Working at a 7-11 while going through college.

And it wasn’t the bosses, bad as they were. It was the customers.

Bouncer at a Serbian nightclub. Large guys with military training who like cocaine and fighting. I try not to be racist to Serbs, but like 98% of the interactions I’ve had with them have been massively negative.

Car sales, you get paid sub minimum wage for your hours if you aren’t selling. You start every day getting yelled at and most customers think you are a crook trying to deceive them when 90% of the time they are just bad at math (total price divided by months of terms = monthly payment there’s no magic math).

Tbh, both of my main jobs had some serious suck involved, and not the fun kind

Nurse’s assistant and bouncer.

The work in nursing was very fulfilling in a lot of ways, but I’ve had ever body fluid there is on me, been peed and pooped on on purpose, hit, cursed, and dealt with all kinds of horror on every level. Part of my PTSD comes from that job.

Another part comes from bouncing. I worked multiple places, but some of those were LGBTQ spaces, in the 90s, in the south. The level of violence was disgusting. I had people try to kill me, my coworkers, and customers. I damn near killed a couple of people trying to prevent the assholes from hurting others.

However, like nursing, there was still plenty of satisfaction and fulfillment in doing the work, even when it wasn’t at LGBTQ spaces. I got a lot of fulfillment bouncing at strip clubs, and not in the sexual way. Strippers deal with a lot of bullshit, and being part of keeping them from the worst of that felt very good. A lot of those ladies (and gentlemen, male strippers deal with some heavy harassment too) burn out fast because of the misogyny and the customers that think the rules don’t apply to them. It was nice to be able to show them that there are people that can treat them with respect and decency without wanting to get in their pants.

Now, if you want to talk about the worst of the bad parts, I worked in nursing homes the first part of my years doing that. One in particular was on what’s called a skilled unit, where the patients run high to dementia and severe disability. That’s where the worst of the worst happened. The other facilities I worked in, I would rotate between units, but at this specific place, it was always on that skilled unit.

Just wall to wall misery. Every patient lost in their own heads, or locked in a body that couldn’t move, but still conscious and hurting. And you can’t really help them. They aren’t going to get better, they aren’t going to go home, they’re just stuck there until they die.

Then, while trying to make their lives less bad, the administration is full of shit, cutting corners, treating staff like dirt, making decisions that make life worse for the patients too. Just some of the worst people I ever had in charge at any job.

I sometimes look back on all of that and wonder how I lasted as long as I did without cracking up inside. I made it long enough that my body broke before my mind fell apart. I’m not sure how, and I came damn close pretty much yearly sometimes, even after I moved to home health care. I would ride the edge of burning out and falling apart, and it was only the fact that I could do other things that would keep me from falling over.

I could take a week off here and there, rely on side gigs to keep me afloat long enough to recover a little. I had hobbies and friends. It kept me going, mostly

Fry’s Electronics.

everyone in the store was on commission. EVERYONE. depending on your position and department, you earned commission differently (even the supervisors and managers were on commission).

the people that worked returns got negative commission. their initial rate was based on how much the store sold, minus a % of what they returned - the harder they worked, the less they got paid.

software department shared their commission. everyone in the dept got the same amount of money added depending on total department sales.

salesmen in most other departments had positive and negative commission - commission was based on the item, not on a % per item. they pushed hard for people to not buy what they needed/wanted and instead buy the biggest commission item.

cashiers brought in a total commission based on how much money went through their register, so salesmen would bring their giant purchases to their friends instead of them getting a random cashier.

loss prevention (dude standing at the door checking receipts) got commission based on how valuable any errors were on the receipt.

enforcing an attitude of hoping your coworkers like you, hoping they want you to earn money, dont work in the same department, make tons of mistakes, and not return anything was a horrible work environment.

Peeling bark off logs for a furniture company, got paid a whole 10 cents a foot :/

Picker at a clothing warehouse. The warehouse was hot AF, probably 110 degrees on some days. Management’s response to multiple people passing out was to add a couple water fountains and remind us to “stay hydrated!” But of course if you took too many bathroom breaks you wouldn’t meet quota, which was already impossible to meet without breaking some rules.

The management office was a little hut in the warehouse with a couple of AC units sticking out of its windows.

The order packers at least got fans.

Landscaping in the desert in the summer.

Can inspecting on an assembly line in Alaska. 12 hour shifts 7 days a week.

Waiting tables at an understaffed yuppie burger place.

Sorry dude, I have literally no control over the price or portion size of the french fries, and you screaming at me is not going to change that. Plus I’ve got a line of customers to the door and a growing backlog of vegetable juices to make, so please kindly fuck off.

“Hey, I see in my file that you have a truck drivers license. You wanna job as a truck driver?”

Yeah, sure, I accepted because I really needed a job there and then.

Well, turned out the job was maybe 10% driving, and the rest was spent manhandling large copymachines (Xerox, Konica Minolta, and all of the other brands) up several flights of stairs.

And then I placed it there for the “technician”* to set it up. After that it was usually an old machine that needed to go the opposite way.

I quit after one month upon realizing that there were plenty other jobs available to me that didn’t break my back, and for better pay.

*: I put “technician” in double quotes because what they did was essentially set up printers. I’ve since worked (and still work) in various flavors of IT, and we all joke that nobody understands printers… but yo be frank, if that is all you do, it’s not rocket surgery.

After leaving I worked at a tyre servicing workshop. Car come in, change tyres, car go out. Pretty lowbrow, but it was easy, chill, and my coworkers were fun. I started my actual career shortly after that in IT/offshore geophysics, but I still look back at the tyre job as something I genuinely enjoyed.

Grocery store deli / hot food counter.

All the downsides of food service, with all the downsides of retail.

Worked in a hotel. Manager worked us to the bone for 12 hours at a time and screamed at us constantly. Also robbed our tips. It was long, hard, stressful days for minimum wage.

Ive been pretty lucky and never had that bad of a job. I think the worst was just one where I had a boss who would not relate any issues to them above him but would pass on directives from above and just blow off our situation. So we would be told to do stuff we simply could not do. We were working on prototype hardware and he was so passive I would say at meetings we need to do some off shifts or something as we did not have even hardware for testing and he would just blow it off again. Eventually I just stated at a meeting that starting the next week I would be coming in at noon and working till 8:30 approx. He never authorized or even acknowledged it but I started working the sorta spit shift and my checks kept on coming so it worked out.

Worked with a plumber and HVAC guy for a summer. So much fun digging out septic systems.

The rest of the work sucked less by comparison. Crawling through 100%+ attics to fix A/C systems, or under a house to install/repair ducting. Some houses were so low you could just barely roll onto your side to work.