xtcian

High's Ice Cream? Was that part of the marijuana scheme again?

I worked at Burger King the summer before college. Standing there in my little uniform, smelling of old fry grease, I was bored out of my mind.

I remember one snotty girl saying, "Who taught you to make a Whopper like that?" I knew she was preparing to criticize me, and I said, "YOU did." She lowered her voice, said, "I didn't teach you to make a Whopper like THAT," and walked away to mind her own beeswax, which she should have.

There was a poster that told what to do in case of a holdup. It had a picture of a man with a gun. I took grease pencil and made a word balloon coming out of his mouth saying, "HEAT THIS UP!" and I drew a burger in his hand.

I also taught some girl calculus so she'd know it upon returning to school.

Just trying to make the day go faster.

I missed yesterday's discussion. I love me so Five Guys and Chipotle's.

Next.

I have had some terrible jobs in the past. The two that immediately come to mind are: summer of 1990: I worked in the cafeteria of the Carolina Inn. Not in the banquet rooms where all the cool Greeks worked, but in the cafeteria. The local workers resented me because I was a student and was new. I was always criticized re: how well I mopped the floor, bussed the tables, etc. The work was hard and boring. Halfway through the summer, I pulled a big tray of something out of the oven and dumped scalding hot grease all over myself. I quit the next day. Just called in and said I was not coming back. It was a terribly unprofessional thing to do, and I suppose it was the fulfilled prophesy of the spoiled student who can't hack it doing real work.

Next. The most mind-crushing boring job was the summer of 1987. I worked in the Lorus watch factory. All day, I manually placed the price tags in the Lorus watch boxes. All day, every day. It is all I did. We sat at a big table and were not allowed to talk. If I did not live in my head so much and allowed myself to daydream all day, I don't know how I would have made it through the summer.

Ice cream wench at the Renaissance Festival.

Sounds like some kind of LARPing fun, but it mostly involves endless scooping, saying "Can I help you, m'lord?" two thousand times a day, and being harassed by assholes for wearing a watch while they're looking down your shirt - all the tune of minimum wage.

Hmmm, I've had jobs that were menial, low-pay, OR a low-esteem job, but not all 3 at the same time.

low-pay: $3/hr salesperson at an athletic store in the mall in high school. on my feet all day and dealt with a lot of mean people as well as shoplifters. BUT, we were across from Record Bar and swapped merchandise discounts. It was a little like Fast Time at Ridgemont High, but just a little.

menial: bartending at Bub's while in grad school. It was of course fun to be behind the bar and see folks, but we all had to take turns cooking food in the kitchen, "cleaning" the bar at close (revolting), and stopping drunk people fights. BUT, I made enough to buy a new car and pay for grad school thanks to working the stretch of Final Four runs during that time.

low-selfesteem: I worked at our country club's tennis center one summer in college. The tennis pro was ass #1 and would berate you for things like putting a penny in the nickle slot of the cash register. Many of the members had quite the ego so it made them feel better to pull a power trip on me if they didn't like something. BUT, I could tell whose mom was hooking up with whose dad.

I've had jobs that others would consider bad, like dishwasher and busboy in a restaurant, but they were in such a good place with good people that it didn't matter.

The worst job I have ever had without a doubt was an assistant manager at a department store in Charlotte. It was the most soul crushing, mind numbing, gawdawful job I have ever had. The company was absolutely a horror, the managers were non existent, I got no help from anyone, I hated the customers (this is where i learned what the general public is really like - so yes I AM an elitist and with damned good reason).

One morning driving into this job I honestly and truthfully started praying for God to kill me before I got there. My life was so terrible because of that place and the people in it that death would have been preferable to continued employment there.

I got in and turned in my 2 week notice that day and I felt good for the first time in 6 months. I had no job, no income, no prospects but was no longer praying for death.

I spent a year at a company that packaged ice melt in the winter (the little white pellets of calcium chloride) Your nose and throat would dry out and even if you wore gloves your hands would chap and bleed. In the summer they manufactured the stuff you use to absord vomit. Sand, sawdust, Sunflower seed oils and a little green dye no 2, shovel it all into the hopper and then shovel it into the 100lb drums. All very low tech. I don't miss that at all. Although I was in great shape and they paid well.

While attending high school in small-town Iowa, I worked at a butcher shop where one of my jobs was to haul five-gallon buckets of bones -- including cow skulls with skin and muscle removed but eyeballs still staring at you -- to a van and drive them out to a farm, where I unloaded them into a stinky, fly-infested holding shed. Some sorry soul with a job worse than mine would then have to bury the bones at the farm.

Menial? Check. Low pay? Check. Low esteem? Check. I'm gonna go with entertainment publicist.

Age 17. Waitressing at the prototypical "dirty spoon" roadside cafe on Route 6 in southeastern Mass. on the way to the Cape in the summer. Two waitresses, one cook. Counter service, drive up window service, and dining room. Waitresses had to wash dishes by hand (no dishwashing machine) between racing around with orders. We also had to fry the clams and french fries etc.

It was terrible. With only 2 servers, people in the "dining room" would get totally pissed off and yell at us for being slow. Of course, hardly anyone tipped.

Ugh, I hated that dirty, crappy, demeaning job so much.

OK: Curtis wins the worst job award! EWWWWWWWWWW!

Maybe I'm weird, but others seem nostalgic as well...I *liked* my menial, low-paying jobs. Junk yards, bakeries, one-hour photo-labs. Met strange people, worked strange hours, and didn't need to care too much about the job other than to do it adequately by the mean standards required. Some good years.

Aside from circus clown? ;-) Santa's helper in a mall during holiday season. Oh horrible horrible!

Curtis definitely wins! Bleck.

I lasted one day working at an animal shelter in southern Missouri. My job was to move all of the dogs from one kennel to another and then clean their cages. Somehow I ended up with wet dog sh*t slathered in my hair and all over my clothes. I don't know if moving 20 huge wild dogs with no help from one place to another was worse than the power-sprayer bouncing off the walls and hitting me full in the face with what I was spraying. I quit, and two days later got a job in a cool little new-age store called Aquarius, where I worked for six months polishing stones, stocking books, folding clothes, and talking to all of the pagans who worked and shopped there. Both paid the same: $5.50/hr.

Summer after freshman year in college, waiting tables at a snotty golf course country club. Day one, the manager asked if I knew how to 'bissell'. Not knowing the brand name, Bissell, I said 'no'.

Big mistake. She spent about 20 minutes showing me how to use a carpet sweep to clean up crumbs on the floor. Over and over and over. I bit my tongue and didn't tell her that a 3 year old knows how to do this. Quit on my way out the door that night.

folks pulled me out of UNC after my sophomore year after i had just achieved a 1.7 GPA taking 9 hrs & gotten a DWI. I immediately went to work at doing general labor on the then nationsbank tower in charlotte. they had just poured the foundation, including the underground parking area, which had massive conrete slab walls that had bumps & imperfections all over it. my first task was to sand away the imperfections from these 200x10 foot walls IN THE DARK & ALONE. my only companions were a lamp, a ladder & my thoughts. it was a furnace in there - no ventilation. the electric sander i was using kicked up concrete dust that settled in my eyes & nose and it would harden if i didn't farmer blow and use eye drops every 15 minutes. it took about 8 days. made me realize there are worse things than an 8am calculus class.

Many, many during high school....

I got a job at a new water plant picking up stray rocks from the just-seeded lawn. The older guy I worked with pulled me aside and took me to a shed out back, where we sat doing nothing for most of the day. I quit.

I got a job counting cars that traveled through various intersections. I kept tally marks on a clipboard while everyone - including my friends - drove through, stopping to ask what I was doing, and why. I quit.

I got a job at a country club, where they wouldn't let me wait tables because I had long hair. (It was the '80s.) Instead, they put me in a refrigerated truck by myself, unwrapping individual chicken cordon bleus and cutting the brown part off of cauliflower. I quit.

I got a job at a doughnut shop, glazing and filling, washing equipment, and manning the register. I was not allowed to go into the dining area because I had hairy legs. (I'm male.) I disobeyed to clean a table. I was fired.

gift wrapper @ belk's during xmas. all my friends would come to the mall and laugh at me standing behind the counter with a bunch of 60+ yr old women. i can wrap the shit out of a present though.

Most boring, menial, soul-sucking job: handing- counting IV drip labels at a sticker factory in Fayetteville. 5 a.m. wakeup call, desperately sad co-workers, and I think I got the beginnings of RSI from flicking my thumb through labels all day long. We had to count the labels into stacks of 100 and make sure they were all facing the same way so they wouldn't get put on an IV bag backwards. The pay was decent, at least for a 17-year-old, but my coworkers all thought I was a snot-nosed rich kid that was doing it for fun. That made me want to get out of Fayetteville pronto. So I did.

Gosh darn, thanks for the shout out! (I apologize for not knowing the protocal on these mentions earlier).

When we were dipping ice cream at Waterside, I was a 16 y/o rising junior at the local PS, so I guess that means it was my first payrolled job ever. I was probably a little intimidated by all of you soon-to-be college kids. Really, did I ever even say anything?

I cant't think of a single job that I considered demeaning, but I can think of one I disliked.

I graduated from college in '91, in a time much like today. We all started that journey brimming with optimism b/c the economy was humming along. Everyone aspired to be a "banker" because that's where the big bucks were made. Then, the S&L crisis hit while we were studying and by '91 there was little demand for a naive, sheltered liberal arts grad from UVA, especially one sans connections. (I so feel for the class of '09.)

So I went back home and looked for a job, and in the interim worked for Sovran Bank/NationsBank (I dont remember which it was, but it's now BofA) as a "flex-pool teller." This is basically a fancy name for a teller temp.

For whatever reason, I was almost always sent to work at the parking lot branch at Tower Mall in P-town (Portsmouth for you non-locals). I dont know about P-town today, but then I believe 60% of the population there was on some form of public assistance. It was a blighted area for certain.

We were busy on welfare and navy paydays. Apparently, the Smithfield (pork) "factory" banked with us, as did the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, so we had some really really busy days when those payrolls hit. It was a corss section of the world I had never seen. Really, if anything this job was a reality check, which is probably the only thing that kept me feeling like a miserable failure.

I have two distinct memories of this job: Sitting in the drive through teller booth listening to my co-workers' reasons for wanting to have a baby: to love them unconditionally. They were my age and, no, they weren't married, but they really wanted those babies.

And then there was the guy who sneezed before placing his shipyard check through the pneumatic tubes. When I touched that wet, sticky check my mind replayed the slo-mo of his movements: wiping his snot on his sleeve...AND across his check, apparently. I dropped to the floor and screamed in disgust. And that was a wake-up call too.

sorry for all the typos. I guess I thought I was on Firefox, and expecting to have my typos cleaned up for me.

Golf cart boy: no hard labor, but couldn't go home until final golfer off the course around 9pm during the summer. Pals would routinely show up at 930pm and we'd race (a la The Road Warrior) golf carts up and down fairways. "No, sir, I have no idea how that axle could have broken during the night."

Engineering intern: On my very first day, my boss told me he was having prostate surgery the next day and that I'd be on my own. Showed me my cubicle in BFE, showed me how to check out a company car, and I didn't see him again until the week before I started law school. I literally did NOTHING except read library books and tool around in company cars all summer.

Forklift operator: Loaded bails of cotton into 18-wheelers in a cotton warehouse. Colder than ass during the winter because thw warehouse was open on one side for 18-wheelers and open on the other side for trains. We'd make whiffle balls out of balls of cotton and duct tape and have games of whiffle ball behind the enormous stacks of cotton bales.

I have loved every job I have ever had, until it was time to move on. I have had lots of jobs that most people would consider menial, even embarrassing, but I liked something about every job. This sounds geeky, but when I first complained about a job washing cars in high school, my Dad (Wick), told me to quit. Quit? I know a lot of parents think the smartest advice is to teach their kids to suck it up, endure. I think Dad's advice was better. As he put it, "Quit! Find another job, put in your notice, and quit. Be positive, or be looking for another job, no complaining about your job. No one is forcing you to work for them." It's silly,but to this day, the urge to bitch about work, is always channeled into problem solving energy for me.

Roofing, as a Summer job. Burnt myself with hot tar in the company of adult submorons whose idea of entertainment was to try and nail someone's rosebushes while taking leaks off the roof. Since I was the young one, I was given most of the hot tar duty, but was unable to share the beer at the end of the shift, which was a further source of amusement to the adult submorons.

One of my first jobs was as a camp counselor in Talkeetna, Alaska, during the summer between my junior and senior years in college ('91). I loved many aspects of the job--the kids, the beautiful landscape and 22 hours of sunlight each day, canoeing on the camp lake--but looking back the incompetence of the whole scenario was breathtaking. The camp was barely functional--actually, it would have to be called nonfunctional. Electricity came from a generator that broke, literally, daily. The "camp director" (a 24-year-old from Wisconsin) spent every single minute, often late into the night, fixing the things that broke right and left--no time with he the kids, whatsoever, at all. If this was supposed to be survival camp that would have been one thing, but this was a YMCA camp and the kids were like 7, 8, & 9--just away from home for the first time! The camp cook (we called him Cookie, to amuse ourselves) was a pothead burnout from Humboldt CA who was probably only 26. He slept through breakfast every single day. My co-worker Jason and I--the only other "adults" around the place--would have the kids lined up dutifully at 8:30 every morning, only to realize he was not going to show, again. "Ok, one of you kids go and wake up Neil." We're supposed to be teaching them attentiveness and discipline. Neil also had his own handgun (?!?!?) and claimed to have chased a bear off the porch of his cabin with it. This was what he talked to the kids about (*sigh*). The summer ended with an "adventure trip" canoeing on the Susitna River, guided by me (neither a lifeguard nor water safety instructor) and a huge schizophrenic Mormon day camp counselor who had a meltdown in the middle of the trip when two boys capsized in their canoe. He stopped the whole trip on an island in the middle of the river, terrifying all the other kids with his screaming (literally frothing at the mouth). I tried to calm him while also trying to think of a way to get help to the capsized boys (who were shivering alone on a nearby island barely big enough for the two of them) without endangering the other kids. My only option seemed to be to go it alone at an unidentified place in the Alaskan wilderness. I opted to spend the night with the screaming crazy man and the kids (he pointlessly yelled their names until he was hoarse). The next day we were "rescued" by a double chopper from a nearby Army base. Of course, the chopper was too big to rescue the kids who actually needed rescuing (though by this time all the other kids felt like they had been through a major ordeal). So they had to send a little pontoon boat out later to get them. Definitely the worst work-related situation I've ever been in...

But the job I hated the most was working at Penguins Cafe at Wellspring in 1994.

Wow, these are AWESOME. Dunno why, but this is my fave comments section in years.

k_upon_a_time, I counted cars too! Every car at the intersection of Colorado and Lake in Pasadena, summer '88, temp: 104 degrees. The next day I had to count cars in every parking lot within a ten-block radius on the hour. After a few days, it got so hot, and I was getting sunstroke, so I started making up numbers in delirium.

I worked one summer in Provo as hired muscle delivering fresh fruit. The job was this: jump on the truck at 6 AM, load a truck with fruit, ride to a supermarket, unload fruit, repeat, until 10PM, 6 days a week, for $2 an hour.

That was exhausting but not particularly demeaning. What was demeaning was riding in a truck with an older guy ranting all day about hippies and commies, who would nudge me every time I started to nod off.

Then there was the time a refrigeration unit failed on a semi-trailer full of watermelons. Remember the scene in the shining where the elevator doors open and a tidal wave of blood rolls out? It was like that when we opened it up, except instead of blood it was liquified rotten watermelons, full of drowned maggots, surrounded by a cloud of flies.

Waiting tables at the Angus Barn (or Anguish Barn as I prefer to think of it). Sure you could make decent money, but the best sections were given to those that had been there for an eternity. Not bad enough that you basically had to wear a dress fashioned out of a red gingham tablecloth (with white apron!) but the cheese crocks were enough to put you over the edge. How it passed health regs is beyond me, but we basically RECYCLED half-eaten cheese crocks, filling them back up, smoothing them back off and sending them back out. People would only *occasionally* find a broken-off cracker, etc. in them...I shudder to think about it. I used to say that the only good thing about that job was I met my (then) husband, but that turned out to not be good either, so I left both of them. Good riddance all around.

I really liked all my restaurant jobs growing up which kept money in my pocket from age 16 to 23.

Worst job - canvassaing for the North Carolina Alliance for Conservation Agency. Basically, went door to door every afternoon all over NC from Durham east asking for money for the agency or letters to your congressman about wetlands or something like that. And to make it worse - it was the fall of 1991 - I had a math degree from UNC at the time.

Ice cream wench, your story is very funny.

At age 14 I had a job filing paperwork for the customer service department of a corporate software company called, with depressing literalism, Corporate Software. The worst thing about the job -- other than the mind-numbing boredom of putting things in alphabetical order into a wall of filing cabinets all day -- was the coworker who could not understand why I was saving up to go to an Outward Bound course, after I admitted there would be no place to plug in a hair dryer.

Then there was the exercise in sleep deprivation, overwork, terror, and verbal abuse known as internship, all for about $3 an hour. During my time at San Francisco General I had an ER patient (a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit) piss on me on purpose, had to take care of a crazy woman who refused treatment for the slow growing tumor that made her right eye protrude alarmingly from its socket, and spent hours arguing with addicts hospitalized for crack lung and pneumonia about why they could not go outside and have a cigarette.

Ah, minimum wage. Has it been so long?

Worst job I ever had was at Ingles grocery store in Statesville, NC after freshman year at UNC. I actually had to get up at 6 am, bicycle several miles to the store and make donuts, bear claws, crullers (etc), then sell them for the next several hours, then bicycle several miles home. My 'boss' was a extremely religious, hyper-conservative, borderline-psycho woman in her 40s who had no clue what she was doing beyond the absolute basics. Her leadership style consisted entirely of finding something to yell at me about whenever one of the actual managers came within earshot. When she wasn't yelling at me, she kept busy reminding me that all the problems of the world were caused by liberal college boys like myself and that hard-working, God-fearing types like herself always ended up cleaning up our messes.

About 2 weeks after I suggested changing the deep-fry grease, a customer complained about the nasty donuts and management told her to change the grease. She had no clue how to change it. Having worked at a fast-food place, I did, but she didn't have it in her to just let me do it.

The store manager stopped by just as I was placing the block of fresh grease where it belonged, directly on the heating element. She screeched at me to instead put it up on top of the filter screen. I pointed out to her and the manager that this would cause grease to drip down onto the heating element and cause a fire. She loudly insisted otherwise, calling me a "college-educated egghead idiot" if I recall correctly. So I did it her way...

When the fire started, she began shouting at me that this wouldn't have happened if I'd had enough sense to do it her way. Having taken it all summer, this time I shouted back. I can't remember what I said, but it must have been good. The small group of customers who'd gathered to watch the show applauded. I was fired on the spot for my "insubordination." I still remember the look of triumph on her face as I walked out.

When I went back for my check a couple days later, I found out she'd been fired later the same day, after having to clean up the mess from the fire.

I was offered my old job back, but I'd already found a better one, driving a delivery truck for a local lumber company. Zero supervision, workday starting at 10 am, better pay...

The weirdest job I ever had was working for a UNC professor who owned a railroad car in Carrboro (some business is in it now, it's right next to Weaver St). This was circa 1986. After being hired to help him move his home office into the rail car, he kept me on and hired two others to help him organize and computerize his office, which consisted of boxes and boxes and boxes of papers, with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. He had a brand-new computer which he didn't know how to use and no idea what he hoped to achieve. Every day, I sorted through the mishmash for a few hours, filing and creating another mishmash of spreadsheets. He paid cash, always asking "what do I owe you?" at the end of each day. I always just asked for $5 an hour: he was just too nice, clueless and trusting to overcharge. I lasted longer than the other two, almost a whole week, but finally the chaos started getting to me. The final straw was when he somehow managed to delete all the files I'd created -- and it didn't even bother him all that much.

Anyway, those are nothing compared to Curtis and several others, but they sure did change the way I looked at life....

Oh, I cant believe I forgot about the door-to-door sales Dog attack.
Selling books for Southwestern in West Bend, Wisconsin. I was walking up the driveway saying "Good Doggie", and the dog was perfectly chill. H wasn't facing me, but he didn't seem to mind me saying hello, so I continued up the driveway. What I did not know, is that this very aggressive dog, was deaf! The moment I crossed his line of sight, the race was ON! Not enough time to turn around, I high stepped backwards, in an effort to get beyond the reach of his chain. With his gnashing teeth a tongues wag from my zipper, I prayed for the end of that fucking chain. Just as his choke collar tightened, he made went for the big chomp. Bullseye! The tips of his canines snapped onto the crotch of my Levi's, just as the chain yanked him sideways! So close, he only managed to inflict a horrible blood blister at the VERY highest point of my inner thigh. In fact, had it not been for the sheer force of his lunge, and the subsequent testicle elevating effect of his wet black nose, I might not be the proud Father I am today.

That night, I calmed myself with a few too many Pints at the "Bag End Tavern", went home to the wrong apartment, fixed a giant Dagwood sandwich, quietly realized my mistake, tip-toed out, found my apartment, and went to bed knowing that it was going to be an interesting summer.

A day late but wanted to chime in anyway. Summer of 1988 - The Biscuit Barn. Average start time 5 AM (but there were some 3:30 openings). Off by 3 PM. Never seen so much nasty grease in all my life. Had to throw away my tennis shoes and the clothes (white shirts, khaki pants) after that--no matter how many times you tried to wash them, they still reeked.

I'm a day late too but need to share.

My first job was at Ponderosa (a.k.a. Bonanza) Steakhouse. $3.10/hour. The managers, a bunch of power hungry fast food careerists, made me the scapegoat and were constantly criticizing my lack of skills in, say, operating the drinks and rolls station or keeping the salad bar sufficiently stocked with those canned miniature corn things. I hated every single moment there yet somehow thought I couldn't quit without a really good reason, because quitting would damage my employment record for good. I was only 15! What was I thinking?!