Top 5 Crappiest Jobs As a Kid

[flashback]

Originally Posted by TylerDurden

-Phone Telemarketer (stayed with that for 2 days total, never got paid by the company ether)

ha, this was the only ****** job I had when I was young, too. I lasted 3 days at mine and actually did quite well at it. I remember them saying that in our first week, closing 1 person a day would be a success (most didn't do any) - I ended up closing 5 on my first day and they thought I was going to be the next hotshot telemarketer, but I couldn't handle the constant bullshit I was spewing and the person I was being when I was on the phone. That **** was awful.

 

[jaydc7]

There are a lot of ****** jobs in here. I really only had two jobs growing up. At 15 I started working in a good italian restauarant in my town, and then after two years I started lifeguarding until 19.

 

[Douglas]

I never had it all that bad.

For a few years, I worked at a golf club doing all kinds of dumb things. Most irritating was when they stuck me out at the snack shack, which meant pouring lemonades, serving beers, and making sandwiches for dudes on the course in a hot shanty all day long. It wasn't so much bad as it was frustrating - I'd spend the entire day out there and make $20 in tips, while girls working the shack would routinely pull in $100. It was a huge waste of my time.

I spent a few shifts once as a bouncer at a strip club. It sounds good, but you don't want to get too close to that kind of ****. The people are all seriously screwed up, drug-addicted, etc. and you basically spend all night waiting to be in a fight. It's maybe the most stressful job I've ever had, as I'm a reasonably big guy but I'm not a lifter or trained fighter, and half the guys in this joint worked at the shipyards and could clearly handle themselves. Worst of all, the rule was that inside the club, the other guys had your back, but in the parking lot, you were on your own. We would toss guys out this one door that had no handle on the outside, so if you got dragged out with a dude, the door would slam right behind you, and you were all alone, maybe with this guy's buddies. I spent my nights in terror of getting dragged out that door. I washed out after about 4 shifts.

I was the lowest grunt on a huge commercial construction site one summer. Basically any dumb **** nobody else wanted to do got filtered down to me... stuff like moving huge piles of lumber around, plank by plank, or busting up bad concrete pours, or hauling trash. I was headed to college the next summer, and the other guys were on me about it 24/7. They hated me, which made giving me the ****** jobs all the more entertaining for them. One older carpenter would call me a slope every chance he got - He was a Vietnam War vet I think.

I lifeguarded all over the place, occasionally as a substitute "floater" for an agency, which wasn't bad unless I ended up at a ****** pool. Some would have filthy facilities, or you'd have to constantly deal with kids ******** in the ****** pool, etc. One place was this nasty "country club" owned by an old Baltimore Colt legend. He'd bought this big mansion and ran a social club out of it and it had a big pool and a few tennis courts. It was a crappy place but there are a lot of blue collar guys who've relatively made it in Baltimore who will pay a lot of money to say they belong to Artie Donovan's club. Donovan is an asshole though, and would expect the lifeguards to be the janitors and laborers for the pool facility, which meant making us clean the toilets, move **** around, etc. And it was the worst pool to work because the kids were all out of control, there were hundreds of them (it was a huge pool), and the people were douchey. But I worked at enough low-key apartment pools with slutty college students getting their g-string tans on that it was OK.

I've also worked as a machinist and assembler, which can be backbreaking at times and dangerous depending on what you're working on, but there's a lot of nobility to working with your hands, and a lot of skills out there that can be learned.