will wrote:Sorry - I read it before my standard 3 cups of coffee and tall shot-in-the-dark. My bad, dog.

Now you called me dog. What gives?

Sorry, I got that from listening to RUN DMC.

Working at McDonalds in high school certainly sucked. Cleaning out grease traps, closing the store and cleaning everything, getting in the car to go home reeking of french fries and covered in a layer of grease. I didn't mind stocking the freezers so much, the up and down the stairs and heavy boxes were good exercise and it was better than working the counter or drive through. Fuck dealing with the public.

Worse though, was my first design job with a small company making corporate presentations. (Some replete with the surprise naked lady slide) I was 19 and going to school. I failed an illustration class because I had to work 80 hours a week for a month or so. The owner yelled a lot, had a bit of a temper, and threatened to fire everyone on a weekly basis. I had my first panic attack working there, at 3am during a regular 60 hour week. I'd just gotten back from Kinko's and they'd fucked up a job, so I was faced with manually trimming and folding 300 brochures when all I really wanted to do was go home and sleep.

I think it was around that time that I once came home at 4am to find my roommate and her boyfriend (who happened to be my ex-boyfriend) sleeping in my bed. I was too tired to yell at them so I slept on the couch for 3 hours and went back to work. I've gotten a lot less doormatty in the past 10 years.

I quit three times in the three years I worked there, but they kept giving me raises to come back. The second time, I'd gotten a $6 an hour raise and someone found out about it through the fault of the payroll lady and complained to the owner that it wasn't fair. I was blamed and the yelling boss fired me. A week later they rehired me with an additional $1 an hour.

Anyway, it was a lot like what I imagine being an intern at a recording studio is like, but with better pay.


I still do design work, print and web stuff. I'm done with sitting being a computer though, and am chewing on other possible career paths.

LAD wrote: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.

Any encounters with brousins up there in Alberta? I've heard it can get pretty dicey close to the border.

I worked for the great and terrible Russian scientist Vladamir Kokoza at a genetics lab for a little while. He was trying to create some sort of a super mosquito that would be immune to malaria.
I bred them, raised them, fed them. Picked out the best poopa (as Abul would call them) for further testing.
Once a week I would anesthetise a rat on top of the mosquito cage so the they could get their blood meal through the metal screen. That rumor about mosquitos drinking until they explode isn't true. They know when to stop. You flick a full one and they pop like a rat blood filled zit.

The crappy part of the job was cleaning out the cockroach meal tubes that had been sitting for a year and a half. The only way to clean them was to use scalding hot water that would release the gag inducing odors.


Now I am the manager of an engineering college bookstore.

"Data clerk" or "Data support" jobs are terrible. My only function was to do things that they were unwilling or unable to program a computer to do. If computers were able to become bored, they'd quit. Wait, no; they'd spend all of their time on the EA board, search for inappropriate things on the internet, and get fired.

One of the most irritating-yet-interesting jobs I had was data collection for sociology studies. It's like being a door-to-door salesman for an academic cause--but when you're a salesperson at least people understand why the hell you're standing on their front porch before they tell you to get the hell off of it. Being consistently rejected, threatened, and having the cops called on you is never fun, but it thickens the skin!

Best high school job ever: whitewater rafting guide. Getting paid to kayak and stand on rocks in the river (but not paid much.) Except for the river fungus...

Worst teaching job ever: Kaplan, Inc. Although it was shocking to learn that suburban high school kids have never heard of Nirvana.

Best teaching job ever: tutoring inner-city high school kids. They used to call me 'Boogie Nights.' "What up, Boogie Nights! Where your ho at?"

Worst research job ever: They called it "molecular neuroscience." I called it "cutting the tails off of mice."

Current research job: psychophysiological recordist. I put electrodes on peoples' faces and run multitrack sessions.

I once worked at a place where they sorted and graded sheep fleeces fresh from the farm. Of course, the area of the fleece that surrounded the sheep's arse was always covered in shit (known in the trade as "daggins"). My job was to pull off the shit-encrusted wool and lay it out in a warehouse to dry. After a couple of days I had to use a wire comb to seperate the shit from the wool. Waste not, want not.

That was a very long summer.

Now I'm a buyer in a large corporate record shop, which is pretty good most of the time, as it's so big I'm allowed to stock whatever I want.

hip priest wrote:(known in the trade as "daggins")

ah! thank you for the reminder of a favorite kiwi phrase for "hurry up" - "rattle your dags!"

also, as a knitter, your story has maybe put me off using wool for a while.

[quote="LAD"]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.



I treeplant still, what companies did you work for? I mainly work in High Level these days, a bit on the coast as well...

When I was 19, I spent a summer painting the walls of a wire factory industrial green. The factory smelled, well, industrial. I am sure it was not good for my health. And I came home every day smelling like oil paint. I worked with two other people who were on break from school, and we were all eventually suspended for three days without pay for leaving the site without permission for hours at a time. I am sure we would have been fired if they could have found replacements easily. The job was that bad.

Second place: Worked in a copy shop for a year after graduating from college. A stressful, shitty-paying job with no benefits and assholes for bosses. If not for a housemate's generosity with his pot stash, it would have been that much worse.

I am now an instructor of philosophy at a Chicago-area university, finishing my Ph.D. It's better, but probably not for me in the long term.