Worst job you ever had?

Working in retail when I was a teenager lol. Standing on your feet while making minimum wage sucks! How about you, OT?

Chef job out of college.

It was 2008, height of the Great Recession, jobs were scarce, and I hadn't networked like I should have in college. Jobs were hard to come by.

Anyway I fell back on my old job of being a cook, so I got a job for a startup company doing these premade, gourmet prepared meals. It paid fairly well but the demands were high. Talking like 14-hour days, six days a week.

Not worth it. No one should ever work that hard or that long.

Anyway, I gave it six months, which was about four months too long in hindsight. Only job I ever quit out of spite. Being desperate and broke with a college degree makes you do stupid things for work.

@mrbojangles25: damn, 14 hours a day? No time for gaming!

I use to work as a cleaner at a meat factory.

The problem wasn't the job itself, I was the only male. With about 5-6 woman of various ages.

When this happens, they turn into roman senators trying to stick daggers in each others backs, while all you want to do is mop a floor, and go home.

I was a sub-contracter for a sub-contracter at FEDEX. Got ripped off by the sub-contracter. Left the van out on route. Got a prank phone call from the secretary. Fun fun!

Worked for a moving company when I was in high school and early university. Most of the people I worked with were scumbags. I wasn’t introduced to my manager in the first week cause he was in jail for beating his wife.

@SOedipus: You are bad to the bone lol.

Too many to list, I'm in a better place now all thanks to peoples taking kindness to me

Worst job activity i had to do was at a company for graphite and coal products. Cutting graphite and coal bricks with a stone saw. It wasn't my main task, just temporary help. All in all i did it for a couple of weeks over a period of half a year. When they wanted me to do it for weeks or even months on end i said no...

It was far from being as tidy as in the video. Besides safety goggles and ear protection (plugs), you had to cover mouth and nose, shower cap, you had to wear safety rubber boots going up to your knees, a heavy rubber apron, rubber gloves almost covering your whole arms, cotton under gloves that start to smell awful quickly because of the chemicals and moisture. Despite the mask in your face and the water to bind the dust, you still be digging for coal in your nose.

Dark, wet, cold, loud, dirty, very depressing. Everything is covered in graphite/coal, the whole compound...

@palasta: I work a job that deals with a lot of dust right now. Basically silica and some other powders so fine they're designed to bond with proteins and other really teeny tiny things.

It get's everywhere, and is impossible to get out entirely without having to shower and wash your clothes.

Thankfully it's not as hazardous as the stuff you are working with but it's still a pain in the ass.

A word to all: stay away from jobs with a lot of dust!!!

Coolie, because all I did was lift stuff and load a truck.

It depends on how you define worst to be honest. I had a fast food job for five years which had a lot of decent people to work with over the years, but because it was being on your feet all day it was easily the worst job on my body. The human body isn't meant to be on their feet for hours on end multiple days a week and I would never go back to a job like that given the option.

On the flip side of that, I had a job at a print sales and repair company where I pretty much hated everyone and didn't fit in with the culture there at all. In was very blue collar and full of old men who acted like toxic old men which is fine I guess if you have the same mentality, but I did not. What's more the building we worked in was shit in a shitty part of town which made just showing up and walking in feel like shit. I lasted there maybe two months and would never go back.

The other job that comes to mind is the job I had in 2021 at a factory/plant. Good people (sorta), but bad pay, very bad benefits, a long ass daily commute, and the shitty mentality that you owe the company for providing you with a job rather than the company owes you for keeping everything running smoothly. Plus a lot of other little bullshit things throughout that I won't bother getting into. On top of that, this was the job at the time my wife got too sick to work and despite working a full time job we would have less and less money each paycheck which was a continuous story all year. We were circling the financial drain, just more slowly than had I not had the job. This was easily the stressful time I've ever had and I would never go back to it.

So yeah, unfortunately, there is a whole range of what makes a job, "the worst job ever" in my career and it really depends on how a person defines it, but those are my examples.

never had a really awful job.

honestly, the most I dreaded going to work was my very first job, at 16 when I started working in a video rental store (when those existed). They gave me one day of training, then left me to run the store by myself for 8 hours every Sunday.

I barely knew what I was doing for the first while. I'd have to call customers and tell them they were late returning rentals, at which point i'd get verbally berated. One guy threatened to come in and beat me up, but never made good on the threat.

I think if I'd been properly trained it would have not been so bad. but the stress of going in and having to deal with inevitable situations I didn't know how to handle really made me dread going to work for the first few months.

I quit before too long for a better job, as the pay was shit anyways.

My next job involved working as a receptionist/janitor and I didn't like that one either but at least I was properly trained.

Fast food in general. Worked a few different spots, each sucked. I've worked dangerous jobs, physically demanding jobs, mentally demanding jobs. Still found fast food way worse than any of them, hated that shit. Definitely had individual days/weeks that were way worse on other jobs, but fast food just consistently sucked. And at least all those tough jobs paid up.

Some funny memories though. First day on the job at Popeyes, think I was like 15. Showed up at 6.am, they had me training with some older dude who just started working there himself. Great. Dude couldn't speak English. Name was Stalin. Looked identical to Cheech Marin. Basically signing to me how to get up to my elbows in raw chicken. Hilariously bad start, I'll never forget it.

I worked for a sportswear company and it was a shit job. Listing 50+ products on the website and having targets meant I was constantly under pressure. What made it worse was working there for nearly 4 years. I struggled to find another job during that time which gave me mild depression for 3 years. The managers lacked experience, lacked team management, and shouted often. The pay was subpar at the time, working 9-6, and didn't offer a lot of new skills, it was shit overall and a waste of 3 or 4 years of my life.

I knew my time was up and thank heavens I left before Covid lockdown.

@Serraph105: It is amazing the difference that a solid financial footing can make. It affects EVERYTHING about your life, attitude, and well being.

I worked for the Home Depot in retirement community for 3.5 years prior to joining the military. It was awful. There were several terrible moments in the service, but it wasn't a sustained ass pain like retail.

delivery driver for pizza hut when i was in college.

i like the delivery part because being out on the road alone was nice and i knew which neighborhoods in my area were wealthier and generally tipped better so i'm manage my delivery speed to try to get the best ones. money was good and never declared tips so on friday / saturday nights i'd walk out with a decent wad of tax free cash.

that being said, being in the restaurant when there were no deliveries to make completely sucked. idle drivers had to help with cleaning floors / bathrooms, washing dishes, folding boxes, or basic food prep which was basically oiling a million deep dish pans or oiling smaller personal pizza pans and dropping a frozen puck of dough on top and setting it on a rack to thaw.

i hated all of it but the dishwashing was the worst. had to clean mountains of used pans and dishware from the dining area for what felt like hours some days. their industrial dishwasher was shit so everything had to be pre-rinsed / scrubbed BEFORE being washed. some days i'd just get tired of it and toss pans in the machine with dough still stuck to the sides. they'd come out with wet dough still stuck to the sides and i'd just put the pan into the clean pile. i remember standing at the sink just thinking to myself "this is why you're going to college"

though getting unload the oven was fun. the food was basically all cooked on a conveyor belt oven so as pizzas came out had to sort the orders, cut them and either box or put back in the pan for dining service. kinda enjoyed that part too, at least it was clean.

It really does. From a mental standpoint, it took quite a while to recover from that year long downward spiral. I don't think I'll ever be quite the same, but the massive stress and panic from it feels much more distant now than it has in a long time.

@comp_atkins: I worked in the dishroom for a couple years, and aside from the smell I kind of.... Loved it? You just got your work done alone with some music and no one bothered you.

Dealing with customers out front sucked. I like my desk very much these days.

that's why i liked the driving. being out on the road alone was nice. i was kinda in my own world when doing the dishes, but being surrounded by other people's food waste and having to deal with it was disgusting to me.

My first 'real' job out of college. I was extremely underpaid, management was awful, and the place I was contracted out to was downright toxic. In hindsight, I should have quit and went back to waiting tables. I would have made more and it would have been way better for my mental health while I was applying elsewhere.

I’ve had a wide variety of jobs throughout my teen years and 20s. Worst one was working at a factory on Honda parts. Minimum wage (not they I’d expect any higher due to how simple the job was), doing insanely mundane and repetitive tasks 8 hrs a day. The atmosphere of a factory is depressing as well, dark and dingy with no windows or sunlight. Mostly drug addicts and ex cons working there. I remember a guy cut someone up with a box cutter for making fun of his tattoo. I worked for 5 months there and got into landscaping after and was so glad I got to work outside doing more meaningful work.