What's the Strangest, Funniest, or Worst Job You Ever Had??

fewpop

fewpop

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I guess if I'm too far off topic with this thread, those manly mods here will bounce me out like a bum in a bar room brawl. :D

Well, what the hey, it wouldn't be the first time. So, I was thinking recently about some of the many jobs I have had in my 57 years on the planet. Since there are a bunch of interesting folks who hang out here, I got to thinkin' that there's bound to be a lot of diversity in the kind of jobs that have been held by knifeknuts like us all as we grew into our adult years. I know we have at least one alligator wrestler in our clan. Who knows what else?

In particular, I thought it would be fun to share some of the strange, funny, or really worst jobs you've had along your pathways to paydays.

List the job, and maybe say a few words about the age you were, or the circumstances in your life that got you there, or the job "features".

I'll lead off to get us started.

My 1st "job" (kinda funny), for "pay" was in 1960 in Clearwater Florida where at the age of ten, I talked myself into a job with the manager of a baseball batting park. My job was to hunker down behind the pitching machine and load baseballs. I got real dirty and sometimes hit with baseballs, but hey, I got paid in free passes to hit balls. :cool: I thought I was pretty cool.

My strangest job was repossessing cars in the Dallas - Ft. Worth area at the age of 19. Basically, I had "legal" authority to steal (usually hotwire) cars from overdue payees in the middle of the night, and return them to a locked compound for the grand sum of $15 per car. It was a fairly dangerous, and exciting job. :eek: I thought I was pretty cool.

My worst job, which did not last long, was working for an oilfield maintenance company during the summer of my 17th year. My job was to climb inside of 5000 gallon oilfield storage tanks that had been emptied recently, and beat big dents out from the inside with a sledge hammer. Summer in Louisiana, only a small porthole in the tank, and oil sludge everywhere. :thumbdn: I was at the bottom of the totem pole. I thought I was pretty uncool. :)

How about sharing some of your odd, funny, or miserable job anecdotes?? Let's hear from some of you traditional, or not so traditional, workers.
 
When I was a Junior in high school, back around 73/74. A local egg producer (egg factory if you will) was pulling its old stock of laying hens and shipping them out. Several of the school aged guys from the area, me included, were to work over three or four days pulling chickens from their cages, taking them out 6 or seven at a time, holding them by one leg each, and putting them in stackable cages for loading onto a flatbed and shipment off to become soup or maybe pet food. It was hot, sickening work. We were supposed to move fast. Guys would just reach in and rip the chickens out. Wings got snapped, the chickens often shrieked in a way that sound like a baby. If a chicken got loose and went into the manure pit below the cages you were supposed to pull it out and hose it off. I saw a few chickens just disappear into the muck, wings still flapping, making waves from under, until the disappeared. All in all it was a very sickening experience. We never treated our livestock so brutally or heartlessly on the farm as those chickens were treated. It was my first look into high production agribusiness. A bit shocking to a boy from family farm country.

As it happened I was coming down with mono at the time and was wiped by the end of the first night. By the time I got home I was running a high fever and ached all over. So, I only worked there one day and was out of school for nearly a month sick. I think it might have been a reasonable trade off for getting out of that place after the first day.
 
Good one Amos. Sounds like a head-on collision with reality job.

C'mon you folksy folks. This could be fun. I know everybody here couldn't have been born rich and famous like Gus and Elliott. :D

After all, it's not like you have to reveal that you once had a job in the midwest going from hog farm to hog farm removing fecal impactions from old sows, or something. :eek:

If you want to mention knife content, that's ok too. :)
 
Ford,
I'd love to play,but I hate typing ,'cause I can't & haven't hired my secretary yet
But real quick,when I was 14,Louis Gomez,a Cuban Immigrant,hard working man,but his practices were too much."Venitian Waterproofing" ,holy cow,the man was like the cast of the Sopranos,wrapped up in one man.What a great summer that was...
He'd get a good price on a dump truck for sale,by going there the night before,and vandalizing it...
I wonder what ever happened to Louis...
My employment terminated,when I tried to move a '50's chevy pick up,hooked up to a diesel compressor,up an inclined driveway...Well,I knew how to drive,I thought,but I didn't put 'er in 4x4,popped the clutch,with the load,blew the universal on the drive shaft,by the time I figured out what the noise was,the compressor was in the divided garge !!
First time I ever hitchhiked,too,from Queens to Huntington...
-Vince
 
Upto now i've never been sacked (knock on wood), but i've given up on quite a few.

Two of them i gave up after the first day:

- I've done a lot of jobs while at university, but one day making ends meet proved to be more difficult then expected and i needed some quick cash, so i applied with a cleaning firm. The first day on the job they dropped me in a burnt out flat and told me i had to empty and clean it. Before they left me there, they told me two things: that they didn't have any ppe for me and that the owner of the flat was an alcoholic old lady that had set herself and the flat ablaze. She hadn't made it... I guess it's pretty sad and also a bit creepy to clean out half burned personel belongings of anybody, but when you come across scorched family pictures of someone that lived unlucky and died even worse, i can assure you it's a big time enthousiasm killer! On top of that i was walking the quickest ever road to long cancer, constantly breathing in clouds of dust containing burnt remains of many different materials, from wood over textile to plastics. By three in the afternoon i called my boss and told him i was finished for the day, and finished with my entire cleaning career...

- The second one - in similar circomstances as the other one - was in the meat industry, with a firm called Ganda Ham. You'd never guess, but they make salted hams there. I had two tasks there, both to be done in cold store environment. First i had to unload forty pound hams from racks that were delivered by truck and put them on a conveyor belt that ran trough a sea salt spraying machine. On the other side of the belt, my colleague (or me if we traded places) had to pick up the salted hams and place them on racks again, which had to be put in storage.
Then i had to pull racks hanging on ceiling conveyor belts out of the "ham wash" (kind of a car wash for hams, to wash the salt away after several weeks of storage) with the thing still spraying...
Damn this was wet, cold and salty! After uni i've sailed tugboats for a couple of years from the north sea to the gulf of mexico, until i had enough of skinless lips, sea sickness, lonelyness, crazy dutch sailors and the likes, but i'd go right back to the tugs if i had to choose between sailing and the salty ham wash, i swear!
 
Outstanding Vince! Your typing is just fine, and practice makes perfect. :)

Zeppos, You got the idea for sure. I can just see you guys in the "ham wash". Probably got sick of ham sandwiches. ;)

Good stuff you guys.

If Robuck doesn't step up, I'm gonna tell about his job at the glue factory, or his job at "Thongs`R Us". :p
 
My worst job ever in my late teens was digging sewer lines. I remember the last job I worked on. We were several feet down to the main. andd we began to notice that where the line broke, there were literally hundreds of condoms of every color imaginable, obviously the reason for the ruptured line. We were all totally grossed out but we still thought it was hilarious. The owner of the house was a single woman in her late thirties/early forties and her teenage daughter. A short while later the lady came out to see how things were going. My buddy made a special point to point out the rainbow plethora of condoms as the source of her problem. She turned red faced and stormed off much to our delight and amusement. Fifteen minutes later while my buddy was in the hole digging, he suddenly froze. the end of the line was about two feet over his head. About this time we heard the ladies car speeding out of the driveway. It was the dreaded flushing of the toilet! My buddy climbed out of that hole with a quickness that would have envied Spiderman, just barely missing the maligned brown and yellow shower. It was hilarious to everyone but him. That was the only point of amusement in a very disgusting and backbreakin job. I believe I quit the next day.
 
Geez! working at M&T chemical. Me and couple 55 gallon drums of caustic soda as high in the air as the forklift would go, while shoveling this caustic soda into the hopper - for 8 hours straight, day after day. No mask, no protective clothing...geez! Bad memories.
 
Two come to mind:

In college a buddy of mine approached me with a job offer;

A local construction company had a concrete mixer lose the motor that spun the drum, instead of pulling over and dumping the load, the driver brought the truck back to the yard, where that sucker set up. They plucked the Drum off the chasis with a crane, then hired my friend and I to go in and chip that thing out. By hand and with a small air hammer it took us three consecutive saturdays but we got it clean.

After graduating; I spent a couple of years at a construction safety consulting firm, going to construction job sites and keeping everybody OSHA compliant. We also did Accident investigations...myfavorite? the guy who brushed a high power high tension line with a crane, he bailed out in time...the crane literally melted into the parking lot before they got the grid shut down.
 
Jenner 515 said:
Two come to mind:
<clip>
After graduating; I spent a couple of years at a construction safety consulting firm, going to construction job sites and keeping everybody OSHA compliant. <clip>
Click to expand...

there is some good money in that!
 
Excellent anecdotes fellas. Thanks for taking to the time to post your experiences. It is interesting to me to hear what other people here have been through, and it's one way to get to know a little bit more about some of the fine folks that frequent here. :thumbup:
 
From 1980 to 1997 I worked for a really nice company that did alot of defense contracting for the govenment. The machine shop was a dream, new Bridgeport mills and Harding lathes every five years. All the tooling we could ever need, and if we needed something special for a job, they got it for us. Had a seperate cleaning crew to clean the shop at the end of every shift.

Then they started to ship our jobs offshore and in October of 1997 laid off the whole machine shop, sheet metal and welding shops, and production lines. No more in house manufacturing, everything went away. I found myself out of work at an age where I ran into age discrimination. At 56 it was hard to find a machinist job. I ended up at a dirty little job shop in Frederick with old worn out mills and two lathers that were pathetic. A hell of a come down. Hardly any tooling. If we needed to make a 5/8 radiused slots, and all we had was one or two semi-dull 1/2 inch end mills, the boss told us to wing it. Worst job I ever had. My fellow machinists called the place the blacksmiths shop. Franky that was an insult to a good blacksmiths shop. Very depressing.

Then in 2001 I blew out my right rotator cuff because the company was too cheap to buy us any lifting tables or overhead hoists, and I was repetedly lifting up to 75 pounds from floor level pallets to machine table. I was getting kind of long in tooth to be doing that kind of grunt work. After surgery the doctor looked at the job description they gave him to sign off so I could return to work, he said there was no way I could do that anymore. That was the first good news I had since I had lost my job in 1997. I carried my disability insurance for the next couple of years till I could file for my social security and tell the whole working thing to kiss my a$$.

I love my retirement. But it was like having to crawl through a sewer to get to it though. Those last 4 working years nearly killed me.
 
You ever see that "Seinfeld" episode where Kramer has a job pretending to have various ailments so med students can practice diagnosing him? My wife actually had that exact job one summer when she was in college.
 
Out of college, not sure about what was next, had a girl friend (my wife now), was just looking for something available while she finished school. Found a job working the graveyard shift at a duck hatchery (i.e. the duck factory). Walls of incubators. Spent lots of time helping little ducklings get completely out of the eggs. It wasn't all it was cracked up to be. ;)


- Joe
 
One summer wile in college, a friend and myself painted low income houseing. We looked forward to the cheap paint smell to cover up the smell of most of the rooms. Truthfully a coat of paint didn't really help those places.
 
When I first got into commercial painting in 1986,I worked for a contractor who did a lot of commercial maintenance painting on Long Island

We had a small job for a Saturday,go to a big developer's (big time guy)main office,and spray a steel roll down door,in the parking garage on his floor.
Simple right?
Wrong...
The "maintenance engineer" of the building was to meet us there that Saturday,and provide us with the key that operated the roll up door,open-close.
No show...The Boss' Son,eager,a go getter,says,F-it,let's throw a coat on it in the down position.
So ,we prep it,and fire off a coat of quick dry Alkyd direct to metal industrial enamel,big name for Rustoluem.
What he (the Son),or I did not know,on the other side,was Mr Big Time's antique Rolls Royce....and,to boot,it had just come back from over wherever,the RR factory,with it's brand new paint job
The enamel,our paint,seeped through the seems of the roll up door and completely coated the antique Rolls.
We heard about it on Mon Morn.,lol,glad I was an employee only.
But Mr BigTime was so pissed at his guy for not showing up w/the key,he barely blamed my boss
Sent the Rolls back,over there again,re-do it
The moral of the story,get the key
-Vince
 
Ford,

I&#8217;m honored that you think of me when it comes to loser jobs. Really.

I won&#8217;t go into the whole catwalk modeling experience in places such as New York, Paris and Rio, though it was both exhilarating and degrading, because my agent may still give me a call some day.

My brother and I were actually talking recently about the time we cleaned out horse stalls during a summer on a ranch in La Salle Junction, Utah. It was like digging through layers of archeological horseshit. I bet the horses that laid down the first layer were long dead by the time we got their stuff cleaned out.

It was several feet thick, to the point that I don&#8217;t even know how a horse could stand in the stall anymore, and there were plenty of dead mice encrusted in the layers, as well as a few live ones who were trying to avoid getting hit with shovels by us.

It being summer in a hot, confined space, the dust stuck to our sweaty faces, arms, and clothes. We were pulling horse crap boogers out of our noses for days.

We were both in junior high school that summer and we learned to appreciate Zane Gray and Louis Lamour novels, old country music (Hank Snow-type old) and the exhilarating buzz of smoking an unfiltered Marlboro while sitting in a tree house.

If there wasn&#8217;t any working buckin&#8217; bales by hand, or digging holes for barbed wire fence posts, my grandfather would drop us off out in the middle of no where with the 50-pound bar we used to dig post holes, two shovels, a very dull axe and a Clorox jug full of water so we could spend the day cutting the sagebrush away from fences that probably no one else would drive by for years to come. My granddad didn&#8217;t believe in days off during the work week.

The axe was worthless for cutting green sagebrush; we had to beat it into submission. We got paid $8 bucks a day (I&#8217;m startin&#8217; to sound like an old timer here), and there was no quitting, although I did fantasize about what would happen if I whanged my brother in the back of the head with a shovel.

And as much as some of the work sucked, it was one of the best summers of my life. Sometime I&#8217;ll tell you about the Monticello Rodeo and my first introduction to &#8220;stinky finger,&#8221; as my uncle so delicately phrased it around the breakfast table the morning after.

Vince, one summer a buddy and myself were supposed to take a garage apart while trying to save the materials. After breaking most of the boards, etc. with crow bars and claw hammers, we figured we&#8217;d save our boss the expense of paying us for countless days of drudgery by burning the garage down for him. I had insurance companies calling me for months after that one.
 
Mike Robuck said:
It was several feet thick, to the point that I don’t even know how a horse could stand in the stall anymore, and there were plenty of dead mice encrusted in the layers, as well as a few live ones who were trying to avoid getting hit with shovels by us.

.
Click to expand...

Holy Hanta Virus Batman!

Glad you survived that one.
 
Had several jobs in college. First couple were restaurants, then I was a helper on a construction cleaning crew. We would load up a huge old truck and trailer with construction garbage, haul it to the dump, and repeat. These were all housing development sites, and after we hauled off the trash, we'd sweep and vacuum.

The boss was a guy my age, who was married to one of the cheerleaders I'd fantasized about in high school. Kind of weird, being at their house before or after work.

Weirdest one was the first one I felt like I had "adult" responsibilities. I worked for the last two years of college doing swing and graveyard shifts at the state mental hospital as a Psychiatric Technician, or nurse's aid. Saw some weird behaviors there. Really, really weird. Got assaulted by patients occaisionally, just bruises except for the time that guy hit me with a chair.

But one night, I went onto a different ward than I usually worked on, and there was a huge bloodstain on the floor that they were cleaning up. Seems that, just half an hour earlier, they had been doing meds, and one of the patients had gotten combative with the nurse through the med window, and one of the other techs walked up to him, talking, trying to calm him down, and the patient punched him in the face. The blow crushed all the bone around the guy's eye -- cheekbone, orbital, part of the brow.

He was just working through college, just like me, and nearly got killed. 8 bucks an hour, plus state health and life insurance benefits.

I got myself permanently assigned to a ward with less-violent patients shortly after that. That was the last job I had before I joined the Army, and now that I'm out, I work full-time for the Army anyway. Wear a beard and civilian clothes, make more money, and don't have to show up at 5 for PT. Life is good.
 
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