sundance-communications.com Forums Member Forums Phone Booth Your Worst Job or Career?

Since Arthur Bloom is now beginning his "fourth (or is it fifth) career". It made me reflect on some of the "careers" I have had in the past and hope I NEVER have to revisit in this lifetime or next.

Here are my top three WORST career choices in no particular order:

• I spent a year driving around to local medical centers and mortuaries to pick up over stuffed and leaking boxes of Bio-Hazardous Waste and then burn the containers in an incinerator. Then clean the incinerator. Repeat.
• I spent six months driving elementary kids on a school bus.
• I spent my first four years out of college performing Monitored Urinalysis on people on parole/probation for alcohol/drug crimes. Yeah not only watching men pee in a bottle but testing the "samples" too.

At least I never had a job that entailed asking people, "Would you like fries with that?"

So...what is your Horror Story?

I doubt that I would be able to stomach watching guys pee into a jar.

1st job fresh out of high school was working on maintenance for a local manufacturing plant, starting in late October, '73. The job itself was pretty easy, especially since our "Crew Chief" knew every "Hiding place" in the plant. The problem was he couldn't speak much English. I think the hardest & most dangerous thing we had to do was install the winter windows on the plant. We used old wooden 40 foot ladders (probably a class 8 - LOL). We worked alone raising 6'x10' windows up the ladder with the wind rushing down between the buildings. Between the ladders giving way to the weight and the wind catching the windows as we climbed to the 2nd & 3rd floors, it was a challenge to say the least. We even had a few that had been caught by the wind and flipping them over our heads to the ground. What was a piss off was as soon as we moved to the next window, the machinists would brake the glass as they wanted the cool fresh air. What a waste of time!

An opening became available as a "Chainman" which I took. That pissed my old man off as he often worked in that plant on the phones. He had told me about a guy that was killed there a few years back when a huge block of steel fell from the crane and crushed him 5 feet into the floor. They picked up the remains with a spoon.

I came close one day when they had a huge block of steel that had to easily be 20 x 30 feet x 8 feet high. It took both cranes to lift it to move it to the other end of the plant. When they lifted it to the top the chains stretched to the point where the block was 5 feet lower. I never saw so many guys run so fast in my life.

Luckily soon after I got the chance to work for Bell....another shit job as you all know too well...but not so dangerous...

1 st job between HS and College was folding Bras at Mays in Brooklyn.

That should build up your manly self-esteem.

Back when I turned 18, I got a job in a plastic bag factory cleaning toilets, taking out garbage, retrieving garbage from the dumpster when someone threw stuff out by accident (yes, I learned dumpster diving at an early age) and moving 500# drums of ink around on a dolly. Good part is I learned to cook food on a manifold of a fork lift, a skill I cherish to this day.

15 when I took a job pulling chickens out of barns and loading them on trucks for their final ride. Worked in a shoe shop for a short while then started doing carpentry until I got into communications/electronics.

I know, big difference between worst and toughest, but carrying sheet rock all summer at the age of 18 was tough!

Summer of '70 I had been laid off from my PA job and found a job working for a small chain of department stores that had branches in every ghetto in NYC and Newark. I was hired to work on the truck - and that was fine. Three days later the regular guy came back (long bender of a weekend) and they put me in the warehouse. I was given a felt tip pen and told to change the price on the already-labeled panty hose from $0.97 to $0.99.

I asked for my money at the end of the first day and they begged me to stay on for a second day to finish out the week. There were vague promises of better things to come. I did the second day (still changing the price on the panty hose) and left, never to return.

I graduated college, got married and decided I needed a "better" job. In the Spring of 1973 I got a job (straight commission, no salary) selling this new Industry - Interconnect. I had been working (part time) in PA, Intercom and BGM for 5 years- how hard could it be? I was the world's worst salesman. Some weeks I sold nothing and we went hungry. Some weeks I sold two jobs and they took taxes out like I made that much every week. It was crazy. I lasted 6 months, quit and took a job with the contractor who did our installs and never looked back.

Sam

Before telecom I worked at a grocery store, auto mechanics shop, worked as a laborer for a floor tile and carpet company, and my favorite- selling vacuum cleaners door to door. Those were the legal businesses....