At one point or another, we've all had a terrible job. (If you haven't yet... don't worry, Grasshopper. Your time is coming.) While they're funny stories once we leave, when we're there it's a never ending nightmare. Well, today we look at some of the worst jobs people have ever had.
Thank you to everyone who shared their story. If you'd like to read more, feel free to visit the source link at the end of this piece. Comments have been edited for clarity.
Dancing bear.
I was a dancing bear.
I was a waiter at a kids restaurant, which had a bear as its mascot. The new guy had to ‘be the bear’ on their first day, which meant putting on a massive bear costume over our waiter’s uniform, including a huge fur head that you could barely see out of. You were then led around the place to wave at the parents and play with the kids, once per hour. If you spoke you were fired, as some of these kids returned customers who would recognize a waiter’s voice.
Wanting to impress my boss, I really hammed it up. I danced, I gestured, I goofed around, I sat on a mother’s lap, I ruffled a father’s hair while he growled, ‘Get off me or I’ll stab you.’ The boss loved it so much that he made me be the bear every day I worked there.
That would have been great, except it was August, and so hot that the restaurant’s air conditioner broke. The bear suit hadn’t been washed in the history of the restaurant and served as a memorial to the sweat of a hundred fallen waiters. Little kids would run headfirst at the bear and headbutt my nether regions with depressing regularity. And all it earned me was the disgust of my wait team, who thought I was ‘goofing off work’ by being the bear since it was clearly easier than carrying two plates of reheated lasagne across the room and refilling drinks.”
Stumbling onto a scene.
“I worked in hotel housekeeping. If it comes out of the human body, I’ve cleaned it up. I started in a by-the-hour motel when I was 14, owned by a woman who didn’t bother with the hazardous waste procedure and cleaned up what looked like a murder scene with nothing but bleach and kitchen gloves. I walked into that room and was absolutely positive that when I pulled the shower curtain open there was going to be a body in the bathtub. Thankfully there wasn’t, just blood everywhere. The owner refused to let me report it, made me clean it, and I didn’t want to get in trouble for bleaching a murder scene at 14 so I never did call the cops.”
You thought your job was bad.
“I worked at a slaughterhouse for a little while. They killed steers there but got pork shipped in. The hams came in a gigantic cardboard vat, probably five inches wide and four inches deep. They were heavily waxed on the inside to make them waterproof and had steel banding running around the outside kind of like an old keg or barrel. Once we fished out most of the hams and trimmed them there was always a couple feet of blood at the bottom. As the new guy, it was my job to dangle over the edge with a meat hook in one hand fishing for the remaining hams and scraps. Usually, it was about an hour in shoulder deep blood with your face next to the surface.”
Door-to-door.
“Door-to-door solar panel salesman for a corrupt home energy company. There’s nothing better than knocking on someone’s front door right in the middle of a Patriots game.”
Hello, may I bother you for money?
“Being poor means being willing to do messed up things for tiny bits of money, so I’ve had more sucky jobs than I can count. But the one that stands out to me most is door-to-door political fundraising/canvassing.
This was back in the early ’90s. The way it worked was you had a clipboard, a pen, a petition, and some envelopes. The whole crew would meet at the office and then pile into the 15-passenger van(s). The supervisors would drive us out to a territory anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours away from the office. Then, they would divide us into pairs and give each pair of canvassers a map marked with the pair’s assigned turf.
If I remember correctly, we started knocking on doors around 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. and kept at it until 8:00 p.m. In that time, we were supposed to knock on people’s doors and talk to them about whatever issue we were working on at that point. Then, we were supposed to get the occupant to sign our petition and make a contribution (preferably check or charge) on the spot. Our nightly quota was $120.
If you think that people hate having telemarketers call their houses at dinnertime to ask them for money, just imagine how much they love it when those same telemarketers show up unannounced on their front doorsteps.
Between the terrible weather, vicious dogs, and tweakers answering the door, people’s pervasive hatred of trespassers and solicitors, and constant fear of being fired for missing my quota, ‘field canvassing’ was definitely one of the worst jobs I’ve ever had.”
Totally clean potatoes.
“I sprinkled mud onto potatoes that had already been washed so that they would look freshly dug when they hit the supermarket. Most depressing holiday job I’ve had.”
Cool story, bro.
“I was a cashew flicker at a candy factory. Literally. I flicked the bad cashews off a conveyor belt.”
Being left to fend for yourself.
“I worked as a nursing assistant in a Long Term Acute Care hospital while I was in nursing school. They were giving me money for the school with a pledge to work for them for two years during my schooling. I chose to go ahead and get my BSN so tuition was on par with any private four-year university.
So an LTACH is basically an advanced rehab, with more high-level care than a skilled nursing facility and longer stays than a hospital. What was supposed to be a practical use of my ongoing education was more like being a personal slave to old mean lazy nurses and being looked down on by the CNAs because I was going to become one of those old mean nurses.
I worked days or evenings on weekends. My boss expected me to fill in last minute whenever anyone called out. Overtime was never acceptable but if you didn’t complete your tasks you had a time management problem. I had nurses who would call me to clean up patients and then leave to go smoke or sit at the nurses’ station and watch me struggle. Some of the aides would help but because of the setting, 90% of the patients were partial if not completely dependent. Some of them were also confused.
I was spat on, hit, bitten, peed on and pooped on. I had a nurse laugh at me as a patient I was cleaning erupted a nice wet fart all over me as I was finishing cleaning him up. Old confused men grabbed me pretty regularly. I’ve seen more nasty old genitalia than I care to speak about.
And the pay? Better than minimum wage, barely. They offered me a job when I graduated. I hopped out of there.”
When your boss ruins a good thing.
It had the possibility of the greatest job I’ve ever had, except I had the worst boss you could possibly think of. I worked at Viacom (parent of MTV, Nick, BET, etc.). My salary was incredible and I was a designer.
My boss though made every single day impossible. The woman proceeded to berate me every single day, kept me working hours past the time I was scheduled to leave and told me if I left before she said I can I would be fired, this was a daily occurrence. I was paid weekly and every week, because I was on an hourly basis when I submitted my timesheet, she made me redo it to lessen the number of hours I worked because she claimed I could have finished the work in less time than I did. So if I worked 50 hours in a week, I would only be paid for 40, again threatened with being fired if I tried anything. When she was mad at me, she physically poked me hard, basically assaulting me. Finally, I’m an adult and she actually brought me to tears one time due to her basically telling me how stupid I am that I can’t follow directions where in fact she was impossibly stupid at explaining herself correctly and any attempt at telling her this would just lead to her becoming so much worse. She also had a mindset that at any hour of the day if she called me, I should answer and help her out with whatever she needed, this meant if she was on a business trip and she called me at 3:00 a.m., that I should get out of bed and go to my computer to help her with the designing, her rationale, because she was my boss.
Yes, I went to HR about her and because she was so manipulative. Even though I had recordings of her, they weren’t secret, she knew I was recording and she gave me permission, she was able to get out of any trouble with HR other than a simple slap on the wrist because she basically called me stupid. I didn’t get in trouble with HR for going but later in that day she pulled me into her office and yelled at me for bringing HR into the mix rather than just talk to her directly because in her words, ‘she’s not an ogre that I can’t come to talk to about something she did.’
Boredom intermingled with terror.
“I was a lifeguard. It was hours upon hours of boredom intermingled with seconds of sheer terror.”
Pretty much could have died.
“So my first ever co-op job, I worked volunteer in a chemistry lab. The job description said that I would be ‘helping with the synthesis of new synthetic rubbers.’ Turns out that before I could get to that part, I had to ‘fix’ their chemical inventory. Essentially, my supervisor asked me to organize the chemicals they had in the lab and have it all documented in an excel spreadsheet. Easy-peasy right? WRONG.
This lab was past its prime. I never actually met the owner of the lab the entire time I worked there; he had tenure and for all I knew he just sent emails to my supervisor telling him what to do. The lab was actually three labs beside each other… each with its own ‘collection’ of chemicals. Thing is, since the supervisor was essentially in charge of the lab, he made decisions on what stuff to keep and what to toss. Turns out he has a bit of a hoarding problem, and there are just over 1,500 individual chemical items in the lab. Yes, I spent the next three months organizing, documenting, and disposing of that massive chemical inventory.
So there’s the normal stuff. All pretty vanilla stuff if you’ve worked in a lab before. But stuffed into the nooks and crannies of this lab lie some of the most horrific stuff you’ve ever seen. But I found some crazy stuff in there as well as unlabelled chemicals, mercury, and other elements that shouldn’t be stored together.
Out of all of those chemicals, a lot of them were well past their expiration date, and it was my job to dispose of them. Now, me being fresh out of high school and having completed two terms of university and never worked a real job before, I thought, ‘Well they’ve got to have like special bins for this right?’ I was so, so wrong.
‘Oh just uncap the lid and toss it in the open garbage bin.’
‘I’m sorry what? You mean the giant metal garbage bin that doesn’t have a lid?’
‘Yes, just throw the solid powders in there that look old.’
So there I am, pulling mostly unknown chemicals off of the shelves, documenting their contents and safety information, and then checking if they’re too old. If they look old, I uncap the container, throw the cap in the garbage, and then empty the contents of that container into the garbage can sitting beside me. Yes, there are powders that start puffing up into dust clouds. No, I don’t know what they really are most of the time. Yes, I am slightly concerned for my safety.
I’m halfway through a set of solids cabinets, and there’s this dark amber container. I can’t really see it, but the outside looks pretty done, not to mention the glass is a little cracked. So I’m like well here’s another one for the bin. Uncap the bottle, and then turn it upside down above the garbage bin. Splash. Out of that container comes about 400 mL of dark liquid, and it hits the massive pile of randomly mixed powder chemicals. My eyes just widen and I just freeze for about 30 seconds, just staring at the liquid as it starts to dissolve a lot of the powder in the bin. Eventually, my head kicks in and I just get out of the lab immediately. I’m cursing to myself, thinking I’ll be fired, but I guess my boss not caring about safety had a silver lining.
I call him up and tell him what happened, and he’s like, ‘_Oh whatever just go home and I’ll deal with it tomorrow morning.’ _Like the first year that I was, I just said,, ‘Well… I don’t know what to do. No one is around. I guess I go home.’ And that’s what I do. Next morning I come in, and the garbage is gone, the supervisor is just at his desk typing away. I ask him what he did with the garbage, and he’s like, ‘Oh I think the janitors just cleared it overnight.’ My heart sinks, and I’m starting to think of what poor janitor probably walked into a lab full of who knows what gas. In hindsight, the gas would have been cleared by the lab’s ventilation system by the time the janitor came around, but I could have killed someone. And here my supervisor is, not a single care to be given.
Now you know.
“I was a temp at a cheese factory. One day I spent nine hours scraping the mold off of 100-pound blocks of swiss and repackaging it. We had collect up and save the scrapings too for animal feed or something.
I spent an hour in the shower afterward and I still smelled like rotten cheese. Gross.”
Unbearable conditions.
“I worked in a granite quarry. You know in the old black and white movies where the prisoners were punished by making big rocks into smaller rocks with a 12-pound sledgehammer? That’s sort of what I did for a living.
Some parts of it were bearable but it was generally 120° in the hole during summer and seemed to always be below freezing in the winter. Swinging a sledgehammer hundreds of times in these conditions is brutal. The only people that the hard physical didn’t phase was my Mexican and Guatemalan coworkers. These dudes were superhuman. The heat didn’t bother them. They would be wearing long sleeves in June when the temp dipped into the 80’s, they were chilly. Also, that lazy Mexican trope is so much nonsense. I had to make them give me the hammer when it was my turn to pound in the wedges and the foot-spikes, otherwise, they would keep the sledgehammer and start down the line again. Any normal man would be physically exhausted from swinging the sledgehammer dozens of times. That goes for the jackhammer too. I laugh when I see one person running one on TV. It takes two people to run the monsters, at least ours did. Enter the Mexican and Guatemalan supermen. I would turn my back for one minute then feel the vibrations in the ground that you can feel when the jackhammer is, well, jacking. Turn around and there would be one of the guys running it by himself, defying the law of physics. When I later found out they send upwards of 80% or more of their check back home to their families my admiration grew. That was over 25 years ago. Much respect for these men. For me, however, it was the worst.”
Some of the worst gigs.
“Worked for UMG straight out of high school processing CD orders. I was 17, the only guy in the office, working with nothing but 40+-year-old women. Sweet Jesus, they had the raunchiest conversations that led me to discover the definition of too much information.
The work was fine and they had a massive backlog when I arrived. In the first week I cleared it all out and no one in the office had anything to do, including myself. I couldn’t browse the web. I brought a book into the office and was reading it, got yelled at by my supervisor for it. I explained that I had nothing to do and sitting around staring at nothing for eight hours a day was torture. I was asked about the backlog and told my manager it was done. She didn’t believe me so she checked for herself and then told me to come talk to her. After a week of coming to her every hour on the hour asking for something to do, she yelled at me again for bugging her. They eventually fired me for refusing to come in 10 minutes prior to my scheduled time, unpaid, and logging into the phones. There was nothing going on and I sure wasn’t going to sit around doing nothing for one more minute then I had to, much less unpaid.
A close second was many years later. I was brought in to package software for a company that had bought another company. They didn’t have a place for me to sit so they put me in an unheated warehouse. In the winter. With massive bay doors that opened up four to six times a day for deliveries. After working there for a month I still didn’t even have a computer to work on. After a month I got a computer but there was nothing for me to do still. It took me a week to track down my manager after this point and he said that they wouldn’t have work for me for a few more months. Then they brought on another guy for some reason to do the same job. We were both incredibly confused, to say the least. After another month and having read about two dozen books I just stopped showing up. I submitted my time and checked my email every day to see if there was any work to do as well as sent weekly emails asking if there were any tasks coming my way soon to my manager. Finally, after two months they caught on and let me go. I didn’t feel bad about it in the slightest.”
Shovel the guts.
“One summer I worked at a seafood distribution plant hauling all of the gut bins to the dump. They send you to a different part of the landfill because it’s all animal wastes. The smell is so bad. Vomit inducing. There’s no forklift at the dump so you have to shovel it out while fighting seagulls during some of the worst hangovers ever because you hate life all the time.”
Career change.
“Childcare for sure. I was a lead teacher for a toddler room. I got it in my head that I wanted to try teaching early childhood after being miserable working a call center job. I got my job at the daycare and I can say I regretted the choice after about a week.
I was stuck in the job for about a year and a half. Teachers were overworked, underpaid, and had nothing for benefits. You were never allowed to call off sick, so even if you were sick as can be you were still told to come in. I liked some of the kids and learning about early childhood development, but overall small children in large groups are a nightmare. I didn’t want to make my living changing diapers anymore so I quit and went back to customer service. I’m much happier now.”
Swing the bat.
“Cold calling people and trying to sell them funeral insurance in Australia. It was as awful as it sounds.
I did it for three weeks because I was between freelance jobs and didn’t want to sit around doing nothing.
On my last day, I got a lecture about being late and constantly missing the morning meetings, which was basically this mid 40-year-old guy enthusiastically praising workers who had managed to sell policies to over five people the previous day. I got a lecture that if I didn’t sell a minimum of five policies that day I’d be fired.
The main boss was furious at me for deceiving her but within five minutes of being on the phone, I sold two policies. Well, on Fridays, the company had this motivational scheme with a Piñata dangling from the ceiling. If you sold two policies, you got to swing at the piñata. The boss reluctantly handed me the bat, and I swung at that piñata so hard, it swung back up and shattered part of the ceiling and dislocated a fluorescent tube. Candy went everywhere. A few people were on the floor laughing and the boss lost the plot at me. She took some packaging tape and put the donkeys head back together, and fixed it back on the ceiling. She left, but a few minutes later, I had made a sale again. The chill boss handed me the bat, and I destroyed it again.
I was not allowed to hit the piñata the rest of the day, and I was told at 5:00 p.m., I needed to promptly leave the office.”
Telling off The Man.
“Internship at a public relations firm in college. I was promised agency experience, writing opportunities, and valuable experience. Turns out what they actually meant was ‘sitting in a room for eight hours cold-calling CEOs from an outdated call list and trying to trick them into a sales presentation.’
Might I add, about a month into the job they hired a new intern manager, who was the epitome of Massachusetts trash. He drove to work every day from the Cape on his Harley, lauded his degree from Bunker Hill Community College, chain-smoked, and DJ’ed on the side at trash north shore nightclubs. He insisted on sitting in the room with us, for eight hours to check if we were actually making calls, all while berating us for being poor employees and cheap labor.
On my last day of the internship, he called me into his office and told me, ‘the only reason you are still here is because we didn’t have to pay you. You’ll never be successful like me. You’re not cut out for the business world, if I were you, I would drop out and try to find a trade you’ll succeed in.’
Even as a 19-year old, I knew an idiot when I saw one. I looked him square in the eye, told him off, and walked out with the other interns. He then wrote a letter of complaint to my school to try and have my internship credit revoked, but luckily my advisor knew the situation and cut him out.”