Most Menial Jobs

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absolutewrite

What's the worst/most menial job you've ever held?

I can't narrow mine down. A selection:

Laundromat wash-n-fold girl
Vitamin factory line worker, usually in charge of placing one coupon in each bottle of vitamin E.
Mall survey girl (lasted one day)
Liquor store cashier
Bus girl
 

Yeshanu

You really want to know?

Sorting people's garbage at a recycling plant. :ack
 

maestrowork

How about janitors? Cleaning toilets? Every day? Used by gazillion strangers? No thanks.

Edit: oh, jobs that I have held! Got it. No, I've never cleaned other people's crap, thank you very much.

:grin
 

aka eraser

Picking worms wasn't very glamorous. Clomping around golf courses at night with a miner's light strapped on my head, a gallon pail with sawdust strapped to my left leg and another gallon pail strapped to my right to drop the critters into.

Working garbage on a Parks Dept. truck was worse though I think. Garbage bags weren't invented yet. One guy tossed the containers to me up in the bed of the truck and I dumped them and edged backwards. Before the shift was over, I'd edged back as far as I could go and was knee-deep in rotting garbage and gazillions of maggots.

Then there was the tomato farm...and selling exercise units.. and that job taking the lids off loaves of bread as they came out of the oven and onto the conveyor belt...

Writing's easy. ;)
 

maestrowork

Bus boy.
Waiter (for too long; hated it)
TV extra (you wait and you wait and you wait, sometimes for 16 hours... and sometimes your scenes are so nasty it's bad)
...
Sheesh, that's it. I have been spoiled!!
 

reph

Eraser, what was the sawdust for?

I haven't had many jobs. One real job that lasted nine years. After that, freelancing; before that, just a few odd temp things. The worst of those was cutting apricots in half for drying. I was 17. It was 108 degrees out there. You use a curved knife. At the end of a day, the thumb of your nondominant hand is covered with shallow knife cuts.
 

Chaoc Kazdul

What I do now to afford tuition.

Surface mining.

Don't let the surface part throw you off, you're usually still 15-30 feet below the surface unless you happen to be operating a front loader.

Nice, damp, dark, smelly, poorly lit tunnels, and all the rocks you could ever ask for.
 

Betty W01

waitress
nursery school worker
telemarketer
stay-at-home mom of babies and toddlers (OK, you don't get paid, just supported by your spouse, but you do get to stick your hand in the toilet to retrieve your car keys, mop up vomit, change poopy diapers, wipe spit-up off your neck, blow nasty little noses, sponge rubbed-in food out of baby hair, and perform other fun activities. At least the kids make it all worthwhile. Not fun - but worthwhile)
 

Sandellen

There's not enough space here for all of them, so I'll just pick one.

I was paid to lie. I was a "test subject" at a polygrapher training school. I had to concoct a story and stick to it until the examiner could wear me down. He didn't like me very much cause I wouldn't budge too easily. He was a Secret Service guy and not amused by my efforts to make him work for his grade!

Hmm, that's not really menial I guess in the scheme of things.

I was paid to open the door at Bennigan's and say "Welcome to Benigan's". That lasted a week.

This is a fun topic. I could see a funny book being written on this subject.
 

aka eraser

Eraser, what was the sawdust for?

Reph, it was for dipping my slime-infested fingers into so I could get a grip on the next slimey little beggar. We were paid the then-princely sum of $20/1000. On a great night a good picker could pick 3000 or so. The best picker was an elderly Hungarian woman who was terrified of worms...hmm...

This topic is fun. I think I have next week's column now: Sawdust & Slime: Memoirs of a Worm Picker.
 

ChunkyC

Working as a night cleaner at a hospital. Duties included:

Cleaning the operating rooms. Some surgeons just can't hit the bio-waste basket. Ugh.

Carrying corpses to the morgue and putting them on slabs. One night a teenage boy had died while mountain biking when his bike went of the trail into a 20 metre deep ravine with a frigid mountain creek at the bottom. The ER doc who worked on him had inserted a chest tube so that warm saline could be pumped into his abdominal cavity in an attempt to bring up his core temperature, but it was too late. Anyway, said doc neglected to tie off the tube, so when my partner and I were lifting this poor kid's body onto the slab and the plastic sheet under him ripped, the corpse thumped onto the slab and fluid shot out of the tube into my partner's face.

I thought he was going to kill that doctor. Fortunately, nothing came of it, all the fluid was on the surface of his skin and he washed up quickly. Needless to say, we both quit shortly after that episode.
 

writerscut

The septic guy came today to empty our tank...now that's a crappy job...literally...:ack
 

awatkins

Cleaning tanning beds in a friend's salon. Some people can be real ... um ... gross. :ack
 

arrowqueen

Putting the tops on Viennese Whirls (by hand) in a biscuit factory in Leith.

Great fun!
 

Kempo Kid

I don't have anything that can top some of these!

Since I've always been an excellent typist, most of my menial jobs consisted of sitting in front of a typewriter or computer screen all day. The temp job I have now is as "Transaction Processor." Music stores all over the country are now renting out instruments to schoolkids. They write up the order sheets, send them in, and because it's the beginning of the school year, the company hires temps to come in and enter all of these order sheets into the system. They have to be counted, batched, scanned, checked, and the information entered into the system.

There are THOUSANDS of them! Tens of thousands! So that's what I do nine and ten hours a day. I sit there and type in orders as fast as I can. My vision gets blurry. My right hand aches from 10-key entering. And for some reason they keep it so cold in there that even with a jacket on my hands get stiff from being so cold.

And all for $9 an hour. As a tech writer, I'm used to getting several times that, but there are no jobs for tech writers any more.

I once worked as a switchboard operator in Chicago for the Chicago Housing Authority, which oversees all of the housing projects for the Chicago metro area. They had one switchboard operator--me. And this was the winter when the elevators and heat went out in the projects all over the city.

So of course all the tenants called me, screaming and cussing. All I could do was transfer them to other departments. I remember one woman screaming at me, "I don't want you to transfer me nowhere! YOU come down here and YOU fix my @#%$ effing elevator!"

I felt for them. I really did. But I was just a poor temp switchboard operator. There was nothing I could do.

I have never accepted a job as a switchboard operator since.
 

Pthom

In ascending order of disgusting:

Dishwasher at a prime dinner restaurant where the dirty dishes came into the dishwashing room on a conveyor belt.

Cleaning the secondary digester at a munincipal sewage treatment plant.

Mucking out a barn at an egg production facility that had been occupied for years by several thousand chickens.

:( :wha :ack
 

Gala

Worst: housewife. That job ended 20 years ago. I excelled in all ways as a domestic engineer, but was miserable with the mundacity. Or maybe it was the idiot I married. (the passage of time has earned him this label. I was a slow learner.)

After that, various temp jobs, the most menial was shoe store worker. I straightened shoes in the rows for hours at a time. Bored brainless.

Waitress didn't last long. I was too busy thinking to remember to put orders on the wheel some times.

Hotel clerk/night auditor. I'm not the cpa type. The entire audit was done manually, using paperworks and a 10 key. I never balanced the hotel. The blessing was meeting famous people, and quitting on short notice when I learned they had me training my own replacement, so they could fire me.

As a kid I picked fruit all summer. I didn't know until adulthood what a back breaking rip-off of a job that was.

Most any job where I've had a female boss had an extra layer of unpleasantness to it.

Church janitor. Never waxed so many floors in my life. Ditto pews. Disgusting bathrooms.

I plan never to work for anyone but myself again, except as a volunteer. Unless it's secretarial. A girl has her bounderies.

Since we're being honest here: Home health aide to a woman that would not get out of bed. She wanted suppositories in all her orifices all the time. Her doctor was giving her drugs that clearly debilitated her to death.

Speaking of morgues and such. I babysat a family that became mortuary keepers. I took care of the kids there, and part of my job was letting people in to visit the dead. I didn't mind it a bit. But that 2-year-old that cried in his crib for hours straight was hard to take.

:nerd
 

HConn

Re: Re: Most Menial Jobs

Trash collecting in high summer. Ah, odors.

Making popcorn. It was strictly a one-man operation. I stood in a tiny room with a giant popcorn fryer. There was a single tiny window--that looked out onto an auto mechanic's shop. After 8 hours of filling and emptying popcorn, I walked out of there coated with a thin layer of coconut oil smoke.

Locker room attendant. Washing and folding towels all day. Of course the guys blew their noses into the towels--why go for a tissue? And why use a tissue to blot that shaving cut? And no, those people can not pick up their own towels, they needed me to do it. And they needed me to pick up their waxy Q-tips. And flush their urinals. And toilets.

Building shelving units by hand. Talk about dull.

Packing books on the assembly line at Amazon.com. This was unbelievably dull. Everyone around me were little hipsters and not worth talking to. Oh, and actually *looking* at the books around you was seriously frowned upon. Like pretending to be a eunich in a harem.
 

LiamJackson

Re: Re: Most Menial Jobs

Thanks to all for sharing. I'm sitting here counting my many, many blessings.

A note to all those who've ever worked as a garbage collector:
ThanK you!
 

writerscut

Re: Re: Most Menial Jobs

I'm fifteen and becoming a little worried...hopefully I'll have fun jobs...:grin
 
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