Nasal hair technician? Elephant poo collector? Fluffer?
It’s Friday so take a moment to think back to the worst job you ever had and share the honorific memory so we can all appreciate how far we’ve come.
What was your worst job ever?
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My worst was a two week stint as a file clerk in a dark dungeon of a building. 8 hours a day of filing court cases and getting paper cuts, only to find most of the time it was all backwards and needed to be completely redone. To this day the site of manilla folders with coloured tabs freaks me out.
But that’s pretty tame… c’mon!
My worst job was wearing a bright pink and blue uniform serving donuts and milkshakes at donut king….
..and yes.. i thought about suing them for the mental illness i suffered from wearing that uniform..
3 months working in a factory building office furniture, my task – assembling those small drawers that sit under desks. Pretty much me standing at a work station with a drill and a rivet gun going drill, rivet, drill, pop lock in, drill, rivet etc…
Going into the factory looked like a longbay prison yard.. and to this day still is the place where I saw the heaviest fist fight in my life.. Which apparently occurred over one guy taking another guys place in a card game during lunch break… The result of that fight saw the loser out of action for about 2 weeks. Oh and lunch break was signalled by a huge horn and we even had clock in machines…
p.s I,m thinking about going back, I hear they are hiring.
I have a few medium level horrors…
Top of my list would be cutting sheets of thick PVC plastic – smells like egg gas when it melts, and probably caused me to lose a few years off my life from the fumes.
2nd on the list was a Grill Cook job at the Black Stump. That was how I found out how to sweat profusely. Lasted 2 weeks.
3rd is another 2 week job in a call center. I have more compassion for those cold callers now.
My worst was working in a Jigsaw factory when I was a uni student. 8 weeks of standing next to a shrink-wrap oven conveyor belt. My job description was: push air out of shrink wrapped box, put box on pallet … for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. My counterpart had done the same job for ten years – she could no longer speak in joined-up sentences. For entertainment we had Capital Gold on the radio that played the same 12 songs on rotation all day, every day. It was supposed to be a request show, but the only people who phoned in requests were fellow factory drones who could no longer think of any other music than what they’d heard in the last 20 minutes on the same radio station.
The production line stopped twice a day when it was time to clear out the ‘extra’ pieces from the jigsaw cutter machine. Not a single jigsaw left that factory with all of it’s pieces.
my worst job ever was a cleaner in a truck manufacturing and maintenance factory for $5.20 an hour for 10 hours every saturday..
my parents forced me to do the job cos i refused to join the armed forces, do homework and refrain from getting the alcoholic 2 doors down to supply me with booze..
so back to the job..
i swept shit up aalllllll day, mopped toilets, hid from adversaries, sat down once and got a backhand to the face and watched the clock go very slowly for 10 hours..
i had to buy industrial strength shite remover to get a thick layer of black shit off my skin, out of my nostrils and ears..
i had long hair at the time which was used by massive hairy westernly orientaled gentlemanly mechanics to drag me around and also as a convenient place for them to store machine coolant, oil, axle grease and pictures of the uglier naked chicks submitted to picture magazine by their proud fat biker boyfriends..
the only good things about this job were:
when i stole a massive road train and drove it up the road before realising i was unable to turn it around and had to call my uncle to help me out.. i knew he was a truck kind of guy but i also knew he was a horrific stoner so i probably would have been better off getting the nearest old lady with no legs and one eye to do it..
and all the money i made stealing all the aluminium and selling it to the scrap yards across the road..
the job finally came good when i managed to convince the owner of the factory to make me his gardener at his massive mansion which i made my own every saturday.. he had a xmas tree up all year the lazy bastard.. i enjoyed chasing his donkeys with his ride on lawn mower and driving his kids miniature mack truck with their small terrier freaking out in the boot.. their other dog only had one ball and i’m pretty sure he knew i was making fun of him for it.. one day the neighbours poisened the terrier while actually trying the kill one-ball who was a fucking bastard car chasing poof.. their pool was rancid and i threw the bosses kid in it.. unfortunately he was in year 7 at my school and decided to hound me to eternity no matter how much i physically abused him (Steve Cook leave that one alone)..
i think i have written enough, i have at least 7 more episodes though..
my worst one was the first one. 14 years old, working at a servo near my house. Mowing the lawns, cleaning oil stains near the pumps. that wasn’t too bad…
…then one day the boss pointed out something nasty i had to clean up. some bum had done a huge smelly shit – right in front of the toilet doors. it had maggots on it and weird black residue.
(almost dry wrenching while typing this)
i refused to clean it up, told the boss off and walked out immediately.
One summer me and two mates got jobs at a packaging warehouse..
We had two tasks that were rotated in morning/afternoon shifts so you “wouldnt get bored”..
The first task involved collecting one each from seven piles of Avon catalogs and makeup brochures and put them in a plastic sleeve. You would then seal plastic bag, not with some kind of fancy-pants machine – but with a hot piece of metal with electrical tape as a handle. Many burns were recieved.
The second task was to put the little foamy rubber bits over the earpieces for Qantas headphones – and again put them in plastic sleeves but with a smaller version of the innovative hot metal sealer system. Many burns were recieved.
Putting the little foamy rubber bits over Qantas headphones – I always wondered who did that.
Hahahahahaa…
My first job was at a pet store. Although most of the time I didn’t mind cleaning out rat cages and sweeping out the bird poo for $4.50/hour. But then the time would come to feed the pythons, and those guinea pigs just looked so cute (yes, the pythons ate them)! Or a customer would come in to buy 40 crickets for his snake, and I would reach into the cricket tank with my naked skin to count out 40 of those suckers. Oh the blissful feeling of their little feet scratching my palms!
So I wouldn’t really call it “the worst job ever”, more like “the most memorable job ever”
My worst job was in New Zealand – Wellington actually. I was a rubbish collector – you know the guys that sit on the back of foul-smelling trucks that you try not to make eye contact with. We started at 12am (thats midnight) and collected garbage from Wellington’s elite in the hille of Wadestown and Kindallah (I am shuddering here). The driver of the truck was a whippet of a man named Ken – he smoked razor thin rollies and seldom left the cab. Our job was to shlep up multiple flights of steps and empty the contents of garbage bins into a wool sack. On a rainy day a thick soup of garbage bin juice would run down the back of your legs filling your already rancid boots with more foulness. He would bark the minimum of instructions as you took another damp sack of the truck “up the steps, one bin, over the fence, two bins, watch for the dog, one more bin coming down the steps – never mind the rats” followed by a phlem-juggling cough and a sleeve-nose wipe.
Come the morning – round 6.45am we’d begin to see the stirrings of normal family life – a wife kissing her husband goodbye as he left for some high-paying job in the city – or the last minute hurry to fill the bin to bursting before I took it’s shameful contents down the steps to the waiting truck below. We were invisible. The old, lonely widows of long departed stock brokers of bankers who left the world before they could fulfill their dreams of retirement were the worst – always the orange juice and a biscuit.
Once the truck was full we’d drop by the Wadestown medical centre and pick up 30 or so bags of medical ‘waste’ – this mysterious cargo would jiggle ominously as we rode on the back step to the tip. It was at this point when my fellow garbos would eat whatever treasures they had put aside from the days collection – a half finished packet of biscuits or an alright looking orange were consumed in the warming rays of the morning sun tinged with the welcome fumes of the days traffic. We’d finish round 10 am and I would return to my flat and to the sink of unwashed breakfast dishes of my flatmates – it was a real shit.
1. Sanding the nobbly bits off CD players all day long in a room so noisy you couldn’t hear the guy satnding next to you. Headache every day.
2. Shovelling Pig poo (amoungst other things) on a farm for 6 weeks every year (for 5 years) as a student.
3. Cleaning toilets in an entertainment centre. Don’t want to talk about that one.
Really makes you think, doesn’t it?
Worst job ever was definitely counting parts for a company that built small electronic quiptment.. .all i did all day was count and mark how many parts there were…
Id also have to say working in a Financial call center sucked… although the pay was good.. it was a nightare of a job… Felt like i was stuck all the time… call after call… after call… after calll.. ugggghhhhhh