What's the worst job you've ever had?

Yes, that did suck, didn’t it? Fortunately, I don’t think kids have to do that anymore. Safety issues and such. Everyone pays via the mail or auto-payment, and the paper carrier gets the money via a check.

I got this really crappy job once while travelling through Greece.

I asked this bar manager if he needed staff, and he told me to come back every night and ‘make fun’ so he could observe how I got along with his customers. For three night I drank free beer, until that fateful midnight when he pulled me out of some girl’s arms and over to the other side of the bar for a lecture:

People come here to have a good time, and drink a lot. I want them to be happy and spend lots of money, and they won’t do that if you’re all serious and sober. So keep drinking, you’re hired. You start now.

The next night I was tasked with doing something to make a bit of atmosphere with the early evening crowd - approach a couple of young lovelies with free drinks, then get them to dance on the bar with me. I almost choked. People get paid for this?

After a while I was banished from behind the bar after smashing a tray of glasses as I pulled them from out from the washing machine. From then it was ‘make fun’ all the way, and as long as the tables were clean my job was just to drink lots and dance with girls. English girls on holiday. What a nightmare!

It all came to an end after four girls walked in on the first night of their one-week adventure. Their ‘welcome’ was me sprinting across the patio in my underwear, pursued by three married women, and they kind of adopted me as their mascot. We hung out and partied like crazy for a week, demolished some furniture and I showed up at work on their final night so drunk that I couldn’t talk or stand up without assistance.

That small disability didn’t stop us dancing on the bar, until I fell off onto some innocent passers-by and my glorious career came to its predictable end. Still, I was drinking more than half a bottle of greek brandy a night by then. Had I stayed for the whole summer it might have killed me.

I don’t remember what they were paying me. The details are all a bit hazy.

Assuming this has moved into the realm of jobs in general :slight_smile:

Worst job: A close race between cold calling ‘would you like to waste 20 minutes of your valuable time answering inane questions about cigarettes? No, I didn’t think so’ and data entry ‘today you’ll type names and addresses into a spreadsheet for 8 hours. And tomorrow, you’ll do it AGAIN’. Thankfully I spent only two weeks and one day of my life doing these jobs. The cold calling was the one day.

Best job: Well, I did enjoy being a film/TV extra. Bring a book, sit out in the sun with a cup of coffee for most of the time, and get paid for it. Although admittedly, not much. Star spotting on the side a bonus if you like that sort of thing. Also I thought being a croupier was cool - for about two months, and then the realisation set in that it was just another menial job…

You think cold calling sucks? I also used to sell space rockets.

Since we’ve veered off into lousy jobs in general, I’ll re-post my und-d-d-d-er wat-t-t-er sc-c-crap-p-p-p rec-c-c-covery, burning brass portholes out of sunken German warships in Scapa Flow up in Orkney.
Talk about bras-s-s-s M-m-m-monkeys!

Or how about lying flat on my back for 12 weeks in a two-foot-high crawlspace jackhammering reinforced concrete in a whisky maltings. If the dust don’t get you, the burning peat fumes will.

Hellish, hellish work.