re: Worse job you ever worked

Legbolting a trailer. First summer job when I was 14, got metal shavings in my eyes (eye protection? What’s that?) arms felt like jelly by the end of the day.

Department manager at Steinmart.

We had a shoplifting ring which was hitting us hard, we had absolutely no security. The two-way mirrors in the ceiling and the "camera globes" were all empty.

We (the dept managers) complained heavily to the store manager enough that he finally relented and hired someone to handle security. She was a midget. No lie, you wouldn't see her over the clothes racks.

Eventually her son was caught stealing costume jewelry from the store.

The breaking point for me was when a mall cop and I chased down a guy who had stolen some shorts, wrestled him down in the back of someone's truck in the middle of traffic and the store manager's response was to let the guy go if he just gave back the shorts.

I waited until the next day to quit because that was our weekly manager's meeting. It ended with me tossing my badge at his face from across the table while saying "you can shove this up your arse."

It's the only job I've ever quit without giving any sort of notice.

During college I spent a summer working for a tank wash facility. We cleaned out the big tank trailers that 18 wheelers pull.

It was off airline highway. The way you clean these tank trailers is dependent on what they had in them last. Most tanks you can clean by dropping these things called "spinners" down in them that are like high powered high pressured lawn sprinklers. They are a multinozzled design that shoots out superheated cleaning chemicals that are mostly something called "caustic". After spinning the tank, you drain it and then hose it out with a fire hose.

That part of the job wasn't bad, but that's not what young punk college boys got to do.

See SOOM tanks don't come clean from just spinning them. Some tanks, you have to spin them, hose them, then crawl inside and scrape off any remaining residue. The worst was tankers carrying can liner.

DId you know that aluminum cans that sodas come in is actually lined with a thin layer of plastic? Ever see it come out of the can? No right? Well that shite didn't want to come out of the tanks either.

Then there was the paper whitner. It's a titanium based chemical that you have to scrub out with scotch brite pads. We cleaned one one night and it took 5 hours of scrubbing. It was me, my buddy, and two of the old hands. Two white guys and two black guys went in the tank to scrub. 4 ghost white exhausted guys came out 5 hours later. It was actually pretty funny and the black dudes were making all kinds of jokes. One said "I'm not gonna take a shower when I get home, and in the morning I'm going to the bank and take out a loan on a new Cadillac. We were tired and laughing our asses off.

But it was dirty exhausting dangerous work, no PPE at all, and 10 hours days.

I was so happy when the fall semester started and I went back to school I made straight A's that semester.

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Should have brought one of the buckets inside and slung it in the store leaving his arse to clean it up all night.

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Oh, I thought about it. My mom was pretty pissed that I quit after one day though. Even after I told her I got paid $5 for 8 hours of work. She pulled the "I made $1.60/hr in 1970 whatever" card and I was like..."that's still more than what I made tonight!".

My dad is semi-retired but still pulls some tankers in the winter.

Up north he hauls anything liquid from the hog packing plants that isn't shite. Blood, melted fat, etc. They use it in cosmetics. He says that shite stinks worse than pretty much anything he has ever experienced. I feel for the guys who have to clean that tank out.

Hot dope gang on a pipeline construction project. Basically pouring molten roofing tar on uncoated parts of the pipe at the weld joints.

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BBBBE

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Piccadilly. Worked the back line. Cleaning the trays that came down the belt. I was assigned to clean toilets. Quit. Boss talked me into cleaning pots my last night. They had to hold my feet while I cleaned the bottom.

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With your grammar, I’m quite sure that you have not risen through the ranks much beyond fryer cook.

I worked for a plumbing company that was burrowing under a prison cell shower room to replace the pipes. 3 days of that shite and I quit.

Food lot in the panhandle of Texas south of Amarillo. My job was scrubbing the water troughs in the middle of each pen.