[M_Six]

Since we have a thread about what you do now for a living, how about one for the worst job experience or job in general?

I've done a bunch of different jobs in my life, but asbestos abatement was by far the worst. Nasty, dirty, hot as hell, and dangerous. There were many nasty and dangerous situations, but the one that still makes me cringe to this day was an abatement job we did at a hospital in Boston.

We were there to strip asbestos insulation off live steam pipes so that the re-insulators could come in and replace the asbestos with fiberglass. These pipes were in a crawlspace about 4ft high. The pipes ran across the concrete floor about 2-1/2 feet off the floor. We were using mechanics crawlers to scoot around under the pipes. There were rows of 6 pipes running zigzag across the floor. The crawlspace had windows to the outside that had been open in the distant past, but were now sealed. But there were piles of leaves and other debris that had previously blown in through the windows.

One day on the job I had to get under a rack of these pipes and there was a pile of leaves and crap in the way at the midpoint. I figured I'd just blast through the pile and be done with it. But when I hit the pile, my crawler got jammed. And the pile was a giant cockroach nest. When I hit the pile, I was suddenly covered in scrambling cockroaches. They were all over my face, so I had to close my eyes. I was under the pipes, so I couldn't stand up. My crawler was stuck so I couldn't move forward or backward. And then I felt cockroaches crawling in my ears. The only thing that kept them out of my nose and mouth was my respirator. I nearly lost my mind. I finally managed to crawl out from under the pipes and brush them all off. In the end, I was fine. Cockroaches don't bite and none of them got into my ear canals, so once they were off me I was ok. But that horrible feeling of cockroaches crawling all over my face is something I'll never forget.

[overcoil]

My worst experiences working were with people that had alcohol problems - think it so affected me I never drink.

[tcphoto]

Just about any job I had in the restaurant industry, it’s disproportionately filled with passive/aggressive personalities, chemical dependencies and miserable people that want to make you the same.

[DocL]

Being a resident at The Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC sucked. I was on the team that was called for injuries to the head. There were many nights I didn't get to sleep and had to go to the OR to repair broken jaws with the attending surgeon. Not fun, but I did get to see some crazy shit.

[Mosaud1998]

My worst job experience would have to be my first job working at Dunkin Doughnuts/Baskin Robbins (at the age of 17). God, it was hell. I got paid Illinois minimum wage ($8.25/hr) and did double the amount of work the females did. There were only two other guys including me that worked at that Dunkin. I remember one of the girls that worked there told me the manager/owner paid the girls $9.50/hr. The girls that worked with us didn't do anything but sit at the cash register while I and the two other guys had to clean the dishes, mop the floors (including bathrooms) every day (twice the amount of times a day when it snowed), take the trash out, and clean the pavement I remember a day or two before the building inspector was supposed to come, she would have me and the other guys move the big ass freezers (with the ice cream tubs and frozen Ice cream cakes) and had us sweep and mop under the fridge then move that big ass fridge back. The day I had enough was when she had me spray paint the drop-down ceiling because water had leaked and there were water spots. This is the day the building inspector was going to come to check on the building. I walked out the back door after I was done spray painting the drop-down ceiling

[vreihen16]

When I was in high school, we lived across the street from an onion farm. I worked with the migrant labor, crawling on the ground sticking onion bulbs into the dirt with my thumb. Wore the knees out of my work jeans in three days, and made a whopping $2.35/hour which was a dime above agricultural minimum wage at the time. Needless to say, I have nothing but respect for migrant farm laborers.....

[shimmy23]

Sounds like some of these really aren't our worst considering we learned so much and came out better people

[DocL]

Originally Posted by shimmy23

Sounds like some of these really aren't our worst considering we learned so much and came out better people

Considering I never stepped foot into an OR again, and the fact that I'll never pull a bullet out of a face again, my experience was hell. But it did make me realize that I didn't want to be a surgeon. I was treated worse than a pile of donkey shit.

Wanna know how much I got paid? After Federal & NYShitty taxes, my bi-weekly paycheck was $360.20. I probably worked 80-100hrs a week. So $720.40 is what I took home after taxes. My parents had to pay my rent for a shitty studio in a walkup building in Spanish Harlem.

[chief1richard]

Originally Posted by M_Six

Since we have a thread about what you do now for a living, how about one for the worst job experience or job in general?

I've done a bunch of different jobs in my life, but asbestos abatement was by far the worst. Nasty, dirty, hot as hell, and dangerous. There were many nasty and dangerous situations, but the one that still makes me cringe to this day was an abatement job we did at a hospital in Boston.

We were there to strip asbestos insulation off live steam pipes so that the re-insulators could come in and replace the asbestos with fiberglass. These pipes were in a crawlspace about 4ft high. The pipes ran across the concrete floor about 2-1/2 feet off the floor. We were using mechanics crawlers to scoot around under the pipes. There were rows of 6 pipes running zigzag across the floor. The crawlspace had windows to the outside that had been open in the distant past, but were now sealed. But there were piles of leaves and other debris that had previously blown in through the windows.

One day on the job I had to get under a rack of these pipes and there was a pile of leaves and crap in the way at the midpoint. I figured I'd just blast through the pile and be done with it. But when I hit the pile, my crawler got jammed. And the pile was a giant cockroach nest. When I hit the pile, I was suddenly covered in scrambling cockroaches. They were all over my face, so I had to close my eyes. I was under the pipes, so I couldn't stand up. My crawler was stuck so I couldn't move forward or backward. And then I felt cockroaches crawling in my ears. The only thing that kept them out of my nose and mouth was my respirator. I nearly lost my mind. I finally managed to crawl out from under the pipes and brush them all off. In the end, I was fine. Cockroaches don't bite and none of them got into my ear canals, so once they were off me I was ok. But that horrible feeling of cockroaches crawling all over my face is something I'll never forget.

I worked in the Power Plant as a Stationary Engineer (2nd Class Steam Fireman) monitoring high pressure boilers at Boston State Hospital in Mattapan in the late 70's. There was so much asbestos there Some days I thought it was snowing. To this day I wonder why I haven't come down with asbestos diseases. Every day is a blessing.

[NEfan508]

@chief1richard
Dorchester, Mass. 3rd generation roofing contractor, my grandfather lived to 80, my dad (64) is as strong as some 30 year olds I work with but I get cancer?!? (Beat it btw, 100% as of now) Asbestos has been gone since late 70's well before I was born, (IT DONT MATTAH) drinking diet soda or simply pumping gas could also be a cause?!?

My generation never touched that stuff, never really drank alcohol or did drugs kept an active lifestyle, I buy clean food @ Whole Foods aka Bread and Circus, got sick anyway

[ASAP]

My worst experiences are all in office environments but all in all typical corporate America experience, one comes out on top though-

1) people in positions that were never supposed to be there with clearly the basic experience completely lacking

2) a total lack of communication and organization

3) positions and a hierarchy that made no sense and you couldn't figure it out

4) Me hired as a consultant to figure it all out.

Let's just say this was only a temporary position for me because my manager and her superiors had no idea what was going on... hint - it was an insurance company... i cannot think of a less honorable industry

[Bunnny]

My last job was in a call center for a big telecom company. We were upgrading communities and areas to fibre from the old phone lines, so we were doing both sales and technical support (it was like corraling cats, over the phone). Unfortunately my company severely lacked managing roll out, and with a small department skilled, it was usually a 2 hour + wait to speak to a rep like me. Usually by the time people got on the phone they were PISSED. The sad part is most of the issues literally took less than 10 minutes of my time to fix. But ironically, the customer yelling added 10 to 15 more minutes of time to the next customer's wait.

My coworker however, came from a particular department working in health insurance, that basically told people they did not qualify for financial help, after they had already had the procedure done. I was glad I did not work there.

[mc-m3]

Durring college I worked for a temp service one summer. Most of the jobs were horrible and I can only remember a couple. The worst that I remember was demo work in a fast food restaurant (either a Jack in the Box or KFC, I forget). Spent several days with a jackhammer busting out the old tile floor. It was truly disgusting. The other was in a machine shop polishing parts for airline duct work. Hot and dirty.

[chief1richard]

Originally Posted by NEfan508

@chief1richard
Dorchester, Mass. 3rd generation roofing contractor, my grandfather lived to 80, my dad (64) is as strong as some 30 year olds I work with but I get cancer?!? (Beat it btw, 100% as of now) Asbestos has been gone since late 70's well before I was born, (IT DONT MATTAH) drinking diet soda or simply pumping gas could also be a cause?!?

My generation never touched that stuff, never really drank alcohol or did drugs kept an active lifestyle, I buy clean food @ Whole Foods aka Bread and Circus, got sick anyway

Glad to hear you recovered. Dorchester Roofing Co? Would that be Duffy Roofing? I also did roofing as one of my dozens of jobs. Used to do slate roofs, and my boss wanted to keep the slate and sell it so I had to carry it down after removing it.

[AntF32]

Working at a high street photo processing lab back in the 1990's. Saw some "interesting" photos, some more adventurous than others........

Handing photos to a 70+ old lady who likes the feel of root vegetables and whilst sitting on a washing machine - I should have bene awarded an Oscar for "Best kept neutral expression"

[pennsiveguy]

My all-time worst job was being a porn movie stunt dick.

A close 2nd was working as a dispatch operations manager for a giant regional building materials contractor supply company. When people would ask what exactly it was that I did, I would say that "I've got 40 commission-whore salespeople who want the entire company inventory shipped to their customers first thing yesterday. And I've got 100 Teamsters who want to spend the entire day in the break room bullshitting and telling jokes and bitching about their wives. My job is to negotiating a compromise between those two sides." Sound like fun? Nope, it sure wasn't. The most soul-sucking job I've ever had.

[M_Six]

My first white collar job was at an environmental engineering firm. I loved the field work and building systems, but the regulatory reports sucked. It was made worse by the owner's insistence that we literally had to cut and paste the reports. We weren't allowed to use Word or any other word processing app to write reports. We had to actually cut out, with scissors, the parts of the previous reports we wanted to keep and then paste them, with glue, onto yellow legal pads and then write in, by hand, the new data and info. Then we'd give that mess to the secretaries to type up. It was a total joke. My handwriting is and was so bad, that they'd bug me for days asking what I had written. Had I been allowed to use Word, I could have written reports in hours instead of the days it took to clarify stuff for the secretaries.

Plus the nutcase owner would insist that your desk was set up exactly like his desk, with your files in the exact same place, your pencils and pens in the same place as on his desk, and your Autocad tools arranged just as his were. It was the ultimate control freak job.

[Lups]

The worst job I've had was also the best one in many ways. In uni, I worked in a shoe store. The owner's son was a total creep, the old ladies I had the pleasure calling my co-workers were awful and mean and all the customers were cheap and pretty fucking amoral bastards.

I hated that they were willing to sell shoes to parents with kids with serious issues with their feet and never mentioned them the kids needed a doctor. The creep always wanting to see me in his office wasn't a nice bonus. However the old ladies that came by and asked for me because i refused to sell them shitty shoes were wonderful marketing lesson and it has done me no harm that the coworkers taught me to tolerate others instead of blowing up.

[CTinline-six]

Originally Posted by Mosaud1998

My worst job experience would have to be my first job working at Dunkin Doughnuts/Baskin Robbins (at the age of 17). God, it was hell. I got paid Illinois minimum wage ($8.25/hr) and did double the amount of work the females did. There were only two other guys including me that worked at that Dunkin. I remember one of the girls that worked there told me the manager/owner paid the girls $9.50/hr. The girls that worked with us didn't do anything but sit at the cash register while I and the two other guys had to clean the dishes, mop the floors (including bathrooms) every day (twice the amount of times a day when it snowed), take the trash out, and clean the pavement I remember a day or two before the building inspector was supposed to come, she would have me and the other guys move the big ass freezers (with the ice cream tubs and frozen Ice cream cakes) and had us sweep and mop under the fridge then move that big ass fridge back. The day I had enough was when she had me spray paint the drop-down ceiling because water had leaked and there were water spots. This is the day the building inspector was going to come to check on the building. I walked out the back door after I was done spray painting the drop-down ceiling

I worked at Dunkin during high school, and also as a second job over the summers during college. Dealing with customers was annoying, but it wasn't too bad considering I worked closing shift and most of the employees at the one I worked for were similar in age to me including our manager. I have some lifelong friends I made from that place, and to this day we still joke about some of the stupid things we did/encountered back when we worked there.


My worst job wasn't physically hard, but mentally it sucked. I worked as an auto insurance adjuster for under a year, and wouldn't recommend it to anyone. My position had a 50% turnover rate every year, and the company was just awful. Super dirty, greedy, and we were incentivized to take advantage of customers. The funny thing was that the 3rd week I worked there the company had to actually send out a memo that relationships with superiors were not allowed, since so many young women had been sleeping with their much older male directors in order to get management positions.

[CTinline-six]

Originally Posted by M_Six

My first white collar job was at an environmental engineering firm. I loved the field work and building systems, but the regulatory reports sucked. It was made worse by the owner's insistence that we literally had to cut and paste the reports. We weren't allowed to use Word or any other word processing app to write reports. We had to actually cut out, with scissors, the parts of the previous reports we wanted to keep and then paste them, with glue, onto yellow legal pads and then write in, by hand, the new data and info. Then we'd give that mess to the secretaries to type up. It was a total joke. My handwriting is and was so bad, that they'd bug me for days asking what I had written. Had I been allowed to use Word, I could have written reports in hours instead of the days it took to clarify stuff for the secretaries.

Plus the nutcase owner would insist that your desk was set up exactly like his desk, with your files in the exact same place, your pencils and pens in the same place as on his desk, and your Autocad tools arranged just as his were. It was the ultimate control freak job.

WTF

[kyriian]

I had 2
1) Worked for a small Asian run (I am asian so I can say this) outdoor product design company, hired as a designer
-Micromanaged to death, when I am scolded for being in the toilet for more than 2 minutes, or come back from lunch a few minutes late from a big car crash that blocked my route
-Husband and wife who runs the place has little to no understanding of design, or manufacturing, or long term reliability, certain things they did was boarderline dangerous, and no suprise, they listens to no one
-Clearly favors their people, any outsider can survive if you can suck up, every moment, given or not.
-Fired for... not working hard enough when I practically OT everyday, because of the 2 million revisions that they want to save half a cent on a design, only to run into issues later from their half a cent saving.

I guess only perk is that there is underground parking, and being relatively close to home

2) Worked for a fairly famous son of a local family business, another small time company making retail technologies.
-Impossible timelines, micromanagement to death
-Boss constantly belittles EVERYONE, questions the head engineer of 20+ years of experience if he earned his degree at all, in front of everyone, he left not long after I did.
-dictates his wants, realizing its wrong when its done, only to go down the rabbit hole further trying to resolve the initial problem, further complicating my design and the engineer's work.
-Working downtown banking district, trying to work on the giant prototype is impossible, often times require odd hours just so we can use the elevator.
-Changes his mind 900 times a day, I can never develop anything as he changes it 5 minutes later
-Long, LONG hours, start at 10 in the morning, usually try to sneak out when the boss is tied up somewhere else in the unit, or he would keep us working till the last subway heads out.

[smyles]

A "business consulting" company where everyone had at least a manager title so they could upsell their "services" to clients; the services consisted of nothing but templated powerpoints and graphs full of business terms that served no real meaning but to overwhelm the customer.

I assume they hired me for my credentials to further their business; I quit after the first month, got paid for few more to keep my mouth shut, and made a mental list of their clients as companies to avoid investing into.

P.S Just to give you an idea, one of their top clients was (still is? who knows...) one of the most expensive private US universities. So imagine my opinion re cost of education and student loans forgiveness.