What's the worst job you've ever had?

[lord_jamitossi]

I'm replacing a woman who's gone on vacation at a company named MP 4-Way. I have 2 days left, and it's the most completely pointless and retarded job that has ever existed.

What I do:

There is a company called Media Power in the States. I am charged with sending their products to people in Canada who have ordered them. The catch : their products are vitamin suppliments and joint cream that they sell on late-night television and radio infomercials.

I'm absolutely sure these things don't work. I checked out their website (www.drpinkus.com) and it's pretty obvious I'm distributing snake oil.

My task is essentially to go on the computer in the morning and get the orders in a PDF file. I have to print them out with a printer that actually doesn't work. Then I have to fill out a form for each and every one of them and then put them on boxes and send them out.

It wouldn't be that bad, but punctuate this with people calling up angrily on the phone to complain about the things I'm sending them. I have to try to calm them down and tell them the -right- number to call.

Then there's the returns. I swear any day now we'll be getting a letter-bomb. People return the products they don't use, mostly with angry letters. I fell really guilty all the time while doing this, especially when I get ones like "This cream did not help at all with my arthiritis, I was very disappointed." I can totally see some little old lady writing this after realizing she just paid 200$ for hand cream. Pitiful.

Now, some stuff this company is doing is actually helarious from my point of view. Buying "BUY THREE GET ONE FREE!!! B-1-BOMBER BEGINNER PACAKGE" actually costs 176$, and four B-1 otherwise sell for about 75$ (still a lot for sugar pills if you ask me). I've seen one guy spend 800 bucks for the same order that someone else got for 200$. Naturally, there is no definate price list, so people are getting screwed left, right and center.

I get bored easily, and it's fortunate that I'm working alone, because I get off-task pretty quick. I spent about half an hour last Wednesday juggling empty CalMAX cans (that's a calcium suppliment you put in your tea). I did target practice with elastic bands today. After discovering that a parcel sent to somewhere in Ontario had a postal code that started with L0L, I spent quite a while looking through the postal code directory looking for L0L 0M6 (like LOL OMG). I'm going to continue that tomorrow.

People have stupid names. I sent a package to William Wallace last week; he lives in Surrey, BC. Winston Churchill (name of an ex-prime-minister of Canada) lives in Newfoundland and ordered 6 bottles of digestion enzymes.
Some poor lady is named Jackie Jacoby. Zahava Shwartz is also a dumb name. I'm a very bitter person, I guess.


So yeah, what's the worst job you've ever had?

[erm2003]

One summer between my junior and senior year of college I had a hard time finding a summer job. I ended up getting hired at Wal-Mart, which was funny because I had just left a job working for Sam's Club near my college. At Sam's I was being paid over $7 an hour (this was 2002) working in the electronics area. Wal-Mart thought they would use me efficiently by paying me $6 an hour and putting me in the parking lot. They then proceeded to treat me like shit for 2 months. My name tag's job description actually said "Cart Pusher" - like that's not degrading. So that's what I did full time, 8 hours a day, in the dead heat of the summer. And we didn't have one of those nice little machines either. But hey, I made it through, knowing now officially, that job sucks balls.

[{DSG}DarkRaven]

I used to live in Minneapolis, and I worked at a fabulous upscale grocery store in the deli dept. This was my first, and arguably, the best job I've ever had. But then, after almost a year, I moved back to southeast Michigan. Since my only experience with employment consisted of slicing bologona and dishing up potato salad for the elderly, I quickly found employment at the local Meijer store, which is a grocery/general store found in abundance in the great lakes area, especially in Michigan (where it was founded in the 1930's, I think). If you've ever lived in Michigan or spent time with relatives here, you've probably been to or at least seen one.

Anyway, I guess it's not altogether inaccurate to say that it's like Wal-Mart, only not as successful. The prices are cheap, the stores are big, and the employees are unhappy. Or, if they are happy, they still aren't paid much. And for three brief months, I was one of those underpaid and under... happy... people.

Now, I don't know if my store, my department, was an isolated case or not, but we were suffering from one of the worst problems that a personal service retalier can have: understaffing. If you're not aware, the holidays (mid november through the first week of january) are the busiest time of the year for grocery stores. People are buying all sorts of food to feed their extended families. Turkeys, hams, baked goods, vegetable and fruit platters, all that stuff that tastes so good but makes your mid-section hurt so bad after the third plate. And brilliantly enough, all of those things go straight through the deli department during the holidays. We're the location where people pick up their pre-packed, all-in-one holiday dinners.

On a normal shift, we might have three people maning the department all at once. The fourth person, which may or may not have actually been my supervisor, was either on a break or busy with some other task that didn't help us serve customers in any way. For instance, my supervisor spent most of her time in front of the deli, stocking the prepacked salads, sandwiches, and so forth, which easily could have been done by someone else at some other time. Often times, when my supervisor was in, one of the deli clerks would be on break, leaving us with only two people and sometimes six or eight customers waiting fifteen minutes for their cheese.

It was times like this that we would get in trouble for our garbage in the back. Not so much the general trash, because we kept that in good order, but the cardboard boxes. The ones that the sliced meats came in (before they got slices, of course) would pile up to the ceiling almost, and when there were no customers, I'd dash back and star slicing the tape and collapsing them so they would fit into our giant cart.

Keeping those things in mind, let's get back to the holiday thing. Our staffing was temporarily increased to handle the demand. Want to guess how many extras we had called in? One. We had five people for the most hectic four weeks that a grocery store goes through a year. People would wait forty-five minutes for their meal boxes. "Want half a pound of ham? Sliced thin? Sure, that'll be twenty minutes. After we call your number." Because our walk-in refrigerator was especially full with all the dinner boxes, it was impossible to find anything. And if someone asked for something we didn't have out front (which, by the way, was a grotesquely unsanitary place for our meats to be kept, in the way that we kept them), I had to go look for it. Customers hate it when they spend half an hour in line, wait ten minutes while you go look for something, and then tell them you're out.

I should have seen it coming, when I got laid off in january. The grocery department manager (one step above my supervisor) said it was because of labor cuts (very common, actually), but I didn't care. I was thrilled to be out of that place. $6 an hour was not enough to put up with all the crap that went on there.

EDIT: I apologize for this post becoming a small novel.

[Archibaldo]

I used to work in a Home for the Elderly. I had to take the meal cart upstairs and dish out the meals to the nurses who would then serve the elderly. Any way, after I was done serving the meals, I had to go back to the kitchen and wait for the dishes. When the trays came back, they would usually be in such a bad mess it was terrible. For some reason about 75% of the trays had coffee poured all over it. Every thing was soaked in coffee. Then some trays would have all the food mixed together. It was quite disgusting.

But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that some times, the Elderly would roam the halls after lights out. And the Kitchen was "forbidden". So while I was finishing up all the dishes I would have random residents come in and start rambling. Especially this one lady. She would speak in the lowest voice possible. Then should would look at me expecting a response. Yeah, that was akward.