What's the worst job you've ever had?

DuctTape&Bondo wrote: Once I had to clean bathrooms at a private school for volunteer credits so my son could attend. That was pretty bad, the girls were much worse than the boys. My crappiest job (literally) was at a very good pharmaceutical company known for treating it's employees very well. Work consisted of cleaning animal plastic cages (mice, rats and rabbits) dumping used bedding, loading, unloading and stacking and then putting them in the autoclav before preparing them for use again. It was loud, hot, wet and smelly. Not to mention how bad the rabbit cages, they didn't use wood chip bedding or whatever, they had these plastic and diaper material that had to be removed from the pans and folded. Oh, and every other Friday or so a truck would come and two guys would have to go into the freezer and load trash bags full of carcasses into a cart and then transfer into the truck. The fresh ones were not in there long enough to freeze and sometimes the bags would rip. Once I found a live one. Fun times. I didn't feel the urge to quit, having just had my son and really, the management and coworkers made it not so bad. Every day I went home physically tired (which I liked) and stank to high hell. A lot of bending and lifting, including filling water bottles into crates, ended up doing a number on my back.

Man, I've worked in those areas. Oh the smell!

During Desert Storm/Shield we used plywood latrines perched over cut down oil drums. Every day someone was assigned E36 M3 burning detail.

Pour a gallon or two of JP4 (diesel) in, light, stir and burn the diesel/piss/E36 M3 slurry until all that's left is slag. Bury sludge and refill the barrels for the next 24 hour shift.

The smell and smoke is hard to believe. It sticks to you, and real showers aren't a thing in the middle of the desert so cleanup was hit-or-miss at best. Stirring burning E36 M3 might be the worst individual job I've had.

----Could also be picking roaches and maggots out of a patient....hard to say.

8 years as an aircraft maintenance engineer.

High stress, E36 M3ty pay, working with people who have E36 M3ty attitudes all day.

My wife was ready to leave me when I finally quit that E36 M3hole. I'm much less of an shiny happy person now.

It wasn't bad like some of the examples here, but my worst one was one summer: "Here's a shipment from overseas, of xx thousand parts weighing 5-20 pounds. We don't trust the vendor. Unbox, count and rebox + label them all."

Alone. In an uncooled warehouse in summer. It was quite tedious and hard to stay focused for 4 hours at a time, and then 4 more. I was, however, in the best shape of my life by the end of it.

The worst was as a Bestbuy Geeksquad "double agent". It basically means that if the store people can sell services you are on the road in the beetle, and if they don't you're on the floor selling. The pay was pretty awesome, and for a while they allowed overtime as well as pretty much setting your schedule. Two things were awful about that job, beyond the obligatory costume of "geek wear".

1. black friday, and early saturday morning team meetings. bestbuy on black friday is hell. retail employees doing team building at 5AM on a saturday is the same hell.

2. hoarders. On one of my very last "assignments" I had to go to a house that from the map looked like it was in a nice neighborhood. It wasn't. The house smelled like cat piss from the driveway. I had to sit on a morbidly obese lady's at home hospital bed (because there was literally nowhere else to sit) and setup her crappy $350 compaq laptop. Found there was no wifi, so got to upsell a router only to realize that meant going in the basement. The best description of this basement was that it was in itself a giant litter box filled with all of the things that a hoarder would keep in a basement.

DuctTape&Bondo wrote: Once I had to clean bathrooms at a private school for volunteer credits so my son could attend. That was pretty bad, the girls were much worse than the boys. My crappiest job (literally) was at a very good pharmaceutical company known for treating it's employees very well. Work consisted of cleaning animal plastic cages (mice, rats and rabbits) dumping used bedding, loading, unloading and stacking and then putting them in the autoclav before preparing them for use again. It was loud, hot, wet and smelly. Not to mention how bad the rabbit cages, they didn't use wood chip bedding or whatever, they had these plastic and diaper material that had to be removed from the pans and folded. Oh, and every other Friday or so a truck would come and two guys would have to go into the freezer and load trash bags full of carcasses into a cart and then transfer into the truck. The fresh ones were not in there long enough to freeze and sometimes the bags would rip. Once I found a live one. Fun times. I didn't feel the urge to quit, having just had my son and really, the management and coworkers made it not so bad. Every day I went home physically tired (which I liked) and stank to high hell. A lot of bending and lifting, including filling water bottles into crates, ended up doing a number on my back.

Is it bad that I think mice facilities smell like shrimp?

KyAllroad wrote: During Desert Storm/Shield we used plywood latrines perched over cut down oil drums. Every day someone was assigned E36 M3 burning detail. Pour a gallon or two of JP4 (diesel) in, light, stir and burn the diesel/piss/E36 M3 slurry until all that's left is slag. Bury sludge and refill the barrels for the next 24 hour shift. The smell and smoke is hard to believe. It sticks to you, and real showers aren't a thing in the middle of the desert so cleanup was hit-or-miss at best. Stirring burning E36 M3 might be the worst individual job I've had. ----Could also be picking roaches and maggots out of a patient....hard to say.

Been there done that. Except the part about patients. The burning. We called them "penalty boxes". Desert Storm wasn't the only place we did that. First did it in Korea late 70's. Burning the trash was hazardous too. Never knew what was in the trash. Aerosol cans blowing up in a fire pit in a combat zone will get your attention. Let alone what it blows out of the pit. You know about the burn pit registry for vets? Burn Pit Registry info

stuart in mn wrote: Cleaning toilets at a summer camp. It's true, women's rooms are nastier than men's rooms.

fasted58 wrote: Municipal waste water treatment operator. I lasted eight weeks. Never again.

These days, I design wastewater treatment plants...modern ones that are tuned up and running well really aren't that bad, but I've been in some older facilities that were awful. The worst was at a cheese processing plant, I about dropped to my knees when I first walked in that place. The operator told me he couldn't smell a thing, I assume his nose was burned out.

This plant was about 50% all new w/ additional expansion and renovations planned. A lot of this job was mind over matter and I could deal w/ most of it. Picking R&R (rags and rubbers) out of the coarse screens w/ a hook tool was not one of them. The new grit separator was a piece of work as well as the conveyor system to the dumpster. They chose the largest dumpster that could fit on a rollback (prolly a budget thing) but it sat there forever before full and stunk to holy high heaven that I about lost my lunch every walk through on rounds. Around August H2S was so bad it'd burn your nostrils out and it seemed stuck to my clothes. Storm water infiltration was another issue, hated seeing the doppler radar showing storm before goin' to work. At six weeks in I operated the plant myself on one of the highest flow rates they'd seen but it wasn't easy. The operator gang fought like cats and dogs each and every day, hostile but totally unnecessarily, they had it totally berkeleying made there w/ new equipment and job security.

I suppose every plant has at least some of these issues if not all. They coulda fixed a lot of it IMO.

My turning point came when I flushed a dump before going to work and said 'see ya at work'. I stunk like sewer every day. The gang war was on again w/ their alpha dog battles, ranting and whining. Enough already, one Friday afternoon I quit on the spot, done!

Never looked back. My work life is much better now.

Definitely a tie between my two worst pre-college graduation roles.

1. Cash Cage Cashier at the Argosy Casino in Lawrenceburg Indiana - Handled $4-$5MM per night and seeing the worst parts of humanity cash out their liveliehood on credit card cash advances. Ended up in a very uncomfortable meeting with the gaming commision one night after my $5MM drawer was $20 over. That was my last night there.
2. UPS truckloader for the summer evening shift. We would load two trucks per shift and they had been sitting in sun closed all day @140degrees inside when they opened them up for us. Every night I worked all I could think was "I'm staying in school, I'm staying in school".