My brother worked construction jobs over college summers. Like you said Kiln, brutal but the pay was excellent. He spent one summer as a roofer and another on a paving crew. After the paving job he learned to wait tables!


All right so here’s the next entry on my resume. When I was 10 we moved downtown where we could walk everywhere (school, friends, grocery store, bank, pool, the projects). I started babysitting for a friend of my mom’s for $2.00 an hour. She wanted me to do some little things around the house to keep me busy (!!) while I was there after school. Seriously, I had her two kids and my homework plus I fed them dinner, what the heck? Since the cleaning wasn’t working out she had me come over on the weekends to clean her house. For $2.00 an hour. I was ten years old. That was before I learned to say, “Screw you.”

A couple of years later she and another friend started up a small manufacturing business. It was literally a sweatshop under the one friend’s garage. In the winter they had to haul in a space heater because it was so cold the paint wouldn’t dry. They paid me $2.50 per hour though, so I was moving up in the world. Plus the one partner was also a caterer and she gave me awesome food. I ended up working for them on school breaks and as a second summer job all the way through my sophomore year of college. It was incredible experience to be in on the ground floor of a company. A lot of what I did opening new profit centers much later I learned as a kid at that company. But there was a funny moment when an inspector came to check their first rented building after we moved out of the sub-basement. We had all sort of forgotten that I wasn’t technically allowed to be working. So when he asked what I was doing there they quickly said I was the babysitter. About two seconds later when he saw the chemicals, power tools and such that were all over the place (because I had been working!) he said to me, “You need to get outside RIGHT NOW.” He was protecting me! Lol.

Oh wow, Grits! Of only he knew XD

Yeah... as I was reading I kept thinking "That is not legal."


I think the worst job I've had was being a cashier at a grocery store. It was mindless work, and then you get the pleasure of telling customers that NO this item is ringing up at the correct price, you just didn't read the sign correctly/at all.

I seriously preferred my janitor job at a factory scrubbing toilets over being a cashier. YEAH.

One of my friends works in the Huntsville prison and she says she likes her job better than mine, lol

I think my worst job was also probably being a cashier at a grocery store too. The worst part of it was that I was not really a cashier at all. I was a produce clerk. Somehow I got roped into running a register whenever things got busy at the registers. Given that it was a grocery store, it was always busy at the registers. So I could never get my own work done, because I was wasting all of my time cashiering. I quit that job not too long after.

I've been cashiering since I was 16. I turn 23 in August. I feel like I have an endless amount of patience XD

But I swear, the next person who tells me my job is easy is going to... not have anything done to them because I'll not say anything XD

For me the misery of cashiering is very much a function of the customer base.

I’ve worked at three very different clothing stores. (All legally, lol.)

In one my manager ended up moving me in with her family so I could stay and work two more months, that’s how well we got along. But it was the worst experience because our customers were surly she-hounds who routinely screamed and cursed at us. Thankfully the company cared even less for the customers than we did, so at least we had the satisfaction of sending them away as unhappy as they made us.

The one where my customers were decent people who actually intended to pay for the clothes (imagine that) was also the one where the district manager was sleeping with the store managers. Seriously, when the scandal broke they were ALL fired. Oh, and his wife would come in all the time and give us bad “Secret Shopper” reports even though we all knew who she was and could retell every second that she was in the store. I mean she used her husband’s discount to buy clothes! But even though that was a truly hostile work environment, it wasn’t the worst because the customers kept the sales floor fun.

Some of my customers are okay. The guys next door at the car shops are great, AMD come in every day. Buuuuuuuuuut the management at this company isn't very good. As in, they make demands we can't, as a staff, meet. We don't get breaks because there are only one manager for 8-13 hours because they won't give us enough budget for two pershift. And, of course, payroll is deemed once a year by inventory losses, AMD we lay 3 times the amount we were expected, so no raise.o

Then there's the screaming customers, dishonest employees, the messes, the trash, the stealing... Standing and scanning things isn't hard. Trying to not bash everyone's faxes is.

My phone is acting up and won't let me.correct my mistakes. Guhh.

Are we counting only legal jobs? Because one or two of my worst jobs were not legal.

Out of my legitimate jobs, I'd say my worst was Burner at K-Mart. I doubt that this job even exists anymore. It consisted of sitting for eight hours a day in a small, windowless room down in the basement. In this room was myself, a chair, a furnace and a mountainous pile of cardboard boxes. All the line workers would cart their empty shipping boxes down to this room. And I would feed these empty cardboard boxes into the furnace. I would open the furnace door, shove in a box or two, close the furnace door, sit down and watch the boxes burn inside the furnace. When they were burned I would open the door again, shove in another box or two, close the door, and sit down and watch those boxes burn. The boxes had to be fed into the furnace at a very specific rate. Shove too many boxes in too fast and it would cause air pollution problems and the city would call up the store manager and the store manager would come down and give me hell. But feed boxes into the furnace too slow and the store manager would come down and yell at me because the boxes were beginning to pile up and he wanted me to speed things up.

It was not a fun job. If I hadn't been absolutely desperate for money at the time I would not have kept it.

Given some of Grit's admissions, I think more than just legal jobs are on the table here. Though you might want to be careful about incriminating yourself in case the FBI is reading...

That burner job sounds horrible. Not to mention ecologically unsound! I am sure that was back in the old days before the word "recycle" had been invented.

I remember back when I was a material handler at a little plastics factory, I had to break down the cardboard bins that the raw plastic pellets came, flatten them out, and stack them up on top of the manager's office. Trouble is said office was a little box standing up on stilts above the rest of the factory, with just a narrow stairway to get up it. I had to balance the huge pieces of cardboard on top of my head, holding each side so it would not tip too far one way or the other and fall off. Then run up the stairs and throw it on top of the pile over the ceiling of the office. If I missed, it went sailing down to the floor 20' below.

It's not the worst job I've had, but right now I'm so mentally understimulated on this damn calendar entry gig I've got that I'm giving autocannibalism serious consideration as means with which to pass the time.

I'm also so bored that I've made up the word 'autocannibalism'.

Ahaha!!!

Wouldn't you have to be an automobile, in order to cannibalize other autos?

Those long words confuse me too. I never figured out if autoerotic had something to do with cars being sexy, or it meant making out in the back seat.

Talking about being poor (in another thread) reminded me of my college jobs.

So while I was in college I qualified to have two jobs (simultaneously) on campus. (Because I was that poor.) One was in food service. I started off as a runner, which is the person who brings food up to the serving line. The other was in a lab doing the devil’s work or possibly averting the next energy crisis, depending on where you stand on environmental issues. As an environmental biologist I quickly realized that I was in service to the devil. A little bit of my soul died every day that I worked there, but it was quite awesome to be in charge of all those machines. I felt like I was in a spaceship. It kind of looked like the engine room of Serenity. But I have now forgotten my point.

Oh yes, something worse than grunt work in a cafeteria. Deliberately advancing the cause of evil.

Oh, and my runner job in the cafeteria rapidly led to a grill cook position even though I was not remotely qualified. I had however been cooking for my brother and other people’s children since I was ten as I related above, so I got the job. That was pretty fun. I got a huge grill to work on and I was right behind the serving line where I could talk to all of my friends (and cook them eggs and burgers!) as they came through to get their meals. Everyone ate on campus, and everyone knew everyone, so it was a pretty good deal. But here’s the very bad part. After work I had to go straight to my afternoon labs smelling like onions. There can be no doubt that had a negative impact on my social life. All through college I never dated any fellow science majors.

Sounds like a dream. Can you get me in?

I quit, so you can take my place

Do I get a big gun??

You get a taser

Count! Me! In!

WAAAAAANT.

You, mirocu, and myself can all work as mall security guards and tase evil shoplifters

SWEEEET.

Major Congratulations Kiln! Awesome news!

I've been sitting here trying to think of any place I ever worked that I hated - can't think of one, I kind of always enjoyed the places I worked. There were some bosses I did not enjoy working under, but loved the work everywhere I've been.

Sign me up!!

Can I join! I love tazers!

Yup. You're in

Man. A bunch of crazy tasers working at the mall.. No one would go shopping there anymore!

I'D SHOP THERE!!!!

Do you... have a weird thing going on..?

Liz is a daredevil

Besides, who doesn't want me to chase them down with a taser

Yeah, it's called living on the edge XD

Me *points at self*

I'll keep that in mind

You're my first target!

Then I might have to use.... THE EAGLE CLAAAAAAW!!

Oh, but we´ve derailed this haven´t we? I did have a job doing the dishes at this nursing home before I got my current one. It wasn´t bad per say but it took up two out of three weekends. I quit it maybe two years after I got this one. Now I wish I still had it!

My worst jobs? I can sum them up as follows:

1. Flogging big ticket items.
2. To people who weren't really quite sure if they wanted them.
3. And couldn't make up their minds (if they had 'em) to save their lives.
4. Or insisted on pinching every penny until it begged for death's sweet embrace.
5. With no sales training.
6. From managers who were overweening, interfering morons.

The first one was my fault; I'd never had a job before; but the second one, I was initially hired to do web and print ad work - however the manager thought that being able to make ads meant I should be able to assist in making actual sales. Which I couldn't. Since I am a gentle soul and not capable of the gentle coercion that sales requires.

And certainly not putting up with workplace bullies.

The thing is... after those hell jobs, I'm beginning to think they've turned me right off the idea of working. Most distressing.