What was your worst job?
The presidential candidates answer the question here. Why don’t I believe a word Hillary says:
Middle class in her youth, Hillary Rodham was already on a promising track when she spent the summer of 1969 working her way across Alaska. The year before, her commencement speech at Wellesley College in defense of war protesters was such a hit she was featured in Life magazine.
In Alaska, she washed dishes in Mount McKinley National Park, the better of two brief menial jobs that financed her travels. “My worst job was sliming fish in a fish cannery in Valdez,” she said without hesitation.
The Democratic New York senator elaborated on this in her memoirs: standing in bloody water in knee-high boots on a pier removing salmon guts with a spoon; supervisors yelling when she didn’t slime fast enough; switching to the packing line where she reported spoiled fish to the boss, who soon fired her.
I certainly believe she’d be good at sliming. It’s just that when she starts reminiscing about her past in such vivid detail, it sets off the B.S. detector big time.
So, what was your worst job?
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Working in a styrofoam processing plant, and being required to sweep wet styrofoam pellets off the floor. I quit after 6 hours, but it increased my motivation to get a degree.
Scooping cow manure from the lane into the dairy barn.We did it bare footed,easier to clean your feet than the boots.In ankle deep poop twice a day and now this sob story of Hills has me knee deep in BS.
Cooking for the dormies wasn’t so bad back in college. Where else could you roll up some pot holders, cover them with enchilada sauce and garnish to see how many freshmen you could get to order them?
Of course the worst part of the job was working 40 hours a week all through college, same as the unionized state employees, for half the money while doing twice the work.
working in a container factory. No windows, tons of dust (allergic). Bolted after 1 day.
Teaching 7th grade in the mid 2000’s.
Liberal ethics and more than enough discipline problem kids than I care to attempt to teach EVER again.
Unfortunately, the Klinton’s have impeached themselves (by lying and being caught lying) so often , it is only prudent to doubt their words.
I, like boilermaker, have had jobs that I have enjoyed immensely. In fact, I keep in contact with most of my former supervisors and visit with them whenever I can.
LOL!!!!!
I picked strawberries for three summers in the late 60’s early 70’s. Cold wet mornings turning to scorching afternoons. By the way, I was a U.S. citizen. Shortly thereafter they started busing in the illegals.
Secretrial temp for a divorce lawyer.
I lasted two weeks, then ran screaming.
I really can’t think of what could possibly qualify as a more depressing job than that. Watching asses of both genders coming in with kids, sometimes injured, transcribing depositions where they’re obviously using them as weapons against their spouse… UGH. Slit your wrists territory.
Qwinn
A good friend of mine and I were tradin g worst job stories. I thought mine was bad.
I was 14 or 15, and was on the summer janitorial crew for the school district. Working with the old crusty janitors was an education! The district was going to demolish an old school house which was built in the late 1800’s. In the tower was an old bell, which the district in their wisdom wanted as a momento.
They took the bell out of the tower and moved it into the school I worked at. It needed to be cleaned. Now that tower was a favorite hangout of flocks of birds, and generations and generations of bird families fondly used the bell as their latrine. As did the bats that roosted there.
Imagine of you will over 100 years of bat and bird droppings. It did not look like a bell, it looked like a 4 foot tall pile of guano.
This was not a job for just anyone. And wouldn’t you know it, the staff janitors all of a sudden found urgent work. SO there I was, given a putty knife and a scrub brush, looking at this ominous pile of crap. Was there really a bell there?
After 3 full days of toil with the perfume of urea wafting through the air, the bell was clean. I understand they bring it out every year to ring at homecoming.
My buddy grew up in Lexington, KY and worked on some of the horse farms there where they raise thoroughbreds. These horses are a business in themselves. And no effort is spared to ensure their genes are passed to the highest bidder. Enter the “spearchucker” - the young man working his way through school who attended the stallion in the breeding shed to make sure his “Spear” was guided by hand into the mare’s female part. Some folks work for tips, and some work with them.
Hey me too! I was in middle school in Washington, and the farms would bus a bunch of us from Whidbey Island to Mount Vernon every morning to pick berries for a dollar a flat. Little did I know I was “doing the work Americans wouldn’t do”…
Back when I used to be a legal temp in D.C., I had to work with some real power-tripping jerks at these firms. One job was so bad, my fellow inmates actually threw a party when it was over. They wanted us to work very late into the night, 7 days a week. They even had people drive 20 miles to come back to work after doctor’s/dental appointments. I used to sneak out at the end of the day because like heck I was going to shuffle paper for 20 hours a day. On top of it all, the supervising attorney was a putz.
At another firm, I had to deal with a supervisor legal assistant who let temps go on a whim, who would insist we not come into work if she was going to be out for more than one day (often telling you this late the day before she was going to be out), made us haul around very heavy boxes without braces or support (even though the temp firm never told me I’d have to move boxes), and demanded that if the work day started at 9 a.m., we had to be there no later than 8:50. She had me released after a month of hell, you guessed it, on a whim.
Then there was a staff supervisor at another firm who accused me of sitting around and talking and not working. Her “evidence” was some anonymous attorney overhearing me and another temp. Nobody was in the room the whole time we were working. She was making it up.
My first job, helping to pack up a carnival with a few friends. We saw notices posted around the carnival for helpers later that night. We were all around 13 years old and excited to be part of the big show. Worked atleast 6 hours ’til 3 or 4 in the morning. When we went to get paid our supervisor told us the boss was dead drunk inside his trailer and the trailer’s safe was locked. He felt pity on us though, so he reached into his wallet and gave us each 10 bucks–it was all he had. I said thanks. It was my turn to learn that “sucker born every minute” thing.
Traveling anvil salesman. Man, those samples were heavy!
ugh. i am at my worst job now. after 7 months of post-grad school unemployment, i finally get a job. its a temp job doing document management for a govt contractor. most mind-numbing, monotonous work ive EVER done.
Summer job working as the low man in a steel mill getting literally covered with oil and soot daily while sorting and packing product. I had a couple other factory jobs that were pretty bad too but all of them were better than unemployment!
Well, look on the bright side you could be Nancy Pelosi wake up every morning and have to be the worlds biggest ‘B’
and for us guys thank goodness were not Harry “tommy” Reid and have the rigorous duties of being the worlds biggest A__hole everyday.
ORRRR,
You could be the “Former” Iranian Secretary of Diversity who HAD the responsibility of ensuring equal rights for all Iranians regardless of their sexual preference.
Lessee, I could fill a resume with bad jobs. My first job was shoveling out horse stalls at the county fair race track, then I moved up to pitch forking dead fish in to drums to sell as bait to fishing boats, worked in a refinery, got knocked out cold on a drill rig, but the best was probably soil sampling a radioctive waste site. It’s amazing hoe far a college degree can get you these days.
Bob, You’re supposed to fire the anvils, not carry them around.
Standing in bloody water in knee-high boots on a pier removing salmon guts with a spoon while listening to this Wellesley grad spout off about some guy who she was dating who thought she was an intern…
Worst job U S Army Infantry After 22 years of it I finally had to quit. Just kidding you don’t do something for 20+ years you hate although at times I did question my sanity.
Actually my worst job was probably work in the oil change department for Wal Mart. Came home every night covered in oil and hands cut and sore from working on cars. The pay wasn’t too great but the hours were almost more then I could handle. It was a job I took after getting out of the Army. Kept a roof over our heads and food on the table until I could a better job and move up the food chain.
Imperial Star Base construction Tech. Long hours, in the dark, for a right b-stard of a boss with a voice like James Earl Jones. And in the end, we got screwed out of our “on time and under budget” bonus because some d-mn fool left a protective vent cover off a minor exhaust port right below the main port. Stupid government bean counters said our company’s incompetence lead to a “chain reaction” incident.
This is a close call, but I’ll say the summer I spent driving up and down the Garden State Parkway every day picking up dead animals and garbage. I can still smell some of the smells.
That would be the person who got a bonus if they kept you from getting yours.
My worst job was doing maintenance for
Cherokee Brick Co. I had to clean and lubricate the kiln cars so that they could be reloaded and sent back into the kiln. Breathing the brick dust all day was killer, but it paid $5.00 an hour. Yipee. It was that job that inspired me to go to culinary school and improve my life.
Spending the summer of my 19th year going door-to-door raising money for Greenpeace. Fortunately, I was really bad at it. In fact, if anything, I probably inhibited their operations that year.
My worst job was working the grill at McDonalds. By the time my shift was up, I had to watch slipping on all the grease on the floor. Nothing like getting home, smelling like burgers, and having to use a stick to scrape all the grease out of the tread of your shoes.
I couldn’t eat there for at least 6 months after I quit.
There’s two sides to that story.
You would have to be one big screw up to be fired from a fish gutting job.
I was a Farrier for nine years.
Yeah, boarded horses and managed stallions, making sure the mares are “properly” bred is almost as much fun as helping deliver the stuck results and wearing placenta before breakfast.
Having grown up around livestock it wasn’t a new thing.
Landscape work! I built rail road tie walls one summer. We’d cut the ties with a chain saw and the creosote dust would get stick my my sweaty arms and irritate the skin. The ties weighed upwards of 200 pounds which was no treat to carry them walking along a 7 inch wide wall. No wonder Romney hired out the work.
cafeteria worker at college!
# 128 Speakup
Farriers. They shoe horses, don’t they?
Yes.
pgtips would probably get this and laugh, but I worked as a tealady as a summer job when I was sixteen. I was the youngest tealady ever, average age usually is 6o and up. Waitressed in a diner here in the States, did the 6am-2pm shift, have a great respect for anyone in the food service since. Shelf stocker in a grocery store, mind-numbing work. I smile when I see my 2 eldest doing the same thing, I always tell them ‘this is why we send you to college, so you can reach for higher goals’
Cultural Revolution. Hillary was doing her part for Mao’s cultural revolution: learning from the peasants
My worst job was working in a butcher shop — watching all those animals hanging in the freezer with those big sad eyes starting at me
Denny’s waitress, midnight shift, working through university. Hungry, nasty drunks, male and female, would come in after the bars closed and threaten thrown plates if their eggs weren’t there in FIVE minutes; others methodically inserted ketchup in all the seat seams and under the plates and glasses, AND snuck out without paying, leaving no tip to boot.
Excellent motivation to do well in school though. Didn’t wanna be a waitress all my life. Still give girnormous tips whenever we dine out (all former servers do, I think).
People have come to believe that meat is something that comes wrapped in cellophane and tend to avoid thinking about what it takes to get it to the store inside that cellophane for them.
Dishwashing. Not just once a day, but frequently walked in from the night shift to find the day guy didn’t show up. I needed the money, so back I went for another 8 hours. Finally got moved to the day shift. After one month, I was the senior guy! One summer was enough for me, though sneaking in to the freezer for illicit slices of Snickers Pie was pretty nice.
Car wash. By the end of the shift you never want to see another vehicle, but you do — in your sleep, coming at you in an endless nightmare line. Gak!
I worked shoving racks of dough into a proof oven in a bakery, but though physically stressful and HOT, it was good, hard, decent work. I worked for a lazy, lying boss who managed by chewing everyone out all the time for nothing, but I was learning stuff in spite of him so it wasn’t the worst. Probably the worst job was a summer job in college driving out into the sticks and writing down prices of stuff in grocery stores all day in a big ledger. It was boring work in a boring place where you learned no marketable skill whatsoever.
Worst job ever? Being unemployed.
After that, as a teen I was a “worker” at a summer camp doing whatever manual labor needed doing for what amounted to room and board. The sewage line between the lodge and the septic tank became clogged so we had to dig it up to identify what section of pipe needed replacing. In the process someone stuck a pickaxe in one section, shattering it, so all the sewage that was backed up in the line poured out into the pit we were working in and we had to manually bail it out with buckets so we could keep working. To make matters worse, people would ignore the signs we posted in the lodge not to use the bathrooms so you had to be fast on your feet to avoid the occasional “discharge” from the broken pipe.
I don’t know bucking hay or picking peonies both were hot back breaking job’s but I must say I was payed well for my work, I think probably retail during Christmas season. Every moron in the world is out on Dec 22, want’s what your sold out of and it’s your fault that you don’t have it. I’ve worked the Christmas holiday season to much, I had to find other work before I injured someone.
Working the graveyard shift at a 24-hour Hardees on the weekends. My sole purpose was to clean up after the drunks who came in for their burgers after last call. It was tolerable, until you got to the bathrooms…
I lasted about 3 months, which I’m told is about 3 times longer than any that preceded me.
It’s a tie.Driving a rendering truck and lumping around 55 gallon drums of rotting animal carcasses than have been sitting “out back” for the last two weeks.HeHe I know where the main ingredient in perfume comes from.
Driving a garbage truck during spring clean up.Imagine spending the day picking up and dumping trash cans full of dog poop that have been sitting in the yard all winter long waiting for spring thaw to come.The best part was when the boss called me into the office and told me “Al,I’m letting you go you just weren’t cut out to be a garbage man.”
Dunkin Donuts Porter - 2 hours in the morning, 3 hours in the afternoon, 7 days a week mucking out what America runs on for $1.50 an hour. (1969)
Avoid the butter cream - it contains neither - but it is kosher…
I grew up farming in the great white north (MN) … great work for the soul, maybe, but brutal. Tearing down a tractor for winter repairs in sub-zero temps without a heated garage = not my idea of pleasant.
Objectively speaking, my worst job would have to be cleaning dorm rooms over summer break. Some of these rooms would be left shut for three weeks by the time we got to them, so you have the normal disgusting mess left by students multiplied by the growing funk. But I actually enjoyed that job, because I was working with some great people.
So my worst job would have to be doing asbestos surveys and industrial hygiene in New York City, a job that would present you with two or three “should I quit or compromise” questions every week. I am not proud to say I lasted six months.
I hear you inviolet. I never worked the Denny’s midnight shift, but I used to have a job where I routinely worked from Noon to 2AM without a break, so I would always be hitting the Denny’s near my house right at Closing Time.
I concluded that the waitresses must all have been sentenced by God to this awful Purgatory for some unbelievably horrendous crime. I would routinely pay 100% tips just out of sympathy for the poor women who had to deal with those drunks.
Needless to say, I got excellent service!
Being married to my first wife.
Worst job?
Fact checker at The New Republic
I hated the first two years I spent in US Army in the late 1970’s. I was 17 when I enlisted and a complete idiot. The following 18 years were some of the best I ever had.
PS. Two of those were at Fort Richardson in Anchorage. I saw first hand what cannery work is like. It’s right up there with chicken processing and garbage collection as the worst jobs in America. Blech.
I would have to say - The last 3 years before I retired from a 110 year old company that had been purchased and destroyed by ATT, (The Death Star).
My worst job was as a soldier because in 1970 I was drafted. Too bad Hillary wasn’t drafted too.
BTW: The army was also my best job, as I got to drive an ambulance at Fort Derussy in Waikiki.
Then again, installing water mains in white sand pits in July in South Florida. But that was only one summer.
Everyone check out #71. I think we have a winner.
I’m a flutist. My worst job was a two week stint that I played with an orchestra in Monterrey, MX during Christmas 2001. The conductor was a big, fat oaf who was married to the concertmistress. They claimed to have studied in Vienna; I think they successfully studied only beer and each other.
Nobody ever told me never to eat Mexican strawberries. I was 23 at the time, young and stupid.
The day before my final concert, I contracted dysentery. I got through the morning rehearsal, and then that afternoon was the worst six hours of my life. I lived through the dress rehearsal the next morning but had to excuse myself every 20 minutes. It was amazing; one could set a watch to it.
On the final concert itself, a Christmas concert, the Mexican equivalent of Jay Leno was the guest host for the evening. That could have been great, but I don’t hablo enough espan~ol to understand what he was saying. He would do routines between every piece we played. A concert that seemed like it would last 75 minutes instead lasted for 170, and the jerk comedian forgot about our intermission.
I was doped up on gut pluggers, but they could do only so much. During the last hour and a half of that concert, I sat there wondering how much longer I could keep that atom bomb in my bowels from igniting and how much longer this old geezer of a comedian was going to drone on about things I couldn’t understand and none of the spanish speakers in the orchestra found funny anyway.
By the grace of God, I succeeded in holding it in. Don’t ask me how. Playing flute requires flexing of abdomen muscles for the necessary air pressure to carry a tone through an orchestra, so you can imagine the pretzeled state of my body from having to flex there yet keep from releasing something that really demanded its escape. Needless to say, I was the first person off the stage that evening. Also needless to say, men who had planned on changing in the men’s dressing room before going home opened the door, thought otherwise, and about-faced.
It took me a month to recover from that illness.
Michelle, what was your worst job?
Two days in a paper mill in August. It was so hot and humid I could barely keep from passing out.
I worked at a gas station for a few months in college and then went on to work in a deli.
The worst part of gas station was ’sticking the tanks’, which basically meant pouring Comet on the end of a long measuring stick, opening the tanks in the ground, putting the stick in the opening and measuring how much gas was in the tanks. I always managed to get Comet and gas all over me.
The worst part of the deli? Cleaning out the walk in fridge once a month, after the chicken juices had a chance to settle on the floor, leaving nice thick rivers of fatty/bloody/chickeny goodness.
Not the best jobs, but they did help me develop a work ethic.
Chicken de-beaker.
The tips of chickens beaks have to be cut off, or they’ll hurt each other.
I had to de-beak tiny, cute chicks, and big chickens. The tool used resembled a red-hot guillotine, to both cut and then cauterize the beak.
The farmer was very nice. We were supposed to kill any sick or otherwise messed up chickens by wringing their necks. I refused- he could fire me, I just wasn’t prepared to wring a chickens neck.
Oh, how I hated that job.
Only lasted a few weeks.
Messcrankin’ when I was in the Navy. 12 hour shifts, almost all on your feet, scullery, deep sink, slime bucket . . . even peeling potatos. Bleck.
Worked in the candy factory for a while tightening up the nuts on the Almond Joys, then later on worked at the hospital putting wheels on the miscairrages.
Temporary employee with the postal service at Christmas. I was at an airport location…the building was right near the runway and almost every day I had to run to the bathroom and puke because the smell of jet fumes made me so sick. Nice people, though.
I want to acknowledge all those here who have served in our armed forces. Particularly if your worst job assignment occurred there, your service is even more sweet.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Everyone.
Assembly line in a scotch tape factory.
How about working on the mixer at Cracker Jack in the summer. I had to pull out the 75 pound containers and throw the popcorn mixed with molasses into the a bin with a partner who would jam my knuckles into the pot. This in 122 degree heat.
My worst job was one summer in high school. I worked on an assembly line in a canyon in the desert North of Los Angeles, crimping the lids on flash bombs for Naval Ordinance. The week after I left to go back to school the line blew up just after quitting time.
Then there was the summer I spent running a plastic injection molding machine in the San Fernando Valley. The machine ran at about 500 degrees. The air conditioner was the whirigig in the roof. We would walk out into the 110 degree heat to cool off.
Feed pump watch while stationed in the Persian Gulf in the summer. Then there was cleaning the Bilge & Oily waste tank.
Waitress. The pay was lousy and the tips even worse. On top of that , I always smelled like a hamburger since it was a hamburger joint. I haven’t been back there since I stopped working there as a teenager - 14 years ago!
Mrs. Malkin,
And these are the jobs “Americans won’t do.” Amazing.
She’s still 5-F
The fifth F stands for FUBAR
Worst Job:
Nurse assistant in an old folks’ home while I was getting my nursing degree. The old folks were fine. My coworkers sold me out at every corner so I would get in trouble for everything.
No wonder I lasted less than 10 years in the clinical nursing profession because there are plenty of that in the medical field.
Best Job:
Camp Nurse - just fun to hang out and give out bandaids.
I used to have to clean out the furnaces at a fat rendering plant with a spoon, but the worst job I ever had was as a compliance officer at Hillary Clinton’s commodities brokerage…or was it as Bill’s pastoral counselor back in Arkansas? No, the worst job I ever had was sponge cleaning Bubba’s Astroturf early on Monday mornings.
Americans do these jobs. The point being that most of us when forced to do them, will work to get another job. it depends on where you are in your life situation. There will always be horrible jobs but they will get done by someone. Cocktail waitress when you aren’t getting child support works out so you can spend time with the kids when they are awake and the money is good so shorter hours can be worked. The assembly line is not for thinkers but it is all some workers are comfortable with. My tree guy does the dangerous work because he can’t work for others. I trade office work with him so I can stay home with my grandchild. I say we are lucky to have some of these bad jobs. My husband’s grandfather went to work in the coal mines at age 9. His brothers also worked so that one of them could go to college. Ah when families pulled together….
I sure know how that is. My last job was at this plastics factory. It wasn’t a bad job-I was there for 13 years (and still would be had life not dealt me some lemons early last year)-but cripes was that place a furnace in the summer!
In my new job (just got hired on full-time permanent–WOOHOO!) it’s a much better atmosphere…but what I do most days tends to provoke wisecracks. I’m the guy who stamps the litmus paper onto these-no kidding! Usually 12-14,000 of them in a 10-hour shift.
More on topic, though…worst job? I can’t really count the pork plant job I worked only one night, but it was pretty miserable. I guess I’ll have to say certain tasks while I was in the Army-especially out in the desert. For example, those field latrines-well, the tubs underneath have to be dumped on a daily basis. As a corporal, I thought that was more of a job for specialists and privates, but others disagreed. Oh well…
Having read through these comments, I see that I really can’t complain.
Ah, the memories…..
Gotta be working in the ice cream plant. Sounds okay, right? I worked in the warehouse/hardening rooms. Had to wear a big industrial-looking overall/jacket combo because the temperature was around zero degrees, unless you had to work near the blowers, where it was closer to 23-30 below.
We were doing manual labor, taking ice cream off the conveyors and loading pallets, or taking hardened ice cream off of pallets and loading trucks. If you started sweating and then moved to a section near the blowers, your eyes would freeze shut. Had to take a 10 minute break every hour and a half to get your face back to normal, at least momentarily.
Worked 4 months at a steel mill, and mopped my way through half of college, but the ice cream plant sucked more.
Garbageman…and no, we didn’t have the big arm that lifted the trash for you. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t hate it as much as you would think. It was simply the most physically demanding job I ever had. I worked many days from 6am to 12 midnight in Texas in the summer. I learned how to drink water without swallowing and saw more than my share of maggots and cockroaches. I’ll never forget that landfill smell.
Collecting on delinquent loans for Kirby vacuum cleaners. Talk about tough. These people didn’t want was forced on them by unscrupulous, high-pressure door-to-door salesmen. I was able to cut the delinquents in half but it was not fun. I only did it for nine months.