What's the worst place you've worked?

[L_Mariachi]

I guess I’ve had it pretty easy.

I spent one day constructing cardboard boxes at a t-shirt printer and it was beyond enervating. When I wasn’t trying my best not to fall asleep my brain was trying to escape out of my ears to get away from me. But a couple of years later the same place hired me to manage a popular licensed product line. My desk was upstairs looking out over the factory floor at the (coincidentally, I’m sure, brown) people stuck for life doing the same type of repetitive drudgery that I didn’t last two days at. Despair by proxy.

I thought the CNC job would be interesting, machining and assembling titanium body jewelry, but the owner was a martinet on the spectrum whose only visible emotion was annoyance. I never once saw him smile. I hoped to learn more about G-code and machining in general but he was very stingy with education. Even my coworkers almost never spoke to me or each other beyond “scuse me” while passing between the mills and lathes. One day while setting stones I was listening to a podcast in one ear (to keep the other ear listening for problems) and he went off on me – his objection wasn’t “you’ll be distracted” or “you won’t hear a machine going haywire” or “it’s dangerous,” but “this is not that kind of job.” Also it was “setting a bad example.” I wound up drinking a lot every day after work; when I started waking up with my hands shaking such that I could barely shave I knew I had to get out of there.

I have fond memories of my first job out of college doing illustration for those t-shirts with popular old cartoon characters wearing sports uniforms or “gangsta” outfits – if you were around in the early 90s you know the ones. We’d go up to the (40-story) roof to get really high and shoot paper airplanes down over the Garment District with a BB gun, then get back to work drawing and playing with this new Photoshop thing. One such occasion I was working on a Betty Boop holding her little dog, zoomed way in on the dog’s paw pressing into her breast. I was so focused on perfecting the details of the paw-boob interaction, for such an inordinately long time, that I didn’t notice the art director looking over my shoulder until she startled me with “What the hell are you doing?!” right next to my head. Didn’t get fired though, and taught myself Ethernet networking when I convinced the boss to buy more computers. Then I got fired for asking for a raise.

[nemomen]

You lasted longer than me. I made it three weeks as a box boy at a Vons in SoCal. The thing that really got me was the mix of constant social interaction with customers which I was poorly suited for and the coworkers who I really disliked. I wanted to work in the back. Chuck-E-Cheese was still worse, though.

[Gyrofrog]

@anon75430791

That owner … in jail

I had a job that ended that way. Actually I was let go between the raid and the trial. (You’d think I’d have quit when the raid happened, but I still prefer work to looking for work.)

[Gyrofrog]

@IronEdithKidd

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

My 1st job was at a burger stand at Six Flags over Texas. They always put me at the register but I would’ve much rather been flipping burgers, or anything else where I didn’t interface with hungry people who’d been out in the hot sun all day.

The thing was, I was not a cashier – they had extra training and their hourly pay was a little higher. At one point they offered me the extra pay and I turned it down – I did not want to be a cashier. I figured that if I took the raise them they’d never take me off the register, but they rarely did anyway.

[Gyrofrog]

I think you could take this post as-is and pitch it for a film/tv show.

[Old]

@jsroberts

I just had to stand to attention for eight hours, in the knowledge that I might see two or three passengers all day. I had some interesting co-workers though: an Andalucian guy who loved flamenco (“you really like flamenco, don’t you?” “No. I am flamenco”.), a Russian guy who excelled in getting drunk and finding all of the local festivals, a Polish guy who loved learning swear words in other languages and basically sounded like he had Tourettes, a Colombian guy who creeped on all the women who passed by and an Argentinian guy who loved 4Chan and internet driving trollies (and also introduced me to IT Crowd and Black Books, so I had good memories of him). We also had a really nice Argentinian woman and a really cynical German woman who were sales assistants.

That right there is enough material for a successful sitcom.

[Gyrofrog]

@AcerPlatanoides

a plastic extrusion line… That was two months of my life, just after college

That’s what I did right after college, but I think I put up with it a full 9 months. I was in a relationship (my first) that bottomed out at the same time, but in spite of everything else happening around me it wasn’t the worst job I ever had.

[Gyrofrog]

@nungesser

A well-bagged bag is a tightly-packed thing of beauty

Reminds me of an old Letterman skit where they picked the catchphrase for the summer. The winner was a elderly woman saying “nicely packed… Bag boy!”

ETA: whoa, then I saw this:

@wrecksdart

she slipped her hand into my back pocket for a whole lotta my right cheek and leaving a neatly folded $1 bill.

[Snowlark]

Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work. Factory work.

[Gyrofrog]

@Snowlark

Factory work…

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.

[nungesser]

@Gyrofrog

During my college years I spent one summer working in a paint line, at a plant where they made air conditioning parts for cars.

That reminds me that one of my favorite jobs (designer at an ad agency) started out as one of the worst. Hired as a junior designer, they proudly told me they ‘made me a new office!’ and I had a small cubby with a window that shared a space with the office paste-up booth (which kinda made sense, since I spent much of my time doing paste-up). It had a large spray-mount booth that was a furnace filter atop an industrial fan to suck away the carcinogenic fumes. After just a few months, I was getting constant headaches and feeling horribly ill; my boss told me it was probably just job stress. But one day they were doing a bunch of remodeling, and a guy came around to take measurements. “Hey, you know this spray booth is unvented, right? The fan’s just blowing the fumes back into the room. I hope nobody’s using this office or OSHA will be pissed, that shit’s deadly,” he said, peering into the paste-up room. “NOPE!! IT’S VACANT HAHA!!” my boss said, moving me into a new space. Magically my headaches went away.

[TooGoodToCheck_]

I knew I generally had cushy jobs, but reading this discussion makes me appreciate just how cushy they’ve generally been.

Somewhat ironically, my very best job was also came with the worst ending - I’ve probably already mentioned the 38 studios bankruptcy clusterfuck. I missed a couple weeks pay and had to flee the country - okay, not technically fleeing, but when you’re in the US on a work visa, you’re obligated to vacate with haste when you lose your job - but I wasn’t one of the people who suddenly found out they were still on the hook for a mortgage they thought was already settled, and I didn’t lose my insurance in the middle of cancer treatment like one of my co-workers, so it could have been worse.

Looking back on it, I have some complaints in retrospect about a job I had making multimedia sales tools for the pharmaceutical industry. Not that I was treated especially badly. But, at the time, I looked at what we were doing, and I said to my self, it’s dumb that we’re redoing stuff so often, when most of the apps we make are so similar to each other. So I wrote some handy code that could be reused, and then I created a way of making individual components that could be reused & bundled together into useful drop-in functionality (and all this in Macromedia Director). And at the time I was just trying to avoid redoing boring work. It wasn’t until years after I quit (because they were getting pissy about me showing up late) that I was reading about the Capability Maturity Model that I realised that the code base I built up over the course 5 years working there took them from Level 1 (Chaotic) where success is constantly dependent on individual talent to Level 3 (Defined) where each new project was a small variation on a proven code base. It’s taken years of experience and perspective to realize exactly how much I was worth to them - I don’t know if they realized it, even after I left, because once the structure was in place, keeping it going wasn’t actually that hard. I doubled my salary within 3 years of quitting that place, and I have probably never provided that much value to anyone since.

Also I didn’t realize that I probably should have publicized/published some of what we were doing, because I don’t know if anyone else used Director the way we did. Probably in general I should be sharing my work more - it’s so hard to distinguish when something clever might actually be useful to someone else, vs when it’s a one-off hack

[Gyrofrog]

@TooGoodToCheck_

I said to my self, it’s dumb that we’re redoing stuff so often, when most of the apps we make are so similar to each other. So I wrote some handy code that could be reused, and then I created a way of making individual components that could be reused & bundled together into useful drop-in functionality (and all this in Macromedia Director).

I did something like that, but with BMC Remedy (mainly used for trouble ticketing). I had started with that company (EDIT: GTE, not BMC Remedy) as a help desk technician – not my favorite time with them, but in a couple of years I had inherited the Remedy admin position (and I’ve been doing mostly that ever since, for various employers). At one point, the sales team kept selling tech support to MLM ISPs (i.e. an MLM scheme where the participants sell ISP services). Must’ve been a nightmare for the help desk, what with all the possible different configurations.

Anyway, these contracts came in one after the other, maybe once or twice a week at one point, and it was always an emergency: “we start supporting it tomorrow!” After the second or third of these, I figured that since the GUI and workflow were mostly the same from one project to the next, I might as well build a template. Remedy doesn’t use code, per se – not for development, there’s a GUI for that – but one can generate a definition file and hack away at a few parameters, then import that. So when the project manager came to me with another emergency, I’d have a new one ready in about 90 minutes. More than a few times, though, these “emergencies” never came to fruition, no one ever took a support call and I’d never hear anything more about it.

@TooGoodToCheck_

the Capability Maturity Model

Ah, CMMI – we had that at a subsequent gig. A co-worker pressed me to come up with something approximating formal procedures, which I did (at the expense of whatever else I was supposed to be doing). Then, when she had to do some development work, she complained about having to follow the procedures! She was long gone by the time we got to the SCAMPI appraisal, but as I was on the team, I noted it is a finding: “the person who made me write a procedure complained about having to follow the procedure.” CMMI appraisal wasn’t so bad, but the guy really held our collective hand through it all, and it seemed almost too easy (OTOH it’s easy for me to say, as there had been a lot of other preparatory legwork that I did not have to do).

[wrecksdart]

@nemomen

Chuck-E-Cheese was still worse, though.

I’ve emptied aircraft latrines after they sat in the blistering Arabian sun for hours, I’ve been screamed at by Generals for not opening an aircraft door early enough to let their adoring masses heap praise upon them, and hell, I’ve been threatened with bodily harm at a workplace for telling the truth…and I would still never accept a job at Chucky Cheese. You’re a brave, brave soul.

[ChickieD]

PopTarts, preferably brown sugar, was my food I ate when I had morning sickness. Now I cannot even look at a PopTart without gagging.

[fiddlingfrog]

Retail work - sales associate at a hardware store. Not actually the worst job I’ve ever held, but definitely the worst place I’ve worked.

[LDoBe]

Retail work is hell, and I think instead of making 18 year old males sign up for selective service, we should make everyone spend a year slinging shit in a junkstore or wait tables.

Let everyone know, it could be worse. So try to be a good customer.

[Missy_Pants]

I’m the dark horse… I lurved retail. Best jobs I ever had were retail and manufacturing. Loved them both for similar reasons; I’m highly social and really good at math with a high attention to detail. Made me excellent for QA and working on Cash.

If only either of those paid well… /sigh

[Snowlark]

Same here (except for manufacturing, that sucked). I think what matters most are the hiring practices of the company. A store—a corporation, for that matter—will fail both its customers and employees if its managers don’t have the sense (or the power) to hire good people who know how to work well with others (and are eager to do so).

The pay is miserable, though.

[Missy_Pants]

I loved retail. I cannot express it. Stand around and talk to people all day long AND do math? Sign me up! LOL
But alas, it simply does not pay.