Best/Worst Short-Term Job
 

Between junior high and 35-years-old, I had about a dozen or so jobs of varying degrees of satisfaction. Now that I have fallen into a steady gig, It's amusing to look back at all those crazy jobs. Describe your best/worst job from your early working years (or perhaps best/worst is what you do now). I'll start with my best:

Right after I completed my master's in history and got divorced, I was broke, in debt, and without a job. Rent was due. I had no time to wait for my perfect history job, so I took a job as a security guard at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I had my own golf cart, two-way radio, and a cadre of other guards to goof around with. Boy, did we take advantage! The place was huge, with paths and roads everywhere. Talk about "tooling around." We even went off-road and made a cool little course in the woods. Our boss was a mean fat-ass, but he just stayed in his office and barked orders over the radio, so we had a lot of freedom. When we weren't racing around on our carts we went on "foot patrol." On foot patrol all you did was walk around the garden and tell people "You can't picnic there" or tell the kids "Don't play in the fountain." It was a joke and I loved it! I got some reflector shades and an earphone for my radio and looked like a total tool, but the joke was on everybody else because I knew I looked that way. I even had a brief romance with a German intern who worked in the greenhouses. This was crucial because I had just gone through my divorce. We could pick up extra money by working the Bar/Bat Mitzvah parties that took place after hours. Damn, that was a great job, but the kind of job you know can't last forever, and would probably not be as memorable if it did.


http://www.wildfreshness.com/brian/archives/botanic.jpg
Yep, that's me, Pangloss62 back in 1997

My pizza delivery job. You'll have to decide for yourself if it was the best or worst, because, as it turns out, I'm kind of neutral overall.

I worked for a temp agency on and off for several years in college. One of my gigs was at a market research company--opinion poll telemarketers, basically. A whole bunch of extra temps had been brought in just to fill this extremely difficult contract: Sunny Delight wanted a focus group of 20 people, who would come to some local area and each be paid $50 for their time. The difficulty was in the qualifications for the focus group. They insisted that each member

1.) Be female, and married.
2.) Have at least 2, and no more than 4, children between the ages of 3 and 12, and no additional children outside that range.
3.) Purchase at least 1 bottle of Sunny Delight every week.
4.) Purchase said bottles only at a Super Wal-Mart (regular Wal-Marts didn't count.)
5.) Score at least 80% on the "outspokenness" section, like "When you're in a social group, do you usually speak your mind or just go with the flow?"

There were more qualifications, but those were the big ones that knocked out most people (out of the small oercentage who were even willing to take the time at all to find out if they qualified for the focus group). In addition, they wanted 5 of these people to be willing to participate in a "shop-along," where someone from Sunny Delight would walk behind them on one of their typical shopping trips with a videocamera, so they could see exactly how these people purchased their Sunny Delight.

There were about 30 of us, cold-calling people from 5:00 to 9:00 in the evenings. Eventually, we did get them all. I personally pulled in 5 people, way more than anyone else, because by day three I started just prompting people for the correct answers.

Best: working for Lucent Technologies, riding high* on the telecom wave
Worst: working for a soul-sucking defense contractor (current)

* metaphorically speaking

Most different:
I washed feet. Old, stinky feet. Feet with problems.

When I was 14, I worked for the summer as a podiatrist's assistant. It was actually a pretty okay job; I have no particular fear of feet. I am mostly amused by the disgusted reactions I got from other people when the topic of that job came up.

Most of the older people that came to see the doc were pretty cool & friendly (although there were a few cases that should have been sent to Wolf!) The other women who worked there were a friendly, low-key group. We even got free coffee from the bakery next door.

Best: Working at a Webelos summer camp.
Worst: Working at a Boy Scout leadership training camp.

Best: Working for AAA doing trip ticks and answering questions from tourists from Kansas one summer. It was a riot! One AAA member wanted a trip tick for the arctic circle. Errr, right - go north as far as possible, then get out and walk.

Worst: Delivering phone books in December. Miserable pay under miserable conditions and your car is somehow never quite the same.

yeah, I done the 'phone book thingie..... only our round was inner-city Birmingham (the LadyWood estate, to be specific...) where you need two to watch the car and an armed guard to deliver the phone books....

But I thiink my worst job was cleaning the 'swarf' off the machines in a metal-cutting factory in the Black Country.... my hands were red-raw and lacerated to the bone for a measly £50 a week (that was in the early 70's)

Worst: Dishwasher at a restaurant in Glacier national park. Stayed all of three hours.

Best: That's a tough call. Probably when I ran my own photo studio. I was always psyched to go to work.

Worst: Working in a college bookstore, stocking shelves and doing inventory and crap like that. Ocasionally dealing with spoiled rich college kids.

Best: Working at the local mom and pop convenience store. I had gone there all the time as a kid, and now I was single handedly running the place for 8 hours at a time. I had regulars who would come in. We rented out movies that I would watch while waiting for customers. I'd make really good sandwiches to order. It was cool. Only time I didn't like it was when the boss went on vacation for a week, and I ran the place for 13 hours a day. I'd have to lock up just to go take a leak. That was a hard week.

Worst: Daycare- la Petit Academy un-potty trained toddler room. 15:1 minimum wage.

Best: Art conservation lab tech. matching and reweaving vegitable dyed wool on ancient Peruvian textile.

best: just had it. exg/f got me fired. again. by calling HR. awesome engineering company with awesome pay to boot. they did say that i can call them back in a month or so and get my job back. just to make sure she's not in the picture.

worst: night manager at a video store. got held up. that sucked.

Worst: Third shift manufacturing gig I got one summer. We were wrapping and taping transformers. An entire summer of my life *poof* gone. I never learned to sleep on that schedule. I even hit a deer coming home from that job and ended up walking the rest of the way.

Best: Bike shop in college. Learned some wrenching, hung out with mtn bikers, got my parts cheap, made some long term buds.:)

I have worked many jobs in addition to my full time one, and all of them have had their good points -
- working with friends & having salad bar fights at Deep Pan when I was at school
- working with student nurses as a barmaid & getting drunk at lock-ins
- eating last night's petit fours at 06.30 in a five star hotel on the breakfast shift
- serving samples of fruit to pensioners in a supermarket ("Would you like a date, would you like to try a date?")

The worst has to be the 4 days I spent working in a factory, trying to get by til I found the job I wanted. I couldn't handle the production line work - it panicked me and I lost all hand/ eye coordination.

They then tried me in the "flour room" mixing tortillas and it got into my contact lenses and made me sneeze.

I then tried packing nachos and broke more than I packed.

So I just didn't turn up for work one morning & let them keep the previous days wages. Very ashamed of myself.

Best part-time job: Working in the cafeteria at college. I loved the work and my coworkers. All walks of life, from the rich kid whose father insisted he made his own money in school, to the "townies", to kids like me, who needed the money. We had a blast. I ended up working in bar/restaurants or Country Clubs as a second job until just recently. Great experiences.

Worst: Trying to get people to buy pictures of their ugly families at Olan Mills. I am nothing close to a salesperson. I would be sick to my stomach on the way in every night. :greenface

Now for the worst...
 

Firstly, I think I've got to know all of you guys better from reading this string; fascinating. Peruvian textiles? That is cool. Washing feet? Who knew?

So honest! Really.

One of the worst ones was one I had while in college. I was part of a "crew" that unloaded and stocked the weekly delivery at a busy CVS. Next time you go into a CVS look for the red plastic bins stacked up in the asiles. We all had our own asile to stock, and it took all night and into the early morning to get done. The worst part was having to put those stupid anti-theft stickers on EVERY damn item; every bottle of stool softener, every cream, balm, salve, bottle of asprin, contact fluid, hydrogen peroxide, Metamucil, Pepto Bismol, etc. By 2:00 am I would just about loose it mentally, but I needed the money, and it was close to home. Squatting in my aisle 2 for hours putting those stupid stickers on product after product would really make me hate capitalism, and when the store closed and we could finally work without customers banging into us or asking where the stool softener was, me and this other dude would critique capitalism, advertising, and just how stupid everything was. I actually enjoy going into a CVS because the knowledge that I DON'T have to stock product makes me feel good.:3eye:

Worst job ever was baling hay. Partly because baling hay is the hardest, most back-breaking labor ever, but mostly because I learned 20 minutes into it that I was so allergic I might actually die if I stayed in that barn.

Best ever: as seen in my profile pic. I got paid for that.

When I was a kid, we visited some friends on a farm for a long weekend. They somehow convinced us that it would be fun to help out with some farm chores. Spent an afternoon riding on a wagon behind the baler, stacking the bales neatly as they came off the belt. Man that sucked. After the second bale, I realized I had been tricked. Now that I think about it, it was probably only an hour or so, but it felt like a long afternoon.

The worst job I ever had was working summers during college under the boiling south Georgia sun on the landscaping and physical plant crew at a large hospital. Typical highlights of those three cloudless, 100+ degree summers include cutting grass, digging trenches, tilling clay harder than granite and laying sod all while fighting off the gnat luftwafa. And more often than not, the sod was infested with fire ants. You wouldn't realize it until enough of them got on your arms then, with military precision, they would all bite at once - each one a red-hot finishing nail.

But I think the highlight - or lowlight - was when it was my turn to steam clean the hospital dumpsters. They would give me a full body jump suit with a built-in gas mask because the stench was nothing short of unbearable and the steam just made it worse. And until I got good at it I would accidentally pass the steam jet over an inside angle of the dumpster which would send the vile, superheated slime firing back at my suit and mask like snake venom out of a water cannon. 25 years later and I can still remember the smell and it still grosses me out. The challenge was to finish the two-hour job without throwing up in the gas mask. Most couldn't.

I currently have the best job I've ever had. I build financial applications for very grateful clients. I'm a consultant but have been at the client site for almost 7 years - an unheard of tenure for a non-employee. I have no manager and have no administrative responsibilities. I just go from dept to dept, figure out what they need and six weeks or so later, give it to them with the only contact in-between being the occasional follow-up question. I've been to my "home office" five times in the last three years, I set my own hours (which are fairly long). And while I have built a solid reputation, I don't rest on it. Each application is more sophisticated, faster and more user-friendly than the last. I can't get far enough away from that summer job. :-)

Best job: Current. I'm a systems engineer for the University of South Florida. Campus life, no pressure, free classes. Hell, I play games during the day if I get bored. It'd be hard pressed to get any better.

Worst Job: I used to have to repair (on-site) lift station pumps. For those of you who do not know what a lift station is, it's essentially an underground silo, where sewer systems deposit their, um, payload, let's say. The pumps sit at the bottom of all this swill and then "lift" the oderiferous treasure to a treatment plant, where the output is placed into every drink that has the word "cran" in it. Without going into detail, let's just say that people flush the damnedest things...

Uplifting
 

I've heard about lift stations. Don't they have those at RV campgrounds? The RV campground down at Everglades National Park was swamped by the storm surge of hurrican Wilma, dramtically reducing the number of campers. Evidently, those lifts need a minimum, um, payload or they don't work. The lift guy I talked to said there was "not enough shit" in the system to make it work.

Quite true. The pumps are submerged and require a certain amout of pressure to kick the pump relays (mileage may vary). The system I maintained turned over at around a two foot depth. The silo was twelve feet in diameter, so at somewhere around 226 cubic feet of yummy, they would spin up and pump down to about four inches. (I think the math is right...) At the same volume of just rainwater, they'd stay idle. This particular silo was about 18 feet deep, so even plain old water would trigger the system eventually. On a related note, did you know that a horsefly could grow to over two inches in length?

Myakka River campground had their RV sewage lift near the tent camping area. The smell produced when the pump turned on was a kick in the head.

That... that was not a pleasant night. :greenface

Like Flies To Shit
 

Sorry to hear that, Kit.

And yes, I would not doubt that horseflies can get to be two inches.

2 inches and their bite is worse than their bark. :thepain3:

Best Job: Front man for a local club band.

Worst: Home care provider for Hospice. The work was fine. Only thing was... none of your patients ever recover or survive. I never could provide the service without getting attached to the patient. Definitely a weak point in this field.

I've done the "provision of personal care in a residential home for the elderly" thing, where the residents only ever left horizontal in a box. I got great job satisfaction from making the residents comfortable, cheering them up, or simply being around. I accepted that they were going to die soon, and felt glad* and privileged to be the one to "lay out" two of the residents after their death, feeling that this deeply personal service should be carried out by someone who cared for them in life.
The worst of this job was that it pays minimum wage, and is a job which requires special skills and demands a lot of you, emotionally.


* this just is NOT the right word, but I'm damned if I know what the right word is ...

honored?

I worked in a nursing home as a teenager. I was a CNA and assigned to several terminal patients. In one case, I was on what they called the "Death Watch" where the patient was expected to die within 24 hours and someone was to be at their side constantly. The lady was tossing and turning a lot, so I had to keep a close eye on her IV (which was in her ankle at the end). I also had the honor and priviledge of laying her out after she died, bathing and dressing her in preparation for the funeral home arriving to collect her.

Another lady had a severe joint disease and her joints were tightened to the point she was unable to eat normally (not even spoon fed). She had to be fed with with a giant syringe and you had to put your ear as close as possible to her mouth to understand what she was saying. She was a beautiful, delightful woman and I treasured those times. Other CNA's were less gentle and caring. I used to get so furious at their callous behavior.

Later, I worked in the nursing home laundry. Now that was a nasty job...washing the soiled bedsheets and dirty, cloth diapers from all the patients. I spent hours using a pressing machine to iron pillowcases in the sweltering heat. Yuck.

I never could term that feeling, either. In some cases relieved would be close.