Top 5 Crappiest Jobs As a Kid

[crazyquik]

Didn't have five different jobs as a kid (well, maybe 5, if I stretched it). And all of them were rather tolerable. Or maybe that's just the difference in people.

However, I'd always heard, from lots of people, about how bad detasseling corn is. I still think it's better than priming tobacco.

 

[Piobaire]

Originally Posted by crazyquik

Didn't have five different jobs as a kid (well, maybe 5, if I stretched it). And all of them were rather tolerable. Or maybe that's just the difference in people.

However, I'd always heard, from lots of people, about how bad detasseling corn is. I still think it's better than priming tobacco.

I never did tobacco, but had friends that did. I wanted to do tobacco, as you got to travel a bit and they put you up in shacks, which led to mucho teenage partying (per my friends stories).

I can tell you about detassleing in just a couple of sentences. It is cold, wet, and muddy in the morning. Everyone makes a poncho out of a black plastic garbage bag. It is muggy and hot as hell in the afternoons. Plenty of bugs, lots of pollen, and times when a helicopter is hovering over the field to help get the cross fertilizing done. You get dropped off at the pick up center at 6a, ride a bus to the field for the day (don't get paid for bus time) and work until dusk.

In a word, it sucks.

 

[AntiHero84]

1) At age 15, I unloaded watermelons from the back of a semi truck with illegal immigrants. Worked from Midnight to 6 or 7 in the morning. Paid 150-200 per truck, split between 3-4 workers.
2) As a Senior in High School through college, I worked as a sales associate for FYE (For Your Entertainment) during the holiday seasons. Standing around for 8 hours at a time without seeing daylight. However, I did get to browse music all day.
3) For a month in college, I helped set up and open a Hollister store. The kept scheduling me to work 8-11:00, so I quit.
4) Lifeguard at a Best Western in Baltimore.
5) When I was 7 years old, my father paid me to pick up his cigarette butts in the backyard.

 

[EL72]

1) Picking strawberries in the summer - ugh!

2) Mover for a company moving their head office and ops. I cut a deep gash in my forearm dismantling metal shelves. I ended up doing some cool assembly work later in the summer for them though.

3) Housekeeping in a hospital. Mopping the geriatric floor was the worst but the pay was really high for the time.

4) I've always liked sales jobs but one of them was this MLM-type gig where I had to leave flyers in business and deliver orders for as-seen-on-TV-type crap like tupperware and knives. Very lame group motivation chants and the higher-ups would rip you off charging for flyers and stuff.

5) I'm sure I'll remember another one later...

 

[odoreater]

Originally Posted by Mauro

odoreater - ice cream truck driver would be awesome!

Yeah, ice cream truck driver was probably the best job I've ever worked in my life. I was 18 years old. Drove around in a truck full of ice cream all day. Made a ton of money. I was mostly outside all day long. It also involved cool strategizing and stuff like that, which was fun (had to figure out how to hit all the factories during their breaks and figure out which hits would give me the most money, etc. Dealing with kids was always interesting.

The only thing that sucked is that we had to load up the trucks at 9:00 a.m. Leave the yard by 10:00 a.m., be at our location by 11:00 or so, run streets and parks until about 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. and be back at the yard by 10:00. So we worked 12 or 13 hours per day, 6 days per week. Also, we had to pay to lease the truck 6 days per week and Sunday was free, so if you really wanted to make good money, you had to go out on Sunday as well (usually from 10:00 a.m. until about 4:00 or 5:00 p.m.). So it was basically 7 days a week, and the only time I took a day off was when it rained.

But still, an awesome job nonetheless.

 

[turboman808]

Originally Posted by TyCooN

What were your best and worse fights like?


Wasn't a college type place so no fights really. I got sucker punched once nothing exciting.

However I saw things that normal people should never see. Lots of things. LOL I didn't know a girl could deep throat a baseball bat before I worked there.

 

[oneblood]

Originally Posted by odoreater

Yeah, ice cream truck driver was probably the best job I've ever worked in my life. I was 18 years old. Drove around in a truck full of ice cream all day. Made a ton of money. I was mostly outside all day long. It also involved cool strategizing and stuff like that, which was fun (had to figure out how to hit all the factories during their breaks and figure out which hits would give me the most money, etc. Dealing with kids was always interesting.

The only thing that sucked is that we had to load up the trucks at 9:00 a.m. Leave the yard by 10:00 a.m., be at our location by 11:00 or so, run streets and parks until about 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. and be back at the yard by 10:00. So we worked 12 or 13 hours per day, 6 days per week. Also, we had to pay to lease the truck 6 days per week and Sunday was free, so if you really wanted to make good money, you had to go out on Sunday as well (usually from 10:00 a.m. until about 4:00 or 5:00 p.m.). So it was basically 7 days a week, and the only time I took a day off was when it rained.

But still, an awesome job nonetheless.

How does one get that job?

 

[dfagdfsh]

Originally Posted by globetrotter

actually, nothing too sucky compared to this list

when I wa about 10 worked in a family bakery, folding boxes after school. my older brother had it bad, he would be the one who cut up the fruit for pies.

I had a good job in a flea market from about 10 to 13, selling cutting boards and welcome matts, mostly

for a year or so worked cleaning apartments that had been skiped out on. the way the landlord understood it, he had to store the stuff, but he didn't have to treat it gently. so I was supposed to put everything in these filthy cheap dives into plastic trash bags, no matter how big they started out - including the furnature.

from 14 to 18 I worked in a resteraunt 4 shifts a week. basically grill cook and cleaning stuff. I was given 2 meals a shift, so that was 8 meat meals a week, that and my salary kept me alive through school. in the summers I worked construction, mostly sifting sand and mixing (by hand) concrete, and laying cinder blocks. the older men who had real skills made the better money

at 18 worked nights in a bakery for 6 months.

is this a joke??? after all your **** about taking the worst jobs possible to become a better man, THESE are your worst jobs?

 

[odoreater]

Originally Posted by oneblood

How does one get that job?

From the age of 15 I started working at a gas station. The gas station was just down the street from the yard where the ice cream trucks were parked. At the end of the day during the summer, all of the ice cream trucks would pull into the station to fuel up. I eventually befriended most of the ice cream men, including the guy that owned all the trucks (who, by the way, was a former banker on wall street and decided to leave that job to start his ice cream truck empire - he drove his ice cream truck and leased out other ice cream trucks during the summer and traded stocks during the off season, and made hundreds of thousands of dollars per year). He told me that when I turned 18, he would have an ice cream truck for me to drive. So, the summer after I turned 18, I left the gas station for the ice cream truck gig. I made more money in one summer driving the ice cream truck than I made all year at the gas station.

 

[DBoon]

Originally Posted by AntiHero84

5) When I was 7 years old, my father paid me to pick up his cigarette butts in the backyard.

5) Tower Records;8 hours of top 40 made me want to kill myself
4)Warehouse forklift operator; was fun, but hours were 12am to 8am and I became pale as a ghost
3) Jack-of-all-trades type job at a homeless shelter, had a knifed pulled on me
2) Residential pool guy in a desert environment was surprisingly bad. Awful chemical stench, and the constant temptation of a forbidden swimming pool
1) Landscaping completely off the record...at first no taxes, then the ****** skipped town and owed (owes) me $520.00

 

[Cavalier]

I guess my worst job working on a construction site in an air conditioned trailer doesn't really compete

truthfully though selling on eBay might be the worst job I've had, just because you never "get off" work at the end of the day, you end up spending every waking hour working it seems

 

[globetrotter]

Originally Posted by Teger

is this a joke??? after all your **** about taking the worst jobs possible to become a better man, THESE are your worst jobs?

first, I did't say take the worst job possible, I said that tough jobs build character. but let me clarify -

"from 14 to 18 I worked in a resteraunt 4 shifts a week. basically grill cook and cleaning stuff. I was given 2 meals a shift, so that was 8 meat meals a week, that and my salary kept me alive through school."

that means that, 2 days a week, on top of regualr school, I would work a 16 hour day in a kitchen, frying, cleaning, lugging. really not the worst possible job, but not the easiest, either.



" in the summers I worked construction, mostly sifting sand and mixing (by hand) concrete, and laying cinder blocks. the older men who had real skills made the better money"

yeah, in 40 degree celcious heat you want to spend the day with a wire basket sifting sand for concrete, or mixing pans of concrete with a mattock, or laying cinder blocks.

again, this isn't washing dead bodies or even the crap Kwik was doing, but it is hard physical labor.

 

[Rye GB]

Originally Posted by Piobaire

What's to rub in? We all seem to have found it vital life experiences. I feel sort of sad for people that never learn what it is like to do a menial job.
Agreed, I feel that if my current gig takes a **** and I fall back down the employment ladder I'll know what to expect from a menial job and wage.

 

[odoreater]

Originally Posted by globetrotter

"from 14 to 18 I worked in a resteraunt 4 shifts a week. basically grill cook and cleaning stuff. I was given 2 meals a shift, so that was 8 meat meals a week, that and my salary kept me alive through school."

weaksauce. I started working at the gas station the summer after I turned 15. That summer, I worked Monday to Friday 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday 9 to 7 and Sunday 10 to 6, that's 63 hours per week at 15 years old. When school started, I went to school until 2:45 p.m. and then worked at the gas station from 3 to 11 every day. I also worked saturdays 9 to 7, that's 50 hours per week while going to high school full time. I did this through all of high school (except for soccer season), until I got the ice cream gig (which, as I posted above, usually involved 80 hour weeks).

No wonder I'm 28 years old and already burnt out.

 

[Sherlockian]

Still waiting for someone to recall a few painful, and heretofore repressed, childhood memories of having to do "special favours" for their shady uncle and his circle of sweaty friends down in the basement.