Pajiba

Ok, now that I have officially made it to first post, I can actually respond to this. Btw, being first post actually made my god-awful day. My worst job is probably my current one. I work as both an admin AND personal assistant. As a temp. So I get paid shit and have to do inane things like drop off my boss' dogs and park his car for him. He has suggested that I put pics of his daughter into albums since his wife hasn't yet, and that I clean out their closets. In addition to marketing property in NJ, getting his partner a license, running errands, and running his start up. For real. I'm normal job meets Devil Wears Prada meets Two Weeks Notice. I'm thinking the title of that last film may be the most relevant soon...

I'm going to have to go with my week at the County Fair. I worked at a food place called "The Smoke House" where I made boiled hot dogs, grilled bratwurst, and fried stuff. The best part was when I got clean up duty. It's literally impossible to scrape off so much grease off a nasty county fair floor. Also, I worked closing shift so it was a frightening experience to make it back to my car in the large field of a parking lot at midnight. The best thing that happened during that week: broke down on the side of the freeway on the way home one night. Thank goodness it wasn't one of the carnies that stopped to give me a ride.

two words: Seasonal Retail.

Do you have any idea what people do in the dressing rooms of the women's department of a major departments store? OR how many people confuse the floor of a dressing room for a toilet? FOR REALS.

Also, I saw an elderly man die waiting for his wife to come out of the dressing room. We all thought he had just nodded off. Nope, he passed away in my department, quietly, whilst I was recommending a pair of polyester pants to a customer. Ambo, cops, you name it. It was not a holly jolly season at Hecht's that year.

Monotony can make you crazy. I had a data entry job which involved going through rolls and rolls and rolls (seriously, hundreds of rolls) of microfiche to catalogue invoices by customer and date and number in a computer database. Not only was this eye-numbing, brain-fizzling, suicidal-thought-inducing tediousness conducted in a room by myself...but also adjacent to an uber-bitch whose sole mission in life seemed to be to ensure my utter insanity. She spent every day trying to catch me listening to music too loudly, which apparently was at any level heard only by small cockroaches in the closet nearby.

Just thinking about it makes me want to rip my hair out.

The last job I quit was so traumatic i can't even talk about it.

However, my first job (EVER) was post-house fire clean up. Sitting in the sun, knocking burned melted crud off bricks so the bricks could be recycled. And making 10 cents a brick. I was desperate, and too young for a normal job.

Waitressing. I would never do it again. I could find more change in my couch than what they paid me.

For starters, my bosses were lying bastards. There were never any back-ups available, so heaven forbid there was an emergency and you couldn't show up. You got sacked. Secondly, I got paid way below minimum wage b/c they figured we made up for in tips. Including what they took out for taxes, some people would be getting checks for $0! Thank God I don't have any kids.

Coincidentally, I got sick because of the job. The kitchen was always hot and steamy, but the dining area was like a meat locker. Imagine going into a sauna for a while and then running out into the snow. That was me, every 5 minutes. I got the flu and told shitty management that if I showed up, I would spread my germs and make everyone else (including the customers) sick. They said they didn't care and to bring my ass in or else I was fired. I said fuck it, and picked up my last check.

What really sucks is that since I quit, the restaurant has been sued twice for embezzlement. Shit, why didn't I get in on that when I had the chance?!?

The summer after my freshman year of college I worked for the city . At that time meter readers went to each electric meter in town every month and copied the reading into a book. (Yes, I know I am old.) My job was to copy the last reading in full meter books onto the first line of the new meter book. Only that, eight hours a day for the whole summer.

Ice Cream Truck Driver:

I did this for a couple of weeks one summer to help out a friend's family (trust me, that was more than enough). The delivery truck was ancient and hulking, the steering wheel was on the right side, there was no power steering, no a/c and it was painted black so hotter than hell. The truck only got up to about 45 mph, so if I was on the highway, people would get totally pissed. But usually that wasn't a problem, because of the time I had to stick to no more than 5 mph to entice small children. Which also pissed people off, beleive me. And I was supposed to go around the block at least twice, to pick up any stragglers.

The truck had not been converted to a modern ice cream storage system, so the cooler was stocked with dry ice to keep the stuff cold; I probably still have dry ice "burn" scars.

Freaking "Pop Goes the Weasel" blaring--it would still be in my head hours later. And most of the kids thought it was free, so I'd stop, and there would be no money, but just sad faces and "Pleeeeeease"-s and "Nope, sorry"-s.

Besides that, because it was a "small business," I was a "contractor" and got a percentage of what I sold. Which was usually about $5 for a 5 hour day. $10 dollars that I would eat up in ice cream the next day to alleviate the boredom and heat fatigue.

I actually haven't had that many really bad jobs...so the worst I ever had was working at Marshall's....bad enough to desperatly want to leave, but it was good enough for a high school job

But I've had so many bad jobs it's hard to choose.

Let's go with custom framing at Michaels. Co-worker was a psychotic bitch who sabotaged my frame jobs. She didn't like me so she tried to get me fired but slicing a customer's prize-winning photograph right down the middle and slapping it in a frame. She didn't account for the fact that I wasn't working when the job was put together. Didn't stop her from trying, though. And that was my first week on the job.

Customers were roughly: 35% price seekers/looky-loos who came in more than once but never placed an order after wasting two+hours of my shift hemming and hawing over the difference between bone and bone white mats; 58% assholes who were never satisfied and bitched no matter what to someone (another employee, their friends, my manager); 5% mentally unstable people who must have been dropped on their head many times in their lives to reach that level of desperation; and 1% genuinely good people who made my job a treat. 1% margin of error on most days.

I left every day covered in sweat, blood, and tears, and that was just from working one on one with customers (those corner frame samples are dangerous). Then, in the shop, I ruined every article of clothing I ever wore. One day, the psychotic bitch "accidentally" dumped a bottle of extremely strong adhesive remover all over my shirt (as in, stood there and emptied the bottle out over me but had no idea what I was talking about when the manager came in to talk to her about it). I cried for four hours during my shift, including a very panicked phone call home that the bitch was trying to kill me and how I needed a new outfit. The manager wouldn't let me go home to change my shirt when I lived five minutes away and hadn't taken my mandatory thirty minute meal break.

Not to mention the crazy people who would tell me on a daily basis I should have never been born because their frame job wasn't done 10 days early. That never got old.

The sad part is I loved the work and still do frame jobs for friends. Would love to own my own shop one day.

Creating junk mail for auto dealerships was fairly up there (discount oil change on the company letterhead? yeah that was me.) but it runs a close second to doing RGIS inventory at a discount drug store. 8 am on a Friday and where am I? Sitting on the filthy floor scanning in dollar-store snowglobes and tacky plastic crap.

Urgh.

My County Fair job was working for the carnies selling ride and food tickets. Fourteen hours a day in a wooden box the size of a coffin standing on end, with one 2 foot square plexiglass window. The only opening was the 3 inch hole where the money and tickets were exchanged. I sat on a little stool in 110 degree weather with only two 15 minute breaks - one at 3PM, one at 8PM. I was fifteen years old, making $50 a day under the table. But at least I wasn't working the food stands.

Having to lick my own shit and pus and blood off of a dude's huge engorged cock after said cock had been pounding my shit encrusted butthole for three hours and then suck said cock until the dude's jizz splattered all in my mouth and face and having to eat all of this dude's jizz.

Oh wait, that's the best job I've ever had.

Oh wait, that's the only job I've ever had.

Blah, should have been "$5 dollars that I would eat up in ...."

I've got a phantom weasel popping in my head right now, which makes it hard to be coherent.

Honestly, that's a tough one for me. I haven't had a truely horrible job, but each job was excruciatingly painful for its own special reason. If I had to pick though, I would have to go with the summer I worked at IHOP.

Out of 1300 IHOP restaurants, this particular one ranks 1000 on the "quality" list. No, really. There was a list, and it was posted in the back. I could probably write a book about just how horrible this place was, but I'll leave you with one story.

One Sunday afternoon, I came in for my normal shift at noon to find the place in complete chaos, which to be honest, was not surprising considering it was a Sunday and the church crowd likes to frequent the restaurant after services. However, on this particular day, I walked in to discover that a fire had broken out in the kitchen. Somebody had not been emptying the grease trap for, oh, I don't know, a few months or so, and it had finaly caught on fire. Now I think at this point most people would consider courses of action such as calling the fire department, evacuating the restaurant, chewing the ass of the person or persons responsible for cleaning the grease trap, etc.

But you would be wrong. Instead, the owner decided to put out the fire while people continued to cook. What's wrong with a little extinguisher fluid in your omelette? It adds extra flavor. It turns out a customer's omelette did go out with that extra ingrediant and a party of eight got their check comp'd in return. The fire department was never called (the fire alarms didn't go off and honestly I wouldn't have been surprised if that was on purpose) because the owner didn't want to evacuate the restaurant and lose his business. He also did not want to let a lovely 60 year old woman, who had just gotten out of a three week visit to the hospital for bronchitis, go home until I arrived. Did anyone call me to say, "Hey, could you do us a favor?" No. The bitches let her suffer because they were "too busy". Thankfully, my notice was already in or it would have been the first job I didn't give two weeks notice.

Wow, Trevor, you just made me regret reading through the comments. For the first time. I'm almost afraid to go on.

Thanks for the comic relief Kolby.

I dressed up in a Pikachu costume to play with kids at company picnics. Reasons the job sucked:

1. Most of the picnics took place in the valley, in the summer, in 90-100 heat.
2. The suit smelled. Bad.
3. There were major blind spots. I once kicked a small child.

I did the plasma thing for a couple of years in college. I always joke that it paid for my beer, but I am pretty sure I stretched it to rent and food also. I started doing it before they had the bedside centrifuge dealies - so they would take my blood to the "back room", spin the plasma out and then come back with my bag of red blood cells and I would have to identify and # and my picture on the bag of blood. I am not sure I would take that kind of chance anymore!

My worst job though was something called "detassling". In Iowa you only had to be 14 to do this and they would pay $8+/hr (in 1988) so lots of kids did it. They would pack a bunch of teenagers into a bus, drive you out to some cornfields and you had to pull the top tassell of of corn stalks (it was a fertilization thing). It would be steamin hot, always next to a hog farm and you would be covered in bugs. It paid for my first car though and developed a healthy empathey for agricultural workers!

During the summer in southeastern New Mexico I worked for my father on his ranch spraying mesquite bushes with herbicide.

This was a completely pointless task considering the amount of mesquites there were and the fact that it takes an amazing amount of work to kill those suckers. These plants have 2" long thorns and rattlesnakes like to hide under them during the heat of the day.

I wore all my poison in a plastic jug backpack with a sprayer attached and it would drip down my back all day turning my boots and my feet bright blue (it was dyed so that you knew where you had sprayed). Most of the time I just wandered around in a heat induced trance trying not to incur the wrath of any snakes!

I also got paid minimum wage.

Customer Service Telephone Operator for a Warranty Company. This was in college, before the days of cheap long distance to India, I had to answer calls from all over the country (my favorite being people in Hawaii who were polite and said Aloha and Mahalo). Usually these people were not polite, had no clue about anything, and fealt it was my place to do something for them (which I could not - for I could do nothing but read them their warranty agreement - a lengthy but not too complicated document). The best day was when I showed up to find all of the early shifters outside smoking because the phone system was down. I don't smoke, but I enjoyed hanging out for three hours doing nothing until all of a sudden we had a million calls to answer - all irrate people who had been trying to get through for three hours. Sucks. Always be nice to your phone rep.

Not necessarily the worst job, but some of the worst days... while working at a supposedly 'posh' hotel in Connecticut I encountered a crazy, naked man hiding behind the ice machine (hiding from the "voices"); crazy naked men exposing themselves to hotel guests; a hysterical bride attacking the front desk staff because it was raining on HER wedding day; weeping executive calling the cops after a hooker stole his wallet out of the hotel room; people pooping on hotel beds, for no real reason; a well-known (now deceased) rock star receiving pornograpic faxes (this was way before email) from his model girlfriend, which had to be hand-delivered to his room; another well-known Piano Man drinking himself to a stupor at the bar - had to be carried back to his room; Martha Stewart (enough said); an orthodox Jew who refused to flush his own toilet on the Sabbath; the Road Rules cast; an overweight guest breaking the toilet seat - twice; a couple filming low-budget porn in room 129 every other Thursday and the antics of the bellboy and every other housekeeper in guest rooms.

2 words: Olive Garden

Whenever anyone mentions soup, salad, or breadsticks, I still break out in hives.

My worst job was customer service for a small Ebay store. The company sold new and used items on Ebay. I answered line 2 and there were only 2 lines. The company was really shady and made us lie about orders being sent all the time. So I basically had people yelling at me for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. It was so frustrating that most of the time I would have to put people on hold so that I could yell "FUCK YOU" at the phone and try to calm down. We never really saw the man who owned the business even though he was in the same office as us, but every so often we would hear him screaming and throwing things. We did not receive any benefits. Instead the owner gave my boss a bunch of only once a month to take us out. We used this time to get very drunk. It was not a great situation. I was angry all the time. I can't believe I lasted as long as I did.

I'd never heard of this 'detassling' thing before. Thank you, Pajiba.

I was a bank teller at the Army base where my husband was stationed, and let me assure you, what GIs lack in financial responsibility they make up for in interesting sexual slang.

This was before online banking, so every time a soldier came in demanding to know why his account was empty (answer: every strip club in town had an ATM inside, and since it was a military town, there was a strip club on every fracking corner) I was called any number of colorful epithets.

The name-calling was so common that the tellers arranged a weekly pot you could win if you were called the most interesting name. I won only once, and it was for "ugly fucking redheaded half-aborted asscunt".

Hm. My jobs have a tendency to involve human bodily fluids. Sadly, this started early with very little pay. I was a maid one summer between my junior and senior years in college. One house we cleaned was that of a harried mother with a baby. I was cleaning the bathroom, on my knees in front of the toilet and I slipped. In shit. Human shit. A lot of it. All over my jeans. It was the first house of the day. Fun. Perhaps on par with that was the house of a woman who literally, and I mean literally, had her house cleaned once a year. This woman had a deck-sized hot tub in her bathroom. The spiders got more use of it than she did. I think the rats may have as well. Her shower was a like a dark, wet cave of doom with every species of mildew known to the universe. Her son's bathroom had bits of magazine pages glued to the floor with old toothpaste. I don't think it was an intentional artistic statement. His toilet bowl was also black as blackest night. It was originally powder blue. There were tumble weeds of dog hair all over the place and we went through two vacuum cleaners that day. We had to go back to the office to get more cleaning supplies because we went through everything we had and still the place was a hell hole. Eww, I just remembered another house where I was cleaning up a 12 year old girl's room and I found used maxi pads all over the floor. Very used big overnighter maxi pads. Girl had some serious flow going on.
You learn a lot about people from how they keep their house and how they treat people who are doing them a service. You learn a lot of ugly things about people.
That job made me really really appreciate the fact that I was getting a college degree.

I won only once, and it was for "ugly fucking redheaded half-aborted asscunt".

That made me laugh for about 5 minutes. Oh man. Classy!

Courtney, I don't think I've winced that much in a long time. Pre-jail Martha Stewart, the Road Rules cast, and low-budget porn? Damn.

MG, I feel your pain. Red Lobster. I can't decide if I depised the all you can eat soup and salad lunch special more or the cheesy biscuits.

No, wait, I lied. Definitely the cheesy biscuits.

Worst Job: Not to long ago, I worked for a "company" (God, I use that term loosely) that sold a medical discount plan to individuals/families that couldn't afford or qualify for medical benefits.

The office furniture was purchased from fire sales (it still had stickers from the previous owners/company), the tech head guy was a huge pervert, I worked weekends, and the sales force used scripts culled from the dialogue from Boiler Room. The owner of the company was a fast talking guy from Brooklyn, that pretty much personified every negative New York stereotype you've ever heard of. His cohorts were two roided up mooks, one of which had an anger control problem and the other was just a fucking nut.

We cold called unsuspecting families and walked a fine line between making sure we didn't call what we sold insurance, but selling them on it being the next best thing.

You know you work for a shady company when your first paycheck is on temporary checks...and bounces.

I'm so ashamed.

I've had several jobs that were really, really awful in their own unique ways, so it's hard to name an all-time worst. One job that came close was my first post-high school job, working as an assistant gardener for a very old, extremely crazy woman who lived in a mansion outside Santa Barbara. She wouldn't let me work unless she or her head gardener was physically present to watch me, and while I worked she kept up a non-stop torrent of abuse--how I hated plants, I was clumsy and cruel, must have been raised by wolves, etc. Seriously, the woman was insane. She had me climbing ladders to pluck individual dead leaves off her trees so they wouldn't fall down and get the lawn dirty, and I had to sweep her driveway daily. On my hands and knees. With a whisk broom. The first time I did it she found a spot of gravel I missed, and hit me in the face with a garbage can lid.

Her head gardner told me that in the twenty years he'd worked there I was the first assistant who'd lasted more than three days, and I worked there for a couple of months before I could find another job. Ah, the carefree days of teenage employment.

Currently, in order to supplement my pathetic grad student income, I do the occassional clinical study. The worst so far has been the bronchoscopy where they pumped saline into my lung to sample for drug levels. I am set to do another bronchoscopy study because my poor cat is sick. I've been poked, bled, had my blood taken out and put back in (let me tell you, blood transfusions hurt! they burn!!!!), taken experimental drugs, and collected my own pee in a big rubber bottle. That cat is lucky I love him. I am really looking forward to graduating someday and getting a job that pays to keep me well above the poverty line.
But it still isn't as bad as being covered in someone else's poo.

I love you Skitt. What did Minimus do while you were playing with Mr. Skankbeard's dangly parts?

"I have discovered a yeast infection, and there is a powerful burning in my vagina!" - Ana

Funniest. Fucking. Thing. Ever!

Wow, Osmate. Just. Wow. People are so fucking weird behind closed doors.

Four summers in a row, working in the office of the small business my mom owns. All day, side-by-side, working with my mother. Coming home, living in my mother's house. The only way I was able to stop hating her was by not working there anymore.
Still, I'd rather do that than wait tables. I tip my hat to you, unsung heroes.

plain and simple. setting up pins at a duck pin bowling alley when i was 13 and 14 years old...

not only was i only making $5-10 a night for simultaneously working 3 lanes for 4 hours, all the while being screamed obscenities at me by 65+ year olds who CONTINUE to bowl while they blatently saw me standing there fixing the pins...

oh no, im not finished. the owner's son also worked with me (who was around 17 or so), and the majority of his night was spent with his hand down his pants while he flipped through a penthouse.

thanks for the opportunity mom and dad.

My worst job ever would be my first job. I was 18 and I had a family connection to a flooring distributor and they needed someone to hang Formica Chips.. Chips of countertop samples on a wire display rack. It was eight hours a day in a warehouse in the muggy southern heat with no air conditioning or even air circulation. I will spare you with the details but basically it consisted of taking 2" x 3" pieces of splintery hell off a board and then putting new colors back on a jagged wire rack with a new cardboard backer. It was mind numbing repetition in it's evilest form and the scenery never changed. Since the heat was so stifling, the employees (all male and I was the only female) were allowed to wear flimsy Umbro-like shorts which proudly displayed every amorphous detail of the male anatomy. And I am still trying to forget the inordinate amount of ball sweat that I witnessed in my time there. And I can't even talk about the smell without gagging. That warehouse is where hopes and dreams go to die.

TK--

I feel for you. In my first lab job, we had to analyze sewage. Fortunately the guys I worked with decided this was great (the same way little kids think snot is hilarious, I suppose) and did most of the work. I was forever hearing from across the room, "What do you think THIS is?"

At the end of the month, we would have to dump all the little jars of sewage into a big drum and even with the hoods working overtime the smell was unreal. The guys called it "The Smell of a Thousand Butts."

I have had several shitty jobs. I spent the first year out of college temping/waiting tables which I really hated. I hated the financial insecurity of it all more than anything. Temping was the worst because you always showed up without any knowledge whatsoever and got very little guidance. It was ridiculous. I also hated the full-time people presuming that I was as invested in the job as they were. Please! I got fired at one gig because I was not busy and started reading a novel...and admitted to it when asked. In my old age, I've learned just to lie about that shit.

Probably my worst experience was at this Mexican restaurant in Atlanta (I spent about six months there after graduation - enormous, enormous mistake). I actually met some hilarious people, but my boss was a real asshole. I had been hired temporarily as a hostess because I had experience as a waitress, but they (allegedly) didn't have any waitress spots. Fine. I would periodically ask the dude about waitressing and get brushed off. Finally, I spotted a new class of trainees (for waiting tables) walk through the restaurant one afternoon. I went to another restaurant, got a job there, went back to the Mexican restaurant, quit, and told them precisely why. I'm pretty proud of myself, in restrospect.

A wholesale business; all women; three bosses; one was crazy; complete lack of communication; day after day of trying to guess which of the three sets of instructions was actually the most important. Icky.

Actually, the worst job I ever had was delivering Pizza in college. It wasn't a hard job by any means, but the kicker was since it was an on-campus delivery, it was practically impossible to use an automobile. This meant walking around campus in the freezing-ass cold (minus 50-70 windchill) delivering food to drunken shitheads who couldn't find thier way to meet you at the locked door of their dormhouse and who'd never quite understood the meaning of "tipping".

Like I said, wasn't a tough job. Best part (and I friggin' guarantee this happens everywhere) - is that delivery people keep track of non-tipping douchebags. Should any non-tipping douchebags be reading this, please keep in mind that the pizza-delivering community is also privvy to what may find it's way into your food. I'll leave it at that...

Wow! I guess I've never had a bad job. My current one is looking better every minute.

tammy, I'm another survivor of seasonal retail at Hecht's, and God bless, I think it's why I am such a disillusioned grump still to this day about Christmas. The worst humanity has to offer rears its ugly head over the promise of cashmere sweaters for $69, free gift with purchase, and the glistening racks marked "Clearance". Then there were my charming, idiotic, lazy, stealing coworkers. And then the time a rack full of clothing fell on me.

That job made me hate People.

To everyone out there who've done the plasma thing, I say thank you for enduring the torture (Yeah, I know you got paid.). This girlie has been on the receiving end of such donors. Much thanks for the track marks.

Thomas Kinkade! I feel for you Pissboy. I heard that the painter of light had a little public urination problem, right?

Ooh Ooh, I win I win!

My very first paying job when I was in Junior High School. I got a job helping out the neighbor pig farmer. I castrated pigs for $.50 a nut. I had to hold the (very small) pigs upside down while the farmer used a razor blade to, well you get the idea.

By the way I also lasted two days detasseling corn and I agree, it's right up there with the worst ever jobs.

Taco Bell. Don't ever eat there. Ever.

That is all.

When I was 15 my sister got involved in the sex toy industry. Her business is currently booming, but once upon a time she had to make it work using iffy practices. Read: forcing her younger sister to spend the summer packaging dildos, body creams, and chinese sex chairs basically for free. Does it end there? Nope. Cut to age 16, where I was the foot model for the burgeoning shoe fetish section. It was January and my sister would bitch at me if I was wearing anything outside of socks and sandals. I quit every 12 minutes but my sister would then threaten to fire me as her sibling... and somehow, that seemed worse than standing on my damn tippy toes wearing ankle straps while some guy pretending to be a professional photographer told me to wiggle my big toe while pretending to kick the camera. But actually, it's been four years, and if she asked, I'd probably do it again. Stupid blood relation.

Genny (also Rusty):

If only it made that much sense! I went to a little state university where our mascot was the mythical creature known as the Blugold. "Yeah, what?" is right.

We had a seperate night desk worker and security worker. I did both during different semesters, but security was far more entertaining--night desk was all about cooking pizzas in the shitty old pizza ovens.

My favorite drunk was the British exchange student who would regularly come in blitzed and try to cuddle up with me--sweet kid drunk, but could never remember who I was when he was sober.

Two words:

Brown's Chicken.

Yes...Kinkade likes to piss wherever he likes. he got arrested for it once. He also has 3 settled sexual harrassment complaints against him. An amazing artist, a devout christian, and pantheon of moral turpitude. Seriously...his whole God, family, love, fuck to procreate, believe, gag, wretch, belch, blah, blah, blah, blah is the biggest fucking act in the world. I recommend working at one of his galleries so you can meet him for a "highlighting event" when he's on tour. Then...you can stab him on the inside of his thigh with his paint spatula. Don't forget to twist, so he'll continue to bleed out.

My worst job ever has to be waitressing at a pool hall in Boston. I had to do it to make ends meet though. The guy who helped me get the job offered to help me get a job there, or he could sell drugs if I knew how to make ecstasy (I am a chemist). He actually promised not to sell it near schools & to split profits with me 50/50. Shit, are these the options my education and the cost of living in Boston had brought me to?!

My sister thought my dress was a long t-shirt. Acting like a bimbo certainly made for better tips. "Great shot!" squealed like a teenager, silencing my understanding of geometry and physics. Yup, my educated ass, tarting it up for a couple dollars per beer, in a micro minidress, padded pushup bra, and knee-high leather (um, probably what the kids call "hooker") boots.

I work as a project manager now & it just killed me that the girls would not implement efficient processes at the end of the night like: one person take out all the plates, one person clean up all the pool tables, one person pour out all the unfinished drinks, one person wipe down the countertops. Everyone thought they would get screwed by possibly having to do more than anyone else. No one ever thought beyond one night - as if we could never rotate tasks. So, everyone had to take care of their own section, and of course, take at least 2-3 times longer than needed. Getting home at 2-3 am was brutal because I had to go to my day job as a chemist at 8-9 am... I only lasted 3 months. I was let go before the baseball opener which would have increased crowds, cattiness, and probably me being cut by a bitch.

Everyone was out for themselves & because I was educated, and the newest girl, I harbored the greatest resentment. My favorite was the girl who wanted to be a police officer and had absolutely no detectable morals and would never look out for anyone else. I would hate to be her partner, oh, if she ever left the damn place. The better shifts and tasks were given to girls with seniority, which is a given in food service I understand, or here, your willingness to shake yo ass for the management. The cooks were nice though.

I sometimes think about going back & seeing who is still there. I can't bring myself to go in, though, I am so glad to be gone.

two weeks in a cassette warehouse, peeling "20% off" stickers from french-canadian country music tapes.

I don't have a specific worst job, but a worst job/career experience. It was right after I graduated from college and was trying to start a career in human resources (which sounds like it could be the start of a movie about shitty jobs). I signed up at a temp agency for HR positions, got two gigs, and was "fired" from both of them. I swear the first was because the HR manager was a snooty, classist bitch and didn't like my regular person ways, including the way I dressed. The second HR manager fired me for spending too much time online. She made this decision although she had never worked directly with me. I did spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen, and I was online, but it was because the HR generalist had assigned me the task of doing online background checks for the 80 employees who worked there, and she had never gotten around to doing it when they were initially hired. The worst part was when I called a meeting with the temp agency to discuss what I was doing wrong. One of the questions she asked me about was my professional mannerisms, and whether or not I wore "nice slacks with the shirt tucked in". Hell no lady, I was 24 years old, not 50. Then she asked if I wore jeans at work, to which I replied that I did but the HR manager did too. It was ridiculous. God, this was almost 10 years ago and it still makes me feel mad...almost stabby.

But even that experience isn't too bad compared to some others here.

The worst one time work experience I had was when I was the insurance specialist for the trauma patients at a hospital. I had to go to the patient rooms to get their insurance info, and once came upon an overweight man, about 70 years old, who was asleep with his legs open and the bed sheet farther up than it should have been. I saw balls dammit, and they weren't pretty.

frumpiefox - My husband drove an ice cream truck for a summer job once, but he said it was the best job he's ever had. He's funny like that though.

My Title: Sandwich Artist.

The Year: '93.

The Owner: A recent college grad (business degree- like, did daddy not realize that's not a real degree?) who received the franchise as a gift from his Daddy

The Owner's Girlfriend: Mary. NO, not plain "mary" MAAAR-IE. Say it right dumb ass.

The Staff: 1/2 jovial pot dealers. the other 1/2 neurotic shit heads

The Ugly: Stoners coming in asking for the... huh heh... special sandwich? Yeah, get back in your car, drive around back, Stoner #3 will meet you out there in a second. Dude, seriously, pick your stupid ass friend off the floor and go around back. THE BACK. Are you deaf? No, just stupid. Gotcha.

Roast Beef? Sorry, we're out. Well, no, technically we're not OUT but it'll be, let me seen, it's bee three minutes so yeah, another minute. Why? Shit... Mary's here. Yes, i said MAAAARY. Yeah. What's that noise? In the freezer? That's Mary. And the owner. Yes... I can't get your roast beef because it's in the freezer and Mary and the Owner are... what? Oh yeah, that's the squeak, I can go back in a second now and get that beef. What do you mean you don't want it anymore?

Dude, my dad has called for like, the 6th time, I'm only 16, I have to get home. It is technically illegal for me to be here past 12, you know? I know you're the manager on duty but hiding my time keys so I can't leave kind of sucks asshole. Do NOT let your stupid friends in, I have already closed out the fricking register. You are giving shit away? Dude, anything but the bread, man it's the only thing they count. WHY ARE YOU GIVING OUT BREAD are you HIGH? Oh, yeah, right. Well still, where the fuck are my keys dude. For the love of godtopus, your dumb ass friend just clogged the toilet with bread. WITH BREAD. Who does that? No, i don't know a plumber. I have class tomorrow dickweed, give me my keys! Dad! Hi dad (kids scatter)! Thank godtopu- you got your tools, dumbass... yeah... thanks. That's great. My last day? Oh I agree. Thanks Daddy.

Detasseling corn. Did it for a week, vowed never again. Eventually the cuts on my arms and face healed.

I also worked at Burger King for one week, then waited 10 years before stomaching eating there again. I've never been back to that particular restaurant. Oh the things I saw.

Lilianna, I am crying I am laughing so hard.

My last job was my worst one. I was the copy desk at a small newspaper. In the 14 months I worked there, we had 3 different editors in chief (this is very high turnover). Our final editor (while I was there) was basically incompetent. He had no managerial experience and couldn't handle conflicts. The reporters didn't make their deadlines, and the editors weren't terribly concerned about getting them to do so. The EIC and the city editor were each supposed to read each story before it got to me, then I would read it and put it on the page. But the CE decided after a while that if the reporter didn't make his deadline, the CE simply wouldn't read the story (i.e., stopped doing his job altogether). The EIC didn't really have a problem with this. So in addition to the fact that I was a copy editor, paginator, wire editor and web editor, I was also having to do half the CE's job and bitch at reporters to do THEIR job by making deadline. Then when I chewed one reporter out for spelling an important local figure's name wrong twice, once after I'd talked to her about it, and chewed the CE and EIC out for missing it out in their reading (it's too much to expect the desk editor to be catching little bullshit things like that all the time, especially when no one meets their goddamn deadlines) I got in trouble and was told to no longer tell the reporters when they'd fucked up. Also, my computer was a piece of shit and was breaking constantly. It was in the fucking shop 3 out of the last 6 weeks I worked at the place, and I kept telling them, look, you need to just buy a new computer, because that one is BROKEN and I can't do my job on a broken computer, but that just fell on deaf ears. Basically the entire company was making its final slow swirl around the bottom of the toilet bowl. About a month after I left, they eliminated my position at that paper and also at the bigger sister paper in the next town over. Then they switched from a daily paper to a semi-weekly paper and laid some people off. I left just in time, and I'm really glad I did. I know this account doesn't do justice to the job's absolute suckitude, but trust me, it sucked.

The summer before my senior year of college I gave up my cushy job waitressing/cooking/delivering pizza at a local Italian place (I know a lot of you had horrible experiences at restaurants, but I loved my job). I left because my dad got me a better paying job at his company.

Working in the factory.

Building industrial precision air conditioners.

The hours were from 5:30 AM to 3:30 PM (10 hour days) and I worked Monday-Saturday, sometimes Sunday. I was the only 1. person younger than 25 years old, 2. person who had attended college, 3. girl who wasn't married or a scary stone butch.

Worst job ever. The guys all liked me a lot (some more than others, I can't tell you how many motorcycle ride offers I had to turn down) but they were never easy on me, no sympathy points for being a girl. (To be fair, I wouldn't have wanted them to treat me any other way, it was easier for me to just be one of the guys) So here I am, on the line, drilling, lifting, riveting (They called me Rosie on those days), and sweating my ass off (the irony of the situation was while we were building air conditioners, the factory wasn't air conditioned and would be 90+ degrees every day that summer). We only had 25 minutes for lunch, and 2 other 10 minute breaks besides those.

The days my dad came to visit, in his suit and tie were the worst. I was called princess and put on the dirty jobs. It was also dangerous. I had my hand smashed, my knuckles cut (I still have a scar) and I hit my head just about every day. I had to buy a pair of steel toe boots, which were 2 sizes to big (I couldn't find a pair made for women) so I had to wear extra socks.

It also killed my social life. I couldn't go out because I went to bed at 9:00pm everyday and if I had Sunday off, I was too exhausted to do anything fun.

The pay was good, but it was honestly the worst job of my life--made me appreciate my college education/degree.

(The real cherry on top of all this, my dad had gotten my sister a job the summer before--IN THE OFFICE. She had a cube, desk, computer AND AIR CONDITIONER. I went into his office on a particularly bad day just to soak in the cool cool AC. Dad told me to stop whining because in the factory we had our own gatoraid fountain. Apparently that evened everything out.)

@ Tammy

other than the old man kickin it, you and i had the same disastrous relationship with seasonal retail. coupled with a raging bitch of a boss and lazy coworkers, i'm intensly disapointed that i never took revenge before i quit.

katy--I'm beginning to think the ice cream truck job wasn't so bad after all....

Though it was still worse than the many summers I spent baling hay and shoveling horse crap.

Working the Phonathon at my college. I lasted six months, which was practically a record.

We called parents and alums, inevitably during their dinner times, to ask them to donate money to my school. Unfortunately the school is known as a pressure cooker, and no one who graduates remembers it fondly. I have never been cursed out so soundly in my entire life than when interrupting a family at dinner and asking them to give money to a college that they hated. Other favorite tactics: hanging up on me and lying to me (i.e. "May I please speak to so-and-so?" "I'm not home, I'm on a boat to China.")

I dated a girl who had one of the worst jobs I ever heard of. She worked for a health care billing company, and her job was to call doctors' offices and harrass them to send in paperwork. She had pretty bad carpal tunnel syndrome, too. She was an unhappy camper.

Ugh...cold calling. For those who do that, I feel your pain. One of the hardest gigs ever, and it's part of my current job. It's amazing how cruel people can be.

During my first week on the job, I got worst call ever. I was nervous as hell and very timid. I called a real estate broker and mentioned my newspaper. His response (very calm)

"Oh, I hate your paper. Yeah, I can't stand it. I hate it so much, I wouldn't give it to my cat to piss on."

I was so stunned I didn't know what to say. Luckily he hung up before I could call him the ignorant fuckrag he was. Every time I see his company name, I'm tempted to go out and throw garbage and rotten eggs at his building.

This is easy. I was living in London and needed to eat. I walked pass a pub with a help wanted sign so I walked in and asked about the job. I mentioned that I had no previous experience and that I don't drink all that often, but they said that's allright come on in. At the time I thought I was the luckiest girl alive and that this was my special tv "everthing is gonna work out fine" moment....I should have known better.

I was absolute crap at the job, couldn't open a wine bottle for my life, had to have a customer do it for me once, was too short to reach the whisky dispenser without doing an embarrasing hop, and too week to lift an entire freeking keg of bear up the basement stairs. But I staid on, I wasn't going to let all that get in the way of making money to eat. Plus everyday I came home smelling of stale ciggies and bear, lovely.

Well I can't even pretend that I had the gumption to quit. I was FIRED. I was fired because one day after many a pinch, leer and horrific come on, I LOST my shit.

Cue the loud pub music. I am carrying a flat of beer mugs up the stairs and a very very drunk doctor comes up behind me and reaches into my shirt and tries to make off with my left breast. Well needless to say I am very attatched to it and let him know if he didn't remove the offending appendage RIGHT NOW he would soon find himself without it. He didn't take it off. I dropped the flat and elbowed him down the stairs. He fell with a comedic drunken crash and I was fired for assaulting a customer.

Thank God.

Front Desk at the Richmond Downtown Hotel That Rhymes with "Chariott", in Richmond, Va.

They decided to train me on their reservation software program 2 months AFTER I'd been working there, not that it helped, since it was plagued with glitches.

I have no words to accurately convey how incredibly mean people can get when their reservations are not honored, (whether or not this is the actual hotel's fault, the glitchy software program's fault, or believe it or not, usually their own.)

I was also amazed at the number of people who become irate because:

a) you can't upgrade them to a suite, just for the hell of it,

b) parking isn't free, (these are people who don't understand the difference between a hotel and a motel, and, sadly enough, they abound)

c) the hotel doesn't provide them with a free shuttle service to ANYWHERE

d) their screaming children aren't allowed run, roller skate, practice gymanistics across the extremely hard marble floors of the hotel lobby

For what it's worth, I did my best to side with, defend, and compensate our tired, traveling customer. But it was obvious that many of them had developed the systematic use of furious verbal abuse as a strategy for basically scoring free shit, as if humiliating someone making $7.50 an hour is worth a free fruit-plate.

But worst than those assholes were the MODs who were never around to step in when asked for, (by us or the customers), always blamed us for customer dissatisfaction, and in my case, fired me when I suggested that part-time employees consistently scheduled for 40+ hours a week should be allowed personal days.

I've never set foot back in a "Chariott" hotel, and don't plan to ever again.

Six years as a nuclear machinist mate in the USN. On a surface boat, working in a radiation area, my exposure level was less than the fight deck idiots because I would get no sunlight exposure over a deployment. I had two guys commit suicide that worked with me, got to read of read cross notices to three guys explaining that their family didn't live through Katrina, missed my sister's wedding, got paid a shit wage, and now have seizures from a head injury that was never treated properly, lost a portion of a finger, watched a guy get ripped apart by an exploding jack, and pulled the remnants of my friends hand from the internals of a pump because a fucking idiot of an office could read a danger tag. Oh but I guess the hundred dollars a month I get in disability makes up for it all. I am statistically more likely to end up in jail, addicted to drugs, or killed by my own hands than graduate from a two year college. Thanks America for sending me to Iraq right after I got back from Afghanland. Should have listened to my high school guidance counselor and became a drifter...

Oh yeah. Waiting tables even just a few months turned me into a decent tipper. I know how hard the wait staff has to work!

Fun thing for me, brig time if I tried to quit. God I hated the navy.

One day we also got Popsicles to go along with our free Gatorade. And on my last day my dad threw a pizza party for my section. Apparently the guys still ask my dad about me.

I noticed one day that all but 2 of the guys that worked in my section had mustaches. It was weird. They also made fun of how much I would sweat (like a man, but it was HOT), and if I ever had to go to the bathroom they wouldn't leave until I let them know if it was number one or number two. And of course I would have to shout it because of the ear plugs we had to wear.

God, diablo, I'm sorry.

While in college in DC, I was the driver for the bus that took drunk ass frat boys and sorority girls from American Uniersity to Georgetown on Friday and Saturday nights. My job, essentially, consisted of a big loop from AU through Georgetown and back. Doesn't sound too bad, right?

Well, I had to deal with the puking. And the fucking in the back seats. And the frat boys bringing back hookers. And the drunken sorority girls pissing on themselves.

And, of course, I had to clean the damn bus out at 5 in the morning. Job lasted about two months before I said, no way man.

The things we do for coin...

When I was in high school back in the late '70's, I worked as a summer janitor in my high school (incidently, the high school where "Breakfast Club" was later filmed). My job was to do all of the deep cleaning that couldn't be done during the year. The first week was spent cleaning the lockers - I still have nightmares about the things in plastic baggies that were jammed in the back recesses of the lockers. The second week it was on to deep clean the bathrooms. I was sent, armed with a metal paint scraper, some carcinogenic cleaning compound, and (thank god!) thick rubber gloves, to scrape the dried and matted melange of blood, fecal matter, vomit, and pubic hair that the janitors overlooked throughout the school year.

The job did have its comedic moments, however. One day, armed with my paint scraper, etc. I was scraping the built-up wax from the edges of a long hallway. Floyd, one of the full-time staff, was telling me how he was going to use a belt sander instead. As he plugged the 50 foot extension cord into the wall, the belt sander turned out to have the on button locked down and starting flying down the hall. Rather than pulling the plug, WHICH HE WAS HOLDING IN HIS HAND, Floyd sprinted down the hall after the sander, until the extension cord streched tight and the sander unplugged itself.

A friend of mine was telling me about a summer job he had in rural Virginia where he grew up. His job was in a factory where they made stuff out of particle board. Most of his coworkers were more or less illiterate, and had a pretty low success rate at cutting things the right size on the first try. According to them it was no big deal, since they would just chip up their mistakes and make more particle board. My friend's job was to walk around with a tape measure and double-check everybody's measurements before they cut anything. Pretty much everyone despised him, and called him "College Boy".

"People are pigs!"

This was said to me less than 30 seconds into my first day in retail at Woolco, a now-defunct K-Mart wannabe. Not "Customers are pigs" or "Some people are pigs". This job wasn't too bad. I got to work with an aspiring rock musician who got drunk and passed out on the railroad tracks, only to be awakened by a train severing his right arm at the shoulder. Another co-worker had his stoned buddies throw gasoline on him and then lit him on fire. I wish I was making this stuff up...

Artificialsweet, you work at that Starbucks on Mass Ave, don't you? Or the one on Huntington. I live around there, and I feel your pain about the homeless people and the assholes.

Clerk at a convenience store. Make minimum wage, get abused by customers, and you never know if the next guy who walks in will be the one who shoots you dead.

Oh, and the store's robbery policy was fun - if someone sticks you up, you cooperate (blood's hell to shift off linoleum), but you get fired because you cooperated. Nice, eh?

All that plus the fact you better godsdamned well pay for everything you eat or drink. I was so glad I got out of that job.

Strange, when I clicked on pajiba in my bookmarks bar, I was really hoping for a worst-job related diversion. And now I can contribute, not so much about the worst job, but definitely about the worst boss.

I was a server in a small, family-owned pub for many years. I didn't mind the waitressing so much; it was never monotonous, I liked my regular customers, and the money was good. But I had the worst boss ever. He was mean, drunk (often at work) and crazy. He called everyone names and made people cry. He would start rumors and pit people against each other. He would harass people for their political affiliations. He was sexist, racist, and homophobic. He was crude and inappropriate, often in front of customers. His hygiene was worse. He never washed his hands after using the bathroom. The tongs that he touched all the food with? Oh, he rested them conveniently on the side of the garbage can. He would prep a bunch of food and leave it out all day because he was too lazy to portion it and put it in the walk-in. When he was bored, his favorite thing to do besides drink and harass his employees, was to come out into the dining room and talk to people--actually, he would sit down and talk at them. Sometimes for as long as a half an hour to an hour. He would just be there, just talking to people who were politely letting their food go cold by waiting for him to finish haranguing before they took a bite. God forbid some of his customers wanted to have an evening out alone and enjoy each other's company.

He wasn't all bad, but it was enough for me to dread going to work everyday and ruin some of my self-esteem. When I got my next job, I came home so excited about having a boss who didn't yell at me.

I worked in a tanning salon. Apart from the fact that if someone came it at one minute to closing you still had to let them use one of the beds for up to 30 minutes, the filth people left behind was the worst. There were those men that would spend their time peering over the tops of the walls dividing the beds and then masturbate, leaving wadded kleenex in the trash cans. Then there were those that would sweat so damned much that it smelled like pork in the tanning bed. I swear, one guy had so much sweat pour from his body that it took damn near five towels to sop it all up.
I guess the best was the time that someone took a shit in the bathroom and then proceeded to clog the toilet. At some point, they decided it would be a good idea to grab some of the, uh, clogging agent with toilet paper and drop it into the trash can. Did. Not. Work. Blech. Fuck tanning beds.

I've actually liked most of my jobs. Most of the time.

Once upon a time, however, I was employed by a certain prominent hotel chain as a bouncer/security guard. This hotel was host to an annual- and very large- science-fiction convention. This shouldn't have been a problem: I was a fan, I got to meet a lot of authors and artists, and I bought some neat stuff.

The problem was some of the fans.

A brief digression is in order. The hotel permitted the general anarchy caused by the Con because the attendees filled the entire hotel (including the $2500/night "Presidential Suite" and the $1500/night "Governor's Suite") for five solid days ... and booked a year in advance. Imagine Spring Break ... confined in one 25-floor hotel ... populated by every nerd and geek within a thousand miles.

Some of the rooms were literally carpeted with sleeping nerds. Basic rooms (single occupancy) went for $100 a night. Sublet the rooms for $50 a head ($200 for the bed) every night and you could make out like a bandit.

As a result of the population density, the hotel had chronic water shortage problems during the Con (this ended up being the reason the hotel finally kicked them out). Add water shortages to crowded rooms to summer temperatures to nerds (many of whom thought bathing was optional anyway) in costumes, and some of the rooms smelled like stockyards covered in skunk shit and whale vomit.

Now add in the fact that many nerds only get laid once a year ... at the Con. Since there was no room in the rooms for any sort of boinking activity, the nerds and nerdettes ended up using whatever horizontal surfaces happened to be relatively unoccupied and not directly in public view. So now places like laundry rooms, public restrooms, and stairwells smelled like the rest of the Con- with the nauseating aroma of deeply warped nerds in rut thrown in.

Now we come to the star of this little drama. I got a sort-of-panicky call from the hotel cafe (as opposed to the four-star restaurant on the top floor) about a guest creating a disturbance. I bobbed and weaved my way through the tide of early-rising Klingons, Imperial Storm Troopers, Daleks, Vulcans, and hordes of creatures and/or characters that would take too long to describe.

When I got to the cafe, I immediately discovered the problem. There was a ... woman ... there. She was hard to miss, being significantly larger in two dimensions than I, but somewhat shorter. If you're familiar with Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures series, think of Maasha without the orange hair and only about 5 feet tall.

She was wearing a (apparently) home made outfit which resembled mosquito netting ... and nothing else. I believe that all women are beautiful, but this woman made me seriously reconsider this philosophy. Pendulous breasts, a jungle of riotous pubic hair, and what resembled a couple of full-size hogs tied up in canvas bags were all clearly visible.

No one was enjoying the view.

As bad as her appearance was, her attitude was worse. Calling her a shrew is an offense to vicious little rodents. She was drunk and/or stoned, combative, and as reasonable as a rabid wolverine with a toothache. And she stank.

She refused any suggestion to change her attire. It was only after I had called the police for assistance (no way in Hell was I about to try to evict this creature all by my lonesome) that she made any attempt to cover herself- she grabbed three cocktail napkins and stuffed them each under her mosquito netting until they covered her nipples and pubic hair.

The police were not amused either.

I worked with emotionally disturbed/developmentally disabled adults in a state run residential setting for almost 2 years. Another staff member and I once got to take some of our "clients" to a basketball game in a nearby city - it was a real treat so we went ahead and did it even though we were rather understaffed for the trip (2 staff and 6 clients). When it was time to go home, one of the guys didn't want to go home and he ended up making his opinion known pretty violently. Even though I had plenty of experience restraining aggressive folks manually, it's hard to do in a van. He bit my back several times (thankfully I had on a thick shirt) and gave me quite the black eye...just in time for valentines day! We ended up having to turn him over to the local police so we could get everyone else back home. I worked there for two years. Some of the folks I worked with could really be delightful, but most of them lived lives of misery. That job motivated me to go ahead and get my master's degree though!

Um yeah. I was going to post my story but Diablo could have just written "I was posted to Iraq" and he would have won already. My story is so pale in comparison it would blend into the page.

Working at a Walgreens my freshman and sophomore year of college.

My self-esteem plummeted due to customers constantly treating me like trash because I was a cashier, oh god forbid. One psycho woman even threw her change at me, saying I needed it more than her. Working till 1am during winter exams and working Christmas friggin Day sucked beyond words.

Retail...never again.

My worst job would have to be a tie between the customer service phone job I worked (my first job, sadly) and the job immediately after that doing inventory with RGIS. That's right. I said the name. It blew.

So the customer service job just sucked as sucky jobs go. It was an inbound call center and I had to answer phones for a number of companies (including James Sokolove and Save the Children). The work was monotonous and boring, and for some reason I still have nightmoare about it. Just the boredom. I walked out one day and never came back, not even to get my check.

The RGIS job was terrible. I have to work crap hours, sometimes requiring me to be up at 4 in the morning so I could count canned goods at Price Chopper. The worst days were when we had to invetory Wal-marts. I am from the midwest, so they're EVERYWHERE, and each one is about a 12 hour job. We got one 30 minute lunch break, and I was on my feet or knees or a ladder counting ALL F-ING DAY! I think the worst part of this job was that my team leader was a crackhead. Literally. She had brown teeth (all 3 of them) and her breath always smelled worse than the rest of her did. We would have to carpool to work with her, and her car was a death trap, not to mention that it was covered in her kids' vomit and crack stains. The windshield wipers didn't work, nor did the speedometer, and her windshield had a huge crack in it. Thank godtopus the job was only over vacations during college. Needless to say, another job I walked away from feeling no remorse.

And I've never worked retail or waitressed, nor will I ever. I will have a nice office job for the rest of my life, especially with my newly acquired law degree.

Milk Recycler

One summer in Houston I worked at a dairy. What most people don't know is that milk that is not purchased from the grocery store is returned to the dairy for store credit. The company I worked for decided it would be good to resell the milk that had gone bad to pig farmers for slop. Great - better than dumping it in the sewers... except they got behind in their recycling efforts sooo the milk and OJ would sit outside IN HOUSTON DURING THE SUMMER for days. My job was to take the bloated gallons that had separated into water and cottage cheese (or vinegarized OJ) and dump it into a "steel bathtub" that was attached to a pump that would move the old milk into a 1000 gal tank. I would cut open each gal, 1/2 gal and/or quart and dump it into the tub. Sometimes the pump would get clogged w/all of the "cheese" like product and I would have to plunger it out. The stench was unimaginable. After two months, I was moved inside and get to stack 40 lb cases of milk for 10 hours/day inside in the refrigerated vaults. Yay for me!

Too tired to read all the comments. My most despised task in my current job involves collecting 40 L water samples for toxicity testing. That's 88 lbs of water to be carried by me and my field partner. Per station. I did three of these today, which is ironically why I'm so late getting to this diversion. Two of the sites were about a half kilometer in the woods, so we had to walk that whole distance. Ohhh, my achy bones.

Ah, the glamorous world of environmental consulting.

Oddly, this even trumps my grad student work, living in a remote and smelly seabird colony with no power/running water for weeks on end. It was dirty work, to be sure, but really quite fun.

Anyway, that's my contribution. Looking forward to reading the rest of your horror stories. Had some great laughs so far!

Diablo, that is the worst. I had some rough times in the military as well (army), but I don't think as horrific as that. The navy is a whole other ball of wax, I think.

I bathed old people for $5.25/hr. A part of me is proud of that fact, another part has been cringing since it happened. But my most recent job as a flight attendant was really great until Sunday when I got laid off.

While in college in DC, I was the driver for the bus that took drunk ass frat boys and sorority girls from American Uniersity to Georgetown on Friday and Saturday nights. My job, essentially, consisted of a big loop from AU through Georgetown and back. Doesn't sound too bad, right?

Well, I had to deal with the puking. And the fucking in the back seats. And the frat boys bringing back hookers. And the drunken sorority girls pissing on themselves.

Danimal, I have been on the bus you speak of. I used to sneak onto the AU shuttle from the metro to the campus because it was free and they never checked id. But I have seen god awful things happen in the back of that bus. I wasn't one of the AU asses you're referring to, but I did stiff-palm one of them. Yeah, bitch spilled a Mike's Hard Lemonade on my new sneakers. Who the fuck smuggles a Mike's Hard Lemonade onto a shuttle bus? The kind who wear UGGS in the summer and get stiff-palmed by me.

Worst job:

Burger. Fucking. King.
I was referred to the job by a friend from school who was, like everyone else who worked there, Pakistani. They ONLY spoke English around the customers. This made training extremely fun. Twenty minutes into my first day, after fucking up a slew of orders from rabid, post-game little leaguers, the team coach (who apparently is adept a the Jay Leno brand of humor) says, "Isn't this supposed to be fast food?". To which a the little leaguers (future Leno viewers) laughed. I smelled like goddamn fries and Whoppers even if I didn't work that day and the day that I quit someone took a shit in the tank, not the toilet, in the men's bathroom.

I'm a 120 pound chick who worked as a baggage handler in Michigan during Valentines day 2006, all while trying to go to school full time. Oh, and work started at four am and ended when your plane left. I win.

I managed the cashroom at several Eurotrash clubs in Boston, which meant that I had to touch every single bill that went through those joints. And they made some crazy cash. There was a machine there to do the counting, but if the money was wet you had to hand count it. On average I probably counted about $10,000 worth of day-old beer and vodka soaked bills a week, and at the end of each day my hands were painted white from all the cocaine those things deposited. For serious, it was ground into my fingerprints and I couldn't get it out. Plus the smell...ugh, the smell. The plus side was that I worked during the day at nightclubs, so I always had the whole place to myself; however the nevelty wore off fast (clubs are really creep during the day time). Oh, and I got to raid the lost and found.

Dingles, I feel you. Pharmacy Tech at Walgreens, here.

Yeah. Pharmacy Technician sounds like an amazing job, right?

Nah.

Lets see, sick shitheads who treat you like shit because the prescription they called in 5 minutes ago isn't ready yet, an arrogant fucktard of a boss who is an evil, blackhearted man, evil bitches whose sole purpose in life is to be a cunt to me are only a few shitbombs I have to deal with constantly.

I've gotten snapped in the face three times with a phone cord (which hurts like a bitch when it's all stretched out and snaps you right in the goddamn eyeball), tripped on a stack of drams, sneezed on directly in the face by someone with Pneumonia, and vile, vile tussin somehow made its way in my nostril.

Oh, but you know what tops the cake? I had to put my dog down on a day I was working. I showed up that morning and asked permission to leave about a half hour before he was going to be put to sleep, and it was very begrudgingly granted. After watching my dog of 8 years die in my arms, I came home and found a voicemail from the black-hearted bastard of a pharmacy manager asking me how long I was planning on taking, because I quote, "He didn't know this was going to be an all night affair."

Motherfucking bastards. Walgreens pharmacy. We don't give a shit about you, people, trust me and get your scripts transferred. Seriously.

Oh, did I mention that I have severe arthritis in my knees and a doctor's note saying that I can blow out my knees from working more than 2 days in a row (standing the entire time, with only a half-hour lunch break in an 8 hour shift), yet the pharmacy manager refuses to change my schedule from the 3 days on, 1 day off, 1 day on, 2 days off schedule I'm on? Yeah.

Looking back, I see that that was the longest run-on sentence I've ever written. Fuck it. Y'all know what I mean.

Oh, and the corn detassling thing? Agreed. Sucks. As a fine, upstanding young lass of good American Midwestern breeding, I'm well acquainted with that unholy shit.

Two rather bad jobs.

One was as an usher at a graduation hall at a prestigious Canadian University. Most of the time we had rentals and actual concerts, and it was fun, pleasant even. But then there were graduations. The tickets were free for but people had to order them in advance. For some reason there is a good number of graduates at one of Maclean's top ranked school's that do not know how to order tickets, or enough tickets, and have parents who think it is acceptable to push ushers, little old ladies, children and big burly security men out of the way to watch their child wear a funny hat and robe and get a rolled up piece of paper. I don't know what's worse, that they actually think pushing and shoving will get the in, or that they think they'll be able to stay inside once they have pushed and shoved their way in. We have police guards on duty because of this, they get used... at a frickin graduation ceremony! Since the hall did not have an elevator, we reserved seats on the main floor for the elderly and disabled, and some people became very enraged by this. I would casually explain that these were for people who could not make it up the stairs, and they could have one member of their party accompany them, rather than the entire party (unless the party had small children and no other adults, of course) so that there would be seats for late coming elderly as well (as they do, of course, show up late) and 90% of them were downright pleased with this. The other 10% threatened me, harassed me, made up fake illnesses to try and get in, demanded they speak to my manager despite the fact that they were perfectly able-bodied, threatened my manager when she would tell them no, and sometimes just tried to sneak in. My coworker once watched a woman refuse to give up her saved seat and go one row up (that was one step up) for an elderly woman. Then an elderly man in that row gave up his seat for her and went up the steps to get this seat, and the woman didn't even move a bit when the lady tried to get past her. You would be appalled at the kind of privilidges people think they are entitled to just because THEY paid $40,000 for their child's education... like every other family with a graduating student.

The summer I worked for College Pro Painters was bad too. They expected me to work 10 hour days in the heat, and then walk around doing cold calls to houses on commission after those shifts... covered in paint and sweat. They paid us by the estimated time a job took, so if it was 20 hours we'd get $10 for those 20 hours and no more than that until we finished the job. If you finished a job early you still got that amount, and so in theory you could make it up if your boss was good at surveying how many hours it would take to do a job. My boss was not, and she often underestimated the work hours. I lived on the other side of the city and had an hour long commute there and back. I'd go home and cry myself to sleep because the chemicals I was exposed to made me unable to stop crying. My partner was a pothead idiot who had bullied my sister in high school, so I was less than fond of him. I quit half way through the summer and promptly got sick for the entire month because of a chronic sinus infection that was so bad I couldn't be around second hand cigarette smoke for six months or it would get inflamed. Ever had a fever because your sinuses are infected? That's a bad fever. They had no safety protection or training, and I developed a chronic allergy to oil based paints and stains, and now being exposed to them for more than 15 minutes lands me in bed for a day. I work in a scenic construction shop now so this is a bit of an inconvenience.

Ahh...the worst.job.ever. How I remember it fondly.

I was the tender age of 23 and sort of dating this guy who did the Christmas marketing for the local malls. He hired the Santa and arranged all the decorations etc. He was low on elves and because I was trying to get into his pants I offered to work as an elf on evenings and weekends. Did I mention I hate children? Did I?

And despite the popular belief that children love Santa, the truth is that most kids, in fact, dislike, nay loathe, Santa thus there was much pants wetting, screaming, wailing and gnashing of teeth. And that my friends, was just the parents. I spent hours trying to convince small, snot-covered children to sit on Santa's knee and remove their hands from their faces so I could get a half decent picture.

As well, the man whose pants I was trying to get into, made promises to the parents that he couldn't keep, i.e. getting the pictures of their snot-covered kids to them the very next day so we also had to deal with extremely irate parents.

And for those of you who are dying to know - I was successful in my quest to bed the guy but sadly, it wasn't that great. Definitely not worth the pain of the worst.job.ever.

I worked at Dairy Queen when I was 14. For those of you who are unaware, Dairy Queen does not sell ice cream--it sells a revolting dairy-like liquid that has been pumped through a machine that freezes it and works in air. Said dairy-like liquid was often crusted in the bottoms of trashcans, on the floor, in the walk-in refrigerator, and in dry storage,sometimes up to an inch thick. The mop sink backed up sewage constantly, the majority of my co-workers were tweaked out on meth and listened to Insane Clown Posse on loop, and I got paid $4.85 an hour. The place was shut down by the IRS two years afer I quit. Hee.

When I was 17, I worked at Roy Rogers Family Restaurant in Norfolk, VA. I had to wear a red cowboy hat, white peasant blouse, red miniskirt, hose, and white orthopedic shoes. I was supposed to say, "Howdy, Pardner" when customers came in, "Happy Trails" when they left, and when I worked the drive-thru, I was supposed to say, "Come round it up." Sometimes I just got into it and really hammed it up, which worked for me because I'm from Texas, so I was the only one there with an authentic accent. One time a guy came in and asked, "Where's Trigger?" (like I hadn't heard that a million times already), and I said, "He's in the hamburger."

Good times.

Other than bra-fitting old fat women? *violent shudder*

I'd have to say working graveyard shift (11pm-7am) at an adult video store. Honest to god, I had a conversation like this.

M: Is that all?
Random Dude at 1:30 in the morning: .. this one (fake vagina-thing) is $400. *points to shelf*
M: ..yes.
RD: .. why is it $400?
M: ........I don't know.
RD: .. [to other guy in the store] This is $400!
OG: .. okay.
RD: Well. I have to find out why this is $400.
M: .. did you want to put back the other two (two hundred dollars each)?
RD: Nope, I'll take 'em all.

And a guy from Edmonton who would phone our store to chat us up about shoes. Pervert.

This was an easy one - medical answering service. Lots of turnover, mandatory overtime, scheduled to work all three shifts in the same week, one 15 minute break per 8 hour shift, and no talking allowed to co workers. If you called in sick, you were supposed to bring in a doctors excuse, and it was expected to list the very reason you could not work your shift. AND, and this was in the employee handbook, if you were called in to work on your day off and you refused, you got fired.

A lot of the practices had a doctor on call "for emergencies". So ignorant soccer moms calling in at 2:30 in the morning because their kid had a sore throat and wanted antibiotics right away would become angry at me for telling them that sore throats are not on the list of emergency calls the physician will take after hours, and the doctors that did take calls like that frequently billed about $50 for taking the call.

On the plus side, I eventually got to work the 10 hour night shift all by myself - I brought in fuzzy navels, had pizza delivered, and read many books while being paid.

All the other shifts sucked. You were yelled at if you crossed your ankles - employees were even expected to keep their feet flat on the floor staring blankly at the monitor waiting for a call!

1)When I was 14, I worked at Saratoga Race Track for one of the trainers. Yep, I shoveled horse shit in the stables for 5 bucks an hour.
1a)As many of you probably don't know, the track is open for 6 weeks in August. I needed a job during school so I made a wise decision and took a job washing dishes at an indian restaurant.

So to recap, I took a 6 week job shoveling shit and followed it right up with another job shoveling shit. Please, don't tell me you happen to enjoy indian food. Had I taken a different path, perhaps I too could love me some Chicken Jalfrezi. The horrors of that kitchen were simply too much for an impressionable mind to handle and thus scarred me for life.

I wanted to be a veterinarian, so in high school I took a job in the kennel of a vet hospital. For the most part I actually loved the job, but some of the duties were, well, doody. Some of the dogs had a habit of messing their cages overnight. One in particular, a permanent resident, refused to ever egest or excrete outside of her cage. Add in her hyperactivity, and the cage was an utter mess on a daily basis. I think it was her way of getting payback for being taken in. She was found frolicking in the median of the Jersey Turnpike, which means she'd already made it across four lanes of traffic.

Ever bathed a dog whose hair was matted in diarrhea? I have. How about having to bag, then carry the dead animals after euthanization down to the freezer to await the incinerator guy? Those were fun. And I mustn't forget holiday times when the entire kennel would fill up and all day long there was nothing but barking coming from all sides. I swear that still rings in my ears.

That was kind of a downer, sorry, pajibans.

Maintenance man for a low income housing project.

Apparently, qualifying for low income housing also qualifies one to throw trash out the window, throw bottles and rocks in the path of the lawnmower, use one's oven as a combo dumpster/toilette, and plug the toilette with foreign objects like cans and phonebooks.

Every day was a lesson in what becomes of human beings after they've given up.

The worst job I've had was 16 hours a day docking sheep. I grew up in Wyoming and worked a summer for a sheep rancher. We met at 4:00 in the morning to drive out in the desert and corral a few hundred sheep at a time (there were thousands of them). One at a time we had to pick up the lambs, and hold them while somebody else docked their tails, clipped the females' ear, and neutered the males. I got home after dark and my clothes were wet with blood, my body was bruised by being stomped by sheep, and my skin was caked with dirt, mud and shit.

Last year I worked as a Personal care Attendant for a severly disabled woman, in home, 24 hour shifts. I only had to work two days a week, which was the main (only) draw. I was not suited well to this work, though outwardly I appeared to be because I'm really good at hiding my feelings. It required crossing a lot of physical boundaries, she had basically no muscle function, so I had to do everything (yes... whatever you're imagining, I had to do that too). This made it a difficult job, but not the worst job.

What made it the worst job was that she was a. a born again christian and b. crazy. I travelled with her to visit her family which meant I was working 24 hours a day for a week and sleeping ON A MAT AT THE FOOT OF HER BED. She had a less than healthy outlook on her life, for instance she would sometimes say things like, "being handicapped is kind of like being famous... everyone knows you!" One day, her dog bit me. The dog was completely neurotic and dangerous and it was completely irresponsible for her to keep him when she had to have strangers working in her home on a daily basis. The dog bit me really hard and I was bleeding everywhere. This happened when she was listening to her daily church radio program (The theme song of which was, in ultra cheerful tones, "getting crucified with chriiiiiist!") And what did she say to me when I was bleeding and crying, did she say sorry? Did she offer me any kind of condolences? No. She said, "why did you do that?" And as if asking me how I could have the audacity to get bitten by her dog wasn't enough, she went on to say, "This is like my church every day, and I'm very annoyed that its being interrupted"

Anyway, one day I realized I was grimacing every time I saw a handicapped van anywhere. When you're job has made you hate the handicapped, its time to move on out. So I did.

I have had a few. First, one of my first babysitting jobs was for this kid who fucking BIT me all the time, threw tantrums, and was completely out of control. I was about twelve or thirteen and had no idea how to handle him.

I worked at Wally World (Wal-Mart) the summer before my senior year of high school. I worked in the clothing dept. with a bunch of mean and bitter old women who hated their lives (understandably), and I had to walk around on cement floors all day folding and refolding and refolding and refolding and refolding...you get the picture...clothes and interacting with the mutants shopping there. And I had to wear khakis and a blue Wal-Mart vest.

Another bad one was mother freaking Hooters one summer in college. My friend worked there and made good money and talked me into applying. I thought I could handle it (I'm usually a tough cookie when it comes to leering men), but I could not handle the Hooters-style leering and all the comments and everything. The younger guys weren't bad (usually just made poor attempts at flirting) but some of the older guys were downright gross. I quit after about 3 weeks.

Another one - my current job. First year associate at a big law firm. I have no life whatsoever. My year's almost up and then I'm peacing out, hopefully moving to a nice cushy government job and working 9-5 and taking off every holiday imaginable. Big dip in pay, but HUGE boost in quality of life.

But I've had awesome jobs too - summer camp counselor, several political internships, orientation assistant for incoming freshman at my college, research assistant for one of my favorite professors, waitress. YES, I happened to love waitressing (just not at Hooters).

And that little tale, fair Skittimus, will surely earn you a spot on this weeks's edition of "He spake it best".

Poor Minimus, indeed. Is there a Parasitic Twin Protective Services? I mean, all the alcohol and the murder sprees are bad enough, but now there's contortionist bondage in pursuit of sexed-up waitressin'? For shame!

Skits, you should really think about making up for these egregious errors and getting on his good side, otherwise one of these days Minimus might feel inclined to use his turkey claw on sensitive areas of your anatomy while you sleep. Doctors can only reattach things when there's a clean cut.

I'm proud to say that I think I can one-up everyone's plasma story, as if it's something I want on my tombstone... Started college in '98 in the Quad Cities, specifically a little school called Marycrest in Davenport, where I donated plasma with my volleyball teammates. A team that practices with gauze pads together, stays together (until your college goes bankrupt and closes). Got booted from the plasma clinic when I got my tongue pierced because I had an "alternative lifestyle" which I took as meaning I was gay, b/c in the midwest in the late 90s that's what a tongue piercing meant I guess. After 6 months of not donating plasma, I was invited back (a nurse actually told one of my teammates the policy had changed and my plasma was taken back with open arms). After my freshman year, I then moved to San Diego to continue playing volleyball at SDSU and lo and behold, after talking to one of my Japanese language classmates found another plasma center to donate to!!! Riding a bike was the only means of transportation I had so the quarter mile uphill climb after donating was always the most fun. I finally stopped donating once I started bartending... that was 7 years ago and I still have the scars from those fat needles.

I went to college in a small town, pretty much surrounded by country. The only employment I could find was at a tanning salon/ Laundromat. Being it was on the very edge of town this is where all the migrant workers were dropped off once a week to wash their clothes. Explaining to them how to do laundry was almost as much fun as having to clean up after 30 of them left. Luckily I worked the tanning end more often than not. But still I had the crazy lady who tried, every month, to get a refund on her month long package because technically she couldn't go an entire month as she couldn't tan during her period.(?) I also had the privilege of catching a man masturbating only to have him say "Please just let me finish! Just sit there til I'm finished!" before he ran out with his pants around his ankles; although truly, that's kind of a story within itself.

Waaaay late but I have to talk about my Worst Job Ever, since I haven't seen it mentioned yet.
My first job was working in a pet store. I didn't mind cleaning out the mice cages or the fish tanks or the reptile tanks. There were only two things that made this job so awful.
First, chinchillas. But, they're so cute, you say? No way man. I love animals, I really do, but FUCK chinchillas. Ten years later and I can still show you the scars where those fuckers bit me.
Second, crickets. We had, as pet stores are wont to do, a supply of crickets in various sizes that customers could buy to feed to their lizards and other reptiles. These crickets were kept in large glass aquariums. My job was to tilt the aquariums up on the smallest side and scrape all of the dead crickets into a giant trashbag. The cricket tanks were full of pieces of egg cartons, the natural habitat of crickets, so I had to shake the egg cartons to make sure all the cricket carcasses came out.
Now, I am five feet tall, so my arms are all stubby and useless for reaching. I had to lean into these tanks to scrape them out, and all the while the still-alive crickets were jumping all over the damn place and CRAWLING ON ME!
But the worst thing about the crickets? The smell. I can't even describe it. It was the kind of smell the comes down your nostrils and sears down your throat like acid and makes you blind. And there was never any getting used to the stench, since it was a cycle of putting my head into the tank to scrape and pulling my head out to breathe.
My second job was almost as bad. I worked at a movie theatre, which thejodester has already pointed out is foul. You would not believe some of the things that people do in theatres. I found used condoms all the time, not suprisingly. Dirty diapers were pretty bad too. The worst inside-the-theatre finding was a used tampon next to a tampon applicator. Seriously, people. IT IS JUST A MOVIE. Go to the bathroom. The worst finding ever was when we discovered that someone had gone into the handicapped stall in the bathroom and smeared feces all over the walls. The floor manager had the balls to tell me that I had to clean it. I laughed in his face and told the house manager, who was a friend of mine, to call the janitorial service.

My worst job I worked at the WB store during the summer of 1997 the year that "Batman and Robin" came out. We had to wear a baseball hat that had bat ears on it along with a batman t-shirt. I was a greeter so every person who came into the store I had to say "Welcome to the Bat Cave" or something like it. I also had to listen to the trailer at least 15 times an hour. Terrible.

been a pajiba reader for quite a while now - maybe 2 years now - and im finally delurking to tell the tale of MY WORST JOB EVER...

at around 15 i had just moved to the US from south africa and my mum and i would do odd jobs to make money... the worst?

PEALING LABELS OFF FLOPPY DISKS

it was weird, i have no idea what it was for and we worked in a cold, damp, dark warehouse - awful, but it paid under the table at a time i was still sort-of illegal :)

maybe weirdest job ever instead?

haha - it took me the whole (crazy Busy) day to read all of these - very poignant and gut busting stuff. I'll be brief:

1. working at the Ontario Place Baseball Hall of Fame, demonstrating my dad's PC computer game Pro Challenge Baseball to the folks kindly directed out of the IMAX theatre and into my face. I had to wear my step-sister's sparkly white spandex Pro Challenge themed baseball uniform and it's a damn shame she was a mammary miracle and I was...90lbs at the time. This had to be in 1986 or 87 because my dad's big competition in the PC games field was Electronic Arts, and I outsold those f*ckers by 82 games that summer. Take that, ya billionaire wonkers. Anyways - I could care less about baseball, the people shuffling past couldn't either, the guys working the hall of fame had minimal exposure to women, and daddy didn't take my advice and work some killer graphics into his game. Statistical genius wasn't as compelling, he found. Also - nobody had a frickin' home P.C. AT ALL. I think I learned right there and then that a cute, polite teenage girl can sell almost anything.

2. designing a pool hall in Surrey BC. I was so broke, and in way over my head, school full time. The guy's brother had 'serious mental and social issues', yet he was the driver. I took over 2000 photographs to make this mega barn of a space cool with a projected imagery ceiling that changed with time of day, with environmental (universe, sky, stars), film and pop-culture themes. I plaster casted my boyfriend and made him a 3d angel in the women's bathroom with marilyn, greta, and bettie page peeking through the wall with hand detialed everything and plaster fingers entering the space. I was the plaster cast for the devil in the mens room with the godfather, walkin, eastwood and other toughies bursting from the barbed wire men's walls.

I died a million, painful, physical deaths on that job, plus they blew my specifications and generally cheaped out on the already miniscule budget. Opening night, the bathrooms were completely defaced, fingers broken, the me-devil 'decorated' with offensive filth, the paint, furnishings and sandblasted glass light fixtures I killed myself on...all replaced by benny's warehouse of comfort crap, very Surrey. Then they pitched a piss fit at my guests opening night because they ordered free pops. Then they failed to pay me and threatened me with the brother. Assholes.

SO GREAT to get those off my chest! Ta pajibans!

The worst job I ever had was as at a deli one summer. My boss was completely crazy, and would scream absenities at me while I was on the phone trying to take orders and put out fires my other co-workers created. I was so disgusted by food that I stopped eating, stopped sleeping. I fell asleep at the wheel of my car and crashed it. After two weeks on crutches and head trauma. They took me back on couldn't understand why I couldn't work ten hour days on bruised bones and peroset.

I forgot about my gig lifeguarding at an apartment complex that I didn't realize was almost entirely Section 8 until I got there. Whatever, I figured, I was a woman of the people. I discovered swiftly that I was, in fact, not a woman of the people. The pools (yes, I was also responsible for a kiddie pool) were crowded from the second I showed up until the second I left. Everybody had a huge attitude with me when I tried to enforce, oh, STATE SAFETY LAWS and the one time I saved some kid (literally a save - would've drowned without me) her father wasn't at all shaken by the incident and sure as hell didn't thank me (I know it was my job, but I think any parent would feel grateful, regardless of who saved their daughter). And the bathrooms. Oh, the bathrooms. I ended up quitting because on a rainy day, when I usually just kind of sat there shivering by myself outside the pool house, some dude who I knew hated me sat right next to me and started sharpening his knife.

It wasn't pretty.

The same young woman who started the summer an open-minded, liberal Smithie ended it thinking "Don't any of y'all have JOBS?!"

You might think it sounds great, but my worst job ever was one where I did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for about three months. New VP wasn't even entrenched enough to need an assistant. I'd ask him things like "What's a 9-letter word for 'malcontent?' Are you SURE you don't have any work for me?" Then I discovered huge hoppers of paper in the hall. Asked around, they said they were thrown away 'cause they were stapled and couldn't be recycled. Desperate, I volunteered to remove the staples so it could be recycled. I got through twenty huge hoppers. Many also had rubber bands so I made a rubber band ball. After about two weeks, they were empty, and the daily additions only took up a few minutes. I started again: 'Watch me solve this Rubik's cube! See how big my rubber band ball is [several inches diameter]? Are you SURE you don't have anything for me to do?" Finally one day he came in, said "Hi, how are you?" and I burst into tears. (Yes, it's true, a person can literally be bored to tears!) Boss asked what was wrong. I said, "I just can't take doing nothing all day like this." He said, "Why didn't you say something sooner?" What part of "can I remove 75,000 staples and make a 1-ft. diameter rubber band ball" wasn't he hearing?!