My worst job ever
I've worked a few less than stellar jobs in my life, but today I was reminded of the worst job I ever held.
I stopped at the bank to deposit some checks and I went through the second teller's drive-through, the one that sends the checks through the pneumatic tube or whatever that thing is. I thought the kids would get a kick out of it.
As I'm preparing to launch the deposit, I hear the man in the car next to me cursing and giving the teller a hard time. Apparently he was cashing a check and she asked to see his ID. I couldn't make out everything he was saying, but the teller was biting her tongue and continuing to be very polite to this irate individual. Suddenly I had a flashback to the time when I worked as a bank teller down in New Jersey. It was maybe my second or third week there and I was working the drive-up window for the first time and I asked for this man's ID, just as I was instructed to do by the management. The man began flipping out on me and then drove around to the front, parked his truck and came into the bank to curse me out. He went on and on about he'd been coming to this bank for five thousand years and what kind of idiots were they hiring at this branch now, yada, yada, yada. I was horrified, embarrassed, angry, all that stuff. And not one of my superiors defended me. They smiled at him, apologized and sent him on his way. I felt humiliated and beleagured as to why no one stepped up and said anything. The job was horrible for about a dozen other reasons as well, all stories unto themselves, but this episode was one of the worst.
That same day I decided that it was time to find a new job. I think I worked there for maybe four months at the most. My last day there was my favorite day of work.
So as I'm watching this woman take this abuse, I was really impressed by how well she held it together. She was very professional and treated him as though he was just sunshine and roses personified. I'm sure she was seething underneath, but you really couldn't tell. I witnessed the whole scenario and I don't think the man knew anyone else was there but he must have heard me speaking to the kids because he flashed a quick look in my direction and then his face went all red. Yep, I'm watching you. Thanks for teaching my children some new words you big jackalope.
I'll try and remember that day back in NJ every time I'm having a bad day at home. A bad day here with the kids is still ten thousand times better than a good day back in that hell hole.
So now I want to know...what's the worst job YOU ever held?
I stopped at the bank to deposit some checks and I went through the second teller's drive-through, the one that sends the checks through the pneumatic tube or whatever that thing is. I thought the kids would get a kick out of it.
As I'm preparing to launch the deposit, I hear the man in the car next to me cursing and giving the teller a hard time. Apparently he was cashing a check and she asked to see his ID. I couldn't make out everything he was saying, but the teller was biting her tongue and continuing to be very polite to this irate individual. Suddenly I had a flashback to the time when I worked as a bank teller down in New Jersey. It was maybe my second or third week there and I was working the drive-up window for the first time and I asked for this man's ID, just as I was instructed to do by the management. The man began flipping out on me and then drove around to the front, parked his truck and came into the bank to curse me out. He went on and on about he'd been coming to this bank for five thousand years and what kind of idiots were they hiring at this branch now, yada, yada, yada. I was horrified, embarrassed, angry, all that stuff. And not one of my superiors defended me. They smiled at him, apologized and sent him on his way. I felt humiliated and beleagured as to why no one stepped up and said anything. The job was horrible for about a dozen other reasons as well, all stories unto themselves, but this episode was one of the worst.
That same day I decided that it was time to find a new job. I think I worked there for maybe four months at the most. My last day there was my favorite day of work.
So as I'm watching this woman take this abuse, I was really impressed by how well she held it together. She was very professional and treated him as though he was just sunshine and roses personified. I'm sure she was seething underneath, but you really couldn't tell. I witnessed the whole scenario and I don't think the man knew anyone else was there but he must have heard me speaking to the kids because he flashed a quick look in my direction and then his face went all red. Yep, I'm watching you. Thanks for teaching my children some new words you big jackalope.
I'll try and remember that day back in NJ every time I'm having a bad day at home. A bad day here with the kids is still ten thousand times better than a good day back in that hell hole.
So now I want to know...what's the worst job YOU ever held?
posted by Kristen @ 2:06 PM
11 Comments:
At 9:39 AM,
John O'Brien said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
At 9:40 AM,
John O'Brien said…
I was originally going to say that my worst job was working at Capt. Bob's in high school (remember that place?) Bob was an alcoholic, and would be passed out at the bar by noon, and I had to run the place... Here I was, like 16 years old dealing with beer distributors and whatnot... being the GM of a restuarant. But I did make a LOT of money working there. I always felt like a drug dealer, I always had a fat wad of cash in my pocket. I'd KILL for that now that I'm older! Where did the disposable income go?!? ;)
I think my worst job was a freelance editing gig I did once years ago. The edit suite was set up very weirdly... I sat in a recessed pit with the computer and gear, while the producers sat at tables ringing the pit, literally about 4-5' above me. It was very uncomfortable and sort of dehumanizing in a way. It was like they literally sat up on high and lorded over me. That was a miserable couple of weeks.
But the good thing is, when that place went out of buisness, a few of the employees there started a new company. And now, ten years later, I'm working with them again. In a much better and healthier space to boot! :D
At 10:04 AM,
Anonymous said…
Oh, but there's been so many, how do I choose?!
One of the worst, but probably the funniest too was working one summer for the Alumni Association where I went to college. About 10 of us students would spend our evenings cold-calling alumni. Boy did we get hung up on a lot! (and cursed out a few times ;) Of course we also got the ones who just wouldn't stop talking!! Those were really the worst.
That was the early 90s, jobs very scarce then and I was desperate. So yes, I was one of those telemarkers everyone loves to hate!!
At 10:35 AM,
Anonymous said…
Oh, there have been many horrible jobs, but I'd say my last one before my current one (which I love) took the cake. I also have received my share of verbal abuse and harrassment while working in retail (I cannot understand why people get so worked up over being asked for ID when it is FOR THEIR OWN PROTECTION!), but it wasn't until I reached middle-management level that my stress level skyrocketed. On a daily basis I was torn between corporate suits and their rules (and they NEVER hit the sales floor themselves!) and my very-teenaged staff's needs while taking the brunt of the verbal customer abuse (unlike your bosses at the bank, I made sure all difficult abusive customers were passed up to me.) Anyway, I think the worst part of that job was the fact that I was on call 24/7 because my own boss refused to help should there be last minute staff problems. Someone's car broke down at 1am and they wouldn't be in for their next day's shift--guess who got called? Someone forgot to show up for their Sunday morning shift guess who Security called? Someone was short on their cash out guess who got called at 10pm on a Friday night? And guess who had to answer to her boss as to why she wasn't reachable for say an hour early one morning before the scheduled work time, when she called with a question? Yep, they OWNED me! It was a nightmare. No hobbies, no trips, nothing. I was required to be accessible to everyone at ALL times. It would have made sense if it was an important field like medical care, but we sold GIFT CERTIFICATES for crying out loud! I often felt like a hamster on a wheel, or a truck with spinning wheels in the mud, going nowhere, and nowhere, and nowhere...
I've been free from that job for 2 1/2 years now and I have my life back (and a steady schedule in a non-retail company, a boss I love, and NO STAFF TO WORRY ABOUT!) Praise God! :)
At 4:20 PM,
Anonymous said…
The worst job I ever had was inputting business orders for long distance telephone service. It made me want to bang my head on the desk every. day. Basically the customer service reps would take orders from business customers for long distance plans, but they invariably screwed up the entire order. Then, we were supposed to fix all the problems with the order. Sometimes they did things like assign the business two carriers. Hello, that is impossible. And we got to deal with the snotty emails about getting the orders right. Hello, why are you hiring middle men instead of properly training the idiots who take the orders?
But it paid $20/hr. so I hung on as long as I could.
At 8:04 PM,
Flea said…
You have drive through bank tellers??? om goodness!
At 9:35 PM,
HLiza said…
I would do the same thing you did..we deserve better than that! My worst job was actually collecting bad debts for a clinical lab from stingy and cunning GPs who made 1001 excuses so that they don't have to pay! Strangely I was there for 2 years..!
At 7:23 PM,
Kristen said…
John- If I'd had known you were always carrying so much cash on you, I would have hit you up for money more often.
Annette- I can only imagine what that job was like...cold calling is my one of my job nightmares...
Jody- Oh, that really does sound like it was fun...I worked in retail for a while and it wasn't the worst job I had, it wasn't the best, either.
Melissa- I was never good at dealing with unhappy customers... not at ALL my field of expertise. The customer may always be right, but very often the customer is an intolerable creep and I don't want to be the one to deal with them.
Hann- You don't have drive through tellers??
Hliza- Debt collecting...what fun! NOT!
Notice how no one wrote, "Oh, my worst ever job was being an overpaid, famous actor."
At 3:23 AM,
Idaho Dad said…
I wouldn't say I've had any really bad jobs, but I would describe a fair number of them as deadly boring.
Those jobs developed a fear in me of being bored. It still haunts me to this day, so I now constantly have a dozen different projects and activities going on so I'm never bored.
At 5:34 PM,
Anonymous said…
The worst job I ever had was working day labor for 5.15 an hour doing riprap (stacking rocks on a hillside) while paired with a crackhead who slept in the shade most of the day as I attempted to complete one of the unfinished tasks of Heracles. That day the soles of my work boots finally gave out and it was like walking in bedroom slippers over crushed glass. But hey, it beats investment banking....
At 6:27 PM,
Anonymous said…
I’m probably pretty fortunate in having never had a really awful job. I never worked at a fast food joint, or with food at all, and most of the jobs I had before I started working as a professional were usually decent at least. For the most part, even where the job itself wasn’t great, the people were. The one exception to this is rather complicated, and a certain amount of explanation is in order.
I had changed jobs because a botched internal memo at my employer said things that sounded like significant layoffs were coming. (They weren’t, as it turns out, but everyone thought they were). So I decided to see what else was out there. I responded to a newspaper ad for a job in a different industry, as a supervisor (I hadn’t supervised before). It was specialized enough that they couldn’t find someone with the experience that they really wanted, so they were going outside to find someone to train. I would be under contract initially, but in every other respect I would be like a full time employee. Vacation and benefits were at least as good as my current position, and the salary was a lot better – about a 75% increase! Apparently, they had previously promoted from within, and it hadn’t worked out. The only other internal person qualified for the job had turned it down – in itself an early warning sign. I didn’t heed this, being blinded by almighty dollar, and I took the job.
At first, things weren’t too bad. The job was a lot of work – I had been told that it would be about 50 hours a week the first year, decreasing to 40 hours a week as I got experienced. Ha ha. Sixty hours a week was routine, and ninety hour weeks/twenty hour days weren’t unheard of. The plant had staff for three shifts five days a week, but frequently worked seven days a week for weeks at a time. As a supervisor, I was expected to get people to fill those weekend overtime shifts – even if management suddenly decided to put on 48 hours of weekend overtime at 3:00 Friday afternoon. I cannot tell you how scummy I felt, trying to convince someone that had worked 32 hours overtime each weekend for seven weekends straight that I needed them to do it again. I felt like sh*t having to do that.
I had originally been hired by the company’s two ‘techies’ – I was supposed to be the line supervisor of the technicians and chemical mixers, while these two dealt with wider technical issues. At first, it worked okay – although I was working insane hours, we were all on the same side, I was learning things well, and I actually enjoyed the work most of the time. Then, about six months after I started, there was a management rearrangement, and I ended up reporting to someone else – who the two techies hated with vitriolic passion. I was in the impossible position of reporting to a manager with no understanding of the technical requirements of my job, but needing to get technical support from the two techies, when the two sides hated each other, constantly trying to get the other guys in trouble with higher management. This was a war, and I was caught in the middle, with no possibility of escape.
Problems started to manifest themselves. I had to implement a new process for environmental reasons. The company that developed the process offered to send one of their technical people for free, to help get things started up properly, which would help immensely. But the techies nixed this, saying that this guy couldn’t be allowed into the plant because of our proprietary processes. This was complete bullshit, but I was stuck. In the end, I did get the new process working after some false starts, but it was enormously stressful, involved working even longer hours than usual, and practically destroyed whatever was left of my family life. And this was just one of numerous technical issues I was caught in the middle of – including the plant’s chemical systems being completely rebuilt at the busiest time of the year, without interrupting peak production!
Eventually, I came to see that this was just the way this employer worked, and that it was never going to change. One of my more perceptive co-workers told me that “This is a company where you work for a few years, make a good pile of money, and get out”. He was absolutely right, and I hope he took his own advice. Ironically, I got fired just after I had decided to quit. On a Wednesday evening, I decided that on the following Saturday, I was going to start looking though the newspapers for another job. Then, on Friday, one of my technicians (recently hired) made a particularly expensive blunder that he had never been trained to avoid. I walked up to my bosses office late Friday afternoon expecting to have to defend my new technician from being fired, only to discover that I had just been. It was actually a relief – despite being just married, with no savings to speak of, being fired and finally no longer having to worry about the insane politics of that place was like a great weight being lifted from my shoulders. I was out of work for nine months after that, but I didn’t regret leaving. Any work I have had subsequently has been a breeze by comparison.
A vitally important lesson that I learned from this is that some jobs aren’t worth it, no matter how much they pay.
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