Worst Jobs

Respect. Hearing these things is always a good slap in the face for me as a reminder of how easy I had it (and HAVE it). I never had to work during school, and couldn't imagine doing so while trying to balance school work.

 

20 years ago, I worked for a service bureau in Hollywood.

Service Bureaus develop film for studios, create storyboards for pitching film/TV show ideas, etc.

The beeeyotch that ran the place chain-smoked, drank craploads of coffee in the morning and beer in the afternoon, and ate prozac by the handful.

This place was open 6 days a week, and she made you work all six days, and paid straight time only (no time and a half for overtime).

Needless to say, in that environment, I developed a bad attitude at work. They wound up firing me. After they did so, I filed a wage claim grievance against them with the California Labor Relations Board, and won. This forced her to pay me all of my back overtime (I had saved copies of my timesheets) and forced her to begin paying the people who still worked there time and a half for overtime.

 

I will leave the name of the business out of this, because they are very lawsuit-happy.

It was a very large convenience store. Every day on my drive up there I contemplated just driving into a ditch. Insanely busy. All you do is scan, bag, scan, bag, scan, bag. And every single customer had the same 4-5 questions about the store or products. Then if you're fortunate enough to get off the register, you clean the restrooms, where people like to smear their **** on the walls and pee everywhere except for in the toilet bowl. Or you would clean the messes created by the customers inside the store, which seemed to happen every 30 seconds. Or you pick up the trash outside (this was actually the best gig there) and you would sweat your ass off and smell like garbage.

Plus the manager was a dick, and he hated me because I was dating a coworker that he used to like to hit on, and because I didn't laugh at his god-awful jokes. For this reason he would constantly give me the worst jobs to do. I know this for a fact because for a while he didn't know I was dating that girl he would creepily hit on, and he'd tell her about how he wanted to make conditions so bad for me that I would just quit. The assistant manager was a dick too. That assistant manager ended up impregnating one of the young girls who worked there. Disgusting. He has a daughter the same age as the girl he seeded.

You weren't allowed to sit down when you were on your break. We had to stand up to eat. This isn't too bad for me, but there were elderly people there who were told they couldn't ever sit while in the store. You weren't allowed to leave the building for any reason.

For some reason, I worked there for 18 months. I started smoking (I've since quit) and drank quite a bit more than I ever had or ever have since. The only redeaming quality thing about the store is that the girl I started dating there is still with me to this day and we are very happy together... so long as we never talk about that place.

 

When I was a teen, during summers I would work for my grandfather in construction. There is nothing like doing that work outdoors all day in 100+ degree heat. I have the utmost respect for construction, road, etc. workers who spend their entire day outside all year.

 

The summer before I went to college, I needed a job just for a couple of weeks. My grandfather worked at a hospital, and got me a job with the housekeeping department.

When I got there to work, I was told that my job would be scrubbing base boards, for the entire hospital. I had a little bucket of water and some spray. Spray this stuff on, just some little sponge, and then towel it down with wet water. They told me to do it three times for every base board.

After one day of doing this, I noticed it didn't look any different. The boss came by, looked at it and gave me the nod saying "Good job!" After that, I barely wet the based boards, and kept on zooming through that place.

I was the only person who spoke english there. Pretty sure they just paid me because my Granpda knew everyone there, but I hated that job.

 

Cleaned VA foreclosure homes about 25 years ago. It was filthy and depressing, but coulda been worse. It paid better than delivering pizza, and didn't destroy my vehicle.

 

Summer job working for an aluminum recycling plant. I was sent out in a big truck, and my job was to take the plastic garbage can filled with "empty" cans, place on the scale, and then heave the contents into the back of the truck.

Note the word "empty" and the word "weigh". Since folks got paid per pound, they tended to be a bit creative in the definition of "empty" when it came to their cans. When I would fling the contents into the truck, all sorts of various fluids would end up on me.

I once stopped at a day-old bakery in the bad part of town to buy some bread and donuts and I was asked to leave. I later quit that job and got a warehouse job at Macys.

 

I once had to work with no access to ClutchFans.net. It was the worst time at my job.

 

When I was 12 years old, I had my first summer job. I washed dishes and bussed tables in a restaurant owned by two Greek brothers. For some reason, I was the only one who could understand them (they had very heavy accents). I was usually the only dishwasher, so I never stopped moving. I made $2.50 an hour, and gave most of my paycheck to my mom so we could afford rent/groceries.

Later in my teens, I did some daily labor/daily pay work. It was minimum wage, plus a deduction to pay for my ride to the work site. The worst thing I ever did was hot tar roofing during the summer in Florida.

 

Work from 2:45 am to 6:00am unloading trailers in the northside and get home take bath, drive all the way to league city from 7:30 am to 3:30 pm to do clinicals.

 

Worked installing security fences at a prison down near Freeport. Sucked to be working out in the Texas summer while watching prisoners just lounge around. Not sure why they ever had to do it but I'd have liked to see them busting rocks or something.

 

Uh... assistant crack w****?

 

Correction: Assistant to the crack w****.

 

I worked one summer at the Exxon plant in Baytown. It was extremely hot and muggy right by the ship channel and you had to wear long-sleave shirts, hard hats, goggles, gloves and jeans the whole day. I had to grind pipes 50ft in the air and I never let on that I was scared of heights. It was hard work, but honestly it wasn't that bad. The worst part of the job was the crappy middle-school mentality of most of the people that worked there. But the work itself wasn't that bad.

The worst job I had was washing dishes at the Black-Eyed Pea on I-10 and Uvalde the summer before college. I worked from 8am to 2:30pm and the lunch rush was always slammed. The People were nice though, so it was okay. I just felt tired, and dirty so I had to wash myself off at the sink in the restroom and change clothes before I left each day to go to my night job. I worked 4pm to 9:30pm most nights at the Hastings in San Jacinto mall and it was a nice rest compared to the day job. Coincidently, my manager at hastings was a waiter at the Black-Eyed Pea..so I saw him every day at both jobs. I got hired at both places the same day and saved a bunch of money that summer...sadly all the money was gone by the 2nd month of college because I used it all to pay tuition because my financial aid was delayed and I faced having my meal program cut off.

I've figured that I can do any job, no matter how hard or bad, if I know its just temporary.

My last job was at a company that produced sports programming for networks like Fox Sports, NBC, CBS, etc. It was awesome the first 5yrs. I got to work on shows like Dallas Cowboys Weekly, Big 12 Showcase, High School Xtra, The Rangers Report...and I met and worked around lots of great people like Drew Pearson, Roger Staubach, Bill Land (now the voice of the SA Spurs), worked heavily with Randy McIlvoy for several years, met many of the Big 12 coaches, but the last 4 years progressively got worse as the owner slowly ran the company into the ground and we lost business and shows. By the time I left, I didn't want to get up in the morning because I dreaded going to work because the owners attitude had soured and his daughter had begun working there and had a terrible terrible attitude. The Day I turned in my 2 weeks notice, I was told that he was going to lay off everybody anyway in a few months and only hire freelance.