[Conor Friedersdorf]
What's yours? I share after the jump.
My worst jobs all came through a temp agency I worked at during high school and college summers. The lowlights:
An eight week stint at Quiksilver in the accounts payable department, where I was given a large stack of carbon paper invoices and asked to separate the white, pink and yellow copies into piles for eight hours a day.
Six weeks at Mazda Motors of America, where I answered phones at the 1 800 number customers called when their cars broke down.
“Zoom zoom,” I’d greet callers.
My supervisor never told me to say that, but I found caricaturing the summer job helped to make its degrading moments more palatable. So many callers were primed to “tear me a new one,” as we say in the business. Thankfully I devised a strategy to check their tirades:
Me: “Zoom zoom! This is Mazda.”Customer: “My Miata just broke down for the fifth time!”
Me: “Yelling at me makes some Mazda owners feel better, sir. Go ahead.”
The Preemptive Theory of Customer Service worked nine times out of ten.
A 3 day stint at a refinance company. One month they botched a bunch of paperwork, missed deadlines and failed to lock in a couple dozen homeowners at the lower interest rate they expected to begin paying. I was hired to call these homeowners and explain to them that contrary to the company's assurances they hadn't refinanced.
As I look back at these utterly mindless jobs, I find it interesting that all paid a higher hourly wage than my first stint as a journalist at an 80,000 circulation newspaper.
As a beat reporter for a city of 100,000 plus people I was basically responsible for ferreting out what they needed to know about their municipal government as citizens in a democracy. In one case my reporting uncovered misbehavior on the part of the City Council, which was violating California's open meeting laws. I was routinely the only one looking into contracts with municipal employees worth many millions of dollars.
Of course, my reporter job was infinitely more fun and rewarding than any of my temp jobs, but one reason local newspapers are so poorly written is that its scribes are paid less than the people who separate carbon paper into three piles.
Worst job ever: was also pretty much my first (real) job ever. At 16, my father lined up a job for me through a work associate who owned a small machine shop that made metal parts. The badness of the job was mostly just the mindless boredom of it. I really was only there for 8 hours every SUMMER weekday because they needed someone to sweep the place at the beginning of the shift, and again at the end of the shift. The best part of the job was that it paid pretty well at the time, and it sealed my conviction to go on to college.
A close second was delivering telephone books. This was during a brief period of unemployment AFTER having a college degree. Mostly, it was humiliating to have to take the job - but I did. At least it was outside and the weather was good.
Telemarketer. I lasted four hours.
No, I take that back. Data entry for a cap & gown manufacturing company. I lasted about four hours on that job. You had to raise your hand to ask to go to the bathroom.
Both of those jobs were worse than digging ditches, which I did for two days for my dad, a job which drove me to re-enlist in the Navy.
One week a year, our relatively small city is the site of a major aviation convention, so my first two summer jobs were selling souvenir merchandise. It was pretty hot, and mostly just boring waiting for the occasional customer to wander by, but it paid 300 bucks for the week. Basically minimum wage, but to a 14 year old kid used to making $20 allowance a month, it was a lot of cash.
After that, I worked as a cashier at Wal-mart, making two bucks over minimum wage. Still boring, but I made a lot of good friends there, and it was vastly superior to selling tshirts.
Changing the water in the tofu bucket at the end of the day during my time at a health food store. And then cleaning the tofutti machine (melting tofu-based ice cream). Lots of sponging required.
The rest of that job was great.
Obviously the free market was saying that sorting carbon paper invoices was more valuable then newspaper reporting.
So why are you saying the market was wrong?
Spencer, I don't think he is saying the free market is wrong. Note that he enjoyed the newpaper job much more, and not all compensation is in dollars. You might have to pay people a bit higher to sort invoices than to do something enjoyable.
My own, and I can't really complain:
Back in college (University of Rochester, Rochester, New York), I got to spend a summer with my dad in Germany. He got a friend of his to give me a summer job at a dairy plant that made butter. The butter was shipped in bulk, in cardboard boxes (lined with wax paper).
My job was making the boxes, my body still remembers every motion perfectly (this is after 28 years). Every 10 boxes there would be a "fun" interlude, where for change of pace you got to cut the strap that held 10 flat box blanks together. Then:
1) Press on the ends of the boxes to unfold it.
2) Push down two opposing flaps on the bottom of the box.
3) Push down the other two opposing flaps on the bottom of the box over the two previous ones.
4) Pull on the handle of the tape machine to feed out and cut a pre-measured length of tape.
5) Tape down the center line with the straight strip of tape.
6) Pull on the handle of the tape machine to feed out and cut another pre-measured length of tape.
7) Tape down one edge of the bottom, with wrapping roughly equal lengths around the adjacent edges, fold down with a nice crinkle on the diagonal.
8) Pull on the handle of the tape machine to feed out and cut the third pre-measured length of tape.
9) Rotate the box to put the taped edge nearest my body.
10) Tape down the other edge of the bottom, with wrapping roughly equal lengths around the adjacent edges, fold down with a nice crinkle on the diagonal.
11) Put the box on a dolly so the next guy could line it with waxed paper.
This was so dull I tried to improve my time to keep it interesting. The guy who lined with wax papers got assigned to do something else, giving me the opportunity to do the wax paper lining as well (just two lengths of paper crossing each other).
After a while, the shift supervisor pointed at the hallway, which was filled with dollies stacked with wax-paper lined boxes: "You are making these boxes much faster than we can fill them with butter. What are we going to do with all these boxes? Here, take this bucket and this rag and go polish the milk vats."
I didn't realize at the time there was no need for the milk vats to be polished at all. He just needed to slow me down to keep from being smothered in boxes.
You're not including your work as guestblogger, I assume.
It's not possible to do a worse job than the one you're doing.
How did that paper ever manage to get a circulation of 80,000 in a city of 100,000? A circulation rate of +/- 80% sounds improbable.
buttox at 4:07, that was sort of funny, but cut them some slack. They are doing a friend a favor.
Customer service in call centers.
You make $14 or less. You are strapped to the phone. Timed by call quantity and reviewed for call quality. Your breaks will often be at slightly different times each day, and then they get upset when you miss the break or off by a few minutes. Forget getting to know coworkers well. Awful work. One would think they could reduce the cost by putting dead time back into the job. It would drop turnover, make employees happier and improve customer service when you are not trying to get someone off the phone in two minutes.
But of course that would mean, possibly, reducing profits or hiring more people to make it more humane. Which is crazy talk.
Running the changing room at a Ross discount store, for three reasons:
1. In addition to being at the counter, I was expected to properly rehang every piece of clothing that was rejected. This is, as you might imagine, physically impossible.
2. People expected Nordstrom service. That was, you might say, a bit difficult.
3. It took me five months of searching to get this part-time job, and I had been told that my college degree was actually a liability because "I'd want too much." Dude, if I'm looking at retail, I know what the pay scale is and I just want a job.
One of the cashiers accidentally did me a really good turn by telling me to not get register-trained. She'd said that because it's annoying to get called up to the front all the time but it turned out, later, that one of the managers was doing fraudulent returns and framing one cashier after another. Several of them had gotten fired, with bad records, before they figured out who was actually doing it.
Gene,
The newspaper covered roughly a dozen cities. I was assigned beat reporter to one of them.
Working in a large winery on the cellar crew: I was hired on as a temp worker for the annual crush--when the grapes are brought in, crushed, inoculated, aerated, etc.-- which was alright, though attaching sumps and pumps to a vat and just watching it go for 25 minutes at a time got pretty boring pretty fast. But I stayed on a little longer and got to see some of the work that the cellar crew does during the rest of the year, and I have yet to see anything so mindless. Basicallly, there are thousands of barrels that all must be treated exactly the same, which requires grunts to do so. Stirring chardonnay barrels or, worse, racking barrels were some of the lowlights. With racking, you move with a partner from barrel to barrel with a wand that sucks out the wine and puts it temporarily into a vat, then you rinse the barrel, scrub the opening and repeat for about 4 hours. The next four hours are spent putting all that wine back, one barrel at a time. This went on for days.
Dry cleaner's -- smell of the cleaning fumes was so bad, I started in the a.m., quit at lunch.
Next was a Dunkin Donuts, (shop where the donuts were fried on site,) after two weeks, I felt like I was going into sugar/fat shock just walking through the door.
A summer at a pipe-coating plant. The gunk for coating the pipes came solid in 55-gallon steel drums. My job was to take a dull double-bitted ax, cut the steel drum off the solid block of gunk and break the block into pieces small enough for me to carry. Of course, the whole point of the gunk was that a thin coating of it would toughen up cast-iron pipes. Then I carried the pieces up a steel staircase to the top of a 15-foot tall vat filled with melted gunk and threw the pieces in. The vapors coated me, and at the end of the day my hair was the consistency of 18-gauge copper wire. That's all I remember.
10 weeks telemarketing HELOCs in 2002. I would have happily scrubbed toilets for the same amount of money.
There were a few amusing moments:
Me: "Hello, is Mr A. there?"
Lady Answering: "No, and the son of a bitch ain't never coming back!"
And, trying not to lose it while pronouncing awkward last names, like "Mrs Kuntz" or "Mr Phuc".
In the mid-70's, I had two temp jobs at a major university-affiliated teaching hospital on the East Coast. I can't decide which was worse.
(1) Ripping asbestos ceiling tile out of the nurses' dormitory. Without a mask. The hospital said it wasn't necessary.
(2) Washing test tubes in one of the labs. Easy, but very boring...until a guy in a hazmat suit came up and pointed a Geiger counter at me. It chirped loudly. He waved a clipboard and said, "It says here you're a temp, and that Friday's your last day. If that's the case, you shouldn't develop any problems. But don't come back on Monday even if they beg you, okay?"
You tell me which was worse.
While waiting for the bar exam results, I was working as a temp for some big DC firm with a bunch of other hopeful attorneys-to-be.
Our assignment was to photocopy redacted documents for trial notebooks. The pages were entirely whited out except for the page number. Our "challenge" was ensuring that the right number of blank pages were in each notebook.
A tossup between two summer jobs during my college years, both via temp agencies:
1) At a chemical warehouse, loading 100-pound bags of soda ash onto trucks for delivery to water treatment plants. It would've been tolerable but for the fact that it was very hot most of the summer and the warehouse wasn't air conditioned and of course the truck cargo compartments weren't either.
2) At an electroplating plant, using an overhead conveyor to dip metal bars into huge vats filled with cyanide. No, I wasn't about to drink the stuff, and it didn't create dangerous fumes, but just spending eight hours a day standing next to thousands of gallons of one of the world's deadliest poisons is sort of disconcerting.
I wrote articles for a national magazine.
A few years in a just-got-out-of-prison-style environment, including people who slammed meth in the bathrooms. At least the money was good.
But remember the Democrats want to keep all those quality, industrial jobs in the states.
The biggest battle in WWII was fought at a place called Kursk, and both the Germans and the Russians laid out extensive minefields during the fight. The Russians, being short on mines and long on bodies, had squads of men whose job it was to crawl through the Russian minefields, into the german minefields, dig up the ARMED German mines (with special wooden shovels to avoid setting off magnetic triggers) carry the ARMED German mines back into the Russian mine fields and bury the German mines next to Russian mines, all in the middle of the largest tank battle in history.
Personally though, cold calling old people for a political campaign. The only thing worse than having a grandmother lie to you is getting stuck with someone who won't let you hang up because they have no one else to talk to. It eats at your soul.
The biggest battle in WWII was fought at a place called Kursk, and both the Germans and the Russians laid out extensive minefields during the fight. The Russians, being short on mines and long on bodies, had squads of men whose job it was to crawl through the Russian minefields, into the german minefields, dig up the ARMED German mines (with special wooden shovels to avoid setting off magnetic triggers) carry the ARMED German mines back into the Russian mine fields and bury the German mines next to Russian mines, all in the middle of the largest tank battle in history.
Personally though, cold calling old people for a political campaign. The only thing worse than having a grandmother lie to you to get rid of you is getting stuck with someone who won't let you hang up because they are so desperately lonely. It eats at your soul.
Summer job during college at Carborundum filling bags with silicon carbide, stacking them on pallets, and loading them onto trucks or railroad cars. This was pre-OHSA and the abrasive dust was everywhere - watches would last about 3 months before the abrasive dust would grind the parts enough so that they no longer worked. Imagine what it was doing to people's lungs.
I thought it couldn't get worse, but the guy who filled the really small orders went on vacation for two weeks, and I had to scoop the extremely fine stuff out of 55 gallon drums into paper bags. The back pain was agonizing.
Pharmacy warehouse. The HMO's unions were on strike, so all of us data processing types got to go fill in (I guess I was lucky not to get janitorial). The first day, it took 20 of us 12 hours to get all the pills pulled and shipped.
By the end of the first week, a half dozen of us were doing in under 8 hours what the regular staff of 30 did. And we weren't working particularly hard. Bored to tears, but not working hard at all. Gave me a whole new perspective on union labor.
The summer I got my working papers I worked as a golf caddy. I discovered that I could not follow the ball in flight. I coped alright for a few weeks but met my waterloo with one golfer guest: on one hole, watched the ball bounce down a hill into broad leaf overgrowth and could not find it; coming off that hole, after a drive to the green, we were not in good view of the hole, and he asked me where the correct hole was: I gave him the wrong hole; he drove the ball right to the green; at which time, we realized I had given him incorrect directions. The game continued for the final holes without much incident. But I was so chagrined that I told him when I put his bag in his car trunk that I was firing myself and would not be there if he ever returned. He graciously, over my objections, gave me a full tip.
Oh my god, it's true! Libertarians really do consist entirely of people who've never done an honest day's work in their lives. Yeah, all these 9-5 data entry jobs really are the worst thing imaginable.
Fall of 1994. In a depressed economy, I couldn't get a teaching job. Forced to move back in with my parents, I took the only job available, working the night shift at a local plant that made air-bag components. My job was to stand in front of a press, put a small piece of metal into a groove, press a bit, and then jump back as the press cut the piece down into a slightly smaller piece of metal while spraying coolant and red-hot shards of metal in the general direction of my face.
I worked from 3:30 in the afternoon to 2 a.m., six nights a week. I was only allowed 2 sick days for the first six months -- any more than that was a termination offense. Even with ear plugs, the place was so loud that my ears would ring for about two hours after I got home. I still have two small scars on my right arm from where hot metal shavings fell into the gloves I wore. After the second, I just stopped wearing the gloves -- the rash the coolant gave me was less of a problem to me than the burns.
I worked there from September till the first of January and then got my ass into a graduate program on a merit scholarship. Most of my co-workers had a high school education at best, needed the job desperately, and were resigned to working there for another 20 years. Or they would have been had the plant not closed recently thanks to this wonderful Bush economy.
And some of you are bitching because you had to spend your days collating copies.
Wankers.