Posted on 07/14/2015 11:28:53 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The best job I’ve ever had was cleaning deep fryers at McDonald’s at 4:30 in the morning. By “best,” I don’t mean most pleasant. Each morning, I would take a filtration device (basically a heavy bucket with a filter, on wheels) up to each deep fryer, empty the fryer’s oil into it and, while it churned away, I would scrub the sides and bottom of the fryer. After the filter was done working, I would pump the filtered oil back into the fryer and turn on the heating element to prepare it for that day’s cooking.
By the end of this process, which took about an hour, I smelled like a combination of old French fries and fish filets, and I had at least one new burn per week. After finishing this job, I was expected to start up the grills and prep for breakfast service.
It was greasy, hot, and deeply unpleasant work, but in a very important way it was the best job I’ve ever had because those mornings are what I thought about in future jobs when things seemed bad. Scrubbing deep fryers will always remind me to keep a healthy perspective about work. Now, as a stay-at-home dad, even my worst day is better than cleaning those fryers, because that job was terrible.
After McDonald’s came a steady stream of crap jobs as I worked my way through college. I’ve sliced roast beef at Arby’s, tried (unsuccessfully) to corral parents during the Christmas shopping season at Toys ‘R Us, and I’ve survived a stint at the returns desk at Wal-Mart, where getting yelled at was not uncommon.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
Eventually I moved over to chopping cotten (mid 70's) because they let us off at 5pm so that I could go play tennis every night (the tractors usually ran to 8-9pm during the Summer months).
Wonderful job!
Of course greedy biz is more then happy to hire them.
I was made aware of this dirty machine shop who hired illegals to baby sit the machines. One got so drunk on breaks he stood on his rubber floor mat and pee'd all over the machine and the floor. Was he fired? No, he was sent home for the day. He returned to work the following day and continued working/drinking. He eventual filed a lawsuit against the company for multiple workers comp injuries. Hammered them good.
It's the price of doing biz and getting that cheap low wage illegal labor. They love it.
Try working in the Lethal Room (where they electrocuted stray dogs and cats) at the Animal Rescue League.
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My oldest son worked at a Tyson’s chicken processing plant, in the offal room.
I worked as a lifeguard during the summers. Generally was on shift for about 3 hours a day and worked out, slept, or played basketball for the rest of the time. There was a 2 hour lunch most days. On Sundays we always had a BBQ going. That was on the clock also.
BTW, this was for the Chicago Park District. ;-)
“Unfortunately I know.....”
I worked at garage for several years dug the pit a couple of times. It does beat being a honey dipper.
Waiting tables in my college women’s dining hall. Not only was I guaranteed to wall myself off forever from the trust fund babies (and potential upscale hiring connections), I also had to deal with the bulimia ladies who would barf right on their dinner plates.
The honey truck guys are always upbeat. Even though they hear the same joke over and over, what a sh-—y job you have.
Ain't chickens fun?? My dad initially tried raising broilers from chicks, then switched over to egg-layers. Our operation wasn't as big as your....only a couple of thousand birds. fortunately, dad "saw the light", and we got out of the chicken business completely.
The only thing dumber than a chicken is a turkey.
Sixteen years old and I worked the summer as a roofer in north Texas. Military, I spent summers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Turkey. I know hot wheather.
Wow - Fury. You must be older than me!
My first jobs were of McD’s, Subway and working in my uncle’s car shop because my dad hated me screwing around during the summer time. Worst summer job was back breaking work at a tetra pack factory where you have to BY HAND mix and match all flavors of every known drink like Monster and Coke and place them in value packs. The factory was so effing cheap they didn;t even have a forklift and we had to lift those pallets unto the trucks. Years later i was happy to know he went bankrupt.
Then consider IBM's recent announcement:
in which IBM's deal involved PAYING the UAE entity "Global Foundries" $1.5 BILLION over three years to take over it's chip-making operations, which will make GF the EXCLUSIVE supplier of certain classes of chips to IBM for 10 years.
*****
Such are the DEALS being made by government and corporate America. Apparently, there wasn't a patriotic American entity willing to take $1.5 Billion from IBM to keep manufacturing these chips.
Worked prep sanding at Miracle Auto. Forged my DL to say I was 18 instead of 15 1/2. Wake up each morning, cough and tell you the colors of the cars I worked on the previous day.
But, hey, I won the affections of the hot girl over the other two guys who didn’t have jobs, so being 16, buxom highly underage GF and a Dodge Polara and a job wasn’t all bad
BTTT
I learned a lot working in Yemen.
Mostly I learned I don't want to live and work in Yemen.
When a job after that had a really bad day, I told myself "at least I'm not still in Yemen".
Paid well 'though....
I left my job running a 28 person engineering department to follow my dream, being a writer. I’d already finished four 100k word novels and received wonderful feedback from agents and editors. I took three years off and wrote six more novels. But the market had changed and I went from getting encouraging rejections to “Sorry, we get x thousand submissions per year and can’t look at yours.” After I failed to get a book published by a mainstream press, I made some calls and took a short term engineering job that was described as “crap work.” It lasted two weeks and paid $40/hour and $60/hour overtime. It was indeed crap work. But by the time it ended I had found myself several other crap jobs and they paid the same. My boss said that as long as I could find my own work (a novel approach at a Fortune 500 company) I could stay. But one day he came to me and said, “Look, I’m laying off real employees while you’re billing 20 hours a week overtime. Cut it out.” I said, “John, I’ve got people waiting for product. They don’t care if it’s overtime or not.” He said, “Well share the wealth. You can’t keep this up. It makes me look bad.” I handed him a stack of folders, explaining that each one had a Statement of Work, a charge number, an agreed number of hours and whatever I’d collected on how the job must be done. He came back a half hour later and threw the folders on my desk and they cascaded into a mess.
I followed him as he stomped back to his office. I’d never seen him so mad. He shook his head and dropped his face into his hands. Finally, when he could talk he said, “To a man, they told me, ‘I’m a radar engineer, or software engineer, or a digital designer. I don’t do crap work.’” So, he laid them all off and for a while it was just him, me and a few others in a big echoing room.
In a huge company there is always somebody who has work they don’t have people for. I’d simply go and ask each manager what he had. I even did work for other divisions and sometimes our customers. I’d still be there except when they went into their latest Obama downturn they laid off using a formulae that, while it didn’t include age, managed to get rid of us older workers.
I consider myself CEO of Bern Inc. The CEO’s job is to keep Bern employed.
I’m still writing novels. Here’s a link.
“If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean”. I hated my McDonald’s job during college, too (If I had to sweep up one more sesame seed I was gonna puke), but it taught me 1)that any job, done honorably, is worth the doing, and 2) I didn’t EVER want to HAVE to work there again, so better get my studies in order.
Colonel, USAFR
Heck I do that now just for fun. A mental break from real work.
“Sales cold calls. “
I had two jobs that were like that and strangely, I was good at it.
1) Calling a list of people to listen to a country radio station and win prizes. I dislike country but I got the positive results because i changed the script when talking to people. I only stayed because not of the money but there was this cute chick in the same dept. I wanted to ask for a date..
2) TELEMARKETING a lottery (scam) to retired old people. This was the job i really had a bad conscience about but I was so good at it I made a $1000 a WEEK. Late left after my sales went down probably because my conscience was getting to me through my subconscious which affected my work..
likewise only it was a steel foundry. They have this gigantic air filter called a bag house. It filters particulates from the foundry before the air is released into the atmosphere. It's called that because it is filled with very tall sock-like bags. When they would need replacing, the low man, me at the time, would get to go in there and repair or replace. That thing was filled with dark black iron oxide dust. It was so fine that you would sweat black sweat from your pores for days after being in there.
My Dad built sub-division homes, and hired a lot of union guys. He bribed someone and got me started as a carpenter’s apprentice at age 14, during Summer breaks. I loved that job, and I made three or four times what my friends earned.
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