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I’ve had just about every horrible job under the sun. I spent one summer in high school cleaning out college apartment complexes and literally found human feces inside of an oven. I detailed cars at a Lexus dealership for a few months in college and then quit because I was ready to hang myself from the rafters of the garage.
And while those were nightmare situations for yours truly, they aren’t exactly common gigs, and the ones I’m about to begin talking about have been worked by just about everyone reading this. Here, in no particular order, are the four most thankless, soul-sucking jobs in the universe and the reason why we all ended up going to college, only to find ourselves where we are at now, rotting away in cubicles for the next forty plus years and laughing about how our jobs of yore weren’t really all that bad after all.
Restaurant Staff
I can’t speak too intelligently on the work life of a person in the service industry because I have never worked in a bar or restaurant, but I had friends who did it who never had very many positive things to say about it. If you have done the restaurant thing, you were most likely either a barback or a waiter because the bartending positions were almost always reserved for veterans who had worked there for years.
Post-college, you could probably find a job bartending in the city you just moved to, but no matter what position you had, it always seemed to me like the pay was never good enough for the shit you had to put up with.
Every single day there are always a couple of assholes who don’t tip enough or send back their food four times or are just downright rude, and that is why you’re constantly seeing tweets and memes joking about how bad it is. You do your job correctly and you might get a nice tip but probably not. You do it wrong and you’re more than likely going to get an earful from some dickwad who had a bad day in the cubes.
Landscaping
Spreading mulch, pulling weeds, tending to overgrown bushes, and of course, mowing the lawn – this was standard stuff for the landscaper. I did this for two summers in college working with borderline criminals and other hungover college students and while I did get a pretty savage tan, there was absolutely nothing fun about going out on a Thursday or Friday night and then having to be at a work site by 6:30 a.m. The clientele skews towards upper middle class, meaning that you better spread that mulch and trim those hedges perfectly or else you’re going to get yelled at not once but twice – once by the homeowner and then again by your boss.
The plus side of this is that most landscaping businesses pay their employees under the table and if your foreman is cool he’ll usually let you drink beers during the last job of the day. Semi-unrelated but landscaping also made me something of an amateur meteorologist and to this day I’m pretty good at recognizing when rain or something worse is coming – if there was any sign of lightning I would know about it because we’d automatically get the rest of the day off if there was inclement weather. A so-so job but something I would never do again.
“Brand Ambassador”
Reserved exclusively for hot girls in college. It could be Bumble or Tinder, where you’re standing around outside of classrooms and handing out lighters and gift certificates, but in my day it was almost always for a new flavor of Captain Morgan that was trying to break its way onto college campuses.
The product was always, always disgusting, and these girls would walk around bars and hand out free “swag” and more importantly complimentary shots to anyone who wanted them. I can’t even imagine the amount of catcalling these girls had to put up with, and I’m sure the pay wasn’t great either, but hey it’s college, right? Extra beer money is always, always needed.
Sales
Anyone remember Cutco knives? This was a job reserved exclusively for high school kids with a promise of base pay plus massive commissions when you were able to actually sell knives.
I had a few friends do this for a month or two during the summer between junior and senior year of high school and I’m not entirely sure how it worked but none of them ever made any money. Once in a while, you’d hear about a kid in the town over getting a sale from a family friend or something but I just never understood why anyone would do this. Naivete, I suppose?
Or I guess if your parents were the type to make you get a job and you literally had no other options this was your best bet. A door to door knife salesman might be the hardest job in the world, though. Who the hell wants to buy knives from a 16-year-old kid that is more than likely stoned out of his gourd? No one, that’s who. I guess on the bright side it wasn’t like you were working for Herbalife, though. .
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jduda@grandex.co
I sell drugs. Can confirm most of the time it is thankless.
Sounds like you’re selling the wrong kinds of drugs.
Nah. Some people have a hard time understanding you can’t burn through a 30 day supply of a controlled substance in 5 days and just get more. It doesn’t work like that.
I always thank my drug dealers.
See, that’s the beauty of “non-controlled” substances. You can get more anytime you want. Not only does it create a swath of bloated bureaucratic jobs, it also stimulates the economy via war mongering and the military industrial complex. It also is another avenue to stimulate hyper local economies and get the poor out of poverty but they don’t want that so that’s why they’re illegal for everyone else but “them” lol
Everyone should have to work retail and in a restaurant at some point in their life. We’d probably have less shitty people who are rude to those people.
A guy I dated in college sold Cutco knives. A few months of being exclusive and I suggested he come with me and meet my family and he said only on the condition that he could make his sales pitch to them, since he’d be “missing out on a lot of opportunities” if he spent the weekend at my parents’ place. The relationship did not last.
ABC
Shitty jobs suck but they also teach you so much. Nothing threw me for a loop more than graduating college with kids that had never once had a summer job, or a part time job, anything.
I read that as “graduating college with kids” and thought you really got thrown for a loop!
Same. I graduated pharm school with people who had never worked a day in their lives.
I haven’t eaten lunch yet today and read this as “parm school” and now I’m getting a chicken parm for lunch.
I firmly believe that working a restaurant is the worst job anyone could have. It really makes you appreciate how great life is now
A restaurant is where you get your masters degree in complaining and insulting people in the BOH.
Also, a few guys I know sold Cutco one summer and they made staccs
To be fair, they are quality knives.
I did for a year. There is good earning potential. Product is good and a good value compared to other knives. But a bad culture, and a lot of bullshit awards and titles and “conferences”. Really do not recommend.
Honorable mention to the cashiers at the grocery stores in small towns.
Firm believer that everyone needs to work in the restaurant business for at least 6 months in their lifetime. Can’t appreciate how much those jobs can suck until you’ve had some McMoneybags asswipe complain about how his water had too many ice cubes, and therefore you won’t be getting a tip on his $100 meal
I worked at Waffle House for a while in college. We had different issues with customers
I am so glad that I grew up on a farm, so most of my summers were filled with picking turkey eggs every hour for 15 minutes and then going home to watch tv for the remaining 45.
Turkey eggs? Do you eat those? Honest question
You can. I have really only ever eaten the ones with two yolks that can’t be hatched. One of those is a little more than two chicken eggs that I would normally eat. The taste is the same, but according to my grandma, turkey eggs are better for baking.
How can you tell if it has two yolks without cracking it open?
They’re quite a bit bigger so they don’t fit in the cases that the good eggs are packed in.
That’s pretty neat! Appreciate it!
If you’re ever in west central MN hit me up and I’ll give you some double yolk eggs
buy you a drink*
Am I doing this right??
Oh you bet, that sounds delightful! If you’re ever west of the Red River in west central North Dakota, give me a holler yourself!
Cool, I’ll let you know next time I go to hang out with Salem Sue!
Farm work is the best work. Gives you responsibility paired well with the freedom of doing it your own way.
Why is the timeline like that? For how many hours? I am very interested to understand this.
It’s every hour just so the turkeys don’t have time to break them and/or try to eat them. There are nests that go around the outside of the pen so the amount of time working per hour depends on how long it takes the person to get around the whole thing while getting the turkeys out of the nests and picking up the eggs, followed by sending them through this thing that washes them. It takes longer the first 2-3 months for each flock because they’re laying a lot more and they don’t want to leave the nests, but after that it’s pretty fast. I think they pick 14 times per day. The turkeys pretty much only lay when it’s light so the lights turn on a couple of hours before they start picking.
Bonus fun fact that I just learned recently: apparently eggs have some kind of protective coating on them when they’re laid so they don’t actually have to be refrigerated until after they’re washed.
During one of my first shifts bartending during college a customer accidentally caught my hair on fire with a lighter. He said if I didn’t have fake hair it wouldn’t have been a problem… I’d like to take this moment to point out that my hair, is in fact, real and that hair is flammable.
Article Idea: The # kinds of people you encounter at a bar.
Also: that customer is obvious trash. Did he even try to help put out the follicle flame?
Since high school, I have worked at Burger King, a movie theater, a seafood marketplace/restaurant, and been a grunt for a construction company. I have some stories. It’s fun looking back at how shitty yet sometimes awesome those jobs were.