Next weekend I go back to my alma mater to talk to college kids about jobs, specifically, jobs in my industry. At a time when the business I work in is shrinking somewhat—and hey, what business isn’t?—I still generally feel upbeat about it, and very fortunate to have a job. But going back to campus reminds me of all the weird interim jobs I did to make extra cash while I was getting edumacated.
There was a summer stint as an audiologist for public schools, where I tested elementary school kids’ hearing to see if they qualified for special ed assistance. There was a temp job for a labor union where I spent nearly a month sorting through box after box of death certificates, which was both tedious as hell and intriguing in a ghoulishly voyeuristic way: heart attack, heart attack, cancer, heart attack…ooh, lightning strike! There were a couple of college years where I led Saturday morning tours for prospective students and their families, showing off our picturesque historic campus and hoping there would be no puddles of Friday-night vomit outside the dorms. I nearly got fired from that job for my response to a high school senior who asked if there were any gay kids at my school because “I don’t wanna live with a lot of homos.” After college I went straight into the white collar grind, which has its upside—health insurance, air-conditioning—and its downside: eyestrain, stiff neck, too many meetings.
What’s your favorite or least favorite job that you’ve ever done? Gold stars awarded to the ladies (or gents) with the toughest, ickiest, or downright weirdest gig.
All my jobs were really boring. I was breakfast waitress, a silver service waitress, worked in bars and was (am I suppose) a qualified secretary doing legal and medical work.
The best job not related to my career that I did was working in an antiquarian bookshop – weirdly a job that lated helped me land a scholarship to study in the US as it happened to be one of the judging panel’s favourite shops (which was odd in itself as it was a tiny shop hidden down a back street near Threadneedle St in the City of London).
Love this topic. I have a story that I’ll have to type up later, since I’m headed out the door, but OH LAWS, I have had every horrible crap job out there. Except home health aide.
My weirdest job was my first. When I was fifteen, my dad got me a job with a coke-addled artist who needed help with his junk art. He had a really cool building, IIRC. I spent the summer coating random bits of hardware and old furniture with a healthy coating of primer while the guy romped around in the upper floors of the warehouse with his various boy-toys.
I spent the next summer working in a factory, weighing and greasing ball bearings prior to shipment.
It’s not a horrible job per se, and I did come away with a lot of respect for people who work in the restaurant business, but my first job as a hostess at a family-style restaurant was a mess. I was a smart kid, but had zero social skills and I almost tossed their house dressing on more than one occasion because I thought it was slop water. (It was in a big bucket, and it did look like dirty water.) And I think I might have held the record for most cakes dropped in a single work week. It made me realize I’m completely ill-equipped to work around food or people.
hey, i might know that bookshop! that is right near where i work.
My weirdest jobs were as PAs to casting directors and a film publicist. Not weird on paper, but in reality it was a complete shitshow. Give me people accused of hideous crimes any day over movie people!
Lessee. I worked in two bakeries (not simultaneously or sequentially) where I had to be at work before 5 am. So I was waking up around 4 to get there on time. I delivered pizza for two years, which is actually rather dangerous. I was given counterfeit bills and nearly mugged; yanked inside peoples houses against my will, offered shots as tips, groped, hit on, etc. I carried pepper spray on my key chain. I deliver hibachi/sushi food now. I was a hostess at a Buffalo Wild Wings. Most of my jobs have been food jobs that led to a lot of people yelling at me for stupid things that didn’t matter and weren’t my fault, just because they could. I have some doozies in the way of stories.
My favorite bad job story was from the summer after my freshman year of college.
I was working in a Real Estate title office, owned by friends of my parents. They didn’t actually need my help, but they hired me anyway, and in consequence, I ended up doing a bunch of menial tasks.
The worst was shredding paper. My boss had me research electronic shredders, and I picked out a low-cost cross cut shredder. However, he never bought it. Instead, I shredded paper *by hand* for up to 8 hours a day.
I can’t even describe the hand cramps!
My worst job was being a secretary to a VP of a mortgage company right after college. The people were all just hideously awful. Sexual harassment galore. Plus, I’m pretty sure my boss was on coke. So that made for some charming mood swings.
I’ve had so many jobs though, the physically hardest was waitress.
I think I can win for weirdest job: I worked for a small courier service that shipped nothing but horse semen. I would drive to a farm, pick up a box with specimens packed away, and drive it to the airport. If I arrived at the farm early, I could watch the collection process. (This job was also responsible for my most comical interaction with a cop when he asked what the boxes in my car were when stopped for speeding. Nothing like saying “Oh, it’s horse semen!” in a very cheerful voice to get you out of a ticket.)
After that, waiting tables was all down hill.
For a couple of summers in grad school, I worked in the research corn fields for seed company. In addition to taking notes on the growth rate of plants, I worked in the corn nursery artificially breeding corn plants. It involved covering the shoots with tiny paper condoms until the tassels emerged, and collecting the pollen in larger paper bags and attaching it to the emerging shoot so that no plant inadvertently bred with any other plant.
I actually liked it because it was such a respite from my grad work in humanities, and I had the tan of lifetime, as all of the work was outdoors in a midwestern summer. My friends called me the Bronze Goddess.
I’m rilly rilly old and have been working the same job for 34 years and it has been both the best and worst. I’m a groundskeeper at a large campus of a community college that also has a farm and forest land. I hated being indoors as a kid so this has been ideal. The meanies at the main campus pretty much leave me alone so I do as I please most days. Before this I worked in a sawmill, as a waitress and in various factories, all pretty awful. I truly disliked gender-segregated work and have managed to avoid it.
My two least favorite jobs were such because I found them abhorrently gross, even though my current career is pretty nasty, too. I volunteered at the small town recycling center, full of crazy cat lady cat food cans (unwashed and sitting in garages for months on end) and enough beer cans to drown yourself in, from one family, who clearly was hosting a beer fest in the middle of the corn fields. I did my externship at a small animal clinic, where expressing the anal glands of impacted cats and dogs was the absolute limit to my strong stomach. Kudos to the small animal nurses and vets of the world.
My 2nd favorite job was working at the local bowling alley when I was a college kid. Ever seen that old episode of the Simpsons where Homer lives his dream of working at the bowling alley? Spot On. Within 24 hours, every single bowling alley regular knows your name and they are genuinely super-friendly. They will actually applaud you when you help clear a lane or fix the pin-setter. Unbelievably fun job.
Almost as good as the job I have now…library clerk at a large university library. So. Many. Books. Droooooool.
Best job so far: working at a tiny, educational magazine for the best boss in the world. He really believed in me and trained me, and I loved the writing, the sense of satisfaction seeing the magazine go out the door every month, and online every week. The rapport we had was unparalleled in any situation I’ve had before or since. I’ve never met anyone outside my family who thought so much like I did.
Worst job wasn’t so terrible, really, but it showed me the horrors of boring, soul-crushing “just jobs.” I worked as a temp at a commercial fishing company. Lots of paperwork. The most interesting part was trying to explain in mime to the non-English-speaking, mostly Mexican immigrants (alas, I spoke no Spanish whatsoever) how really, really, unbelievably cold it was going to be on a boat in Alaska in the winter, and why they really needed a good, warm coat, and no, the sweatshirt wasn’t going to cut it. The worst part was seeing the reams of paperwork these six women processed, endlessly, all day, and how the only joy in their lives came from going out for drinks afterwards, and looking forward to the youngest one’s impending wedding. It inspired me to finish my college degree, and it showed me the wasteland I wanted to avoid.
Oh, and processing all the workers comp claims for severed or mutilated digits, hands and limbs. Cause tuna are REALLY BIG and floppy and strong. And you don’t want one falling on you.
Everyone should have to wait tables for a few months. And everyone should work retail, too, so they learn how to behave as patrons.
One of the less-usual jobs I had was as an industrial painter, scraping paint off concrete landings in dormitory emergency exit staircases with nasty chemicals and wire brushes, then re-painting them.
But the weirdest not-horrible work experience was an acting gig. Sort-of-acting. I was hired for some rich people’s Valentine’s Day dinner party to read/perform the last couple of pages of Joyce’s Ulysses. Molly Bloom’s run-on, stream of consciousness story? Yeah. It was supposed to be the quick, 15-minute deal but they kept me there for hours, plying me with wine and cake and requesting that I read them love poems (they were all asked to bring poems to share) and asking me about my exotic, poverty-stricken grad student life. I felt like Sarah Bernhardt, only totally not.
The grossest thing I had to do in the line of duty was clean up a kid with learning difficulties who had diarrhoea. It was running down his legs and he was leaping around the bathroom, flicking it off his feet.
However, that was actually the best job I ever had. Working in a special school is great, you get to go on lots of school trips (I went on at least one a week, if you include community visits. They were just trips to cafes and shops, but they were fun). And the kids are mostly lovely. The worst job I ever had was in a call centre, doing surveys. I’ve done the holy trilogy of crappy jobs: retail, food, and call centre.
Well, I’ve shoved a lot of non-metaphorical shit in my life. And had my arms all up inside some poor cow’s lady bidness. But that’s all pretty expected when you grow up on a farm.
I have a friend who can beat anyone for ickiest job though: one summer he worked for the local museum, removing all of the flesh from a rotting whale carcass. It’s pretty hard to get ickier than that. Not only is it rotting – a face mask did not protect him from the stench – but there is just so much of it!
Oh, and evil_fizz, if that had been bull semen, it might have been me doing the collecting!
I really enjoyed spending a couple of summers as an assistant to a children’s librarian. I got the job by being willing to dress as Arthur the Aardvark for three days.
Oh man, I’ve had a lot of jobs. All of the ones before and during college were pretty typical – hostess, waitress (I was horrible), sales associate (gee, I get to refold the Dockers wall again today, oh goody), store clerk, etc. I have a ton of funny, sad, horrifying, rage-inducing stories from my years working in psychiatric hospitals. The job that still pokes at my heart, though, was working as a counselor in a K-5 classroom at a special school for seriously emotionally disturbed children. Great program, great staff, and I loved my kids. I had some awesome moments during my time there that I still draw on for hope and inspiration when I am feeling down about the world.
So at the close of the work day, ladies,
Ickiest job trophy: Nicola. The thought of someone with the runs “flicking diarrhea off his feet” is so gag-arific it’s making me light-headed. Although wondering’s friend would also be a contender if we were accepting second-hand stories.
Most outlandish job trophy: Evil Fizz, jizz-chauffeur.
Toughest job trophy: All y’all who worked in food service. At least, you can have it until the home health or sex workers show up in this thread.
VOTING IS STILL OPEN, THOUGH, SO TELL YOUR STORIES! MORE TROPHIES MAY BE AWARDED!
I worked at Johnny Rockets in high school. I had to wear the ridiculous hat, dance every half hour or so, and deal with the cook who was ten years my senior who had a crush on me because I was a blond, virginal teenager. It was good because I made a lot of money for a high school student, but it was pretty terrible because I was the only kid in my class at school who worked (one of the very, very few kids in the whole school who actually had to get a job) and people from school would come in, request to sit at my table, and be either delightful or heinously soul suckingly mean. And would ask the manager when we were going to dance, so we’d have to.
My first job I worked at a county fair. I sold balloon yo-yo things, fake crystal angel statues, and personal massagers. Trust, being a 15 year old virginal blond girl selling personal massagers invites plenty of gross/hilarious comments from the fairgoers. Unsurprisingly, the gross/hilarious divide lined up almost entirely along gender lines: women mostly responded either benignly or hilariously (oooh when you’re older this will come in very handy, child), while men would be creepy–perhaps because the description is sort of like the beginning of a porn?
I realized the other day that even though I have a very intense job right now (grad student), I don’t feel like I’m working. Because when I was getting my MA, the work load was just as intense as it is now, but I also had to nanny 20ish hours a week, plus work as a house cleaner. Now I just am a student, which I haven’t been able to do since I was 14. It’s really wonderful.
Oh, and being a housecleaner is also really interesting. I was basically working for myself, cleaning the houses of old women who couldn’t clean the way they were “supposed” to any longer, had significant money to pay me well, and told me things like “When you come here I feel so much better, so relaxed, when you clean my house it’s just like going to confession!” and “One time the milk man groped me and it was terrible, I threw the eggs he was delivering on him. [whole story]. Wow, I never told anyone that before.”
But nothing will ever top working as a teacher at a prep school. Dealing with unbelievably privileged kids, rapists, teachers who talked about students in the most reprehensible manner–all balanced by mindblowing kids reading poems in front of the whole school about what it’s like being descended from slaves, seeing the gay-straight-alliance have a successful National Day of Silence, seeing teachers really make meaningful differences in kids lives. I had to stop, it was all too much.
I worked in HR for a major financial services company one summer during college. The pay was excellent, but my entire job was basically scheduling people to get drug tested and reviewing the result as they came in on this weird teletype machine straight from Quest Diagnostics. (And this was in 1999!)
I only had two positive tests all summer, which I figure is a pretty good run of things.
Worst jobs: seasonal mall retail and summertime campus food service.
Best jobs:
live in part-time home health assistant for a middle aged woman with post-polio syndrome one summer during college. She was freaking AWESOME. I never even noticed the butt-wiping as bothersome when we were having such amazing coversations.
Library assistant while in grad school. Someday when my kids are raised I will go back to a similar job. I love helping people research stuff.
When I was 16, my weekend job was at Miami Seaquarium. I rented dolphin-shaped strollers and sold lottery tickets simultaneously. Nuff said.