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Post by coppice on Apr 22, 2014 17:24:13 GMT -5
I've made my peace with what I though was my all time worst job, only to have TV programs on cable like "Deadliest Catch" or, "Dirty Jobs", show me up and point out I wasn't the only lucky person out there.
IMO there are two catgegories for that worstest job ever; what it looked like to me, and what (my job) looked like to others.
My number one worsted job was sizing and sexing formalin soaked dead cats for Ward Scientific*. The cats were used for dissection in biology classes. The fetid cloying and numbing scent of a horse trough fulla floating cats made anybody doing the job an intoxicated dummy in minutes. The wife compelled me to shower on return home. Huh, who'd a thunk it.
Now oddly enough (to me) my youngest held out my old job as an aide on a locked psychiatric facility as my worst job ever. Most of that based on a single meeting with Ron. Ron was huge (six foot-eleven) and eubulent. He spoke at all times loudly and with his hands and arms in motion. For all of Ron's lack of volume control he was a gentle and sentimental man. Who heart disease took away at barely fifty years of age.
The son still swears that what ever I was paid, it wasn't enough.
* Ward Scientific' full name is: Wards' Natural Science Establishment
So, what was your worst job ever?
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Post by spacecase0 on Apr 22, 2014 19:11:16 GMT -5
my mom says that she dissected one of the cats...
my worst ever was working at vendco, a company that builds vending machines, the job lasted 3 days before they let me go, they thought I was going to die, assembly line work is horrible, I put together something like 500 starter capacitor assemblies a day
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Post by paulf on Apr 24, 2014 7:59:05 GMT -5
This may sound goofy, but the worst job I ever had was also the best. I worked for Cargill Corn Milling where corn syrup, corn starch, citric acid, ethanol and vitamin E was produced plus several other co-products. I worked in the Utilities department that produced energy (steam and electricity) from three large coal boilers and three large natural gas boilers. Working around coal and steam was fairly dangerous and could get very dirty. We burned 40-50 semi loads of coal per day and produced electricity to power a city of 50,000 and enough steam if run through turbines to power a city of 200.000.
We also were in charge of water treatment to make ultra-pure water for the boilers and drinking water for the 1500 employees. Of course all the wastewater needed to be treated and returned to the Des Moines River cleaner than it was when we pulled it out. Nine million gallons per day pumped to our facility and seven million gallons per day back to the river making the river cleaner downstream than up stream.
Coal dust, heat(140degrees in several area), working outside in all weather with raw industrial wastewater, working with chemicals and high pressure steam made for some strange conditions. But guess what....I loved it as much as I hated it. I did that job for seven years before my lungs couldn't take the coal dust any more. Transferred to another department that was more high tech, high stress and more dangerous...go figure. At that job for seven more years and then retired to a low tech, low stress life of gardening and whatever else I do now for the past nine years.
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Post by horsea on Apr 24, 2014 14:09:06 GMT -5
This topic is hilarious and I am "enjoying" reading about your horrid jobs. Here is my contribution, not as glamorous as sizing smelly dead felines, of course. My worst job was so awful that the factory could not keep any staff for long, so they went to temporary help agencies to get some desperate suckers to perform this task. So I was one of a new platoon starting Monday morning. This was a large sewing factory that specialized in various sorts of custom made bags, large and small, of various materials. The section I was in, they sewed giant bags, about 4 ft. X 6 ft for the mines to put ore or some other material in. These large sacks were made of, I'm not sure here, some kind of tough woven shiny synthetic cloth that had sharp edges and was hard on the fingers. Our job, done in teams of two persons, consisted of slipping the giant bags over a framework, one at a time, then folding the fabric over at the top to make a nice cuff. The two partners had to work in harmony to get this done. Okay, what's so terrible about this? We had to do a minimum of 2,000 bags per 8 hour day - and management kept count. You had to work at the speed of light to grab the bag off the pile, slide it over the frame, make the cuff, remove it from the framework, and put it on another pile. All while standing. At the end of the day our fingers were bloody and sore. We all got to hate the partner we were working with, staring at each other all day. There was 2 10-minute coffee breaks but by the time you got to the door, it was crowded with the sewing machine operators, dozens of them, also wanting to get the h*ll out. We all had to rush down 4 flights of stairs in this rickety old building and by the time you got to sit at the table in the coffee room, why, you had to get up and go back. Half-hour for noon meal. I lasted one week even though I was badly fed up by noon of the first day. Some girls quit after one day, some after two. So, every Monday, as far as I understand, they brought in a new group of suckers from the agency to take over. This is why there was a communist revolution, kids.
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Post by coppice on Apr 24, 2014 16:51:54 GMT -5
My job at New Hampshire Hospital grew out of NH's reluctance to build housing for its adult psychiatric population. So most of the folks we got a wash and some meds were fairly promptly returned to us because there simply was no housing for them.
Ron by virtue of his volume of speech, and his size was an easy target. He scared more than few cops (who didn't know him). They were often flummoxed at his returning hero pose at our front door...
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Post by bestofour on Apr 24, 2014 17:35:11 GMT -5
I thought I had a horrible job but after reading all these posts maybe I haven't had it so bad.
I worked at the Union County Health Department for 7-1/2 years. When I first started I liked it. Everyone did. There was little staff turnover. People got these state jobs and stayed until they retired. We were dealing with people who spoke English who for whatever reason were down on their luck (for a while) or out right poor because they were disabled or uneducated. Many reasons but they needed our help. To get government services they had to produce a Social Security number, a phone number, and keep their appointments. Slowly over the years our population changed to people who didn't speak English and we were expected to bend over backwards to serve them. We were told hundreds of times that "they are entitled to our services" even though they could not produce a SS#, phone number, or keep an assigned appointment. If our usual clientele missed an appointment they had to take the next available. If a non-English speaking person missed an appointment we had to call them and offer to find them transportation or offer to send a nurse to their home to meet their needs. And when they weren't home to be picked up because they had gone to WalMart we had to send a car again the next day and the next day and the next for however many times it took to get them to the services they were "entitled" to get. After a while I got sick and tired of clients lying to me and having to take it on the chin. I got tired of finding out things like the women continued to have babies because they were selling their SS numbers for $800.00 a piece. I got tired of a woman telling me that even though her name is Elvia if I had to call her at work at Tyson Foods to ask for Sheila because she was using false documents and then being told by the Health Director that it wasn't any of my business what name she used. I got tired of finding out that the social security number one of these clients did, in fact, produce actually belonged to a 10 year old boy in Texas. I have nothing against non English speaking people. My best friend is from Mexico City. I just think everyone should be treated the same. If you don't have to produce a SS# then I shouldn't have to produce one either. If they send a car to pick you up then they should send a car to pick me up too. I couldn't stand it anymore and I quit. A lot of people have quit but I think every government job is the same these days.
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Post by Laura_in_FL on Apr 25, 2014 11:33:23 GMT -5
I used to have a job that was a good job in many respects - it was a nice cushy desk job, decent money after a few years' experience, and I generally got along with my coworkers. I actually liked my job a lot of the time - but it got to me for some of the same reasons that your job irked you, Bestofour. I underwrote loans and tax credit allocations to developers who were building affordable housing. I wasn't an underwriter in quite the same sense as a bank underwriter or an insurance company underwriter - I worked for a private company that did due diligence under a contract for the state. The process was that developers would send in a applications for an affordable housing development and the state would score them. The highest scoring applications went to us (or other underwriters) to determine whether the developers could actually build what they promised, for their proposed budget, in the time allotted, whether the project complied with program rules, and whether there was sufficient need for the development. So we had appraisals done, checked surveys, soil tests, zoning and approvals, had the plans looked over by a contractor we had on retainer, analyzed the budget, did a site visit, and so on. Then we sent a "yes" or "no" recommendation to the state in the form of a pretty report with lots of charts and graphs. The problem is that the state and federal subsidies completely skewed the economics of these transactions. Normally when a developer builds an apartment complex, the profits (if any) come from operating the complex, or reselling it to an investor who plans to profit from operating it. So there is strong incentive to control development and construction costs. That way the developer can borrow as little money as possible - lower loan payments mean more operating profit. By contrast, in these subsidized apartment complexes, the developer was paid a "developer's fee" (read that as guaranteed profit) of up to 15% of the project costs. Between tax credits, subsidized, flexible-repayment government loans, and guaranteed rental income from HUD Section 8 vouchers to the tenants, the developers could still get the project financed and operate at a profit even if they padded the project budget like crazy - increasing their "developer's fee." So, all of the financial incentives were to inflate costs as high as possible. One of the frustrating things about the job was that I was lied to daily. I won't say that all developers lie. But based on personal experience I'd say that quite a few do. In many of the larger developments, the developer's fee alone was a couple of million dollars. Since the state wouldn't fund them until we underwriters gave the okay, there was a lot of incentive for developers to say anything to get our recommendation. Also, because they were rewarded directly for higher project costs, developers would pad multiple line items in the budget, hire family members as contractors, consultants, and lawyers (and often pay them above-market fees), base budgets on features and amenities that were not in the construction plans (when called on it, they would claim it was a mistake and get the plans "fixed" to add them in), and use all sorts of other tricks. The frustration was that for every time I caught something, it was likely that the developer was slipping three or four more things past me. Often I would have strong suspicions about exactly what the developer was slipping by me, but I couldn't document it within the time allotted or the scope of work authorized by our contract. It was frustrating to know that I was participating in a program that allowed people to take huge chunks of taxpayer money they weren't entitled to - even after they were already making a tidy profit off the taxpayers. But I was okay with all of that for years. I tried to think of it as a game to find as much of the budget padding as I could. I even learned that some of the developers had taken to calling me "the Bulldog" behind my back. They didn't mean it nicely, but I took it as a professional compliment. What finally pushed me to quit was being deposed in a lawsuit. I was a witness, not a defendant, but I had already been concerned about increasing politicization of the state agency we worked for. I knew I wasn't ever going to sign my name to a project that I didn't think would fundamentally work. First of all, if I did that, one day I might end up being a defendant in court rather than a witness. Even more important, by this time I had a young son - how could I look him in the eye and tell him to be honest if I lied professionally? But I believed that if I stayed, sooner or later I'd be pressured to make inappropriate recommendations. So I left. I honestly don't know how bad things got (or maybe didn't get?) after I left. I've stayed completely out of the industry since. One thing is for sure: every time you see an affordable housing apartment complex, you can rest assured that somebody made a huge chunk of change, paid for by us taxpayers. Hmm...I should have posted this on the 15th, so you could have all sent in your tax returns with a warm fuzzy feeling about how your money is spent.
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Post by Laura_in_FL on Apr 25, 2014 13:40:54 GMT -5
To DLD, Strat, etc., if you think my post above strayed too far into the political, feel free to edit or nuke it.
I can definitely say that the things I observed that bothered me were not confined to any one party, so what I said should not be construed as a criticism of any particular political organization. It was intended as a commentary on greed.
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Post by horsea on Apr 25, 2014 15:51:20 GMT -5
I underwrote loans and tax credit allocations to developers who were building affordable housing.
The road to H*ll is paved with good intentions, and even not-so-good ones.
I guess your awful job was awful in that you had to quit for moral, not physical, reasons like some of us here. Hard to say what is worse. 32 years on, I still remember the bagging factory and I can't laugh about it, though I wish I could.
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Post by Laura_in_FL on Apr 26, 2014 14:43:19 GMT -5
My brother has had worse jobs than mine. For a while he worked at a crab house, cleaning crabs, shucking oysters, and such. The smell, oh the smell! The whole family insisted he go shower the instant he got home from work - he wasn't allowed to touch anything or sit down until he had bathed. We also kept his work laundry separate. Yet he could never completely get the smell off, and the whole house developed a faint aroma of decomposing seafood products, despite Mom's best efforts at deodorizing. The job was piece work, and after he got some experience so that he could work faster, the money wasn't too shabby. But we were all glad when he quit. After a month or so we finally got rid of the smell, too.
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billh
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Post by billh on Jul 13, 2014 17:34:29 GMT -5
I used to dairy farm, I liked the work but you were tied to it 2 times a day 365 days a year. The cows didn't care if you were sick or dying they just wanted milked. It was hard for me to get away because 1 you couldn't find anyone that can or will milk and 2 following LIF theme most people don't like the dairyair. Worst job by far was working the kill line for Hudson foods gutting chickens. I made it 4 hours and told my boss I was taking my 2nd career choice as a food stamp recepeint.
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elliemater
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Post by elliemater on Jul 13, 2014 18:14:46 GMT -5
One of my worst jobs was fortunately only several months, it was a summer job delivering telephone books. Why was that so bad? Well it was in rural central Louisiana.
So here I am, prissy lil' thing, 16 years old wearing hair bows and skirt with hose and heels. Trying to look pretty. Driving down the billowing dirt roads in a car with no AC...the problem was that nearly every place I went to had large dogs that roamed the property. And they didn't like to see strangers drive up and get out.
I distinctly remember at one place, some fellow drinking beer on his porch and laughing at me as I fought off his Cujo with his new phone book. I finally saw red (had a temper back then) and whacked the poor creature (very large creature!) right across the nose and he took off. I then marched up to the porch, large runs in my stockings and hair a mess, took that tattered phone book and threw it at the man, shouting, "Here's your damned new phone book!" and flung gravel with my tires as I left.
Knowing the people of central Louisiana as I do, I will say that he probably would have proposed to me if he knew where I lived. They like spunky wimmins.
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Post by Laura_in_FL on Jul 14, 2014 13:34:28 GMT -5
You cracked me up there. And yes, if he'd known where you lived, he probably would have come-a-courtin'. Though you'd have been even more of a catch if you'd had a gun rack in your car.
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Post by stratcat on Jul 18, 2014 16:00:53 GMT -5
Bill said "dairyair", heheh!
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billh
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Post by billh on Aug 1, 2014 5:48:31 GMT -5
You caught that stratcat? We had that on t-shirts cows faces on the front wearing sun glasses and the rear ends on the back saying enjoy our dairy air.
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