free cigarettes"
Curly: "What....no matches???....I wouldn't work for that piker!"
Take Care God Bless and Keep Watching
Danl57