Discussion on:

What's the worst job in the world?

Once while between jobs I sold Kirby Vacuum Cleaners. that was probably the worst thing ever!

Have you ever tried to sell someone a $2,000 vacuum cleaner?!!??

A former Kirby salesmen was on Dragon's Den the other night trying to sell water...

Needless to say, he failed!

On topic: Chestnut Picker. It kills your back and is so bloody boring!

Chestnut Picking can be beat: I was a Quality Tester of weed whackers in Tucson, AZ. I stood out in the middle of the desert 8 hours a day cutting desert brush just to put a load on gass powered weed whackers. When it broke, I picked up the next one and did it again. Did I mention it gets up to 115 degrees in the Sonora Desert?

manufacturing. Assembly line. Shoes, hats, tents, vinyl products. Same task, hour after hour after hour after mind-numbing hour. Were it not for the euthanasia aspect to the Humane Society job mentioned below, assembly line would be the worst job ever.

I can sympathize with those who have had manufacturing experience. My last job was as a process engineer. Going over manufacturing instructions and routers endlessly, knowing if I screwed up it would cost the company thousands of dollars. Pouring over paperwork for assemblies with thousands of parts can get to you.

Right, in 'Modern Times' the Little Tramp accurately summed up the assembly line. It can easily send you off for a visit to the nuthouse.

...Anything worse has to be unmentionable here, except perhaps for an infantryman who is under fire or being shelled (for 'normal' guys this clearly would win the 'unwanted' award).

Agreed, assembly line work can be pretty bad.

Doing manufacturing/processing through a temp agency is definitely worse. Minimum wage, no benefits, and in all too many cases being treated like a drooling idiot!

One job that I had while going through school takes the cake though. It was through a temp agency for a company that processed ad mailers for the entire San Francisco Bay Area. Probably processed somewhere around a million pieces of junk mail per day. That alone was bad enough, but to add insult to injury, when people found out what I was doing, I was pretty much an instant pariah! Needless to say, I wasn't there very long! LOL!

I was doing some temp work a few years ago at a plant in Manteno, IL that manufacturers those little blue packets of imitation sugar. I worked a 12 hour shift from 7pm until 7am. Every 5 minutes I had to remove 5 packets from the line, weigh them and record the average weight in a record book. One night the line was down so they had me stuffing samples of sugar-free flavor packets into the bulk package that contained the little blue packets. I left early that night and never went back.

the guy on the other end of the phone listening to the verizon guy asking "Can you hear me now?" all day long.

It was the mid 80's. Way before IT for me. I worked in a plant that processed chickens. I basically stood on the prod line and packed chicken parts on swing shift. To make it worse? I was trying to be a 100% commissioned Insurance Salesman during the day and I sucked at it. From suit to rubber boots and a long butchers smock with dinner (Mickey D's) thrown in between.

But the guy who had the worst job there? He sat on a stool in a rain suit with a charcoal respirator on all day. He slit the throat of EVERY bird (thousands a day) that came in that place just after they got an electrical shock to knock them out. They bled on to the floor which was basically a big plastic catch basin with a drain in the middle. By lunch time, the blood had coagulated (sp?) enough that it would no longer drain and was a foot deep where he was sitting. A hose with hot water was used to wash it all down in to the 250 gallons containers below which were then hauled off to the dog/cat food plant (I assume). By the end of the day, being within 10 feet of that guy made you want to vomit.

Sounds like the other guy's job is a good one to make those peta fanatics do. You know, the idiots who throw blood on people's coats.

I can feel ya on that. The worst Job I ever had was, being a towel Counter for this Sanis type company.

They brough in just HUGE bags of bar towels and we counted each one. Mind you these bar towels would sit and fester for weeks at a time before they got to us. So not only did you get to touch filthy god knows what they cleaned up with that thing towels.....they had foster maggot families living in them.

Not to mention the hours were lets say.....sh*t. 10PM-6:30am Weds-Sun.
The second night I was there I found a half dead Rat......I politely walked to my car and drove home. It was horrible.

The chicken boy is way up there...

After high school, I took a job on the docks in Oakland, CA, counting hides. The trucks would come from the slaughter houses with raw cow hides headed for Japan for tanning. The hides were salted, folded, tied with twine and palletized. They would cook in the hot summer sun for most of the morning waiting for me to count them. I had the job of counting the hides on each pallet before they were loaded on the ship. The smell was unworldly at best, and most of the shipping clerks spent more of their time "feeding the fish" over the edge of the dock than counting hides.

I worked on a Kibbutz in Israel for a while.
One of the jobs I had was giving the chickens a vaccine and cutting their beaks.
We had to pick up the chicken, give it a shot and then cut their beak with a hot knife.
The chickens would vomit on your shoes and the stench from the hot knife still plagues me.

It was way back in 1977 when I too, worked in a poulty processing plant...
The worst job there wasn't a guy slitting throats... That was automatically done with two chains side by side which basically pinched their necks until they were removed..
BTW Sometimes they would miss the electric shock first.. and the chain as well... No pity was spared for them in the next stage...
Anyway the worst job was the guy they paid to stand in the inedible pit below in approx. 2' foot of blood and chicken guts, heads, feet, etc. ALL DAY LONG and squeege them onto a conveyor belt to be sent to the pet food processing plant.

I could go into a whole lot of other horrors here, but I am now 46 years old and haven't eaten anything other than a egg from a chicken ever since...

I sold Rainbows. Mind you, they were ONLY $1500 back then....

The funny thing was, the people that wanted one the most was always the people that couldn't get financed...

It was amazing how many times I would be invited to hang around afterwards and have a beer or whatever.

Had one old couple that had me deliver theirs first thing sunday morning, but wouldn't talk to me about it until after I had breakfast with them....

Hey,

Back in the late 70's before I got into the computer field as a field engineer, I was a life insurance agent for a major company, it didn't matter how big the company, they still locked the doors and would hide, really. Here comes jim and his black suit, yes folks, a black suit. I WONDER why they ran

It was one of the toughest jobs I ever had, but it wasn't dirty.

Jim
wireless-home-computer.com
golf cronys.com

I graduated in the early '80s in the middle of a recession... I wound up picking tobacco plants in a green house for others to go and plant... with my 6-year in tow!

The work was toxic, pay was pennies per flat and owners were racist.

So always very grateful for the work I have now

Back in 2000 I made a career change. At 37, going back to school was one of the hardest things I ever did....well....until I did the graveyard shift on construction of a new mega grocery store.

I had been attempting to get work in my new field and it wasn't happening just yet. I hadn't completed all of my certification exams and I was left to anything I could get to remain living indoors and eating.

The first week or two was nothing but a trek through the muckiness that would become the parking lot. I never knew that seeing paving trucks could be so delightful.

The job itself was really nothing...it was walking around with a flashlight aqnd making sure that drunks and alike weren't camping out in the half-built store. The hard part was staying awake all night when I had never worked the graveyard shift in my life. I wouldn't like to go back to that.

One week working until midnight, one from midnight. You're barely getting used to a shift when it's time to switch. Besides the mind-numbing boredom of it all, sleeplessness was a killer.
Didn't you feel your brain was slowly deteriorating? I did, even though I was preparing for the PMP certification at the time, I was not allowed to take my books, or laptop, or anything to work. I could feel my neurons falling one by one into deep comas.

Ha! Try it the way I did in my first IT job! I worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 7am-4pm and Monday and Tuesday from 3:30pm-12:00pm, with Wednesday and Thursday off. I did that for more than three years while I racked up experience and certifications. Brutal!

I worked a shift like that when I first started in the medical field. My hours for 1st week were: Mon 7a-3p, Tues 3p-12a, Wed 3p-12a, Thurs off, Fri night Sat morning 11p-7a, Sat night Sun morning 11p-7a, Sun night Mon morning 11p-7a. The 2nd week was: Mon off (even though I had just left work that morning), Tues 7a-3p, Wed 3p-12a, Thurs 3p-12a, Fri night Sat morning 11p-7a, Sat off, Sun off. We also could be mandated to stay up to 8 hrs; which happened often. And I was finishing my degree. YUCK! Luckily, right after I graduated a full time midnight shift opened up and I GLADLY took it!

The job wasn't bad, just wasn't for me.

Hell...I didn't even have electricity on the site for 3 weeks....didn't have a roof for one of those weeks.

But I'd still take my night shift to that rotating shift.

My brain was swimming and I accomplished very little during that time because there was no time to study during the day at home trying to catch up on sleep in the daylight....but I still think the rotating shift must have been harder to deal with. After 5 weeks I got used to the nights and sleeping a little bit during the days...the 2 hour city bus ride including 3 transfers wasn't all that bad really.

When I first started in Telecommunications with GTE I was working in the Network Operations Center. First day you worked 12A-8A, second day was 8A to 4P, third day was 4P to 12A. One day off and start again. They finally ended this nightmare when other departments screamed loudly that we were becoming a bunch of walking zombies, which we were.

Working in a beef/poultry/hog slaughterhouse. I've been to several across the US and the smell at all of them literally made me gag and I wasn't even allowed inside. Can't imagine what it was like inside. Don't want to know.

There used to be a few meat packing places in the area, back when my dad was young. It would turn the river red from all the blood flowing into it.

And that was back when the method for killing cows was a sledge hammer. every now and then, they would do a glancing blow. suppose to be horrible, hope I never see for myself.

about 30 years later, one of the meat packing places was turned into a warehouse for a company I worked for. The basement was all setup for the refrigeration of the meat, and it STILL stuck of it, add in 30 years of mildew...

No one wanted to go down into the dungeon...

I emptied canal boat toilets for ?1.50 an hour.

I did collections for a major credit card for a while. The job was 50% okay (people that really wanted help, being able to help them out a bit and try to find a solution that will get them out of debt (well at least current I don't think the credit card business really wants them out of debit just not missing payments)). The other 50% really sucked, random people calling asking why you called them, but if they weren't the customer (say a wife or something) we weren't allowed to say anything because of privacy issues.

That sucked, they probably should know, for example sometimes it was the day before a due date and a $10 payment would have saved $50 in late fees and a bad credit report but if we didn't get the right person we couldn't do anything about it.

In the late 70's I had to get a job fast and the best place was the local meat packing plant. I was a dock worker and occasionally had to go out to the kill floor. The kill floor is nasty, not because of the dead and dying steers, it was nasty because of the illegal immigrants who would start hooting everytime they saw a white face.

Once, INS came in and the illegals scattered all over the place to keep from being caught. One even hid in the coldest freeser with just a light jacket (the freezer was set for -60).

The best jobs were the butchers, except that a lot of them were missing fingers. I worked there for 3 months and count that as the worst job ever. There are others much worse.

I worked as a "Meat Trainee" in a butcher shop in the 70's. My job was to clean up after the cutters/butchers. It was a nasty, bloody job.

well, when I worked at a Tannery I was put with the guys that put the hides in these huge drums, they look like the back side of a cement mixer, Anyway when the time came to dump them out(about 150 hides) onto the floor my job was to pick them up with a partner and try to heft them up onto a table, the hides where about an inch thick with no fur left and they were slick. I had just got hired and was ready to walk, but a friend of mine told me to hang in there so, I did and got laid off after 13 years working so YES that was the worst job anyone could have

That's what the meat processing plants WANT you to think! Inside, they are a beautiful rainbow where nothing actually dies, but the meat comes pre-packaged to them. This is how they get all their money.

(Sarcasm)

I remember when I lived in Orrville. There use to be these dump trucks that would come from the slaughterhouse. The reason I know they are from the slaughterhouse??? They were always full of things like severed pig heads and other various pieces. If you end up there, hopefully you'll just have to drive the truck.

You'd pass as soon as you had a chance.

When I'd go to a slaughterhouse to pick-up a load of meat I'd often have to spend the night there in my truck before it'd get loaded. It took days to get the smell out of the cab and the cab air filter. I guess that's why we got paid the big bucks.

My husband bought me a Kirby ...oy, rather I bought myself a Kirby in 1995... my new wonderful husband... oy... also bought a Kirby in 2006... I cant take anymore Kirby's!

Oh yeah, i've been there. Try to convince someone to buy that expensive vacuum cleaner when even I wouldn't buy it... what a nightmare.

> Have you ever tried to sell someone a
> $2,000 vacuum cleaner?

My wife would buy two.

My neighbor is from Laos and not familiar with Kirby. He then brought the Kirby guy over to our house and my girlfriend thought it would be "neat" to get one room cleaned for free and then tell the guy "No thanks". I told her not to do it, but she wanted to. (She's from Vietnam and had never heard of or been through the Kirby sales pitch either). My dad was over helping me build a deck. I looked at him, smiled, and then told her to go ahead. My dad just chuckled a bit. My girlfriend didn't see what was funny.

45 minutes later, she comes back outside with this guy. She can't get him to leave OR clean the carpet. Took me 5 minutes to get him out myself cause he had to pack that big damn silver vacuum back up. She then asked why I didn't tell her about it. I told her "I told you not to"...

I have done a lot of things: waiting tables, working assembly line, etc. But the worst job I ever had was as an adjunct community college instructor. Low pay, no job security, teaching at three or four schools to make ends meet, no mentoring, rude/indifferent students mixed with really talented students in the same class, students who were older than my mother and didn't hesitate to remind me.

The best part was when our department coordinator let us know that another class opened up and she chose the instructor by pulling his name out of a hat.

I bought a Rainbow for $2000. It's the best vacuum ever. I clean the carpet right?, and with a separate attachment I clean the dust mytes from the mattresses. I even do steam cleaning to my carpet ever few months and it keeps it like new. I've saved more than the $2k is cost. I even use it as a leaf blower for the driveway. I inflated 200 balloons in 1/2 hour for my grandmas 94th BDay. What else? No better vacuum for the car becasue it sucks big time (in a good way). It makes my house smell good because you can put smelly oils in it (good smells). Any way that's that. Oh, and I bought it more than 10 years ago and it's never broke, still like new. (now i've jinxed it)
My suckiest job was helping my dad clean the farm when I was about 12-14. He wouldn't pay me and the weeds were the kind like razor thin and would cut my arms and legs. I would end up all bloody at the end of the day. Child abuse, I tell you.

Working six days a week for peanuts, in a shop with horrible lighting, hardly any customers to help the time pass... Boss who thought hardware was a "career". (whimper)

I managed to stick it for two weeks but it was torture. I still get pangs of the same feeling when I'm working for a company where the decision maker is a clueless "jobsworth". I've had a few jobs like that too.

The BEST job I've had is when I ran my own consultancy. OK, hard times sometimes, having to do accounts yuk, always working, but I was successful for 10 years so I must have been doing something right in that time.

I think this little saying sums it up - "Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven". Having control over ones life so it isn't pointless is everything, no matter how unpleasant the actual job!

This is not a lecture just an observation. If you truly new what "hell" was going to be like, I don't think you would be joking making a comment about ruling in hell.

Perhaps you don't even believe that there is a hell and your comment was meant to dramatize your point. Even so, the Word of God (the Bible) states that it is better to be a guard in the House of God than to sit at the head table of sinners.

I'm sure this won't change your view on the jobs you have had, but perhaps it will give you a better perspective on future jobs.

Any job where you have to work with a nut job.

State of DE

When read backward, your post states: "Hail, Satan, the prince of darkness. Obey him! Serve him!"

Freakin wingnuts.

You were able to read it too.

Interesting...is that the best you can do?
While the post may have seemed like an overreaction to you, he was just trying to help people see that hell is not a joke.
I hope you never find out personally how right he is.

"Do you believe in hell?"

"You're here, aren't you?"