

What's the worst job you've had outside technology? - watmough

What's the 'worst' job you've had outside of technology, and did you enjoy it more or less than what you do now?
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philwelch
Telephone survey taker. Much less. In fact, I hated it worse than being a
nighttime post-event arena janitor.

Most people assume you're a telemarketer if you call them to do a survey, so
they hang up. By policy, anyone who hung up had to be called back because we
officially assumed their phone line spontaneously glitched. Anybody who said
they weren't interested and hung up _before we clarified we were taking a
survey_ had to be called back because we officially assumed they thought we
were telemarketers. (They weren't called back right away, but put back in the
hopper for future autodialing.) So I'm pretty sure my employer was evil. On
top of that, one of our common survey techniques was to mail people a
videotape with a terrible sitcom pilot on it, and then ask them about the ads
we put on the videotape. On the initial setup call we act like we want them to
review the sitcom, and they're like, "Sure, I like sitcoms!". I never saw the
tape, but I was told the show itself was atrocious, and the technique was
simply to get them to see the ad.

There were interesting parts (doing a survey for a bank, I spoke to a Texas
millionaire who was more than happy to talk, in detail, about how much he
hated Smith Barney, and made disparaging remarks about "yankee banks"; old
lifelong female smokers whose gender I couldn't easily distinguish over the
phone; drunk hockey fans upset at me for calling during the Stanley Cup
Finals; being briefed on the proper pronunciation of California placenames for
a political survey, and then listening to strong political opinions and
suspicions of bias when in fact I knew little and cared less about the issue
in the first place). I had fun using a pseudonym, met a girl at work, lost my
virginity. As far as bad jobs go, it definitely had its good parts.

In any job where you have to deal with the public, you have a facade of fake
niceness which overcomes you. You call everyone "sir" or "ma'am", talk calmly,
try to sound like you're smiling. Well, I was working on Father's Day, and
apparently some people _get really pissed off about being called on Father's
Day_. Specifically this one guy, whose voice and tone and anger had exactly
the right qualities--ironically, very similar to those of my _own_ father--to
instantly piss me off. He started cussing me out, and instantly the calmness
and patience wore off, with just enough left of my facade of fake niceness
left to vigorously shout into the headset " _fuck you too, sir!_ " I was more
or less fired on the spot for lacking the mellowness of my coworkers, who by
and large smoked copious amounts of marijuana.

Epilogue: For the next couple weeks, I went into work with aforementioned girl
every Friday to pick up my last paychecks. The managers seemed somewhat
displeased about that.

Some time later, I got back in touch with the girl (who I had stopped seeing).
The whole dialing system was routed through a computer, which also handled
timekeeping and statistics and so forth, so if you took a break you'd log that
on the computer. She told me someone found a bug in their computer system so
you could actually take an indefinite paid break and no one would be the
wiser. Shortly after that the call center went out of business.

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pg
Working at the Baskin Robbins in the mall that was the scene of Dawn of the
Dead.

Much, much less.

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piehen
Pay-wise, worst I ever had was my first job as a kitchen porter at a 'local'
hotel. £1.60p/h and it was a 3 mile walk to get there (buses were once every 2
hours and 2hrs wages). I once did a 22hr shift with one half hour break when
the other 2 KP's failed to show. Earned just over £20 after tax for that :)
The minimum wage kicked in a year later and would nearly tripled my pay if I
hadn't quit.

Worst otherwise: cardboard box production line. Worked on the gloriously named
ZOR-D machine. It had a speed dial that went up to 21 but anything over 8
resulted in instant jamming. Of course the floor boss would always run over
and turn it right up to prevent slacking. Cue 40 minutes unclogging machinery.
Worst part though was washing your hands at breaks/end of day. You'd have
thousands of tiny paper cuts and applying water would cause what we knew as
'involuntary fisting' (ooh er!). Your hands would clamp shut as the acids
reacted.

I enjoyed both these jobs considerably less than my current work.

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watmough
Lots of interesting posts, and not exactly what I expected, so I thought I'd
chime in with mine.

The only three non-tech jobs I've ever done were working as a dishwasher in a
small Scottish hotel, driving taxis in my hometown, and selling cars in
Houston Texas.

The kitchen porter job was my first job out of school, and was great money for
university, maybe a few hundred dollars a week equivalent, and it turned out
to be a great way of getting exposed to parties, booze and the attractive
young women also working in the hotel, who were picked mainly for their looks.
I did wait tables on weekends, but my main task was washing dishes and
silverware, and cleaning the kitchen one the rest of the staff had gone home.

Driving taxis in my hometown was also a fun job, but with long hours and the
risk of finding yourself many miles from home at 2am on any given morning.
Since cell phones weren't that commonplace in 1989 or so, and the radios were
quite short-range, there was scope for improvisation on fares and passengers,
so you could be your own little company for short periods. The worst aspect of
this job was fending off drunks and making people who knew the 'boss' actually
hand over money.

Most recently, and probably the worst job was selling cars in the Texas heat.
Still a lot of fun at times, with some interesting customers, with the worst
aspect being the fact that dealerships use your honest face as a wedge for
their lies about, well, everything. Wasn't too upset to see the back of that
job.

Thanks again for all the responses. :)

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faramarz
Stand in front of a giant injection moulding machine and wait for the clamp to
open up and the finish product would drop into a box.

of course, it never did, because the air blowers were broken, so every 30sec I
had to open and manually remove the product (I think it was miniature plastic
tree) from the clamp and close it, otherwise it would close with the product
in it. Repeat this all day. Thats when I decided I hate routines.

The boss was my grandfather, and I couldn't say no to the job.

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nbakshi
I came to USA for my masters degree in Computer Engineering. Coming from a
financially weak family, I had to work in my university's dining hall for my
day to day expenses. There were variety of jobs in the Dining hall, one could
be a Chef's assistant, a salad bar attendant, or cashier. The job I hated the
most was that of dish washing, just because you don't have to use any brain,
its a very mechanical job. Looking back at my career now, I think this is the
worst job I ever had.

~~~
natep
huh. I worked in a dining hall for a while, but only as cashier. I think I
might have liked dishwasher, though, because my favorite non-programming jobs
have all involved manual labor. Top 3: moving sound equipment, moving
students' stuff in and out of temporary storage, and moving furniture into and
out of dorms.

~~~
nbakshi
I am surprised with how you are surprised my _my_ preference. Well I guess its
each man to his own.

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stuntgoat
Scraping bird poo from the inside of large outdoor bird cages. While the birds
scream and flap from above, I wear a rain jacket and scrap the cement floors
with a putty knife. This was my first job and lowest paying job when I was 10.
It was also only 3-4 hours a week.

Obviously, I like what I do now more than that job. But I am not currently
working in tech.

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albahk
In my early twenties I worked as an entry-level property agent (realtor) in
Hong Kong for a small-time agency. No minimum wage system exists so I got paid
about US$650 per month and had to work 6 full days (right up until 7pm on
Saturday nights). Job involved wearing a suit running around showing flats,
meeting clients in 35 degree C heat and 99% humidity (no joke). In the office
I had to cold call property owners and large companies to pitch our services.
At slow times I stood on the sidewalk handing out flyers for properties. All
the while having to swallow my pride in huge amounts when dealing with rude
and unreasonable clients.

I enjoyed this much less than my current job and feel stupid for having fallen
for the con of potentially lucrative commissions that never happened. Live and
Learn I guess.

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zbyszek
I worked in a canteen kitchen at the dish-wash end. The diners would put their
trays on a conveyer belt and we would scrape the leftovers into the waste
disposal, sort the dishes, cutlery and glassware into their allotted crates
which we then fed into the giant dishwasher. It was fast, frantic, filthy and
hot work. Among the diners were bastards who made things difficult in
interesting ways; I remember digging teaspoons out of elaborate mashed potato
sculptures, and there was the time when some joker trapped a wasp in an
upturned glass on their tray before handing it in to us.

I got on very well with my fellow workers there, though, many of whom did that
for living, whereas I was just passing through, earning some cash as an
undergraduate.

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stretchwithme
I actually worked on a garbage truck for a couple a years in my early 20s. And
not in a unionized situation where the weight was regulated. Lovely weather in
upstate New York with bitterly cold winter more than offset by sweltering
summers.

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mindcrime
Construction crew on a group building a golf course. One day my job was -
literally - to walk around and pick up rocks and sticks and what-not. In the
98 degree heat and sweltering humidity of NC in the summertime... with no
shade to be found. For not much more than minimum wage.

Outside of that, my dad was in the logging business when I was a kid, so I
worked summers during high-school helping him cut down trees and load them
onto a truck to haul to the paper mill. That was more being outside, doing
hard physical labor, in NC, in the summertime. And I'm not even sure I got
paid, now that I think about it... :-)

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limedaring
My first job was working in the Pear Sheds... growing up in an agricultural
area, the factories that would sort the pears coming off of the orchards would
often hire HS students during peak season. Thankfully since I was underage I
only had to work 60 hours/week (10 hours/day, 6 days/week), standing since we
couldn't sit down, staring at a convener belt of pears going by and throwing
the blemished/bad ones onto two other convener belts. F'ing monotonous, 7am to
6pm.

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pierrefar
I worked in a hospital's lab one summer. The three things I remember the most
are counting sperm under the microscope (which smells really really bad),
helping out with Pap smear analysis (which looks really really bad), and being
the pee-on intern who, yep, gets first dibs in processing the urine samples as
they come in (which smell really really bad).

Worst job? Yes and no. I went on to do a PhD in bacterial genetics.

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klaut
Being an assistant in a winter coats shop during summer holidays. I was 13 and
it was my first job. I was bored all day because we never got any customers -
this was in a seaside town and you can imagine that people do not tend to go
buy winter coats during summer while they are going home from the day at the
beach :)

~~~
sentinel
That sounds like a great business model.

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kmano8
Working retail at cvs. For a given 8 hour shift on a saturday, I figured most
of these people are coming in to relieve some kind of sickness. I can only
imagine how many things I was exposed to.

Thinking about the job now, perhaps I came out of it all with a stronger
immune system.

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mrlyc
Calling between 60 and 100 companies a day and asking why they haven't paid. I
did that for three years while I saved up to go to college.

I'm a programmer so I'm unemployed and not doing anything now, apart from
fiddling around with the Linux kernel which is much more interesting.

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c1sc0
Summer job working in a supermarket as a teenager. I actually preferred
working the cash register to stocking the aisles. At least at the cash
register you can have a little fun & try to rig the total bill. Most stupid
job ever: turning apples so the red side points up.

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petervandijck
Industrial cleaning. Enjoyed it much less than what I do now.

~~~
petervandijck
Although car manufacturing (in a GM factory) was up there with worst jobs, but
it paid well. You think repetitive strain injury in desk jobs is bad? Try
putting the same screw in a car for 10 hours, for months.

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staunch
Sanding dry wall. Oh so much less.

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napierzaza
Managed a fish market for a year. Was working 12 hour days cutting, smoking
and preparing fish for customers. YOu'd get home and be so tired and used to
the smell that you'd just go to sleep without a shower.

After a certain amount of sleep deprivation you start cutting yourself
accidentally pretty often.

Every week we had to open up the counters and chop up the ice underneath
because the drain was always clogged. The ice was usually yellow or red. We
also had to periodically dump the giant bins of fish refuse and take out the
trash to the street. We were pretty universally reviled because we stunk up
the entire street.

If I did it now I probably would have gotten laid more, but I didn't then.

But I ate lobsters, blue marlin, and tuna with regularity. So it's not all bad
(except that the fish contain potassium benzoate).

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dnsworks
The only job I've had outside of technology, I worked two summers on a
neighbor's farm, age 12 and 13. Half of the day I would shovel chicken manure,
the other half I would "bail" hay and straw. This process consisted of
standing in a rickety wooden trailer, guiding bails into neat stacks with a
big metal hook. The bails were about 40-60 lbs depending on how wet they were,
and they flew at your head around 30-40 mph. If you're lucky the tractor
driver is paying attention to your pace. If not you're picking up bails that
just hit you in the head a moment ago.

I love working in technology.

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alnayyir
Warehouse stocking, nearly got pneumonia from working in a -20F freezer.

