One job that was my worst in some ways but also very interesting was working as a waiter in a hotel in the Canary Islands, right on the beach at a popular kitesurfing location. The hotel was getting older and run down, but I needed a job as part of my year abroad during my degree, and I got to speak German, Spanish and French with the staff and guests. Everyone objected to me trying to do my job, because I “always did things the hard way”. Trying to keep the surfaces clean was unnecessary (lots of sand and wind makes the bar area look dirty quite quickly). I set up the abandoned cafe again and offered coffee and cake for the German guests and actually filled the area quite regularly, but the other staff members thought I was being excessive for checking the drinks that had been left up there for over a year and getting rid of the ones that were past their sell-by date (many were years past). When I said that Germans like their cakes fresh, they insisted that this was not necessary and I should just keep bringing the same cake out every day until it sold out. When I said that dishes needed to be washed with proper detergent, not cold water and hand soap, this was pointless. When I saw cockroaches in the restaurant area, this was no big deal. When I complained to the head waiter that a large rat had run across the length of the restaurant area over the top of the sofas lining the wall and had entered the kitchen area (during dinner time, and witnessed by at least one group of guests who were eating), he didn’t tell anyone. At this time, the main chef and the assistant had both left for a few months and the pool boy had been recruited as a cook.
The hotel was 1.5 hours away by bus and I had six day weeks and sometimes split shifts, so I would leave at 5:30 am and get back at 10 pm, but I was able to see the beach in between. It was the only job I could find as the credit crisis had just hit and tourism had practically disappeared. My income was 550 EUR/month, and it did not go far (we usually didn’t get tips like in the US, either). On the other hand, I had a contract so I knew a number of people who envied me (including the West Africans who would come over illegally in boats - once I saw some arrive and the police assembling them in our car park).
A month or two ago, I saw a report on German TV about this hotel (there had been so many complaints about it that they had sent someone to see if it was really that bad). I was not surprised. It’s a beautiful area though, and has an interesting claim to fame as the last place that Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastián Elcano stopped before embarking on their circumnavigation of the globe.
Ooooh! You reminded me of my shortest/worst “job”!
In my early 20s I had answered an ad for a marketing assistant, I was trying to move out of retail and into office work so this seemed perfect. Save that it was a “multi-level-marketing” scheme, aka: pyramid scheme. I was paired with a mentor, walked through the most confusing math possible about how in six months I would become a mentor to others and would get a percent of their sales, and my mentor would get a percent of everything I took in too, etc etc etc. And then we hit the streets, barging into offices and workplaces trying to sell “spa packages” to the office workers. “Its $1000 value for only $100!” - I lasted until lunch, which my mentor bought for me… a street hotdog. And then I said “this isn’t for me, I can’t do this” and dude had a fucking tantrum, tried to guilt me into staying, and also tried to negotiate me staying by lowering the percentage of his take of my sales from 10% to 8%. I just walked away and got on the subway.
Ironically enough, a decade later I worked at a spa/salon that actually had offered that deal, and everyone hated the people that came in to redeem those coupons. It was SUCH a rip off for everyone.
I worked summers as a house-painter after high-school and in college. I didn’t mind it so much, despite the heat – power-washing barns on a hot day was awesome.
The kicker was the year after all the hog-farms had made money - they all wanted their barns painted. And the hogs and the smell of hog-shit wasn’t all that bad (except for the time somebody forgot one of the small wooden ladders in a hog-pen and they ate it all up). What was bad was lunch, because we ate on-site, and if you didn’t walk around and wave your sandwich in the air with another hand waving over under and around your sandwich your sandwich would become BLACK with crawling flies. Which itself wasn’t all that bad until you remembered where those flies had been 30 seconds ago.
That was my last summer painting.
But I still get pretty critical when I see drips or a poorly-cut line.
When I used to cover for the receptionist’s lunch at one place I worked, I’d get those people barging in and trying to sell stuff. Spa packages, perfumes, makeup, etc. I would just “nope” them the whole way through their spiel and ask them to leave. There’s no way they were getting past me and into the offices.
I was horrified that this was the job, and totally embarrassed and mortified that he was just barging into offices and launching into the hard sell, I just can’t imagine they made much money…
Its why I cannot get behind any of the home-shopping things, tupperware, pampered chef, jamberry, scentsy, candlelight, silpada, stella & dot, jeez… I’ve been invited to a lot of shit… (remember the knives in the 90s? everyone was trying to sell knives, that was weird) Its all just pyramid schemes, sorry “MLM” - which is better and legal, apparently.
My aunt was selling Pampered Chef for awhile, and she sent me a knife for my birthday. Decently sharp blade, but not a very sturdy kitchen tool. I worked with a guy whose mom sold Amway, and apparently made a passable amount of money doing it. That stuff always felt weird to me, but I thought it was just because of my aversion to sales people.
I got some pampered chef as a present, and I do love it, but its super expensive (I got several pieces at the SallyAnn once, that was a score!) and I would never host a home party, thats just weird… “come to my house, buy some things!” friends are not customers, thinking that is weird…
It’d be tempting to say “stock boy at Kmart”, but that job was actually kind of rad for a 16-year-old. Crushing boxes, stacking crates, straightening the storeroom. It sure beat being a cashier.
The worst job I ever had was as an “executive creative director” at a design agency. It was great being a designer there, but when I got promoted and promoted again and had my own team, things got weird. Suddenly my whole day was just meetings and paperwork, and instead of being judged on my skill, I was judged on how many ‘billable’ hours my team and I did each week: we had a quota of X number of hours of design work we had to do, no matter what. But I was also told that we could only charge a total of X number of hours, in full, to our projects. I explained to the higher-ups that it was impossible to have enough billable hours, but they just said “oh, just spend your time web-surfing, nobody cares”. So I had a year or so of being a professional number-fudger, going from meeting to meeting, before inevitably getting canned, because yes, they do care if you’re not working, sometimes.
No special horror stories, but the worst was fast food. The front counter was the absolute worst because people are assholes, drive-through was second worst because people are assholes, kitchen was least worst, but sooo greasy. Plus, I’ve been a reasonably strict vegetarian since I was 11, flipping burgers was…interesting. Management was sub-professional, petty and poorly paid, which just made everything worse.
My sister worked at Burger King in the mid-80s, and she would come home in her polyester uniform smelling of deep-fried greasy grossness. That smell made me swear I’d never work fast food (and so far, I haven’t).
Somewhere after high school (Call these the lost years), my brother and me got jobs at a cleaning company. First job was a bank, the people at the bank were not happy to see me, I later found out the regular cleaning person was sick and they sent me there as a replacement.
The second worst part was the interlock to access the back room, you had to wait for somebody with access to open the first door and close it, it was a small cramped space with these sort of blocks on your feet which prevented movement, not that you could go anywhere, the space was barely wider than my shoulders and I had to wait for somebody on the other side to unlock the door while I stood there trapped in this small confined space holding up a bucket and a mop. I now know that while I’m not claustrophobic, it wouldn’t take much to push me over the edge.
The worst part was the realization that I was working for a cleaning company because I never even tried to look for a better job. Sitting there in that little white lunchroom, I felt absolute despair at my position in life. I quit the next day, things are better now
On the system we were on there were a bunch of queues for different products/call types, and you’d get skill sets assigned to you to decide which calls you’d take. There was a little light on the phone that was green when call volume for your queues was low, yellow when they were moderately busy, and red when wait times were all > 20 minutes. They put me in like 20 skill sets so I’d log in and the red light would be on all day and it’d be eight hours of calls about all kind of things from “I can’t print” to “my modem isn’t connecting” to “my Bible software crashed” to “I’m a service provider trying to fix this system, the replacement part didn’t fit, so I shoved it in and now the thing won’t boot” with no pause between calls. Add people from New Jersey angry about their Bible software not working and shouting at me to replace their computer with a Dell and it was totally soul-crushing. I stopped caring at the end and would sit idle not taking calls for long periods surfing the net instead, so they promoted me.
I once had a crappy tele-job, contacting known marks (donors/customers depending on the client) from purchased lists and for contracted agencies. It was well automated and soul destroying. Just an efficient boiler room, we’d do anything, sales, customer service, collections, surveys, whatever teh fuck you want to bother people with. we’d bother, and for peanuts (at least for the workers)
I had a good bit of fun for several weeks until there was huge meeting where we were warned that our system logs would reveal who the bastard sabotaging us all was. Now, that wasn’t true at all, because they hadn’t caught me yet there I was at the meeting.
I had been modifying the outgoing auto dialer files, adding random internal phone numbers of our own firm as secondary numbers or replacing the primary number with same. Not far from me was a bank of 20+ stations fielding incoming calls, not far from the vast bank of outgoing stations. It wasn’t long before hilarity ensued, as caller and callee attempted to get something from one another just meters apart. Or a back office would get the call, and our own people would try to get money/sales/leads/answers from our own accounts payable dept or any other…oh it was delicious.
This was pretty much from the point where I knew I was not remaining, until I left. Because I went to lunch and breaks with a like minded gang of resistors, and I immediately confessed the first time one of them laughed to death describing when it happened to them, we all started doing it. No idea how many thousands of files were compromised before they called that meeting trying to end the insanity. By then the days were constantly punctuated with different operators standing at their cubicles, getting LOS on whoever they got and firing off the double bird or a few choice words every few minutes, even tho everyone but upper echelon thought it was effin hilarious.
It was totally wrong, but to be fair they shouldn’t have tried to destroy our souls like that.
Moral of the story: Got lemons? Make lemonade, put it in a squirt gun and aim for the eyes of that shit that handed you lemons.
My roommate in Calgary worked at fish processing plant. Specifically, she wrapped bacon around scallops all day. She would come home everyday, smelling of fish. Her fiancee hated fish (tbf none of us were particularly fond of the smell either). We lived in a condo on the 11th floor. She’d start undressing when she got of the elevator and would walk through the door nude, throw all her clothes on the balcony to “air”. It was always fun having people over when she’d arrive home from work and walk in the door naked.
If I had to list one of my top ten worst jobs; wrapping scallops in bacon would be one of the worst…
Those ones were easier in one sense, “I’m sorry ma’am, we don’t support third-party products. I can look up the vendor so you can contact them, though.” But nobody ever liked/understood that answer so they would always beg me to fix their crap we had nothing to do with anyway. The best was “I’m trying to print from my Bible software you didn’t make to a printer you didn’t make, and it’s not working. Fix it.”
