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Answers of the Day: Worst Jobs
This morning, we posed a question about the news, now we’re posting the best comments. Join the conversation!
The Question of the Day: What is the worst job you’ve ever had? From the comments, here are the answers:
@PHenry:
I guess it matters what you define as ‘worst’, but I have had some doozies..
I spent a few weeks over a summer cleaning up illegal dump sites for minimum wage. It wasn’t hard work, but it was, as you can imagine, pretty dirty and disgusting at times.
I once had a job as a ‘manager trainee’ – I delivered rental cars for a low rate ‘insurance rentals’ company ( when your car was in the body shop, insurance would pay for your rental vehicle, but not much! ) I drove a small company car with a tow bar permanently welded to the front bumper. When someone was done with their rental, they would put the keys in the glove box and lock the car, then call in its location. I would drive to where they left the car, and with a coat hanger I would pop open the door lock, get the keys, connect my car to the rear bumper of the rental, drive to where the next customer was and disconnect my car to drive to the next pickup. Once in a while, someone would see you with the coat hanger and think you were stealing the car, one of my colleagues even got physically attacked because someone thought he was a repo man and they hated repo men…
The condition, gas tank level, etc of the car was however the last customer left it. I was often embarrassed to deliver those cars to the next customer, but when they complained I was just supposed to say ‘do you want the car or not? ‘. The pay was poor, the job was stressful, and every day at quitting time I would get ‘just one more delivery – pick up this car in the middle of the city (during rush hour) and deliver it 30 miles outside the city. ‘
Then there was the time I spend traveling with the Clyde Beatty Cole Brothers circus. It was a terrible job, a dirty job, it paid $35 a week (less room and board of $7. ) But it was an experience I wouldn’t trade for anything, and a story I will tell my grandchildren!
And yes, there were others, but those are the standouts…
@Ekosj:
Worked one summer for a general contractor building houses. It was actually interesting and could have been fun except for the fact that I couldn’t pound a straight nail nor saw a straight line ( and still can’t to this day ). So I got dressed down loudly and often. But the thing that made it ‘the worst’ was my fear of heights. The roofs were bad, bad, bad. You know why the claw part of a roofer’s hammer is straight instead of curved like on a normal hammer? So if you are sliding off the roof you can use it like a climber’s ice axe and punch it through the roof to arrest your fall. At least that’s what they told me. And bad as it is … never get off the roof. Because inevitably, when you have to go back up someone will yell down “And bring up two bags of shingles with you!”
However the absolute worst was walking on the high scaffolding. Especially where the ends of the boards you walked on overlapped. I thought I was going to fall to my death hundreds of times a day. Walking one way you’d trip over the one-inch rise of the board on top. Walking the other way you’d step off that one-inch cliff and for a millisecond think “Oh My God I’m dead!!!” Every eight feet along the scaffolding. I never got used to it. Scared the bejezus out of me! That was the worst!
@RushBabe49:
Published in GeneralI was a buyer at a contract manufacturer of circuit card assemblies. All the buyers were required to sit right next to the production floor, where the big pick-and-place machines made obnoxious noise all day, and we couldn’t get away. It was very difficult to make phone calls and hear your caller over the background noise. I’m certain I have hearing loss from that job. Worse yet was the supervisor, who just loved to chew out employees at the top of her voice in front of everyone. She did that to me only once, and I swore if she ever did it again, I’d give as good as I got back. Well, the company fell on hard times, and closed up shop. Miss Supervisor had one last fun time, when we were all laid off. She’d come and get you from your desk for the long walk to the room where the “executioners” were. I really wanted to punch her out, because while I was walking to the gallows, she had a wide grin on her face, secure in the knowledge that she wasn’t getting canned. (at least not yet-the management got to stay another month before getting canned)
[Interesting story about that supervisor. She got another job, as a buyer at another contract manufacturer, and she got let go after less than three months there, because she just couldn’t be bothered to do real work.]
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I hate to use the word “worst” because it was a good job. I was 17, and it was during the summer before my senior year of high school when I worked for a lawn care company. Being underage, I couldn’t ride the big mowers or operate the backhoes, but I could use the push mowers, edgers, shovels, and so forth. There were two things that stood out that summer:
First, we placed cement for a walkway in a cemetery. It was the middle of July, and over 100 degrees. I worked with three black men in their forties and fifties. They had no trouble in the heat, while I was about to die.
Second, I would say this is not the worst, but the most unusual thing I did. While working for the lawn care company, I had the opportunity to jump into a newly occupied grave and use a 70 pound pneumatic tamp to pack the dirt down. The other guy (another old black dude) pushed dirt into the grave with a small tractor, then I would hop in and tamp the dirt down. It was lather, rinse, and repeat until the grave was entirely covered up. Again, this was the middle of summer, temperatures in the upper 90s.
These experiences sealed the deal for me-I was going to college to avoid doing this for a living!
I had some doozies: a college summer job in a factory where some old guys were always trying to cause the foreman to suffer serious “accidental” injuries, or the off-the-books job as a truck driver for a ships’ chandler on the rough and tumble east coast docks (before containerization tamed it some).
But my worst was an office gig, yet easily the most stressful — a minimum wage draw/to be deducted against to-be-earned commissions — as a 70’s employment agency headhunter. The applicants were desperate sometimes, and often enough so “off” that we were all required to hide behind phony desk names. When I got the job, I was handed the business cards of the most recent washout, and “presto” I had my new name. Made just two placements in 6 months, earning just enough commissions to cover my draw. My stomach began to hurt every day.
Two examples of what made it my worst job: the dapper applicant looked and sounded perfect for the job opening as a chemical salesman, right degree, excellent resume, etc. Before I could set him up for an interview with the employer, my boss called me on the intercom, asked if I was interviewing so-and-so (by name), and when I said yes, told me to end it at once, get rid of him, and then come to his office. I did so. In his office, the boss told me I’d been with a notorious nutcase, well-known to veteran job shops, as one who dressed himself up for the part and with phony resumes would fool employment agents into sending him out on interviews. There he’d invariably scream obscenities at the interviewer, maybe throw a glass of water on the floor, or worse in his fantasy world of revenge for some unknown hurt that somehow was tied to employment agencies. He wanted to make sure the agency sending him would be blackballed by the employer. Go figure.
Worse and more dangerous was the second example: the fellow who applied for a position in the wholesale tire business. I thought he was a good fit, but after he left, my experienced colleague who’d overheard my intake interview, commented that “there’s something not right with that guy.” He interviewed, didn’t get the job, but boy, was she right — a couple years later he died while hijacking an airliner, having murdered the pilot. His plan was to crash it into the White House. Sean Penn played a dramatized version of him in The Assassination of Richard Nixon. Reading the news that day in 1974 gave me the creeps to think of the close encounters with the deranged in that job. Thankfully, aliases worked well in the pre-internet age.