On my way home from work today I ended up behind a truck owned by JMaines Electric, Co. I remember working 3 days for them when I was an apprentice to become an electrician. They needed an apprentice at the shop so away I went. There was only me and another apprentice who had been there for over a year. We were suppossed to help out in the shop and deliver supplies to the guys out in the field.
On my first day they wanted me to deliver some stuff to a site in a town 30 miles away. The truck was an old Ford with manual transmission, which I didn't know how to operate very well. So, I got in and stalled and proceeded to stall the piece of crap in rush hour traffic all the way down to Galt and back. It sucked and that was it for me driving the truck.
The next day I had to clean the shop, which also sucked, and then strip wire, which sucked even worse.
This was thick construction wire. It has rubber insulation that is 1/4" to 3/4" inches thick (approximately 1 to 2 cm for you metric guys
) and has a solid or stranded copper or aluminum core. They wanted me to strip all the rubber off several box fulls of scrap wire with a utility knife. Stripping wire like that is hard. Try to imagine cutting away and peeling off the surface layer of rubber from a car tire. It's kind of like that. And it can be very hard on your hands.
I was there for the next couple of days, striping wire in a dusty garage for 8 hours each day.
I stripped it all and left, and never came back. Mmmm, bad memories...
I was a paperboy for almost five fucking years. And it's probably the least paid job in the world... *shudders*
I was at a sausage making factory for 6 weeks one summer, and my god... Imagine coming into work at 7 in the morning, and the first thing to greet you is the disgusting smell in a warm factory with left over meat rotting in every corner... *shudders even more*
Enough said.
i worked at this shit restaurant called "barbara's". it was owned by a lesbian, and all of the girls worked in the front of the establishment, while men kept everything cooking, and clean.
i was a dishwasher.
and in case you don't know, the job title "dishwasher" basically means "underpaid mr. do-everything".
they got really pissed at me one day because i spilled tomato sauce all over the floor by accident. meanwhile, the cooks come to work in the exact same t-shirts every single day for a week straight.
it all ended when i asked for my birthday off a full month in advance. they refused, so i told them that my last day working would be on the day before my birthday, and the boss thanked me for giving her more than enough notice.
i was fired about a week later.
which was cool with me. the main chef / deputy manager-type dude was a total fucking idiot, and he'd start drinking beer at about 4pm. by the time 10pm rolled around he was too "tired" to help clean the place up.
that job sucked. and i got paid dirt.
Schizoid : yuck! that woulda been horrible
I used to work in a library, my job was to make sure all the books were in their right places. It was really tedious having numbers like 109873.23455 RL. I used to have nightmares about the binary system.
OK I lied, I didn't have nightmares, but I could have.
I also worked in a fish and chip shop in the middle of summer, deep frying fish in hot oil. *argh*. I quit after 4 weeks because the boss made me cry
because he said I was too slow? but I was so scared of him if he told me to do something I would do it, god-speed. he smelt bad anyway and had cock roaches in his kitchen. asshole.
Uh...I never worked a day in my life. The Gods told me to relax, they said I'm gonna get fixed up right
Um, I picked blueberries for one day: got a sore back, a ruined pair of shoes, and a sunburn for my troubles. Wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that I only got paid $20 for a full days work.
Being that I've only held one "real" job previous to my current one, I'd have to say that the recycling depot wins by default. As a non-union student on a government program, I got shunted around from job to job depending on wherever my alcoholic supervisor figured he could use me to pick up his slack. From all of the various jobs that I did at the depot, the worse one would have to be baling milk jugs. Throwing empty milk jugs into a big metal machine that compresses them by the thousands into massive rectangular blocks. Nothing difficult about it, and it wouldn't have been half bad if it wasn't for the smell. Imagine a few hundred milk jugs with milky residue being left in the summer sun for a few days. Then imagine what the machine which squishes the things together must smell like. Once, I found a jug full of some unknown liquid in the bin. Rather than just chucking the thing in the garbage, I decided to do "the right thing" and empty it out and bale it. Big mistake. The guy I was working with had his face closer to the jug when I removed the lid, and he nearly passed out. He staggered back, throwing his hands in front of his face to block the stench, which resulted in him knocking the jug from my hands and spraying the contents all over the place. We later guessed that the thing was full of fermented urine.
I could regale you with "tales from the depot" for years to come, but I don't think I'd relish the task of reliving those memories any more than you'd enjoy reading them, so I'm gonna shut up now.
Any of the 5 jobs I've had, hasn't been bad. Lucky me.
I'm replying to all of you in no particular order:
Inertia:
Oh my god, that was funny. That was written well, I "saw" the whole thing.
Amor: Why you little....
Glacialis: Most of mine weren't that bad either. I had one where I was working for Phillip Morris (big tobacco). I was suppossed to survey people that came to a 7-11 in a bad area. It was ok until a couple of people (complete strangers to me and each other) bitched me out for working for them. That's when I said "fuck this" and went across the street to a McDonalds for the next couple of hours filling out surveys with random answers
I went back to stand in front of the 7-11 hardly five minutes before my employer cruised up to get me
Contraband: Poor girl...
JuggleFoe: Poor guy...
Schizoid: In my best Tom Green voice: "Daddy, would you like some sausage? Daddy, would you like some saus-ag-es?"