Pajiba

FIRST!!

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...

My worst job was a one weekend baby sitting stint. I babysat a lot and made good money doing so. This time, I was called by coworkers of my mother's who did not have children. They did however have relatives with children. Said relatives and children were coming into town. I showed up at their house and the adults left with very little instruction. They left me with an infant, a two year old and a five year-old. The infant and five year-old had never before met their cousin (two year-old), never been in this house before, and all were worn out from travelling all day. The two year-old had been abandonned in a strange place with strange people and promptly forgot all his potty training (fortunately on the hardwood floor not the carpeting). None of the kids knew where anything was in the house. The house was not child proofed at all. I was constantly running around, pulling out sharp and dangerous knick knacks out of mouths, trying to protect expensive belongings, cleaning up bodily waste, and trying to find toys, food, anything. Everyone was scared, upset, and frantic, including me. It was exhausting and I'm still amazed I went back for the next two days (they'd hired me for the entire weekend). The kids weren't bad, just the situation was awful. It isn't as bad as many other jobs could have been, I've been blessed in my jobs, but it was memorable.

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.

Worst job ever...for me, it was a summer cleaning and painting on campus, mostly dorm rooms and the men's locker room. The buildings were trashed, OSHA never got anywhere near the paint crew, and said paint crew was composed of three of the most obnoxiously, gleefully misogynistic redneck assholes I've ever met. Oh, and it was hellishly hot the whole time--no air conditioning, no sun protection and we had to provide our own water with the buildings' water being turned off. By fall semester, I was pissing paint thinner and MEK. My short-term memory never quite recovered from the chemical exposure and epoxy paint still makes me twitch.

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.

This is an easy one.

Worst job ever was working as a dishwasher at The Mongolian Grill. Never, in my life, have I had to clean so many bowls...they'd never stop coming. I wouldn't get out of the restaurant until 1:30 am and even then I still had dishes coming in.

The worst by far, however, was cleaning out all the bins full of blood from beef and chicken entrails. However, there was also the sink that always got clogged and would then involve me sticking my arm into elbow-deep dirty, greasy, water filled with the most disgusting things you could imagine and picking out shit from the drain...most notably, pieces of chewing gum and meat fat.

About halfway through I started wearing my bathing suit under my uniform because I would be completely drenched by the end of my shift. I also enjoyed the split shifts I had to work every Sunday. Yeah, those weren't fun.

Worst. Job. Ever.

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 fist 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.

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.

Dustin - I did that in college (damn, they only paid me $40 a week)! I still have track marks in my elbows from it. The worst bit is that I apparently have nice, big veins, so whenever they had a new trainee, I was the one they got to practice on. I also did self-fertilization of corn as part of a research job, which involved spending hours outside in the heat of midsummer getting completely covered in pollen. But my worst job? Kennel cleaner at a vet's in high school. I had to clean up after, walk, and feed boarding dogs during the weekend. There was much dog poo involved, the occasional scary bitey type of dog, dogs that could have dragged me across the field if they'd gotten it into their mind to, since I am not particularly large or strong, and I did I mention I had to clean up vast amounts of dog poo since they never waited til their turn to go outside to do their business?

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?!?

I've had dozens of jobs, ugh, and most of them sucked, but the worst ever was when I worked for the local ARC branch as a Residence Manager. I liked the people I worked with, and the job itself could be very fulfilling, but it was far too stressful for the average college sophomore. I went to school full-time Mondays - Fridays, and I spent the weekends at the residence. I had to provide meals, transportation, medical supervision, and recreation for the 6 residents, some of whom were much bigger than I was at the time (I was 19 and weighed about 102 lbs.) On more than one occasion I got no sleep in that 48-hour period, mainly due to medical emergencies or just because I was so on edge that something could go wrong. By the time I quit, after a year and a half there, I was a complete mess. Frazzled beyond belief.

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.

In Illinois, for our first ever summer style job, it's all about the detassling (corn). you get to ride in a cushy-if-dilapidated jalopy thing, listen to your walkman, get a great tan, and every once in awhile grab one of those tassel-thingies and rip it off an ear of corn. easy, peasy right? well the year I decided to join up, i aparrently did so too early in the year. see before the corn tassels out, you have to go into the rows ON FOOT and use a tiny shovel to weed out the mutant or "rogue" corn stalks, so they DONT tassle, and infect the good corn with their mutant-pollen dna. this is NOT detassling, it is called ROGUE-ING and it is the worst job ever. 8 hours per day inside a cornfield, randomly bludgoning corn stalks to a pulpy death. and this without the privaledge of water or bathroom breaks. just one half hour for lunch. it's a suprise to me i'm even able to eat corn anymore- but the fact that i only worked there 1 day may have some bearing.

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.

It wasn't necessarily my worst job, but it was the weirdest day at my old job.
I worked in a nursing home as an activities assistant. The residents had these green lights outside their rooms they could light from inside when then need something. No one was allowed to walk buy these just in case it was an emergency or something we could do to lighten the nurses loads.
One morning I saw a light of a woman I knew well so I went in and asked her if there was anything I could do for her. Her reply was "I have discovered a yeast infection, and there is a powerful burning in my vagina!"
I almost died, all I could say was I'm sorry and that there was nothing I could do for that. She brushed me off saying that she just needed a new diaper, because someone was bringing her some cream.

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

I worked at a truckstop as a waitress. My uniform was a blue button down shirt that I had to tie under my boobs and a little black tube top item that was supposed to be a skirt. That wasn't really the bad part though, the bad part was the patrons...really, really drunk men who would say things like, "I'll have a banana split with YOUR cherry on top." (that's probably the only SFW thing I can remember) At the time, I was an 18 year old virgin, it taught me to quickly make snappy comebacks. I had to be walked to my car every night by one of the cooks because truckers would be waiting for me to get off of work. It was too creepy to continue working there. My tips were awesome but not worth it.

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.

My worst job was actually the one I just got laid off from, since it was just a soul-crushing office job that nobody wants to hear about. For the sake of being interesting, though, in high school, my parents wouldn't let me get a real job (until I crashed the car), so I basically had to find oddjobs to scrape up some cash to buy CDs and whatever. I mowed a lot of lawns.

The big one, though, was umpiring Little League. First off, the pay was crap - $10 for a two and a half hour game, $15 if you got the plate. More importantly, the kids were just bloody terrible. I'd have to call strikes a foot and a half off the plate just to move the game along eventually. But the absolute worst were the parents. I'm from kind of the sticks, and a lot of the parents thought it was OK to heckle the other team. I actually had to yell at a bleacher full of visiting parents for talking (loudly) about how crappy the players on the opposing team were - these were 8-year olds! And then the coaches would get in my face as if it actually mattered who won these games... Yeah, that was a lot of stress for a Hamilton.

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.

CSR for a clothing store.

You may think that fast food is so much worse. You may have a different opinion after I tell the things that I have seen. I have been run over by a fat 12 year old on a Razor scooter with a 400+ pound mother who threatened me when I told her to remove her child from the scooter. I had the following list of items thrown at my head by pissed customers: Driver's licenses, receipts, plastic bags, clothes, a personal favorite, a used wet swimsuit (women's naturally). I was called pretty much every name under the sun by customers who did not read store policy. I also had a manager who would not back me up half of the time.

This job also involved cleaning dressing rooms. People, I urge you to not step in bare feet in a fitting room. We used to have people steal underwear, clothes, you name it. We also had a person use the bathroom in a fitting room. There was also the used feminine product in another. Finally, there was the men's jeans that were used as a clean up item after a little naughty time in a fitting room. Which myself and my other coworkers got to listen to as they were very, very loud.

I also routinely worked 10-12 hour shifts around that unholy period of time known as Christmas and Back to school shopping. I remember one day after Thanksgiving working a 13 hour shift that was scheduled as 11 hours, without a single break or a lunch. People would leave their screaming, unruly children to stand by my counter and scream, while begging them to "Please stop because mommy doesn't like it when you scream". That little incident occurred during hour number 11 of a 12 hour Christmas eve. I have never been as close to a psychotic break as that day.

In short, retail sucks. Be nice to the poor CSR. It is a horrible job.

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.

"What has little balls and screws old ladies?"

"Bingo!"

That's right, folks. I was a bingo caller. On a cruise ship. Let that sink in. The constant muttering off old ladies. The bitching about the unfair calling. The demanding of money back for cards they thought were unlucky. The utter confusion of how to play the simplest goddamn game ever. And worse of all the stupid jokes I came up with to keep the mind-numbing monotany from killing my soul. "G 44. That's right. G 44. Dolly Parton's favorite number." "O 69. OH YEAH!" And I did it for six months. I have never hated numbers more.

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.

Oh please be the spambot.

I'm praying Trevor is a spambot too

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.

I was a janitor in a old folks home. I am not harshing on seniors on anything, most were super sweet. But men some hit the pervy/dementia stage and I saw a ton of exposed wang. There was also a young cokehead and a 40ish gas sniffer guy who basically turned their brains to mush. It did keep me out of trouble, and I made sure I did well in high school so I didn't end up working there forever.

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

My worst job wasn't as bad as those I'm sure others will post. I was a hostess for a small Italian place in Newtown, PA for one summer. I was 19 years old and working at Eckerd full-time, but every Friday night I would drag my despondent ass to the restaurant, already counting down the minutes to 10:00. There was an older waiter who thought he owned the place who would, when he would see the regular customers who were known to tip well, would seat them himself if I was in the kitchen or seating another party. I had to ring up the checks, take take-out orders, AND make the salads/put soup in containers on top of managing the seating chart.

The worst part was that the owner would ask me to take drink orders if the restaurant was full. I had no bar training and I didn't start drinking until college, and even then my experience with alcohol was limited to Beer My Roommate's Friends Bought Us and Vodka Purchased By Rowdy Penn Staters That Cost $10 For a Handle and Tasted Like Liquid Evil...so imagine when a customer ordered a Beefeater martini up.

Me: "Excuse me, a what?"
Annoyed customer: "Beefeater martini up."
Me: (utterly perplexed) "I'm so sorry...a what martini?"
Irate not as drunk as he would like customer: "BEEFEATER!!! UUUUPPPP!!!"
Me: [can't decide whether to laugh at the term beefeater or run away crying]

Hate.

Thanks for the comic relief Kolby.

worst job - Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I'm still convinced that they hate their employees.

Ana - the most depressing day I have ever worked was Christmas Day at a nursing home. They needed the receptionist to work that day to check in guests as they visited residents. Exactly one family came to visit their relative. And to make the holiday spirit even more present, some of the residents sat in the lounge and stared at the door for hours at a time. Halfway through my shift I wanted to die from depression and decided if I make it to 70 I should just start a dehibilitating heroin habit to avoid elder care. Your story is much funnier.

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.

Having paid my way through college as a waitress, I have a long history of awful restaurant jobs. None, however, compares to the hellish experience that was Tony's Pizza in North Kingston, Rhode Island. I stopped in for dinner one night with some of my URI friends and was offered a job as a waitress. I had already spent most of my savings on alcohol and pot by that point in the year, so I accepted and eagerly showed up for work two days later. Unfortunately, by "waitress," they meant "dishwasher." My job consisted of washing plastic soda cups and nasty french fry baskets, sweeping the floor, and taking out the trash. I highly resented their deceptive hiring practices and this dirty, unglamourous job - which I felt I was far too cute, smart, and personable to do - but due to the aforementioned depleted savings and raging alcohol/pot habit, I had no choice but to keep it.

The worst part of the experience was dealing with this old, cunty hag who waited tables there six nights a week. She NEVER tipped me out at the end of the night and purposely tossed her dirty dishes into the sink in such a way as to splash me with the filthy water. I've never hated anyone with such intensity and it started to turn me into a bad person. One night, she got a phone call that some relative had been killed in a car accident and when she started sobbing, I ACTUALLY smiled to myself...I sometimes still do.

Towards the end of the semester, I had enough and one night, called to order a shitload of pizza and sandwhiches for a party I was hosting. I picked up the food and told them I would pay the next workday and then never returned again.

Fuck you, Tony's Pizza.

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!

I worked at a bar for a while, cleaning bathrooms, washing glasses. It was okay. I liked the owner and the bartenders, I got free drinks and got to hear some fun bands. The only thing that I HATED was cleaning the men's room: Vomit in the urinals (Fellas: CHEW YOUR FOOD!) and toilets clogged with paper towels and diarhea. We had toilet paper in there, why use paper towels?! The women's room was never that bad. I was so happy when I moved up to door bitch--checking ids and taking cover charge.

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.

I once worked customer service at an HMO. We got to do fun things like explaining to people why their live-saving surgery had been disallowed. Or why the shark bite that severed a femoral artery was not considered an emergency situation (You should have gone to urgent care, Sir). And then there was Mr. Blank. Mr. Blank was 73. He wanted a penile implant. So his girlfriend wouldn't leave him. She was only 56 and had needs. So Mr. Blank called us 8-10 times a day. Screaming. "I want my penis fixed now!"

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.

I have been a waitress, a janitor, a receptionist at an old folks' home and an assistant in a college police department (drunk frat boys ahoy!), but NONE of those compare to the trauma I experienced when I worked for one week at a small, locally-owned computer repair shop. It was in post-flood Grand Forks, North Dakota back in the late 90's, and it smelled like death...instead of tearing down the building after it had flooded, they left it standing and attempted to clean it out without removing any drywall. God knows what was growing and/or rotting in those walls. Some days the smell got so bad, we had to light cinnamon-scented candles all over the shop to cover it up. Combine the smell with the backwards, misogynist farmer customers ("Honey, where da men at? I have a computer question"), and the tech who cornered me and tried to grab my tits after closing the shop one night, and I was outta there.

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.

My worst job was doing data entry in a warehouse at a semi-conductor company. I sat in a cubicle that I shared right above the warehouse floor where tools and what not were constantly crashing around. The sound was deafening. Also, the woman I worked under was absolutely terrifying. I never even had the courage to ask her where the bathroom was.

The best part, however, was one of my first days there before I had an official workspace and I was just working on a laptop in the corner of the conference room. One day there were 5 or 6 engineers in the room with me going over blue prints of some sort when an alarm started sounding and the lights started flashing. A man ran to the door and yelled at the guys in the room "The core is down!" All of the men in the room instantly jumped up and ran out the door, leaving me behind to try and figure out what kind of core shut down and if I was in any danger.

I didn't stay at the job for very long.

2 words: Olive Garden

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

While I did love the job overall, I worked night desk at my dorm at UMiami. I got paid fantastically well for a job that was 80% staring at my computer and wishing people goodnight. The other 20%, though, was the sloppy drunk girls that were spoiled brats who would call me every name under the sun because I asked to see their UM ID (required to get into the dorms after 10pm), parents who would give me shit for not letting them into the building without their student/resident there to accompany them, drunk boys trying to pick me up and/or play with my radio and the inevitable fire alarms or other emergencies.

And the days when I would go for about 48 hours on 5 hours of sleep. Hey, if you can't do it when you're 20 when can you?

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.

Blockbuster Video for 6.10 an hour. After a year they gave me a raise, my first, despite the fact that they were supposed to give me two before hand.

The raise was for ten cents.

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

Jen--I totally sympathize on the "Where da men at." Though my job was in a "progressive" midwestern city at a car repair shop. "Da men" may know how to fix shit, but I know the prices, chump. Luckily the repair guys were awesome, once they figured out that I wasn't a pushover.

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".

Selling Ginsing Gum at Kung Fu Conventions.
Ya.
For serious.

The best part about a Kung Fu Convention is that along with the ACTUALLY good participants that come from all around to do some very cool stuff, you have the odd Chuck Norris hangers-on. The ones that 'taught themselves' the Kung Fu. The "see this scar? I got that form punching rocks in Mr. Wu's Temple for 14 hours a day" guys.

So I sat at a table and hawked the Ginsing gum, which tated like utter crap, and watched white guys from places like Oroville, Concrete, and Wilmanette try to speak Chinese and get into the perfect 'Praying mantis Shoulin fighting monkey' stance.

Allthough I did meet The Beastmaster. Ya. How lucky am I?

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.

Genny (also Rusty), night desk reception was awesome! I was a horrible employee (I'm a soft touch for a sob story) but I quit after all but one set of dorm building keys went missing, so it was a subpar job for a subpar employer.

Easy money, though.

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!

I'm rolling here Mella.

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.

Genny (also Rusty): I did that! My favorite wildly inappropriate drunk guy come-on: "You wanna see my bulldog?" It actually referenced a tatoo of a bulldog right next to his junk. Yeah.

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.

Ugh, the one I am supposed to be doing RIGHT NOW...it's a home business staffing agency, placing nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Basically telemarketing and cold-calling, which i already knew I hated. At least I only have 3 more days of it, yays!!!! Even the night desk reception at my dorm was better than this crap! I am on pajiba and gossip sites every chance I get.

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.

It wasn't really a job... although I did get paid for... Nevermind. Can't do it. Nope... It's not that I was hurting for dough either, which makes the whole friggin' mess that much more... (justfuckintellemdammit) I... I was the on-set fluffer for Vincent Gallo on... on the closing scene on "The Brown Bunny". I'm not proud of it, so don't hate...

WORST JOB EVER. And he never even called me back...

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 used to work in this family owned microfilming company. there was so much drama and nepotism in that place, i don't know why i stayed so long. i had to sit in front of this machine and feed pages of medical documents into it one by one by one. it was boring, repetitive and mindnumbing. it didn't help that the nicotine/diet coke addicted slags surrounding me were gossiping bitches whose sole purpose in life was to make everyone not related to them miserable.

what made it worse was the fact that they wore flip flops year-round. if you are going to show your feet, take care of the damn things. i don't want to see your scaly feet and your yellowed half-painted toenails. if these women buffed the dead skin off of their heels they would have easily lost two inches in height. i shudder thinking about those nasty things. it's called lotion. use it.

eventually, i brought my headphones in and tuned their asses out. of course, they took offense to this. yeah, my rocking out to they might be giants rather than gossiping over petty bullshit so i could concentrate on work was a personal attack on them. ugh. i'm sorry but i have better things to do than listen to how your daughter accidentally got pregnant...again. it's called birth control. use it.

some of my co-workers were not very trustworthy and shady (ahem, crackheads), yet had easy access to personal information: social security numbers, addresses, credit card receipts, phone numbers, prescriptions, etc. it is scary to think about it. i mean, do you know where your medical documents are?

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

Skittmus - Oh. My. God.

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

Funniest. Fucking. Thing. Ever!

My God, these are hilarious.

Melody--retail is the worst. Which is why I'm always super-nice to any clerk in retail, and why I can't walk into a Meijer's without wanting to throw up. So many bad, bad memories...

I bused tables for a while, which included cleaning the restrooms, something I think every person should have to do at some point in their life. I still remember the time someone dropped a USED maxi pad into the little metal boxes they had in each stall, WITHOUT wrapping it in anything first, and I had to reach in deep with my hands and peel it off. Thanks, you thoughtless bitch, wherever you are.

This was also my first job, in which sheltered little me from the suburbs was introduced to the real world. My co-worker asked if I had any kids. "God, no!" I said. "I'm only 17!" So was she, and she had two.

I decided to try for another job at a local greenhouse potting plants. I envisioned myself sitting on a stool in a sunlit corner, gently coaxing little plants into their new containers and smiling serenely as I watered them. In reality, you sat on a hard metal stool that had my back screaming for mercy within an hour, in front of a conveyor belt as trays of seedlings went by, and you grabbed as many as you could and stuffed them into slightly larger trays. We weren't given gloves and while I don't mind a little dirt, having hands so dirty that I could have sowed crops in them was a bit much. And apparently every single woman there was a high school dropout who had spent time in prison. Conversation revolved around length of time served, what they were charged with, and how much their lawyer screwed them. Someone commented on how quiet I was, but it wasn't like I could contribute anything. I went home at lunch and quit over the phone.

Which is why I'm so thankful for my current job, which involves working in a lab, shut off from the public, with nice, non-felon coworkers and comfy seats. So what if people in my line of work have a life span 15 years shorter than the average? It's worth it.

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

You people are fucking kidding me, right? Waitressing? Dishwasher? Retail? Puh-lease.

Try garbage truck driver. I did that for a summer while in college.

Or how about the summer that I was downgraded to Sewer Truck Driver. What we not-so-fucking-affectionately called, "The Shit Truck". Anytime someone's septic tank backed up, or there was any kind of sewage problem, I was your man.

I will not discuss the things I saw. Or smelled. It... it changed me.

shudder

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.

Thankfully, he was sleeping/drunk. I'm not exactly sure on how the law works when it comes to exposing half-developed, turkey-clawed, conjoined twins to things as disturing as Gallopecker, but I'm pretty sure they'da thrown my ass in the joint.

Actually, I'm surprised Gallo didn't bump Sevigny outta the scene and have Minimus do the business... In which case I woulda had to find the nearest chainsaw and have myself a twenty-six pound dead-weight diet. Geeesh.

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.

Seriously, I am choking from laughter here. These are some truly heinous jobs. I'm hearing about falling in shit, getting hit with garbage can lids, bingo craziness, and selling gum....you guys are troopers.

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.

I worked at a movie theater in high school. Now, I know what you're thinking -- free movies whenever you want? who could beat that! -- but it was no picnic. I worked there during the period of time when Titanic was out, so I got to hear Celine Dion warbling about her heart going on every time the movie let out. Aside from that torture, the boss was an Italian-Stallion type who had married one of the concession girls. He blew a fuse when an assistant manager and I were on the walkie-talkies when I was in the ticket booth and his wife came to see a show; admittedly, I was pointing out which one his wife was to the manager, but he didn't know that. To top it all off, he had the gall to accuse me of stealing. Asshole.

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."

Let me guess, frumple,, UGA?

But night desk (we called it "security" but as a 5'4" ridiculously skinny girl when I tell people I worked security they laugh till they weep) was awesome. I was at that job for 2 years, and I've never had to work food service.

However, I am now an unapologetic misanthrope.

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.

I love you guys! My nightmare job just doesn't seem so bad any more.

I always try to be nice to wait staff, hotel cleaning staff, telemarketers, and customer service representatives because I know I couldn't do those jobs without losing my mind.

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.

Skittimus, OK, please tell us what Chloe was thinking - or was she drunk as well?

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...

Being an "art consultant" working at a bullshit Thomas Kinkade Lightpost Gallery and dealing with the vapid, self-absorbed buyers who would come in and wax poetic about how visionary this walking fuckrag is. I have a bit of advice for anyone who thinks his stuff is good art. I can do the same shit with a paint-by-numbers book, taking half the time, and being about 1 billion times less preachy. The only message that should be conveyed with his type of 'art', much like paint-by-numbers, is that 1. you can color within the lines. 2. You've been sleeping in a big-boy bed for at least a year. 3. You only pick your nose when no one is looking now. 4. You no longer regularly and willingly shit your pants. That part of your life is under control. Fuck...i hated that place. It almost makes me hemmorage rectally just thinking about it right now.

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

apart from the marvelous baby sitting experience with the devil's spawn I once talked about in here (the girl was and is, I assume, pure evil. after I stopped babysitting her she started going to school, where she once brought the body of the kitten she killed with her bare hands, oh yeah, I still have nightmares she will come back for me, michael meyers style) but I was also was for a summer not long ago a night consierge in a hotel.
At the beginning I thought it was the best job ever since the place was mainly occupied by old grumpy people, which means everyone would be in bed by 10 pm and I could stay up watching movies all night. But I was living in the place, in freaking hot rooms right under the roof, in a room with no lock. and no tends, I could barely sleep during the day and got often woke up by the staff walking in by mistake, I then had to share the tiny ass room with a friend who was also working there, 2 bed could barely feat, not fun. I started losing my mind working there and losing weight and got grumpier and grumpier with anyone who wasnt a client. the old ladies there loved me so much they started staying up until late. once until 1 am!!! and they were in the seventies!!! It wasnt bad when we were sharing our mutual love for joseph cotten and gregory peck it went pretty fast down hill when they started saying that "partisans where butchers and when nazi occupied rome and florence it wasnt all that bad cause they would tell you before hands if they were going to kill you and they kept the cities soooooo clean" I clearly got pretty grumpy with them too I was done by the end of the summer and my sleep is still fucked up from the experience. Also this kind of sick ideas are clearly becomin pretty pupular over here, so no surprise italy is back being the sucky country we were back then. home sweet home.

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.

Well let's see my worst job is a bit of a tie between either a high school or college summer job.

High School is the short one, I grew up in a small tourist town in Pennsylvania that had one of the highest gay-straight ratios in the country, which in all honesty you'd have to be a serious asshole to care, however the only summer job I was able to find the summer after my Junior year was at a family toy store that had originally opened in the 1970's innocently as "Toys For Men" however 30 years later it tended to mislead people as exactly what was for sale... that was an interesting summer for sure.

One of my last summers in college I was working at a roadside farmer's market/fish stand, stupid idea to begin with because I hate fish. So the 4th of July roles around and I'm scheduled for a 12 hr shift so I'm pissed to begin with. Three hours into the day the owner calls out sick from the fish market, so I get transferred in to cover for her in the store and to go pick up fish from the market. One of the fish I was set to pick up was a 60lbs Halibut, mind you previously to this I hadn't handled a dead fish larger than a goldfish in my life. Now said Halibut wasn't packaged or wrapped in anyway, in fact the only preparation that had been done to it was the removal of the head. I managed to choke down the first few dry heaves and throw the Halibut on top of the Salmon . But as I came to the stop sign at the entrance to the fish market the Halibut slid forward hitting the back of the passenger seat neck hole first, and then started sliding off of the salmon boxes towards the door of the van. Being a good little, naive, employee I ran around the van and slid open the door to rearrange things, opening the door was apparently all the motivation the Halibut needed to start trying to fall out of the van altogether. I quickly grabbed the tail and not thinking or looking reached for the head and ended up with my right arm more than wrist deep inside the Halibut... and that children is the story of how uncle Alex fisted a fish, it was not a good day. That's also the job that because one of the high school students threw out a customer's debit card, I got to search through garbage bags that had been in a dumpster for about a week in August.

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

Skittimus Maximus: I am sorry that people were rude to you. I don't understand that at all. I take very good care of the people who deliver food to my house because I am a lazy pig who appreciates not having to go out for food. (It usually means I have to wear a bra--ugh.)

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.

But PissBoy, Kinkade's paintings change when the light changes...like magic! That gives them meaning!! He's a modern day Magritte!!

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

That is all.

Last summer I left a pretty decent job to pursue a better opportunity with another company. After two weeks that said company let me go with no explations. Those commie bastards!!!!

I ran into an old friend from highschool shortly after all this occured. She told me her work was hiring and she could guarantee me a job. I was so excited. The pay was slightly modest, but I was in a lower tax bracket so it didn't necessarily matter. This company booked interpreters for Medical appt's, court trials and other things of that nature. They hired me under the premise that I would be either a "booking coordinator" or "customer service". Um yeah, they made me their office bitch. All I did was fax, file, fax, file, and call to remind the interpreters of their appt's.

Needless to say I was more then vehemently mad. They hired me under false pretenses to start. Not to mention the system that they operated was so completely archaic and ridiculous. They were creating useless work for people. If only they implemented a few changes the whole operation would run much more smoothly.

Then there was the manager. A complete idiot. It would take her up to 5 mins to spew one sentance out of her mouth. I nickednamed her "Stating the obvious" because thats all she did. After a month of trechary I started to look for another job. I wanted to walk out on the job so badly. But my friend worked there so I had to respect that. I gave them a weeks notice.

But I told the manager that she was absolutely insane and that for future reference she shouldn't hire people under false pretenses. If she was upfront with people about the position she probably wouldn't go through so many workers. I asked her is she was insane. She asked me what I meant, and I said. "To take someone with my experience and resume, you must be completely maniacal to make them the office bitch". LOL, she didn't talk to me my whole last week there!

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.

I still have my worst jobs ahead of me, I'm afraid (only 23), but the worst so far was working as a "Marketing Associate" for a company that marketed Medicare Advantage plans to seniors. Basically I was a telemarketer trying to get seniors to switch from Original Medicare to a Medicare advantage plan. I won't go into too much detail, but the whole business is a somehow-legal scam. My grandmother had gotten suckered by an agent into getting on one of these things, not realizing that her doctor did not accept the plan and that her meds weren't covered by it. That's negligence, folks. My mom had to chew out people in six states to get Nana's old medicare coverage back in her name. Naturally, my folks were not wild about me working at this place.

I only took the job because no one else was calling for interviews, and the pay was $12/hour to start, and I thought it would be inbounds only. I could handle answering questions all day, no problem. You could also sit and read while waiting for calls. But then the bosses said we couldn't read anymore, which, you know, fine, because they aren't paying us to read. But then they started an outbound campaign: hooked into an auto-dialer, you call people and read the same spiel about what the plan offers, and usually they say no thanks or ask for something in the mail to look at as they make their decision. Or, they would hang up on you outright, or scream at you, or not even hear you at all, and just bellow "What?!" into your ear. This goes on, back to back, every ten seconds or so. Of course, the bosses don't want you to just mail stuff, they want you to get them to call back and talk to an agent in five minutes. You have to get them to call back, and if you don't, it counts against your performance. You are successful if you get someone to call back for an agent or successfully transfer someone to an agent off an inbounds call.

A further injustice: three Marketing associates had their phones set on inbounds-only, denying almost everyone else the opportunity to receive and inbounds call. These three people made the most transfers, which of course makes them the most valuable employees. How did they get this privilege? They forgot to turn on their outbound button on the first day, racked up all the inbounds calls, and were just told to do that every day, because supposedly the system didn't work as well if everyone was on outbound and inbound equally.

I quit after two months, mostly because of the outbound campaign, but also because the management kept going back on their earlier word. They were also disorganized as hell. Any announcement was contradicted five minutes later. And the corporate bullshit! My god! I got so tired of management assholes looking over my shoulder as I was on the phone and shoving pages of rebuttals under my hands. Also, the CEO was the most oily and creepy-looking jerk I ever laid eyes on. And below him, so many managers and bosses that too this day I don't know the name of my actual supervisor. They also said they had a system in place so no one would be fired when the annual enrollment period (our busiest time) ended. Yet, when I left near the end of that period, I was told I was doing them a favor by leaving earlier and making one less person to evaluate and fire. Temping, in all its inconsistent glory, was by far more preferable than working for those fuckers.

Blargh, the mere memory of that hole is making me angry.

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.

I think it's why I am such a disillusioned grump still to this day about Christmas.

Elvis' "Blue Christmas" makes me nine kinds of homicidal to this day.

I did forget to mention the moron girl who thought dollar coins were "monopoly" money who was a cashier and her best friend, who so pleasantly asked me what "amount due" meant, who was not allowed to be a cashier due to lack of one intelligent brain cell that worked there.

To the person who worked at Bed, Bath and Beyond, I worked for the competition for a while. Linens and Things wasn't terrible. Maybe I feel this way simply because the 4 years of combined clothing retail was so bad. People just don't get as pissed off in one of those stores.

Two words:

Brown's Chicken.

Ah, MG, I too have had the joy of the Olive Garden servanthood. I popped in there four years after I had left their employ to buy gift cards for my sister (hey, I'll still eat their food, the kitchen was clean, I just won't do the "unlimited" thing to the waitress or that many carbs period), and the bartender who sold the gift cards was the same one from my days of working their. I felt bad, so bad, and so glad of my shiny new diploma and non-food related job.

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.

I didn't do too bad with high school jobs, your run of the mill family business (never seeing daylight or kids my own age, palest I've ever been after a summer break) and working in restaurants (a little bit of mild sexual harassment never hurt anyone?).

I think the worst my be my current 2nd job. I am a barista at a lovely establishment that rhymes with Barshucks. Heart of the city, near a couple of colleges, symphony halls, shopping destinations, and baseball field.

Our store has a homeless problem. I have never seen such abuse of a public bathroom, blatent stealing, or endured so much crazy speak. They bring in flasks to get lit and yell at customers, light up while inside, threaten to shoot/rob us, crack their heads open 2 minutes before close, etc.

Our customers possess an astonishing amount of self entitlement.

"I dropped my frappuccino on the ground yesterday before I got to finish it. Don't you guys have a discount for that?"

In the interest of keeping things short, I'll cut this off now.

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.

Also Kinkade drunkenly heckled Sigfried and Roy.

NEVER FORGET.

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

Cleaning Lady. For a rental property company. That rented exclusively to college students. Students signed a year lease, never cleaned once. So every August I'd have 1 or 2 days before the next tenants came in to make the house sparkle.

One house had dried-on old cheese stuck EVERYWHERE. Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, front door. Fucking cheese. There was a cheese orgy, and I got to be the mop-jock.

Do you realize how much pubic hair accumulates in a bathroom over 12 months? I went home every night with a complete stranger's pubic hair stuck all over my body. My boyfriend was convinced I was cheating.

Only advantage was that I got to keep anything I found. 1 diamond earring, two 5lb dumbbells, a handful of crappy CDs, and the best of all, several half-full bottles of alcohol to drink away the humiliation.

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.

And another reason why my degree was worthless:

I was an Animated Character at a theme park. Which meant I had to dress up as Woody Woodpecker, Popeye, or Sam I Am and dance for the little kiddies. Sounds fun, right? Hell the fuck no. First of all, I was in FLORIDA. That's right. 100-degrees-in-the-motherfucking-shade-in-winter Florida. Dressed from head to toe in fur, padding, clothes, and a huge plastic and latex head that was strapped to my skull. And don't believe the hype that there are ac units in those things. Oh no. And to make matters worse, the people that visit theme parks aren't saints. They are a bunch of lazy fuckers who thought it was hilarious that their kids are trying to beat up Popeye, or yank off Woody's beak (which was attached to my head, ya fuck!). They felt that since they had paid their $50, they didn't have to wait in line for pictures; hell, they can just storm the characters. I must have had to go to the hospital six times that summer. Either for heat exhaustion (I'm not a pussy; those costumes were fucking HOT!) or for a wrenched spine or neck (little bastard spawns of Satan). All of that for less that 8 bucks an hour. Damn.

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.

Also Kinkade drunkenly heckled Sigfried and Roy.

NEVER FORGET.

:laughs my ass off:

My best friend's mother has a Kinkade print hanging in their kitchen, we find GREAT amusement in mocking it when the suns starts to set. "Look Boot (her nickname)...the painting is changing, oooooh!"

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.

"Patient Escort" (not nearly as amorous and glamorous?? as it sounds):
It was the late 1980's. The hospital and clinic in my tiny town were attached by hallways/walkways. I would escort patients from their hospital rooms to their various appointments with specialists over in the clinic building, mostly because they were elderly and it was basically a labyrinth (with a cafeteria!). That part wasn't so bad. It was carrying the tissue samples and specimens from the clinic down to the lab in the creepy basement that was gross, especially for a rather silly 16 year-old. Looking back, there is no way administrators would now let a dopey teenager put on latex gloves and haul bone marrow cores, moles, nasty vaginal wet preps, and various chunks of flesh down to the Pathology Dept. Even when safely floating in formalin, those specimens were freaky ("Ugggh. . Look! There's a hair sticking out of this mole!" or "Hey, that wide excision looks just like Abe Lincoln"). Yep, I've seen pee in every color AND carried it to the lab. Of course, I now periodically fret over how many viruses I've been exposed to. . . not the best job for a germaphobe.

Lilianna, I am crying I am laughing so hard.

i spent a good three years of my life working weekends at an extreeemely swanky hotel on the banqueting team. bearing in mind that this was just a pocket money job, that i was in full time education and should have been studying for a levels etc...they worked us 12 hour days, so out of my 48 hr weekend i worked half of them:

-starting at two in the afternoon, laying tables for 300 guests, serving champagne for 300 guests, serving dinner, packing it all away so they can dance drunkenly away whilst we polish 900 plates (if it's a cheapo wedding with only 3 courses), 4 glasses per guest (count 'em people!) plus cutlery to set it up for the next day - but of course you had to wait for everyone to leave before we could do that!
-dinner break of twenty minutes, which we couldn't take until the party had finished dinner, as (lucky us) our dinner was the leftovers...no leftovers...no dinner
-paid less that minimum wage and of course no tips as...well who tips at weddings? everyone is there for free booze!

i remember one summer i worked four fifteen hour shifts on the trot, and fainting in the corridor to the side if the banqueting hall. also, so hot one week my feet SWELLED UP in my shoes and i still have the scars! yay!

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.

Melody: thanks, I'm still just CRYING :)

This wasn't a bad job, far from it, BUT it was hilarious: I worked for Bill Kurtis, Mr. A&E, at this tiny educational company. Meetings would start with the "Bill Kurtis phone message" where we'd listen to a raunchy joke that Mr. Kurtis had left on our boss's phone or some other random thing.

I met the man in an elevator one day- there was a commercial being shot and a model was dressed up like a cheerleader. She gets off the elevator and Mr. Kurtis turns to my co-worker and says "There are two outfits I love on a woman. Cheerleading Outfits, and Little Bo Peep Costumes." IN THE VOICE, people. He walks out and we pissed our pants laughing.

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.)

Trouble, I feel your pain. For you see, I was my college mascot all four years of college. I went to the football, basketball, baseball, volleyball games, and just about anything else, and shook my ass. High Fives, thumbs up, pictures and little kids.

Worst of all, I did it for free. There was honor being the official university Mascot. Plus there are some great stories there.

@ 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.

well shit, Masey, you didn't mention the GATORADE fountain at the beginning of your post? I'm with your dad you whiner.

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 for the Child Support Agency (UK) was one of the worst (and yet, the longest running) jobs I've ever held down.

I started when I was 18, with a week's basic computer training, dealing with extremely upset, angry, frustrated and often suicidal people. By the time I left I too was extremely upset, angry and frustrated, though thankfully not suicidal. Every time my current job starts to suck I cast my mind back and suddenly feel like I have the best job on earth.

Then there was the job where my sole function was to photocopy drawings and then file them. For eight hours a day. Scintillating.

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.")

Masey, I had to deal with "princess" comments as well. I worked at the car dealership during summers between college where my dad was the service director; I would file the stacks and stacks of folders for each service and parts job that came in. The files were situated right behind the service writers' desks and went from the ceiling to the floor. So there was a lot of squatting as I would files those on the lower levels...I was always cognizant of the mechanics standing behind me and, ahem, how low my shorts would go when bending over, so I'd try to wait until nighttime to file the lower shelves.

To my horror my brother-in-law (who worked as a mechanic) told me that one of the mechanics' favorite topics of conversation was what color underwear I had on. Gah.

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.

My best friend used to work for the FAA - transcribing "black box" communications. She had to quit after a crash, where after typing out the random chatter between the pilot and the control tower somewhere, there was just, silence. Freaked her out. Couldn't do it anymore.

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.

Long time lurker first time commenter: My worst job is a tie between handling/sorting clothes at Goodwill or being an assembly line temp at a razor factory. The Goodwill job was horrible because half the time the clothes were soiled with human waste(mostly sweat and piss) and I had to buy my own gloves. Of course the back room had no ventilation or anything so the overpowering stench of failure gave me daily headaches. I lasted about a week. The razor factory job was bad because I was stuck in a factory filled with middle aged women and I was the only one who spoke English aside from the line manager. I was equipped with a ridiculous hairnet, gloves, and neon colored foam earplugs and even in that get up I still managed to get hit on by the middle aged men working the machines. The only plus side was I got many free razors.

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.

I've pretty much had all of your terrible jobs.

Seasonal retail? Check. At Barnes and Noble. In the Grove. I served Melanie Griffith, Sharon Stone, Justin Long, Paris Hilton, and various other celebrities.

Had a woman come in one Christmas asking for the new Terry Goodkind book "Pillars of Power". I said, "You mean, the Pillars of Creation. She said, No. He wrote the Pillars of Power. I want it on audiotape. I handed her the box. She looks at me and says, "This is not what I asked for." I said, "But this IS the new Terry Goodkind." She gets in my face and says, "YOUNG MAN, you are NOT listening to ME. He WANTS the PILLARS of POWER." I said, "Then he's going to have to WRITE IT HIMSELF. IT DOESN'T EXIST." Then I excuse myself to the back room.

Waiter? Check. Worked at the Ground Round. While working at the Barnes and Noble. NEVER AGAIN.

Carny? Check. When you go to festivals, and see that shady looking clown doing face painting and making balloon animals? It's ME. When your kids scream and cry because that want you to pay $5 to make a friggin bottle full of colored sand. ME. When they fight you because they want to spend $3 to play a game and win a crappy dollar store plastic toy, IT'S ME. I had a woman scowl at me and ask me how I sleep with myself at night. I said, "On a big pile of your money. Keep walking, toots." It was all the more funny because I was wearing a giant foam cowboy hat at the time.

But the keeper is this current job. My job does not exist in the real world, but an alternate dimension in hell. My company cleans grocery carts and shopping equipment. I applied for data entry. My boss told me to tell the temp agency that the interview went poorly so he could hire me on the side without paying their fee. I should have known then.

Not only am I an executive adminstrative assistant for one of the most odious human beings in the world, but criminally so. When two of our crewmen got stranded on the side of the road when the truck they were driving broke down, he docked them pay because they weren't actually working. A man who paid off the people who work in the front office and brought in friends from his tennis club to fake that we had a larger operation. He hired our fucking cleaning lady's daughter to pretend to be our secretary. Who will spend $200 to stay at a hotel but not shell out $35 to reimburse us for a lunch meeting when he kicked us out of our workstations when faking the larger office. A man who fired one of our co-workers on a Friday afternoon after he had secretly hired a replacement and had been training him in another office for three weeks prior. Who tells me on a constant basis how replacable I am. Who suggested that $75 should be good enough to pay for individual health insurance coverage. Who insists we shred every document. We clean fucking grocery carts.

My only salvation is that I am currently turning this into the most vicious screenplay I've ever written.

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.

I was a porter at the Sports Arena, basically like a janitor. They seriously told me that they were hiring me just because I filled out the entire application, which was probably some sort of warning sign. I would have to walk around and refill toilet paper in the bathrooms, sweep up peanut shells and popcorn, but that wasn't the bad part. I would have to take mops up into the stands whenever anyone spilled pop or beer, and I would have to take a yucky mop and mop the liquid up while spectators screamed at the hockey games around me. Though, in hindsight, and compared to some of the other entries, this was pretty mild. I once had to sweep up someone's throw up, at a Godsmack concert. Besides the indignities of working, the uniform was a very ugly blue sweatshirt and trucker hat combo, we got to have a hot dog every shift, but I never wanted the yucky hot dogs, and two of my co-workers looked exactly like Jay and Silent Bob. I never went back the next season.

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...

I was a waitress at Shoney's Big Boy while I was in high school. Since I was in school, I just worked Friday nights and Saturdays all day. The restaurant was in a shopping mall and my area had blue laws at the time, so I didn't have to work Sundays. If it had been freestanding the hours would have been a whole lot worse. The cooks were psychotic; I wouldn't have been surprised if one had come in and started shooting. I was cleaning up one night after closing and had a tray full of half-empty catsup bottles on my tray. I stepped in a wet spot and went flying ass over teakettle. Of course, the catsup went everywhere. It looked like a battlefield.I wrecked my car going home after working the Thanksgiving weekend, so I had to quit because of no transportation. I was unemployed for several months (living at home as my parents' dependent) until a Hardees opened in my small town, and I got a job there as counter help. The work was probably just as hard, but I didn't have to depend on tips.

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!

oh yeah, Diablo?!? SANDWICH ARTIST, alright, and boss had sexy time in the freezer! That's... well.. yeah. You win.

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

I also know that I should spell check my posts. But I don't.

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.

Diablo, my fianace hated the navy so much he ducked out on his obligatory post-tour service and lived off the grid for several years to avoid prosecution. He eventually got it all squared away--they told him he was no longer eligible for benefits and could never serve in any branch of US armed forces (as if he would want to).

God, diablo, I'm sorry.

I was a funeral home telemarketer, calling the elderly to sell them cemetery plots, caskets, and funeral services. I lasted half an hour.

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.

High school music teacher. That job sucked my soul and spat it out in chunks that took years to rebuild. I'd rather wash dishes at a summer camp again, as I did summer of my freshman year in college, than go back to teaching high school music.

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 pubi