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
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.
Hardest I’ve ever worked (and it wasn’t for much money, but as a 14 year old, you think $20 is huge) was de-tasseling corn as it was being harvested... and it was in the upper 90s out. No idea what I was paid, all, I remember is marveling at how much water I was losing through sweat, and how the day never seemed to end.
My sons can’t get those jobs. And they are had by adult men who barely speak English. Now, I’ve worked as a lowly cook in kitchens with some of these men. They loved to shock me with their after work (and before they went home to their wives) exploits. I’m sorry, no way I want my teenage sons working with these amoral guys.
But there aren’t any illegals at In N Outs. Well spoken young white and black American kids. I’d be proud to have my sons work there.
I lasted a little while on a hot tar roofing crew in the middle of summertime in Southern CA when I was 18 years old. The only attraction to it was that it paid pretty well: $18.75 an hour in 1986 dollars.
The crew members were all ex-cons and the gravelly old boss used to throw shovels like a Zulu spear at people who weren’t paying attention. He also had arms burnt by years of hot tar splattering (usually caused by unaware nitwits, which is why he threw shovels at people) and had lobster-claw hands burnt down to the muscle from when he once pulled out a man who fell into a tub of molten tar. It was just hideous to look at his hands and arms. He looked like a melted doll. Everyone threatened the new guys with “If you burn me, I’m gonna burn you back.”.
On my first few days there, they made me start driving the tar truck — a giant commercial Class C vehicle with 10 manual air-shifted gears — because the ex-cons all lost their licenses to drive from being pulled over for DUI and drugs. They were all on probation, and if they got pulled over with no license they were going to county lockup. Better to let my young dumb ass drive the tar truck. I ground the gears as three guys yelled instructions at me to get us underway. By the end of the week, I kinda had it down.
Work began at 4:30am and every morning they made me stop at a Quicky-Mart where they bought a big jug of cheap vodka in a plastic bottle and Tropicana orange juice they they took turns swigging from making Screwdriver cocktails in their mouths. They drink it all day until it was gone, climbing up three stories on rickety ladders and slipping around on a fresh tarred roof. If you’ve never climbed up three stories on a rickety aluminum ladder carrying a scraper shovel, let me tell you it’s a big unnerving.
We’d spend the whole morning into the early afternoon slopping hot tar on the rooftops of supermarkets and warehouses after ripping off tar paper. They made us wear flannel and canvas pants in 109-degree F heat to keep from getting burnt with tar. After two weeks, I had a pair of old high top sneakers so covered with tar that each shoe weighed five pounds each. We’d have to load giant 200-pound cardboard wrapped slugs of tar onto the truck and then into the tar trailer once we got to the site. The sun would just come up over the horizon and that meant it was time to start tearing off old tar paper and slopping down fresh tar with a mop. Then we’d haul buckets of fine gravel up the ladder and spread it over the freshly-applied slurried tar. I simply cannot properly articulate how stupidly dangerous this job was.
After a few weeks, I said screw this and enlisted in the Marines on a Saturday morning. Asked to ship out ASAP so I didn’t have to go back to that awful hot tar roofing job.
After the Marines, I went back to school and decided never to associate with the low-class criminal element again. Today, if I get a whiff of hot tar, it brings it all back. Absolutely cannot stand the smell of hot molten tar.
Islam has the problem of saying manual labor should be for slaves and non-Muslims, better to raid and enslave than do manual labor. If slaves aren’t available, the women and children do the hard work while men graduate to “master”.
So you get a culture that despises manual labor and skilled tradespeople, along with one that hates business (raiders are more honest than traders, per the Koran, because the raider risks his life to steal).
The end result is an indolent culture, unwilling to do the work to build much or do much except conquer and live off the spoils.
Americans saying such jobs are beneath them risks replicating this model on free labor, feeding it by further importation of foreigners who hate them. It also leads to greater poverty among the native born, because they will live off welfare before cleaning toilets, either for money or their family.
Agree 100%. I’ve done more crap jobs than most, often quite literally. Nothing is quite as much fun as working in a crawlspace with two foot clearance filled with six inches of sewage.
I’ve scrubbed toilets. It was a job. I got paid. It’s something that needs to be done. Someone has to do it. The key is to better yourself so that you’re not stuck doing that forever, if it’s not what you want to do. Some folks may take a great deal of pride in that kind of work. Good on them, and I wish them well in it. I’ve seen some jobs that Mike Rowe has highlighted in ‘Dirty Jobs’ that I sure as hell wouldn’t want to do, but what’s important is how you do it.
I have a friend who had his legs blown off in Afghanistan.
He was 19 then. It was his first job.
I was mopping the floors at 5 AM one morning listening to FM radio when I heard that Jim Morrison had died.
I love working by myself in the early morning.
Cleaned houses from the time I was 16 until 19. Not real bad,except the spitoon. I still gag thinking about it. Sick people...cannot clean such. Boss when I was 19 walked around in his whitey-tighties. THAT was weird.
I loved the college receptionist job, they asked me to stay, wish I would have.
Worked hoeing fields some, picking beans, driving tractor those were when I was 11-13.
I did the closing cleanup at Mc D’s. I’d make a body cover out of a trash can liner, and wash everything in the kitchen, then take out the trash in 14 degree weather.
I’ve done some crap jobs, for sure. Burger King burger cook. Worked at BFI repairing dumpsters all day long. Washed cars outdoors in the winter. Worked at a printing plant collating, binding, and so on.
I never thought I was too good to do any of those jobs, and still don’t. They were good motivation to get an education and get a job that didn’t involve doing manual labour all day long. If I had to I’d still do one of those jobs.
Eh, I did time in McHell. I suppose it’s handy when my job gets rough to have a solid “could be worse” in my life frankly if I could push a button and not have spent that time there I’d push it so hard and fast I’d probably wind up in a cast. Crap jobs are crap jobs, and I really don’t blame anybody for wanting to avoid them.