What was your worst job ever? I had my fair share. 1. Korean boss - enough said. This was a stint during high school and I was being paid under the table, below minimum wage. Basically, you were expected to work without any breaks and was discouraged from being a social human being. Boss was really cheap and would chastise anyone for making too many copies, among other things. I was basically the boss’s dirty rag. However, this wasn’t my WORST job. 2. Worst. job. ever. I could probably have a real lawsuit against this one company I worked for and cash in some serious $$$. Don’t want to get into details, but it’s a small somewhat-known company, and I will never EVER buy any of their services. EVER. So unethical and inhuman. It was actually a few people in particular that worked there and one of the heads that made it hell. Insulting pay, insulting ethics, just insulting and dirty period. This job taught me how cruel life could be, and because of this lesson, I learned how to succeed and advance quickly (with keeping my morals intact). Interestingly, I later saw one of the witches of the wild west up around my area. Small world - this is exactly why I am always professional even if the other person screws with me. How about you?
What were your positions at these places? Worst job ever? Not an official job I suppose but in junior high I did yardwork for extra cash during the summer. One of my Dad’s friends took full advantage of this and hired my brother and I out at $5.00 an hour to landscape and haul beauty bark around his house. He had a nice house on about 2 acres of waterfront property. A huge yard and enormous barked areas… the guy was an absolute slave driver. In his mind he must have thought he hired two full grown men and not two 12 y/o’s … it was absolutely brutal work pushing whellbarrow after overloaded wheelbarrow of moist, hot beauty bark around his property. After a few weeks the smell of beauty bark actually began to make me sick. Even today the smell brings back horrible memories.
Worked for a start up “distressed company consulting firm” with a boss who hated every labor law pertaining to EDD regulations, paid “salary” but deducted hourly for drs appointments, etc. Expected you to come in early and stay late and find work to do, lied to every new colleague, veteran sales guys left in a month. Stiffed me and 2 friends who left after me out of commissions, withheld money for payroll taxes from the EDD so I threatened to sue. Thats why my number 1 criteria for any new job is leadership. Good experience though as every time I look at a new job I know it cant possibly be worse than that one.
My worst job had to be as an intern at a medical billing company the summer before starting college. I was compensated $8.00 an hour to literally transcribe handwritten applications into a computer database. Many of the patients were from lower-income families, some of whom presumably had fairly low literacy levels. I’d literally go through 100-200 of these applications 8 hours a day, just reading people’s handwriting and entering them into this proprietary database so that the healthcare administrators could determine the bare minimum level of reimbursement they could provide to these Medicaid patients. Luckily, I can type over 150 words per minute, which helped boost my efficiency level. Unfortunately, the company had very strict hourly requirements – basically down to the minute – so I had to clock in by exactly 9AM and leave no earlier than 5PM every day, or else I’d risk my job security there. As such, no matter how quickly I could type, there’s no way I would be able to leave work early, even if there was absolutely nothing to do there. Moreover, there was no outside access to internet or e-mail. Lastly, because many of the patients had low literacy levels, I often spent copious amounts of time just trying to decipher what they wrote, only to realize that they had written their “address” in the “disease/condition” section or that they had put “other” as the gender of their kids. The people were generally OK to work with, except that a number of them had major chips on their shoulder because they knew I was going to a top university (even though I myself never advertised this). They basically ensured that a “young gunner” like me was given all the scud work, though in their defense I can’t envision too much work that actually required much thought or analysis. On the plus side, there was one guy from the Dominican Republic named Collin that I always hung out with, because he was one of few people there that had a sense of humor and literally came into work high every day, or otherwise intoxicated to a level where he was unable to perform his work responsibilities seriously. Then, there was this other lady who was really hot – I’m not sure what she did for the company, but she looked really good and did provide me with one indispensable piece of advice: “Congratulations on college! That’s so great…you’re going to have the time of your life. But just remember, the most important thing that you have to do while you’re in college is to get a major.” (?!) There are very few moments in my life where I’m utterly speechless, but that was one of them. Anyway, fortunately I only had to work four days a week at this job, and I was only there for six weeks. After that, I went to get my four wisdom teeth extracted and took a few “sick days,” and didn’t end up returning to work. My first summer job taught me a lot of things; most importantly, it helped me realize that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working for $8 an hour at a medical billing company and being told that the best thing I could do in college was to get a major.
^LOL! That is classic Numi, but I think I take the cake - I’m taking some master’s classes for fun and am part of the first cohort. Because of this, they had to lower their standards to meet the class size requirement. Some of the backgrounds: person 1: Hi, my name is ___. I graduated from University of Phoenix. person 2: Hi, I graduated from Everest College. … Does this really happen in real life? F- me!
lol. you guys are all amateurs. My first summer back from college, I was living with my crazy mother who was hounding me to get a job. At the time, I had long hair, so the only thing I could land was work through a friend with this ‘contractor’. I called the guy up and he told me I would be doing some yard work. Not bad I thought. I met him at a subway station, he took me into his van and just drove. I started some small talk in the van, asking what kind of yard work it was. He told me it would just be digging some holes. That’s when we stopped in a church cemetery. Turns out by ‘holes’ he meant ‘graves’. So he gave me a shovel and told me to dig as many graves as I could, and that he would be back at nightfall. I didnt realize at the time how dangerous it is to be 6 feet in the ground with no braces on the sides of the holes, as they can collapse any minute and crush you. The day I quit is when I dug a hole that was marked incorrectly and hit bone.
libor.plus1 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > lol. you guys are all amateurs. > > My first summer back from college, I was living > with my crazy mother who was hounding me to get a > job. At the time, I had long hair, so the only > thing I could land was work through a friend with > this ‘contractor’. > > I called the guy up and he told me I would be > doing some yard work. Not bad I thought. I met him > at a subway station, he took me into his van and > just drove. I started some small talk in the van, > asking what kind of yard work it was. He told me > it would just be digging some holes. That’s when > we stopped in a church cemetery. Turns out by > ‘holes’ he meant ‘graves’. So he gave me a shovel > and told me to dig as many graves as I could, and > that he would be back at nightfall. I didnt > realize at the time how dangerous it is to be 6 > feet in the ground with no braces on the sides of > the holes, as they can collapse any minute and > crush you. The day I quit is when I dug a hole > that was marked incorrectly and hit bone. BS. Nice attempt at a troll post. Thanks for playing.
wow, you guys really needed the money i suppose. I bail out if i don’t like it QUICK. definitely my worst job was my first. at a BB in a call centre pitching mutual funds to grandmas. felt like a slave. everything you did was monitored from washroom breaks etc. then i bounced within 3 months. i think i might be blacklisted from this MAJOR Canadian bank. no regrets either than i took the manager’s advice and “give it a try”.
Well, I guess the fact you dont believe it is testament to how shitty the job was.
Year before university or maybe it was two years before. Show up at this office have some interview the guy says show up Monay wearing a tie at 7am. I show up at 7am, by 8am were driven one and half hours out of the city and he stops the car we take out a small table and start selling crap made in china to anyone. It was all cash. I got Mcdonalds for lunch. The guy’s who run the thing was such a scam that who knows how much cash they keep and payout. So get this I go back to the office at 4pm ready to run away after peddling crap across the city all day, when they say we want you in at 6am tomorrow so you can come for our “pump-up meetings!” gots to get going for the sales day. They then say they will teach me business from ground-up and how their is levels, and one day I can be master peddler of useless crap to scam people. There was also a brief time of the day that we went to the welfare areas and literally forced toys infront of lil kids so their broke parents would buy them cuz we could not hit quota on the day with middle-class people. I really felt like I was working alongside satan at that point.
I got a job as a bouncer at a bar/restaurant/brewery. Bouncing was cool but they roped me into hosting during dinners. It was pretty bizarre in that I welcomed people into the joint for dinner and sometimes ended up throwing them out by 11. Anyway, I HATED hosting and I was quite possibly the surliest and most incompetent host in restaurant history. The worst part of the gig was dealing with the waitresses. Every waitress in that place hated the job, always showed up late, had some kind of personal problem (drugs, out of wedlock kids, car problems, stupidity) and continually demanded that every new party be thrown in their section. After an hour of dealing with those b****** I was so irritated that I greeted every new customer with a scowl and motioned them to their tables with Mafioso-style hand gestures. One day the plumbing broke and I spent about 2 hours literally mopping up s*** as a it flowed to the kitchen. I quit mid-shift after a few weeks later.
I have posted this on a similar thread a while back but thought it might be relevant. In high school I worked as a door to door salesman for an electricity marketer just after the Texas market was deregulated. The company was sub contracted to sell for the marketer and was a little shady. One prospect asked me if it was a good deal and I said yes. He then said it better be because I have pit bulls in the back and they don’t like white people. It was entertaining but the company folded within a matter of weeks with no explanation. The place was run by career salesmen who used to sell $2000 Kirby vacuums door to door.
Man think about how spoiled we are. Imagine what it was like to haul tons of stone up the pyramids, or work in the rice fields in Cambodia with a machine gun to your back (I’d assumed you’re not getting overly compensated as well), work in diamond mines in Africa, or harvest rubber in Congo. But seriously in high school I worked as a dish washer in a kitchen that was constantly 50 degrees Celsius and the cooks were total dicks. You also had to work at the speed of light just to keep on pace with the crap that was coming in! Ridiculous.
FrankArabia Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > wow, you guys really needed the money i suppose. I > bail out if i don’t like it QUICK. > > definitely my worst job was my first. at a BB in a > call centre pitching mutual funds to grandmas. > felt like a slave. everything you did was > monitored from washroom breaks etc. then i bounced > within 3 months. i think i might be blacklisted > from this MAJOR Canadian bank. > > no regrets either than i took the manager’s advice > and “give it a try”. I’ve never worked at one but have gone through the application/interview process and I can also say that call centers have got to be the worst jobs on the planet. Total slave shops. Everything from getting screamed at by angry customers 8 hours a day, the manager hovering over your shoulder, and the timed bathroom breaks. Seriously, I’d rather shovel $hit all day.
^I don’t know what’s worse - data entry all day & getting carpool tunnel or call center.
The worst job I had was in the summer of college one year. I worked for a guy that put sprinkler systems in, digging ditches in the nice Texas sun. Very fun. Since we did the job usually in two days (for small residential) it usually meant one day of 13 hours and the next of normal 8…
Ocean Mist Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > ^I don’t know what’s worse - data entry all day & > getting carpool tunnel or call center. wtf is carpool tunnel? what you get when you have to share a car to work with a workmate who lets one rip every time you drive through a tunnel?
Worst job I had and I think takes the cake from all of you was… AUDITOR! Did it at some mid tier accounting firm, and it totally sucked. It was so boring and the same with the people I worked with I wanted to suffocate myself. You could put an orange in a room of auditors and come back in an hour and it woulve turned into a lemon. We had to go out to this really crappy country towns in my state in australia and audit government organisations mostly, like the water company etc. Be there for like 3 to 5 days with absolutely nothing to do but AUDIT! The staff were all a few grads auditing who had no idea, things were just getting ticked as fine as it was just easier. Anyway, after 2 months I realised audit wasnt for me, got a job somewhere else and quit. To make matters work, they made me work out my final months notice!
My first and worst ‘office job’ was a summer job between sophomore and junior year of college. A classmate was working as a “[major phone company] affiliate” and his boss mentioned they needed people in the office to help schedule appointments. “Scheduling appointments”, by the way, means “cold calling”. And by “cold calling”, I mean, “hating yourself”. The office was 2 hours away from my summer apartment, via 3 subway lines with plenty of transfers that changed frequently due to construction. I can’t remember if I was interviewed or not. I think they may have just told me to show up. The dude running it [We’ll call him “satan”] was a former chop-shop/boiler-room veteran who couldn’t work in the industry anymore due to putting a paraplegic’s settlement money into a bunch of dot-coms in the height of the bubble. Paraplegic lost all his money, natch, and sued Satan and Satan’s old employer. Satan told me that story with a laugh and explained that “Finance just wasn’t for [him].” Now Satan was out, living the dream, as a “self-employed business owner.” First paycheck, Satan called me into his office and explained that I was being fired. He made up a reason [sending personal e-mail or something] and then handed me my paycheck. “Kidding! [huge grin].” Years later, I watched Ricky Gervais make a similar joke on ‘The Office’ and didn’t laugh. I left after about six weeks for a much better job that I kept throughout the next school year, with way better prospects/work. The only reason I can offer as to why I took the awful job is that I figured any work that was in an office must’ve been more respectable than my previous work in highschool/summers, which was totally fun [paintball ref] and totally not going to help with the post-college job hunt. I still can’t believe I worked at that place six weeks. [facepalm]
Crap Jobs When I was 14 I worked for a Chickfila, fast food chain in the southeast, because I really wanted a dvd player for my laptop. I asked my parents and they told me to go pound sand and get a job. It was awful. I was working with people that were 30 and had IQs not much higher than that. Needless to say I got out of there. When I was 17 I built tennis courts one summer. It doesn’t sound like strenuous labor but there is an enormous amount of sand and paint that go into a tennis court surface. So I spent my days toting around 125lb bags of sand on my shoulder along with hauling 600lb barrels of acrylic paint. I probably could have been on the Jersey Shore after that summer from all of the heavy lifting I did and the amount of sun I was exposed to. Good Jobs When I was 16 I was a Golf cart attendant. This job was money. I received free golf along with my minimum wage so I was ok with the pay. People would get so wasted on the course and tip me ridiculous amounts of money along with handing me all of their unconsumed beers. The cart chick would also give me all of her beers that were leftover from her day. Maybe she thought I actually put these beers back in the clubhouse or something. I would routinely leave the course with 30 beers every night and just throw them in my trunk. At one point I must have had 300 beers in my trunk, if you’ve seen “dazed and confused” you’ll know what I’m talking about. Not a bad job at all. As a 16 year old that beer was worth its weight in gold to my friends. When I was 18 I started my own little in-home computer servicing company. I charged ~$25/hr and made bank that summer. I remember helping a guy transfer his ipod to his computer which took 15 minutes. He paid me $100 even though I tried to turn him down.