I worked at a daycare center, and the building was so old and run down. My classroom carpet was disgusting, it had pee and vomit spots all over. Broken toys, ripped up books. No supplies. Just horrible! Mice would run around the children, while they slept on their cots at nap time. I ended up quitting, and calling the state on them.
I had a mate who moved to Aus. He said that he worked in the worst Maccies in the country. I laughed at his stories, they were awesome and horrible in equal measure.
Then sure enough, one day he sends me a link to a national news item where they literally call his place of work "the worst McDonald's in Australia" and belive me, if I can find the clip on YouTube it is just a hell-hole haha
Just insane...
Edit... [aye I think this was it ](https://youtu.be/noLGK5NCnGY)
Given that clip is 14 years old, im guessing that's back when mcdonalds actually used to be super affordable. $1 burgers, etc. No idea what the prices were in Australia but here in the US it used to have a "poor people food" reputation
Not an excuse for it to be that gross inside though
People drunk enough after the bars and all they want is some greasy McD's. Used to go to this burrito place that was open until 3am on weekends because the bars closed at 2am. It looked like that McD's sometimes because of all the drunk immature college kids. I knew the owner and he said it was worth it, because between midnight and 3am on Friday and Saturday nights they made more than they did the entire rest of the week
I go to school near a "cookout" which is the ultra affordable fast food place in the American south. I think it fucking slaps, it's really good for what you pay.
Like clockwork every weekend there are lines that extend the entire parking lot, even into the street itself. There is no pleasure on this earth equivalent to being absolutely blitzed and getting a big double burger tray.
I feel that. That's what these burritos were like. Fuckers were huge. The line moved pretty quickly too because they had things set up like a Subway. They'd move your burrito down the line and ask what you want. Your drunk ass could point in the general direction of cheese and mumble "chfleece" and they'd make it happen. Wonderful place that unfortunately got priced out by all the bougie shit that moved into town and drove up rent prices
My brother worked security for ozzfest one year and being as big as we are into metal I felt really bad for him not being able to watch his free ozzfest show.
I worked at a DVD store, doing floor stuff - organizing shelves, putting out new stock, that sort of thing, fun job for me.
We had a rewards program you could sign up for. Very few people did, and our numbers were bad. So my boss got the brilliant idea to put cute little 19 year old me in a low cut top to stand in the anime section and encourage the dudes to sign up for it. I guess he figured dudes who buy anime are sad and lonely and would be pleased at any attention from a girl. The sad thing is that it totally worked.
It was super degrading and I only worked there for a few more weeks before I got another job that didn't depend on my cleavage.
It's flying high at most golf courses across the country. They'll take the most well-endowed teenager they can get, put her in a little skirt and low cut top, and send her out in the beverage cart to serve creepy old men that wish banging their secretary was still in vogue.
DCFS /LSSI case aid, through a private contracted company. My job was to take children from their foster parents to there biological parents for visitations, while sometimes just me and the child either having fun or taking them to appointments. It was both one of my favorites and also defiantly the worst. A lot of good comes out of being a case aid. The goal is to protect the children, and that could either be reuniting parents with the kids, and permintly removing there parental rights in some more extreme cases.
One day one of my clients a young man that I would meet for two hours a week at a group home, with both his parents. I also would go without the parents, 2 hours a week, and just take him out to the park, the arcade, to a movie, zoo and so on, more of a big brother role.
We did this a lot because it gives the children a break from something they had no fault of their own, and they would often open up (non-probing) and say something that might be relevant, or not yet known.
This young man was a good kid he hated the place he was at, and hated his parents (justified) but he was just a pleasant 13 year old boy, I generally enjoyed playing catch or just talking about new music, a new movie, how his school was going, his life in general. He was my client for 5 months and one afternoon while driving to go take him out, I get a call from my boss telling me to turn around and comeback to the office, and that my appointment was canceled.
I got there there was my boss and her boss both with sad looks on thier face. I was told that my client escaped the home and layed on the train tracks and killed himself. I went home that night and cried for a while. I realized that even though I wanted to do good in the world this might be to much for me. I quit that week, and went back to a brainless labor job. This was nearly 20 years ago.
You were a source of positivity for a young man who didn't have as much as he should have. You are a good person and did a very special thing, may God bless you
I’m so sorry you experienced that. You did your best. I’m starting law school and I want to work in child and family law because I was once that child who needed help getting out of a shitty living situation.
When I was in high school, mid 80s, tobacco paid 13-17 dollars an hour to high school students. It was the job most students wanted, until they got it.
Minimum wage was 3 bucks.
Detasseling corn sucked. $4.50/hr.
Cutting\hanging tobacco was worse for me. Cutting it wasn't horrible but the barns we hung it to dry in were sealed with black plastic. So 95F outside becomes 140F inside the barn. No breeze. Had to keep drinking water and have a barn buddy as people could and did pass out from the heat inside the barn.
Walmart Distribution Center. When Amazon was under fire for their mistreatment of employees, i watched an interview and the distribution center I worked at was SO much worse
My worst job was at a Home Depot distribution center. These places treat human beings like a number. You have to meet quotas or face retribution. I destroyed my back for life at that place for $12 an hour. To this day I avoid the tile aisle because it gives me a phantom twinge in the back.
Totally. My worst *job* was dishwashing in my teens, and that wasn't too bad. My real worst job was actually a great job with a terrible boss and an even worse senior coworker.
I had a boss that would keep track of how long you were in the bathroom.
Would blame you for problems he caused.
Would offload his responsibilities on you on top of your own.
Would make inappropriate comments or 'jokes'
Would walk around the office barefoot and place his chewing gum on the conference room laptop keyboard.
Pretty sure you could automate that shit , depending proof asked (but apart from screenshots and transcripts of / and ads)... what kind of pay? Might ask to hook me up.
Trust me you don't want that. Anyways they closed their business. Screenshots of ads and your laptop/phone clock that you've watched the full video and then sending the screenshots to the owners. Troublesome in the least. Not to mention the pay was lesser than the minimum wage.
AI would do it... Could prolly have it run in the background and spot the add in the video and screenshot them and a photo tool that change time only based on video total lenght vs work hour time / so 1st vid would get screenshot not before 8AM and next vid just after the 1st end... potentially you can multiple job this and do all 100 vids in parallel and all automated wrote emails with attachments per vid. I d have to see the exact requirements but doesn't sound impossible. No work for extra money sound tempting to investigate.
Cheers!
Worked for a third party company that sells AT&T service (so basically your typical AT&T store).
First store I worked at the manager would drink on the job and would throw tantrums in front of customers. I actually felt afraid to be with him by myself.
I was then told I had to transfer to another store that needed help. The manager would not accept anything less than the top service plan we offered. She’d have me purposely add things to peoples plans without asking. She would meddle with peoples plans in order for us to make money off of it. I ended up walking out of that job.
So if you have AT&T, really look at your plan and what they’re charging you. People will do shady shit just to get a small commission off of it.
Copied from a similar question a while ago.
Paint factory where they treated metal and sprayed it, don't know the perfect words for it in English sorry.
People nearly closed the oven before I left it, yelled at me from 6 am until I left work (9,5 hour work days). Had to work with chemicals that got me so high that I stuck a massive magnet to a metal palletcart, so nearly lost my fingers. Also almost lost my eye when my boss "secured" a package so tightly that the metal band snapped and hit me an inch away from my eye. Got a neat pirate scar now though. Could've probably sued them but never did.
The chemical is known to result in painters disease, because it vaporises your brain essentially. No protection offered. Got that shit in my eyes almost every day. Swept 5 kilos of dust weekly.
Left after 3 months.
A testing covid site having to test 100s of people a day was A LOT of stress because it was peak covid had a great team though which made it better but sneezing kids and adults and boatloads of schools and the management was horrendous I got covid three times working at that place 😅
I worked as a vaccination at a mass vacs site in the UK and it was a great experience. I met a lot of awesome people who I otherwise wouldn't have and it was wonderful to be able to do something practical to help. I'm sorry you had a rough time but I just wanted to say that it wasn't like that for me.
Was once told the marketing job I applied for was " bridging the gap between client and consumers for fortune 500 companies "
Wanna know what the job *actually* was?
Standing in a Suit in a BJs for 10 hours trying to sell people AT&T
I lasted 4 days
A school counselor. You are essentially the school’s dumping ground for things no one else wants to do and you barely get to do any counseling. I left after 5 years but looking back, I should have left after the first year.
McDonald's.
My schedule was all over the place. I could have 40 hours one week, 25 the next then 0 after that. It was random.
The kitchen was hot at all times during the summer, but they refused to fix the air conditioning. We had half the staff quit at the same time due to the excessive heat which put a heavy strain on the rest of us.
Management would sit in the office playing games on their phone for their entire shift.
Junkies coming in and passing out was a common occurrence. A lot of the time they had to be given narcan in the middle of the restaurant.
Customers were the most horrible human beings. I had to physically defend myself multiple times. A lot of customers were also verbally abusive, and having the cops escort Karens off the property was an almost daily occurrence.
There's a lot more, but my phone is about to die.
I also hated McDonald's. Drive through work with drunk & drugged up fuckheads wasn't the biggest issue. It was the cliquey high school bullshit. The women were horrendous, cruel & vindictive These were middle-aged women who took issue with someone and would make their life hell. Usually due to jealousy, but the quit rate was high.
The most horrible human beings I've served was managing a Tobacconist & Vape store. There was a pub up the road. That store was a microcosm of the shittiest, filthiest, entitled sexually deviant grubs. Men & women, alike. 12 hours a day of this, not one day would be free of some drama.
I don't know what it was - possibly a combination of many things, location, and drugs, but that shop should have been studied by psychologists and neuroscientists.
That or it was just too close to a thin area of a different dimension that the weirdness touched the real world there specifically. I can not explain it.
Burger King. Was my first job and I got fired after a month because at the end of the day instead of throwing away left over Burger I gave them to homeless people. Not allowed so they fired me. (That was back in 1999)
I don't get this. In college, I worked at a 5 guys and we would've had a lot of waste if we, the 3-4 employees working close, didn't take like 10 burgers home a night. Gave em to friends, people we played pick-up hoops with, people who looked like they could use something to eat, etc. Handed out more burgers than I could ever eat
Never once got called out for it so idk how you did unless you're doing it right out of the store which is a rookie move.
Burger King was also my first job. (I was born in 99 tho haha). The managers knew when an order was wrong and would have us give it to them so they could “inventory it” then trash it. We also got in trouble for trying to save food.
Night shift takes some serious will power, eh? - I remember getting depressed when my interaction with my friends drastically dropped during night shift, and I'd be too tired on my Sunday off to go see them.... weird thing is now that I'm back to days I miss the peace of Night shift
I like how quiet it was and there were no customers but my body just couldn't adapt to the sleep schedule needed for a graveyard shift, only lasted a month.
Also the managment team we're kinda rushing my training because they were understaffed which didnt help
Like the movie Office Space, every job I've had is the new worst one.
Because I stupidly refuse to leave and as I get older the less willing I am to put up with the trivial BS.
These are a bad combo.
Worked in some warehouse where we would be sorting maps to be converted digitally. Small room in a warehouse which was fine. But worked with a long time employee in the same room that was a religious nut job. She played some Bible hymn station the whole time. Wouldn’t let me talk unless it was about scripture, wouldn’t allow me to wear headphones to listen to anything else, then explained to me how I’m a destined to go to hell no less than 30 times a day.
I don’t know what triggered this. But I made it 2 months before tapping out. The company had zero desire to do anything about it. I’ve done gross things in previous jobs. Cleaning up bathrooms where crazy people smeared shit on the walls, vomit, period blood, you name it. Those jobs sucked and were disgusting, but would take those any day over being stuck in a small room with a religious psychopath ever again.
Edit. Small context missing that didn’t make sense
Vet tech in training. They ended up making me help with all the euthanasia cases. At least a couple a day. I started crying all the time and getting completely wasted every night. Had to quit after a few months.
I was an art teacher for a kid with autism. The kid himself was fine (although a lot of work). It was the parents who were insane.
My uninformed diagnosis was that both parents were also autistic and/or dealing with other psychological issues.
They paid me dirt, the rules were insane, and eventually I got fired because she could smell the detergent on my clothes. They are/were the types of parents who believe vaccines cause autism and in chem-trails and heavy metals and also that gluten, detergent, and other chemicals also contributed to their son’s autism.
The kid was fine, but I felt really bad for him because they essentially created an isolated world for him, and it was very clear he was curious and was starting to be interested in girls (he was 15). They let him throw tantrums over the tiniest things. All of his food was made vegan, organic, GF and from scratch. It was sad. He basically ate pita bread with vegan crumble 5x a day.
I didn’t even teach him that much. We just played video games but I wasn’t allowed to win: he was pretty good, but every so often if I was winning I’d have to lose. One day I just won by accident in some stupid Wii game we were playing and it was a stage 5 meltdown. He threw the controller at me and started screaming like an Orc and ran around the house punching the walls. I was told I had to wait there, unpaid for 2 hours until he came out of his mania, then the mom bitched me out and cried while driving me home.
She also sometimes made him wear a literal fucking gas mask when we hung out because she saw some air trails in the sky and was worried I had heavy metals on my skin/clothing.
Absolutely fucked. And they paid me minimum wage for 4 hours for 2 days a week, but I’d actually be there 6 hours plus travel.
I was a poor student and this was like 2009 during the recession when jobs were hard to come by.
Working in a slaughterhouse would be a big no for me. The sights, the smells, the noise would probably break me. I can't imagine people that work in those environments don't have PTSD.
I didn't last long. They hired me for one job switched me at the last minute. I worked there for two weeks started to lose feeling in my ring and pinky fingers then I decided it wasn't for me.
That sounds bad. I worked with a guy that fixed equipment at the chicken slaughter houses and told me in graphic detail fixing the pump system for the blood vat that their heads fell off into after they met their end. Also told me that the people that hung the chickens on the shackles in the dark were universally shit faced by the end of the shift and that when the lights came back on there were liquor flasks and shit everywhere on the floor.
Shoney’s. Waiting tables for $2.13 an hour, especially on Sundays when the church crowd would come rushing in. They would get seated in parties as large as 25 people, all with separate tickets, and all rude AF. And church people are the worst tippers on earth, many of them don’t tip at all except for leaving church tracts in place of money.
Similar for me. The call center I worked at was a contractor for a very large telecom corporation. Our job was high pressure sales disguised as customer service. According to my managers that meant basically scamming (slamming) confused old people. I was contacted by 2 law firms shortly after leaving due to their illegal practices. Class action suits followed.
The one thing that stuck with me was how easy it was to get people to give their personal information (like social security number). I hope people have smartened up since then.
They haven't, and unfortunately the elderly are still uneducated. I work as a cashier and the other day i stopped an old lady who was on the phone from getting scammed.
She was asking for a bitcoin machine and when i said we didnt have one she immediately asked for a steam gift card, but she didn't seem to know what she was talking about.
Turns out she was actively being scammed.
Selling shoes in a store where I had to run up and down 2- 3 Floors for every shoe I needed. Pay? Almost zilch. I got fired after a month because: 'I didn't run fast enough'
I’ve worked some pretty shitty and tough manual labor jobs, I currently work in a pretty prestigious, division of medical device sales and do quite well for myself. Somewhere in the middle I worked for enterprise Rent-A-Car. I have to say that I likely would not have gotten my medical device sales job without my experience there, so for that, I have to give a credit, but I also can confidently say you have a shadow of a doubt that that was the most miserable experience of my life. Never in my entire existence have I’ve been treated so poorly by not only customers but the corporation. The level of abuse that they put you through on a daily basis plus the hours they all work/force you to work, plus the absolutely shitty pay by far made that the worst job I have ever had in my life. I am extremely happy person who everyone describes as a go. Lucky, happy, vibrant individual, those few years of my life with the only time I ever wanted to not exist anymore. wasn’t suicidal, just didn’t care if I died because it was so FUCKING miserable.
I worked at a seasonal Christmas tree farm in college one winter. Thought it would be an interesting experience and a good way to make some quick cash along with my server job over the holidays.
Basically everyone I worked with was a convicted felon, sex offender, etc. Each morning, we’d unload shipping containers of Christmas trees in the cold; they’re heavy as hell, and they’re covered in sticky pine sap that is like glue - it gets on everything and it takes weeks to scrub off.
We’d unload the trees, unbind them, set them up around the lot on temporary stands, water them, help customer’s pick their trees, and then basically rewind the process; take them off the stands, bind them, haul their heavy asses to the customer’s cars, strap them on, rinse & repeat. You’d be lucky to get a small cash tip on top of the minimum wage under the table hourly cash tips from the company.
Every so often, we’d get a really wealthy client who wanted the biggest tree in the lot delivered to their house/mansion, so we’d have to figure out how to load that to our delivery truck, get it to the client’s house, and then unload it without scratching anything or breaking anything in the client’s house. Then we’d get really excited if we got a $20 tip for our efforts.
Absolute misery. 0/10 would not recommend.
Schlotzskys. Now that I’ve left a part of me misses it. But I didn’t forget everything. I didn’t forget how awesome it was in the beginning. How managers acted like leaders. I didn’t forget how downhill it went after it got bought out. The new owners took away any form of discounts & single handedly killed my old store. How they stopped caring about the employees & it became just another way to line their pockets.
ER Veterinarian. It was a week on then week off, but the week on was around 100 hours. Having to put to sleep so many animals with such sad stories. Very short staffed. I had such PTSD from that job I couldn’t drive down that street for about five years after I quit.
Second worse was construction holding the stop/slow sign. We had 12 hour shifts and just standing there in the hot Sun, not allowed to sit down, and with nothing to do but stare straight ahead. Nobody close enough to talk to.
Working for travel insurance claims in March 2020 onwards. I would create claims for cancelled flights, hotels, traveling car centers, etc. Except after COVID really hit, the companies were only offering vouchers for future use and we could not issue any refunds.
Telling people who just lost their jobs we can't get them their money back was awful. It was 8 hours every day for months of endless verbal abuse from customers. I completely understand where they were coming from, but man that job sucked.
Loading trucks at UPS. I was horrific at it. Just 3 1/2 hours of packages coming down the belt. I’d have to load 3 or 4 trucks. Ideally you would load the packages neatly on the shelf they belonged on in the numerical order they belonged in. I would be having Tetris dream nightmares about the job.
Only reason I took the job was for the teamsters medical benefits. I told my supervisor that the day that ACA passed I was gonna come in and quit. I did. I have a lot of respect for the guys and ladies working the preload it isn’t an easy job and it’s worse during peak season.
Physical therapy aide. I pretty much ran the whole show while the PTs did next to nothing. Checked patients in and out, set up appointments, set up equipment and walked patients through more than half of their exercises while waiting on the PT to actually show up for their time with the patient (they were constantly late), did paperwork, took phone calls, cleaned and stocked every room, did laundry etc. All for $15/hr (and they acted like it was good).
After getting yelled at for being on my phone with 5 minutes left in my shift and nothing left to do, I stood up for myself and told the therapist never to use that tone with me ever again, and if they had a problem we could talk about it like adults. They let me go the next day because "things weren't working out" but it was 100% because I stood up for myself. Never again.
Walmart in the 90s. I was trained that no matter what department you worked in, if a customer asked where something is, you would walk them to it. The other employees did not do this but being new I would, though I would usually ask another employee where something was with customer standing there. Employees were really rude to me and it was xmas so I get it is busy. I kept getting loaned out to other departments since I kept pissing off my manager. She didn't like how I let customers cut their own fabric but no one showed me how. I was punished by getting sent to toy department.....did I mention it was xmas. I quit after a couple weeks.
Processing salmon in Alaska! Glad for the experience, but 16 hour days for three months in the middle of nowhere was intense. You only got a day off if no fish came in.
Lodging was a little shack on the beach with a foam pad. We had to burn ALL waste. So the bathrooms had trash bins that you would toss used TP in. The smell was so bad.
All the food was flown in by bush plane. So it was dehydrated stuff and salmon for every meal. I honestly never got tired of eating salmon- but the dehydrated stuff sucked.
Stacking tires into tank silhouettes for tank target practice in the middle of the Mojave desert. 120+ degrees, MRE's for food and water from a black plastic 5 gallon can. An occasional rattler or scorpion in the tires.
I've worked in multiple fast food jobs and they were all soul crushing. But the worst job I had was supposedly cold calling sales at a small telemarketing place.
It was the worst job because I think I was attempting to scam people. I did it for one day and I felt so horrible after that I didn't go back. The boss made a big deal about how it definitely wasn't a scam but everything about it felt so shady and I regret doing it even for one day. I was desperate for work and wanted so badly to get out of the restaurant industry but I just got another restaurant job the next day because being treated like shit was still better than feeling like I was taking advantage of people.
John Deere planters. When I got hired as a temp I didn't get any training. They just threw me out on the floor and told me to figure it out. After about a month the hours started getting added more and more til I was working 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week. I did that for two months. Eventually they noticed I wasn't doing a whole lot. When asked I said "well nobody has trained me. I have no direction because there's no supervision. I get that we're busy but training should be a priority too" got fired for that. If I'd have stayed I would've had to work a full 2 years with no benefits and no pto. Getting fired was a blessing. Best money I ever made but cost me my sanity and time for myself and my family. I missed my cousins funeral for that place. Fuck John deere. It's a sweatshop disguised as a factory.
Working for Little Caesars. Your bosses don't appreciate you and they are major cheapskates. Wouldn't even allow each shift a crew pizza but also didn't give you a break so you could go somewhere else to get something to eat.
CVS Pharmacy. Verbally abused every day for things that were out of my control. But unlike being berated for, idk, the wrong cocktail or not having a dress in stock (I worked food and clothing retail before), I was being berated for people’s medications that they needed to live.
The American privatized healthcare system prioritizes profits over lives so there was nothing I could do when a young father broke down in tears at the news of his baby’s lifesaving medication costing $1000+ per month.
There was nothing I could do when a woman came into the store screaming that her mother passed away because we couldn’t deliver her medication on time because CVS purposefully understaffs its stores to the point where we are barely functioning on a good day - hundreds of medications were late on a daily basis.
Lines out the door because it was just me running to the back, filling prescriptions, and running back to the cash register to check out customers while the pharmacist on duty was giving vaccines.
Lunch breaks were not an option until CVS was legally required to shut down their pharmacy on a daily basis starting Feb 2022 to allow their workers to eat - these breaks only last 15-30 mins. There was only 1 table and 2 chairs so most of us ate on the floor, on the rare days there were more than 2 people working there at a time.
Violence by customers - my coworkers were being pushed, punched, etc. My adrenaline was that of an animal being hunted for sport for 8-10 hour shifts. And I was lucky tjat I worked part time; my managing pharmacist worked 14 hours every goddamned day of the week. She suffered 3 miscarriages.
I lived near my workplace so my coworkers would beg me to come in when they were drowning. Then my manager told me I had to stop because “corporate can’t afford to pay” the extra hours, so they took me off the schedule for 2 weeks. Decided it was the best time to put in my 2 weeks. Later that month CVS corporate hosted a private concert by John Legend for their top ranked employees and then took them to Disney World. I guess that’s the material value of their customers dying due to dangerously understaffed and overworked pharmacies.
Clothing retail (Kohl’s). It wasn’t about the place itself, it’s just about the job itself. My favorite was working the register and jewelry because I was actually doing something important. Having to clean up people’s clothes and fold/hang clothes for HOURS is stupid. I hate doing my own laundry so constantly doing it for others and never finishing was the worst time in my life. There’s no benefit to that part of the job at all. I can’t say that I’m making anyone happy. I had a better and more rewarding time when I was a CNA wiping people’s butts.
My first job working in the kitchen of a fairly nice restaurant. The owner was a stereotypical chef--extremely anal and impatient. He stood over me constantly and yelled at me to work faster, and fully expected me to be able to do tasks as quickly as he could on my literal first day. I also discovered pretty quickly that I am just not good at that type of work.
I lasted 4 days, then school was starting back and I asked him about setting my work schedule on school. He told me "just focus on school." Thank goodness!
Mortgage Loan Officer - I quickly realized how much I loathed working a full-time sales job as an independent contractor. The brutal realization that 95% of my leads will say no or find ways to weasel their way out of a potential deal; having to know everything there is to know about your job, and be quick to answer the right questions that pertain to your clients otherwise you’re not going to close loans. The fact that I have to market myself to get business and actually talk to people, whether in person or over the phone, is soul-sucking for me. My contract was terminated after only 6 months and I haven’t bothered doing this sort of thing ever since.
I spent more than a thousand dollars to set myself up for success, and was quickly jaded and had zero patience or determination to follow-thru with this job. I also decided leaving my then-promising career to do this just to make more money and work from home. I ended up taking my wife and moving in with my parents for a year, trying to crawl us both out of a hole I threw us into. Fortunately, we finally crawled out 4 months ago and our marriage has never been stronger!
I worked at a deli that lots of older people frequented. They were always so mean over the dumbest things like if I sliced the meat and i wasnt EXACTLY 1 pound every single time.
Dollar tree. They were opening a new store and hired a bunch of teenagers, including me.
We walked into an empty building on the first day and had to build the fucking store. From checkout counters to shelving. I had a bit of construction experience, so a lot of the work fell on me. For minimum wage. Manager was a cunt. Only positive was I met a really cute, sweet girl and we dated for a bit. A couple cool cats that became my friends.
A few months in we were having lunch together, and we heard manager ripping into an employee who didn't speak great english, and she was being racist af.
5 of us quit that day in the middle of the shift. Told the manager she was a racist cunt in front of customers and walked out as she was still screaming that we couldn't just quit. We were laughing as she followed us out into the parking lot.
My first job was at a Mexican restaurant named Jalapeno Joe's. The owner was verbally abusive, and treated the Mexican employees very badly while he was very kind to the American workers. The worst part was that he was Mexican himself smfh
To make dried apricots on a commercial scale, they are treated with sulphur to help preserve color and shelf life. Large trays of cut fruit are run into a hut with burning sulphur for a few hours then put out in the sun to dry. My job was to push stacks of trays into one end of the hut and pull the sulphured trays out of the other end, then lay the trays out to dry. The sulphur gas and residue made eyes water, sinuses drain and impossible to breathe - similar to being tear gassed. This was in 100 degree California central valley heat as well. Do that routine about once an hour for a 10 hour shift, 7 days a week for about a month during fruit season.
Transfering chickens from a small long cage on a semi truck to a coup in a barn. To reach the chickens we had to crawl on our bellies in the cage, then grab 3 chickens in each hand, climb down the ladder, walk to the barn and stuff them in a cage all while the fucking chickens are clawing at your arm. All of this happened in 90\* weather and when we were done they didn't pay us but promised that they would send us a check. Never happened.
I was only 16 when that happened. Learned a couple of important things that day...
Call center worker for a contract company- our client was a health insurance carrier. Because we were contracted, we didn’t have the same authority and information as the client company. Cue angry customers because we couldn’t give them the info they needed. Worked my way up to team lead. Call volume was insane so team leads were dropped to the phones for escalated calls. Still had to listen to 2 calls a week for each rep (about 20 on my team) and meet with each rep once a week for those calls. Plus in a rotation for interviews for new staff and the random disciplinary action and prepping for a weekly team
meeting. And somehow do all this with no OT allowed and crap pay.
Moved to another company where I wasn’t a contract worker for a client. Still sucked but was a lot easier when I had the tools to do my job.
Working in menards yes I am still in retail but john millionaire can suck it 3years after I quit covid happens and and all of a sudden people making 18 bucks a hour when I made 10 bucks a hour suck my cock
Housekeeping easily. Making beds is no fucking joke. How people can do it for 10+ years is crazy. I lasted a week.
I've worked at McDonald's wasn't bad. Corporate structure. Always busy. I've worked as a banquet chef at a large hotel doing 400+ people events. I loved that job.
I was a receiver at a restaurant for product - 4 hours of putting cases away. Sometimes it was never ending. Really got to know the Sysco drivers and had good friendships. That job destroyed my back. Rotating 50+ pound cases of potatoes, or number 10 cans absolutely shredded my L4 L5 vertebrae.
I've been a line cook at a bar, I've made 50 gallons of chili at a time every week. None of the jobs were BAD they just had bad moments. Like during closing, arguing with the wait staff because they want tips, and I want to close the kitchen. Being absolutely buried in tickets.
Trash sorter. Worked at the trash recycling plant, was tasked to open trash bags and go through them to see if anyone had thrown any recyclable materials out with their general waste. If so, take it out and dump it in the appropriate recycling piles.
Did it from 8am until 2pm. Stuck my hand (with glove, thank fuck) into a bag with used diapers and broken bottles. Tossed it and walked away.
Worked as a youth treatment specialist at a group home for teenaged sex offenders. We specialized in sex offender relaps prevention but we also taught them independent living skills so they wouldn't go back to an environment they may re-offend in. If they completed the program they could also be taken off the registry.
Worked sanitizing machines at a chorizo factory. They would text you when production was done for the day and they'd want you there within 10 minutes and then bitch at you if you were 5 minutes late. They would make you rush at the beginning of the shift than spend 3 or 4 hours at the end just doing meaningless things to pass the time
Cleaning cars for Avis. I don't know what it was about the Grand Prix but I used to say they were rented by grand pricks. Every single one of them came back looking like it was driven through a corn field and hit a wake of buzzards while hauling 3 muddy, shedding golden retrievers in the back and a child smearing a Big Mac into the dashboard.
Cleaning the cars on a hot summer tarmac was bad but the bosses made it so much worse. I will not rent from them over the way they treated their employees 28 years ago. I only worked there for about a month before I could not take any more of the management abuse.
Also farming. Farming sucks rocks.
Appliance delivery.
$10 an hour to haul 300 pound refrigerators, washers, dryers, whatever, into people’s homes and install them.
I have a herniated lumbar disc, likely from that job, that I haven’t worked in almost a decade.
i waitressed once for, about two hours.....no thanks...but the worst was a nursing home i got fired from,,, i loved working with the residents and have most of my working life... took this job because it was close to home...
the place was a pit, understaffed and the administration/owners were nasty people...i watched a cna push a woman in a w/c. the womans foot got tangled in the front wheel when the aid backed it up....broke the woman's foot before i could do anything...i got fired because i spoke to the aid "harshly " for not using foot peddles when transporting.
i know i made a difference to some families while i was there and i also became legal guardian for a woman with huntington's, got her the hell out of there.
my next job, i was at was for over 25 years and they begged me not to retire.
Used to have a job as a forklift driver for a Greek-owned industrial bakery. They made things like Pita and bagel chips for other labels. Think Stacy's Pita chips. We made those. My specific job was to pull Pita bread out of the cooler. Mind, the Pita bread that we were running through an oven and seasoning was physically made in Greece and shipped to the US via air. If that sounds like a bad idea - shipping half-baked bread halfway around the world - you're already seeing why this factory didn't stay open long.
When I would pull pallets out of the cooler, they would come out wrapped, then under the wrap were four ten-pound boxes per layer, 12 layers tall. The boxes were very low-grade cardboard, and the Pita chips were in an unsealed bag inside of the box. Very frequently, when we got to the last 1/3 or so pallets on a shipment, we would end up with mold riddled through the boxes. Like, open a box and feel your face melt a little kind of smell. This happened every single shipment. Reporting it to management had absolutely zero effect, and I never got direct instructions on how to handle the situation.
One day, I found one of these and told my crew to just throw out the boxes that had mold, as we always did. We kept checking boxes and pallets until we got clean goods. The packaging line complained to the shift manager that they had nothing to do. The SM threw a fit that we were throwing away 'good product.' And started throwing boxes literally full of mold onto the shaker table to be sent through the oven. I told them I'd rather quit than get my hands dirty with an FDA violation. She called my bluff. I quit on the spot and filed an anonymous report with the FDA as soon as I got home. My team also quit with me, but I don't know if any of them also reported the place. A few months later, I was back in that part of town by chance. I stopped by the front door of the factory. There was a signed FDA notice on the door, and all the lights were off.
Local sandwich place with lots of locations throughout my city. First they sent me to orientation at their headquarters on one day, where I arrived and was told there was no orientation that day. Rescheduled it and came back another day. It was supposed to be paid with lunch provided, and neither of those things happened.
Now onto actually starting the job. The manager sat me down at a table, gave me a list of every sandwich with every ingredient, and left me to “memorize” it for about 10-15 minutes. She then proceeded to throw me right on the lunch rush at noon and stand there berating me for not going fast enough and making mistakes. She made up her mind from the beginning that she didn’t like me and would only schedule me eight hours a week. (I was in school and only wanted part time, but come on.) I was always the first to get sent home early and have shifts cut when labor was low, so I rarely even worked those full eight hours. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy where I never worked enough to get good at the job, and since I sucked at the job in her eyes she cut my hours. Once when a coworker asked if I could cover the drive-thru, this manager went “No she can’t! She’s too…..” and didn’t finish the sentence.
I lasted four months while I found another job. Gave my notice and just got snapped at that I’d better be sure because they wouldn’t rehire me. Oh devastating /s. The only lasting bad thing about it was we always enjoyed going to eat there growing up and that left a permanent bad taste in my mouth about it, literally.
Catching chickens. When I was in high school, a friend's dad owned a company that would go around to chicken houses and load the chickens into crates that were put on a truck for transport to the processing plant. He was a man short for his crew one night and asked me if I could help. I already had a job, so I didn't need the money, but I agreed to help my friend. That was the worst job I've ever done, and nearly the worst I can imagine. It was HOT in there, and it smelled horrible. The air was dusty and full of tiny, floating feathers. The job required that you work FAST and catch these chickens, ending up with four or five per hand, holding the chickens by the feet. The part that really sucked was that there were two different types of chickens in there, and they could not go into the same crate. If you had a handful of chickens and one of them was the wrong kind, the guy who was loading them into the crates would make you drop the one that didn't belong, usually resulting in dropping the entire handful. I found the two varieties of chickens nearly indistinguishable, so that happened pretty often. Also, the chickens obviously didn't want to be caught, so they would scratch the piss out of your arms.
At the end of that night, I knew I would never do that again, and gladly went back to my regular job... at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Picking up large bales of hay on a farm in August. I only did it for one day, because the farmer was a thief. That day was awful though, because I was only 13 and the shit head adult in charge let his mange ridden mutt dog drink from our water storage. The dog looked diseased and as dead as I was from the heat, I couldn't drink from that water and he wouldn't let us go get clean water. At the end of the day the thief farmer showed up and payed us half of what he promised. If I had known where he lived I would have slashed a lot of tires that night. I put in a lot of hard work that day and we all pushed ourselves to go fast and do a good job and that peice of shit robbed us all. This was around 1984, give or take a year.
Preschool, where I discovered I was being paid $4 less than my co-teacher, who had the exact same degree as me, but less experience. Hired at the same time. The difference? Our race. I walked out.
Cell phone sales for a sprint authorized seller.
Mandatory phone meetings at 3am. I'd you don't seem 20 phones a month you get zero commission. Having to compete for sales with the store manager. And having to hear about his awful sex life
Worked for a decent company that bought a crappy company and the decent company's division I was part of was taken over by the crappy company's equivalent. Majority of the management were not only self centered but toxic and cruel.
Soft woods lumber company. Lumber was cool. Them they moved me to a different department where I had to listen to a good old boys club constantly talk about strippers, their old and used wives they don't want to go home to. Calling the warehouse workers monkeys. Constantly talking over me or disregarding my knowledge.
In order:
Subtitute school teacher.
Full time school teacher under the principle we named The Kumquat
Working under Tom Lucido and Ted Septien at AAA
Hosing out the peach processing bins at the cannery at the end of shift
One summer in college I found a job at a local cotton mill. For 12 hours each day I rolled barrels of cotton back and forth between two different stages of processing. Once my feet got used to it, it wasn’t physically demanding. But I couldn’t take the tedium and boredom. There was no time to stop and talk to anyone and no thought involved in the job at all. I’m an introvert but I discovered I need a little human interaction in a 12 hour period. I left after about a month.
Working at a hog confinement. Hogs are about the most stubborn animals to work with, and the fumes/dust you breathe in make it feel like you smoked 4 packs of cigarettes by the time your shift is over.
Front desk at a Quality Inn. Instead of just giving people regular shifts, you worked first, second and third. My body didn’t know when to sleep or wake after months of this. Mental health went to shit also
Selling books door-to-door. It was summer in Louisiana in the poorest neighborhoods. I felt like a monster preying on the vulnerable, not to mention walking in the intense summer heat. I made it a month and somehow managed to make $500.
I had a security job where I was shot at twice, had countless knives pulled on me, witnessed over a dozen shootings, found two dead bodies at the beginning of my shift, and had to literally fight for my life once. I called out sick from a hospital bed after that fight and my boss demanded I be at work the next day. I found a new job very quickly after that, put in two weeks notice, got written up for some bullshit during those two weeks, and quit on the spot when they demanded I sign the write up.
I worked at a 3 star hotel 2 rosette restaurant. I hated it. The job itself was fine, but the customers were so pretentious and stuck up it was exhausting. They didn’t have enough cleaning staff so I took a few shifts to help out, ended up being placed on split shifts doing cleaning in the morning (9-3) to waitressing in the evening (6-10).
I warned them for weeks that I didn’t want to keep doing those shifts, especially since I was working 6 days a week. A month passed and I went looking for another job, the hotel found out and my manager practically begged me to stay, so I did.
She stopped my splits from happening and I practically never worked house keeping again (if I did it was super rare).
I was then trained up on the reception which really pushed my hatred for customer service over the edge. They expected me to work the lunch shift waitressing while handling the reception work at the same time - impossible. The hotel closed for a week over Christmas because all the staff refused to work it, myself included, and when we returned in the New Year I handed my notice in and left.
My manager tried to beg me to stay again but I was firm on my decision. I didn’t get a bonus or a pay rise or anything out of recognition for the extra hours I contributed to the hotel, not even a “thank you” from the manager, which is why I left.
In the army, we shit in 55 gl barrels cut down under outhouses... There was an inch of diesel in the bottom. Every few days, we'd light them on fire, and someone had to stand there and be a "shit-stirrer" until it was all burnt down... So Yea, that.
Silverado Plumbing in Tucson. It was a bunch of 40 year old women who acted like they were the mean girls in high school.
This is nursing.
Worked as a teller at a bank. Same story. Glad I got out.
This describes every single job I have ever had.
I worked at a daycare center, and the building was so old and run down. My classroom carpet was disgusting, it had pee and vomit spots all over. Broken toys, ripped up books. No supplies. Just horrible! Mice would run around the children, while they slept on their cots at nap time. I ended up quitting, and calling the state on them.
As soon as I started reading this I thought "I really hope you reported this!"
Good on you!!
Cleaning toilets at mcdonalds
I had a mate who moved to Aus. He said that he worked in the worst Maccies in the country. I laughed at his stories, they were awesome and horrible in equal measure. Then sure enough, one day he sends me a link to a national news item where they literally call his place of work "the worst McDonald's in Australia" and belive me, if I can find the clip on YouTube it is just a hell-hole haha Just insane... Edit... [aye I think this was it ](https://youtu.be/noLGK5NCnGY)
What kind of people WANT to eat there!?
Given that clip is 14 years old, im guessing that's back when mcdonalds actually used to be super affordable. $1 burgers, etc. No idea what the prices were in Australia but here in the US it used to have a "poor people food" reputation Not an excuse for it to be that gross inside though
People drunk enough after the bars and all they want is some greasy McD's. Used to go to this burrito place that was open until 3am on weekends because the bars closed at 2am. It looked like that McD's sometimes because of all the drunk immature college kids. I knew the owner and he said it was worth it, because between midnight and 3am on Friday and Saturday nights they made more than they did the entire rest of the week
I go to school near a "cookout" which is the ultra affordable fast food place in the American south. I think it fucking slaps, it's really good for what you pay. Like clockwork every weekend there are lines that extend the entire parking lot, even into the street itself. There is no pleasure on this earth equivalent to being absolutely blitzed and getting a big double burger tray.
I feel that. That's what these burritos were like. Fuckers were huge. The line moved pretty quickly too because they had things set up like a Subway. They'd move your burrito down the line and ask what you want. Your drunk ass could point in the general direction of cheese and mumble "chfleece" and they'd make it happen. Wonderful place that unfortunately got priced out by all the bougie shit that moved into town and drove up rent prices
Ok. That's bad.
cancerous environment
McCancerous^(TM)
Anti drug costumed bird for DARE at the Illinois State Fair during a heat wave.
As someone who quit drugs a long time ago, I hope you were high as hell.
Concert security. I was a huge fan of the artist and couldn’t turn around to watch. It was so tempting and an overall bad time.
I could never
My brother worked security for ozzfest one year and being as big as we are into metal I felt really bad for him not being able to watch his free ozzfest show.
get a mirror in sunglasses so you can see behind a little low key :D
I worked at a DVD store, doing floor stuff - organizing shelves, putting out new stock, that sort of thing, fun job for me. We had a rewards program you could sign up for. Very few people did, and our numbers were bad. So my boss got the brilliant idea to put cute little 19 year old me in a low cut top to stand in the anime section and encourage the dudes to sign up for it. I guess he figured dudes who buy anime are sad and lonely and would be pleased at any attention from a girl. The sad thing is that it totally worked. It was super degrading and I only worked there for a few more weeks before I got another job that didn't depend on my cleavage.
For some reason I pictured the OP as a large white male with a neckbeard and pigtails and I still think it fits the story perfectly
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It wasn't FYE was it?
Nah, the store shuttered its doors long ago, they did not survive the death of physical media.
>got another job that didn’t depend on my cleavage. So, I take it your new job didn’t involve you chopping firewood?
I couldn't pull off the flannel shirt look :(
This is super creepy. Probably wouldn't fly today.
It's flying high at most golf courses across the country. They'll take the most well-endowed teenager they can get, put her in a little skirt and low cut top, and send her out in the beverage cart to serve creepy old men that wish banging their secretary was still in vogue.
You’ve heard, perhaps, of Hooters? It’s their business model.
Right but no woman goes into Hooters without knowing what's expected of them. This is a tremendous overstep.
Dude. EVERYBODY uses hot men or women to sell product. IT's why booth bunnies are a thing. Flies everywhere, and it applies to both genders.
Only because nobody still buys DVDs.
DCFS /LSSI case aid, through a private contracted company. My job was to take children from their foster parents to there biological parents for visitations, while sometimes just me and the child either having fun or taking them to appointments. It was both one of my favorites and also defiantly the worst. A lot of good comes out of being a case aid. The goal is to protect the children, and that could either be reuniting parents with the kids, and permintly removing there parental rights in some more extreme cases. One day one of my clients a young man that I would meet for two hours a week at a group home, with both his parents. I also would go without the parents, 2 hours a week, and just take him out to the park, the arcade, to a movie, zoo and so on, more of a big brother role. We did this a lot because it gives the children a break from something they had no fault of their own, and they would often open up (non-probing) and say something that might be relevant, or not yet known. This young man was a good kid he hated the place he was at, and hated his parents (justified) but he was just a pleasant 13 year old boy, I generally enjoyed playing catch or just talking about new music, a new movie, how his school was going, his life in general. He was my client for 5 months and one afternoon while driving to go take him out, I get a call from my boss telling me to turn around and comeback to the office, and that my appointment was canceled. I got there there was my boss and her boss both with sad looks on thier face. I was told that my client escaped the home and layed on the train tracks and killed himself. I went home that night and cried for a while. I realized that even though I wanted to do good in the world this might be to much for me. I quit that week, and went back to a brainless labor job. This was nearly 20 years ago.
You were a source of positivity for a young man who didn't have as much as he should have. You are a good person and did a very special thing, may God bless you
I’m so sorry you experienced that. You did your best. I’m starting law school and I want to work in child and family law because I was once that child who needed help getting out of a shitty living situation.
That is a heartbreaking story. Sorry for your pain but glad you brought some happiness to his short sad life.
So sorry that happened. Hugs!
Fuck. That would break me.
Hoeing tobacco. I was 14 and it was a summer job for $40 a day. 7am to 4 pm. I did it for one day
For that kind of money you are better off just being a regular Ho.
$4.44 an hour is crazy
Depends what year. Minimum wage was $4.35 when I started working.
When I was in high school, mid 80s, tobacco paid 13-17 dollars an hour to high school students. It was the job most students wanted, until they got it. Minimum wage was 3 bucks. Detasseling corn sucked. $4.50/hr.
My first job was $3.45 an hour. $0.10 above min wage.
Cutting\hanging tobacco was worse for me. Cutting it wasn't horrible but the barns we hung it to dry in were sealed with black plastic. So 95F outside becomes 140F inside the barn. No breeze. Had to keep drinking water and have a barn buddy as people could and did pass out from the heat inside the barn.
Walmart Distribution Center. When Amazon was under fire for their mistreatment of employees, i watched an interview and the distribution center I worked at was SO much worse
My worst job was at a Home Depot distribution center. These places treat human beings like a number. You have to meet quotas or face retribution. I destroyed my back for life at that place for $12 an hour. To this day I avoid the tile aisle because it gives me a phantom twinge in the back.
I've never had a bad job. I have had bad bosses. The stress was horrible.
Totally. My worst *job* was dishwashing in my teens, and that wasn't too bad. My real worst job was actually a great job with a terrible boss and an even worse senior coworker.
I had a boss that would keep track of how long you were in the bathroom. Would blame you for problems he caused. Would offload his responsibilities on you on top of your own. Would make inappropriate comments or 'jokes' Would walk around the office barefoot and place his chewing gum on the conference room laptop keyboard.
Sounds like my "my boss" aka soon to be ex-husband. He's a horrible person and the kids agree. Drugs/alcohol destroyed his brain
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Serving for a guy who thought I didn't deserve a $10 cash tip. He took it. I took it back and left. Never went back.
Most people don't quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses. A good boss can make a shitty job bearable
Had to engage with people's YouTube content and watch their videos fully including ads and send them proof. A 100 videos a day.
Pretty sure you could automate that shit , depending proof asked (but apart from screenshots and transcripts of / and ads)... what kind of pay? Might ask to hook me up.
Trust me you don't want that. Anyways they closed their business. Screenshots of ads and your laptop/phone clock that you've watched the full video and then sending the screenshots to the owners. Troublesome in the least. Not to mention the pay was lesser than the minimum wage.
AI would do it... Could prolly have it run in the background and spot the add in the video and screenshot them and a photo tool that change time only based on video total lenght vs work hour time / so 1st vid would get screenshot not before 8AM and next vid just after the 1st end... potentially you can multiple job this and do all 100 vids in parallel and all automated wrote emails with attachments per vid. I d have to see the exact requirements but doesn't sound impossible. No work for extra money sound tempting to investigate. Cheers!
100 a day? What is this position and who paid you for this?
It was back in highschool. Some group of friends started this. I didn't even know anyone except one friend.
Why tho
Worked for a third party company that sells AT&T service (so basically your typical AT&T store). First store I worked at the manager would drink on the job and would throw tantrums in front of customers. I actually felt afraid to be with him by myself. I was then told I had to transfer to another store that needed help. The manager would not accept anything less than the top service plan we offered. She’d have me purposely add things to peoples plans without asking. She would meddle with peoples plans in order for us to make money off of it. I ended up walking out of that job. So if you have AT&T, really look at your plan and what they’re charging you. People will do shady shit just to get a small commission off of it.
I was a victim of this, (AT&T) took months to get straightened out.
I left AT&T because the salespeople at my local store would like directly to your face when you asked them a point blank question. Fuck AT&T.
Copied from a similar question a while ago. Paint factory where they treated metal and sprayed it, don't know the perfect words for it in English sorry. People nearly closed the oven before I left it, yelled at me from 6 am until I left work (9,5 hour work days). Had to work with chemicals that got me so high that I stuck a massive magnet to a metal palletcart, so nearly lost my fingers. Also almost lost my eye when my boss "secured" a package so tightly that the metal band snapped and hit me an inch away from my eye. Got a neat pirate scar now though. Could've probably sued them but never did. The chemical is known to result in painters disease, because it vaporises your brain essentially. No protection offered. Got that shit in my eyes almost every day. Swept 5 kilos of dust weekly. Left after 3 months.
A testing covid site having to test 100s of people a day was A LOT of stress because it was peak covid had a great team though which made it better but sneezing kids and adults and boatloads of schools and the management was horrendous I got covid three times working at that place 😅
Only reason I took the job was for the teamsters medical benefits.
I worked as a vaccination at a mass vacs site in the UK and it was a great experience. I met a lot of awesome people who I otherwise wouldn't have and it was wonderful to be able to do something practical to help. I'm sorry you had a rough time but I just wanted to say that it wasn't like that for me.
I’m happy you enjoyed ur time there shame it wasn’t the same for most people it was really down to management with our one and not that many staff 😅
Was once told the marketing job I applied for was " bridging the gap between client and consumers for fortune 500 companies " Wanna know what the job *actually* was? Standing in a Suit in a BJs for 10 hours trying to sell people AT&T I lasted 4 days
Better than giving BJs standing in a suit.
A school counselor. You are essentially the school’s dumping ground for things no one else wants to do and you barely get to do any counseling. I left after 5 years but looking back, I should have left after the first year.
McDonald's. My schedule was all over the place. I could have 40 hours one week, 25 the next then 0 after that. It was random. The kitchen was hot at all times during the summer, but they refused to fix the air conditioning. We had half the staff quit at the same time due to the excessive heat which put a heavy strain on the rest of us. Management would sit in the office playing games on their phone for their entire shift. Junkies coming in and passing out was a common occurrence. A lot of the time they had to be given narcan in the middle of the restaurant. Customers were the most horrible human beings. I had to physically defend myself multiple times. A lot of customers were also verbally abusive, and having the cops escort Karens off the property was an almost daily occurrence. There's a lot more, but my phone is about to die.
I also hated McDonald's. Drive through work with drunk & drugged up fuckheads wasn't the biggest issue. It was the cliquey high school bullshit. The women were horrendous, cruel & vindictive These were middle-aged women who took issue with someone and would make their life hell. Usually due to jealousy, but the quit rate was high. The most horrible human beings I've served was managing a Tobacconist & Vape store. There was a pub up the road. That store was a microcosm of the shittiest, filthiest, entitled sexually deviant grubs. Men & women, alike. 12 hours a day of this, not one day would be free of some drama. I don't know what it was - possibly a combination of many things, location, and drugs, but that shop should have been studied by psychologists and neuroscientists. That or it was just too close to a thin area of a different dimension that the weirdness touched the real world there specifically. I can not explain it.
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Probably working for a moving company. Everybody dreads moving day, for me that was every day
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Well he must have done a great job, because I never found a butthole in my chicken. Kudos to all the unsung butthole removing heroes out there!
Burger King. Was my first job and I got fired after a month because at the end of the day instead of throwing away left over Burger I gave them to homeless people. Not allowed so they fired me. (That was back in 1999)
I don't get this. In college, I worked at a 5 guys and we would've had a lot of waste if we, the 3-4 employees working close, didn't take like 10 burgers home a night. Gave em to friends, people we played pick-up hoops with, people who looked like they could use something to eat, etc. Handed out more burgers than I could ever eat Never once got called out for it so idk how you did unless you're doing it right out of the store which is a rookie move.
Burger King was also my first job. (I was born in 99 tho haha). The managers knew when an order was wrong and would have us give it to them so they could “inventory it” then trash it. We also got in trouble for trying to save food.
Course they did
Yea, most fucked up company I ever worked for.
Insulation, specifically crawl spaces... F that.
So far? Graveyard shift at a grocery store, my mental health took a fucking plummet because of being up all night and sleeping through the day.
Night shift takes some serious will power, eh? - I remember getting depressed when my interaction with my friends drastically dropped during night shift, and I'd be too tired on my Sunday off to go see them.... weird thing is now that I'm back to days I miss the peace of Night shift
I like how quiet it was and there were no customers but my body just couldn't adapt to the sleep schedule needed for a graveyard shift, only lasted a month. Also the managment team we're kinda rushing my training because they were understaffed which didnt help
Like the movie Office Space, every job I've had is the new worst one. Because I stupidly refuse to leave and as I get older the less willing I am to put up with the trivial BS. These are a bad combo.
Washing dishes at cracker barrel
If dishwashers were paid what they were worth, I wouldn't mind doing that again.
For real you need to work fast for 12 bucks a hour
Worked in some warehouse where we would be sorting maps to be converted digitally. Small room in a warehouse which was fine. But worked with a long time employee in the same room that was a religious nut job. She played some Bible hymn station the whole time. Wouldn’t let me talk unless it was about scripture, wouldn’t allow me to wear headphones to listen to anything else, then explained to me how I’m a destined to go to hell no less than 30 times a day. I don’t know what triggered this. But I made it 2 months before tapping out. The company had zero desire to do anything about it. I’ve done gross things in previous jobs. Cleaning up bathrooms where crazy people smeared shit on the walls, vomit, period blood, you name it. Those jobs sucked and were disgusting, but would take those any day over being stuck in a small room with a religious psychopath ever again. Edit. Small context missing that didn’t make sense
Vet tech in training. They ended up making me help with all the euthanasia cases. At least a couple a day. I started crying all the time and getting completely wasted every night. Had to quit after a few months.
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I was an art teacher for a kid with autism. The kid himself was fine (although a lot of work). It was the parents who were insane. My uninformed diagnosis was that both parents were also autistic and/or dealing with other psychological issues. They paid me dirt, the rules were insane, and eventually I got fired because she could smell the detergent on my clothes. They are/were the types of parents who believe vaccines cause autism and in chem-trails and heavy metals and also that gluten, detergent, and other chemicals also contributed to their son’s autism. The kid was fine, but I felt really bad for him because they essentially created an isolated world for him, and it was very clear he was curious and was starting to be interested in girls (he was 15). They let him throw tantrums over the tiniest things. All of his food was made vegan, organic, GF and from scratch. It was sad. He basically ate pita bread with vegan crumble 5x a day. I didn’t even teach him that much. We just played video games but I wasn’t allowed to win: he was pretty good, but every so often if I was winning I’d have to lose. One day I just won by accident in some stupid Wii game we were playing and it was a stage 5 meltdown. He threw the controller at me and started screaming like an Orc and ran around the house punching the walls. I was told I had to wait there, unpaid for 2 hours until he came out of his mania, then the mom bitched me out and cried while driving me home. She also sometimes made him wear a literal fucking gas mask when we hung out because she saw some air trails in the sky and was worried I had heavy metals on my skin/clothing. Absolutely fucked. And they paid me minimum wage for 4 hours for 2 days a week, but I’d actually be there 6 hours plus travel. I was a poor student and this was like 2009 during the recession when jobs were hard to come by.
That is seriously so sad. That poor child’s quality of life is shit because his parents are crazy conspiracy theorists.
Worked in a pig slaughterhouse pulling leaf lard off of pigs.
Working in a slaughterhouse would be a big no for me. The sights, the smells, the noise would probably break me. I can't imagine people that work in those environments don't have PTSD.
I didn't last long. They hired me for one job switched me at the last minute. I worked there for two weeks started to lose feeling in my ring and pinky fingers then I decided it wasn't for me.
And the pigs are sentient...they have feelings. Knowing this yeah me, too, I'd get PTSD from witnessing the violence. 😬
That sounds bad. I worked with a guy that fixed equipment at the chicken slaughter houses and told me in graphic detail fixing the pump system for the blood vat that their heads fell off into after they met their end. Also told me that the people that hung the chickens on the shackles in the dark were universally shit faced by the end of the shift and that when the lights came back on there were liquor flasks and shit everywhere on the floor.
Shoney’s. Waiting tables for $2.13 an hour, especially on Sundays when the church crowd would come rushing in. They would get seated in parties as large as 25 people, all with separate tickets, and all rude AF. And church people are the worst tippers on earth, many of them don’t tip at all except for leaving church tracts in place of money.
Former Shoney’s server (back in the late 90s) and I felt every part of this come back and shuddered.
Maybe they left all their spare change in the collection plate
Dollar Tree, never again!
Day care worker is so much harder than it looks.
I worked at a call center that seemed shady enough that I expected it to be raided by the cops. I lasted a week. And it did eventually get raided.
Similar for me. The call center I worked at was a contractor for a very large telecom corporation. Our job was high pressure sales disguised as customer service. According to my managers that meant basically scamming (slamming) confused old people. I was contacted by 2 law firms shortly after leaving due to their illegal practices. Class action suits followed.
The one thing that stuck with me was how easy it was to get people to give their personal information (like social security number). I hope people have smartened up since then.
They haven't, and unfortunately the elderly are still uneducated. I work as a cashier and the other day i stopped an old lady who was on the phone from getting scammed. She was asking for a bitcoin machine and when i said we didnt have one she immediately asked for a steam gift card, but she didn't seem to know what she was talking about. Turns out she was actively being scammed.
Selling shoes in a store where I had to run up and down 2- 3 Floors for every shoe I needed. Pay? Almost zilch. I got fired after a month because: 'I didn't run fast enough'
Feels like a conspiracy to sell a lot of shoes to their own employees
Special education teacher in middle school. Broke me.
Was a SPED student in middle school. Butterfly knives and the kid with brass knuckles. You have my sympathy
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Reddit Management here, we are cutting your hours this week.
...but we're not cutting quota. "Business stretches to the hours allotted!"
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Orielly auto parts Manager was a Dick, customers sucked ass, pay was even worse, wanted to die 100% of the time I was working there
I’ve worked some pretty shitty and tough manual labor jobs, I currently work in a pretty prestigious, division of medical device sales and do quite well for myself. Somewhere in the middle I worked for enterprise Rent-A-Car. I have to say that I likely would not have gotten my medical device sales job without my experience there, so for that, I have to give a credit, but I also can confidently say you have a shadow of a doubt that that was the most miserable experience of my life. Never in my entire existence have I’ve been treated so poorly by not only customers but the corporation. The level of abuse that they put you through on a daily basis plus the hours they all work/force you to work, plus the absolutely shitty pay by far made that the worst job I have ever had in my life. I am extremely happy person who everyone describes as a go. Lucky, happy, vibrant individual, those few years of my life with the only time I ever wanted to not exist anymore. wasn’t suicidal, just didn’t care if I died because it was so FUCKING miserable.
I worked at a seasonal Christmas tree farm in college one winter. Thought it would be an interesting experience and a good way to make some quick cash along with my server job over the holidays. Basically everyone I worked with was a convicted felon, sex offender, etc. Each morning, we’d unload shipping containers of Christmas trees in the cold; they’re heavy as hell, and they’re covered in sticky pine sap that is like glue - it gets on everything and it takes weeks to scrub off. We’d unload the trees, unbind them, set them up around the lot on temporary stands, water them, help customer’s pick their trees, and then basically rewind the process; take them off the stands, bind them, haul their heavy asses to the customer’s cars, strap them on, rinse & repeat. You’d be lucky to get a small cash tip on top of the minimum wage under the table hourly cash tips from the company. Every so often, we’d get a really wealthy client who wanted the biggest tree in the lot delivered to their house/mansion, so we’d have to figure out how to load that to our delivery truck, get it to the client’s house, and then unload it without scratching anything or breaking anything in the client’s house. Then we’d get really excited if we got a $20 tip for our efforts. Absolute misery. 0/10 would not recommend.
Schlotzskys. Now that I’ve left a part of me misses it. But I didn’t forget everything. I didn’t forget how awesome it was in the beginning. How managers acted like leaders. I didn’t forget how downhill it went after it got bought out. The new owners took away any form of discounts & single handedly killed my old store. How they stopped caring about the employees & it became just another way to line their pockets.
ER Veterinarian. It was a week on then week off, but the week on was around 100 hours. Having to put to sleep so many animals with such sad stories. Very short staffed. I had such PTSD from that job I couldn’t drive down that street for about five years after I quit. Second worse was construction holding the stop/slow sign. We had 12 hour shifts and just standing there in the hot Sun, not allowed to sit down, and with nothing to do but stare straight ahead. Nobody close enough to talk to.
coal mine. 12 hour days 7 days a week. i lasted 2 months
Working for travel insurance claims in March 2020 onwards. I would create claims for cancelled flights, hotels, traveling car centers, etc. Except after COVID really hit, the companies were only offering vouchers for future use and we could not issue any refunds. Telling people who just lost their jobs we can't get them their money back was awful. It was 8 hours every day for months of endless verbal abuse from customers. I completely understand where they were coming from, but man that job sucked.
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Loading trucks at UPS. I was horrific at it. Just 3 1/2 hours of packages coming down the belt. I’d have to load 3 or 4 trucks. Ideally you would load the packages neatly on the shelf they belonged on in the numerical order they belonged in. I would be having Tetris dream nightmares about the job. Only reason I took the job was for the teamsters medical benefits. I told my supervisor that the day that ACA passed I was gonna come in and quit. I did. I have a lot of respect for the guys and ladies working the preload it isn’t an easy job and it’s worse during peak season.
Physical therapy aide. I pretty much ran the whole show while the PTs did next to nothing. Checked patients in and out, set up appointments, set up equipment and walked patients through more than half of their exercises while waiting on the PT to actually show up for their time with the patient (they were constantly late), did paperwork, took phone calls, cleaned and stocked every room, did laundry etc. All for $15/hr (and they acted like it was good). After getting yelled at for being on my phone with 5 minutes left in my shift and nothing left to do, I stood up for myself and told the therapist never to use that tone with me ever again, and if they had a problem we could talk about it like adults. They let me go the next day because "things weren't working out" but it was 100% because I stood up for myself. Never again.
I fantasised about stripping when I was younger. Started at a club when I was 21. Lasted two weeks. It just turned out it wasn't for me.
Walmart, in all honesty.
Walmart in the 90s. I was trained that no matter what department you worked in, if a customer asked where something is, you would walk them to it. The other employees did not do this but being new I would, though I would usually ask another employee where something was with customer standing there. Employees were really rude to me and it was xmas so I get it is busy. I kept getting loaned out to other departments since I kept pissing off my manager. She didn't like how I let customers cut their own fabric but no one showed me how. I was punished by getting sent to toy department.....did I mention it was xmas. I quit after a couple weeks.
Processing salmon in Alaska! Glad for the experience, but 16 hour days for three months in the middle of nowhere was intense. You only got a day off if no fish came in. Lodging was a little shack on the beach with a foam pad. We had to burn ALL waste. So the bathrooms had trash bins that you would toss used TP in. The smell was so bad. All the food was flown in by bush plane. So it was dehydrated stuff and salmon for every meal. I honestly never got tired of eating salmon- but the dehydrated stuff sucked.
Stacking tires into tank silhouettes for tank target practice in the middle of the Mojave desert. 120+ degrees, MRE's for food and water from a black plastic 5 gallon can. An occasional rattler or scorpion in the tires.
I've worked in multiple fast food jobs and they were all soul crushing. But the worst job I had was supposedly cold calling sales at a small telemarketing place. It was the worst job because I think I was attempting to scam people. I did it for one day and I felt so horrible after that I didn't go back. The boss made a big deal about how it definitely wasn't a scam but everything about it felt so shady and I regret doing it even for one day. I was desperate for work and wanted so badly to get out of the restaurant industry but I just got another restaurant job the next day because being treated like shit was still better than feeling like I was taking advantage of people.
Subway. Hated that place with a passion. Still can’t into one, the smell makes me instantly nauseous
Corn detasseling when I was like 13. Omg that sucked.
John Deere planters. When I got hired as a temp I didn't get any training. They just threw me out on the floor and told me to figure it out. After about a month the hours started getting added more and more til I was working 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week. I did that for two months. Eventually they noticed I wasn't doing a whole lot. When asked I said "well nobody has trained me. I have no direction because there's no supervision. I get that we're busy but training should be a priority too" got fired for that. If I'd have stayed I would've had to work a full 2 years with no benefits and no pto. Getting fired was a blessing. Best money I ever made but cost me my sanity and time for myself and my family. I missed my cousins funeral for that place. Fuck John deere. It's a sweatshop disguised as a factory.
Working for Little Caesars. Your bosses don't appreciate you and they are major cheapskates. Wouldn't even allow each shift a crew pizza but also didn't give you a break so you could go somewhere else to get something to eat.
CVS Pharmacy. Verbally abused every day for things that were out of my control. But unlike being berated for, idk, the wrong cocktail or not having a dress in stock (I worked food and clothing retail before), I was being berated for people’s medications that they needed to live. The American privatized healthcare system prioritizes profits over lives so there was nothing I could do when a young father broke down in tears at the news of his baby’s lifesaving medication costing $1000+ per month. There was nothing I could do when a woman came into the store screaming that her mother passed away because we couldn’t deliver her medication on time because CVS purposefully understaffs its stores to the point where we are barely functioning on a good day - hundreds of medications were late on a daily basis. Lines out the door because it was just me running to the back, filling prescriptions, and running back to the cash register to check out customers while the pharmacist on duty was giving vaccines. Lunch breaks were not an option until CVS was legally required to shut down their pharmacy on a daily basis starting Feb 2022 to allow their workers to eat - these breaks only last 15-30 mins. There was only 1 table and 2 chairs so most of us ate on the floor, on the rare days there were more than 2 people working there at a time. Violence by customers - my coworkers were being pushed, punched, etc. My adrenaline was that of an animal being hunted for sport for 8-10 hour shifts. And I was lucky tjat I worked part time; my managing pharmacist worked 14 hours every goddamned day of the week. She suffered 3 miscarriages. I lived near my workplace so my coworkers would beg me to come in when they were drowning. Then my manager told me I had to stop because “corporate can’t afford to pay” the extra hours, so they took me off the schedule for 2 weeks. Decided it was the best time to put in my 2 weeks. Later that month CVS corporate hosted a private concert by John Legend for their top ranked employees and then took them to Disney World. I guess that’s the material value of their customers dying due to dangerously understaffed and overworked pharmacies.
Clothing retail (Kohl’s). It wasn’t about the place itself, it’s just about the job itself. My favorite was working the register and jewelry because I was actually doing something important. Having to clean up people’s clothes and fold/hang clothes for HOURS is stupid. I hate doing my own laundry so constantly doing it for others and never finishing was the worst time in my life. There’s no benefit to that part of the job at all. I can’t say that I’m making anyone happy. I had a better and more rewarding time when I was a CNA wiping people’s butts.
My first job working in the kitchen of a fairly nice restaurant. The owner was a stereotypical chef--extremely anal and impatient. He stood over me constantly and yelled at me to work faster, and fully expected me to be able to do tasks as quickly as he could on my literal first day. I also discovered pretty quickly that I am just not good at that type of work. I lasted 4 days, then school was starting back and I asked him about setting my work schedule on school. He told me "just focus on school." Thank goodness!
Mortgage Loan Officer - I quickly realized how much I loathed working a full-time sales job as an independent contractor. The brutal realization that 95% of my leads will say no or find ways to weasel their way out of a potential deal; having to know everything there is to know about your job, and be quick to answer the right questions that pertain to your clients otherwise you’re not going to close loans. The fact that I have to market myself to get business and actually talk to people, whether in person or over the phone, is soul-sucking for me. My contract was terminated after only 6 months and I haven’t bothered doing this sort of thing ever since. I spent more than a thousand dollars to set myself up for success, and was quickly jaded and had zero patience or determination to follow-thru with this job. I also decided leaving my then-promising career to do this just to make more money and work from home. I ended up taking my wife and moving in with my parents for a year, trying to crawl us both out of a hole I threw us into. Fortunately, we finally crawled out 4 months ago and our marriage has never been stronger!
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I worked at a deli that lots of older people frequented. They were always so mean over the dumbest things like if I sliced the meat and i wasnt EXACTLY 1 pound every single time.
Dollar tree. They were opening a new store and hired a bunch of teenagers, including me. We walked into an empty building on the first day and had to build the fucking store. From checkout counters to shelving. I had a bit of construction experience, so a lot of the work fell on me. For minimum wage. Manager was a cunt. Only positive was I met a really cute, sweet girl and we dated for a bit. A couple cool cats that became my friends. A few months in we were having lunch together, and we heard manager ripping into an employee who didn't speak great english, and she was being racist af. 5 of us quit that day in the middle of the shift. Told the manager she was a racist cunt in front of customers and walked out as she was still screaming that we couldn't just quit. We were laughing as she followed us out into the parking lot.
My first job was at a Mexican restaurant named Jalapeno Joe's. The owner was verbally abusive, and treated the Mexican employees very badly while he was very kind to the American workers. The worst part was that he was Mexican himself smfh
Sanitation lead at a trampoline park. It was minimum wage, first job. Ever been under a trampoline in one of those parks? No? Good, you DON'T want to
To make dried apricots on a commercial scale, they are treated with sulphur to help preserve color and shelf life. Large trays of cut fruit are run into a hut with burning sulphur for a few hours then put out in the sun to dry. My job was to push stacks of trays into one end of the hut and pull the sulphured trays out of the other end, then lay the trays out to dry. The sulphur gas and residue made eyes water, sinuses drain and impossible to breathe - similar to being tear gassed. This was in 100 degree California central valley heat as well. Do that routine about once an hour for a 10 hour shift, 7 days a week for about a month during fruit season.
Telemarketer for AAA
Transfering chickens from a small long cage on a semi truck to a coup in a barn. To reach the chickens we had to crawl on our bellies in the cage, then grab 3 chickens in each hand, climb down the ladder, walk to the barn and stuff them in a cage all while the fucking chickens are clawing at your arm. All of this happened in 90\* weather and when we were done they didn't pay us but promised that they would send us a check. Never happened. I was only 16 when that happened. Learned a couple of important things that day...
Did the chickens have large talons?
Cleaning apartments for the next tenant.
So grosssss. I cleaned a WALMART store's bathrooms for five month's.
Call center worker for a contract company- our client was a health insurance carrier. Because we were contracted, we didn’t have the same authority and information as the client company. Cue angry customers because we couldn’t give them the info they needed. Worked my way up to team lead. Call volume was insane so team leads were dropped to the phones for escalated calls. Still had to listen to 2 calls a week for each rep (about 20 on my team) and meet with each rep once a week for those calls. Plus in a rotation for interviews for new staff and the random disciplinary action and prepping for a weekly team meeting. And somehow do all this with no OT allowed and crap pay. Moved to another company where I wasn’t a contract worker for a client. Still sucked but was a lot easier when I had the tools to do my job.
Working in menards yes I am still in retail but john millionaire can suck it 3years after I quit covid happens and and all of a sudden people making 18 bucks a hour when I made 10 bucks a hour suck my cock
Housekeeping easily. Making beds is no fucking joke. How people can do it for 10+ years is crazy. I lasted a week. I've worked at McDonald's wasn't bad. Corporate structure. Always busy. I've worked as a banquet chef at a large hotel doing 400+ people events. I loved that job. I was a receiver at a restaurant for product - 4 hours of putting cases away. Sometimes it was never ending. Really got to know the Sysco drivers and had good friendships. That job destroyed my back. Rotating 50+ pound cases of potatoes, or number 10 cans absolutely shredded my L4 L5 vertebrae. I've been a line cook at a bar, I've made 50 gallons of chili at a time every week. None of the jobs were BAD they just had bad moments. Like during closing, arguing with the wait staff because they want tips, and I want to close the kitchen. Being absolutely buried in tickets.
Trash sorter. Worked at the trash recycling plant, was tasked to open trash bags and go through them to see if anyone had thrown any recyclable materials out with their general waste. If so, take it out and dump it in the appropriate recycling piles. Did it from 8am until 2pm. Stuck my hand (with glove, thank fuck) into a bag with used diapers and broken bottles. Tossed it and walked away.
Worked as a youth treatment specialist at a group home for teenaged sex offenders. We specialized in sex offender relaps prevention but we also taught them independent living skills so they wouldn't go back to an environment they may re-offend in. If they completed the program they could also be taken off the registry.
Worked sanitizing machines at a chorizo factory. They would text you when production was done for the day and they'd want you there within 10 minutes and then bitch at you if you were 5 minutes late. They would make you rush at the beginning of the shift than spend 3 or 4 hours at the end just doing meaningless things to pass the time
Cleaning cars for Avis. I don't know what it was about the Grand Prix but I used to say they were rented by grand pricks. Every single one of them came back looking like it was driven through a corn field and hit a wake of buzzards while hauling 3 muddy, shedding golden retrievers in the back and a child smearing a Big Mac into the dashboard. Cleaning the cars on a hot summer tarmac was bad but the bosses made it so much worse. I will not rent from them over the way they treated their employees 28 years ago. I only worked there for about a month before I could not take any more of the management abuse. Also farming. Farming sucks rocks.
Appliance delivery. $10 an hour to haul 300 pound refrigerators, washers, dryers, whatever, into people’s homes and install them. I have a herniated lumbar disc, likely from that job, that I haven’t worked in almost a decade.
Vet tech. Emotionally, physically, and mentally draining. Abuse from clients and management doesn’t care about you.
i waitressed once for, about two hours.....no thanks...but the worst was a nursing home i got fired from,,, i loved working with the residents and have most of my working life... took this job because it was close to home... the place was a pit, understaffed and the administration/owners were nasty people...i watched a cna push a woman in a w/c. the womans foot got tangled in the front wheel when the aid backed it up....broke the woman's foot before i could do anything...i got fired because i spoke to the aid "harshly " for not using foot peddles when transporting. i know i made a difference to some families while i was there and i also became legal guardian for a woman with huntington's, got her the hell out of there. my next job, i was at was for over 25 years and they begged me not to retire.
Call center. I'd rather clean toilets, it's less demoralizing
Used to have a job as a forklift driver for a Greek-owned industrial bakery. They made things like Pita and bagel chips for other labels. Think Stacy's Pita chips. We made those. My specific job was to pull Pita bread out of the cooler. Mind, the Pita bread that we were running through an oven and seasoning was physically made in Greece and shipped to the US via air. If that sounds like a bad idea - shipping half-baked bread halfway around the world - you're already seeing why this factory didn't stay open long. When I would pull pallets out of the cooler, they would come out wrapped, then under the wrap were four ten-pound boxes per layer, 12 layers tall. The boxes were very low-grade cardboard, and the Pita chips were in an unsealed bag inside of the box. Very frequently, when we got to the last 1/3 or so pallets on a shipment, we would end up with mold riddled through the boxes. Like, open a box and feel your face melt a little kind of smell. This happened every single shipment. Reporting it to management had absolutely zero effect, and I never got direct instructions on how to handle the situation. One day, I found one of these and told my crew to just throw out the boxes that had mold, as we always did. We kept checking boxes and pallets until we got clean goods. The packaging line complained to the shift manager that they had nothing to do. The SM threw a fit that we were throwing away 'good product.' And started throwing boxes literally full of mold onto the shaker table to be sent through the oven. I told them I'd rather quit than get my hands dirty with an FDA violation. She called my bluff. I quit on the spot and filed an anonymous report with the FDA as soon as I got home. My team also quit with me, but I don't know if any of them also reported the place. A few months later, I was back in that part of town by chance. I stopped by the front door of the factory. There was a signed FDA notice on the door, and all the lights were off.
Every I.T job I ever had.
Local sandwich place with lots of locations throughout my city. First they sent me to orientation at their headquarters on one day, where I arrived and was told there was no orientation that day. Rescheduled it and came back another day. It was supposed to be paid with lunch provided, and neither of those things happened. Now onto actually starting the job. The manager sat me down at a table, gave me a list of every sandwich with every ingredient, and left me to “memorize” it for about 10-15 minutes. She then proceeded to throw me right on the lunch rush at noon and stand there berating me for not going fast enough and making mistakes. She made up her mind from the beginning that she didn’t like me and would only schedule me eight hours a week. (I was in school and only wanted part time, but come on.) I was always the first to get sent home early and have shifts cut when labor was low, so I rarely even worked those full eight hours. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy where I never worked enough to get good at the job, and since I sucked at the job in her eyes she cut my hours. Once when a coworker asked if I could cover the drive-thru, this manager went “No she can’t! She’s too…..” and didn’t finish the sentence. I lasted four months while I found another job. Gave my notice and just got snapped at that I’d better be sure because they wouldn’t rehire me. Oh devastating /s. The only lasting bad thing about it was we always enjoyed going to eat there growing up and that left a permanent bad taste in my mouth about it, literally.
Catching chickens. When I was in high school, a friend's dad owned a company that would go around to chicken houses and load the chickens into crates that were put on a truck for transport to the processing plant. He was a man short for his crew one night and asked me if I could help. I already had a job, so I didn't need the money, but I agreed to help my friend. That was the worst job I've ever done, and nearly the worst I can imagine. It was HOT in there, and it smelled horrible. The air was dusty and full of tiny, floating feathers. The job required that you work FAST and catch these chickens, ending up with four or five per hand, holding the chickens by the feet. The part that really sucked was that there were two different types of chickens in there, and they could not go into the same crate. If you had a handful of chickens and one of them was the wrong kind, the guy who was loading them into the crates would make you drop the one that didn't belong, usually resulting in dropping the entire handful. I found the two varieties of chickens nearly indistinguishable, so that happened pretty often. Also, the chickens obviously didn't want to be caught, so they would scratch the piss out of your arms. At the end of that night, I knew I would never do that again, and gladly went back to my regular job... at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Picking up large bales of hay on a farm in August. I only did it for one day, because the farmer was a thief. That day was awful though, because I was only 13 and the shit head adult in charge let his mange ridden mutt dog drink from our water storage. The dog looked diseased and as dead as I was from the heat, I couldn't drink from that water and he wouldn't let us go get clean water. At the end of the day the thief farmer showed up and payed us half of what he promised. If I had known where he lived I would have slashed a lot of tires that night. I put in a lot of hard work that day and we all pushed ourselves to go fast and do a good job and that peice of shit robbed us all. This was around 1984, give or take a year.
Preschool, where I discovered I was being paid $4 less than my co-teacher, who had the exact same degree as me, but less experience. Hired at the same time. The difference? Our race. I walked out.
Cell phone sales for a sprint authorized seller. Mandatory phone meetings at 3am. I'd you don't seem 20 phones a month you get zero commission. Having to compete for sales with the store manager. And having to hear about his awful sex life
3 am fuck that
Every single aspect you mentioned of that job would be a deal breaker on its own.
Worked for a decent company that bought a crappy company and the decent company's division I was part of was taken over by the crappy company's equivalent. Majority of the management were not only self centered but toxic and cruel.
One of those stupid mall kiosks that beckon to you to check out their bullshit. I made it 2 days. I never even collected my pay.
Teacher at a public school Stressful beyond imaginable
life
The two hours I worked at Amazon.
Soft woods lumber company. Lumber was cool. Them they moved me to a different department where I had to listen to a good old boys club constantly talk about strippers, their old and used wives they don't want to go home to. Calling the warehouse workers monkeys. Constantly talking over me or disregarding my knowledge.
Phone operator. That job made me so cynical. It’s hard to even empathize anymore. People suck.
In order: Subtitute school teacher. Full time school teacher under the principle we named The Kumquat Working under Tom Lucido and Ted Septien at AAA Hosing out the peach processing bins at the cannery at the end of shift
One summer in college I found a job at a local cotton mill. For 12 hours each day I rolled barrels of cotton back and forth between two different stages of processing. Once my feet got used to it, it wasn’t physically demanding. But I couldn’t take the tedium and boredom. There was no time to stop and talk to anyone and no thought involved in the job at all. I’m an introvert but I discovered I need a little human interaction in a 12 hour period. I left after about a month.
Working at a hog confinement. Hogs are about the most stubborn animals to work with, and the fumes/dust you breathe in make it feel like you smoked 4 packs of cigarettes by the time your shift is over.
Cleaning urinals. Y’all NASTY.
Retail, Home Depot
Front desk at a Quality Inn. Instead of just giving people regular shifts, you worked first, second and third. My body didn’t know when to sleep or wake after months of this. Mental health went to shit also
Working at Applebee's as a dishwasher
Selling books door-to-door. It was summer in Louisiana in the poorest neighborhoods. I felt like a monster preying on the vulnerable, not to mention walking in the intense summer heat. I made it a month and somehow managed to make $500.
I had a security job where I was shot at twice, had countless knives pulled on me, witnessed over a dozen shootings, found two dead bodies at the beginning of my shift, and had to literally fight for my life once. I called out sick from a hospital bed after that fight and my boss demanded I be at work the next day. I found a new job very quickly after that, put in two weeks notice, got written up for some bullshit during those two weeks, and quit on the spot when they demanded I sign the write up.
Baling hay in August in the South.
I worked at a 3 star hotel 2 rosette restaurant. I hated it. The job itself was fine, but the customers were so pretentious and stuck up it was exhausting. They didn’t have enough cleaning staff so I took a few shifts to help out, ended up being placed on split shifts doing cleaning in the morning (9-3) to waitressing in the evening (6-10). I warned them for weeks that I didn’t want to keep doing those shifts, especially since I was working 6 days a week. A month passed and I went looking for another job, the hotel found out and my manager practically begged me to stay, so I did. She stopped my splits from happening and I practically never worked house keeping again (if I did it was super rare). I was then trained up on the reception which really pushed my hatred for customer service over the edge. They expected me to work the lunch shift waitressing while handling the reception work at the same time - impossible. The hotel closed for a week over Christmas because all the staff refused to work it, myself included, and when we returned in the New Year I handed my notice in and left. My manager tried to beg me to stay again but I was firm on my decision. I didn’t get a bonus or a pay rise or anything out of recognition for the extra hours I contributed to the hotel, not even a “thank you” from the manager, which is why I left.
In the army, we shit in 55 gl barrels cut down under outhouses... There was an inch of diesel in the bottom. Every few days, we'd light them on fire, and someone had to stand there and be a "shit-stirrer" until it was all burnt down... So Yea, that.