Community Chat

[Deb1010yetagain]

I call it my one day wonder.  After I got my master's degree I paid my dues working round the clock at a consulting firm.  I actually enjoyed the work although the hours were very taxing and left me no room for a social life.  Well, I moved for a job at a different consulting firm where I was assured I wouldn't be working round the clock. 

On my first day I realized how wrong I was to believe them.  The office they  gave me was from an associate who had just been fired and I had a bunch of people coming to my office still expecting to find her.   I found out most of the staff had worked thru the weekend and I was inheriting ALL the project load from two other managers who were going on maternity leave.  I'm usually such a responsible dependable person, but I panicked and decided I could do it, but I wasn't going to put myself thru it again.

[carlycat]

Oh my gosh, I can't pick. I'll let you decide.

1. Was it the job where they restructured the DAY after I started and demoted me? (Had to know that before they hired me!) Turned out my boss was sleeping with the #2 in the company and they did whatever they wanted. I lasted a year and took job number 2:

2. Or, was it the next job, where they told me I'd be coaching people to improve their skills working with people....and when I got there it was a call center and I monitored people on the phone all day. Surely they would have wanted someone who'd done that before! I lasted 3 months, walked out. 

3. Or, my last job, lasted 7 years, where management ranked every employee in the department (we had 40) from 1-40 every 6 months and fired the bottom 10%?!! I'm amazed I lasted 7 years, took me that long to reach the bottom. 

I couldn't make this stuff up. I hate corporate America. Love being retired. 

[mima]

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@qualitygal wrote:

We had a big old apple tree out in our back yard when I was a kid. The worst job I had was with my sister, and we had to go pick up the over-ripe mushy apples and get rid of them in some pile. It was disgusting, we had to use our bare hands. My sister would probably agree.

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 I forgot about that job as a kid.  My brother and I had to do that too.  Sometimes we'd end up throwing rotten apples at each other.  LOL

[Moonchilde]

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@DiAnne wrote:

@Moonchilde

The hospital where I worked has also been gobbled up.  It was sold several years ago.  One of the really nice things about it was when you had reached the top of your pay scale they started giving bonuses instead of raises (the amount based on your evaluation) because they did not want to lose the experienced employees.  

I think the unions have done a lot to make going into the hospital scary.  They protect the employees - good and bad.  

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@DiAnne, our RNs were unionized after several failed attempts. Then some floor employees decided they wanted in on what they *think* would be "the good stuff" and pushed for a vote for the rest of us to be unionized. It was roundly defeated.

[Mominohio]

I've always found value in every job I had from fast food work during high school and college, to delivering papers and cleaning offices in addition to my full time job in retail when I bought my first home and was working to keep it. 

The one I liked least was assembly work in a thermostat factory that I did for a short time after college. It was second shift, which I hated. The environment was very clean, air conditioned, most work was sit down assembly of small parts, but it was so incredibly boring. The only thing that kept me sane was that the line I worked on usually just had me and one other young lady working, and we could talk the entire night as we built parts. It was a great job for factory work, but so very boring.

[Moonchilde]

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@blackhole99 wrote:

I worked in a nursing home once where I had a tremendous amount of responsibility and no power to follow through on anything without the blessing of the administration. The higher ups seemed to delight in that fact and had me and my coworkers running around and jumping through hoops almost on a daily basis. I finally had had enough and even though I needed the job because my husband was in school I found another job and left that horrible situation. The administrator was shocked when I turned in my resignation . I never said a word about the stressful work atmosphere because I knew if I did it could come back somewhere sometime to bite me.

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I admire anyone who willingly works in a nursing home. Low pay, hard work and no recognition. That is hard.

[hckynut]

I worked many jobs that were hard in many aspects of the duties required. There is not any one of them I would call "the worst". I went looking for a job to make money and appreciated the ones that chose to hire me over others?

With no high school diploma I had only my word and short work records to offer my employers. Every job I worked was a blue color job. Dirty/long hours/no air conditioning and so forth. Never had a job that I did not have to punch a time clock.

If I was forced to pick the worst work? The United States Army working KP, which for me was always washing the biggest pots and pans I have ever seen in any kitchen, and I have worked in many restaurants of all types and sizes.

Overall as far as jobs?  I was just happy to have one.

hckynut(john)

[Eileen in Virginia]

When I was 24, I taught in a Catholic school in Northern New Jersey that was so small (fewer than 100 students in K though 8) that the principal lived in constant fear that the diocese would close it. She was so paranoid about this that she caved to any and all parental whims, most of which were conflicting and created an incredible amount of confusion among the staff. I made $5,000 per year (before taxes) and got paid once a month. Our only benefit was 5 sick days. The principal (a lay woman, not a nun) thought nothing of screaming at you in the hallway, regardless of who happened to be there. I still look back on that year and cringe nearly 40 years later. On the silver lining side, at the end of the school year my husband and I moved to Central Jersey to be closer to his job, then to Northern Virginia where we both had very rewarding careers in the Federal Government. We may not have made these moves if we'd had better jobs in North Jersey.

[chrystaltree]

When I was 18, the summer after hs graduation, I worked as a nurses' aid in a hospital.  I applied to nursing school (remember when they had nursing schools) late and I was going to start in the Jan semester.  Well, we had 13 weeks of training and that went amazingly well!  I thought I found my place in the world.   And then, I was placed on one of the floors.  And that ended any thoughts I might have had about being a nurse...lol   The charge nurse was a miserable witch who existed solely to torture anyone and everyone she encountered.  Especially me...lol   The work was back breaking, tedious, dirty and mindless.  I saw how the doctors, patients, families and even some other nurses treated nurses and I knew....it wasn't for me.  It takes a special person to do that job and I was not that person.  I remember the day I left.  The charge nurse was always critical of how I made mades, the corners were never sharp enough, the sheets never tight enough.  Well, one morning; I put my ALL into making up several beds.  Those beds were perfect.  And witchy came by and claimed she way a wrinkle or crease in ome of them and she went down the ward and yanked the sheets off the empty beds and bellowed at me to re do them.  So, I went to the locker room, I put my street clothes on, hung the uniform up in the locker and walked out.  Never to return.  A day or so later, someone from HR called me to ask if I was coming back and I explained what happened and how I had been treated.  HR offered to transfer me to another floor but I politely declined.  I knew the witch was only half the problem, the other half was that I didn't have the personality for that type of work. 

[RedTop]

Every job I received a paycheck for was a good job; I left them because I wanted to learn something new.   

My worst jobs were farm chores; particularly when it involved shoveling animal ******.  Whether it was cow, pig, chicken, or dog, shoveling ****** was the worst.  

Grandpa didn't like for the apples or peaches to rot on the ground in the orchard, so my brothers and I stayed busy picking them up.  Salvageable ones were taken to the house to be used right away, and the rotten ones went in a bucket to be carried outside the orchard, for the deer to eat.  

I also wasn't fond of keeping runners pulled off numerous rows of strawberries, or picking beetles off the beans and potato vines.   

My Grandpa and my Dad were very meticulous when it came to the chores on the farm, and we learned real quick to take our time, and do the job right the first time around.  Having to re-do a job we hated doing in the first place was the worst punishment ever.