Best and worse jobs you have had....

NotaSuv

Worse without a doubt was running a rock wool baler in Red Wing Mn......best was owner/operator of a 52 foot commercial fishing boat out of Key West 75-85

mhardy6647

I only ever did one thing -- the best stint doing it was with Genetics Institute, which became Wyeth BioPharma (and ultimately Pfizer). 1996 to 2011 for me.

Also had the best boss I ever had -- Hubie Scoble. Taught me so, so much about how to do efficient, effective for-profit R&D while sacrificing neither quality nor integrity. Plus, he had faith in his employees, trusted and enabled them, and he had their backs when the goin' got tough (e.g., whenever there was misguided pressure from above). I used to say of him that, almost to a person, members of his organization would willingly take a bullet for him without hesitation. He was (is) a true and remarkable leader. Scientifically excellent, too.

Worst job. umm... well, there were two different companies with which I had moderately short stints. I'll not name names. Neither still exists, although one is still sort of around, albeit under a different name and ownership.

OleBoot

Was reminded of this. Too naughty to post a real link.

kevhed72

Best jobs - usher at a movie theater in DeKalb, IL
2nd best - peon at a Rosatis Pizza joint. Yes, they gave us the job title of "peon".

Worst job - corn de-tasseler in Illinois in the summer. Lasted 1 day. Anyone who complains about these types of job being taken away....go try it.

pitdogg2

Oh yes walking bean and detassler...
Wonderful jobs.

Clipdat

kevhed72 wrote: »

Worst job - corn de-tasseler in Illinois in the summer. Lasted 1 day. Anyone who complains about these types of job being taken away....go try it.

hahah! Beat me to it. I too lasted one day doing it in the Wisconsin summer heat and humidity.

westmassguy

Worst Job: Busing tables and prep for a catering company as a wee lad.
Best Job: What I'm doing now.

WLDock

Worst Job: around college age, I did telemaketing funraising for a Symphony Orchestra
Best Job: What I'm doing now. However, again around college age I worked at a bicycle shop. That job was pure fun!

Jstas

Best job - Rifle Range Director/Assistant Camp Ranger on summer camp staff at a local BSA Reservation. Three summers in a row while on break in college.

Worst job - Diesel Mechanic doing fleet maintenance for a trash company.


Best job was awesome because I spent 2.5 months at camp, went home on weekends but otherwise, lived at the scout camp all summer. Ran the rifle range during the day, ran the rest of the camp in the evenings. Sometimes there were suck parts like having to dig up a busted water pipe at 10:30 at night and still have to get up at 6 am to get a shower before program started at 7:30 am breakfast but, that's how it goes.

Worst job was the worst for many reasons. The work was hard, hot and unbelievably stinky. I would get to the shop around 5:30-6:00 pm from my day job and work on getting trucks serviced and ready since most of our trucks started their runs at 11pm 'cause they collected dumpsters. So I wouldn't get done until 11:30-12:00 at night. Then I'd have to be there at 7 AM on Saturday and worked until at least 2pm doing repairs and any heavy maintenance like valvetrain adjustments. I had a roll of trash bags to put over my seats so I didn't stink up the car permanently. Since I was working at Lockheed at the time, they had a no moon lighting policy. So I was off the books and paid under the table. A friend was the shop foreman and I was bitching to him that the wife (now ex-wife) was spending money like it was going out of style and refused to get anything more than a part-time job to help make ends meet. So I had to figure out how I was going to make extra money to cover the deficit without going bankrupt. He talked to the owner and they both agreed I'd be good help and helped me out. So I did that out of necessity for about 3 years. Laying on a creeper under a trash truck greasing brake adjuster banjos in a 95 degree shop with trash juice and maggots dripping on your head is about as **** as it gets. But they paid me well and were lax on my schedule so if I was a little late, they didn't care as long as work got done.

At least I got to play with GIANT Tonka trucks and after a while, the boss was having some of his friends (two demolition companies and a paving company) dropping their equipment off for us to service. So I got drive all kinds of stuff. One of the paving guys actually had us go to a couple dirt tracks with him to fill in on his pit crew for him when he was short handed too. So I got to work on Outlaw Sprint cars out of it too. So it wasn't all bad. Just a bad situation that put me there. The ex-wife was pissed off that I was spending so much time there but she was forcing my hand and every minute I was at the shop I got paid for it. Even when I was on the pit crew, I got paid to be there. Nancy took my time card on paper instead of electronically so every time I was there, I had to fill out my card by the door and at the end of every week, she handed me a wad of cash and tacked up a new card. She even paid me over-time if I was over my typically scheduled 30 hours.

joecoulson

Best job- running a cabinet company (now)

Worst- delivering cabinets (23 years ago)

Milito

Worst job, working on the freight docks during the Texas Summer during my years in college to help pay for my education.

Best job, knowing that was my last job before being retired.

jstas I worked as a mechanic's helper one Summer and the head mechanic played a joke on me. He didn't tell me I needed to release the pressure on a hydraulic system before I worked on it and got sprayed with hydraulic fluid. He got a big laugh out of that.

I was going to get him back, but I had to go back to college in a few weeks and never got the chance.

I also got to play with big trucks as I sold Peterbilt trucks during my sales career. Those big Pete's rode almost as well as a car and would haul 80,000 lbs over 100 MPH, not that I recommend that as only a fool would do that.

krazypolk

Worst job: Pig Slaughterer

Best job: Pig Slaughterer

Jazzhead

What a great thread!

Worst Job: Writing parking tickets at the university I was attending while desperately struggling to pay my way through school (aka: "Ticket F#(%$r").

Best Job: Working as a wilderness guide and educator at that very same university for decades.

Quirkiest Best Job (honorable mention): Playing trumpet in a Christmas season Salvation Army quartet on the streets of uptown Charlotte with my music major bro and friends (all way better musicians than I). Certainly the best Salvation Army band that ever existed.

Quirkiest Worst Job (honorable mention): Shoving massive rough-sawn boards through a thundering, screaming, 22-ton double planer in the 110 degree heat/humidity/dust of a now burned down NC furniture plant.

Viking64

Best Job: Dolly grip on a feature film with a hilarious camera crew from Italy.

Worst Job: GG Allin's fluffer.

mrbiron

Best job - Anything Friday Afternoon through Sunday Night

Worst Job - Everything Sunday Night through Friday Afternoon

I once spent a summer making mascara brushes with a mob of retired women. Not only were they funny as hell, but their level of lewd goes uncontested even to this day.

mrloren

Best job: Warehose Lead at Sony's CRT plant

Worst job: just after High School I worked at a beer distributor. What made it bad was free beer. I put on like 25lb in 3 months...

What I do now is great but the last 8 years it's either been a screwed up parent company or our local management. Can't get a combo of the two in the right way.

nooshinjohn

Worst job? Washing pans at a bakery while in high school...

Top three???

Working on F/A-18 Hornets as a United States Marine.

Installing mobile communications equipment for ten years, working on celebrity cars, and meeting some cool people...

But the best job by far, has been watching my son grow up before my very eyes. Any job I get after this is going to literally suck.

VR3

Best job is my current job

Worst job was Bush sanitation for @lightman1

F1nut

What's a job?

Viking64

F1nut wrote: »

What's a job?

$10. Same as downtown.

afterburnt

The first one and the last one.

motorstereo

Being laid off in the winter months and working on my own projects is my best job. The other 8 months of the year spent working in the asphalt paving industry are the worst.

Jstas

Milito wrote: »

jstas I worked as a mechanic's helper one Summer and the head mechanic played a joke on me. He didn't tell me I needed to release the pressure on a hydraulic system before I worked on it and got sprayed with hydraulic fluid. He got a big laugh out of that.

I was going to get him back, but I had to go back to college in a few weeks and never got the chance.

I also got to play with big trucks as I sold Peterbilt trucks during my sales career. Those big Pete's rode almost as well as a car and would haul 80,000 lbs over 100 MPH, not that I recommend that as only a fool would do that.

Practical jokes were pretty common. Everything from someone deliberately parking a truck on one of my hoses to the acetylene in a rubber glove while working with a torch or welding mask on. I didn't fall for much and when I did it was usually 'cause I was tired. But we worked with hydraulic systems all the time so I got sprayed often just trying to repair something. Most of my repair time was spent pulling broken hydraulic hoses and then taking them down the street to Pardo's who would repair them for us. Then I'd get to go pick them all up. At least I got free coffee and donuts out of that!

All of the trash company's trucks were Mack cab-overs except for 3 of the rolloffs which were Mack Granite bodies. One of the demolition companies used Kenworth tractors for hauling equipment, the other had ancient Autocar tractors. The paving company must have had a deal with Ford/International 'cause all his haulers were Ford F900/F9000 or a number of International flavors that he bought all new from the same dealer. The heavy equipment was all kinds of stuff from John Deere to Kubotoa to Caterpillar to Komatsu to Hitachi. The paving guy, his son was running a commercial lawn service (cutting grass/landscaping for places like malls, office parks, etc) and he started send the fleet of Mitsubishi-Fuso stake bodies to us too. So some days, I'd get a rig in and have to do a diesel service and then service all of the equipment that was on that trailer too.

I only ever had one Peterbilt and it was the trash company owner's son's Peterbilt 281 "narrow-nose". It was his "hot rod" and he did a ton of work to it but didn't have the heavy tools at home to do the big work. So he would bring it to the shop to do the service intervals and such on it and he usually "pulled rank" to get me to help him. It was a nice truck, a bit much for a "hot rod" but he was always asked to be in parades and stuff and had it in car shows. He would take trips with it and drive down to, like, Daytona Beach with it, bobtailing the whole way. It actually had a chopped top. Wish I had pictures of it.

txcoastal1

Viking64 wrote: »

Best Job: Dolly grip on a feature film with a hilarious camera crew from Italy.

Worst Job: GG Allin's fluffer.

fluffer??

pillow fluffer....oh my

https://youtu.be/4NNVWfkGDUg

verb

Worst jobs, dishwasher, landscaper, busser, waiter, janitor all in my youth.

Best jobs - Working in the aerospace industry designing turbine engines. 2nd best, what I'm doing now, automotive industry designing cars and trucks!

WLDock

Wait, I forgot about a job a did for one day.

Worst Job: around college age, I did telemaketing funraising for a Symphony Orchestra *Correction >Working in the empty returnables department for Coca-Cola bottling in the 80's for one day was the worst by far! Heavy lifting, stacking crates, and sweeping up broken glass everywhere!
Best Job: What I'm doing now. However, again around college age I worked at a bicycle shop. That job was pure fun!

aprazer402

Being an appraiser before 2008.
Being an appraiser after 2008.

audioluvr

Worst: High school summer job spraying county road ditches with 2-4-D. Probably why I got cancer.

Best: Running a tower crane in the summer across from the women's college dorms. Sun bathing on the roof...

msg

Go Go Gadget Binoculars!

mrbigbluelight

Worst job: Navy nuke RO. 2am - 8pm work days can get kind of old after a month or two (depending how short our division was). Yep 6 and 6's aren't as much fun as you'd think

Best job: Navy nuke RO Awesome work with some of the smartest/craziest fuggers on the planet . Made me wonder how I snuck into that bunch until I realized
........well...the crazy part aspect.

I was once invited to be a "player" in the "movie" business by V*****'s mom (name withheld due to HIPPA laws) but I declined.
I'm not that crazy. 😇

DISCLAIMER: Ok, I made the last part up but it could happen ! You don't know, it could happen ! 😳

displayname

Worst job overall: Cook at Chicken Express. Had that job in college. I hated it, but it was the highest paying gig I could get my hands on at the time. The saving grace was a working with some friends.

Worst professional job: Working at one of the largest audio companies in the world in the professional division. I thought this was going to be my dream job and a long term career move. I only made it 3 years. Massive layoffs after my first year. Company was sold to an even bigger company after my second year. The resources were shockingly low, and the expectations and pressure were through the roof. I also don't recall working anywhere that put such little thought into how customers would actually receive or use products. Every new release was chasing more features, more specs and higher price tags. That job really showed me the value of good leadership and a good team, because lacking both of those elements was miserable. I've actually spoken to people considering working there, and I have expressed that I would not recommend it - at least not the pro division. But it was a good career stepping stone, and the discounts were nice.

Best job: Working at a mini-golf and go-karts place in high school. The job itself was low pay and psychically difficult, but several of my good friends worked there and our boss was great. Another lesson that a good team can even make a terrible job great.