One of mine was I got a job as a temporary and was hired to literally spy on people. The job was at a law firm and people came in to go through the files to look for evidence for their case. They were put in a conference room with all these boxes of files. My job was to sit there and watch them to make sure they did not steal anything out of the files. I was not to tell them why I was there or what I was doing. Guess what? They figured it out, they were not dumb. They must have had the room bugged because as soon as they asked me some questions, one of the lawyers aka my boss on this assignment came into the room and asked me to step out. He took me to his office and wanted to know what they asked me and stressed again that I should not talk to them or answer any of their questions. It was so weird and awkward!
Another temp job years later: It was a great assignment and the pay was awesome! The co-workers were so nice but the boss was horrible. Everyone walked around on pins and needles and was afraid of being fired. No one ever took a break and everyone ate lunch at their desk or in the file room and went back to work ASAP. I took my breaks, lunch outside of the office and left at quitting time and the people always looked at me like they were either A) jealous or B) wanted to escape. I ended up having a flat tire one morning and decided to tell the temp service to end the assignment. A lady in HR called me and asked me if I would mind coming in to talk to her. She wanted to know why I left the assignment. I told her everything that went on in the department. She was so thankful I told her the truth. She could not understand why they could not keep a temp in that dept. She also noticed that no one ever took lunch outside of the office either. I could not wait to get off that assignment. I felt so sorry for those people in that dept.
What are some of your worst jobs?
One of my units in the USMC. BAD command. Really, really bad command.
The nice thing, though, is that after that... nothing seems that bad anymore! :)
Student Maintenance supervisor in a college Dorm...need I say more?
When I was in High school there was a huge parking lot across the field from my school that set up stations and truckloads of 'mushroom compost' (AKA S**T) and you were paid per bag to scoop the stuff into these plastic bags and tie them and stack them. It was the type of job that wasnt like a 'youre hired' instead you just showed up and worked as long as you wanted, took the cash and left
So beyond gross - I still cant believe I did that
When I was 14. My mom volunteered me to be a mascot for Ihop ( she worked there as a waitress) I had to wear a giant hideous smelly pancake suit in 90 degree weather outside at a park with kids jumping all over me for 6hours. My mom thinks still thinks it is funny to tell people that I was crabby and not too friendly to the kids...um hello I was 14 and I hated everyone. My pay for all my suffering ... a plate full of Ihop pancakes.
I cleaned houses for several years before getting married. A lot of people would think that in itself is a terrible job but I liked it. The worst was the time I was asked to go clean this really old ladys home (shack) in a really old section of town. She smoked and had big bowls of ciggarette butts sitting EVERYWHERE smoldering and stinking. Every room, every surface was covered in bowls of butts! She wanted me to mop her living room floor so I started to, and when I moved the coffee table, the linolium floor under it was worn away and there was no other flooring. Just the dirt! She told me to be careful and not make too much mud...She wouldnt let me empty the "ash trays" and would walk from room to room picking up a butt and puffing on it and puting it back in the bowl. She had cob webs so thick you could have caught birds in them. There were mice too. I had to wash a sink full of moldy filthy dishes and mice ran across the back of the sink trying to get away. What was really funny was there was an old tent in the back yard and a little old man was sitting by it reading the paper. She told me he was her boy friend and he had no home so he lived in the tent in her yard. She said she was a Christian and it would be a sin to let him live in her house and make people talk. It was all just weird and strange. She paid me $2 for all I did that day. I remember when she handed me the money, her hands were so old wrinkled and brown from the years of smoking. gross..
1. Temp job following people around the grocery store to see what they were buying and from which shelf. This could all be done electronically now, but at the time, this was what a marketing firm hired us to do. I'd push a shopping cart around, pretending to shop, while spying on the person I was following.
2. First job out of college. I had a manager-level job, but a boss who didn't believe women should be treated with respect. We had to play backup to the receptionist (who could only handle one call at a time), when the men didn't. My boss called me "Little One." And this was a female boss! She resented any woman who earned a degree when young and didn't have to start as a secretary like she did and earn a degree in night school.
3. Second job out of college. Boss didn't trust anyone. He'd go through our garbage cans at night. Thought coworkers made this up, only to come in one day to find advertisements I'd thrown away sitting on my desk with a note to file them. Ick.
jobs!
Meter reading for a utility company. OUCH no matter how hard I ran the route I could not keep up witht he men, I developed spurs in my feet (Toes, Ankle and heal) I have been out of that job for over 6 years and still have nightmares about having to return to it.
ha ha! good question.
Elderly Caregiver. yeah. that had some fun times. I had an old guy throw his walker at me because I didn't cook his eggs right. Men do not age as gracefully as women. Man I had some cranky buggers! There was one Japanese man I cared for that was 101. He came to the top of the stairs with no pants on (or underwear) thinking he was dressed! He never remembered any of our names (different care givers would come different days) so he would just call out "hey ladyyyyyyyyyyyy!" so funny.
oh another one: when I was about 19 or 20 I applied at American Eagle for the summer. They hired me, and I came in to watch a video on "celebrating diversity in the workplace" after which they told me to take out my (tiny) nose stud. Yeah. Hypocrites much? I had it in when they hired me!
The hardest job I ever had was stacking brick...3 at a time, by hand as fast as I could go, 8-10 hours a day in 100 degree temperatures. I must say, I was in the best physical condition of my life after 6 months. Think Michelle Obama arms...LOL Had my back not finally given out, (at 5'6" tall and J. 110 lbs., I really wasn't built for that kind of hard labor) I wouldn't have minded the job at all.
The worst job I ever had was tending bar...It's no secret that a lot of men can be vulgar pigs, but drunken groups of them were more than I could stomach.
The 2 that I remember the most:
1. I worked as a home health/advantage aid and would go to homes of people who qualified for assistance. I would do light housekeeping and help them bathe. I had one lady who did not have physical disabilities but would put her shower chair in the shower and get undressed, sit down with the water running, and tell me to wash her....I told her I could only help her with the parts she couldn't reach like her back and perhaps her feet. She called me lazy and useless. She would follow me to the laundry room after sorting her clothes the way she asked, and she would start yelling at me that I was doing it wrong. I taught people with developmental disabilities how to do laundry and am darn good at laundry. I was doing it her way too, even if she wanted things different than I would do if sorting them myself.
I had an older man who only wanted to me read to him from his memoirs, he was a small town pastor with a very very boring life. I could barely make it through a page, much less 5 hours of it while his wife got some respite time....
2. My other most hated job had little to do with the work but more with the company. I worked in a call center for a world wide DSL provider. I had little knowledge about computers and after 2 seeks of classes I understood the difference between a LAN and WAN. The rest was in Swahili or some other foreign language because I didn't understand any of it.
I enjoyed the customers that called in. I worked Windows computers and due to how complicated they are my calls could take up to 2 hours. Once I was switched to MAC support my call times went down to about 15 minutes. BUY MAC'S people. Anyway, I hated the dynamics of the workplace. The silly games they would have us caught up in, then pitting the employees against each other. I hated every minute I wasn't on the phones with customers. I would wish on the way home that I could have a car accident or something, just bad enough I would have to take some time off, not a bad accident just bad enough.
1. My first job ever was at a retirement community where among other things, my job was to bathe the residents.
2. Selling perfume door to door. Lasted about three or four days.
3. Telemarketing, cold calling for AT&T. That lasted about two weeks. Also one time I paid an agency to help find me a job and they gave me a job working for their company, doing cold calls again. When I said it wasn't what I wanted and they didn't provide the service they said they would and I wanted my money back, they refused to refund it.
4. I had some good and bad experiences in fast food. Have to agree with Amanda though about smelling like food all the time. When I worked at KFC, my boyfriend's sister would call me the chicken lady because she said I always smelled like fried chicken.
5. I bartended my way through college and most of the time it was really fun. But on two occasions, a change in bar management made it living hell. Then I moved to another state and got a bartending job at a huge club. Thought it would be lots of fun, but the people who worked there were the most unfun group of bartenders I've ever had the unpleasure of knowing. It finally encouraged me to get a real job with benefits, at least.
When i served food to people, especially fast food. I worked two jobs in my teen years where i served food, one was fast food at a drive in, the other was a fajita place. Nothing says "crappy job" like smelling like grease or fried beef all day (especially when you dont even eat meat). Plus a lot of the customers were very rude and my bosses were losers on power trips. (which is typical for this industry) I hope my kids never want to work serving food.
I used to work as an environmental consultant. Going out in the woods looking for endangered species and whatnot. Sounds exciting but most of the "wilderness" we explored was actually nasty, overgrown properties the kind you see on the side of the highway. We would actually take machetes to hack our way through the thick underbrush to be able to walk through. I also ran into homeless men, which was scary. I got bitten up by bugs, tripped and fell constantly, my legs and arms were always scratched up from thorny plants.We would often end up climbing over barbed wired fences....I mean really it was like boot camp or something. For other projects I had to swim through murky waters, inspecting things for docks, and there were absolutely sharks and alligators around. Tell your kids not to major in Environmental Science when they go to college.
When I was pregnant with my first, I was hired to go door to door for some hippie activist group. I was really into SOME of their causes, but was not assigned to any of the cool one's. I don't even remember what I ended up going door to door for, some petition, and I swear I got more signatures out of pity because I was so pregnant, but I know how much *I* hate solicitors, so I don't blame the way some of those people reacted to me!!
I also worked for the DARE program briefly, fundraising. One of my old high school teachers saw me working, and about dying and fell over laughing, saying 'R.? With the DARE program?! BWAAHAHAHAHA!!'... I was a terrible kid.... ooooh the irony.
My husband and his best friend, when they were young (like 19 or 20), interviewed and were hired to work concession at some 'kid concert' (think Hannah Montana type stuff, 20 years ago), thinking they would pick up girls. They ended up having to dress up in ridiculous outfits to work there, and then found out (too late) that all the people attending the concert were either under 8 years old or over 40, HAHA! Stupid jerks ;)
i worked at kohls part time....it lasted about 2 hours maybe 2.5 . i went in and about an hour after i got there on my first day they told me i needed to change my schedule so that i would work at 430 am.....yahhh not happenin....so i finished what i was doing then i left.... what was i going to do even if i did give them a 2wk notice? use them as a 2 wk job reference? lol
I had a job moving books in the 8th floor library stacks at school. In the summer, no air conditioning. The job was moving the books approximately 2 rows over since someone had calculated how much space could be made by eliminating empty shelf space. My supervisor would constantly check on us and let us know how much faster the 'guys on floor 5' were moving their books. Turns out there were 3 of them and 2 of us. My partner lasted 4 days. I lasted one more than that. My supervisor asked for two weeks notice - did he think if I couldn't handle 5 total days, I could do 10 more? I actually laughed. I got a job after that doing campus food service and comparatively it was heaven.
One of the jobs I had when I was about 17 or 18 was at a nursery (flowers not kids!). It was owned by an older couple and I thought it would be "fun" to be around plants and flowers all day. Well, I really liked working with the customers and being outside (this was when I lived in So Cal). But the old lady just hovered around me constantly and it seemed like I couldn't do anything right. I mean how hard is it to water plants???!!! And then they up and fired me! The excuse they used was that I hadn't memorized all the prices and sizes of containers (like pony packs) and didn't have all the plant and flowers names memorized. A few days later I saw them out to lunch with a girl that was fired and I think something happened to make them hire her back so thats why they got rid of me. I guess that wasn't really my "worst job" but my "worst firing" story!!!!
i worked at a grocery store deli once, for about 4 hours, that was it, I had to quit. It was so disgusting. It was a very nice grocery store, clean, great employees, but the deli work grossed me out. They would slice all the meats on the same slicer and all the same cheese too, all on the same slicer. talk about cross contamination, i'm sure people with food allergies got sick sometimes from there.
I was a shift manager at a bowling alley for about 6ish months, I hated that too. no offense to anyone but league bowlers, especially the older ones are mean and rude!
I did tech support for a company that served Bell South internet users....i wont go into details but i really hated that one too. i had one person call for help with their internet, and they couldnt read. so they had no clue what to do. how do you have the internet but you cant read?
this one is the last one i swear...LOL
right out of high school i worked at a plasma donation center...it was in a very bad part of town. the girl who was training me didnt want to be training so she would show me things a couple of times and then want to sign off on my training papers. you had to do each thing so many times before you were signed off to do it alone. i was like, i am not going to cheat on my training, if i mess up someone can get hurt....i only worked there 2 weeks.
I was hired by a manufacturing company as a clerical. The plant manager was an alcoholic, one clerical was a flighty 19 yr old who was cheating on her husband who was away in the army, and the other clerical designated to "train" me acted like I was an intruder. Needless to say, they didn't offer to train me and I didn't know what to do. After a couple of months, the plant manager called me in and fired me for not learning the job. The whole atmosphere in that office was oppressive. Getting fired really tore me up, so I went to a counselor/friend and poured my heart out. He said it sounded like I was dealing with a bunch of co-dependents and I was just not in their "class." That made me feel some better, but it was a horrible experience. I soon got another job I loved, so the feeling of failure didn't last long.
