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Shit Jobs.

Jackalope

Dignitary Member
Staff member
38,841
260
The what do you do for a living thread got me to thinking about the shit Jobs I've had. By far the worst was a meter reading job in my late teens. My dad and I had a rural meter reading job once a month. Now the meters down south aren't like the fancy ones here that are indoors and read with a scanner. These meters are in a box in the ground somewhere in someones yard. To read them you have to hop out of the truck and find the box in the yard, flip open the access lid, and wipe the dirt off the lense to read the numbers. My dad would drive and I would ride with the door ajar on the truck, he would pull up and I would hop out, run up and flip open the door, reach in and wipe the glass and then call the numbers out to him where he would write them down in the big book. We had a route of 850 meters. Lots of in and out of the truck running a some of the meter boxes held water so you had to bail them out to read it, or dig them out because they were full of mud. They always had spiders in them from black widows to brown recluses, and there was no doubt that you would find a snake in a box or two every month.

Flip open the little lid, reach in to wipe the glass and read the numbers.

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I always flipped open the little lid then used that as a handle to pull the top off. Why, well because this.
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Lets not forget wasps and black widows.

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I made $50 bucks a day and it would usually take about a day and a half. Usually got paid around $65. That comes out to around 7 cents per meter. I save up for 6 months to buy my first rifle. A Savage 30-06.
 
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Sgt Fury

Sgt. Spellchecker
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My current job is a good one but there are shitty days thrown in....going into muddy, smelly manholes, splicing up in a bucket in the middle of a blizzard at 20 degrees, mice, ants and spiders in the pedestals, neglected plant that you have to fix after 40 years of people doing a quick fix, dead birds and bird nests/shit and wasps nests inside the enclosures and paper cable that gets wet and starts to slow burn because of the current on the wires are all hazards that you come across every year.
 
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bowhunter1023

Owner/Operator
Staff member
48,879
274
Appalachia
I mopped floors, cleaned grills/fryers/shitters, and washed dishes/pots/pan when I was a student manager in the dining hall at OU. I also built fence in the summers and over winter break, and we hand dug most of our holes. But the worst gig I had was the summer we got hooked up with the City who had grant money that paid for a licensed contractor to upgrade the wiring (and other items) to code in many of the older homes in town occupied by low-income people. Anyone that's done a rewire knows it sucks. If you've been in the attics and crawl spaces of shitty houses in the summer, you know it sucks. One day we were in the house of a hoarder and the best option was to open the knee wall along the only room on the second floor. We popped the paneling off to find bags of garbage surrounded by dead cats, rats, and coons. Feces all over the place. I took one look down the wall with my light, backed out of the hole and told my boss: "It's your company man. If you want to satisfy this contract, that's all you..." To his credit, he wollered in there like a champ, but hell if I was doing it for $8/hr!
 

5Cent

Dignitary Member
Supporting Member
12,290
212
North Central Ohio
Keep pushing Mike, youll get there man!

Dustin, bs, it gets hauled not burned....duh!

Detasselig corn was my worst job since I have started working at the age of 10. My first 4yrs, from 10-14, was spent split between detasseling and chicken wrangling. The smell of a huge chicken farm puts it in a close 2nd. Made being a bus boy at a restaurant, shoe salesman at Elder Beerman, a lineman at the local small airport and a masonry labor, easy! If I had to bale hay and staw all summer, that would take over #2. Thank god cuttings arent every day and it was every few weeks between spring and fall.
 

Sgt Fury

Sgt. Spellchecker
Keep pushing Mike, youll get there man!

Dustin, bs, it gets hauled not burned....duh!

Detasselig corn was my worst job since I have started working at the age of 10. My first 4yrs, from 10-14, was spent split between detasseling and chicken wrangling. The smell of a huge chicken farm puts it in a close 2nd. Made being a bus boy at a restaurant, shoe salesman at Elder Beerman, a lineman at the local small airport and a masonry labor, easy! If I had to bale hay and staw all summer, that would take over #2. Thank god cuttings arent every day and it was every few weeks between spring and fall.
I baled hay also when I was a teenager...hard work and you would end up coughing black shit out of your lungs at the end of the day. Was also a dishwasher at a diner in high school but that was kinda fun working with friends. Paper route sucked but put cash in my pocket when I as young. Also laid carpet for a summer...I wouldn’t want to do that job for a living...had to move a lot of furniture and a lot of dust/dirt flying around once you started ripping up the old carpet.
 

OhioWhiteTails

Senior Member
Supporting Member
8,482
191
Flatlands
Roofing as a summer job right out of high school. No roof delivery ever where we were. Shingles, ladders, chicken sticks and 90 degree heat sucked. BUT it did support my tail chasing at the time.
 
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jagermeister

Dignitary Member
Supporting Member
18,060
223
Ohio
Sorted peaches all summer at the local orchard when I was 12. Spent the days trying to decipher Spanish and would go home itching like I swam through fiberglass insulation. Made $1.25 per hour and the owner once yelled at me for not knowing how to run a pallet jack. I was 12, motherfucker! [emoji23]

Worked multiple janitorial jobs... All at manufacturing facilities that were absolute shit holes.

Ran tow motors in a warehouse for Whirpool, loading washing machines on semi trailers on midnight shift, 5 pm to 5 am. Not a terrible job but only because I got paid piece rate. I worked nonstop, usually without taking a lunch break. I was fast enough to load enough trucks that by the time I left I was averaging about $23 an hour. But I was busting ass and getting burned out. Wanna see something awesome? Drop an 8-pack of Whirpool Oasis washing machines from your clamps from the upper deck of a stow. That's about a 25 foot drop straight to the concrete. It's a pretty impressive crash. Don't ask me how I know. [emoji849]
 

hickslawns

Dignitary Member
Supporting Member
39,720
248
Ohio
Painter in the summers throughout high school. Wasn't terrible except when we landed a job at a farm. Boss put me on his 40' extension ladder doing the sheep barn. Set up with sheep running in/out the doors under me was horrible stench but the kicker was the heat that month. 40' up a ladder with wasps/bees nests in the overhang you are scraping/painting will make you pucker.

When I started on my own in business I did anything and everything to make a buck. Worst job I took was cleaning out a house for a guy. He bought it at Sheriff Sale and it was a boarded up crack house. That was one of the worst. Some of my rental properties have taken me into some ugly places as well. Re-doing the plumbing in some of those crawl spaces was ugly. Some of the attics I've been in have been rough. Fortunately, those aren't jobs I had to do all day every day. Not sure I could ever be an actual plumber and do this daily.

Some of my tasks I have had to perform for customers have been rather unpleasant as well. Last year i had to drain a retention pond which had filled up. Ever try to find a drain in a 5 acre pond based on a 30yr old map? Poison ivy and pond muck was plentiful. Had an overhead sprinkler line freeze and break one year. The 8" main line froze. Naturally it was sub zero, 2am, and the shut off for the main supply line was buried under a massive pile of snow. Had to take the push box off the backhoe and start digging. Later came the tear out of all the damaged drywall, ceiling tiles, carpet etc in the empty units. Not the same night, but kept us busy the next week. It was ugly. Nothing like wet carpet with fallen ceiling tiles as you slosh thru water. Had a deer go thru a store front window into an empty unit one time (actually the same empty we had to gut)). That was sort of fun wrangling the disoriented deer out with the Wildlife Officer. Cleaning up the mess wasn't so much fun. Again, those are just random ugly jobs. Fortunately, they don't happen every day. Daily uglies? Probably the worst is picking up the trash in the lawns and landscapes of box stores to mow. You wouldn't believe how many people poop in bags and toss them into lawns. You find plenty of condoms tossed out too. Feminine hygiene products? What kind of lady changes her pad/tampon in a parking lot? Find plenty of other nasties with the parking lot sweeping trucks.

Oh well. All in all I can't complain. It pays the bills.
 
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Buckmaster

Senior Member
14,362
191
Portage
I never had a lousy job until now. I've enjoyed all my past work from newspaper boy from 8-15, Napa Auto counter sales from 15-22, then sales and business development up to last year.
 
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Hunter II

Junior Member
604
127
As a medic in Army in the late 80’s I had some shitty tasks. Plucking ticks from under someones balls. Every Wednesday guys would show up with the clap they caught on the weekend and I would have to give them the rod. That shit sucked.


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