I was just randomly thinking about some really shitty jobs I have had, and I am curious what a shitty job is for different folks.
For me, it’s easy to recall.
3- I worked as a spray rig operator on an orchard in Emerald. That’s about 800km inland in Queensland, Australia. The job itself was good. I was operating a brand new rig with pressurized cabin, air seat, CD player, air conditioning, etc. Moving forward at about 3km/hr spraying citrus trees. The pay was excellent considering I was a backpacker. I needed traveling money so I took the job. Problem is, I’m scared shitless in the dark and I was working at night. I fucking hated it.
2- Lumberjack. Did this for three summers- I was still in school. What a back breaker that job was. I was working with this older guy(65 something), and he was unstoppable. He was not human. The deal was we got a 2 minutes break between fill ups. My chainsaw would go for about 1hr before I ran out of gas. So in a day, I’d get about 15 minutes sitting down, and I had to use about ten minutes to sharpen my chain. I was young and the money was excellent for my age, so I did it. The first week, my left arm would cramp up and wake me up in my sleep. It’s really demanding on your back and upper body to run a chainsaw all week long. Not a good job.
1- And the big winner: Picking zucchinis in Childers, Australia. That was miserable. Rain or shine we had to work because the crops were ripe, and if you don’t pick them, mold sets in. Especially if it’s rainy, and it rained all the fucking time. Picture yourself on your knees all day with poring rain on your back going elbow-deep through abrasive vines. And don’t forget the mozzies. That was horrible.
Worst ever: Worked as marketing manager for a carpet cleaning firm run by scientologists. And you thought evangelical Christians were bad!
All these complaints about teaching English in Taiwan make me think that they are coming from 21 year old backpackers who’ve never had a proper shit job before.
The last teaching job I had in Taipei. Absolutely unbearable for anyone who enjoyed eating, sleeping, leisure time, earning money, achieving personal or professional goals, or having any self-esteem.
Packing Christmas trees was not the greatest job in the world, when you are a 5’2" gurly. Nearly ended up being bagged in a big green net thingy myself, a couple of times. Very cold in Glasgow at Christmas. Pine needles sticking in skin. Ow.
And a short attempt at ‘independence’ when I was 17 or so, working in a hospital kitchen. The horror …
For a summer job while I was a uni student, I made doughnuts for a supermarket bakery, from 4:00 a.m. till noon 5 days a week (I did this for two summers). It was so depressing that even now, 15 years later, when I hear a song that they used to play at that supermarket, I get this awful, depressing, sinking feeling in my gut.
If nothing else though, it made me realize how lucky I was to be getting an education so that I wouldn’t have to do that for the rest of my life!
Sheet, now you remind me! I had a job during my last year of school selling Xmas trees at a petrol station. Cold in Glasgow, sure. Try 35C in the SA sun!
[quote=“Indiana”]
If nothing else though, it made me realize how lucky I was to be getting an education so that I wouldn’t have to do that for the rest of my life! [/quote]
Yes! ALL kids should be forced to do a nasty summer job. I couldn’t wait to go to uni after my hospital stint. When I was a teen, I thought ‘good jobs’ were another bunch of boring crap my materialistic family cooked up to oppress me. Didn’t they know that money doesn’t buy love or happiness? If you have your friends and your health, being a hospital cleaner is a fine and noble way to spend your life! My wise mother knows how to handle me, though.
Illegal factory worker in a Taiwan video game mfg. in a small family run business.
I did this on break my freshman year in college. I had to pirate software and screw together coin operated video game machines (back when they were legal). On occasion I would have to go to video game parlors to fix broken machines (the loose change rattling around the machinese were mine). My commute was from Luchou to Xindian on my motorcycle - twice daily. I got my breakfast and lunch box with the rest of the workers, (night school students). I got a real education into how things really work.
I also learned how to solder & seal wires, use powered screwdrivers and got really good at assembling things - skills that still help me on Christmas day.
I did it so I could learn the language and because I didn’t want to teach. The alternative was to work as a trader for my uncle on Wall St.
One summer, where I worked in a sweaty, grimy machine tool factory, cleaning 40 years’ worth of accumulated crud that was caked and hardened onto the factory floor. One other unlucky sod was my partner in this hellhole, and together we scraped every inch of the caked-on grime off the floor, getting blisters and not being allowed to sit down. It was stand up or lie down.
Our supervisor was the biggest a-hole, who had his watch set 10 minutes forward so he could accuse us of coming in late. “I’m on time…five minutes to spare”, I’d say. “Not by my Mickey, you’re not,” he’d reply. He was one sarcastic, controlling mofo, the sneer of cold command on his Rick Moranis-like visage.
Then one day the big boss, a truly stingy bass-turd, came in, saw our progress, and decided to send me upstairs, leaving the other guy downstairs to battle Mr. Mickey alone. Upstairs, the supervisor was as lax as one could be, and was filled with entertaining stories about his four ex-wives. “Take a break, you’re working too hard” was a common refrain of his. And “Go ahead and take off early; I’ll sign your timecard with full hours.” The place was air conditioned and the work was easy. The office fridge was there, and the supervisor told me to help myself to the Cokes in there. What a guy!
After a while, it dawned on me: downstairs was hell, and upstairs was heaven!
I’d say the summers I spent unloading rose bushes were tough (they threw them at you from a truck, and you had to catch them, thorns and all), and unloading watermelons was tough for the same reason. But I had a great boss, so that made up for it.
The worst jobs are those with a-hole bosses, not the ones with the most grime, IMO. I’ve never dreaded a job like I did the one I had at Nationwide Insurance in Columbus, OH, working for a real bitch, the type that think the way to show they’re boss is to be nasty to the underlings. Man, I’m glad I quit that one.
[quote=“Dragonbones”]The worst jobs are those with a-hole bosses, not the ones with the most grime, IMO.[/quote]I’d say that’s probably true for 95% of jobs. Some jobs are unbelievably hard, though.
[quote]cleaning 40 years’ worth of accumulated crud that was caked and hardened onto the factory floor.[/quote]Thats a pretty bad one.
[quote]Working on a capsicum sorter conveyor machine in a hot shed in Bundaberg, Australia.[/quote]My wife did that in Emerald. Not capsicums, but oranges, lemons and tangerines. She became suicidal after a month or so. They were not even allowed to talk to the person next to them on the sorting line.
I’ve had a few dodgy jobs.
The most hellish and yet still an interesting job for a short time was as a banana ‘humper’ in Tully, Queensland. Tully’s is basically semi-rainforest and it’s claim to fame is that it is the wettest place in Australia with over 400cm annual rainfall and rain pretty much every afternoon of the year. It means you spend most of the day soaking wet in 100% sticky hot humidity. My job as humper was to stand behind the guy who hacked off the banana bunches, which weigh 10s of kgs, I would have to load them gingerly onto my shoulder without bruising them and at the same time keep up with a slow moving tractor and cart to deposit it in, then go to the next ripe bunch where the cutter was moving, all the time half running to keep up. The ground was muddy and full of puddles, I’d stumble and lurch around half the time and after a while I gave up wearing shoes half the days to stop my feet rotting although still getting spiked by plants or stones every now and then. The great thing about rainforest areas is that of course you get all types of animals and creepy-crawlies, such as fire ants, banana spiders as big as your hand, rats, mice, wild pigs, tree frogs, all of which like to hang out in or around banana trees.
The contant loads impacting my shoulders meant I couldn’t even lift my hands to brush my teeth. My workmate got something called ‘banana fever’, a mysterious flu-like illness which regularly hit the banana workers of Tully and I was jealous even though he had a fever and couldn’t get out of bed. We were let go after about 4 weeks just as I was getting hardened up to the job. I have many more stories about that place…like the guy who almost lost his eye because somebo burst a banana in his face and banana sap, which is like a superglue when it dries, stuck to the front of his eye!
I also worked in Childers, Australia picking tomatoes briefly which was a piece of cake compared to bananas… Another job I had was setting up lighting apparatus for events on top of scaffolding towers with no safety equipment, dodgy as hell.
I worked for a couple of months part-time as a rose bush gardener in a private estate in the Hamptons, basically meant deadheading the roses. Roses are the worst s*n of a bitch plant to deal with because their thorns scratch you to hell all day. Two German/Russian ladies owned the estate and treated their mostly illegal workers like garbage. One guys job was to shred documents everyday in the garage, mafia anyone? They got real upset when I mentioned that at the same time as I wanted my backpay and wouldn’t let me off the gated estate for ages, lucky to get out of that place in one piece.
One of my worst jobs was being left in a lab for days at a time on my own as an intern, bored to tears. One time I was centrifuging something which I hadn’t bolted down and the locking nut got loose in the machine spinning at about 10,000 rpm, I had to make a decision whether to enter the centrifuge room to shut down the machine or risk the whole place disintegrating, I rushed in, hit the switch and rushed out, lucky my boss didn’t know about that one!
The worst job I had was cleaning the floor of the local supermarket when I was a kid with a buffer machine and sweeping brush, simply because the local lasses might come in and see me do it…tough times! I worked in the butchers of the same place for 1 day but decided cleaning guts and blood of the walls and implements wasn’t for me!
construction/renovation, but specifically re-roofing. We had to rip off the tiles and underneath it the layer of tar, etc. lots of pollutants in the air to breathe, dust, nails, other crap, i didn’t always have gloves - torn my hands apart, and the pay wasn’t worth the trouble, so I quit soon after. the contractor wanted to give me part of my earnings in beer! I said no.
Professional hit man. Movies like Pulp Fiction and Grosse Point Blank make it seem glamorous and fun, but in reality you’re doing a dirty, nasty, and often bloody job that you get no thanks for. You’re on call 24/7 - when the boss rings you up, whenever, you gotta go. Like seasonal work you go for long stretches idling away and then suddenly, BAM!, you’re up to your neck in too much work for you and your associates to handle. The '98 Triad War in Honkers, we were up to our necks in gore. It’s not a fun job, believe me - no matter how hard you plan, most hits don’t go down nearly as smoothly as you’d wish. I can’t count the times when I expected to take a guy out with one clean shot but the bastard still lived. I had to take additional shots, sometimes even resorting to stuff like hacksaws and butcher knives – I mean, I tell ya, it can get messy. And offing some dude’s by far the easiest and quickest part. Somebody’s gotta clean up this mess, and guess who it’s going to be? Scraping the blood and bits of chipped bone off walls, that can hours. I didn’t realize when I signed on for this gig that I’d spend most of my time on the job working as a glorified cleaning lady.
And I’m not going to get into the nervous tension this sort of job brings on a guy. You try driving around with a dead body hacked into several pieces crammed in the back of your car trunk, desperately trying to find a river or secluded spot in the woods to dump. I get flashback chills every time I see flashing blue lights.
On top of it all, the money ain’t that good. Sure, a good professional hit will set you back a cool $10,000, and it’s all tax free, which seems like good money, until you realize that more often than not you’ve got to split it 2, 3, maybe even 4 or 5 ways. And like I said the work is inconsistent, sometimes you can go for months without a contract. Breaking it down it don’t work out that profitable. Most of the hit men I know, they do it as a moonlighting operation, they have to hold a second job as bouncers or protection money collectors or something, just to pay the bills.
Doing fiberglass on the inside of unventilated holds of fishing boats with no breathing apparatus. At 12. There oughta be a law - oh wait. There is.
Working on boats for skippers who scream a lot. Or panic. Not good.
So you are basically telling us that you killed people for a living. You took money from people who asked you to kill someone else. Well man, you win. That is right up there among the worst jobs a man can have.
marboulette
[quote=“Quentin”]Professional hit man. Movies like Pulp Fiction and Grosse Point Blank make it seem glamorous and fun, but in reality you’re doing a dirty, nasty, and often bloody job that you get no thanks for. You’re on call 24/7 - when the boss rings you up, whenever, you gotta go. Like seasonal work you go for long stretches idling away and then suddenly, BAM!, you’re up to your neck in too much work for you and your associates to handle. The '98 Triad War in Honkers, we were up to our necks in gore. It’s not a fun job, believe me - no matter how hard you plan, most hits don’t go down nearly as smoothly as you’d wish. I can’t count the times when I expected to take a guy out with one clean shot but the bastard still lived. I had to take additional shots, sometimes even resorting to stuff like hacksaws and butcher knives – I mean, I tell ya, it can get messy. And offing some dude’s by far the easiest and quickest part. Somebody’s gotta clean up this mess, and guess who it’s going to be? Scraping the blood and bits of chipped bone off walls, that can hours. I didn’t realize when I signed on for this gig that I’d spend most of my time on the job working as a glorified cleaning lady.
And I’m not going to get into the nervous tension this sort of job brings on a guy. You try driving around with a dead body hacked into several pieces crammed in the back of your car trunk, desperately trying to find a river or secluded spot in the woods to dump. I get flashback chills every time I see flashing blue lights.
On top of it all, the money ain’t that good. Sure, a good professional hit will set you back a cool $10,000, and it’s all tax free, which seems like good money, until you realize that more often than not you’ve got to split it 2, 3, maybe even 4 or 5 ways. And like I said the work is inconsistent, sometimes you can go for months without a contract. Breaking it down it don’t work out that profitable. Most of the hit men I know, they do it as a moonlighting operation, they have to hold a second job as bouncers or protection money collectors or something, just to pay the bills.[/quote]
[quote=“kage”]Doing fiberglass on the inside of unventilated holds of fishing boats with no breathing apparatus. At 12. There oughta be a law - oh wait. There is.
Working on boats for skippers who scream a lot. Or panic. Not good.[/quote]
So they were panicing when a 12 year old was fixing holes in the boat?
I love my job, but there’s just one super-irritating department. I want to go down there and shout ‘LIKE THIS, FFS!’. But no.
I’m surprised at the statistics of shit jobs so far brought up in this forum from my home state of Queensland. And the all the shittiest jobs I ever had were in that state too, and Kage beat me to the gun about fibre glass.
The worst job I ever had was as a high-school drop-out making fiberglass water tanks. Had to get inside to sand 'em and seal 'em with a hot mixture of resin and only a paper mask. I was always caked in the resin, clothes stiff and spiky. Still have slivers of glass in me 26 years later. Only 20 bucks a day and most of the other guys were on social security and would run whenever an official looking car pulled up in front. And that’s how all those leaky water tanks got around Childers and Emerald and the chemical tanks you drag behind the tractors too.
But before that, my family was so poor we lived in a paper bag in the middle of the road and ate gravel for breakfast and had to wank the dog to feed the cat. So I was happy just to have a job.
Yeah, teaching English sucks too. It’s too hard to get off my butt.
Just got an email from my old boss at a college I worked for in Manchester:
Message subject line: ‘don’t forget - top up classes from waiting list file next to my desk’
Text: As title.
I’m really happy I don’t have to deal with that brain donor any more. The fact that she is still sending me confidential emails seven months after I stopped working there, and after I threatened them with legal action for salary non-payment goes to show why teachers shouldn’t even be involved in managing stationery orders, let alone personnel.
The worst job was cleaning the bathroom of an airplane coming back from the mines in northern Canada. Bunch of greasy miners trying to piss standing up in a bouncing turbo Prop plane. Everyday empty the crapper and scub the dripping toulet top to bottom.
Most dangerous job: driving through blizzards for 16-20 hours a day 4 days in a row one way in a old truck and back in an old 15 passenger van with 16 F’n chain smoking geriatrics.(yeah 17 in the van) The job continued for a year and a half with the road conditions repeating every couple weeks in the winter. Year n a half 5 our of the 17 of us died. (various causes, 1 accident, rest health but I was the only one under 70.)
