We've all had to work the odd, less-than-stellar job just to get by.
Below are 19 of the craziest stories from reddit involving some of the worst possible jobs. Check them out!
1/19) Door to door salesman, commission only. Had to pay for my own travel and lunch. Have you ever gone to work and come back poorer?
-Rothead
2/19) I worked at 'love boutique', also known as a sex toy shop which was next door to a strip club. I constantly got harassed by club patrons and had to deal with bums coming in with bloody money for poppers (little bottles of VHS cleaner they get high off of) so you could never quiet feel safe.
-Jenniker
3/19) I've posted this before but its up there as one of the worst I did...
I worked on a croissant line. You can bet they never came out of the machine with that nice curved shape. Nope - they are straight, but someone has to bend them into shape, thousands of them every day, on a moving line. This equates to the most depressing job in the world. I bent croissants for a living.
-Pat_Mustard2
4/19) When I was 19, I started telemarketing for this place selling car warranties. (I really needed money)
Immediately, I could tell this was a shady business. I would be given a name, address and make/model of a person's car. I would then call and was given a script where I informed them their warranty expired and that they could buy a new one from us.
I realized right away that it was a scam because sometimes it would be a model year only 1-2 years old (no way warranty expired already). We still had to tell them it expired, to the point of arguing with them to convince them. Our best targets were senior citizens on already fixed incomes. They are extremely gullible when it comes to this kind of stuff. So I would sell these 3 year/36k mile policies for $4000 to people who already don't have much money.
I then looked into our actual warranties and realized they basically cover nuts/bolts and useless parts. But we would tell them it covered "everything on the engine from nuts to bolts". So I guess that was the truth.
Then one day, I called someone from the opposite side of the country. He stopped me mid-pitch and started reciting my script back to me. This freaked me out (what are the odds I called him?). He said he used to work for them until the government came knocking and they closed up shop. Apparently they just relocated and changed the name. He advised me to get out now and that I was doing a terrible, terrible thing.
I hung up with him and promptly quit.
-you_gotredonyou
5/19) Industrial maintenance mechanic as a summer job for three consecutive years between semesters.
Imagine walking around every day wearing a hazmat body suit and mask in hot steamy rooms filled with poisonous gas, while you stand knee-deep in toxic waste for hours on end. We would duct-tape our boots, suit and masks in order to not let any of the fumes in.
The pay was amazing though.
-Calimariae
Keep going for even worse jobs! Take pity!
6/19) I worked in a supermarket for two weeks when I was 14, no training or anything.
Customers kept asking me where things were and I had no fucking clue, so I'd say "I'll go find out for you" and hide in the stock room until they left.
-Fallen_Through
7/19) Selling doors, door-to-door.
-Debazzle
8/19) I used to weedwack around the tombstones at the town cemetery one summer. It was actually a pretty sweet gig, would just listen to my ipod and do my thing, make the dead people look fresh. As for downsides though it definitely made me think about death a lot. It was also very easy to get caught up in the feels watching people come to mourn their SO and what not. I always tried my best to weedwack the fallen tombstones that were being overgrown.
-green0ctagon
9/19) I worked as a greeter in [a large furniture company's] returns department one summer. People would come in spitting feathers. "This billy bookcase has one beige panel and the rest are all black." "My kid lost all the screws and it's all your fault." "This 8'6" sideboard won't fit into my Nissan Micra. How dare you sell something that you can't transport home yourself?" all I could reply with was, "Welcome to [Store]. Take a ticket. " and point at a little box with 1,2 &3 on it for missing parts, exchanges or refunds. I was a 17 year old kid. I didn't know ANYTHING about billy bookcases. Most mind numbing, painful job I have ever had. Plus side though, free meatballs.
-BigJDizzleMaNizzles
10/19) I worked with a pet store as an animal handler for children's birthday parties.
Imagine being surrounded by dozens of squealing 5-year-olds while trying to hang on to a terrified ferret.
-WwistedtirE
11/19) Installing fibreglass insulation in the summer in Australia.
Imagine hundreds if not thousands of tiny glass arrows stuck into your skin that even after showering and scrubbing are still in your skin an every movement when dressed rubs these glass shards into your pain receptors causing you to think you will lose your mind if you have to take another step.
That and the heat up there and tiny roof spaces where you couldn't even turn your head, all the time only lying and standing on the beams so you don't go through the plaster ceiling. Shittiest job ever, should be illegal.
-straylittlelambs
Ever think playing video games could suck? Next page to find out how!
12/19) QA game tester for a large video game publisher.
I've worked in 120 degree attics that were four feet high, pulling hundreds of pounds of lubed up cable through tiny conduits, for fourteen hours a day. I'd rather do that than work at this company again.
So we're testing this hockey game. I think my name is actually in the credits, I never checked. Anyway, it's a pretty stupid idea to outsource the hockey game testing to Louisiana. We literally had one guy on the floor who was "the rules guy", as in, he actually knew the rules of hockey. So, imagine rows of consoles, at the time PS3s and Xbox360s, with someone at each. Everyone is quietly doing their tests, and few people talk to each other. Most people have earbuds in. My boss is in a cubicle literally twenty feet away, but when he wants to communicate, he sends an email to someone who sends an email to someone who sends an email to someone in Canada, who sends an email to my friend sitting next to me, who tells me. It is considered "problematic behavior" that I respond by standing up, looking at the boss, and saying "Got it".
So, we're supposed to find bugs, by performing tests. For instance, my job was to test something called the EASHL League. The problem is, I was one of two people in my team, and each EASHL test required four consoles. Even when we did manage to get four, the entire thing was broken anyway, so any tests we would try to do were impossible, because they hadn't fixed the bug that made the entire section inaccessible. On top of that, just to get four consoles of the same kind meant asking people in other teams to help us, when nobody else's work required any help, and the entire place was set up to reward asocial behavior. More than once, we were flatly told by coworkers that "It's not their problem". Of course, any reason we had for being unable to perform the tests was unacceptable. Furthermore, the bugs had to be reported in a login system, but because of the group nature of the online testers, we never had bugs reported under the accounts of those who found them, just whatever person was logged in when we found it. So around 90% of my work was being credited to others, and while the higher ups knew this, they did not bother to adjust any assessments.
For this job I was paid $7.50/hour, and could only work for nine months at a time (I didn't make it nine months). The thing is, the company has a policy of annual raises. So, to avoid giving these raises, they lay off every employee after nine months, then offer to hire them back three months later. They even advised us to collect unemployment during that time.
I've worked some shit jobs. Hell, I deal with some of the dirtiest shit around at my current job, I get injured all the time, and the management are jackasses. Kid me would have never believed that out of all the jobs I've had, that video game testing would be the worst.
-Unconfidence
13/19) Telephone book delivery. First get your car loaded to the roof with phone books, then for minimum wage dodge dogs and run around apartment complexes and homes to drop off f*cking phone books.
-DarthContinent
14/19) Worked in a slaughterhouse for 1 day. They put me in the 'clean section', which is supposed to mean 'no blood'. Pigs came in to a big hall upside down, hanging from meat hooks, already bled out, but still in one piece.
By the time they reached me, paws and ears were already chopped of, and a big saw had cut the pig in half from ass to nose My job was to get the marrow out of the spine, with a sort of vacuum cleaner with a small hook on the end. The carcasses keep moving at a vast pace and I had to stand inbetween the two halfs, so was enclosed by 2 half pig bodies all day.
Non of this really bothered me, but the foul smell was what got to me and made me decide that one day was enough of this for me.
-WhiteRavenMaster
Keep going for the worst ones yet!
15/19) Worked at a call center at my college to call alumni and ask for donations. Nine bucks an hour to read off a script? Psh, easy beer money!
What I didn't know is that since I was new, I had to call all the kids who just recently graduated.
"Hi, this is sh*tfaced34 from the ___ call center, I was just wondering if you would be interested in placing a donation to the school?"
"Are you f*cking kidding me dude?? Really?? I just graduated 2 f*cking months ago and have over $60k in debt. What in the f*ck makes you think that I have the money right now to donate to this bullshit school?!"
-Anonymous
16/19) Mine was at [a fast food Mexican chain]. The job itself was actually kind of fun but the management was just total s**t. Manager would always get flustered during a rush and try to jump in on the line and make tons of mistakes, get pissed if a car stayed more than 5 seconds after we handed them the food and would actually hang out the window and tell them to move on. He literally had me scrubbing the oil spots in the 20 year-old parking lot every morning. Never understood why they were still there the next day, ragged on me hard for it until one day he went out there with me and scrubbed till his face turned red... and they were still there the next day.
I firmly believe his s***ty management is the primary reason that store closed down. Seriously, it was the only [one of its kind] within a 30 minute drive, right off the side of a highway. Wasn't like they were short of customers.
-frivolouslyfurious
17/19) When I was a senior in high school, I was hired as seasonal help at a Sears in the dirt mall. It was incredibly disorganized and I was never really given a schedule or told who to report to. On my first day I was led through a long dungeon-like series of hallways between the walls of the store (super creepy) to a back storeroom where I was told that I would be folding towels. I was handed a respirator to help me breathe, when you're folding thousands of towels all of the lint makes its way into your lungs, eyes and mouth. It sounds silly...but holy hell...so much lint.
I showed up for work everyday, but since I never knew who my supervisor was and never met any co-workers I just returned to the endless boxes of towels every day. For eight hours of day, I stood in a dark room folding towels wearing a gas mask. Any time I asked a co-worker if I could take a break or sit down, they shrugged and told me to find a supervisor (it may have been easier to find a leprechaun). Eventually I realized that no one would ever notice if I fell over dead on that pile of towels so I started napping in the bathroom.
After the naps went undiscovered, I started swiping my timecard and then going home until it was time to punch out . This went on for months before I got bored and stopped showing up. My employee discount card worked all the way through college.
On second thought, maybe that was the best job I've ever had.
-betabrains
To the last page for horror from wall-to-wall superstores!
18/19) I worked as a manager at [large wall-to-wall superstore] for a while. I took the position because - shock - I needed the money and I figured the step up would at least look like good on my resume. The store manager basically hand picked me to run the most profitable part of the store, which felt awesome.
And then it wasn't. My workers, with the exception of one or two of them, would basically forget things I taught them after a day or two and do whatever the hell they wanted. Everyone bitched about how messy things were, but they would balk every time I assigned someone to clean something. Then, after I cleaned goddamn everything, they would mess it all up again.
Any time I set a priority that I knew would help my area, my [expletive] store manager would interrupt over the walkie, ask me why something significantly less important wasn't getting done, and tell me that I needed to do that instead. So, big projects would neverr get done because the store manager wanted to [show off] and micromanage. Every higher up manager was like that, too: territorial asses who went to extreme lengths to make your day miserable.
I was also basically on call. Sometimes I would get calls late at night telling me that I needed to turn up to work early to make sure the department got set up to look the best it could due to a corporate tour. Any time off I requested would typically be ignored, and even though I followed the procedure for time off precisely, they would make it sound like I fucked it up or I was asking for something unreasonable.
I put up with it all because I needed to. I either needed a promotion, or needed to get the hell out. Every last higher up manager dangled promotions in front of me for prooooobably four months. I'd go to work, go to the gym, come home and send out resumes because I didn't have the money to do anything else.
The best day of my life was when I put in my two weeks notice. It was a busy, miserable Friday where everything across the store had gone wrong. I caught up to the wonderful store manager and gave my two weeks directly to him without a goddamn bit of warning. The look on his face, and the subsequent conversation a few hours later where he tried to convince me to stay, felt so goddamn satisfying.
-Thunderbro_
19/19) I worked at a chicken hatchery for a summer. At the end of an average day I would come home covered in a mixture of rotten eggs, cleaning chemicals, and blood.
And the smell, oh the smell. We had these barrels that would get filled up with the waste from the day, which would include rotten eggs, and the chicken equivalent of placenta.
Those barrels would just fester until a truck came and emptied them out, and then I was required to pressure wash them. I once came to work hungover, and I ended up just puking into the barrel.
Worst thing I ever saw was when we vaccinating eggs that were about three days from hatching. They came out of the incubators in these big carts, and get put on a conveyor belt into the vaccination machine. The guy transferring the eggs from the cart dropped his entire slide tray somehow, which is 18 dozen eggs. 18 dozen eggs that were three days from hatching.
Me and fucking Randy are just trying to get it all into the drainage trench as fast as possible, cause if the boss walks in on this we're sure as hell fired, regardless of the fact that I hadn't done anything wrong.
In the one summer I worked there, I saw four people who were hired after me get fired, and three people quit after working less than a week. Some girl walked out after the introductory tour, turns out she was a vegetarian.
Anyways, TL;DR: Industrial food production is gross.
-Alsea