No one gets fulfilling work all the time. I certainly haven’t. As long as I can pay my bills, I will endure it until I can (finally) find something better.
My worst job was during my 2nd summer of university. Being a lousy student and the fact we were in the midst of a recession at the time, I couldn’t find any summer engineering job worthy of the name. It was the summer of attempting to sell knives (fuck you CutCo) and selling vacuum cleaners door to door.
I made it thru the Cutco seminar and that was it. Vacuum cleaners… I actually lasted a month as a Kirby door to door salesperson (cough independent contractor cough) and sold four of the damn things.
However, I learned a few things.
The first lesson was people are freaks. I got physically thrown out of a house once because the old guy wanted the paper towels, but snapped when he saw the vacuum. I’m sure that the Watchtower folks got the same treatment. It got better… I was hit on by a couple who I had sold a vacuum to… it seemed like a cuckold thing as the wife looked me over like a piece of raw meat and the husband just stared at me while my “team” leader negotiated the sale. The worst was actually the Kirby dealer’s wife who took me under my wing, but freaked 20 year old sexually naive me out because I got the sense she was a sexual shark and I was… well… the naive chum. I quit a week after I got placed on the wife’s team. When I saw the film “To Die For”, a few years later… I felt that this chum dodged a bullet.
The 2nd lesson that earning money is hard and sucks.
The 3rd and most important lesson, don’t ever sell vacuums door to door again.
in my experience….theres no such thing as a worst job
its shitty leadership thats the problem
ive worked everything from fucking flower picking to being a mechanic….its a fucking wide range
its not the work thats bad…its who you work with
I got my first summer job in High School cleaning the schools over the break. Working in the Elementary Schools was the worst. First day on the job I was handed a putty knife and told to scrape off the bottom of the desks. I won’t go into the details, suffice it to say that little kids are disgusting.
Overall it wasn’t too bad though, a couple of my friends worked with me. When we moved to one of the Middle Schools one of them hauled some gym mats up into the rafters and made a hiding place where we could smoke weed. And we took turns napping up there, covering for each other with our boss.
I never really hated any of my jobs. As long as I had at least one coworker I could relate to I was fine.
One summer in high school I loaded vegetable trucks in Chicago’s South Water Market. 50 lb sacks of potatoes and 100 lb sacks of carrots. It was good money but at the end of the week I got dressed up and took my girlfriend out to dinner but was so exhausted that I fell asleep in the restaurant.
Just one summer. I decided I wasn’t really cut out for work.
The summer before I started college I was a dishwasher at a now defunct 24-hour restaurant chain called Sambo’s. Yes, it was originally racist as fuck, and had been slightly rebranded to not be quite so overt. But it’s gone now. That was the worst job I ever had. The job was nasty and unpleasant, but I also had to bus tables and mop the floors, which had to be done while customers were there, since it never closed. I had so many asshole customers bitching about me mopping the floors. I’m like, I don’t have a choice here.
I will say that my mom once told me, “I know this job is awful. But anywhere you go from here is up.”
I fell for a flier right after college that said something like “Organize for the Environment” and when I showed up the “training seminar” was actually getting handed a list of numbers to cold call and ask for donations.
I did not dial many numbers and I did not try to convince many people, and I quickly left.
It was some Ralph Nader group and when he later pulled his stunt in 2000 it only added to the antipathy I already felt toward him. I mean, screw GM, but c’mon Ralph, this stuff isn’t right.
Out of high school I delivered documents via moped downtown. We were paid by how many documents we delivered so I drove as fast as I could. I was hit twice which was a fireable offense though neither was my fault. One was hit & run while the other one I went over his hood before I charged him to beat the shit out of him. He started to get out of his car then saw me with fire in my eyes & took off. I lasted less than a month.
You dodged a bullet with CutCo too. One of my friends got conned into it. I vaguely remember her having to fork up $100 or something for the set of demo knives. She sold some knives to her mom and that was the end of that job.
Call center for a national fast casual chain. I had great coworkers. It was just the customer such entitled little fucks. It was soul-destroying. “Oh my bread was smaller than my friends, the worker did that on purpose!” “The butter was too cold to spread on my bread, I demand to speak to the regional manager!” etc etc. Some people got so mad they threatened us, like legit had a man ask how I would feel if he came to my office parking lot and found me with some guns.
NOPE not worth it. Not at all.