The Worst Job You've Ever Had

[Ash]

There are a lot of bad jobs out there and most of us at one time or another have held one.
I was curious to know what the worst job you've ever had was.

For me it would have to be my very first job working at Wendy's.  I was 16 years old (in 1990) and was excited to finally have a job making money.  It paid terrible, but it was a job and the checks from it allowed me to buy the useless junk a teenager often buys.
Right off the bat it started off bad.
Instead of getting to run the grill or cash register, they made me toast buns.
I would sit in this lonely corner and do nothing but toast hamburger buns the entire shift.  I'd take them out of the bags they came in and feed them into this machine that automatically toasted them.  When they came out the other side, I'd get them ready for the grill person.  What made matters worse is that I was always hungry while working there.  The combination of the smell of food constantly cooking and the great smell of the toasted buns in front of me was too much for a growing 16 year old to bear.  So I started sneaking food and got caught a couple of times.

After awhile, my co-workers started calling me "Bun Boy".  I hated that name with a passion  Eventually, I began to hate hamburger buns too. 
It tooks weeks of begging and pleading with the manager to give me some other type of job.  So she put me on fries.  Then my co-workers started calling me "Fry Boy" or "Fry Guy"
No matter what position I got put on, they would make up some nickname.

Another thing that was awful about that job was the stifling heat.  Working at a fast food restaurant in the middle of summer with a "sometimes it works/sometimes it doesn't" air conditioning system is the pits.  90% of the time it was hotter than hell and oftentimes it became downright unbearable.  It got to the point that the managers were telling us to make sure to drink plenty of water so we didn't keel over from heat stroke. 

So yeah, working at Wendy's was the worst job I've ever had.
How about you?  What's the worst job you've ever had?

[ER]

Well, I wasn't getting paid for it, so I don't know if it was a real job, but right after college I volunteered to work at a homeless shelter in the inner city. The people there were....often channeling voices the rest of us could not hear. It was a truly dangerous place to be, I was the only woman there and felt like a piece of meat dangled over a cave full of bears, and frankly it was scary. In fact I later found out about murders having happened within the shelter itself. I've been involved in my share of community service type projects but this was its own order of frightening. Although I hated to admit failure, I didn't last long.

Um, my second worst job? Selling Girl Scout cookies. Definitely.

[Jack]

The worst was being an accountant/receptionist/general shop worker for this tiny little electronics firm.  All day every day I'd answer phone calls from irate creditors.  I finally quit when some guy called up - we owed him about $100, and after a year or so we made a partial payment of $50.  He was all pi$$ed off, saying "I suppose I'll have to wait another year to get the other $50", and I'm thinking to myself, yup, you probably will.  Every payday you'd have to run to the bank to cash your paycheck, they only had enough money in the account to cover perhaps half of them.  They'd always make a deposit, but it wouldn't be credited to the account for a day or two, and it was the weekend and I was about 20 and I wanted that money immediately!  I finally figured out I could go to Target and they'd cash just about any check there.  No way I was going to deposit the check in my account, LOL. 

Other than that it actually wasn't too bad, about the most laid back environment you could possibly imagine.  Probably why they were always on the verge of bankruptcy.  I looked them up a few years ago and, believe it or not, they were still in business.  Wonders will never cease.

[ghouck]

My worst job was one of my duty assignmants while I was in the Army, My LAST assignment to be exact: I was stationed at Ft Hood for the second time, and worked in a maintenence unit that deactivated. This put me in ANOTHER maintenence unit for about a year, and THAT unit, SUCKED. We had an female, African American commander who was the most racist piece of trash I'd ever met. Her whole agenda and outlook was that WE were there to facilitate HER career. She did so many unethical, dangerous, and selfish things, it was my only assignment I didn't enjoy. She used to make fun of a guy in the unit because he had a stutter, it was disgusting. She also was (alledgedly) sleeping with out battallion XO, her HUSBAND told us he was confident enough that it had happened that he threw all her belongings out. He (her husband) was a Captain also. Her going-away ceremony consisted of her crying for a half an hour while telling everyone in the unit how small-minded they are and how much of a disgrace we were, and how we weren't even smart enough to realize how bad we were damaging her career. We had an African-American private that punched a white Sergeant and she blocked any kind of discipline from being brought down on him. The thought of that troll makes me want to puke.

[sprite75]

I've had a couple of stinkers over the years - one of which took such a toll on my health that I spent a couple months in a hospital and nearly died a couple times.  The other one the manager was a first class A-hole - some of the antics he pulled would've gotten him fired and probably arrested too at every place I have worked at since then.

[Psycho Circus]

As a porter working in a hotel for £4 an hour, scrubbing dishes, floors and loads of other strenuous crap. I once did a 14 hour shift in the kitchen when there was a wedding party on for around 250 people, I was always asked to cover other people's shifts, when no one would cove for me, the other staff used to swear at me all the time and the manager thought I was some sort of drug addict. I put up with that crap for 8 months, 4 of which I was homeless. I would have to kip in some car park at night, get up the next day after no sleep and work 12 hour split shifts, it sucked big time. 

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

Beinga human voice mail for a big insurance company.   They were trying to avoid too much de-humanization.  I lasted 2 weeks.

[indianasmith]

Once, in the Navy, I got assigned to the "Tiger Team" - whose job it was to clean out all the ventilation ducts on the ship.  Not too bad, till we got to the galley.  There was this huge duct directly over the grill that I had to climb inside to scrape out the three inches of congealed grease that was clinging to all parts of it.  I've never felt so nasty in my whole life.


My first paying job in high school was shovelling out stables for $2 an hour.

[Mr. DS]

I think my stint in retail was enough to go after any job away from the public.  I worked at a well known pharmacy chain from high school up until one year after I graduated college.  Awful pay, awful hours and awful customers who would drop by from time to time.  Worst of all, certain managers I worked for would have wanted blood from their employees if they could.  I think corporate trained them this way.  And they'd hire the most idiotic morons with no social skills into manager positions.

Granted I remember people, both customers and fellow employees, who made my shifts much happier ones.  Unfortunately the d*ckheads are the ones who stick out the most though.  Why I stayed with them so long is beyond me. I unfortunately get comfortable, even in situations that make me miserable.  Luckily I finally bailed on retail many years ago and I would gladly mop up human excrement before ever going back.   

[HappyGilmore]

The job I work at now.  Extremely horrible.  I'm paid to do ONE Job, but I often times have to do another person's job on top of it.  The hours are horrible, the pay is bad, and I am desperately seeking a new one.

They hired me to be the 'shake guy', making milkshakes.  I'm paid to do that.  Not to do stock.  Not to do dishes.  Not to do the floors.  Then it's like they expect you to do all that, and they yell at you for like, not being in the station they hired me to be at.  I'm not Superman, and I can't be in all the different places at once.

[trekgeezer]

My Dad was the bookkeeper at a large sawmill  and right before I graduated from High School he got me a job helping to clean the mill after school. One of the duties was to shovel bark out from under the debarker (like the one in the picture above.  It was me and another guy underneath the conveyor where they dumped the logs shoveling the bark with pitchforks into a dumpster.  We actually did this while the thing was running and they were dumping more logs on it.  You had to make sure you had your hard hat on because rocks and all sorts of stuff fell off those logs.

When the mill shutdown we had to clean the band saws with this really high pressure air hose (it would cut your skin if you got to close to it and it didn't help that the guy I worked with was a sado-masochist.  

Needless to say I lasted about three weeks.  Oh and I didn't mention the rats as big as beagles that weren't in the least intimidated by humans.  

[Patient7]

The job I have now is the only one I've ever had and it's definitley not going to be the worst.  I'm a porter at a local bowling alley and the only problem is late hours, considering school and homework that is, along with taking out the trash which I knew I would have to do, standing on my feet for six hours, piloting around roughly 100 drunk guys who think they know everything, said drunks also get p**sed because I took away their empty glass (I mean literally, there are only two drops of backwash and some ice left, get over it), and the fact that I had to pull a beer bottle out of a urinal and nobody told me where the gloves were.  Long list but it sounds worse than it is.  Plus now I have more $$$.  

[Trevor]

I hate to say this, but I've been doing this job I have now since 1989 and it is, nearly twenty years on, starting to suck ever so slowly. It is still rewarding in many ways (especially to the public I serve who make it good) but it's the little things that get me down badly.

[akiratubo]

Working at Lowe's.  I quickly grew to hate all humanity, and all humanity was perfectly willing to hate me right back.

That job ruined my life.  I still have nightmares about it.

[Hammock Rider]

I've had a couple stinkers. I worked for about 3 weeks as an industrial painter. We used high pressure air hoses to spraypaint the interior works of large buildings like malls and such. We painted the girders, other iron work, sprinkler pipes etc. We wrapped ourselves like mummies to keep the HIGHLY TOXIC paint from getting on our skin, but to no avail. I came home every night looking like Derek Zoolander at the end of his one day in the coal mines with his family. We also wore respirators masks. I told an uncle who was  a painter about the chemicals we were using and he said I should be wearing an independent air supply on my back. I brought this up with the job foreman and he told me to leave the job site and report to his grandmothers house and clean out her garage, a job which would have also eaten up the entire weekend. His nickname was Lumpy(from Leave it To Beaver) and I almost gave him one. That ended that career.

I also worked at a freezer warehouse picking orders from 10pm -5am which were shipped out in the morning. Some of the guys who worked there, like me, had been hurt financially in some way and were doing what they had to in order to earn abuck. But many of my co-workers had been hurt and wanted to hurt someone back. Drunkeness on the job was common and there were even brawls in the freezer. I saw a guy brain another guy with a case of frozen French Toast stix!


But this guy, he has a REALLy rotten job: