My Worst Job. Have a story?

[icarus]

My Worst Job

Yes, we've all had'em. Bizarre jobs we don't care to admit until a friend thinks they have a worse story - Oh yeah?

Job titles that require lengthy explanation. (Mine tops everyone's: Roach Coach Driver.)

Job descriptions so strange, pointless or insane, you can't believe you ever did that. (Wilderness Guru takes the cake: he worked for a bomb factory. Ever have something actually blow up on the job?)

Bosses that were let out of the looney bin, just for you.

Or that day at work that would make anyone decide... no thanks. (The Puppy's worst day: off the coast of Alaska, up to his waist in bilge water, pouring quick-set concrete to fill that, er, hole the boat developed.)

For some reason these shitty jobs all pay badly. (Roach Coach? $200/week, cash. Bomb Factory? $4.75/hour. Sinking boat? No one could pay enough.)

Now there's a use for these stories - to entertain the multitude! I'm doing a tongue-in-cheek column for the college newspaper, and I want to hear from you.

[Poll #392948]


ETA: I'm finding that the maximum space allowed on these polls really doesn't leave enough space for these description-defying jobs. So if it's too short (it was for me) just go ahead and leave the story in comments.

ETA2: Okay, "Elver Gatherer" tops "Roach Coach Driver", any day of the week. Thanks, Webba.

ETA3: cordelia_v! *snort* *splutter!* *wheeze!* Ahahahahahaha!

Comments

[skuf.livejournal.com]

Can you use odd-job stories from Denmark? Of course the pay is going to sound fantastic (but we have high taxes and everything costs a fortune…)

[cara-chapel.livejournal.com]

I would like to add that I was also in charge of hiding certain kitchen health violations from the food-safety inspector. Among my duties were rounding up filthy cleaning cloths, putting them in bread sacks, and burying them in the garbage for retrieval when the guy left.

Oh, yeah. And I was supposed to meet, I quote, "The Biggers Nigger" who was our very pleasant and efficient deliveryman, and show him where to store the food, so the boss could hide and not have to tip him.

And the boss's son was dealing dope out of the gas station/campground.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. Any shitty job will do. :D

If there isn't enough room, just go ahead and put it in comments.

Oh man...

Icarus

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

That is gloriously appalling. Hide the dirty dish-rags, because heck, we don't want to clean 'em.

Icarus

[bsafemydeers.livejournal.com]

I feel kind of bad admitting that I really do love my shitty job-- mostly because of those damned kids. It's the "special" ones who know what's really going down. Every single time my kid for the summer called someone a fricking idiot, he was right.

HOWEVER, this does not excuse the fact that I was supposed to do my job "undercover". Like, follow this kid around and keep him out of trouble while not officially being named as his aide. Because his parents didn't want one. (Same parents who gave me a week from hell by letting him not take meds because "he didn't want to".)

He wasn't the one I had to restrain at the amusement park, though. That one is a baby tinhat, I'm afraid. On that same day, I also suspended a kid from rides because the kid stood up on the log ride (which someone died on once for doing something similar), and then got in huge trouble with his mom for ruining his day. We also had an incident with security after a little girl cut her lip on a ride.

[jadarene.livejournal.com]

Hi. I just wanted to say that my real last name starts with an R, in case you were wondering. And I don't know that my story is all that amusing, except for the audit the company had to endure and the press they got over the embezzlement. Just think, it could've been me on TV if I'd had less morals.

[wildernessguru.livejournal.com]

Many years ago, I worked in what I affectionately called a Bomb Factory, ie., a Magnesium Smeltering Plant. For a whopping $4.25 hr. my job was to use these 3ft long metal tongs to pick up Mangesium Igots - huge bars about 2ft long and several inches thick from a blast furnace and then turn around and insert these straight into a volcano looking smeltering pot. I wore one of those reflective flame proof suits, and all, it was an eXtremely dangerous job. Many times we'd get jams in the line that'd we have to clear all-the-while bending over this melting pot. The melted Mag' would be pumped thru a thin pipe, that was shot with helium and then it'd turn into powder.

In the process of making the Magnesium Powder, there was another powder (a byproduct during production) called Draco Powder that would be pumped into another holding tank. This stuff was deadly explosive, all it take to set it off is outside contact with the air, even blow on it. For years, the company would merely dump this Draco Powder in a large field devoid of plants and let it decompose, because they didn't know anything else to do with it.

One day, the entire facility was alerted to stop work and clear the buildings while myself and another guy carried a small bag of this D'powder doing a long, slow, slow walk out to the 'field'. I'll never forget what happened next. Just as soon as we gently put the 10Lb 'bag' down, turned around and took maybe 10-steps we heard this loud POOF! My foreman about a hundred yards away heard and saw it and yelled to us, RUN, RUN, RUN!!!! We ran for our lives literally and about 60-yards later the [bleep] exploded with a huge mushroom cloud -it was large enough to devastate a small house.

The plant also made Aluminum powder which is used in rocket fuel. But the Mangesium powder is and was hands-down thee most dangerous to work with. Another Magnesium smeltering plant back in Penns. years before I worked blew up and was leveled killing 5-workers. They always told us if our plant were to ever blow up a fourth of Stkn would be gone.

A former worker took some of this 'powder' home one day, and ignited it, the result was a crater in his backyard lawn, and all the neighbors windows were blown out. When the local Fire Dept. came they asked him, "where on earth did you get this stuff?!"

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed my Roach Coach job, too. There's something about doing something so very foreign to my background (I was more the 'intern-at-Dad's-Ad-Agency' type). I got to see an entirely different cross-section of life. I kept looking around thinking, "wow, this is weird," and felt like an anthropologist who'd landed on Mars.

Icarus

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Just think, it could've been me on TV if I'd had less morals.

*snort* I found it hard to choose among my shitty jobs. I worked for Arthur Andersen you see and....

Icarus

Apparently Snape had a sex change and moved to New England.

[alchemia.livejournal.com]

The oddest job I had was working for $4.25/hr as an office/research assistant to an entomologist. Why was this odd? I'm absobloodylutely phobic of insects. But I did like the researcher, the hours were good and as long as all the icky slimy things were in jars or behind glass, I could just have a nice potion-y calming tea and remind myself they couldn't get at me. And yes this was in the dungeon basement of a stone manor that was nicknamed "the castle".

I've also done art modeling (which I kinda liked), worked in a newspaper (where I spent most of the time hiding under desks and took 2 hour lunch breaks, yet the boss thought I was a model employee(wtf?)) Oh, and then there is 'Rat Breeder' which always gets some puzzled expressions, but I think of that more as an overblown hobby =)

Oh and then there the complete lack of a title with complete lack of monetary pay because you're expected to help out with the family business and you don't need a title nor any money - "general family slave labour in a sex toy warehouse" (that looks kinkier than I intended...)

Oh yes, all of this would look great on a resume =P

[skuf.livejournal.com]

*Ponders, which shitty job to share?* I'll tell you about my garbage can job - which actually isn't even the worst job I've ever had, sad as it sounds:

The "Odd" Job Title
My one co-worker and I talked about our "title" - I think we came up with "renovation consultant assistants" (because our boss was a "renovation consultant". Well, that's what his card said, heh).


Bizarre/Dangerous/Stupid Job Description
A couple of summers ago, I was employed briefly by the city for a special project: scraping old stickers off garbage cans/garbage containers, cleaning the area off with methylated spirits, and putting on new shiny stickers.¹ Work started at 6 am and was 6-8 hours every day. Walking from trash can/container to trash can/container, stopping to scrape, clean, stick at each one.

Marvelous job. The first days, I practically jumped from the front door into the shower, I felt so dirty, ick!


My Weirdest Day... you won't believe it...
They were all exactly the same. Oh, wait: it was hilarious when people would come out and see us messing with their garbage can and think we were cleaning them! Yes, buddy: with this small rag and a bottle of methylated spirits, I'm going to clean your whole garbage can!² Don't forget to thank the city for this nice service.


The Upshot (end of job, continuation of story, idiot!boss)
I'll tell you why it's not the worst job I've had (that would be the part-time job I currently hold and am quitting as of Wednesday: cleaning at a butcher's, yuckyuckyuck!):

• It was a lot of walking - and scraping, which was harder work than it maybe sounds - but that also meant lots of exercise.
  
• We had a boss, but he sat in his office somewhere in town and we did our own thing, no supervision. Hey, if lunch dragged out past that ½ hour, who'd know?
  
• We couldn't work in wet weather - then the stickers wouldn't stick. Only nice weather for us!
  
• I didn't have to deal with any people (and no boss!) - except my co-worker, and the occasional surprised garbage can-owner. I much prefer to work on my own.

Less-than-stellar pay. For this shit I made --
Went and looked it up: 93 kr. per hour - around $16.50. I paid 42% of that in taxes, though. And everything is much more expensive in Denmark :o)


Your first name and last initial
Heidi M.


¹Which told people to please knot their trash bags, so things didn't spill out and mix - the city was trying out separating organic garbage from ordinary garbage…
²I can't find you a picture, but they weren't small.

[skuf.livejournal.com]

It would! You just have to rephrase that last one ;o)

[alchemia.livejournal.com]

Dildo Jugler?

Er... hm... no.

[alchemia.livejournal.com]

Juggler even. Still , no

[cordelia_v]

Hmm. I'm not sure if this job would qualify as "odd," but it's my most amusing, to look back at.

Among the jobs I did as an undergrad/grad student was working as a cleaning lady for various faculty members. I liked it, because you could come in and clean while the person was at work (avoiding interaction) and just pick up your money from the counter and walk out when you were done. I'll take that over office politics any day.

Most of the faculty clients were harmless, although you certainly see someone differently once you've been cleaning up after them for a while (they don't see how much it gives away about them).

Ah, but there was one man . . . He was a professor at the law school, and was (still is) a nationally known conservative legal theoretician (I still see his articles in neocon magazines, etc.). He came from a VERY upper class background, and that sort has no idea how to run a house; and he was a bachelor.

So: my job was to run his house for him, dropping by for one day a week ($40 a day, big money for me back then) and doing everything. He'd heat up microwaved food and leave the entire week's worth of dishes (food dried to concrete consistency) on the counter for me to scrub; week's worth of clothes scattered across the floor; and of course the standard jobs of cleaning the bathroom, changing bedsheets, mopping, dusting, etc. If I saw that anything needed to be purchased for the house, I was to order it (he had an account set up for me) and I was in charge of jobs that had to be done semi-annually (e.g., waxing and buffing the wood floors).


OK. So far, he's just a lazy upper-class twit. Treated me like I was invisible, of course, even when he was home while I worked. When I later read about house elves, I could immediately intuit how the wizards saw (didn't see) them, because that was close to how he saw me. But the funny part was my employer's lifestyle: my first exposure to world-class hypocrisy. The bookshelves I dusted were full of porn (s/m, mostly); the bed I changed had chains and manacles at all four corners; and many mornings, I came in to find his trick from the night before still lounging in bed (I would be expected to clean around this person).

The capper was the first time I went to defrost the fridge/freezer. He knew I was planning on doing this (I left lists of jobs I was rotating through) and yet when I opened the freezer, I found a large quantity of cocaine and dope rolled up into plastic pouches. The temptation to take a lot to sell was very strong: after all, he couldn't turn me in for it, now could he? But I resisted the urge, took all the drugs out of the freezer along with the frozen dinners, and got on with my job. When the freezer was cleaned, it all went back in, logs of dope stacked in a much neater pile than I'd found them.

OK. Perhaps a couple of joints made their way into my purse before I left that day. But no more

I still remember dusting and cleaning around this law professor, as he sat at his desk, talking to buddies in the Reagan administration back in D.C., when they called him to brainstorm possible nominees for judicial positions (as I said, he was a prominent neocon, and his White House friends seemed to call regularly). Sometimes, they'd discuss "family values" litmus tests for possible judicial nominees . . .

An amusing job, in retrospect. At the time, it was no fun being treated as if I were a member of a sort of sub-species, of course.

The best day on that job was the day I told him I'd been admitted to a top 10 PhD program in my discipline (with full scholarship) and that I therefore wouldn't be cleaning for him anymore. "You were admitted to grad school?" he asked, clearly taken aback . . .

yes, and I can both speak and write in English quite fluently . . .

Appropo of nothing: have you decided what you want to do next, in the academic world? Just curious.

[skuf.livejournal.com]

Definitely no, *g*!

[caseylane.livejournal.com]

You should have take pictures and negotiated better justices.

[jadarene.livejournal.com]

You did? O.O

How was it? Crappy?

[kijikun.livejournal.com]

I've been very lucky with jobs it seems.