A description of a Job once gone, will always be remember. What's Yours?

[ping-ping-clicka]

I was poking around and ended in an online magazineof sorts and There was a Worst job story I was entertained , I like the story , and the writing
so have a go.
Would you care to contribute any job related stories here .

The smell could best be described as rotting flesh mixed with that amazing salty fishy smell but majorly amplified, and a hit of wood smoke from the smoking process. It was unbearable, so strong my stomach was turning. It took everything in me to not vomit.
We used second-hand embalming tables (you know, the tables they lay dead people on) to lay out boxes of frozen Alaskan salmon. I did not recognise what the tables were at the time, but when I asked them where they got the weird tables, another employee explained they were embalming tables, which blew my mind: Why not just buy metal food prep tables?
They had gotten a “good deal” on them from the nearby morgue….

 

[dogmeat]

cabin boy on a Greek Vasoline tanker

not me...

my worst was "hod carrier"

 

[johnny k]

Tou have gor a way with words dude

 

[Cyberi4n]

I know of someone who's first job was harvesting mushrooms grown in a derelict cinema building

 

[imwjl]

Operating and pouring ingots from a sweat furnace was pretty bad and same for having to help the vet with autopsies in turkey farming in Israel.

There was a whole lot of rotten stuff between events in my late teens and starting my IT career in the late 1980s.

 

[Buell]

All of them

 

[Bob M]

File clerks! I worked for an insurance company in the early seventies and we had hundreds of file cabinets and 4 women who moved all the files from desk to desk!

 

[dustoff pilot]

When I turned 16 I got my first job, dishwasher at a very nice restaurant on the Mountain Road in Stowe, VT the summer of 1966. It was owned by the Rigby family and George Rigby was the chef, he and his wife were great people to work for. It was one of the best jobs I ever had, they only offered dinner so we started work around 3pm and finished around 10. Had room and board and Stowe was a great place for a young guy to be working. My next job was as a dishwasher the next summer at a boys camp on Lake Fairlee in Vermont. After the evening dishes were finished us guys would head down the road to the girls camps to meet up with the girls that worked there. Those sure were a couple of great jobs! Looking back it appears I had the makings of an excellent culinary support worker!

 

[BroGreg]

Ten years of this..now automated. Still got the burn scars as a reminder.

 

[uriah1]

Doing tear off on a commercial roof on a hot summer day.
Ah ya, those were the days. Put a nail through my boot.
More fun.

 

[nojazzhere]

I was poking around and ended in an online magazineof sorts and There was a Worst job story I was entertained , I like the story , and the writing
so have a go.
Would you care to contribute any job related stories here .

The smell could best be described as rotting flesh mixed with that amazing salty fishy smell but majorly amplified, and a hit of wood smoke from the smoking process. It was unbearable, so strong my stomach was turning. It took everything in me to not vomit.
We used second-hand embalming tables (you know, the tables they lay dead people on) to lay out boxes of frozen Alaskan salmon. I did not recognise what the tables were at the time, but when I asked them where they got the weird tables, another employee explained they were embalming tables, which blew my mind: Why not just buy metal food prep tables?
They had gotten a “good deal” on them from the nearby morgue….

View attachment 1054021​

My WORST job ever was the temporary job I took after college, that ended up lasting 14 1/2 years. Retail sales at Montgomery Ward. There was NEVER a day that I woke up and looked forward to the day without overwhelming dread. Why did I do it?......it was relatively easy, and the pay and benefits were fairly good.....and I lacked the will to break free. (until I finally did)
My favorite job (I know you didn't ask) was after the Ward's job, as a neon glassblower. Polar opposite of retail. It was exhaustingly hard, but the sense of taking raw materials and crafting a thing of value with my own hands and skills, was amazingly satisfying. I did that for twenty years, until the neon industry was devastated by the introduction of LEDs. It was great while it lasted.

 

[Lou Tencodpees]

A friend's dad was a wannabe entrepreneur and seemed to change jobs every time I talked to him. Out of high school I got a job at his latest venture, a small shop that made industrial soaps. My first day I was brought into their "lab" to be introduced to the owners/management. My foggy recollection is that they were all standing around wearing lab coats and holding steaming beakers. I do know for certain that I started coughing uncontrollably and they laughed and told me I'd get used to it in a week. I didn't stick around long enough to find out. After melting rubber gloves to my hands with caustic soda, inhaling some fine brown powers and coming home with nostrils plugged with flakey ground soap I had had enough. Their senior guy on the floor was 26 and looked to be about 80.

 

[Knows3Chords]

One of the few jobs I had while taking a break from school in my early 20's was a railcar switchman for a scrap steel company that serviced Great Lakes Steel electric and oxygen furnaces in Ecorse Mi.. Coupling and decoupling rail cars full scrap metal, then climbing on the side and riding to the next stop. I was either freezing my butt off our sweating my butt off. Then there were the packs of wild dogs that would roam the yard. I would have to jump inside one of the cars and radio someone that I was stuck. Of course that would bring a chorus of laughter from the crane operators and engineers. I literally thought I was going to die everyday. Luckily after a few months I got to work up in the scale tower out of the elements.

 

[Chuckster]

Master plumber... 'nuff said.

 

[bgmacaw]

Probably the worst in my professional career as a software developer was a short term contract job at a chicken processing company. It involved helping them deal with some issues with their production line automation software. So, in addition to trying to fix/update an extremely poorly coded application. For other software devs, it was written in Access/VBScript by a non-programmer. That guy was still there and was extremely defensive about making any changes to his awful code, much less replacing it entirely (my recommendation). On top of that, I had to smell the background odor of chicken processing while working. I was only there about 3 weeks although I was scheduled for 6 months. Fortunately, the contracting agency I was working with at the time was sympathetic to the situation and found me another contract gig quickly.

 

[Powdog]

I worked the summer of ‘81 at the Chevron oil refinery in El Segundo CA. Hired on as “general labor” and did everything from cleaning out cracking tanks, unloading railroad cars filled with filthy 55 gal oil drums, chipping off solidified sulphur from atop heating vessels (lots of flare ups). Worked in the barrel reconditioning plant for a few weeks, leak testing the 55 gal drums after they had been cleaned out. Standing above the massive water tank and getting sprayed all day by really nasty water, I developed the sinus infection of a lifetime. I can’t imagine guys that make a career working in a refinery.

Best job I ever quit was working as a lab inspector at the research institute on the UCLA campus. I had two bosses; a PhD physicist who had worked on the accelerator at Lawrence Livermore and another physicist (a Marine who had fought at Iwo Jima) who had worked on developing the external neutron generator at Los Alamos right after the end of WWII. Plus, the research going on at the time surrounding AIDS, Lyme Disease, heart and neonatology, I met and became friends with some of the brightest scientists from all over. The most humbling experience of my life.

 

[yegbert]

Not a worst, just memorable…

Up until around maybe my early teens, my dad farmed tobacco in SC. The way we did involved cropping the few more ripe leaves, stringing them by the stems of a small handful on sticks, which were hung in a barn to cure by heat. I started as a real young kid driving the tractor that pulled the two wheel trailer the croppers put armfuls into and that were then carried to the barn. There, teams of one stringer flanked by two handers on either of her sides worked together to string it onto sticks. When I was older there was a spider-like harvesting contraption pulled slowly by the tractor, croppers sitting down cropping the leaves and handling them to the stringer sitting in front of him and immediately stringing it. Croppers were men paid $8 a day ($6 if they were African-American), stringers were women paid maybe $5, handers were most often kids paid $3. The crew was the farmer’s family, other family/friends from the area, and maybe a worker or two that stayed the summer in some little shack the farmer kept for that purpose.

Green tobacco is sticky. it gums up everything you touch. When I was just a kid driving the tractor, early on I wasn’t skilled enough to pull the tractor and it’s trailer out of one tractor alley out between one set of rows and into the next, without running over the hills of tobacco on the ends. So my daddy or an older brother who was cropping would make the turn. I wasn’t otherwise handling the leaves, but the other cropper/driver got tobacco gum onto the tractor steering wheel making that turn. So I’d spend the next set of rows picking the tobacco “boogers” off the steering wheel. I’d pull the tractor up maybe 20-30 feet at one move, wait for the croppers to work their way up to the trailer and unload, then pull up again.

For additional entertainment, if I saw a tobacco hornworm on a plant, I’d catch it and hold it against the tractor’s exhaust manifold. Once I caught a young rabbit that was in tall grass that was in the tractor alley in front of the tractor. I quickly pinned it with the tall grass and kept it in my coat pocket til I got home and kept it for a few weeks in a cage my dad had.

When I got older I had to crop. We worked even in rain many times, and a cropper would have to hold a bundle of the leaves under his arm until he could unload in the trailer. I got sick a couple of times one summer cropping and wasn’t sure what was causing it, so I quit worrying in green tobacco. As an adult I learned that the wet green nicoteen-laden leaves and under my arm meant I got a real big dose of nicotine and therefore nicotine poisoning.

I’m glad I got out of that particular hard and health-risky job, but in hindsight I enjoyed the experiences. Now, I garden in my back yard and volunteer in a “kitchen garden” that’s part of National Colonial farm in Accokeek, MD; across the Potomac and in sight of George Washington’s home in Virginia.

https://www.accokeek.org/national-colonial-farm

 

[memorex]

When I was in high school, I worked part-time at a KFC take-out. On one occasion, the main sink drain clogged, and the manager made me open the grease trap and clean it out. It smelled worse than puke. Even holding my breath, I almost puked.

 

[ping-ping-clicka]

My WORST job ever was the temporary job I took after college, that ended up lasting 14 1/2 years. Retail sales at Montgomery Ward. There was NEVER a day that I woke up and looked forward to the day without overwhelming dread. Why did I do it?......it was relatively easy, and the pay and benefits were fairly good.....and I lacked the will to break free. (until I finally did)
My favorite job (I know you didn't ask) was after the Ward's job, as a neon glassblower. Polar opposite of retail. It was exhaustingly hard, but the sense of taking raw materials and crafting a thing of value with my own hands and skills, was amazingly satisfying. I did that for twenty years, until the neon industry was devastated by the introduction of LEDs. It was great while it lasted.

thank you for your answer. Wow , neon glass blower, how cool. , Montgomery wards they always seemed understaffed , maybe ?Which from a workers perspective , mine , is a drag. for the worker drag for the customers

 

[tlsmack]

Back in the 90’s I worked as a line cook in some crazy high volume NYC restaurants. Back before the concept of Human Resources had reached the food biz. Chefs ruled with an iron fist and each shift was like being on a pirate ship. You just hoped to survive to fight another day. Teamwork was seen as weakness, every man for himself was the order of the day.