Mcdonalds: Need I say anymore.
A close second: Dishwasher ant the “Chief Crowfoot Dinig Room”
Third: Russian Black Market Money Exchanger. Had it’s benifits though.
Ski
[quote=“ski”]Mcdonalds: Need I say anymore.
A close second: Dishwasher ant the “Chief Crowfoot Dinig Room”
Third: Russian Black Market Money Exchanger. Had it’s benifits though.
Ski[/quote]
Wow, this thread has risen from a two-year coma.
I know what you mean, Ski, I worked at Wendy’s. They actually had a spy at McDonald’s. My boss was a bitch but much to my delight was later busted for embezzlement and ended up having to sleep in her car.
A mate of mine worked a part-time job for the “Weet Bix” cereal factory in Brisbane while he did his Phd. His job was to manage the defective Weet Bix, and he would sit in a dark, little room from midnight 'til 8am, filling cereal into big, brown, sugar cane bags. It was pretty menial stuff, just sitting on a chair, pulling the lever, watching the cereal come down the chute, filling the bag and then moving it to one side before starting again… for 8 hours at a time. The cereal would eventually be sent out to farms to be used as cattle feed.
It so happened that my friend also quite liked to smoke the “green tea” if you know what I mean. He said it helped him to pass the time away while working such a boring job. Anyway, one day at work he got a little too stoned and passed out on the little chair in the little room. Unfortunately, he had just pulled the lever to dump the cereal before he passed out…
He was later revived by his boss, who, upon opening the door to come in for a chat, was met by an avalanche of Weet Bix. As the cereal emptied out of the room, he saw the emerging form of his colleague slumped over the chair, and thinking that he had actually drowned, ran over to revive him.
Anyway, that was my friend’s last day of employment at the Weet Bix factory.
Three words: Christmas Tree Factory
CK
One summer, a friend, knowing that I possess very little common sense, dared me to work in a gas station. A medium sum of money was involved in this dare. I thought, “Why the fuck not.” So I got a job pumping gas at a local gas station.
Anyways, on my third day, a 72 year old laborer from the local pulp mill comes into fill up his tank. Before I put the pump in his truck, he decides to add some small bottle of something to his gas tank. Unfortunately, my gas pump was on automatic and it sprayed him all over his head, mouth, and shoulders etc. I thought he was gonna have a heart attack. The ambulance came etc. Luckily he was a rock solid sorta dude and he didn’t due. While he was crying on the ground, my friend who orginally placed the bet arrived at the gas station. To this day, I would almost give my right ball to have had a camera and videotape of this, especially my friends smile when he saw the ambulance. It was like this “I told you so” sort of smile. I will never to manual labor again after this experience.
Chewy
Tree planting takes a close second to working as a production assistant on a movie set. 17 hours a day, unpaid overtime, dealing with people. I prefer the kindys.
Working on the family farm. Not a real farm, just doing my chores on a small plot of land behind our house out in the countryside.
Goddamn that sucked. Hoeing and planting vegetables all spring and summer.
Actually, picking blackberries was the worst.
And the worst was I wasn’t even paid for it because I was only a minor.
No, wait - hauling timber for the fireplace in the winter with my old man. That sucked the worst of all of my chores. Goddamnit them logs was heavy!
I can honestly say that no jobs I’ve had as an adult have been half as hellish as the chores I had to do around the house when I was a kid.
Dishwasher is a pretty lousy job, especially at the end of the night when you have to clean the greasy floor mats. But I met a guy once who had a job cleaning septic tanks (vacuuming shit into a truck). He showered as soon as he got home, but even then I don’t know how his wife could stand to touch him. Too disgusting for me. 
Picking okra in the summer really, really sucks.
I worked in a bingo hall when I was 12 years old… that sucked… cranky old people smoking and cussing like crazy…
I worked on a farm for many years… I liked that… but I didn’t like putting grain away… the dust was awful.
I worked construction one summer… that was OK, I’d been doing stuff like that all my life for my dad… but one job sucked… unloading plaster board off a flatbed trailer of an 18 wheeler and carrying 2 4x8 sheets up the stairs to the third floor…
I worked for a concert venue that utilized a circus tent… putting up the tent sucked…
I agree with Mod Lang… all of the jobs I’ve had since graduating from college have been pretty easy. As we used to say back on the farm about office jobs… “That ain’t work”.
Oh… there was one job I did after college… I had just arrived in Taiwan and was living at the Catholic Priory with the priests and monks… one old priest had a pigeon hutch on the roof of the priory and the others decided that since the old priest no longer raised pigeons, the hutch should be taken down… I offered to do the demolition… The hutch was a wooden structure filled with dust, cockroaches, bats and bat and pigeon shit… I had a sledge hammer and a crow bar. That was an awful job.
Reminds me of one of the duties I had in a Sunday job when I was 15. I was working on what might be called a smallholding owned by a doctor. He kept geese and penned them up at nights in a little goosehouse three feet high and covered with a tin roof. I had to get almost inside the goosehouse and muck it out.
Another nasty task there was shifting sacks of coal about in all weathers. Although the doctor meant well and tried to be kind, he wasn’t the most practical of guys. He chose to have his sacks of coal stored at the end of a yard several hundred metres away from the coal bunker.
The most pointless job there was the attempt to use a big petrol Flymo as a strimmer. The doctor’s long driveway had earth banks on either side with what seemed like more than a year’s accumulation of weeds and brambles growing on them. He didn’t want to buy a strimmer so insisted that I swing the Flymo up onto the banks to chop the weeds. Of course it stalled every time so I’d be there, yanking on the starter cable, swinging the heavy Flymo onto the bank, dragging it off the bank a few seconds later when it stalled and repeating the process.
One thing was that I got physically stronger. It wasn’t all bad either. It was a nice patch of land and in the summer I’d be there with my shirt off in the sun, scything cowparsley and rounding up the cows. Pleasant enough. I saved a few hundred pounds as well.
Most Redundant Job: Spraying cellulose insulation into the crawls spaces of a southern Ontarian farm. The dead flies were insulation enough. I was 14.
Most Dangerous Moment on the Job: Same job, 2 weeks later. Left alone on another farm, my task was to drill holes every three feet or so, up and across, all the way around a 3 story farmhouse. I have a ladder and a B&D hammering drill, its half my pubescing size. Then there’s the rose garden. Had to adjust the ground to ladder angle somwhat to avoid tramping the roses. While 45 degrees is the optimal angle for most things, hammer-drilling thru mortar 20 feet up in the cannot be counted amongst its best moments. Yes, I landed in a bed of roses.
Thanks for the job, Dad. Can I use u for a reference?
How about this guy I worked on set-up and strike crews with. He’s working in the orch. pit and a 6’ slab of marble falls of the stage and brains him. He’s fine, BTW. I demo’d a house with him a couple of years later. Cool guy. Tough guy. Demo’ing that house…dustiest job I’ve ever had…and I used to spread cellulose around.
Most Thankless and Rewarding Job: Stage Manager
All Time Worst Job: Again with the ladder and the marble…furniture mover…i am talking a 12’ table chunk that took 16 guys to move. And the pedastel…fuck me. They also had this armoir that was built in the bedroom on the 2nd floor. We had to strip away the window sill to the house’s framework and inch this massive and extremely valuable piece feet first out the window. Me and this other guy are on a ladder outside supporting this monster as the crew inside are trying to belay it to the ground. we are juggling and jostling, cajoling and cursing it out until it looks like the house has a hard on. This thing is sticking straight out, 90 frickin degrees and hanging on by a rope fibre…i am braced between the ladder and the porch roof and buddy is on the ladder directly beneath the beast…when she decides to pop, i get a wee head bonking and start to fall…i grab for the ladder and pull it out from under the on-crashing armoir. Buddy’s inertia causes his leg to kick out thus padding the shuddering thumping against the house, I steady him and myself 'gainst the roof and we clambour down. Mission accomplished.
Later that summer, me and another guy corkscrewed a couch for 13 floors.
We do what we gotta do.
So what’s the best job you’ve ever had? And I don’t mean money, I mean the most fun.
Easy for me - paperboy. If I could earn my current salary at it, I’d go back to being a paperboy the rest of my life. What fun! Riding your bicycle around town, in the fresh air, throwing stuff at people’s houses - ah, the life!
[quote=“mod lang”]So what’s the best job you’ve ever had? And I don’t mean money, I mean the most fun.
Easy for me - paperboy. If I could earn my current salary at it, I’d go back to being a paperboy the rest of my life. What fun! Riding your bicycle around town, in the fresh air, throwing stuff at people’s houses - ah, the life![/quote]
Bartender on this travelling back and forth, twice between Vancouver and Montreal. Best 36 days on a train ever.
[quote=“mod lang”]So what’s the best job you’ve ever had? And I don’t mean money, I mean the most fun.[/quote]My job now, teaching English mainly to elementary-age children. It’s rewarding and involving and the students come out with some hilarious stuff, often intentionally, sometimes not.
I know what you mean – the brother of a friend is in the “recycling industry”. The poor guy is mentally unstable (I forget how) and can’t/won’t hold a regular job. He reeks from handling garbage all the time.
I’ve had some jobs that were ridiculously (and needlessly) high-stress, but nothing really nasty (the grossest was cafeteria worker during college). Probably the worst, stresswise – purely due to the job itself – was an IBM subsidiary where the top two guys (Pres and VP) were utter morons who had helped each other climb the corporate ladders at various companies for decades. The VP was stealing equipment and hiring incompetents from a business he ran on the side (letting them double-dip, basically); he was destroying the good workers under another manager to cover his own double-dippers and himself. One of these incompetents screwed up a critical piece of the system which caused the whole company to halt work for a full month – everyone had to sit on their asses because they couldn’t build or test. The product they were supposed to deliver was a medical patient-care system which was so full of serious bugs that I felt sure it would kill patients if it ever made it to market. Fortunately they got bought out by a rival and their product was shelved. On top of all that, IBM was pushing for it to be a resource hog so that they could sell more memory and require it to run on only their fastest computers – totally pointless, since some simple optimizations drastically improved efficiency. But they refused to use those optimizations because they wanted to sell more hardware. . . . (This was in the days when a four megabyte memory card weighed a couple of pounds and sold for US$16,000.)
Back in the days of my architectural cadetship, a friend/colleague of mine was asked to go out to deliver some drawings to a client. Deliveries were seen to be an essential part of a young architect’s training, and we would often spend most of a working day sweating outside in the 40 degree summer heat to delivery what would eventually become a soggy set of drawings. But, luckily for him, that day his destination was far enough away to require the use of a car, which meant he could bask in the relative luxury of an air-conditioned environment. Even luckier for him, the only available car at the time was the boss’ Porsche. It was quite a privalege to drive the Porsche… Anyway, the boss reminded him to fill the tank while he was out, and of course, to drive carefully.
However, being his first time to drive a luxury car, he wasn’t quite sure how everything worked. At the petrol station, he had a little difficulty opening the fuel tank cap, and so, using the natural wisdom that a first-year cadet would have, decided to get a screwdriver out of the car to prise it open… Little did he know, but a curious station attendant was watching the whole thing from behind. The attendant eventually decided to approach him, and just as my friend finally began to open the cap, tapped him on the shoulder to ask if he needed any help. This startled my friend, who then dropped the screwdriver into the fuel tank of the Porsche. An uncomfortable moment passed before he decided that his best course of action would simply be to fill-up the tank and drive away.
For the next 6 weeks, the boss was complaining about a strangle rattling sound in his car. Naturally, my friend maintained his vow of silence… even 'til the day that the boss took the car to a mechanic to look at the problem. After half a day of work, the mechanic discovered an old scredriver in the fuel tank, and presented it to an even more-surprised boss, who then took it back to the office to approach his staff.
As it turned out, my friend had built up such a reputation for doing brainless things, that the boss didn’t need to ask who had dropped the screwdriver into the fuel tank. It was his last day in that job…
I’ve never had a crappy job in Taiwan, but I’ll comment on jobs in general, if Sir Flicka doesn’t mind too much.
I enjoy physical labor. Worked as a laborer, and later, a carpenter during summers in college. Had a good tan, stayed fit and lean, and went to bed exhausted every night at 9pm. It isn’t such a bad life, if you don’t have many bills to pay.
The worst jobs I’ve held were jobs selling things I wasn’t interested in (e.g. trade show displays, telecommunications, skin care products). I took those jobs when I was in between other, better jobs. Everyone should do some cold calling for at least a few months to learn what it feels like to be rejected and jerked around on a daily basis.
The best jobs I’ve held were not in business. Being a GM, a VP, or a company president ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, unless you own the company. I’m much happier writing texts for classes, and then teaching them. I prefer teaching college-level classes.
Mod lang, I’ve known more than a few people who have worked throwing papers as adults. You can make an extra US$1,000 or so a month do it. Can get you through some lean times, or help you save money for a trip or to pay off some bills. You get to toss the papers out your car window while listening to your favorite tunes. The only drawback is that it has to be done at 4 in the morning. I knew one couple who had two huge routes, and made around $3,000 a month doing it. It was all they did, and they were done by 7 or 8 am each morning.
The worst thing about a paper route is collecting the money. Riding around throwing papers is fine, but when I had a paper route, I couldn’t believe how many of my customers were so stingy, dishonest and inconsiderate. I’m just a young kid delivering papers that these people had ordered, but when it came payment time, one after another made excuses, often repeatedly, about how they didn’t presently have the $3.50 or whatever or I would have to come back when the spouse was home, etc. Sometimes kids can be more mature than adults.
Ain’t that the truth!
As a kid, I just thought it was a bit of an inconvenience. But, now that my time really is valuable, I can’t imagine telling some kid that he’ll have to come around later… as if his / her time is completely worthless.