WORST JOB YOU'VE EVER HAD

yikes that's a fucken nightmare!

this one was very stressful and torturous at the time, but funny in hindsight in a like Penski file meets Officespace way... but worst one was this office job in a human research ethics role where absolutely no one would tell me what i was supposed to do...so just tried my best not to get noticed. sat down in this building at the uni and was told to 'look through the dropbox to get used to how the filing system works'. then a week later, i was done with that 5 second job and was like 'okay, so what do i do?' and they looked at me in shock, asked 'what do you mean?' and proceeded not to tell me what to do. eventually figured out that i was supposed to send out questionaires and info sheets and whatnot, but still didn't know what to do with them, other than trying to file them... etc etc.. anyway, after three months of this, the professor who runs the group calls me in and asks "where are we at with the XX project?" which is very confusing, so i say, "when you say where are we at, what do you mean exactly?" then he starts going red in the face, smashing the table saying shit like: "YOUR JOB IS TO TELL ME WHERE WE ARE UP TO WITH A PROJECT WHEN I ASK YOU" and i'm still going... 'yeah, but what does "where are we up to" mean? like how many forms have been sent out? how many have been received?' he keeps screaming, i tell him he can't talk to me like that, and somehow this gives me the upper hand and i don't get fired because clearly he's been run through the ringer by HR at some point. a few months later, i tell them i'm going on tour and they say 'great, just make a handover document for the person who'll fill in while you're away'... which presents a challenge because i still don't know what MY JOB IS. i do the best i can, give them the handover document, and they fire me on the spot, two days before tour with a smug smile and a 'thank you for your service'. joke's on them, because the handover document was useless and a few months later, a bunch of us shitworkers got lumped into a class action lawsuit because the whole department was underpaying their casual staff, so i somehow got a backpayment that covered all the money lost on tour...

Michael's art supply store. I had to wear a vest and an awkward headset straight out of dystopia. I was essentially bullied by the retail veterans who worked there. The manager was quite perplexed when I called to quit. Much respect for those who work in retail.

Worst by far was working Patient Experience in a hospital, which was essentially being the front desk person and giving directions/escorting people. Since the med center here privatized parking, the bulk of the job ended up being validating parking so people only had to pay $2. This entailed confirming the patient they were there to visit, or their appointment that day, while having to turn away frustrated patients of the dental and optometry clinics because they weren't covered for reduced parking. Saw a lot of shit in the two-and-a-half years I was there, including blood all over bathrooms, wasted family members coming behind the desk to yell at us and falling over, and all-out brawls in waiting areas. Just a demoralizing environment, and especially hard to try and maintain some empathy for people going through hard times when we were the ones receiving their vented stress. Final straw was when I saw a bedbug crawling across the desk midway through a shift and I was stuck there (we couldn't leave desks unmanned) for another few hours. Started applying for other positions that night. One positive is that I got out of there three weeks before COVID hit Ohio, can't even imagine what the job would have been like during that initial wave.

My worst job was for one of those mobil catering companies that drive the trucks around to construction sites and sell crappy hot food to the construction workers. It was called One Against Two Mobil Catering. That's because there were already two other mobil catering companies in Pittsburgh at the time! A friend kept calling it I Against I mobil catering but it was nowhere near that cool. The kicker was that I didn't even get to drive the truck. I had to load up a bunch of hot food on to some other dude's truck and he dropped me off at a construction site where I set up a cafeteria each day. I had to be at their headquarters (a former McDonald's) by 6 in the morning and at the construction site by 7. Once at the site the only bathrooms were the porta-johns out in the yard and no one to cover for you so you had to hide the cash drawer best you could and make a run for it when you could. Hopefully you didn't have to take a shit. I lasted about 6 weeks.
A close second would be GC Murphy Company, an East Coast/ Midwest 5 and dime chain. I worked at the downtown Pgh location in the mid-80's. Three days a week during the school year and full time in the summer. Overall I look back on the job fondly, but there was the time when I got called down the sales floor with another young stockboy and the assistant manager told us: "look, I don't think this is a big deal, but we've had a bomb threat. If you two could just take a walk around the basement sales floor and look under the racks. If you see anything, don't touch it. Just come tell me." Being all of 16 I was like "Uh, Okay." We didn't see shit and went on about our day. The next day there was another bomb threat and in that 24 hours someone must have told the assistant manager that he was NOT allowed to the have the stockboys look for the bombs because this time we actually evacuated the store. Middle of the day, all of the employees were standing across the street in the porn store parking lot as the bomb squad went through the store. The whole time customers kept walking up to the doors and were basically slamming into them because they were locked. This amazing lifer employee in her mid 60's who had worked there since she was my age yelling at the top of her lungs in the thickest Pittsburgh accent "Hey! Yinz can't go in der! There's a bomb in der!"
Another amazing/fucked up thing they had me do - Help the porter unclog pipes from the greasy spoon counter restaurant. He hands me some gloves and the puts a huge plumbing snake in my hands and says "I just need you to support this and help guide it into the pipe, but don't grip it. It will rip your hands right off." Plumber's assistant at 1980's minimum wage!
One last fucked up experience. They asked for volunteers to stay after hours and clean the florescent lights and light fixtures. We set up some scaffolding and would go along, take the tubes out (Probably 8 to 10 foot lighting tubes) wipe the dust off of them and wipe off the tops and bottoms of the lighting fixtures as well. One time one of the tubes slipped out of someone's hand and fell right onto a bin with tons of pairs of socks in it. Not sure why we didn't think to cover stuff like that before we started. We tried to pick up any big, visible pieces of the lights, but mostly just shrugged and moved on. I really hope that whoever bought those socks washed them first.

In 1998 I was 16 and worked for Albertson's supermarket as a bag boy. Larry Hardy worked for the same chain earlier. I lasted three months, tops. The head of the frontend department was a total chump. Total Napoleon complex. He ended up getting fired for sexual harassment later on. I knew the girl he was harassing who later informed me what happened.

The only corporate job I ever had was at Country Wide Financial. I was there for four weeks and ditched one day to go to a show at the Scene Bar in Glendale. I felt like the place was inherently evil without knowing what a NINJA loan was or that they were forging loan documents. This was 2004. They went out just after the '08 financial crash. One of the worst offenders.

I was a shop-sponsored skateboarder -- amazing, I still skate -- and I worked at the shop I rode for. Working for the skate shop wasn't bad, but it was mostly a glorified shoe store. I tried to live in front of the skate decks and voluntarily gripped every board sold.

Was on the dole and they made me apply to a bunch of jobs. Got a job in a family owned garden centre. Every single member of staff hated all of the other staff. There was three departments, each ran by one of the owner's awful kids. Their kids also worked there. I used to hope the bus was crash on the way in. Every member of staff was actively trying to undermine their colleagues. We were selling bags of compost. Hated it.

One of the owner's idiot sons tried to make small talk in the staff room.
"Him what music do you like"
"Punk"
"I've seen The Hives spends a while counting once"

That was the solitary pleasant interaction in my three months there.

Probably my stint at Kelley’s Cafe in Jamestown Ohio. I quit a job at a factory that made springs (a month of near-intolerable work) when I was told I might get hired on at university. In the interim I was a dishwasher. The job itself was fine. There was another dishwasher there that would relieve me who would talk to me about UFOs. He lived in a house with no electricity for a while- he also worked across the street at a pizzeria and at a Dollar General. But anyway, there was this other short guy who’d come in often that was a friend of the owners and who I heard was the son of a local police chief. He was always insulting but everyone just said he was having fun or making a joke. One night I was working and he saw me, called me a “BARCODE FAGGOT” (presumably cuz I have a barcode tattoo on the back of my neck, you know, like a fag) in a drunken slur and then literally RAN AWAY to join his friends. So I went out there and said what, you think that’s funny? I’m like two heads taller than this guy— “IT WAS JUST A JOKE MAN YOU KNOW HAH HA FUNNY.” Been called that and other things a lot in the past but not on the clock, in my 30s. Made complaints to people but nothing came of it. Still, I worked there even after I got my other job until I skipped too many days, effectively removing myself from their schedule. I still have a paper from my factory job that was sent to me, fired for leaving without notice, but didn’t receive a similar form from there.

BARELY HUMAN #KAFKA