Redditor 7Earth7Energy asked:
"In all seriousness, what's the worst job you've ever had?"
Heartbroken Santa
"Store Santa during my college years."
"Sometimes I enjoyed being 'Santa.'"
"But many times, children were sad and asked for things that likely would never happen, like, as I once commented, 'A new boyfriend for Mommy because she was so lonely ever since Daddy died.'"
- Back2Bach
Retail Managers
"Cashier at a grocery store. The work was fine. My manager was a nightmare."
- Dwight_Bright
Fast-Paced Kitchen
"Fast food... I know everyone knows its a bad job, but nobody knows the stress that goes round in that kitchen, it's insane."
- AnnaEatBanana
Unpredictable Cleaning Schedules
"I used to work for a carpet cleaning company. You never knew what you were going to come across that day. There are basically two types of people that use carpet cleaning services:"
"Type One: Pretty much spotless clean house. Perhaps they spilled a glass of wine on the carpet, and they want the stain out. Easy job..."
"Type Two: They had four dogs and never let them out, and there is more s**t in the carpet than carpet."
- Euphoric-Beat-7206
Thankless Job
"Dishwasher. I’ll go to my grave saying that it is the worst possible job you can have."
"Dishpan hands are a real thing and suck a**. You’re the last to leave the restaurant, the least paid, and least respected person in the building."
- Cognitive-Shadow
Plants and Cars
"I can't decide between two, so I'll share both:"
"First, I was 19 and had just dropped out of college. I decided to take a job over the summer building scaffolding in the chemical plants around the Houston ship channel. I lasted exactly two weeks doing that work."
"12-hour days, carrying long metal posts and hammering them together in the hot Texas sun, with the smell of burning chemicals all around you, and a foreman who can't speak English so communicates to you with hand signals and whistles."
"A lot of my classmates went and had full careers working in the plants. I knew then I had no desire to chase that living. That s**t sucked. I hated the work, I hated being there, and I hated that I had no time to do anything because I was always at work or sleeping."
"Second, Car sales. When I first got out of the Navy and was looking for my first civilian IT job, I was having a hard time getting hired anywhere. I took a job selling cars because it's pretty much what I could find aside from barista work."
"Long, long days. Like 14+ hours, calling 'ups' and calling people on the phone to harass them into coming into the store for some 'once in a lifetime deal.' Having to try and get people to buy a car they won't like because that's the one that would get me the bigger spiff, or trying to f**k them on the price because I'd get a higher commission if I did."
"And it was causing so much grief at home because I was never home, and my wife and son were never seeing me, and we were still not making enough money to get by, despite me selling out my own morals every day and hating myself for it."
"And I was so busy at work, I didn't have time to apply and interview for the jobs I actually wanted. I ended up taking a loan from my gramps to help me pay the bills for a few months while I quit this job so I was able to find IT work, which finally paid off."
- SweetCosmicPope
Out in the Lumberyard
"Working on a lumber mill. I was literally the only employee with all my teeth and all my fingers. Watched a guy take a 14” splinter through his thigh. Board came off the saw and split, half of it opened the guy's leg like stabbing a balloon full of blood. The owner was on the line before medics arrived, yelling at us to get the saws working again."
"I was a medic in the Army and an EMT, so I was working on the injured man. The boss yelled at me to get back to the chain and let the injured man lay there till the medics arrived. I loudly told him to go f**k himself and stayed with the victim."
"He threatened to fire me and I told him I was calling OSHA. He shut up."
- Outlander56
World Runs On...
"Dunkin. Literally new staff each week. They don't pay their employees. And they screw you over so bad, they make you quit. Not to mention they don't even put you into the system on purpose, not expecting you to last long."
"Also, it's not Krispy Kream. They don't make their donuts fresh. They wait for a truckload and they gotta microwave them so they're not stiff and frozen."
"Don't buy from Dunkin. They overwork and severely underpay their staff."
- LueWinchesterSPN
The Family Clique
"A small town family-owned diner. It was my first job, they took advantage of me for being young and inexperienced, I was underpaid, and the family who worked there was very cliquey."
"They made jokes at my expense, excluded me from certain things, and overall just didn't treat me well."
- Lilah_Vale
Fast Food Woes
"McDonald’s was a s**t show. I worked there for nearly two years back in high school. I’ll never forget the cheeseburger lady."
"She would always order a cheeseburger with no cheese (hamburger, but she wouldn’t take that for an answer) One day, she got cheese on her burger. Note that this wasn’t an allergy thing, she just didn’t like our ‘fake cheese.' When she checked her burger at the window, she saw the ungodly sight of cheese staring back at her."
"She slammed the burger on her lap and screamed at the top of her lungs. She just sat there screaming. I awkwardly tried to consult her but instead, I got the burger thrown at me."
"I was 16 at the time, and I knew I wasn’t getting paid enough for that psycho s**t."
- deathmetalish
Call Center Life
"Customer Service call center. No one can pay me any reasonable amount of money to go back."
"It’s been six years since I left and I still hate talking on the phone for any reason whatsoever."
"Whoever invented that stupid metric where if your satisfaction is eight or lower is considered a failure, I hope you get stuck with a thousand pine needles and are set on fire."
- DJVanillaBear
Instant Karma
"This was about 25 years ago. It wasn’t an actual job, but I got roped into volunteering for a St. Patrick’s Day dinner at a catholic church where I lived. There were about 10 of us teenagers and our job was to serve food to the people who’d bought tickets. Corned beef, mashed potatoes, and like, steamed carrots…some s**t like that."
"Anyway, like 100 people showed up and they were the rudest sacks of s**t I’d ever encountered in my life. They treated us like dirt. Total disrespect. And I’m sure their treatment was made worse by the fact that we were kids."
"This was the moment I realized I could never ever work in the food industry. I learned a huge lesson that night and have always gone out of my way to be kind to servers and tip extra. It changed my life."
"But also, the joke's on them. The church refused to let us eat anything until all these a**holes had finished their meals (we were told we had to clean up, too), so we kids just started eating off the plates before serving them. We didn’t give a s**t anymore. Had they treated us better, we wouldn’t have done that. F**k those people."
- idkidc9876
Hospital Volunteer
"I volunteered at a hospital ICU, I was by myself and no one would talk to me. The nurses are pretty quiet and the doctors are major douchebags, and the patients are old and sick."
"Because I was volunteering, I got like $15 credit every day for cafeteria food, but my shift ended right when the cafeteria closed, so sometimes I'd ask if I could leave early."
"The nurses would get p**sed about that and make me stay to the very end, even though my job was literally just to sit there and draw grids for their future logbooks... which I already did all day. Jerks wouldn't even let me get some food."
- blackhistorymonthlea
Telemarketing Drama
"Telemarketer. They moved me from an outside sales position into a telephone sales one where I would be reporting to the boss's 19-year-old side piece. Part of the job was keeping it secret from his wife."
"That's the only job I didn't give two weeks' notice at."
- AdmiralBofa
Deeply Exhausting
"This is not even remotely as bad as others, but babysitting a three-year-old who was obsessed with stairs."
"The kid lived on the first floor of an apartment building and had never really gotten to play on stairs until I was looking after her at my place while her mom was working late and their regular babysitter was unavailable."
"I was 13 or 14 at the time, I think. You can only chase a kid up and down the stairs for so long before you want to curl in a ball and sleep for two days. I played several sports at the time too."
"But after literal hours of her wanting me to chase her up and down the stairs, I wanted to die. Even our dog, a hyper lab mix, had long since pooped out and went off to sleep somewhere, lol (laughing out loud)."
- KittyObsession
Everyone has their workplace horror stories, but there typically will always be that one workplace that was particularly bad with one day that served as the ultimate deal breaker. At least these experiences help us to appreciate the better opportunities that come along!
