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What’s Your Worst Job Ever?
Michael has the makings of a pretty good thread on that subject over at discourse.net.
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7 Responses to “What’s Your Worst Job Ever?”
Well, two come to mind for me.
Installing roof-top solar panels (unbelievably hot, the heavy panels had to be carried up ladders, and a lot of the houses were not on the beach, but on mountainsides, with hundreds of feet of drop-off at the roof-line); and being a grave-digger (‘nuf said), both while I lived in Hawaii.
That’s a bad photo to start this! One of the disgustingly backward phenomena in the eastern USA is the establishment of toll booths on Interstate highways. There should never be any stops or obstructions of any kind on modern high-speed roads, and it is worse than criminally negligent for backward states to retain their toll booths from dinosaur days on Interstate highways.
Toll booth personnel, particularly if working under union-enhanced conditions, deserve no sympathy; they are complicit conspirators in a scam to erect highway hazards, create traffic backups where none should exist, and extort money from motorists. I’m kind to them when I deal with them, but they and their scummy toll booths have no place on modern freeways, and haven’t in modern parts of the nation for ages. (That we have toll booths on water crossings in California long after the crossings have been paid for is simply due to greedy government there aping their stupid, greedy backward cousins to the east.)
Hey DLS, is there one, happy, good thing you find about life?
I worked at a golf course when I was 15. I was a range rat, the guy that drives the cart that picks up the golf balls on the driving range. That sounds like a cush job you say? It was, when the weather was good. But when it rained things got ugly because golfers are CRAZY and they will keep hitting balls in anything short of a hurricane.
When the ground turns to mud the machine will only drive the balls into it. So the range closes early and you pick them up by hand. In the rain. Oh, and there were ducks. You’d be surprised what percentage of the driving range is actually duck feces, you don’t notice till its wet and your covered in it. Also the balls all need to be washed twice and with the mud the machine frequently jams taking well over twice as long as usual to complete the task. At the end of 5 hours of picking up golfballs in 40 degrees while its raining and covered in duck crap I was a pretty sad sight.
Plenty. The presence of toll booths on Interstate highways, which are backward, however, is not one of them. As a serious traveler as well as observer of the details and differences all over this nation (I have lived and traveled everywhere in the USA and visited Canada and Mexico on the road as well), I particularly resent them.
Things that are bad and wrong, I write about as being bad and wrong. There’s nothing wrong about that.
You are overreacting to a string (2-3 postings?) of negative stuff from me, or you are only looking for the bad things. That explains your question.
Probably the worst job I had was working for a company owned by an older German guy, who was old-world European, and for an Italian supervisor, also from the Old Country. Verbal abuse of me and of my supervisor by the owner was the norm, repeat, the norm. The owner was also physically abusive toward the supervisor. This was Old World Europe — those above were royalty, those beneath, a lower form of life. The place had a perpetual emotional or even mental cloud above it, and I could hear the owner’s screaming from as far back as the parking lot, through not only the entrance doors but also through separate doors to the laboratory. He was a total Scrooge. He would buy us tea bags but expect us to reuse a single bag for a week or more! He also, being the King, expected us to run errands for him and do everything else in addition to our “official” jobs, which including cleaning the building completely every afternoon. His chemical container storage site was part of a yard outside with two metal sheds, corroding from the fumes from the old, leaking chemical containers. When the local OSHA inspector who was friends with him was replaced and there was need for cleanup, guess who did it? We were given dust masks as a generous concession. In the lab, high voltage was commonly exposed, with cables all over the place. At least with the chemicals we had goggles and gloves to wear (also those dust masks).
Still, he was fascinating, the owner — used to talk about Napolean’s army and especially about Germany and life in Nazi Germany. Once the supervisor dropped something and the owner (in beautiful German accent) said that in Nazi Germany, “you would be taken outside this building [points outside] and shot.”
I left, but ended up developing sympathy with the guy once I learned more: he was from a wealthy and very accomplished German Jewish family, and was the only surviving family member from a concentration camp. He witnessed the rest of his family being killed in that camp.
Even the bad jobs can (sometimes) be of interest.
My worst gig ever was for a chain of pawn shops as an electronic equipment evaluator. And every bozo with a greed instinct was trying to pawn an 8086-based system like it had a brand new 386. Telephone plates stapled onto the back of the case were called internal modems…
And that was just the owners. Don’t let’s start on the clientèle.