Soooo....whats the worst job you've had that wasnt art related

[hunchback]

Kinda curious...
whats the worst occupation you,ve had other than being an artist.
Graphic and disgusting is okay...

[Psychotime]

I think you need to rename the thread. It doesn't sound right.

I'm pretty sure you mean: "What's the worst job you've had that wasn't art related?"

[RogerAdams]

Internet Tech Support. I did it for 5 years. It was like going to work and getting yelled at for 8 hours a day.

[Flake]

Happy Dog and Cat Holiday Home.

Temporary cribs for spoiled pets. Basically you turn up at 6am and get bitten/scratched by hostile and paranoid cats, then you get dragged through muddy puddles by freindly but giant Wolfhounds ( I was pretty sure that only happened in cartoons, I was mistaken., some of them are bigger than horses...) or bitten by typically psychotic pitbulls.

You'll want your tetanus shots up to date..

Many jobs suck but at least most of the customers in BurgerKing don't try to bite you.

If you're not having a sufficiently bad time by this point, you can probably get covered in bleach while washing dog poop out of kennels with a broom and hosepipe.

Good times..

[Katfayheirti]

I've never had a job other than one in art. muahahaha!

Actually, no. Come to think of it, I don't know if this counts as a "Job," but for several years I've been a live actress in a weeklong annual recreated biblical town that the church down the road puts up every year around Christmastime. I've been, among other things, a fake fishmonger, fake fuitseller, and fake donkey handler (well, the donkeys were very real, were very mean, and I was put in charge of them....) It's kind of like working at a Ren Fest for a week....except maybe creepier

[Jason Snair]

Shaw's supermarket: Summer between High school and College.

Cashier, bagger, basket-getter-finder.

I'm pretty easy going and have liked most/all of my jobs, but this one was soul-sucking. Human beings are never crueler or more depressed when they have to actually pay for the food they just shopped for. It was so bad I called in sick on my very last day. I just couldn't take it even one more day.

[KEM720]

Working concession stands in the Gwinnett Arena was my worst.

Angry, boozed up hockey fans can be hard to deal with.

[ArtZealot]

Bestbuy because they literally made me walk up and down 2 15 foot long isles all day and didn't expect me to leave or wander out. It was the most boring, redundant, slave work i've ever done. I called it "doing laps".

Frys, in the winter i'd come in around 12pm and be required to stay until around 12am up to 2:30am cleaning up after customers, restocking shelves, etc. Yes they were eventually sued for making people do this.

[Cthogua]

I was an "Archivist" for an experimental pathology laboratory for about a year after I graduated college. The ad in the paper just said "archivist" casual dress, 11 dollars an hour....so I called. When I went in for the interview they explained that the company stored all the left over specimens from animal experiments, for other companies who had paid for the research, basically all the big pharm. companies, agricultural chemical companies, cosmetics etc. From what was explained to me, as long as a company held a patent on a commerically available compound they had to retain all the original research "material" that proved the compound was safe for human interaction/consumption or various other things. So we would get sent all the mostly dissected remains of the animals that had been involved in the tests. We would transfer the "tissue" into new formaldehyde and heat seal it into special bags, then store all that in waterproof boxes in big climate controlled vaults. Sometimes the tissue was in bags of old form., sometimes it was banks of glass slides, sometimes it was organs suspended in little blocks of wax. I once had to separate out, and bag separately 100 pairs of rat testicles that had all been stored together in a big bottle. One of the first studies I worked on involved dogs, and we received a bunch of these opaque plastic jars as part of the study. When I opened the jar to drain the old form. out and get whatever was in it out I was greeted by a dogs head, with the skin removed except at the nose, and its eyes and brain had been removed. All of their ears were in a separate bag together. It turns out beagles are the dog of choice for clinical experimentation. I've always been an animal lover, but I've also always been fascinated by biology, so while there were aspects to the job that I really felt terrible about, I can't deny that it also wasn't extremely interesting. Probably the most disturbing stuff to work with was the monkey studies. Typically their remains came, chopped up and wrapped in gauze so you couldn't really see the pieces. One day I was trying to force a bags worth of tissue into a new bag, and one of the monkey arms popped up out of the bag and it was like a little persons arm with black fingernails. Even though the heads were wrapped in gauze you could still make out their features. One of the most interesting things I saw there was the glycerin pups. Basically they were fetal cats, dogs, rats, mice, and sometimes rabbits, who had been put through some sort of process that actually rendered nearly all of their soft tissue completely transparent, and dyed their bones and cartilage either bright blue of bright red. They would come in the bags or jars with 50 or 100 or more and were preserved in glyercin. They were extremely slimey and slippery, but when there was a bag full of them, you could kind of push and squish them around and see their little skeletons moving. They almost looked alive in a weird, transparent, dyed skeleton moving sort of way It was a pretty small company and so on the first day of work the guys that ran the company took me out to get Chinese food and I realized that the food at the buffet looked almost exactly like what I had just been transferring....this was no accident...everyone at that place had a pretty dark sense of humor, and fortunately I have a strong stomach, enjoy Chinese food, and have a rather dark stream as well so it didn't really bother me. Its funny what ended up getting to me the most wasn't being elbow deep in rabbit entrails, it was the kind of boys club, frat house vibe there was at work. The guys that ran the place were a bunch of Soprano wanna-be dudes that thought it was hilarious that I had been to school for painting a drawing and was now working for them.

....oh yeah and I worked at Hardee's for 2 summers in highschool

[AsaB]

I worked in a hospital's office two years ago one summer. Although the people were so very nice, the job itself killed quite a few brain cells. I basically had to put numbers from documents into the computer. And they had to even out to 0 (credit, debet). Oh, and if it didn't check out, I was in for a treat! I had to go through aaalll the files and find maybe one tiny error, usually a typo or similar stupid error made by the secretaries who charged the patients. It was mindboggling how boring this was, I still don't understand how I made it through the whole summer--probably my iPod who saved me!

[Mulm]

Internet Tech Support. I did it for 5 years. It was like going to work and getting yelled at for 8 hours a day.

My condolances. After one year of this I was out <_<
Ended up with some pretty funny stories though.

[kab]

Only real job I've had that wasn't art related was as what I'd call a sledgehammer-mechanic, basically a metal worker. Using an angle-grinder for 8 hours a day for two months in 30 degrees celcius wearing full protective equipment and a jumpsuit. My hands were so tired when I came home in the afternoon that I could lift a glass over water off the table.

For art related work, the fumes involved in screen-printing with solvent-based inks can get you really fucked up if you're not careful with ventilation and using a mask. You'll feel really drunk, but in a lazy, can't read or focus, kinda way...

[Desero]

I was a cashier at a super market in the inner city. Most of the people who came in where pretty gross. Either bum/Crack heads who had gotten enough change to buy a 40. Saw my fair share of Meth heads, threatened by a couple- Its like having friggen Smeagul demand the 5 bucks that you "shorted him". Lots of fat, decrepit, run down, old ladies who seemed to be raising their daughter's children with food stamps and whatever else they could scratch together, that was kinda tragic . Had this dude who was all rotten and yellow try to beg a bottle of wine out of me. He said he only a few months left to live because of Cirrhosis that damn near broke my heart. I had lost hope in humanity in the first month I was ready to die after 3 . I ended up just not going a few weeks later . Finished school a few years later and got a job at a ski resort—a heaven of fluffy powder.

[Sublimus]

I used to be a professional mover.

Like -show up to a house, pack everything in a box and put it in a truck in the middle of summer for them- mover.

[VulgarDragon]

Er, didn't we have a thread just like this one a few weeks ago? ---->http://www.conceptart.org/forums/sho...d.php?t=159723


Anyway, my first work I did was when I was growing up...I worked in chicken farms. It involved wading through chicken shit, cleaning out chicken shit, and being literally knee-deep in chicken shit. There were dead chickens to pick up every day, and to dispose of them, I had to toss them into a big hole that was covered up by concrete blocks with a door. When I open that door, the smell literally knocks you down and if I didn't pass out from the smell, I could see a carpet of wriggling maggots. That, and working in 90-plus degree heat and having to wear a mask and getting covered up in dust....very nasty work.

Also, during my first few years as a microbiologist, I had to set up bug traps to trap mosquitoes. Part of my job was driving across the state, going into the woods with a pack of dry ice as the bait of mosquitoes (mosquitoes are attracted to carbon dioxide). I had a swarm of mosquitoes all over me...not itty bitty mosquitoes but gargantuan-sized ones biting me all over. I could even feel them biting through the shirt on my back. The next day I was covered in itchy red welts. Then I had to go back and collect the mosquitoes in the trap.

During my career at microbiology laboratory, I have had to deal with many disgusting stuff like anaerobic jars (anaerobic bacteria smells like old sauerkraut), plastic tubs of feces that are sent to our lab, cans stuffed with moldy mosquitoes, and dissect brains of animals and birds. I literally had to sit in a fart suit for hours in a little room going through piles of dead and maggoty birds, cutting their skulls open to get samples of their brains.

[Sven]

I worked as a janitor for a summer at an oil refinery. We were required to wear a "fire resistant" (A friend of mine took one home and we didn't have any real problems lighting that puppy up) orange jumpsuit and hat over our regular clothes (we were required to wear regular clothes underneath, I'm not entirely sure of their logic) in weather that routinely exceeded 100 degrees with 90-100% humidity. (The refinery was located on the edge of a river)

I was also required to shave, which I despise (the more of my face covered the better), just in case the refinery caught fire or spewed posion or something of the like. The thing was that there were about 25 people to each respirator and the chances of a janitor getting one over any other person in the plant were minimal at best.

I remember a place in the refinery called "Sulfur Recovery" where super-hot sulfur was pumped through a bunch of pipes in a fairly small area. The net result was that sulfur recovery got about 25 degrees hotter than the rest of the plant and reeked of boiling hot rotten eggs.

My other favorite area was the coker where they manufactured grease. The entire area was pretty much a shade of black and slippery as hell. We would go in to scrub the floors with super heavy duty floor machines once a week and by the time the next week came around it looked just as bad as before.

Most refinery workers also tended to not be the most, uh, cultured I guess. They tended to miss the toilets quite a bit and left porno mags laying all over the place. It was kinda uncomfortable to be scrubbing urinals while some dude with three teeth was flipping through a Hustler on the crapper next to you. I also really enjoyed (sarcasm) that when they would occasionally talk to us it was usually to tell some horrible racist joke. (I'd say about 95% of the plant workers were white)

Basically, the job was so bad that the only thing that I could do was to laugh at how awful everything was. This was long before "Dirty Jobs" but that job could have easily made it on that program.

[IKV Nexis]

Oh boy you guys are making me feel so much better about myself. I was only a night/day swing shift security guard. If anyone wants to know how it is to be a guard watch the movie Armed and Dangerous. Its a comedy but it ain't kidding! Most rediculous thing I had to do was take and sell tickets at a snow dump....Yes. Training was hard you had to watch a film strip and answer a multipel choice questonare. I missed one answer and the guy marking the test looked at me like I was Stephen Hawking! To say that 90% of them were stupid is being generous. One guard from South America liked to take off his shirt and show his scars from crashing five trucks in his job down there.
I have to admit I did meet one incredibel person. He was an older gentelmen from East Germany. When the Russians took over that side the horror they started was unbalevabel. This guy joined the local resistance aided by the western Intelligence until he had to run for it when one of the people in his cell changed sides and ratted them out. That day was acctualy one of the best. The rest was total bordem mixed with just shaking my head and asking myself why am I here?

Then I got a job at a small video store and all was well till I was let go due to economics. I love movies.

[Uziel]

Anyway, my first work I did was when I was growing up...I worked in chicken farms. It involved wading through chicken shit, cleaning out chicken shit, and being literally knee-deep in chicken shit. There were dead chickens to pick up every day, and to dispose of them, I had to toss them into a big hole that was covered up by concrete blocks with a door. When I open that door, the smell literally knocks you down and if I didn't pass out from the smell, I could see a carpet of wriggling maggots. That, and working in 90-plus degree heat and having to wear a mask and getting covered up in dust....very nasty work.

We understand eachother.

I also worked at a Chicken hatchery as a student job.

Constant high temperature, rotten eggs that sometimes explode in your hand + insane smell, a lot of dust and feathers, chicken shit, corrosive cleaning products that burn your eyes.

I did it together with a friend of mine and one time he had the best position on the converyor when sorting the new hatched chickens - he was stacking containers on a conveyor in a seperate room. After ten minutes he ran past me to throw up outside the building.

The disabled and dead chickens went to the zoo as food for the birds of prey.

Can it get worse?

I didn't eat eggs for many years - it always smelled rotten to me.

[corspufo]

wow, Uziel for the win.

I worked at the Gap for 2 weeks after I graduated college. I didn't think that folding shirts would be riddled with drama. I had a girl that worked there tell me to stay out of denim, that was HER area. Fun. Also, having to lie to people telling them that their 4 times too small jeans look good on them, and the "cute" top they got go well together, it got old fast. Also, sarcasm is never a good selling technique when you're trying to push the new drawstring cargo Capri's. ugh. I also worked as a Apartment Leasing consultant for a dumpy apartment complex. Trying to sell people on apartments that have rat traps, double dead-bolt locks and visible fist prints in the doors is always tough. Especially when you have to do it with a smile and need a commission.

[sourgasm]

My first job was at Dollywood in Gatlinburg, TN. For those not familiar (hopefully all of you), that's the country music and redneck culture based amusement park owned and operate by Dolly Parton. It was the only place in my area that hired 15 year old folks. I only worked there for a year, but I'm pretty sure I inexplicably aged to 36 by about 7 months in.

[velderia]

Mine isn't graphic at all. I've worked in several different places that paid minimum wage throughout my pre-college years. Most were pretty good with few complaints.
There was one that I really enjoyed: A local florist. There were some moments in that florist that bugged me. Working during the winter there wasn't pleasant (heat isn't good for most flowers and sometimes I had to walk into a cooler/meatlocker for plants) but I could handle it.
Some that were okay: Abercrombie & Fitch, Hancock Fabrics. I notice that dust really bogs me down for some odd reason. This is especially true for Hancock Fabrics. Abercrombie wasn't so bad but the rising gas prices back then made it worthless for me to drive all the way there. The perfume they spray on the clothes didn't bother me, unless some other employee was over-spraying then the recommended amount.

There was one that I had a terrible experience with though. It was in a coffeehouse. Pouring coffee wasn't hard at all, but the manager was just awful. She couldn't handle the massive amount of new customers that she was having at that time and kind of took her anger out on me. I ended up not sleeping well, thus not performing well and having her fire me. A friend of mine was working there too but she quit before the manager could do anything to her. It was messed up.

I remember her talking to my mom on the phone, and actually listening in halfway in the conversation via a second phone on the same line. She was like "She's not normal, blah blah blah, at least her friend was better and she messed up in the beginning, blah blah blah" etc. Which kind of hurt me a little. Something all the other places I've worked at would say the opposite of, especially the florist.

[TASmith]

I've been lucky with jobs. As a teacher, even with a few bad students and having to correct essays, it's not so bad. I have a lot of freedom which I love, and I like kids.

Once I worked in the salesroom at an art center, and there would be literally no one come in all day. There was construction going on inside, so everyday there'd be a thick layer of dust on everything, and I was supposed to clean it. It was all just pointless, cleaning all these glass display cases, pottery, and beady jewelry for no one to ever buy it, and the boss there would chew me out for not cleaning enough - like i clean it one day and get chewed out the next - surprise, there's dust due to construction. Not my fault. I also taught there and the same boss chewed me out for doing a demo in class. Because it was a large clay tile, she felt I was doing more private work than teaching. yes it was large in size, but I only spent about 15 minutes on it in class while explaining to students, then stayed after class to work on it till midnight. Then she broke it >.<

Long story short a bad boss can make any job hellish. The worst jobs are the impossible ones. Like having to archive architectural plans at a large company. They give you a chart of different kinds of plans and tell you how they're supposed to be organized. Then you look at the mountains of plans and see none of them are labeled, or labeled correctly. So about 80% of them don't fit the planned methods. You ask for help, but everyone's too busy, or they don't really know themselves. Then you try anyway, and realize that the plans already in storage are all mixed together, and completely unorganized - there's no way to find anything old, or keep anything new. That was an eye opening summer experience.

Side Note: I like working retail, especially putting up food and products on shelves. It's a simple job, easy to do well, easy to organize, it's physical, and I feel I've accomplished something, however fleeting. It's very zen for me, although the music they play in those places slowly unwinds your sanity.

[donm]

Ive had 9 non-related art jobs and they all sucked. I guess Ill post them in order of suckitude (1. being the worst):

10. projectionist (local theater)
9. pharmacy tech (Walgreens)
8. copymax (officemax)
7. bookstore (Hastings)
6. cartpusher (Walmart)
5. photolab (Walmart)
4. photolab (CVS)
3. cartpusher (Albertson's)
2. jewelry polisher (James Avery)
1. bagboy/cartpusher (HEB grocery)

[waronmars]

Being abused by a lady when I worked at pizza hut because we were out of dip sticks was the worst I ever had...the funny thing was, she kept yelling that she was a scientist and that we were all idiots going nowhere. Most of the employees were uni students working to make a little cash lol. People are insane.

[Kman.]

i've worked a lottttttt of jobs, but i think i hate working as a pharmacy tech the most.

[AeonPhoenix]

I'm not sure if those of you who worked at a CVS had the same experience, but the 3 months I worked there was pure hell. It really made me hate humanity. Now I may not have the right to complain, but when you're stuck ringing people up constantly for almost 4 hours nonstop on a regular day, with half of them bitching to you about how their expired 50 cent coupon is still valid, and assuming you're an idiot cause you made a tiny mistake returning their change, you really start to contemplate if you could make better use of your time. It could be worse, but I was glad to leave that place. Makes me stressed just thinking about it. Probably wasn't the job for me xD.

[MikeMakesMonkeys]

Batman's stone-raker.


(That's not a joke btw - I raked stones for a man with a big house and a batcave)

[Steph Laberis]

Sweat shop employee.

Worked a summer at a children's clothing factory in Marblehead MA. Back room, big table, surrounded by grandmas, ironing fuzzy heart appliques to small pairs of overalls, $7.00/hour. The ad said they were looking for creative people who were good with their hands.

Thus, I liked my second job from that summer much better, and that one involved scooping ice cream and wiping up spilled sodas for $3.25/hour. There were tips, at least...

[liam.c]

bestbuy has to be one of the worst i think i lasted 2 days lol the morning cheer sessions , and the insistance that any one not buying was tryign to take money from the company aggrovated me to no end

and roofer for flat roofs , middle of winter with windchill at kelvn , useing a blowtorch to melt ice , it was at an old folks home , from the pipes on top was the worst smell of what seemd to be salsbury steak and ass with some urine seasoning , and some lady keep standing at her window flashing us all day , that job didnt last much longer then best buy

[Shantih]

Happy Dog and Cat Holiday Home.

Temporary cribs for spoiled pets. Basically you turn up at 6am and get bitten/scratched by hostile and paranoid cats, then you get dragged through muddy puddles by freindly but giant Wolfhounds ( I was pretty sure that only happened in cartoons, I was mistaken., some of them are bigger than horses...) or bitten by typically psychotic pitbulls.

You'll want your tetanus shots up to date..

Many jobs suck but at least most of the customers in BurgerKing don't try to bite you.

If you're not having a sufficiently bad time by this point, you can probably get covered in bleach while washing dog poop out of kennels with a broom and hosepipe.

Good times..

See, I used to work in a cattery and sort of enjoyed it. The hours and pay were crap, but I got to cuddle cats every morning. I did get bitten and scratched a lot, but before that I'd worked with horses so in comparison the cats couldn't do much damage. Except for when they go for your eyes.

There were some horses there too that I'd help out with, they were worth a lot of money as was their tack, so the place had a guard dog that would follow me around on my shift. I got on well with him, but sadly the same couldn't be said for some of the other employees. I don't think he ever fully went for any of them, but sometimes he'd corner them and glare at them for a while, or refuse to let them into the office for hours, often in the middle of winter when it was snowing and raining like hell.