Worst job you ever had

[dogfish]

So let's hear em.

Mine was working in a fast food place when I was a kid, cleaning the fry vats once a month. The owner was also a little sadistic, and made us scrub the floors with pure bleach. I can still remember coughing from that, sucked big time, but I needed the money.

[surferman]

Dog walker as a teenager. I hated it! Picking up all that crap was not for me.

[bababooey]

When I was in high school, I worked the last summer for an excavating company. One time we were digging a hole near a sidewalk, and they didn't use the digging box, they said it wasn't that bad. My friend had the sides collapse on him. I climbed out in time, tried to pull him, but I couldn't. They ended up getting the fire and rescue people and digging him out. I stopped working for the guy after that, big OSHA investigation anyway. That was enough for me.

[CharlieTuna]

So let's hear em.

Mine was working in a fast food place when I was a kid, cleaning the fry vats once a month. The owner was also a little sadistic, and made us scrub the floors with pure bleach. I can still remember coughing from that, sucked big time, but I needed the money.

I worked fry vats when I was a kid too. Good motivation to keep going to school.

[skinner]

Had a job in a supermarket in high school. I was the stock boy/cleanup crew. One night an old lady walks through the aisle. She had an accident and left some nuggets behind. Guess who got to clean it up?

[nitestrikes]

I worked for a paving company one year. The boss was a mean SOB. He used to yell at us all the time to work faster. He didn't get a lot of repeat work. Got a lot of business as the cheapest, turnover was high. I had it after the summer.

[DarkSkies]

I had a cleaning service that got called on by the state for "specialty" jobs that no one else wanted. My people were honest, and we were trusted in areas where seniors had a history of being victimized. Some short recollections of "best of" moments--

1. Old lady living in senior housing, apt filled to the brim with junk, roaches, and rotten food. We had to convince her to stay downstairs in the lobby while we did the job, only way to work it. There were maggots, flies, and roaches everywhere. We ended up throwing 75% of her belongings in the dumpsters, too roach-infested to save. Even after spraying, there were literally thousands of roaches crawling on the walls of her apt, started streaming out into the hall, freaking the other residents out. (the lady had been scheduled for eviction that week.) This apt was a perfect setting for a Stephen King movie.

Then when whe returned to the apt, accused me and workers of "stealing" meat from her refrigerator. I explained the meat was maggot infested, but she didn't care/ I had to go to the supermarket and shop for $60 worth of groceries to replace what we "stole" from her.

2. Another old lady in senior housing, bad eyesight. Only had a few roaches, but she would not believe she had mice living in the apt until I brought her back in, and showed her 5 separate colonies of newborn mice living underneath her furniture. I crushed them with my boots when she left. She was one of the more appreciative ones. She and her daughter could not thank us enough for giving her a fresh start.



The best for last:

3. One lady living in a 2 fam house with 27 cats. Board of health called us in before her court date, complaints from the neighbors. I can not be descriptive enough in describing the smells coming from this house - you really had to be there. Suffice it to say, 2 of the 5 people I brought into the house to help me ran outside and puked in the backyard, couldn't handle it. So I promised the remaining ones double time, and a special bonus when done.

Even with the special suits, there were times when I just threw my work clothes away at the end of the day. Not one roach here, but there were these special "excrement bugs" that were everywhere, cat feces all over the first floor. It was the only house that I ever had to use a powerwasher to clean the walls and floors on the 1st floor. Can you imagine the damage that hot water does to walls and wood floors?

Worst part of the job was when I opened a closet upstairs, and found a bag with about 10 dead cat skeletal remains inside. When I asked her why she did this, she said "Well sometimes they die, and I am embarassed, and don't know what to do with them". We "rescued" about 5 newborn kittens from that house without her knowledge, and paid to have them taken in at shelters.

4. Were contacted by the Board of Health, and the state, to help a woman caring for her handicapped mother in a 1 fam, upper middle class area. Only problem noticable from the outside was the house was a little "unkempt", and smelled a little funny.

Once you got inside, you knew why. A split level, the whole living space in the living room and the kitchen was covered 2" thick in human feces. I have experience getting people to open up in these situations, so I got her to reveal to me that while caring for her mother, who was incontinent, she sometimes filled the crap bags a little "too much", and they broke before she would get them outside.

This was another case where workers puked when entering the house, and had to be promised double time and special bonuses if they would just help complete the job.

After that job was done, I had to promise: that's it - we are done with these types of jobs, no more.

[paco33]

^^^ So we take crap from our boss, and you had to shovel it? Actually, I worked in a stable for awhile. Shoveling crap isn't the best job in the world. And we didn't get put in TV like Mike Rowe.