Maybe I was lucky, but not my worst job. It was monotonous and tedious but (in my experience) it left my brain alone to ruminate over whatever it wanted. There’s a quote I’ve seen attributed to Ian Curtis, “I used to work in a factory and I was really happy because I could daydream all day” (though maybe he was being sarcastic).
On the other hand sometimes you don’t want to be alone with whatever’s in your head, as I alluded to earlier.
During my college years I spent one summer working in a paint line, at a plant where they made air conditioning parts for cars. It was hot as hell in there on account of the paint oven, and one night I accidentally flung paint in my eye (I was OK), but OTOH it was the night shift so there were only a few of us there.
Right after college was the job I had at a plastics molding shop. A shitty chapter in my life (relatively speaking; most people have been through much worse) and the job didn’t make it much better, but it kept the lights on at home.
I left that job to work at an IBM plant. Probably not what most of us think of when we think of factory work (for one thing the place was air conditioned), but it’s where they made PCs, at a time when such jobs still existed in this country and IBM actually produced physical objects. I learned to solder and fixed motherboards. It was actually one of my favorite jobs, even though I was barely getting by, and it’s where I met my wife.
If I had to pick the worst job, it would probably be Verizon. Not the whole time I was there, though: before the merger (except there’s no such thing as a merger, one company buys out another), GTE was a great company to work for, very laid-back culture as far as corporations go. But the last boss I had took me out of what I’d been doing for years, and did well, and had me constructing reports in Excel. When I’d get everything like it needed to be, she’d move the goalposts, rinse lather & repeat. I got laid off after a few months, but got a decent severance package. I was actually lucky – I’d heard that the next round of layoffs, there’d be no such package. Others who worked for my boss were genuinely pissed that it was me, and not them, who got the ax.
