I've had all kinds of shit jobs for crap money.

When you are young and out on your own for the first time you will take almost anything with a check to pay the rent.

I've worked for Domino's Pizza and a popcorn factory but only for a few days so those don't really count.

But easily my WORST job was detassling corn in the Iowa summer before I moved out. Didn't even pay minimum wage. Only Jr. High and High School kids are stupid enough to take this job. This is work that sucks ass so bad even FARMERS would rather pay someone else to do it.

You get up at about 4:30 AM so you can get on a bus and be in the field before sunup. This is in the summer when you are NOT in school and suppossed to be able to sleep in. So you are now in the middle of a fucking corn field, this is as fucking boring as it sounds. Your job is basically to walk a row of corn and pull the tassle off the top of every corn stalk in that row. This is as monotonous, tedious and tiring as it sounds.

When you reach the end of the row you are fucking soaked from the dew on the corn and freezing ass cold. You are also dirty and covered with spider webs, spiders and assorted other bugs and debris.

You then repeat the above for several hours (Did I mention you were making almost $3 an hour?). At some point the temperature changes from freezing ass cold to ungoldly fucking hot and humid. You will remain saturated throughout the entire temperature shift.

If you are smart and lucky you brought a walkman to break up the monotony of this shit ass job and it keeps you from slitting your wrists. You try not to think about the fact that the walkman represents about every dime you will make doing this loser job all summer (if you are lucky).

You break for lunch which will be whatever you brought with you. If you think "bag lunches" suck at school wait until you eat one in a fucking cornfield. Nothing like eating a sandwich with hands encrusted black with what you "hope" is only dirt. And nothing washes down a sack lunch like a warm coke (or Pop as we called it).......mmmmmmmmmmmmmm good. This really is the best part of the day sad as that is.

So when you've eaten your soiled sandwich and fritos and washed it down with your room temperature beverage it's time to do some mindless field work again for several hours. Of course the sun is now directly overhead and you wish you were somplace cool like subsaharan Africa. Somehow you end up on the bus at around 3pm but honestly you don't quite remember how you got there. You only know that the blue spot in your vision is starting to go away and you are hallucinating less.

At about 3:30 you get off the bus. You are so dirt encrusted that before you walk you decide to break some "dirt layers" off of you and your clothes. You walk home looking at the other kids in town who are clean and smart enough to have gotten "real" summer jobs. You wonder why you didn't think of working at Dairy Queen. It doesn't open till 9am, pays minimum wage and is air conditioned.

So you get home and putty knife the main layer of shit off of you. You turn on the hose and try and flush out you clothes. You are so hot and covered in shit you really don't care that you have stripped down to your underwear on the back porch and the only thing that really makes you uncomfortable is some of the things that you flush out of your hair and underwear.

You go inside, usually directly to the basement, and you take another shower. This time using soap and a brush. You get dressed and go back outside and finish hosing off your clothes. You hang them on the line and consider wearing the same shit tommarow so you don't fuck up any more of your clothes.

You are done for the day but too fucking tired to do ANYTHING with your freinds who are now getting off of their REAL jobs. You try not to think about the fact that you MAYBE made $15.00 today.

You eat dinner and pass out from exhaustion. Your friends go out and eat pizza and hook up with girls while you sleep. About the time they are rolling over to pass out from hours of sex it is about 4:30 am.

You get up put on socks and underwear and walk outside and put on the crusty detassling clothes from the line where you hung them up yesterday and walk to the fucking bus stop. If you are lucky you remembered to bring your crappy lunch and a walkman.

That was my job one summer. I lasted 6-8 weeks or so. Long enought to fuck over a walkman by having it in the field all day. I almost made enough to replace it when it stopped working weeks later.

But the important thing is I got off my ass and earned some money that summer. Or at least that is what I was told.

Being a squid for six years pretty much sucked ass most of the time.  But it payed off, getting me the job I have now, I guess.

THe worst job I have ever had is right now when it is Hot and Humid like the last couple of weeks

It was still 110 by my mahine at 1:00 am when I got off work tonight

The factory where I work has no AC and I work with steel that has been baking in the sun all day long

Making end mills. I ran a grinding machine all day long and performed the same operation over and over again.

Assembly line work for Atari. Temp for the Christmas season, 1977. Minimum wage was $2.00/hr at the time, I made $2.25/hr for working swing shift. Operated a pneumatic screwdriver assembling Pong games. 8 hrs./day, put in thousands upon thousands of screws.

I got paid to screw all day.

ETA I forgot about one of my high school summer jobs. I had a job working for Pepsico building systems. We used to travel around northern CA putting up and taking down commercial portable buildings. I was the "go fer" of the crew for the summer. When I wasn't on the roof frying my brains in the blazing sun, I was under the building on my back in the dirt with the black widows tightening or loosening the bolts that held the buildings together or adjusting the jacks. Or hauling trash. Or ripping up tile. It paid pretty good at the time.

The job i have now: DHL package sorter. one 15 min. break in a 10 hour shift. 9.75 hours of either unloading loose packed semi trucks or flipping the packages unloaded off the trucks.

Dishwasher in a restaurant, when I was still in high school. Man, how I hated that job! Even being a busboy was better than that shit; at least they got to hang out with the waitresses.

I worked at a Burger Chef when I was 16.

Flipping burgers, doing grunt work - changing tp in the shitter, dumping old grease, cleaning the lot.... the crap work.

Worse, I had to wear what was then the high-fashion of Fast Food - the Rayon Gumbi suit. Brown Rayon. With Orange/white/yellow/white/orange stripes down the sides. And, to further make me look like a walking turd, a brown paper hat shaped like a canoe. Jesus Christ I was pussy repellant.

I lasted one summer, before dignity caught up with me....and I walked out after changing out of the gumbi costume.

I dug ditches in Phoenix during the summer. It sucked.

shortly after high school i was hired at the town dump, excuse me, "transfer station".
i picked papers that were outside the building,swept the pavement in front of the bay doors, swept the floor inside at the end of the day, helped canvass the outgoing trailers, which also entails cleaning the raw garbage off the top rails of the trailer. i also had the distinct privalige of being seen by people i knew, working for the town dump.
progressed to running the loader and loading the trailers.
progressed to yardman at a bigger transfer station i another town. cleaning raw trash off the backs of push outs before canvassing, off the rails of open tops before canvassing, having maggots fall on me as i reached under to pull the 5th wheel pin, outside, rain/sun/winter/summer.
got over the road,same company, hauling ash and trash up into a landfill. smell, mud so deep we needed a push from a dozer and had to get pulled back with a chain from a compactor. frozen loads/frozen canvasses/climbing in the front trailer end to clean out the trunnion area of old garbage that slipped by the headboard.
same company, working in a shredding plant, trash again. the shredder would occasionally go down on over amps, you can't start it loaded, so you go in and clear it out by hand, smelly summertime garbage higher than you stand.
same company, but now i got a license to work at the powerhouse that burned some of this trash, breaking slag that fell off the rear wall of the furnace, unplugging conveyors, unplugging downchutes, unplugging lime injection lines, unplugging ash collection conveyors, ash collection hoppers, feedchutes, screw conveyors....if it could plug, it did, and we undid it.
we would go inside down boilers 4 hours after they were running @ 1600 to 1800 degrees and break slag off of the waterwalls...f'n hot i'll tell ya.
we'd enter electrostatic precipitators and deal with fly ash plugs.
break ash-rocks that would plug superheater hoppers.  
17 nasty long-ass years in trash to energy starting on a broom and shovel working into the control room, and doing about everything in between...hot/cold/wet/dusty/smelly/muddy/hard/ 12 hr shifts/ nights/weekends/holidays.
best experience i could have ever gotten.
i now work in a powerhouse for a biophamacuitical company at night, 2 combustion gas turbine generator sets, 2 waste heat recovery boilers,2 regular boilers, all apurtanances and auxiliary equipment, NO supervisor, only one co-worker, no trash, no ash, nothing plugs......i'm happy.

What Is The Worst Job You've Ever Had...?  

Long ago I went to work as a highschool night-crew janitor, it was a union job (good pay) and the boss (non-union) was incredibly antagonistic.

It was bad enough that the work was hard, dirty and just generaly sucked, but the boss made it untenable.

So as not to be forced to kill him, I left after a couple weeks.

I was a, how should I put it, general laborer, for a boatyard during senior year of HS. This included everything from powerwashing boats to washing vomit off toilets. It was mostly working out in the shops, cleaning up, that sort of deal, but there was some janitorial that had to be done too. Sometimes I was in the deli/ships store manning the cash register. Sometimes I was out raking leaves.

It wasn't that bad of a job really. I met a lot of nice people. My boss was an OK guy. I ran into him at a restaruant a few months ago and he bought me a few beers.  

And I ended up getting another credit for school becuase I worked in a School to work program for extra credit.

Federal Corrections Officer (hack).  Not near as hard as what a lot of you have posted.

I worked on what they call a "green line" at a lumber mill.  Rough slats would come through the planers where it was smoothed then it went to the saws where it was cut to the maximum length, then to the graders that graded the lumber.  Then the boards came down to us, about twenty guys along the chain conveyor and we would manually pull a certain grade and length of board and then stack it behind us for shipping.  The only time there was a break was when the saws or planers broke and then only after you hustled to the end of the line to walk the lumber back that got by you on the line.  If you were pulling something popular, like eight foot 2X4's there was usually quite a few missed and piled up at the end of the line.  They usually fixed the equipment pretty fast so you might get a cigarette in real fast before the line started moving again.  Crushed fingers and six inch splinters up the hand were not uncommon at all, this was the 60's and work place safety was only a shadow of that it is today.

Quoted: I worked on what they call a "green line" at a lumber mill.  Rough slats would come through the planers where it was smoothed then it went to the saws where it was cut to the maximum length, then to the graders that graded the lumber.  Then the boards came down to us, about twenty guys along the chain conveyor and we would manually pull a certain grade and length of board and then stack it behind us for shipping.  The only time there was a break was when the saws or planers broke and then only after you hustled to the end of the line to walk the lumber back that got by you on the line.  If you were pulling something popular, like eight foot 2X4's there was usually quite a few missed and piled up at the end of the line.  They usually fixed the equipment pretty fast so you might get a cigarette in real fast before the line started moving again.  Crushed fingers and six inch splinters up the hand were not uncommon at all, this was the 60's and work place safety was only a shadow of that it is today.

I did that for a few hours training for my job with a sawmill last year (I was just getting familiarized with as many aspects of the company's operations as possible).  A guy got his hand ever so slightly crushed by the planer, another guy broke his knee and then some guys welding the mill itself nearly burned it down  when a spark embedded itself in a pile of sawdust and ignited in the middle of the night.  All this happened in the space of a single week, I couldn't believe it.

My worst job was either

1. cleaning pipe for a welder when I was 14.  40 mile round trip by bus to the shop, hard drudge work for $3.85 an hour when I was there.  

2.  Working for my brother-in-law's start up fish packing plant. Work and pay wasn't what was so bad.  He's the biggest asshole I've ever met in my life and all I could think of was plunging a a knife in his back the whole time I worked with the bastard.

Phatforrest,
You didn't by chance work for cross sound ferry did you?

Artifial insemination crew that went to "The Turkey Store" Farms.
One crew would "milk" the Toms, The other crew would "inseminate the hens.
My job was to catch the birds, I flatly refused to "jack off a tom, or Open up a hen and inseminate it! That lasted 3 years, until they cost cut and new management started, they didnt like my attitude... $7.50 hr 20 years ago- not bad pay...then.

Quoted: Artifial insemination crew that went to "The Turkey Store" Farms. One crew would "milk" the Toms, The other crew would "inseminate the hens. My job was to catch the birds, I flatly refused to "jack off a tom, or Open up a hen and inseminate it! That lasted 3 years, until they cost cut and new management started, they didnt like my attitude... $7.50 hr 20 years ago- not bad pay...then.

You know, no matter how bad you think you have it...

Interning for Anthony Wiener.  Period.  Period. Period.  the worst.  Period.  Only good thing was my sabotage efforts during the ban sunset.  Still classified.  

Quoted: Phatforrest, You didn't by chance work for cross sound ferry did you?

No, but that's 2 towns away though. Excellent guess.

I did have a few friends that worked the snack stands for the ferries over the years.

My first summer job - working on a horse farm. Paid $1.50/hr in 1975. The worst part was bailing hay. The farmer would drive his tractor with bailer and trailer attached, and I would ride in the trailer stacking bails of hay as fast as the machine could toss them at me. This was in August, and the heat and humidity were incredible. Then, once a trailer was filled to above the top of the side rails, it was back to the barn for loading and stacking into the hay loft. Between the bugs, bees, heat, weak floor in the loft, and plain hard work, it truly sucked! The only good part was I got to ride horses a lot, but also had to shovel out their stalls (he boarded dozens of horses). I simultaniously learned the meaning and value of a dollar, what "hard work" was, and I learned that contrary to my previous thinking that I didn't really want to own any horses when I "grew up". I was also inspired to work harder at school....

I worked for six months as an isnside sales rep for Westinghouse Electric Supply Co.  There were something line 297 branches across the US and the one I was at was either 296 or 297, ie, we sucked.  Everyone but me chain smoked and were rum heads, the other inside sales guy was gay (not that there is anything wrong with that), and the salesman I worked for seldom did shit.  I got a call one morning from some pissed off guy wanting to know where the panels and switching gear was for job number so and so.  I told him to hold on and I asked the salesman whose job that was.  His words, more or less, were "that the shit for the B-1 security lighting and Dyess AFB and I forgot to order it (3-4 month lead time).  Tell him it's on the way."  Yeah, right, you tell him.  I got fired after 6 months (thank goodness) and the next day the asst manager was fired.  He had been with Westinghouse 20 years.  That job sucked and I didn't miss being gone one bit.

Quoted: Quoted: Artifial insemination crew that went to "The Turkey Store" Farms. One crew would "milk" the Toms, The other crew would "inseminate the hens. My job was to catch the birds, I flatly refused to "jack off a tom, or Open up a hen and inseminate it! That lasted 3 years, until they cost cut and new management started, they didnt like my attitude... $7.50 hr 20 years ago- not bad pay...then. You know, no matter how bad you think you have it...

.............some body else has it worse.

I actually had a job worse than summer I spent flippin' burgers at McDonalds.  I worked as general labor for a commecial painter.  This was 1979 in Michigan, right in the middle of the worst economic decline in decades.  Any job was difficult to come by.

This commercial painter would make an asshole a pleasure to work for.

I started on a Monday afternoon cleaning the shop & loading the painter's trucks for the next days jobs.  The shop was a total fucking disaster.  By Tuesday at quitting time, I had it ship shape & in order.  By Friday I was getting the hang of the place & at 5:00 the boss came to me and said "hey fuck boy, you're working tomorrow be here at 5:00."  
I asked "PM?"
He said "NO! Ya dumb fuckin idiot 5 FUCKING IN THE FUCKING MORNING"

That was the extent of the conversation I'd had with him

Next morning I was there at 4:45am, not wanting to piss off the boss anymore.  He showed up about 6:00 hung over & reaking of booze.  All he said was "Git in the fuckin' truck"

The tasks for the day was to stripe parking lots with yellow lines.

He'd sit in the truck napping while I unloaded the line stripe machine & readied it for painting.  No ramp to roll it in & out of the truck.  It was 150+ pounds & I had to carefully unload & load it because he had a bad back....lying prick....

He did help lay out the chalk lines because that did require two guys.  Then I'd go ahead of him sweeping were he was to paint "BUT DON'T SWEEP TOO MUCH OF THE FUCKING LINES STUPID"
I was using the push broom the way every body uses one, pushing it.  

He yelled at me "THAT FUCKING BROOM WORKS TWO FUCKING DIRECTIONS. GET MOVING OR I'll BREAK IT OFF IN YOUR ASS"

That was the last straw.  At the end of the day I made up my mind to quit.
At about 4:00 we got back to the shop & he told me about a dozen things he wanted done before I could go.

I told him "Nope, I'm quiting. You'll get your key back when I get my paycheck next Friday"

He said "GET YOUR FUCKING ASS IN THE SHOP & CLEAN OUT THE SPRAYER THEN YOU CAN GO"

I said "See ya" and left.

The following Friday I showed up just before 5:00pm to pick up my check.  The shop was open & guys were standing in line as the boss handed out paychecks.  

I was next & the boss said "WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU HERE?"

me>"I'm here to collect the money you owe me and return your key"

him>"WHAT IF I DON'T PAY YOU?"

me>"I won't return your key"

him> "BIG FUCKING DEAL"

I mustered all the guts a scrawny 18yr old kid could muster & said
"It will be when I come back in the middle of the night & fuck this place up.  Then call the state labor board & tell them you ripped off a hard working kid for a weeks pay. My uncle who works in that department will take great pride in fucking up your business with a big assed fine"

He stood there a second as though no one had ever said such a thing to him.  He sorted through the envelopes & gave me mine.  I opened it right there, the amount was correct for the hours I worked so I reached in my pocket & dropped his key on the floor at his feet and left.  The other guys were laughing at the exchange as I walked out of the shop.

Phatforrest,
I live on the other side of Cross Sound Ferry. So whenever I go to so my family in R.I. or Conn. Ihave to take the ferry, so when you said deli I figured it was them.

I guess the second worse was the couple of days I worked for a roofing crew.  

There was no conveyor systems in those days and starting roofers started "totin' shingles" up the ladder to the roofing crew.  They could lay them faster than I could get them up there and when being paid by the "square" they were eager to lay as many as possible in as little time as possible.  I started carrying two bundles at a time to keep up.  They weren't too bad on the ground, but half way up thet ladder they gained a couple of hundred pounds.  Add to that fun the Carolina summers that were usually 95 degrees and 95 percent humidity.

Sears Termite and Pest Control by far. When you weren't crawling around in attics and under houses you were expected to go door-to-door making cold calls if you didn't have any other appointments. I saw some of the nastiest, infested dwellings on that job. People with garbage piled in spare rooms wondering why they have millions of cockroaches running around all kinds of stuff like that. Plus I reaffirmed that I really really really hate spiders

Flipping burgers for three and a half bucks an hour has to be up there among the worst, but I think one of the jobs I had during grad school has to take the cake. I was freelancing in the evenings, building up data acquisition systems for some of the clinical scientists and was finishing up a project for one of the urologists. He came to me asking if I was interested in helping out on a study. Being the money ho that I am, I agreed without asking for more details. Well, it ended up being an errectile disfunction study which involved accurate placement of a transducer on Mr. Willy to measure blood flow. Never again....

I worked at an amusement park when I was 16.  HOT and boring.  Then someone would throw up to break the monotony.  Of course, I would have to hump the water to the ride in a 5 gal bucket to rinse it down.  It is the only job I ever got fired from.  

Second worst is any sales job that involves cold calling.  I had three and failed at all three.  I hate cold calling.  I guess I'm a slow learner too, as it took me three jobs to figure it out.

When I was 16 I was a drug store stockboy / clerk.

Minimum wage at the time was $4.25/hr and that's what I made.

Quoted: The job i have now: DHL package sorter. one 15 min. break in a 10 hour shift. 9.75 hours of either unloading loose packed semi trucks or flipping the packages unloaded off the trucks.

I'm a delivery driver for DHL.  I absolutely fucking hate it.  It's the worst job I've had thus far.  Can't wait till this weekend.  Hopefully I'll have something new.

One year I worked for a sewage company fixing/installing septic tanks. Nothing like the smell human shit on a hot summer day!! One slip in the mud and you are floating in fecal matter. The winter wasn't so bad except for the days when the bud would freeze while you are standing in. We would have to take turns passing the hammer around to break the ice off our boots so we could get out of the hole we were standing in. Its amazing what people flush!! We had the expected mice, gold fish, condoms and old feminine  hygiene products then you would get the weird stuff we once found a finger. The home owner had an accident with a table saw and when he was getting him self ready to go to the hospital he knocked in the pisser and flushed it. That was the worst job ever.

I do think that it should be mandatory that all high school kids should have such jobs as sewage workers, flipping burgers, and retail for at least a year or two. Talk about justification for a higher education its finest. After that they will beg to go back to school or already be established in a career.

Quoted: I worked at an amusement park when I was 16.  HOT and boring.  Then someone would throw up to break the monotony.  Of course, I would have to hump the water to the ride in a 5 gal bucket to rinse it down.  It is the only job I ever got fired from.

This was my first real after school job in Austin, Texas.  I made 25 cents an hour (more than I made throwing papers though).  I got fired when I listened to the mother of a kid and let the Shetland pony go after she swore the kid could ride.  That fuckin' pony took that kid on the ride of his life, mostly hanging off the stirup screaming like a banchee.  I did get hired back though when the mother confessed to my boss that she had insisted I let go of the reigns.  

Landscaping.  I quit after the second day, when I realized that "8-5" actually meant "8-8."

I was once talking to another guy at the refinery where I worked and was telling him about a bad job I once had.

Jeff said, "I can always win the "bad job" contests.

When I went to work at the Texaco refinery, I was assigned to "maintenance", which included cleaning up the offices.  In those days, a lot of guys chewed tabacco and they had spitoons all over the office.

My job was to collect the spitoons, empty them, wash them, and return them each day."

Now, anytime I think things are bad, I remember Jeff's spitoon job.  

Things don't seem so bad.  

Hauling hay or detasseling corn. Both jobs suck.

I washed dishes during the 11pm - 7am shift at a truck stop one summer during college, at first it sucked, but after a while it was actually fun, wasn't busy all the time and got to goof off a lot

Digging/cutting these http://www.kiowacd.org/images/musk_thistle_main.jpg in the pasture or
doing this http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/specials/snapshot/images/p153.jpg.

Great character builders those jobs were.  hinking.gif

Paper boy when I was 12. For three months I got up at 0500 4 times a week, rode my bike loaded with papers for 2 miles for $30 a month which I had to collect from bastards who didn't want to pay. It must have come to about $1.25/hr.

Quoted: Second worst is any sales job that involves cold calling.

+1,000

For some reason there is nothing more soul sucking than making cold calls.  I would rather shovel shit at an elephant show with spoon than do that again.  Lasted for 2 weeks before I realized that I would end up killing myself within the next month if I continued that job.

Worst part was my coworkers in the office.  Since we were a medical sales company, your goal is to get a doctor on the phone.  BUT YOU HAD TO GET PAST THE GATEKEEPER!  Usually a office nurse or manager.  

Coworkers use to lie,  saying they were the school principal at the doctor's kids school, or they were the doctor's brother, or they were an agent with the malpractice insurance that covered the doctor and needed to talk to him about an upcoming lawsuit against him.

I could never bring myself to lie like that and after 2 weeks had zero contacts.

MORAL TO THE STORY KIDS:  Never, never, never believe anything a telemarketer tells you on the phone.

EPOCH

HiLo driver.  24-28 hours shifts.  Burned up in the summer, froze to death in the winter. Fucking union steward trying to kill you.  Unmaintained dangerous equipment.  Black shit and dust in the air constantly.  You would go home blow your nose and get sick.

Night help for a quad lady.  Had to wipe her ass when she took a dump.  Had to put up with her liberal ranting.  The worst part was having to catch her dumbass cat to give it insulin shots.  I found the fucker in my dinner one night.  Threw a tennis shoe as hard as I could and smacked in the nose.  The little shit never came out again when I was around.

Sometimes I take my engineering degree off the wall and kiss it.

my effort/income ratio is excellent

i had a bunch of suck ass jobs but the worst was factory electronics assembly

the day would last 100 hours it seemed like

i'll tell you one thing, i can solder wires like a motherfocker

Hauled hay in the Texas sun for a couple summers.  Good honest work - not really that bad (mesquite and fire ants suck though).  

Shoveled Chicken shit for one summer.  In the shade though, not that bad...

Worked for a cement crew, setting up forms and breaking them - mostly shoveld fill.  Worse was when I was put at the bottom of a swimming pool.  105-110 degrees at noon at the bottom of a hole will absolutely no shade or breeze.  That sucked.

That said, doubled my bench press that summer.  So was not all bad.

I worked at a fish market for 3 years in college back when minimum wage was $3.35 - I was making $7.25/hr. so I can't complain too much. But in the winter it was SUPER cold, and in the summer it was air conditioned but outside the refrigerated room I was in it was HOT. And fish guts + heat = stink... I would come home with fish scales all over my arms and smelling just awful. I got in pretty good shape though, that job could be a workout.

Quoted: Sometimes I take my engineering degree off the wall and kiss it. my effort/income ratio is excellent

+1

I haven't had anything that can compete with some of your worst jobs.  Nothing I've done has been quite as bad.  I have had some challenging ones though...

My first summer after college the manager of the sporting goods store I worked for during H.S. bought a local florist shop and green house that had been unused for at least ten years.  It had at least 6 glass greenhouses from the '20s that were now reduced to splinters by vandals.  My job with one helper was to clean up the mess.  A little background info on me:  I'm so fair skinned I don't cast a shadow.  So here I am "Mr. SPF 80 Wearer" working out in the sun all day with glass that reflects any sun that missed on it's first trip past for another attempt at burning the inside of my nostils or my armpits.  I had to wear gloves to protect against the sharp glass, which isn't a big deal until the heat index approaches 100.  Oh yes...  Glass is heavy.  At the time I weighted about 155 lbs and was 6'2".  Not exactly the build for heavy physical labor.  On the plus side I got to take a break 2X per day and water hundreds of plants in the one operating greenhouse where it felt like 120 degrees F.

There really was a good part to the job...  We got to do deliveries to pretty girls who already had boyfriends and old ladies that didn't have time to pull up their panyhose before they answered the door.

My other chalenging job was about 5 years ago when I was laid off.  A friend of mine asked me to help him with his dock installation business.  He had to have several huge dock installations for neighborhood associations done before Memorial Day.  Now I've got the same physical limitations I had for the previous job plus I'm working in Lake MI water in late April and early May.  Spending 6-8 hours in a wetsuit in 55 degree water while its raining and handling 150 pound dock sections was not my idea of fun.  On the plus side my friend paid well and bought the beer.  (I'm not a big drinker but one of the other guys on the crew would leave an empty beer can on each section of dock we installed (20 mins per section) all day long.  I think he had a problem )

Kent

mani love hauling hay!!! but then again, the neighbors pay .50 cents for each (bail,bale i dont know how to spell it))

My first job... scrubbing grease spots in a restaurant parking lot.

--Mike

Doing almost anything on a farm. Anything that needs to be done in a field needs to be done over and over and over again, usually when it's hot, humid, or cold.

My parents thought it would teach me the value of hard work. It actually taught me the value of indoor, air-conditioned jobs, which is not quite the same thing, but it works for me.

BTW, Steyr, the trick is to put the can of pop in the freezer the night before, then wrap it in newspaper before you go out. It will still be icy at lunchtime. Or you can spring for a plastic thermos.