Does growing up with farm chores count? And summers bailing hay in such heat! When I was a kid we picked the field corn by hand. It was all a horror. I felt like a slave. I didn't get anything out of it - for working so hard - I should have been rich. But I didn't have any money - and it was all dad's hobby farm - he was a senior scientist for an international corporation.
Working at Sears was unpleasant. The manager of my section was such a jerk, I couldn't stand the buffoon, no one could. Then the employee theft was ridiculous. It seemed like everyone was stealing. I lasted a year though, I really needed the money at the time and it paid a little better than minimum wage at the time.
I had a temp job with Manpower at Lipton's when I was 18. I was on a line where I had to grab cardboard boxes of empty salad dressing bottles, flip the box upside down onto the assembly line without letting gravity dash them to the floor.
I kept breaking them. You ever see that I Love Lucy episode where she works in a candy factory? It was like that. I tried sweeping up the broken bottles at first but that slowed down the line. The foreman would yell "Leave 'em"! Sweep up when we go to break."
So after a couple teeth grinding hours I was ankle deep in broken glass, my arms and back are screaming (you have to press your hands tightly together to keep the box from falling) and I got to spend my break time cleaning up my mess.
On a garbage truck...in the middle of summer...where things got pretty ripe including us. I needed the money to survive on so I had no choice but to continue until I found something else. At least I had some kind of job to earn money.
The jobs themselves weren't bad, but some of the managers were awful! Retail at Bath and Body Works wouldn't have been half so bad if my manager hadn't been bat-shit crazy.
I'll tell you two. First I worked at a processing plant that prepared salad greens and vegetables for fast food resaurants. Every thing in the place was constantly rinsed with a weak bleach solution for sanitation, and the temperature was a balmy 40 degrees to retard spoilage. I stood at a stainless steel table with about 10 others. This table was at the end of a large conveyor belt. Above the belt was a hopper full of heads of lettuce. As the lettuce fell onto the table we would have to grab the cold,wet heads and jam them stem first onto a tube and rip the core out. Then we tossed the cored heads onto another belt that took them to be shredded. After the first hour your hands would be numb inside your little rubber gloves and your eyes would still me smarting from the bleach and your nose might be running from the same. We wore winter coats under rain slickers to keep warm and dry and rubber boots to keep our feet dry. By the time I got home every day I couldnt smell a thing but my girlfriend would make me strip the second I got in the door because I reeked of bleach.
Now I'm all depressed. I'll tell the other story after I go outside and get some sunshine LOL
I worked at a carwash one summer when I was in college. I don't want this to be racial, but I was the only white guy there, besides the owner who was an sob. This was before the day of the automated carwash. If you ever saw the movie Carwash you'll know what I am talking about. Only not as cool. The black guys were mostly ok, family men, who like my father enjoyed a day at Jones Beach with their families on the weekend. They weren't very educated at all. I knew better than to correct them on say, their version of geography. I just let them be.
We got minimum wage, which in 1964 was $2 an hour, but not a 40 hour week. If business was slow the ownner gaves an unpaid "break." Since the carwash was in Astoria an industrial area of New York City, there wasn't much to do on these enforced breaks, but hang and shoot the sh*t.
Al of this was bareable until Sonny came along. Now, I had a relatively easy job, toweling off the cars when they came out of the carwash. Since Sonny was new they put him on working next to me. Sonny felt that the other blacks were "Uncle Toms." Sonny also told me how he was in trouble with the police and had a gun. Since we were in the last position, we were the guys who got the tips. I always put the tips in the tip box for later divying up among the crew. LIke I was told to. But Sonny had other ideas. He just keep the tips for himself and was pressuring me to join him in being a thief. As the only white guy there I could see the wheels turning in Sonny's not very smart or honest head. And I didn't like it one bit. So I up and quit.
I always wondered if I should have turned Sonny in. But, instead I hoofed it to the subway station as quickly as I could without it appearing that I was making a quick getaway from a heated and perhaps violent confrontation when Sonny was finally found out. I hope he was.
I've had horrors! Some were horrible because of the work, and others because of the management. One of the most ghastly was with a dreadful industrial chemicals manufacturer called Cantol. The expected you to give your entire life to the company, even to the detriment of your marriage. The local CEO talked a great Christian line but then set sales meetings for Sunday mornings, involving missing church and family time! I came to realize that the company mores were off kilter. I would make sales calls on msall companies and realize that they were really handing on by their teeth and couldn't afford the high-end stuff I was selling so I thought I should leave them in peace with their off-brand plain bleach and the like, that truthfully, did just as good a job. I couldn't bear the thought of making them unable to sleep at night worrying about cash flow just because I'd forced them to buy something hugely expensive. My manager, OTOH, said they'd use the stuff and if they couldn't sleep at night it wasn't my concern. I thought if I'd contributed to it, then morally, it was my concern.
Another horrible job was during grad school at a venerble department store called John Wanamaker. The department manager where I worked (sewing and fabrics) was a b***h, and totally unreasonable. Once she yelled at me for leafing through a pattern catalogue during own time. Heck, I thought it was *good* so that I would be familiar with what the people were coming in to buy! I'd be able to help them find the patterns they wanted if I was familiar with the pattern books!
I've also had wonderful jobs, mostly in teaching. I love my students.
Anytime I was confined to an office, I suffered miserably. The worst was the last job I had being contracted to the Air Force. There's not enough space on Gather to record the horrors there.
Service coordinator, lasted 3 months. the stress was so horrible I had to. had a supervisor who did not explain what was expected and they were changing the system and she didn't always explain what was going on.
I worked at a rent to own place in the inner city, where we often had to go to peoples houses for deliveries and pick ups. Some of these places were filled with roaches. They would crawl out of the furniture we were taking and the tv, stereos and refrigerators would have to be sealed up in huge plastic bags with bug spray before we could take them back into our store.
I worked for a candy company in southeast Lousiana once. Day one: they stood me at a big machine whose function was to dump out these chocolate "eggs" onto a conveyor belt, only the nonstick surface on the tray of molds they were in had been long gone. So I had to pound on this tray every minute or so when it came around to make the eggs fall out of it, then turn them all right side up so the chopped nuts would fall into the little depression on top. I was in no physical shape to even have a job standing on my feet all day, and swinging that giant rubber mallet thingie did not help. When it was time to leave for the day, the badge reader was out of whack so I sat down at a nearby table and laid my head on the table to wait for them to fix it. Eventually they did, but I didn't care enough to lift my head and go badge out. Hubby, who had come to pick me up and who had been sitting in the parking lot for about 45 minutes waiting for me, finally came in and coaxed me out of there. Day one was day last. I don't even think I went back to get my check for that one day. Never could eat their candy again. It was cheap chocolate anyway so no big loss. LOL
I haven't had any gross jobs or anything and have worked at a fast food place (Roy Rogers) but that was actually fun for me. I would have to say there are 2 jobs that were the worst for me. 1-- When I worked as a waitress in a diner and they made me come in to work even though I had the flu. Why would you want a sick waitress to wait on somebody? and 2 -- I worked for a small company as and admin assist. Problem was, I was never trained and then expected to do all the things the guys didn't want to do and wasn't supposed to complain about it. I was left to wing it plus do other's jobs.
The 12 hours I lasted at McDonalds. It was HORRIBLE!! No training, just thrown on the register, yelled out, and none of the other employees would help me because if they weren't fast enough they got yelled at, too..... and they didn't want to be yelled at either so they wouldn't help because it would slow them down. After 12 hours I QUIT!!
The jobs can be hard, but some bad management would made it even worse. I worked with a manager that like to say f*, f* the whole world, sh*, you're f*ing right, etc, to everybody except the boss and the buyer. At that time I had to spend a lot of time in the office without overtime pay. Many times I came back from work at 10pm even upto 12pm, the next day the company expect me to come sharp at 8am, or I got 'marked' on my card. Imagine that.
But the worst of all was the supervisor that told me that I need to give her a note from my doctor explaining why I need to go to pee more often (than her). The things is she told the whole department to feel free to go to pee, so I basically don't have a real witness to her harrasment. All her power misused to abuse me successfully made me depressed.
I still have panic attack if I think about going back to work because of her.
work at kiwk shop, 24 hour mini mart, got rob in middle of night right after police left from their night coffee break, been there 6 month b4 that stay 2 wekks after that, out in my notice, they couldn't understand why I had to leave...
too many "worst" jobs to think about ........ best one was when I tutored at the local college ..... I really loved it when my students "got it" and really understood what was going on ...... that moment of comprehension and excitement was the best .....
i worked in Credit collections for sears for several months. I had been a single parent raising two kids, so I tended to sympathize with the people that would take the time to talk to me. We had to work on Christmas eve, and I had a supervisor standing over my shoulder on one call. This woman had just brought her son home from the hospital to spend the holiday with them. He was fighting cancer, and they didn't expect him to see the new year. Their church was raising money to help them with expenses, since they had no insurance, but they had not been able to pay the credit card yet. I could not ask this woman to make a payment arrangement, especially not today. My boss was tapping my screen telling me to get a payment it was going to go further behind. I asked her to hold for just a moment, handed my boss my headphones, and headed for the breakroom. I figured I was fired. It turned out he did not even ask her for one either. He made a special deal, I couldn't make and then logged me out to find me. After some "counsel" on being too sympathetic, I was put back on the phones the next work day. (it was end of day that day) I ended up looking and finding my current job because of it, but not getting it until March. It was the longest 8 months I spent on any job.
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Comments: 30
I kept breaking them. You ever see that I Love Lucy episode where she works in a candy factory? It was like that. I tried sweeping up the broken bottles at first but that slowed down the line. The foreman would yell "Leave 'em"! Sweep up when we go to break."
So after a couple teeth grinding hours I was ankle deep in broken glass, my arms and back are screaming (you have to press your hands tightly together to keep the box from falling) and I got to spend my break time cleaning up my mess.
I lasted five hours.
First I worked at a processing plant that prepared salad greens and vegetables for fast food resaurants. Every thing in the place was constantly rinsed with a weak bleach solution for sanitation, and the temperature was a balmy 40 degrees to retard spoilage. I stood at a stainless steel table with about 10 others. This table was at the end of a large conveyor belt. Above the belt was a hopper full of heads of lettuce. As the lettuce fell onto the table we would have to grab the cold,wet heads and jam them stem first onto a tube and rip the core out. Then we tossed the cored heads onto another belt that took them to be shredded. After the first hour your hands would be numb inside your little rubber gloves and your eyes would still me smarting from the bleach and your nose might be running from the same. We wore winter coats under rain slickers to keep warm and dry and rubber boots to keep our feet dry.
By the time I got home every day I couldnt smell a thing but my girlfriend would make me strip the second I got in the door because I reeked of bleach.
Now I'm all depressed. I'll tell the other story after I go outside and get some sunshine LOL
in the freezing cold, for daily paper sign ups
and getting no orders.
We got minimum wage, which in 1964 was $2 an hour, but not a 40 hour week. If business was slow the ownner gaves an unpaid "break." Since the carwash was in Astoria an industrial area of New York City, there wasn't much to do on these enforced breaks, but hang and shoot the sh*t.
Al of this was bareable until Sonny came along. Now, I had a relatively easy job, toweling off the cars when they came out of the carwash. Since Sonny was new they put him on working next to me. Sonny felt that the other blacks were "Uncle Toms." Sonny also told me how he was in trouble with the police and had a gun. Since we were in the last position, we were the guys who got the tips. I always put the tips in the tip box for later divying up among the crew. LIke I was told to. But Sonny had other ideas. He just keep the tips for himself and was pressuring me to join him in being a thief. As the only white guy there I could see the wheels turning in Sonny's not very smart or honest head. And I didn't like it one bit. So I up and quit.
I always wondered if I should have turned Sonny in. But, instead I hoofed it to the subway station as quickly as I could without it appearing that I was making a quick getaway from a heated and perhaps violent confrontation when Sonny was finally found out. I hope he was.
Another horrible job was during grad school at a venerble department store called John Wanamaker. The department manager where I worked (sewing and fabrics) was a b***h, and totally unreasonable. Once she yelled at me for leafing through a pattern catalogue during own time. Heck, I thought it was *good* so that I would be familiar with what the people were coming in to buy! I'd be able to help them find the patterns they wanted if I was familiar with the pattern books!
I've also had wonderful jobs, mostly in teaching. I love my students.
It was HORRIBLE!!
No training, just thrown on the register,
yelled out, and none of the other employees
would help me because if they weren't
fast enough they got yelled at, too.....
and they didn't want to be yelled at either
so they wouldn't help because it would
slow them down. After 12 hours I QUIT!!
But the worst of all was the supervisor that told me that I need to give her a note from my doctor explaining why I need to go to pee more often (than her). The things is she told the whole department to feel free to go to pee, so I basically don't have a real witness to her harrasment. All her power misused to abuse me successfully made me depressed.
I still have panic attack if I think about going back to work because of her.