Nothing like walking up to somebody's house at dinner time, having the whole family in the dining room window look at you walking up their driveway with utter disgust and knowing in about 10 seconds, someone is going to answer the door and you are the absolute last person in the world they want to talk to about anything much less try and sell something too.
Worse than Mcdonalds! (But I did it and made good money too and it got me through college and not a single college loan)
Worse job ever and you still didn't occupy anything?
1987, Burger King, $3.35 per hour to be yelled at by 400 lb women at least weekly that she ordered a TRIPLE WHOPPER, not a DOUBLE WHOPPER!
Involuntary military conscription ranks right up there. But I did get an extra $45/month because I had 2 dependents which was real decent of my employer.
That’s pretty bad. Night Janitor, for me. Cleaning office building toilets at 3AM. Five bucks an hour, under the table.
Honestly I can’t really think of any “worst” job. For most of my life, just having a job at all has been a prize in itself.
I used to make fiberglass truck caps and lids which means being cut up and itchy a lot but it was still solid work.
NOTHING was free.
I have no sympathy for these losers. My husband works on Wall Street - started in the mailroom, put himself through college at night - hardly a Wall Street fat cat. My oldest son currently working two jobs to support his family. My youngest graduated college class of ‘09 - right after the collapse. Took a BS job at a start up firm, worked his butt off and proved himself and is now in management. The protesters are lazy leeches.
1979 part time at Bowling Green State U working in the cafeteria scraping uneaten food into the garbage. It wasn’t all that bad until Super Bowl Sunday, when I had to be there at 6 AM, nauseated and hung over as all hell. THAT was a stomach-churner!
Spending summers hoeing weeds by hand 8 hours a day. Gave me a lot of time to think.
First REAL job at 16, $1.35/hour, working as a summer kitchen aide on split shift in a non-air conditioned convalescent home. Hours: 7 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., then back at 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. for the dinner shift. It must have been 110 degrees in that joint and I had to bend over huge greasy aluminum trays - and a hot, steaming stainless steel sink - to clean them by hand. I had to take the bus because I had no car, and then hang around our downtown area for 3 hours until the second shift started, then back home on the bus. Lots of walking involved!
Still, I was THRILLED to get my first real paycheck and open my first bank account. I felt, as the kids like to say, "empowered." :-)
I had a boss that was soooo bad, he would tell other customers that he only hired me because no one else would work for him...once he called a customer and told him that I had lied to him, and that his job was not going to be delivered on time. I was in the customers office handing off the job while his call was going on. The customer hung up, thanked me for getting his job to him, and promply cancelled the remainder of the contract... of course this was my fault
Acquisitions and copy editor for a small publishing company based in San Francisco. The owner of the company was an absolute demon, and his wife was a bully.
Well, it was only a one day job (all day), and I was only a child, but picking cotton in Fresno was by far the worst. The second would be working at a drive in restaurant for minimum wage when I was a teen. They even deducted the cleaning of our aprons from our pay.
“Rack stripper” at a fiber glass plant stripping fiberglass remnants from spools. Swing shift. Horrid, horrid job with little to no thought required. So for twelve hours a night, I would drive myself crazy worrying about ‘things’. Thank the good Lord I no longer work there, and I no longer worry. 8 )
But, I still had to pay some federal income taxes: about $50 for the year. I eventually got that back in the first "income tax rebate". After that year, I've had to pay at least some personal income tax every year --- so I've been in the "53%" ever since.
Some job highlights? Changed blown-out truck tires. Changed oil, fueled the trucks, washed trucks. It was fun in the winter time, when trucks came in with chains, and I had to break them off with a sledge hammer before repairing the tire. I also broke tires off rims with two crow bar-like devices, and replaced them with new tires. Very back-breaking work, but I got better at it. I got to drive 12-speed tractor trailers with three trailers on them around the yards. Fun stuff.
Working in the shipyards.
One of my fun tasks was prepping pipe (up to 60” x 20’) for shipment overseas. I had to take a mop and coat the pipe with Cosmolene, a tick, goopy mess. I also got the clean the weld slag from the inside of boilers - that’s where I learned that I have claustrophobia.
Baling hay at 13 and 14 for $30 a week, it was hard work and we thought we were getting paid well (’74 - ‘75), one summer during college I worked as a conservation assistant (commonly known as a ‘con ass’) at a MD state park, $3.05/hour picking up trash, cleaning campground bathrooms and showers, cleaning up mounds of two-day old crab feasts, people would treat that park like crap, and we were just glorified janitors...
Best job ever: Tutoring chemistry as a junior and senior in undergrad for freshman women nursing and physical therapy students...$40/week and the opportunity to meet lotsa freshman women...sigh...I miss those days...
21 years old, fresh to the urban jungle of NYC, working as a receptionist for a sex-crazed lawyer who spent his entire day placing ads in Hustler. He had a female enforcer of a bookkeeper who helped lure young girls into the office. If I google his name, his court records come up when he was convicted of tax fraud and served time in Sing Sing for other crimes.
Never blamed the government or bankers for this missed hit.