Quote:
Originally Posted by Needbmwpartzz
Thought this would be a neat topic for a thread.
Tell me of the most horrible/dangerous/physically exhausting or just a job you hated for whatever reason....this could be a paid job or any job that went terribly wrong like a home renovation that was more work/cost than you thought etc etc.
In my teens I worked for a chicken catching company and this was shittiest,smelliest,and physically exhausting job.....at the end of the work day your covered in shit/scratched and exhausted.
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Easy: working for my father was the worst job I ever had. I worked out of the maintenance shop of his real estate company. I was a building maintenance carpenter's assistant, or to put it bluntly, laborer. I did whatever I was asked to do and that was pretty much the job description.
- The work was physically demanding (compared to most other summer jobs my friends had). Try being a skinny kid climbing on a slippery ladder through an accessway to a roof while holding a five gallon can of roofing tar. Then repeat the trip to bring multiple cans up to the roof after which you have to then work on the roof in the blazing sun, often enough having also to heat the tar and wear protective clothing so you don't burn yourself.
- I had to go to some of the most unsavory parts of town at times. Not such a big deal now, but as a teenager, it was scary.
- Sometimes the work was downright disgusting, such as having to fix a clogged or overflowed toilet that was full of feces and as often as not had urine and excrement on the floor as well. A few of those overflowed commodes had spilled enough water that the ceiling of the unit below also needed to be repaired/replaced. No matter how nice the building, there are invariably roaches, and occasionally mice, dead mice, birds, bats, or other critters, and/or their feces in between floors or between ceiling and a roof. One just never knew what to one was in for until one got there to see. Plus, whenever one works around bugs, there's always the risk that they or their eggs will end up coming home in one's clothes/shoes.
- Speaking of bugs, I once was walking around the lawn at one of Dad's buildings and stepped on a yellow-jack nest. I didn't know it until I got stung and saw a cloud of the damn things forming around me. I dropped everything and ran like crazy around the building and into the back entrance. I had to go back at night and destroy the nest.
Another summer I had to help remove a hornets' nest from a passive exhaust vent. Fortunately we knew what we were headed for and had the appropriate gear. I still got stung a few times and it hurt like a MF!
It wasn't those buildings, but the pics should give you the general gist of what was going on. Obviously, the trick is to get rid of the next and not flood the tenant's apartment with hornets. 
We didn't "flood" the place with hornets, but we left a note telling the tenant they might have to kill one or two that may have gotten past us. 
I'm just glad it wasn't as bad as this...
As much as I hated the job overall, it wasn't always horrible, and the job had its upsides as well:
- It paid really well, better than all my friends' summer jobs did. And don't think I was doing all that stuff alone.
- I wasn't working alone, so it wasn't boring.
- Blue collar types have, to say the least, a colorful way of seeing the world around them. Being "a fly on the wall" for some of their conversations was enlightening and entertaining at times.
- I learned many useful household maintenance skills: pluming, electrical work, wall, floor and ceiling repair/installation, painting, glass cutting, door installation, lock picking and/or drilling, woodworking, the hard way and the easy way to do certain things, etc.
- It was kind of cool to see some of the stuff I'd learned in geometry class applied in real life. It was somewhat artful to see the carpenter applying the principles I'd studied, all the while knowing the only thing he knew about Euclid was that it is the name of several streets in D.C. and that we had properties on each of them. LOL All the same, those skills have come in handy at multiple points in my life since then, sometimes in an immediately practical way, other times just because I'm aware of them and "how stuff works."
All in all, my description of my worst job is but a reflection of it's having been the worst one I've had. I know without a doubt there are worse jobs and that unlike my high school summer job, they perform them for a living.
After high school, I never have had a job that I really didn't like, although the few I have had since then have all had elements that I really don't and didn't like.
- I hated having to give students an "F" when I was teaching. That led me to give more "essay"/unaided recall test questions rather than multiple choice/true false ones. At least I could give partial credit for essays-type answers. Multiple choice stinks for the student because for whatever they do know, if they choose the wrong answer, they get no credit.
- I hate having to dismiss people from a project or from the firm in general. Even when doing so is justified and/or necessary, I hate doing it. I hate it so much that I'll often reach out to associates and coordinate getting the person a new job/role, making sure both parties know the circumstances that brought the three of us together in that moment. Most of the times I've done that, things work out for everyone and I feel somewhat better about how it had to play out along the way.
- I hate doing things for the money rather than because it's the right/best thing to do.
All the best.