Have you had any distasteful Jobs?

Post Reply New Topic

I have had two rather unpleasant Jobs.
I worked in a Fish and Chip shop called Daves in sheringham. I hated it. I worked out in the back and lugged sacks of potatoes and move trays of fish. I then got the nickname 'Serious Owl' on the count of my then tufty Robert Smith hair and the lack of smileing.
Another job I had was working in a 'steak house' in washing-up department. I'm a vegetarian. The smell of dead flesh appaled me. My hands were persistantly covered in a distasteful slime whilst at work and I couldn't bear it.

So have you had any terrible jobs?

I worked at the produce section of a grocery store for 2 months. Here's my typical work schedule.
3:00PM Sweep the floor
4:00PM Mop the floor
5:00PM Sweep the floor
6:00PM Mop the floor
7:00PM Sweep the floor

you get the idea.

I work in a bookshop, which sells far more newspapers than books. It depresses me as our best selling papers are the xenophobic, poverphobic, leftyphobic generally petty rightwing imbecilic papers known as the Daily Mail (how will bird flu affect the housing markets?), the Daily Express (outrage as french designer calls your Queen a 'fashion disaster') and Torygraph, sorry Telegraph which is your rather well-spoken, wonderfully reasonable xenophobic paper.

Is that Sheringham, Norfolk? If so, I live just 30 miles down the road from you!! I used to visit there a lot during my childhood.

It is that Sheringham. I live there too. Sam is a friend of mine

During a spell of unemployment I took a temp factory job in a place that made rubber gloves.

I worked on the part of the production line to do with packing. So, I would spend my time sorting left & right hand gloves and putting them into their packaging.

This was fine, I could live with that, although the constant gossiping of the other employees (mostly women) annoyed me.

No, the real nightmare was when they switched me onto a pressurised production line. There would be glove after glove launched at me at unreasonable short intervals, each one had to be fitted onto a fiddly peg that would go onto the next stage of the process. It really stressed me out because of the speed and co-ordination required.
If you screwed up the whole line had to be stopped, reset and started again - I kept screwing up and started to really get some aggravation from the other employees.
After a couple of hours of that I left and didn't return.

I should be grateful that I've had nothing worse than that, but it was stressful enough at the time.

I delivered pizza for close to 4 years. Sometimes the tips were good, but a lot of customers didn't tip, and treated drivers like me with contempt. What really made this job distastefull, was my boss, the store manager. He was the type who thought that if you worked for him that meant that he owned all of your time, he even considered days when a worker wasn't scheduled, but didn't request as "off," as being a day "on call." On the job, he was a petty bully, though I stood up to him, and I could usually make him back down. He once tried to trick me into driving for a store I didn't want to drive for (in a bad area), and when I spoke to him about it later that day, backed it up by telling me that the franchise owner could make me drive there if he wanted to (drive for that store or be fired); both conning and threatening me in one day. He could have made that whole thing go away by just being a man and apologizing. Then there was the time he spoke to me about a few things he wanted to see me improve at, and backing that up by making an Anti-Semitic joke.

Not to diminish what you just said, but I just have to ask - did you spit on the pizzas of regular customers who wouldn't tip?

Seriously, I have to know and I won't be offended if you say yes!

p.s. I always tip the pizza guy, general nice guy that I am - just curious...

List of demeaning jobs? Here goes!

Glass Collector in a pub (part time, during end of term).
Office Cleaner and Washer Upper.
Kitchen Assistant in Post Office Catering Establishment
General Skivvy (sorry, 'Assistant') in a food hall in a supermarket.
Kitchen Porter at various Race Tracks.
Working in a Crisp Factory.
Working in a Plastics Factory.
Working as a Dustbin Man (during summer while at University).
Working as a Litter Picker (during summer while at University).
Working at lowly Kitchen Duties in the Student Union
Working as a Kitchen Drone in a Pub
Working at a Refuse Recyclign Plant (during summer while at University).
Working in a Kitchen in a Kebab Shop.
Working in a Lettuce Factory.
Working in a Kitchen / as a Glass Collector in a Pub.

In each of these roles, I had terrible working relationships with the managers/supervisors and many of the employees.

To offset all the above however, I have enjoyed extended periods of time in which I have not been answerable to any demeaning, belittling mini-hitlers. In that time, I have taught myself quite a bit about computers and undertaken fairly extended periods of formal education, so it wasn't all bad.[

Last edited by adversarial on 27 Oct 2005, 10:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

Most of these jobs don't seem too distasteful to me, just normally unpleasant as most jobs tend to be.

I think one of my least favorite jobs was when I worked in a chicken factory, turning boneless, skinless chicken breasts over shiny side up 8 hours a day. It was some time before I could stomach eating chicken again. Chcicken factories are so nasty...you can smell them a mile or two away, and they have concrete gutters with blood and stuff stagnating and reeking in the open air outside, yech!! !

The steel factory wasn't too bad, just loud.

Peeling outer layers of garlic on a garlic farm- again, not bad. Lost my appetite for garlic for a while, though...

Getting and selling firewood to people: cutting and loading wood in freezing rain or sleet with soggy cold wet cloth gloves really bothers me!!

Honestly, I think the most distasteful things I've had to do have been outside the workplace; things such as emptying the bucket my folk's family used as a chamber pot, or changing diapers and washing them, or pulling stillborn decomposed sheep/goat babies out of their mothers (that has got to be the grossest).

I did once work for an obese woman who was in poor health- I lived in her house and was at her beck and call. She smelled pretty bad, and the bathroom smelled worse. Soemtimes the toilet backed up, I had to clean it. Sometimes (especially after I didn't live there anymore but came periodically to help her out) the sink was full of putrid dishes half full of rotting food, and I had to wash the dishes. The laundry made me want to retch.....if it hadn't been for the smells I probably could have handled it better.

Seeing that I was not diagnosed until 37, and had a difficult time with managing my behavior until then, I've had more unpleasent jobs then pleasent.

I've worked in a bookstore where the owner shot heroine in the bathroom.
(She was really (not) fun to go to conferences with.)

I've worked as a security guard watching cement dry.

I went from teaching to working at a convenience store because I didn't know what was wrong with me. Thankfully, I'm back in the classroom again.

I've worked as a general laborer at construction sites walking around picking up trash.

I've worked a lot of sucky jobs.
Should I continue?

still never had a job though I cant really get a job during the school year (can you say overload), and next summer I want to work at an aspie/disability camp.

How is this for a bad job -- right out of school I was hired by a tech company to be the responsable adult.

Monday through Friday I was an R&D engineer. Then while everyone else got drunk on Fridays I had to answer phones, provide customer and technical support, diagnose malfunctions, ship large parts, and stay out of my office because people were busy having intimate relations in it. In fact my first to do on Friday am was to double check the beer/ alcohol order.

The bright side -- for doing the discusting part -- stock options. Also for a nerdy aspie - I got to be the office pet.

Unpleasant jobs…

At the age of 20 I was hired to be an apprentice carpenter. The other carpenters wouldn’t teach my anything and told me I would have to learn by watching. I don’t learn very well in that manner, so I was relegated to unskilled labor: stacking lumber, cleaning the jobsite, etc. I put up with lots of verbal abuse at this job. Every day I was called names and yelled at. Eventually the foreman fired me for being late (I wasn't.) A couple of years later, I found out he didn’t have the authority to fire me and had told the company owner that I stopped showing up for work.

Fumigating houses was rather unpleasant as well. The job consisted of dragging heavy tubes full of sand, carrying tarps (that were almost equal my body weight) up a rickety ladder, and breathing methyl bromide. The boss was too cheap to fill the single oxygen tank the company had, so we entered houses “hot” the following day with no breathing apparatus. That couldn’t have been healthy.

Installing carpeting was difficult and strenuous work, made worse by an abusive boss. Salesmen would neglect to tell customers that they must remove all their furniture from their homes before the carpet is installed. So we would arrive and have to move everything they own outside, then install the carpet, and then move their items back into the house. All the while, the boss would hurl insults and ridicule at me. Eventually, I threw a carpet knife at him and quit on the spot, making him finish a job by himself. (He didn’t get hurt.) That was the last time I ever put up with abuse at work.

I once had an assembly job, putting together filing systems for medical offices. It was a family business and unfortunately the whole family were jerks. They were always threatening the employees in one way or another. “We’re taking the water cooler away, we’re taking the refrigerator away,” etc. Once the employees had a potluck lunch. The owners had said they wouldn’t be there that day. They showed up, though, with several members of their church. These people actually sat down at our buffet table we were serving from and helped themselves to our food! No, they didn’t bring anything.

Another unpleasant job was picking up large-item garbage. I drove a thirty-five foot cargo van, picking up couches, stoves, BBQs, anything too large for the normal trash trucks. During my interview, I was told they “like to keep employee hours under forty per week.” So I reasonably assumed I would be working less than eight hour per day. Instead, I was working twelve-hour days just to get the job done. The work was miserable and hectic. I had problems map reading while driving and would always forget where was going. Also, I couldn’t understand the dispatcher on the two-way radio. I had to stop the truck and turn off the engine to hear what he was saying. My trainer said it was unacceptable to do that. I quit after seven work days, with a sore back that lasted for over a month.

Sorry to ramble, there’s more but I’ll spare you.

Try this job for someone who has ADHD (and probably AS too):

CALL CENTER

I worked at a call center for only three days. I couldn't listen to what people were telling me. I couldn't follow intructions properly. I had to pay close attention to what people were telling me. Geez. And people were rude and thought I could solve their problems via a phone. How dumb is that? It is what most people who call call centers believe, and it is dumb, since phones are not magical.

I quit three days after they hired me.

I've done housekeeping for major resorts so.. umm.. yeah thats very distasteful.

Worst of all though was when I had to work for a timeshare company or ..well, starve literally. only job that i could get back then. The concept of just how the entire business process was set up to blatantly make money by deceiving people by every conceivable means...everything and anything to get them to sign the timeshare contract... just disgusting. The day the economy took that whole multimillion dollar company down the toilet was like a karmic orgasm.. i may have been laid off but MAN I walked outta there with a huge grin on my face knowing the fekkers on the top of that food chain were losing all the money they had stolen.