Some of you may want to call B.S. on this, but it's the God's honest truth:
I worked for two summers in High School for the street department for the town I lived in. Part of my job was to carry a pitchfork and scrape up roadkill - Racoons, possums, squirrels, cats, one dog... And when I wasn't doing that, I was mixing cement, rebuilding faulty drainage basins, laying hot asphalt on potholes...

But this was not the worst job I had, as bad as it was for $8 an hour.

Every summer through college, I worked for a moving company. The pay was great, but the work was beyond tough. Imagine: You and me carrying a fold-out couch down a tight and winding back porch staircase from the third floor on a 95 degree day. Your hands are cramped and slippery from the sweat, you come dangerously close to missing a step as you backstep your way around a curve with the armrest "resting" on the side of your head - all the while thinking to yourself, "I wonder if this porch can support all this weight, or the weight of the armoir (sp?) I got to get next, or the sectional couch I got to get after that, or the granite coffee table I got to get after that, or the pool table I got to get after that..." and so on.

Oh, the pain.

Although it was a good job, I had the worst experience ever as a carer. A guy with projectile (yes, projectile) diarrhea. I mean, I'm showering him off from the first bout and then, kaboom, right across the room. (I know I said that website the other day was disgusting but I'm neither making fun of this guy nor degrading him with "ironic" namecalling)

My first job ever was a petrol pump attendant, which is something I've never seen in England before or since. I was 14 and whenever someone spilled petrol they told me to throw sand on it to soak it up. They never told me what to do with the sand afterwards so I put it back in the buckets. Later I found out that had there been a fire someone would have thrown my petrol-soaked sand on it.

See: http://www.electrical.com/phpBB2/viewto ... 4972#24972

Aside from those, the start of my first season treeplanting was probably the worst month of my (working) life.

I've done my share of dishwashing. Working a graveyard shift as a room service waiter was also lame. What else. . . house painting with "College Pro" painters sucked. What a scam that is.

I worked on a brushing crew in Northern Alberta for a summer. The job itself was fine, working outdoors all day for good pay. But the guys I worked with (and *lived* with in skanky hotel rooms) were another matter. There were three acceptable categories of conversation: bowel movements, pussy, and WWF wrestling. Okay, four. Indian jokes, too.

Ah, strip clubs in Grande Prairie, how I don't miss you.

Currently I teach ESL and work as an editor in Taiwan, but I'm out of here in less than a month.

When I was 15, I worked at a local bar on Sunday afternoons. They paid me to clean the bathrooms and such. It was assy.

Now I'm a web developer for the Air Force and it's all OK.

I've had lots of not-great jobs to support my "career", which is photography. In January, I was laid off from the worst job I ever had.

But first, the second-worst: I was a file clerk at a wallcovering manufacturer/distributor when I was in high school. I got paid $8 an hour to "clean up" their ancient filing system - purging duplicates, consolidating orders from repeat clients.

The job was "supposed" to take months. It took me a week. Not because I was fast, mind you, but because the other file clerks there were among the stupidest people on God's green earth.

The only good thing about it was that it was located in Chelsea, and it was a block away from a club called Tramps (now gone.) I would go there at lunchtime and watch the bands load in, take pictures and such.

The worst job I have ever had was working as a Market Research Analyst. You know those questionnaires you fill out when you try a new product, or go to a focus group? Well, *someone* has to read through all those and codify the answers. That was me, for five months. It was hell.

Dragon and I used to inspect / inventory electrical poles (commonly mis-referred-to as "phone poles") all over the DC suburbs for a winter. The job paid $10 an hour, and I think in retrospect I enjoyed it significantly more than the much-better-paying job I have now monitoring DSL networks.

I remain convinced that every job I've ever had has been both the best and the worst I could think of at one time or another.

I had dozens of boring factory jobs but the worst one surely was selling computers and other related stuff in a big electronic store.
Every day I had to deal with ignorant (I mean really ignorant people) and advise them about printers, cartridges, modems, graphic cards and some pointless fucking wireless and bluetooth shit!
I'll never forget that lady who bought a Playstation 2 and as it wasn't working, she came back to complain about the game and the PS2. As part of my duty, I tried to figure out where was the problem and I had to test the game. The game was ok, the console too......SHE fucking was the problem!!!! I realised that she thought the PS2 was a dvd player (it is but it's a fucking game console first) and Prince of Persia a movie!!!!! She told me that the movie was a bit strange and probably defect as the actors were not moving at all. I tried to imagine how long she watched her TV without touching the controller......

Any jobs I've had in shops have been crap.

Actually, the best job I ever had was when I was 17 working as a labourer on a building site. The weather was good all summer and I got lots of exercise. That made me fitter than I'd ever been.

I'm now 21 and teach people how to play the guitar. I am also a student.

I was the night manager of a thrift store in a pretty crappy area of town for about a year (1998-1999, I think), and it was abysmal. This place stayed open until 9:00 PM, and there was this guy who would come in all the time, sometimes alone, sometimes with this chick, and would always stay until AFTER our closing time, just fucking browsing around like he owned the place. That was irritating. In fact, very few of the people who shopped there weren't completely annoying in one way or another. I had the cops called on me by customers for inane reasons (one cretin asked us to "hold" a couch or something for her without paying up front. We held it for a week, which is something we usually didn't do, then sold it after she never came back in. A few days later, this chick comes back in, causing a huge scene with screaming and flipping out, then called the cops on me for selling merchandise. They ended up escorting her out).

On most nights, I was the only guy working, so if anyone bought furniture, I'd be the one carrying it out. I don't mind carrying a sofa or something for an old person or a girl or whatever, but perfectly healthy guys would stand there and watch me carry this crap out without offering to help. Bastards.

Once, a chick brought in this TV that she bought "as-is", and was angry that it didn't work. I told her I wouldn't give her her money back for it (that was store policy, and as such was posted on these big signs all over the place), but I'd give her store credit. It wasn't a big TV, and I think she paid $10 for it, but expected it to work. Idiot. She freaked out, called me a "white devil", and threw the TV at me. It was hilarious. Then, she got into her car and backed all the way out of the parking lot, presumably so I wouldn't write down her plate number, which I had no interest in doing.

One of the employees (mercifully on the day shift, so I didn't have to deal with her much) had maybe a quarter of her teeth, was completely illiterate, and had absolutely zero interest in learning how to read. This person once said to me, I kid you not, "I hate books". She also soiled herself during her shift and had to be sent home a couple of times. She didn't have any developmental problems or anything, she apparently just did not care.

I've rambled about this enough, but there were so many completely fucked up, irritating people who were regulars or employees there, that I could go on much longer. I won't, but I could.

There was some decent stuff about that place, though. One of the other guys who worked there was really cool, though, so when he was working, I could talk music with him. He turned me on to Acid Mothers Temple, MX-80, and Chunklet, so that was a benefit. I also met a few nice customers who I'm still friendly with to this day; people I might have presumed were ridiculing me and dismissed as hipster scum had they not talked to me and turned out nice. I still see them at shows, and they're still nice. I also got lots of "free" records and books, whatever I could fit in my backpack, to compensate for my extremely low wage.

That was a terrible, demoralizing job, though it seems less bad than a lot of the ones you guys have had. I still have nightmares about working in that place...

Now, I'm a technical writer for an office equipment manufacturer. I sometimes get roped into doing tech support, which is what I was originally hired to do. I work with fax machines and printers, and I like my job an awful lot.

will wrote:Now I'm a web developer for the Air Force and it's all OK.

It is?