One of the threads in Chit-Chat got me thinking about different jobs (below the 4-year degree mark) that I've worked and that some of my freshmen dormmates discussed working. It got me wondering not just what the worst jobs are that people around here have worked, but also if they had to work a job like that (i.e., had to work to support the family or pay for their car/insurance/gas). I'd be really interested to know how many people had no actual "need" to work a crummy job, but did so anyway either for the experience or any other reasons.

1/13/2012 1:32:03 PM

Dishwasher at a hospital the summer after my freshman year. Litterally chucking nasty half eaten food into a grinder and cleaning it out afterwards. Also, the nurses would occasionally send down used syringes on the trays. Thankfully never got stuck!

1/13/2012 1:38:45 PM

3rd shift at steak n shake on south blvd in charlotte
fdh engineering

1/13/2012 1:40:27 PM

Washed dishes at the food court on breakfast night for a semester. Peeling apart trays covered in maple syrup was not fun.

1/13/2012 1:43:11 PM

Cleaned the kennels at a large veterinary hospital when I was in high school. Somehow I thought that cleaning up dog shit for minimum wage would help me get into vet school.

I liked the people I worked with though, so it could have been worse. I have had 2 "Professional" jobs since college that I quit because the managers/employees were just impossible to work with.

1/13/2012 2:22:49 PM

Target off Lawndale in Greensboro during high school.

1/13/2012 2:24:25 PM

Democratic fundraising call center

:/

1/13/2012 2:26:13 PM

Bath and Body Works holiday temp job... only made it about 3 weeks before I gave them the finger.

1/13/2012 2:28:23 PM

^That was a job I picked up one summer because, frankly, I knew they wouldn't turn me away (only guy to apply there since I had seen the place open). I made it about the same amount of time before deciding I had way too little respect for the managers at the Concord Mills location to take their bullshit.

...but that's just shitty management/employees, not really "hard work".

I worked in a warehouse whenever I was home from college (down off "The Plaza" in Charlotte... not exactly a safe community to work) then did some grounds/maintenance work around a community college. 100 degree summers with 80% humidity sucks whether you're in a warehouse with no A/C or in the sun having high school drop outs judge you. I kept with it just because it was the kind of work your grandparents tell you about (where you come home saying "that was a full day of hard work").

1/13/2012 2:39:21 PM

the worst job i worked was in high school for The Cary News. They would print articles for me, and I had to type them up and turn them in a floppy disk. Something about PC and Macintosh being incompatible they told me at the time.

not a bad job in terms of what i had to do, but by far the worst job in terms of how the actual existence of the job was

1/13/2012 2:43:34 PM

2nd and 3rd semester of undergrad. worked at C-stores. didn't have a car and was bored (i had had a job since i was 14 and not having one made me feel lazy). it wasnt the best job and the pay sucked, but it got me out of the dorm and meeting people..

1/13/2012 2:46:46 PM

Bus boy at CiCi's Pizza when I was 15

1/13/2012 2:47:17 PM

worked in a manufacturing facility where I was allergic to some of the stuff they did. THAT sucked

1/13/2012 2:56:23 PM

picking blackberries and setting up trellis systems for blackberry field plots 6 hours a day mid summer sucked pretty bad also

o my god. BLOOD BABY

the call center was just really unfortunate, calling people asking for money from their widowed spouses and shit but you have to push the sale and then make em use a credit card

[Edited on January 13, 2012 at 2:57 PM. Reason : d]

1/13/2012 2:56:43 PM

A sales clerk at the Limited Too. I swear if I had to hear the beebs one more time

1/13/2012 2:57:32 PM

I worked at Spirit Halloween this past year, just for shits and giggles. I have never worked a retail or restaurant job before, and basically I had a kind of morbid curiosity about it. I saw an email about the job in August or something and just felt compelled to send in my name, figuring I'd never hear from them. A week before Halloween they called me, and I worked I think 8 days total. For me, it was a matter of deciding to try something I'd never done before at an obviously very seasonal store to know what it's like. And I wasn't surprised to learn it kind of sucks. But I also had fun and I'm glad I did it. And that it was just 8 days.

1/13/2012 2:58:31 PM

Quote :

"Democratic fundraising call center"

Did you volunteer or get paid for this?

1/13/2012 3:01:07 PM

surprised no one has said UPS packing facility. I think thats the worst job out there

1/13/2012 3:23:20 PM

I worked construction and we had a lot of work at the sewer treatment plant at MCAS Cherry Point. Power washing the inside of a large(drained) sewage holding tank prior to it being sent to the clarifyer or anarobic digestor during the middle of the summer probably tops my list.

1/13/2012 3:28:05 PM

I worked at UPS one summer at State and enjoyed the shit out if it

Good pay for menial work and I was as strong as a fucking ox when I left

1/13/2012 3:37:14 PM

Working as an expo at a restaurant. That job stressed the hell out of me when it got crowded and I was by myself. Didn't mind it when I had help or it was a normal day but when it got busy it was insane trying to keep track of everything.

1/13/2012 4:11:20 PM

i worked for a lawncare/landscaping company for 2 summers and on fall/winter/spring breaks. it was really hard work and long hours, but it was fun and it paid great. i had to do it so i'd have money when i went back to raleigh during the school year.

worked on campus doing maintenance in the central campus dorms during junior and senior years. job was great, but it had a few moments that were pretty shitty. i didn't really have to work that job, but it gave me money to blow on fun stuff.

[Edited on January 13, 2012 at 4:15 PM. Reason : aef]

1/13/2012 4:14:05 PM

^^ but i'd much rather be by myself on the line, than have some idiot who doesn't know what they're doing up there trying to help

aka every manager i ever had

1/13/2012 4:14:33 PM

Game Tester for Red Storm Entertainment.

Shit pay. Shit employees. Shit hours. No, it's not as fun as it sounds. It's awful and you want to die.

1/13/2012 4:18:42 PM

It's divided between being a farmhand and a dishwasher/prep cook at a diner. The farmhand job was hot and sweaty but I worked at my own pace, and I worked with my older sister at the diner. She was the short order cook and we got into some hair-pullers. Lol.

1/13/2012 4:44:09 PM

Champion's Pizza and Wing in mission valley.
Worst job ever.
Did work with jackleg though.

1/13/2012 7:31:30 PM

so at least you had access to some good drugs

1/13/2012 7:41:11 PM

Delivering phone books in the summer

1/13/2012 8:03:13 PM

I worked as a photographer for Olan Mills just to see what a major studio job was like, worst fucking job of my entire life. I still complain about it and I've been gone a yr.

The boss was terrible (had an "olan mills" degree type boss), the hours sucked (11hrs 7 days a week nov-jan with only tgiving and xmas day off) and the job itself is a bitch (photographing poor families that decide to have 30 screaming children and not get a dime out of them)

Glad to hear they were bought out but that sort of business is the worst shit ever.

1/13/2012 8:20:45 PM

Depending on the people tutoring can be the best or worst job ever.

1/13/2012 8:24:35 PM

I worked as a accounts payable for a freind's family company for some time. The pay was good, but HATED that place. The office was one huge room, with the owner sitting at the back looking over your shoulder. The whole set up was out of the 80s. NO modernization, and everything done on paper. I spent half my time searching file cabinets. All the employees couldn't wait to leave.

You even had to sign out TP from the storage closet, to put it in the office bathroom.

1/13/2012 8:40:34 PM

I used to deliver the Ad-pack in middle school. that job sucked and didn't pay for shit.


I also used to dress like barney and big bird during high school. that job sucked and didn't pay for shit.

1/13/2012 8:56:32 PM

haha the ad-pack

i remember delivering that rag

it beat cleaning bilges

1/13/2012 9:59:18 PM

oh dear god. I worked at radioshack for a few months, worst job experience by far that I've ever had. I was working two other jobs at the time, UPS being one of them and waiting tables the other, and I would be literally ecstatic to walk into either of those places compared to radioshack. It was the most fake, soulless, condescending and tedious job that I never thought possible. All that on top of it being 100% commission pay in a store that never saw enough traffic to make more than minimum wage.

I finally quit when my boss called me in the back to reprimand me for not trying to sell a cell phone to a guy who came in to by one $1.50 pack of resistors.



I kinda miss UPS though. something satisfying about going in, shutting the fuck up and busting ass for 5 hours straight and being appreciated for it

[Edited on January 13, 2012 at 10:17 PM. Reason : asdf]

1/13/2012 10:14:18 PM

I worked one summer in college as a maintenance man at a YMCA camp. I didn't know shit about fixing things or manual labor and almost killed myself several times (set myself on fire, fell off moving lawn mowers, attacked by hornets).

Actually, the job title on my pay stub was custodian, and that's a lot of what I did.

Every morning at 6am I would go through this entire camp and clean every single bathroom. A lot of times the toilets would be clogged up with shit, and it was my job to unclog them. Since kids would come in and stay a week then leave, they treated the place like shit. One time I even had to fish out a double decker.

The head of maintenance that I worked under had a master's degree and hated everything about his life. He was a miserable person to be around, and because of it the half dozen or so other guys who got hired for maintenance over the course of the summer never lasted more than two days.
.
The camp had no money, so we never had the resources to actually fix things. Everything was jury-rigged and it was our job to duct tape and bubble gum everything back together.

I will say this about the experience, it was one of the most memorable summers and I'm glad I did it. At the time it sucked ass; it was sweltering hot, physically exhausting, and often demeaning. But I learned a lot about do-it yourself handyman stuff. And I have a ton of stories.

1/13/2012 11:57:02 PM

Other than some shitty tutoring students, target cashiering was the worst job. I didn't get properly trained, then they got mad when I did stuff wrong and didn't meet quotas. They told me they'd hire my full time for the summer, then it went from 29 hours a week down to 13 over the course of a little over a month. If it hadn't been for the incompetent managers I would have been ok with it. It was just the HR guy that kept on hiring tons of people and never giving anyone the hours they needed that sucked. He'd schedule people for closing and opening the next day, but only for a couple hours at a time.

[Edited on January 14, 2012 at 1:02 AM. Reason : ...]

1/14/2012 1:01:35 AM

I worked maintenance at a Textile Mill the summer before I went off to school because my father made me. I had to like change pattern wheels in knitting machines, change the oil, and stuff like that. There was no air conditioning, and its quite scary crawling up under 3-4 ton machines to drain the oil or climbing inside of one with all the gears and getting covered in oil when all that's holding them up is a forklift or a ceiling crane. Mid Summer, it regularly got above 100 degrees in there it seemed with all of the hot dying machines going with zero air conditioning.

My father was one of of the 'office' workers at the mill, and he made me work there the Summer before i left for NC State. He paid for my college, but said that if I flunked out, I would work there for minimum wage until I paid him back.

He made my brother do the same thing.

We both graduated in 4 years

[Edited on January 14, 2012 at 1:10 AM. Reason : ]

1/14/2012 1:07:51 AM

The summer before the Freshman yr of college I worked at my father's company in a factory/assembly line. We made energy meters. I would get to work around 5am. It was a good learning experience.

[Edited on January 14, 2012 at 1:19 AM. Reason : l]

1/14/2012 1:19:01 AM

i did golf course maintenance. being on the business end of a shovel or weed-eater for 8-10 hours/day in the summer when it's 100 degrees sucks something awful. When I was mowing greens and stuff, that wasn't too bad.

the most miserable thing i've ever gotten paid to do, though, was SERE school.

1/14/2012 1:45:25 AM

ITT

tl;dr

1/14/2012 2:48:24 AM

target in high school. manager was a complete idiot, had no idea what he was doing, kept us high school kids there late into the night even though it was against target policy (and possibly some law?). i heard he was fired about a week after i quit.

1/14/2012 8:55:46 AM

Worst physically: 2nd shift Color Sorter Operater at a peanut plant. Working in the evening at a cold ass manufacturing facility with huge shake trays and stuff making tons of noise, vibrations, and a shit-ton of peanut dust was FTL physically. Mentally it was really boring. Also somewhat dangerous. Had to get over my fear of heights to crawl up a 3 story high ladder to the top of a storage bin a few times a week. Place shook so bad a decent earthquake in the area went completely unnoticed by us. Definitely taught me I don't want a damn blue collar job almost minimum wage job. Dunno how so many people can live like that.

Worst mentally/emotionally: Vet Assistant. Cleaning dog shit, worrying about getting bit by dogs in the kennel. Helping put down dogs and cats, and then wrapping them up and tossing them in a trash bin. Physically it was easy, but emotionally it blew.

1/14/2012 9:06:22 AM

priming sand lugs

1/14/2012 9:17:35 AM

tie between bagger at the Adam's Farm Harris Teeter in Greensboro and grocery stocker at the SuperK in Greensboro.

1/14/2012 10:07:06 AM

roadkill deer removal (picked up dead deer off the side of the road, some in worse condition than others)
assembling engines at freightliner 3rd shift
camp counselor
priming tobacco

all jobs I worked because I had to, to make ends meet. they were certainly interesting though, and made me realize what I wanted to do with myself and what I didnt.

[Edited on January 14, 2012 at 10:17 AM. Reason : ..]

1/14/2012 10:10:08 AM

Worked in a cemetery, mowing, weed-trimming.

Got to ride around in a golf cart. One time, I had to help my buddy move a body from a hearse into the "chill box" before cremation. I saw the feet and hair of the former-lady and they reminded me of my grandmother (who was alive but sick at the time).

Told him was never going to help him do that again.

1/14/2012 10:23:28 AM

Mine would be a tie between my brief stint as a nanny or when I was slaughtering chickens. At least with slaughtering chickens I learned a skill that will be useful when the zombie hordes come. All being a nanny taught me is ostentatiously rich people make horrible parents.

Quote :

"Democratic fundraising call center"

hah yeah that job sucks too. Though I was working for a specific candidate and not a general party. At least I learned I didn't want to do that sort of thing for a living. It seemed like most of the career people in that office were either batshit crazy passionate about politics or hated their lives and would most likely end it by jumping in front of a train.


[Edited on January 14, 2012 at 7:04 PM. Reason : a]

1/14/2012 7:01:26 PM

Quote :

"target in high school. manager was a complete idiot, had no idea what he was doing, kept us high school kids there late into the night even though it was against target policy (and possibly some law?). i heard he was fired about a week after i quit."

This was exactly my experience, except for firing the manager thing. He would even lock the exit, so we had to ask permission to leave at our scheduled time.

1/14/2012 7:02:59 PM

Managed a pet store. The owners were manipulative, lying cocksuckers.

1/14/2012 7:29:38 PM

i worked at a dry cleaners for a short period of time. the owners were awful people and would always have me lie and say they weren't there whenever an angry customer called. or any customer, really.

1/14/2012 7:41:00 PM