I can point to several aspects of my job (when training) that were crap.
1) Log sheets – to be filled in and signed off every month; thank god I don't do them any more.
2) Folding drawings – very dull, lack of concentration meant frequent paper cuts
3) Binding documents with a wire bind. Try this with a manual binder and you'll understand.
Before the Architecture I worked in an Ice Cream factory lidding tubs of the cool stuff ------- it was monotonous, thank god I escaped before the RSI became permanent.
What's your worst work aspect of the profession and what crap jobs did you do previous?
worst architecture job-related task: i once had to field survey an abandoned warehouse that hadn't been opened in years...it was ankle-deep in pigeon shit. no exaggeration.
previous crap job: line worker at a chicken hatchery. rotten eggs can and do explode.
I once had to inspect the roof of an anaerobic digester at the wastewater treatment plant. It was a panelized geodesic structure (about 100' diameter) made of 2x's and plywood that creaked when I walked on it. As I was walking on it I couldn't help imaging that the roof would give way and I would fall thru about 75 feet into a 20 foor deep cesspool of shit with no oxygen that would be pitch black except for the shaft of light from the hole in the roof. I literally started to shake and sweat and hyperventilate up there - I couldn't get off that roof fast enough.
I still get the shivers thinking about that one...
Worst Architecture Related Job - converting old hand drawn detail library to AutoCAD. That was one summer I'd like to forget.
Worst job ever - spent a summer working in a corrugated cardboard plant. The temperature hovered between 105F - 115F all the time. I breathed about a pound of paper dust a day and had more papercuts that imaginable. My only hope was that the giant cutting machine would suck me in and take me out quickly. We also made millions of boxes for Budwesier. Nothing is more depressing than an empty beer box.
worst job: at 15 i spent four hours working at a pigfarm. newspaper ad advertised for a 'hay bailer'. instead i was given a rainsuit and a pressure-washer and told to spray out the one thousand or so pens. the building was only about five feet high, sweltering hot, almost no light. i had to bend over while the noxious filth sprayed back into my face. did i mention i'm claustrophobic?
the caretaker was a sadistic little dwarf who would come in with an electric tazer and zap the shit out (literally) of the squeeling pigs. the pigs would go berserk and stampede around me. i saw him pin a huge sow to the fence and zap her fucking unconscious. occasionally i think about going back, killing him, and letting the pigs enjoy.
1 particular job as a plumber assistant;
3 story this old house. repipe job, 12" crawl space, all steel and lead pipes to be replaced with copper ones.
rat and cat jerkies, live electrical cables criss crossing and loose, first week after the last los angeles earthquake, and couple of aftershocks that luckly cought me between the floor joists. muddy under floor ,due to micky-maus foundation walls which gave the insects a proving ground for evalution. i have seen bugs i've never seen before under the flashlight. occsional carcass smell oozing out from a distance you'll be crawling to in a minute.stays of 2-3 hours at a time in there. when i came out cigarette felt like fresh air.
paid 9 bucks an hour, about the same as a draftsman. most architects were out of business.
i recommend a plumbing experience to architects who want to design houses later on. you see all the good and the bad about houses, new and old. buying elbows and valves is an act you have to think 3d right at supplier's counter. linear thinking all the way. had a lot of conversations about life and art with my boss who was a transvestite cal-arts graduate.
Worst Architectural task... Cleaning out the desks of laid off employees from the past year.
Worst Job... I worked in a chemical plant for a dirt moving company. We were in charge all the backhoes vacuum trucks etc... The chemical plant sends some of its byproducts into these ponds. As el jeffe mentioned there is no oxygen in the liquid so if you were to fall in then you'd sink to the bottom. Anyhow the ponds are filled with microorganisms that eat the waste and break it down. These organisms themselves eventually die and then fill the 1 foot wide concrete ditch around the pond. The dead guys make up the nastiest black granulated paste that I have ever seen. Me and 3 other guys had to shovel these dead bugs into a backhoe bucket. Because of the narrow ditch and the backhoe there wasn't much room. Needless to say we all got hit with a big pile of bug shit from time to time.
Worst design job: I worked for an enginner that HATED architects. I heard all the time about how stupid and selfish architects were, how they screwed everything up and didn't know anything about construction practices, materiality, water shed, etc. and we just out to cater to thier own egos. We looked at buildings designed by architects (that I now work for) and he pointed out how horrible they were.
He had me draw a floor plan of a house for a client - I spent several days sketching the plan and elevations and site plans besides. I was pretty proud, felt I met all thier needs and situated the house quite exquisitely on the site. I showed it to the engineer and he took one look at the paper and gripped a pencil roughly in his fist and scratched a stiff icky rectangle over top of my floor plan (mine wasn't a rectangle, but wasn't exactly "crazy" either, I knew who I was working for). I thought I had a great design and had the verbage to back it up, such as window locations and room relationships. He didn't give me a chance to explain my ideas, and then lectured me for drawing site plans, elevations and sections when I was supposed to be drawing a floor plan. (Oh no! I thought they were all interrelated?)
And so I tried again and basically my next floor plan resembled a double wide trailer... Needless to say, it was built. It sits horribly on the site - lots of fill, the bedrooms are like 10' wide with one stinkin window each and with those narrow bi-fold door closets, none of the bathrooms has a window, and the garage and super steep drive are the main front facade features. It is the dorkiest house in the neighborhood. What's worst is I think the clients were comletely satisfied!
in no particular order
i've worked at mc donald's
in a tire warehouse
for the university library
for an industrial design firm
for a land planning office
cleaning artificial kidneys
for a digital media company
in shop that makes wooden playset
in several architecture firms
for a graphic design firm or two
delivering pizza
wrote parking tickets for the university
digging the deep ends of pools with pick and shovel
and for a construction firm building houses
and now i run my own business
i used to be a porter at a car dealership
now this wasnt so bad a job, except for in the summers and winters.
in the summers in kansas, it gets really hot, and when you have to go pick up a car thats been sitting in a vast asphalt lot all afternoon long, the interior gets incredibly hot. i constantly would burn my hands to the point of blistering opening doors, touching seatbelts and stearing wheels, not to mention the fact that it was almost impossible to breath as the air temp was so high.
then, in the winter, though it rarely gets below 20 in KC during the day times, imagine a job where your in an open garage washing cars (with water) when its 25. imagine during the course of the day your feet getting wet, and staying wet, and such numbing cold in your hands from the washing and drying dozens of cars you fear for your digits.
man o balls alive i do NOT miss that job
though it paid REALLY well
better than my arch job now....
Being job captain on a complicated project that was completely beyond the firm's level of competence, and where I was in the office until 2 AM most nights cleaning up the CAD mistakes made by my project team during the course of the day. These are people who may have taken a semester of AutoCAD at DeVry, but had no clue how to actually put together a set of construction documents. Of course, the office had no CAD standards to speak of, and the project principal -- who was a professional paper-pusher and wouldn't know one end of a tape measure from the other -- never stayed a minute past 4:59 PM. After one particularly bad night in which I had stayed until 4 AM cleaning up some drawings sent to us by our Dallas office, I got chewed out the next morning by said project principal for being 10 minutes late. I think that's the closest I've ever come to killing somebody in my professional career.
My worst job outside an architecture firm:
I worked a lot of shit retail jobs during high school and in the couple years afterwards (I couldn't afford to go straight to college), including Subway, Radio Shack, Winn-Dixie, Target, and Circuit City. Some of them were actually fun, but the worst of them all was the time I spent working at a Subway franchise. The manager was so dumb she couldn't operate velcro without an instruction manual, and the assistant manager was an unbelievable penny-pincher who once instructed that if I were accidentally drop a sandwich on the floor while, making it, I was supposed to pick up and salvage any ingredients that didn't actually come into direct contact with the floor. (While the horrified customer looks on, mind you.) All this on top of the usual parade of human debris that's involved with dealing with the general public: Beligerent customers with screaming kids, etc. Being fired from that gig was the best thing that ever happened to me, although I'll grant that falling into a vat of shit was never an occupational hazard. I've rarely been able to eat at Subway since then, though.
I couldn't help imaging that the roof would give way and I would fall thru about 75 feet into a 20 foor deep cesspool of shit with no oxygen that would be pitch black except for the shaft of light from the hole in the roof.
employer didn't supply you with wet suit o2 tank/apparatus and fins?
it was built. It sits horribly on the site - lots of fill, the bedrooms are like 10' wide with one stinkin window each and with those narrow bi-fold door closets,
always busting apart
[/i]none of the bathrooms has a window, and the garage and super steep drive are the main front facade features. It is the dorkiest house in the neighborhood.[/i]
why didn't they just buy a prefab?
When I was in high school I had a job going door-to-door signing up members for a community organizing nonprofit. I should've been warned by the hundreds of lawn gnomes in this one front yard. But, undeterred, I rang the doorbell and was greeted by an ancient, emaciated dude wearing liederhosen and absolutely NOTHING else, offering me a tray of very stale looking gingerbread men. I can't even recall how i got out of there.
Worst job #2: Internship where they made my scrawny carcass haul around a delivery of magazines (60 lbs) on a 97 degree humid summer day. That ended with me puking from exhaustion into a box in the storage room after i got back into the office, and then they asked me to go pick up something else.. noo thanks.
Worst job:
It was just a one week job.
Some slightly suspicious businessmen bought a warehouse full of butter and sold it to some Russians. But the Russians wanted the butter in 10 kilo boxes and it was packed in 5 kilo boxes.So what we had to do was open 2 boxes, get the butter out, fold a new box and put the butter in.
When this boring job was finally finished, I took my bike and raced to the office to let them sign my paycheck...but then my buttery-foot slipped of the pedal and my balls had an extremely painfull encounter with the frame of my bicycle.
I took years before i could enjoy the smell of butter again.
Worst job:
One summer I worked in an environmental testing lab doing TCLP extractions on contaminated soil. Some of the samples were so ungodly in their odor. One smelled like someone had consumed a gallon of gasoline and then vomited it into a container. A coworked literally had to leave the room. Most just smelled like diesel fuel or shit. Plus my coworkers were jack offs. This one woman was an uber republican who was building a Y2K shelter in the woods and would always talk about her stripper sister. She also had a belly button piercing which she was trying to remove in the lab with wire cutters.
Pretty cool job:
KB Toys during high school. Some would think that a toy store near Christmas would be a nightmare...I disagree. ALL of the best people come out at Christmas. I worked during the Tickle Me Elmo, Tamagochi, and Furbee crazes. If Ebay would have been big at that time I would be rich.
The worst job I ever had was the single day I worked with my stepsister's boyfriend, helping him building decks and wheelchair ramps for an elementary school's portable buildings.
My dad forced me to do it, I had just graduated from college and was having a nice lazy summer for the first time in 5 years, not looking for a job of any kind, so me thought it would motivate me to actually looking for a job - the alternative being more manual labor outdoors in the Texas sun in August.
Best job ever:
The grocery store I worked at when I was 16 where we did a whole manner of destructive things such as:
1) Shot-putting several dozen months-expired, frozen solid hams into the backyards and swimming pool of an apartment complex that backed up to the store's back alley. Never got in trouble for it.
2) Putting out eggs on the shelves that were either a) all totally cracked open, b) only the yokes (cracked open and threw away the shells), c) nothing but cracked, empty shells (we threw out the yokes and such), or d) threw away the eggs entirely and replaced with one dozen foil-wrapped Cadberry eggs.
We also had a secret viewing window looking out on this area, where we'd see women get enraged when finding any of the above.
The one thing we never did, but wanted to, was to take home a few dozen eggs, hard boil them, and put THOSE out on the shelves.! :D
3) We played hockey frequently up and down the aisles with brooms and those blue toilet-tank discs.
4) When a case of canned cokes would be deemed "unsellable" because one had leaked syrup on the others, we would shake them like crazy and throw them down the back alley at a wall about 50-60 yards away.
5) (Not sure why coworkers did this) but this one guy was really into opening a gallon of milk and throwing it like a grenade up onto the top of the freezers, where it's hot and the exhaust is blowing. The milk would just go everywhere and eventually stink horribly.
6) Built forts way up high in the rafters of the store and in the large stacks of product in the storage area, complete with sneaky escapes and lookout holes to spot our manager. It was awesome, he'd be back there looking for us, and we'd be like 30 feet above him looking down on him. After he'd round the corner, we'd slip down the shelves, go out a door, and be hard at work in an area that was the last place he'd look. He would NEVER say he couldn't find us.
7) I once built this ridiculious broom made of about 8 broom handles and duct tape that allowed me to literally sweep the store ceiling (tall, wharehouse style store). I actually got complimented for being so crafty!
Growing up, I thought allowances were for only for kids on TV and in books. I never had an allowance, I had a job, since I was about 5 years old.
While other kids were at the mall watching movies or playing Atari at other kid's houses, I spent summers walking beans for my dad. The memories are horrible: old smelly clothes -- the same ones I wore the day before, stiff shoes caked in mud and shrunk from the moisture, the bean leaves itched my arms and face, back hurt from bending down and pulling the weeds, legs tired from walking miles, and the heat, oh it was hot out there, sharing the thermos of ice water with my mom and brother (who had cooties) getting yelled at for missing weeds, and the bugs and slugs. Then after a few hours you'd look back and see that you hadn't gotten very far at all and there was an overwhelming hundred acres to go.
I made a few hundred bucks every summer and got a can of root beer every Saturday. I usually bought myself something at the end of the summer like a walkman or a stuffed animal and then saved the rest of the money in a bank account which I had for spending cash for college.
Working for the USDA research center. I studied mosquitos. The walls were lined with 18" cube cages each housing anywhere between 25 and 5,000 mosquitos. I had to feed mosquitos live chicken blood which entailed de-feathering part of a chicken, restraining it on a tray and allowing mosquitos to feed. The chickens didn't like it and crapped all over the place. I had to breed mosquitos. I was bitten at least once every day throughout the summer (over 100 bites from work that summer). I was "volunteered" for a repellant test on a Saturday which took 8 hours. I had to lather up w/ repellant and stick my arm in a cage every 15 min until I got bitten. And that's just what I have the patience to type.
Nov 15, 05 9:05 pm ·
·
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.
So you think your job is bad ...
I can point to several aspects of my job (when training) that were crap.
1) Log sheets – to be filled in and signed off every month; thank god I don't do them any more.
2) Folding drawings – very dull, lack of concentration meant frequent paper cuts
3) Binding documents with a wire bind. Try this with a manual binder and you'll understand.
Before the Architecture I worked in an Ice Cream factory lidding tubs of the cool stuff ------- it was monotonous, thank god I escaped before the RSI became permanent.
What's your worst work aspect of the profession and what crap jobs did you do previous?
For other inspirational occupations see:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian_jobs_and_money/story/0,,1301764,00.html
anyone tried public service in a developing country?
the whole environment, bureaucracy, is hard to swallow
co-workers having been adjusted to this type of work for ages even seem to like it
there is no cultural connection with most co-workers, working environment can get really heavy for me.
my only refuge is my PC and archinect :ob
besides that, i like to get lost in CAD & CAM designing public spaces and small facilities.
so rendering is a escape to being surrounded by paperworkers, corruption, gossip and what not is involved in public management
worst architecture job-related task: i once had to field survey an abandoned warehouse that hadn't been opened in years...it was ankle-deep in pigeon shit. no exaggeration.
previous crap job: line worker at a chicken hatchery. rotten eggs can and do explode.
Worst architecture related task. Making blue-prints the old fashioned way, in a small, poorly ventilated room. Ammonia is not a good high.
Previous crap job: Working in the P.E. laundry at college. Loading several hundred jock straps into the industrial sized washer is not a fun task.
I once had to inspect the roof of an anaerobic digester at the wastewater treatment plant. It was a panelized geodesic structure (about 100' diameter) made of 2x's and plywood that creaked when I walked on it. As I was walking on it I couldn't help imaging that the roof would give way and I would fall thru about 75 feet into a 20 foor deep cesspool of shit with no oxygen that would be pitch black except for the shaft of light from the hole in the roof. I literally started to shake and sweat and hyperventilate up there - I couldn't get off that roof fast enough.
I still get the shivers thinking about that one...
Worst Architecture Related Job - converting old hand drawn detail library to AutoCAD. That was one summer I'd like to forget.
Worst job ever - spent a summer working in a corrugated cardboard plant. The temperature hovered between 105F - 115F all the time. I breathed about a pound of paper dust a day and had more papercuts that imaginable. My only hope was that the giant cutting machine would suck me in and take me out quickly. We also made millions of boxes for Budwesier. Nothing is more depressing than an empty beer box.
worst job: at 15 i spent four hours working at a pigfarm. newspaper ad advertised for a 'hay bailer'. instead i was given a rainsuit and a pressure-washer and told to spray out the one thousand or so pens. the building was only about five feet high, sweltering hot, almost no light. i had to bend over while the noxious filth sprayed back into my face. did i mention i'm claustrophobic?
the caretaker was a sadistic little dwarf who would come in with an electric tazer and zap the shit out (literally) of the squeeling pigs. the pigs would go berserk and stampede around me. i saw him pin a huge sow to the fence and zap her fucking unconscious. occasionally i think about going back, killing him, and letting the pigs enjoy.
1 particular job as a plumber assistant;
3 story this old house. repipe job, 12" crawl space, all steel and lead pipes to be replaced with copper ones.
rat and cat jerkies, live electrical cables criss crossing and loose, first week after the last los angeles earthquake, and couple of aftershocks that luckly cought me between the floor joists. muddy under floor ,due to micky-maus foundation walls which gave the insects a proving ground for evalution. i have seen bugs i've never seen before under the flashlight. occsional carcass smell oozing out from a distance you'll be crawling to in a minute.stays of 2-3 hours at a time in there. when i came out cigarette felt like fresh air.
paid 9 bucks an hour, about the same as a draftsman. most architects were out of business.
i recommend a plumbing experience to architects who want to design houses later on. you see all the good and the bad about houses, new and old. buying elbows and valves is an act you have to think 3d right at supplier's counter. linear thinking all the way. had a lot of conversations about life and art with my boss who was a transvestite cal-arts graduate.
Worst Architectural task... Cleaning out the desks of laid off employees from the past year.
Worst Job... I worked in a chemical plant for a dirt moving company. We were in charge all the backhoes vacuum trucks etc... The chemical plant sends some of its byproducts into these ponds. As el jeffe mentioned there is no oxygen in the liquid so if you were to fall in then you'd sink to the bottom. Anyhow the ponds are filled with microorganisms that eat the waste and break it down. These organisms themselves eventually die and then fill the 1 foot wide concrete ditch around the pond. The dead guys make up the nastiest black granulated paste that I have ever seen. Me and 3 other guys had to shovel these dead bugs into a backhoe bucket. Because of the narrow ditch and the backhoe there wasn't much room. Needless to say we all got hit with a big pile of bug shit from time to time.
This is why I went to college.
folding drawing issues, for 3 days solid
emptying the sample cupboards, having to ask everybody if they needed that tile or that carpet sample
having to come ack to the office at 9 on a friday evening to find a file my boss could not retrieve
having to assemble furniture for the office
having to update 3 issues of the building regs, on paper.
archive about 10 projects, and that means 2 weeks of solid paper filing
welcome to the life of an assistant!
Worst design job: I worked for an enginner that HATED architects. I heard all the time about how stupid and selfish architects were, how they screwed everything up and didn't know anything about construction practices, materiality, water shed, etc. and we just out to cater to thier own egos. We looked at buildings designed by architects (that I now work for) and he pointed out how horrible they were.
He had me draw a floor plan of a house for a client - I spent several days sketching the plan and elevations and site plans besides. I was pretty proud, felt I met all thier needs and situated the house quite exquisitely on the site. I showed it to the engineer and he took one look at the paper and gripped a pencil roughly in his fist and scratched a stiff icky rectangle over top of my floor plan (mine wasn't a rectangle, but wasn't exactly "crazy" either, I knew who I was working for). I thought I had a great design and had the verbage to back it up, such as window locations and room relationships. He didn't give me a chance to explain my ideas, and then lectured me for drawing site plans, elevations and sections when I was supposed to be drawing a floor plan. (Oh no! I thought they were all interrelated?)
And so I tried again and basically my next floor plan resembled a double wide trailer... Needless to say, it was built. It sits horribly on the site - lots of fill, the bedrooms are like 10' wide with one stinkin window each and with those narrow bi-fold door closets, none of the bathrooms has a window, and the garage and super steep drive are the main front facade features. It is the dorkiest house in the neighborhood. What's worst is I think the clients were comletely satisfied!
detonator anyone?
in no particular order
i've worked at mc donald's
in a tire warehouse
for the university library
for an industrial design firm
for a land planning office
cleaning artificial kidneys
for a digital media company
in shop that makes wooden playset
in several architecture firms
for a graphic design firm or two
delivering pizza
wrote parking tickets for the university
digging the deep ends of pools with pick and shovel
and for a construction firm building houses
and now i run my own business
worst job i ever had
i used to be a porter at a car dealership
now this wasnt so bad a job, except for in the summers and winters.
in the summers in kansas, it gets really hot, and when you have to go pick up a car thats been sitting in a vast asphalt lot all afternoon long, the interior gets incredibly hot. i constantly would burn my hands to the point of blistering opening doors, touching seatbelts and stearing wheels, not to mention the fact that it was almost impossible to breath as the air temp was so high.
then, in the winter, though it rarely gets below 20 in KC during the day times, imagine a job where your in an open garage washing cars (with water) when its 25. imagine during the course of the day your feet getting wet, and staying wet, and such numbing cold in your hands from the washing and drying dozens of cars you fear for your digits.
man o balls alive i do NOT miss that job
though it paid REALLY well
better than my arch job now....
My worst job at an architecture firm:
Being job captain on a complicated project that was completely beyond the firm's level of competence, and where I was in the office until 2 AM most nights cleaning up the CAD mistakes made by my project team during the course of the day. These are people who may have taken a semester of AutoCAD at DeVry, but had no clue how to actually put together a set of construction documents. Of course, the office had no CAD standards to speak of, and the project principal -- who was a professional paper-pusher and wouldn't know one end of a tape measure from the other -- never stayed a minute past 4:59 PM. After one particularly bad night in which I had stayed until 4 AM cleaning up some drawings sent to us by our Dallas office, I got chewed out the next morning by said project principal for being 10 minutes late. I think that's the closest I've ever come to killing somebody in my professional career.
My worst job outside an architecture firm:
I worked a lot of shit retail jobs during high school and in the couple years afterwards (I couldn't afford to go straight to college), including Subway, Radio Shack, Winn-Dixie, Target, and Circuit City. Some of them were actually fun, but the worst of them all was the time I spent working at a Subway franchise. The manager was so dumb she couldn't operate velcro without an instruction manual, and the assistant manager was an unbelievable penny-pincher who once instructed that if I were accidentally drop a sandwich on the floor while, making it, I was supposed to pick up and salvage any ingredients that didn't actually come into direct contact with the floor. (While the horrified customer looks on, mind you.) All this on top of the usual parade of human debris that's involved with dealing with the general public: Beligerent customers with screaming kids, etc. Being fired from that gig was the best thing that ever happened to me, although I'll grant that falling into a vat of shit was never an occupational hazard. I've rarely been able to eat at Subway since then, though.
employer didn't supply you with wet suit o2 tank/apparatus and fins?
always busting apart
[/i]none of the bathrooms has a window, and the garage and super steep drive are the main front facade features. It is the dorkiest house in the neighborhood.[/i]
why didn't they just buy a prefab?
avoid all restaurants. most of the others are worse.
Worst job:
When I was in high school I had a job going door-to-door signing up members for a community organizing nonprofit. I should've been warned by the hundreds of lawn gnomes in this one front yard. But, undeterred, I rang the doorbell and was greeted by an ancient, emaciated dude wearing liederhosen and absolutely NOTHING else, offering me a tray of very stale looking gingerbread men. I can't even recall how i got out of there.
Worst job #2: Internship where they made my scrawny carcass haul around a delivery of magazines (60 lbs) on a 97 degree humid summer day. That ended with me puking from exhaustion into a box in the storage room after i got back into the office, and then they asked me to go pick up something else.. noo thanks.
Worst job:
It was just a one week job.
Some slightly suspicious businessmen bought a warehouse full of butter and sold it to some Russians. But the Russians wanted the butter in 10 kilo boxes and it was packed in 5 kilo boxes.So what we had to do was open 2 boxes, get the butter out, fold a new box and put the butter in.
When this boring job was finally finished, I took my bike and raced to the office to let them sign my paycheck...but then my buttery-foot slipped of the pedal and my balls had an extremely painfull encounter with the frame of my bicycle.
I took years before i could enjoy the smell of butter again.
Worst job:
One summer I worked in an environmental testing lab doing TCLP extractions on contaminated soil. Some of the samples were so ungodly in their odor. One smelled like someone had consumed a gallon of gasoline and then vomited it into a container. A coworked literally had to leave the room. Most just smelled like diesel fuel or shit. Plus my coworkers were jack offs. This one woman was an uber republican who was building a Y2K shelter in the woods and would always talk about her stripper sister. She also had a belly button piercing which she was trying to remove in the lab with wire cutters.
Pretty cool job:
KB Toys during high school. Some would think that a toy store near Christmas would be a nightmare...I disagree. ALL of the best people come out at Christmas. I worked during the Tickle Me Elmo, Tamagochi, and Furbee crazes. If Ebay would have been big at that time I would be rich.
The worst job I ever had was the single day I worked with my stepsister's boyfriend, helping him building decks and wheelchair ramps for an elementary school's portable buildings.
My dad forced me to do it, I had just graduated from college and was having a nice lazy summer for the first time in 5 years, not looking for a job of any kind, so me thought it would motivate me to actually looking for a job - the alternative being more manual labor outdoors in the Texas sun in August.
Best job ever:
The grocery store I worked at when I was 16 where we did a whole manner of destructive things such as:
1) Shot-putting several dozen months-expired, frozen solid hams into the backyards and swimming pool of an apartment complex that backed up to the store's back alley. Never got in trouble for it.
2) Putting out eggs on the shelves that were either a) all totally cracked open, b) only the yokes (cracked open and threw away the shells), c) nothing but cracked, empty shells (we threw out the yokes and such), or d) threw away the eggs entirely and replaced with one dozen foil-wrapped Cadberry eggs.
We also had a secret viewing window looking out on this area, where we'd see women get enraged when finding any of the above.
The one thing we never did, but wanted to, was to take home a few dozen eggs, hard boil them, and put THOSE out on the shelves.! :D
3) We played hockey frequently up and down the aisles with brooms and those blue toilet-tank discs.
4) When a case of canned cokes would be deemed "unsellable" because one had leaked syrup on the others, we would shake them like crazy and throw them down the back alley at a wall about 50-60 yards away.
5) (Not sure why coworkers did this) but this one guy was really into opening a gallon of milk and throwing it like a grenade up onto the top of the freezers, where it's hot and the exhaust is blowing. The milk would just go everywhere and eventually stink horribly.
6) Built forts way up high in the rafters of the store and in the large stacks of product in the storage area, complete with sneaky escapes and lookout holes to spot our manager. It was awesome, he'd be back there looking for us, and we'd be like 30 feet above him looking down on him. After he'd round the corner, we'd slip down the shelves, go out a door, and be hard at work in an area that was the last place he'd look. He would NEVER say he couldn't find us.
7) I once built this ridiculious broom made of about 8 broom handles and duct tape that allowed me to literally sweep the store ceiling (tall, wharehouse style store). I actually got complimented for being so crafty!
Growing up, I thought allowances were for only for kids on TV and in books. I never had an allowance, I had a job, since I was about 5 years old.
While other kids were at the mall watching movies or playing Atari at other kid's houses, I spent summers walking beans for my dad. The memories are horrible: old smelly clothes -- the same ones I wore the day before, stiff shoes caked in mud and shrunk from the moisture, the bean leaves itched my arms and face, back hurt from bending down and pulling the weeds, legs tired from walking miles, and the heat, oh it was hot out there, sharing the thermos of ice water with my mom and brother (who had cooties) getting yelled at for missing weeds, and the bugs and slugs. Then after a few hours you'd look back and see that you hadn't gotten very far at all and there was an overwhelming hundred acres to go.
I made a few hundred bucks every summer and got a can of root beer every Saturday. I usually bought myself something at the end of the summer like a walkman or a stuffed animal and then saved the rest of the money in a bank account which I had for spending cash for college.
Worst job:
Working for the USDA research center. I studied mosquitos. The walls were lined with 18" cube cages each housing anywhere between 25 and 5,000 mosquitos. I had to feed mosquitos live chicken blood which entailed de-feathering part of a chicken, restraining it on a tray and allowing mosquitos to feed. The chickens didn't like it and crapped all over the place. I had to breed mosquitos. I was bitten at least once every day throughout the summer (over 100 bites from work that summer). I was "volunteered" for a repellant test on a Saturday which took 8 hours. I had to lather up w/ repellant and stick my arm in a cage every 15 min until I got bitten. And that's just what I have the patience to type.
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.