First, yikes. Second, I had friends doing home remodeling/construction in the Bay Area, and they seemed to rely on meth to get through the workday (this is a group of maybe three or four people) for a solid year or so. Party at night, wake up at 5, do lines to wake up, drive the hour+ to work, do lines to stay on pace through the day (along with the regular joint being passed), and then do a final bit to do the drive home. How any of them are still alive and functional amazes me.
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Cleaning windows. No, really, not making a Van Morrison joke. When I was in high school, I got a summer job cleaning windows. There was one office complex with floor to ceiling pane windows we cleaned every Thursday. On a private office on the second floor worked this disgusting slob of a human being who’d unzip his pants and start masturbating every time a window cleaner came up on the lift scaffold. I noticed the door handle’s lock button was always out, so he wasn’t locking his door 
After three weeks of this I figured out which office was his, snuck into the building after quitting time and read his name off his door plaque, then I found the door to the manager’s office and read her name.
The next week I prepped the lift and then went into the suite during the day before I started on his window and waited until she was talking to someone so I’d have time. I hurried down the hall and quietly put a big post-it note on his door with her name and saying:
On phone
Please enter
Don’t knock
Urgent you hear this
I knew he’d be in there waiting for his weekly dose of sexual harassment (though I’m sure he perved other people as well).
I hurried back to the other end of the L-shaped hall and told her I’m sorry to bother you. I’m on the cleaning staff and Mr. X said he needs to speak with you immediately as soon as you’re done here, She looked a little confused then, Did he say what it was about? I said No, I’m sorry, he seemed worried though. then made an apologetic shrug and I dashed back down the stairwell and out the backdoor to the lift. I winched up the lift and proceeded to take my time on the window. Creepaziod started his little show on queue and I began to worry as several minutes passed. But about three quarters through the window the door opens, I see sweet panic in his eyes, and in walks the manager, cathing him trying to buckle his pants. I noisily slap a note in large letters against the window:
Every Damn Week
He Masturbates To Us
The next week the office was vacant and the desk much more empty. I thought about using a camera to report him, but I don’t think it would have worked through the window glare given the light difference inside and outside.
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It absolutely does. Although, given my last twenty four hours, I may go with “worst neighbor” next.
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High school and first year of college I worked as clean-up crew at a factory that made taco shells. Was one of the best jobs and one of the worst… Best because it was just 16-19 yr old kids with no supervision (Lord of the flies, but with steam cleaners, burning oil, and forklift races), worst because one’s jeans could stand up on their own at the end of the day because they were so coated with grease. Not sure if it was better than cleaning calf pens.
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Wow, so Office Space was a documentary then?
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AOHell, after they bought me and all my coworkers. It was the last time I actually wrote code for a living, full-time. I lasted seven months (and lost the tontine by eighteen minutes; there is at least one person in this world more stubborn than I am.) That seven months seemed like a lifetime, and gave me a hard look at the miserable existence of a corporate code monkey in a business run by lawyers.
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It does feel like a documentary in places. In my case when I did take calls I fixed things and didn’t hang up until I’d gotten it sorted out and verified (which also murdered my stats), and managers would pass the harrowing things onto me, so they liked me and knew I was burning out to the point of preparing to bail. I also was writing software for them when I wasn’t taking calls that tied together systems to make life easier for the agents so they liked having me around.
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This excuse for a civilisation appears to delight in creating perverse incentives…
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Ever seen Atlantic City? There’s an iconic scene where Susan Sarandon comes home from working at the oyster bar and she strips down to her camisole and squeezes lemons all over her hands and arms to get the smell off. More sensual than most soft porn.
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LOL - this was not that. Roomie was a large bawdy woman who was a pro-dom in her spare time. I’m sure some would find it erotic but mostly it was just hilarious. 
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I had a “market research” job on the phones after college – no autodialers, we punched the numbers in ourselves. The surveys were boring, but sometimes weirdly interesting, like when we did the “brief” (it was usually 45-60 minute) survey about “micro-encapsulated herbicides” that only contacted managers at grain silos – they were super busy, swore a lot, but wouldn’t get off the phone because they wanted the company to know exactly what shitty things they thought about the product.
I loved all the old, long-gone-now, analog phone sounds, switches, echoes, clicks, cross-talk, weird messages from tape-banks slowly grinding to death.
I have heard the operators calling each to each; I do not think they ring for me.
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In a prior job for the US military, and certainly not the worst job I ever worked, whenever I was oveseas I’d use the military’s DSN telephone network to call an operator at distant American military bases so I could get them to connect me to some other distant military base DSN operator who could then connect me…etc etc. The delays, pops, clicks, and related noises would grow with each base-to-base leap until there was so much delay and reverb the connection was unusable. Good Great times.
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At the end of a plastic extrusion line doing work that they just were not going to invest in a machine for. Check for defects, punch out the little handle bit if it didn’t fall out, and box them for shipment to the syrup makers. That was two months of my life, just after college, and just before I started my actual career. My aversion to syrup in these jugs has passed, finally.
My aversion to light industrial temp work remains.
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Mine pales in comparison to some of these, but:
Home Depot.
Wearing the orange apron, in what amounts to a stockboy job. Endless shuffle of filling holes in inventory. Heavy, dirty, nasty stuff- boxes of nails are 50# each. Sacks of concrete. Bags of mulch.
The concrete floor of the place wasn’t coated or even sealed, so there was always a fine haze of dust in the air.
Needed a forklift license to do my job; management wouldn’t let me take the training course for a forklift.
Lasted 6 months.
I will give it credit for kicking my ass into understanding it was something I DIDN’T want to be doing, and I needed to take steps to find something I DID want, so there’s that, I suppose.
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There’s a song in there somewhere
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I think working at Home Depot is hardcore.
It’s a soul-sucking, corporate-branded, union-resisting “self-help” ploy to hide how anyone working there who can do stuff is driven out.
Where’s Hank Hill when you need him?
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This reminds me of my other Worst Job, a co-op at an industrial design studio. My job for a few months was to assemble box mockups for stress testing. The designers would print out the flat of a cardboard box on huge sheets of plotter paper, and I’d spray-mount it onto 6’x10’ sheets of “b-flute” (the thick industrial corrugated cardboard used for heavy boxes). Then I’d cut those out with large X-acto knives and assemble them. We’d have to do 10-20 per day and they had to be perfect, because their next stop was a box crusher where they’d be tested for how much weight they could withstand before collapsing. Wheee.
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My worst job was in sixth grade, when I worked as a server in the cafeteria. It wasn’t bad, as in I wasn’t abused. But my pay was a single slice of cold pizza, cause we never had money to pay for food.
My favorite job was in the fourth grade when I graded students assignments for $.50 to $1 a day. Leaving me alone in class till 6pm at that age would likely be illegal today :D.
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I think my favorite job was the year or so in college where I worked in the research library. Every morning from 7-9am I’d be all alone in the dim, comfortable, quiet library, sitting behind the desk, reading a book or doing my schoolwork, and I’d maybe have one or two people ask for a book every hour or so. I’d take their request, put it in a pneumatic tube, and a few minutes later their book would arrive from the stacks. The most stress-free job I can imagine.
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