Worst job you ever had?

The current one.  But only for 19 years....

Worst job was working for the USPS in a ghetto neighborhood in Los Angeles. Crap money, Crap coworkers, Crap customers.

Second was being a Tire Humper. The job was to go into junk yards and take the wheels and tires off the trucks and cars, Peel the tires off by hand and slice the tires in half so they stack better. We had a quota to meet and the owner had no idea whet the job entailed since he got the business from his dad.

My worst job:

I hired into a very small, brand new trucking company as a diesel mechanic. I brought a few years of experience and lots of tools with me but settled for absolute E36 M3 pay with the promise of advancement as the company grew. I worked 10's monday-friday and 12's to 16's on saturday and sunday since that's when the majority of the trucks were at the shop. They were old pieces of E36 M3 too, with the vast majority just shy of one million miles.

My salary was $300/week, hours be damned. This was 2005. I had been jobless and barely surviving for a while so I was thoroughly desperate. Also there were the empty promises of advancement.

Initially there was one other mechanic with a decent mechanical aptitude and quite a bit of automotive experience but very little diesel knowledge. And also an impressive appetite for weed and cocaine.

Things are cruising along and I show cokehead a few things and he picks it up quickly. He dives headfirst into clutch replacements, top end rebuilds, etc. He's actually pretty good and is rapidly amassing an impressive collection of tools. Which I find surprising given the E36 M3 pay.

The company buys a few more trucks and decides they need another mechanic. Cokehead knows a guy. The company pays to move this jackass, who is also a cokehead, up from Georgia to southern Illinois. 

I get shuffled to 2nd shift while the cokeheads cover 1st. Turns out cokehead #1 is Very tight with the owners of the company, a husband and wife team, both former truck drivers and meth enthusiasts. They treat him like a son. LOL

After performing a quick rebuild of an old Mack the cokeheads and I are shooting the breeze. Somehow money comes up and cokehead #2 says, "This sucks! I'm working over 70 hours a week and only making $450!".

Cokehead #1 stiffens and tries not to look at me.

"Oh really..." I say, far too calmly. I was still making $300, working just as many hours.

The next day I had a heart to heart with the owners. Turns out cokehead #1 had been making $500/week since day one. They paid me the difference in our pay for the entire time I worked for them and I quit as soon as the cash hit my hand. The company went belly up a year or so later. They also paid for cokeheads tools and justified it, at least in their minds, by reminding me that I already had tools from a previous job.

The best part is they were my family.

Edit:

I forgot the icing on the feces infused layer cake that was this job; the salary was gross, they had not withheld any taxes so at the end of it all I got to deal with a lovely 1099.

Shoveling sheep E36 M3. 

Reselling auction lots. 

Having a yard sale, people think new boxed stuff  40-50% of what they can get it for at the store is too much

I decided to go back into aviation after owning a motorcycle dealership for 10 years. I needed to get some current experience any way I could. I was offered a job in Naknek Alaska as a mechanic. The employer bought me a ticket to Anchorage and met me at Ted Stevens International. 

First clue something was up, the guy had huge black Flock of Seagulls hair and wore all black. Like a 50 year old emo kid.

Second Clue, his rattle canned black Piper Tri-Pacer with huge bush wheels.  To complete the look, he used the window crank off a vintage Jeep to raise and lower the flaps (I found this out later when I couldn't roll the passenger window down in the Jeep)

It turned out the guy was bi-polar and had borderline personality disorder. I lasted a month working for him.

I wish I had the time to type out all the stuff that happened during that month, but it would take all day and none of you would believe me. Final straw was him leaving me in the bush do to a bad choice of landing strips and me hitch hiking back to Naknek on a jet boat after 3 days of avoiding hungry bears.

D.

In reply to RevRico :

I used to do pre-cast which was a chore because of my semi-slim build but not the worst.  Once a job is in the rear view it probably becomes less horrible to think about it.  Right now I can make $650 and watch that go down to $180 because of tip-sharing with a bunch of lazy support staff. $180's not bad for a night is what I tell myself. 

In reply to stuart in mn :

Done that too. Yep. 

spitfirebill said:

Dusterbd13 said:

 

Thw worst, though, was a child protective services agent.

You win. 

The only winner in that scenario. 

Turboeric said:

 

Psychically, the worst job was being Chair of a university department. This position is an elected one, voted on by your peers, and they see it as representing their interests. The admin saw it as an admin position whose function was to impose admin positions on the unruly faculty. I had no authority over my colleagues in this position, but admin treated it like a command and control system. Plus, the overall way the institution used to cut admin costs was to download everything to the Chair, who has no secretarial or other admin ass't. help. This meant my days were spent doing clerk work, listening to complaints from my colleagues about issues over which I had no control or authority, and getting yelled at by thousands of VPs for not carrying out their whims. All this for an extra $386 a month, which nearly covered the increase in by booze bill. Bah! I'm glad to be retired.

"Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." 

Appleseed said:

Septic line work on the fly. Wasn't bad, except the residents kept taking dumps, even though we told them to stop. After the third time, we turned off the water at the b-box. They didn't like it, but I didnt care, I was covered their E36 M3.

This one made me chuckle. 

HonestSpeedShop said:

Carmax for sure. Being lied to, ling to customers and doing some questionable repairs... all for pennies. 

I'd like to hear alot more about this, as I though Carmax was a stand-up business.

Every new car dealership job I ever had.

Because they are all run the same, by former salesmen who have no clue what the back end of the store does other than make money.

I spent almost 15-years in the office equipment industry working for 3 different employers and could write a book(that none of you would read) on all the BS. 

The first job, Ikon(now Ricoh) started out really well, but worsened over time as the economy tanked and new tech drove all the profit out of what had been a cash-cow business. This led to a "big-brother" approach to monitoring tech's activities - and they type of people who make good techs do NOT put up with being babysat. 

The next place, CopyCo -> Global Imaging -> Xerox, went through all those owners in the 7-months I worked there, so you can imaging the E36 M3storm of a mess it was. The highlights being given a territory that stretched 4-hours from home, more babysitting, the owner's step-son who'd just got out of jail for drugs & wrecking his step-dad's AMG. The xmas party was really nice though. The worst part was at a week-long training class at Xerox: the instructor(who didn't, he just sat at his desk the entire time) had a major man-crush on me because he thought I looked like Matthew Broderick(I don't - at all), and that Xerox was driving toward replacing their techs with minimum-wage parts-swappers. 

The last place was a small family-owned shop, and initially seemed like a very refreshing change. However it wasn't long before I figured out the owner's combination of ADHD and bi-polarism would lead to weeks of him not answering mission/client-critical questions, and our vendor accounts being constantly past-due preventing us from taking care of our customers. To counter that, about every 2-3 months he'd come flying through the office with new initiatives/directives, but again whenever we'd need his guidance implementing them he'd be unresponsive. 

I was replaced with a high-schooler, and had never been so happy to lose my job - it was a beautiful day, I dropped the top on the Miata, and took the long way home. 

In reply to Pete Gossett :

You know I can see the Matthew Broderick thing at least a little. 

In reply to Stampie :

You're wrong.

Well if not Matthew Broderick then you still must be pretty decent looking to have been the focus of a man crush. 

In reply to Dogote :

Dude, seriously,  tell. We had a thread here a few years ago along those lines about "Fogger, Jr" that was epic. Maybe yours would be the aviation version.

Datsun310Guy said:

In reply to pheller :

my wife and I were just talking about her staunch German friend whose dad dug his dirt crawl into a basement. We scratch our head how he did it - the guys acre yard was phenomenal and his garage was spotless - seriously how did he dig out that basement?

 

Perhaps he's this guy?

MadScientistMatt said:

Datsun310Guy said:

In reply to pheller :

my wife and I were just talking about her staunch German friend whose dad dug his dirt crawl into a basement. We scratch our head how he did it - the guys acre yard was phenomenal and his garage was spotless - seriously how did he dig out that basement?

 

Perhaps he's this guy?

Now that was cool.

3rd Worst:  Used car sales.  Big local dealership that also sold new Mazdas and Cadillacs.  I can say with 100% certainty that I'm not really cut out for sales.  It was my first "real job" after college, and I made it two months.  Gearheads do not generally make good car salesmen-plausible deniability about how terrible some of your stock is is necessary for success.  I went back to the restaurant I had worked at during college.

2nd Worst:  Night janitor at a factory that built rear axles.  I've seen some disgusting restrooms in other places, but that one takes the cake.  I worked there for four days on second shift while also working 30-35 hours during the day.  I think if I had been less sleep deprived I could have made that work - the pay was actually decent.

Worst:  Christmas tree farm.  Imagine spending your day up on a ladder with a machete, trimming and shaping pine and cedar trees.  Now imagine you have lots of burns on your arms from your other job as a line cook in a restaurant.  Now imagine it's 100 degrees, because it's late July in Missouri, and there's no breeze because the trees are packed so close together.  Really wasn't worth the $10/hr, even though I was a broke 18 year old.

Not a full time job or anything, but my worst one would be helping my friend clean out a house that he had been renting out. It was disgusting. I will save you from further detail. 

In reply to AWSX1686 :

Paging clemsparks to the white courtesy phone...

In reply to The_Jed :

Wow, dude, that's harsh. 

I just had to do some questionable stuff repair wise, and when some family issues came up it became a E36 M3 show. I dont feel they sell as good of a car as they claim and if you try to purchase a car wholesale you will spend about double of what you paid for it.