Current Events > Worst job you've ever had?

(+) Yeah! (+)

For me? Telemarketing for MCI. By far.

MCI had already gone out of business and come back, which is a red flag in and of itself. I had been laid off from my 1st job at Mervyn's and had trouble finding a job for a few months. At about 3:45pm, I happened to drive by the building they were in and there was a sign that said they were hiring.

I went inside and asked about the job. The lady at the front desk told me to go into the next room and fill out an application on the computer. At about 4:30pm, I was done with the application. I went back to the front desk and noticed she was about to walk out the door.

Me: I'm done with my application.
Her: >_> ... ... OK, come back on Wednesday for training.
Me: OK :D

I was excited, but kinda weirded out at the same time. She didn't look at my application at all. No interview. Nothing. No background check. I was hired just like that. I needed a job, though, so I was happy all the same.

I came back that Wednesday for training. Everything seemed normal. All through training, they went on and on about how "they're back in business because they take care of their customers" and "they do the right thing because it's the right thing to do" and blah blah blah.

We got to the part of training where we were supposed to use the computers to do simulated calls with this voice recognition program. Most of us got through it fine, but this one guy... He had a really scratchy voice and the computer wouldn't recognize his voice. He was SO MAD at the computer. His face was beet red. They told him not to worry about it and then we took a break.

Most of us went to this outdoor area behind the breakroom. A bunch of us were standing in a circle talking about... something (can't remember what any more). That guy with the scratchy voice was standing off to the side by himself.

Suddenly, he walked into the middle of the circle and said "The next person who makes fun of me, I'll blow your fucking brains out."

Break time was over and we all went back into the training room. The trainer started saying stuff again. I understood what he was saying, but it was all going in one ear and out the other. All I could think about was whether I was "Am I going to live to see the following week? The following day? Does he have a gun on him right now?" He was sitting right next to me now, but he was staring intensely at this girl at another table the whole time.

After what seemed like forever, it was lunch time. A couple of guys and I went to a Jack in the Box across the street. We were talking about what that dude said and we talked about whether we were going to say something or not. I told them that I was definitely going to say something. I wasn't about to risk dying just to not make waves at MCI. Fuck that. I told them I was going to quit if they refused to do something about that dude.

We went back, and they just walked back tot he training room. The room was on the far side of the building on the right. There was what seemed to be some kind of administrative area toward the front of the building to the left of the main entrance. I grabbed a chair and sat down in the middle of that area. After a couple minutes, a lady poked her head out of her cubicle and asked what I was doing.

Me: I'm not going back in there until y'all get him out of there.

They asked me what I meant, and I explained the situation. They told me to stay where I was while they checked on it further. After a few minutes, I saw a couple security guards walking the guy out of the building. After he left, I went to training and stuff continued.
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When I first got out of training, the 1st thing I heard my boss say was "YOU GOTTA HUSTLE THESE PEOPLE!" I was like "Wait, what? That's... That's not what they said in training."

I quit that job after a couple months. They had an awards ceremony that day. I got my award for perfect attendance, told my boss I quit, then walked out of the building and never went back.
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First one right out of college.

The project was a disaster and we ended up working 80-100 hour weeks for 2 months straight

I worked 18 hours on thanksgiving day

oh yeah, I was a consultant
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Inventory counting. Since the company had so much turnover, typically you would not have enough people at each job. So what should have been a pretty easy 4 hour job turns into a 12 hour horror show. I once worked 101 hours in one week. The best part? I was salaried at the time. No pay for 61 of those hours.
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Busboy the summer after my senior year right before going to college.

It was at a medium-quality restaurant on a lake in a tourist town. The owners lived in NYC and didn't really give a shit so we went through like 3-4 managers during the 3 months I was there. They kept the tips and handed your share out at the end of the week, which I'm fairly sure was skimmed off most the time.

The waitresses were bitchy and no one really trained me so I just kind of went along doing whatever. Scheduling was fucked up so sometimes you'd be the only one there and get swamped.

The dish machine was downstairs so you had to keep carrying the bin of dishes down stairs that were outside the building, which sucked doubly when it rained.

The weekend of July 4 they had a bunch of Elvis impersonators come in, so I got to listen to varying degrees of that shit blasting my ears for 3 days. Parking was an absolute bitch and if you worked holidays (I did) you'd be stuck in traffic getting home.

I will say that the view of the lake was incredible and there'd be fireworks every other week which you got a great view of and usually the place was mostly empty by then. Also there were a bunch of eastern European students that worked there which was kind of cool.
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Those 2 weeks I was a porn fluffer.

*shudders*
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Diamond Foods, basically just processing and packaging almonds and shit for 8 hours. It was a lot of work for minimum wage, and I got tired of having to do swing shift then morning the next day all the time. Eventually I got the morning shift, but for minimum wage it definitely wasn't worth it.
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I worked at a gun range manually loading clay pigeons into a clay pigeon thrower. Every piece of clothing you wore to work was permanently ruined by the black clay dust that was everywhere and it left me with hearing loss.
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I thought I had some bad jobs because I've done some gruelling physical labor stuff, but y'all got me beat with that bullshit. At least I was getting paid well for what I was doing.
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Right after getting my masters degree, I got a new job. Not including retail, it's the worst job I ever had by a long shot. I quit right at 3 months of being there. Believe me I wasn't the only one that wanted to, I was just the only one that could afford to.

Everyone hated my manager, and I mean literally everyone. Even people that didn't work for her. She is by far the worst manager I ever had and that includes retail. The cubes were completely open so they there was no privacy. My manager, sat right next to us. To give you a bit of a hint in regards to how much of a micro manager she was, she was supposed to sit way down on the other end of the office, away from us with the other managers. She however chose to sit right next to us so she could micromanage. If I got up to go to the restroom, she had a problem with this. She was extremely annoying, never shut up, and generally didn't really know how to handle people well.

On top of this, they wanted you to work night and day and didn't know what the term work-life balance meant. This might be cool for some but I refuse to do that unless I'm working for myself. To give you a flipping clue as to how much they worked, my manager sent us an email at 3 in the morning and one of the other members on our team actually responded at like 5. Those two in particular seemed to live and breath work. It was kinda sad.

On top of this, the girl that sat right next to me is by far one of the most annoying co-workers I've ever had. Extremely rude, extremely opinionated, talked way too much, would butt into conversations that didn't involve her, she was unhelpful, etc. The only thing we had in common was our mutual hate of our manager. She left the company only a few weeks after I left.

I happened to run into the IT guy that worked there somewhat recently and he told me that my ex-manager got fired a few weeks before that. Serves her right.
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Pouring concrete.
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DevsBro posted...

Pouring concrete.

Pouring concrete really isn't that hard, I've poured many yards of crete
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Staples retail
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either babysitting or making cold dishes at a restaurant.

both weren't difficult at all, but I hated them.
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Meat storage warehouse

Taking any job I could right out of college until I could find a job I actually wanted

Graveyard shift where the only thing we had to do was unload 100 lb boxes of frozen pig parts off a truck and move them into the warehouse for 8 or 9 hours straight. It didn't help that the warehouse was kept really cold and we had to walk by a blast freezer that was -40 degrees. All for minimum wage

I actually thrive on physical jobs like that, but the amount of work I was putting in did not relate to the money I was being paid. I moved on to another warehouse job for awhile after that
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Trigg3rH4ppy posted...

DevsBro posted...

Pouring concrete.

Pouring concrete really isn't that hard, I've poured many yards of crete

It depends. The actual pouring is the easy part. It's setting forms and driving pins that sucks. Actually, the worst is when you're pulling pins and one of them doesn't want to come out. Nearly passed out trying once.

But none of this is a huge problem if you're not a 12-17 year old kid who has never even seen the inside of a gym.
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Pharmacy tech at CVS. It was literally worse than when I was a cashier at Walmart.
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I worked for a real shady dude who was contracted by banks to clean out foreclosed houses.

Basically spending 12 hours a day either in ghetto or hillbilly dumps cleaning out animal shit, human shit and a bunch of moldy furniture.

The only time it was cool was when he got contracted to clear out this small mansion. Turned out the owner was some dude who was caught sex trafficking. You could tell they took off in a hurry, the place was pretty much together outside of animals getting in and shitting everywhere. Really weird cause if you didn't know the backstory you'd think he was just some rich lame white dude based on all the family pictures and shit.

But yeah, most of the places were total dumps. I found out later that the owner of the company was a slum lord as well and most of the crew were actually his tenants working off rent. I bailed shortly after that, the whole thing just didn't sit right with me.
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telemarketing.

i interviewed on friday.
started on Monday morning.
quit Tuesday afternoon.
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ROBANN_88 posted...

telemarketing.

i interviewed on friday.
started on Monday morning.
quit Tuesday afternoon.

I probably should have quit that MCI telemarketing job in the same fashion. That job was dumb as hell.
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Insurance form corrections

The numbers we were supposed to hit for quota were based off the numbers for the India team that processed what we sent them

They just had to plug in numbers or upload scans. 80+ an hour plugging in provided specific sections of records.

We had to go in to EMRs and check the files for missing information we needed, then add it to a file and print it out. Supposing there were no delays for the systems or printer it still took about a minute to two depending on how much was missing. The exception being two of the huge systems with common minor missing sections like needing a signature. Those take like 30 seconds. The senior member of the team who transferred from another department got that one and used it to justify berating the rest of us for our poor quotas while they easily got (artificially inflated) numbers.
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Probably full-time cashier, age 18 - 19. Boring as hell, basically the only cashier in a full-time shop, staff were mostly white trash, just bad, bad, bad. It was barely even minimum wage.
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Also totally am making nearly as much per hour just starting out with my security job. Will earn nominally more when I start working at the zoo even though I'll have to deal with being in the weather more than my current one.
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tossup

one was a hs job at mcdonalds because i had a couple insufferable coworkers

the other was a technical writing internship for what turned out to be a front company for an essay mill (like damn, i could have freelanced if i knew i was doing that, since i was a college student surrounded by inept writers)
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Package loader during peak season at UPS

Had a few factory jobs that were varying levels of hell.
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Law Office that handled a lot of real estate stuff.

My second day, I was calling people to notify them of eviction. They were crying and telling me their sob stories. I felt terrible.

After that, I was asked to organize our bills. After looking through the notices, we were months behind on a ton of things. I realized that a lot of messages that I was taking for my boss were from those same bill collector's.

After a few days, I just couldn't take it anymore. I was in a room all by myself all day and felt miserable about what I was doing. I talked to my boss and told her how I felt and she seemed to understand.
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Jiek_Fafn posted...

Law Office that handled a lot of real estate stuff.

My second day, I was calling people to notify them of eviction. They were crying and telling me their sob stories. I felt terrible.

After that, I was asked to organize our bills. After looking through the notices, we were months behind on a ton of things. I realized that a lot of messages that I was taking for my boss were from those same bill collector's.

After a few days, I just couldn't take it anymore. I was in a room all by myself all day and felt miserable about what I was doing. I talked to my boss and told her how I felt and she seemed to understand.

Damn... I would have felt the same way.
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i worked at a Kumon tutoring center throughout HS

terrible job, felt like a learning sweatshop
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Asherlee10 posted...

Ashley Furniture

jijiji
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Probably sales associate at Home Depot in college. A lot of issues were related to the quality of employees around me and management not giving a fuck if they disappeared off the floor for hours at a time. I worked in paint but frequently had customers come ask me for help in other departments because the assigned employees were AWOL.

Feeder on a printing press. The work wasnt too terrible but the people I worked with where very miserable and unfortunately it made me miserable too.
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Weight loss counselor.

The nature of the job isn't too bad but the company I worked for was horrible.

Could make a really long post but nah. Gist of it is really inept higher ups (who could stand to do a few crunches...) who really liked pushing sales in such an obvious way we start losing clients because they think they're getting hustled and god forbid they go to another office and get shit advice and have supps pushed on them.

They also cut my salary from 50k to about $12/hr because business was failing so fuckin hard.

Anyway the super boss and a few others weren't very bright and couldn't see this was the reason we would see 6 clients in a 10 hour day.

My time there ended shortly after a meeting where I asked one of the neighboring office managers how long she's been with the company and how many pounds she had left to lose after veto'ing an idea of mine. I also asked the director (CEO?) wtf electrolyte replenishers were after reading some flyer bullshit she typed up to drive sales and then asked if she just strings words together and hope they mean something.

About an hour and a half into the next work day I was asked to resign. Lol.

The company isn't around anymore.
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My worst job wasn't telemarketing, but it was closely related. I worked for a sort of pop-up telemarketing company that would send a manager out to a city for a new promotion and hire temps to make calls. In this case they were selling coupon books. I was looking for a delivery job and got hired to deliver the coupon books and collect the money.

The manager would call me every time somebody made a sale and I would be expected to be there within 15 minutes to complete the transaction. This was way before smart phones or even decent cell networks, so I'd have to have maps and shit to figure out where I was going. Plus, because people would basically say anything to get the salespeople off the phone, I ended up closing the deal about 90% of the time without getting any of the credit or the commission.

Fortunately the coupon books were pretty legit, so I would close by selling out the company and acknowledging how shady the sales practices were and how shitty my job was to the customers, and they'd usually agree to buy the thing. I did that for two weeks and then I bailed.

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EdgeMaster posted...

My time there ended shortly after a meeting where I asked one of the neighboring office managers how long she's been with the company and how many pounds she had left to lose after veto'ing an idea of mine. I also asked the director (CEO?) wtf electrolyte replenishers were after reading some flyer bullshit she typed up to drive sales and then asked if she just strings words together and hope they mean something.

:^)
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Bagging groceries when I was 16

I got yelled at by fat ugly old women every day because I didn't bag their groceries the way they wanted and my boss did coke in the bathroom and always gave me lectures about my quality of work.

I lasted 2 weeks.
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That was a long story, did you live to see next week?
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@Thatuser Yeah my sister works at Lowes in the same position with the same complaints as you. She asked to be reassigned to cashier in order to reduce stress, but of course everyone still comes to her with their problems. I honestly think she's going to quit soon.
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I Like Toast posted...

That was a long story, did you live to see next week?

Fortunately, I did.
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El_Lingo posted...

@Thatuser Yeah my sister works at Lowes in the same position with the same complaints as you. She asked to be reassigned to cashier in order to reduce stress, but of course everyone still comes to her with their problems. I honestly think she's going to quit soon.

Luckily it was just a summer job for me. I hope she gets the position. Although cashier is another type of hell.

I worked seasonal at a record store called f.y.e. a few years ago. All I did was stock DVDs. Boring as hell.
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Mining job where I had to shovel rocks into a mesh screen barrel. It was grueling on the back. I guess driving the forklift and frontloader was alright though.

I guess the better jobs were in the retail and motel business. Well at least it didn't have hard manual labor and the people were cool but it's like that everywhere.