Besides surveying, what is the worst job you have had in your life?
Section 6 in Bonnerdale AR. Dad priced it. We resurveyed the world, found many things, original Section corner, at NW of 6. I think we got paid 1300 for it. We spent a month on it.
It was that job cut off point, where I said "No more shortcut jobs".
Bout killed me.
N
> what is the worst job you have had in your life?
Dog handler for an Iditarod team.
Its not about handling the dogs, so much as the excrement...
Summer newspaper delivery boy and here is why.
1. Up everyday at 4 a.m. to roll/fold newspapers (downright torture to a 14 year old)
2. Ride 5 - 6 miles in order to complete your route, more if you forgot a house.
3. Phone calls from irate customers and/or boss that you missed a house. By the time you ride back out there the customer had found their newspaper (it was on the porch by the door instead of in the street gutter where the other newspaper boy always put it) and decided it wasn't important enough to call you or your boss to say it had been found.
4. Collecting. You think it is hard collecting on surveys! Just try to get that $7.50/month subscription fee from someone.
5. Poor pay. Didn't get paid for what you didn't collect on and the pay was low on the idea that you would get tips from customers. I now know why the papers ended up in the street gutter!
6. Waking up at 4 a.m. everyday.
Cy
Me and my brother would move a quarter mile line of irrigation pipe before 6am and switch the valve. Move another before 7am and switch a valve. Go eat breakfast and then move the two wet lines we turned off. That would take us up to 9am. Hoe cotton until noon. Take a 3hr lunch (nap). The Farmer we were working for would switch the lines at noon and 1pm. At about 3pm we started hoeing cotton again up till about 5:15 and then move 4 lines again. Finished about 8:45pm. The Farmer would switch them again at midnight and 1am. On the weekends we just moved pipe, no hoeing.
My brother was 13, I was 11. If I remember correctly, we made 75 cents/hr hoeing cotton, $1.25 each per line of pipe. That was 1970.
James
It is a toss up between hauling bales of hay from field to stack in barn
or
Pitchin melons from field into transport to Farmer's Market
😉
as a 20 yr. old, having just hitchhiked to San Francisco: at a freight train yard, lifting 80 pound squares of tied up bloody, incredibly smelly,putrid,rawhide that just came in from a slaughterhouse, off freight car to transfer into the hold of a waiting ship at the dock yard 100 yards away.
But worse then that was the old timer Teamster Yard Boss who cracked the whip non-stop and loved seeing guys collapse and fall apart either in the freight car or on that hot blacktop pavement.
Wow, that brought back memories. Newspaper companies were a big bunch of jerks. They liked to say that you are "running your own business". What that meant was that you had to collect for your own papers and that if someone didn't pay you, you still had to pay the newspaper company for their papers. Just to collect you had to go door to door, and hope that you caught them at home. A lot of times they might say that they didn't have any cash on them or just not answer the door. When you got checks you had to take them in to the bank to cash them and if they bounced, you had to go back to the customer.
The first place I got a delivery route we lived in a small town in Kansas (a place called "Norton"). The "Omaha World Journal" and the "Topeka Herald" came by train in the early morning. All the paperboys would be at the same train station waiting for the train. They would stop by and throw the newspaper bundles with your name on them out of the train. You might have to put several sections together on Sunday. Many times the train was late and you just had to sit and wait for it in the summer. But during school, sometimes you had to go to school and not deliver until school let out. A lot of customers were very pissed. I delivered several papers to a Stand at a motel. (The paper boys handled those too). I remember the hotel manager coming out and reaming me because I didn't get the morning's paper in the stand until the afternoon. I said the train was late, and I had to go to school. He said that wasn't his fault.
I guess "running the business" might have been good for our character, I don't know, but in my opinion, these newspaper companies are virtually taking advantage of child labor (or at least did back in the sixties).
Oh, and what about having to work seven days a week? No days off. You had to find someone to substitute for you and teach them the route if your family was going on vacation. Good luck with getting sick too. Admittedly, it wasn't an 8-hours-a-day job, but I agree with Cyril, one of the worst jobs.
I helped out a college roommate’s father move bales of hay 40 years ago for one day. I had to load it on the truck by hand then unload it in the barn by hand. I still remember it and by far the worst job ever
1. "hanging dock" at a chicken processing plant.
2. Gandy dancer on the tram rails at a creosote treating plant.
3. Embryo inverter (egg turner) at a chicken hatchery.
Thank the Lord for Surveying!!
DDSM
One was a surveying job in 1960. We had to topo the berms around a blood pool of a local meat company in the August heat so they could design the raise in the berms. Not only was the place full of mosquitoes, but also full of deer flies. The stench was awful and being bitten by the pesky bugs was something else.
The other was in 1967 when I was employed by a contractor as their structure layout man. They laid everyone off right after Christmas, except for all the main supers. When they started calling some of the other supers back to work to start on a highway project out of Meteetsee, Wyoming, to start the prewatering. It was in March and was still more or less winter weather yet. Anyway, we had to pack the pipe in, the mains and laterals, get it all hooked up and set up the pump on the bank of the Greybull River. We worked three eight hour shifts, alternating shift hours each week. The river still had ice in it as well as flowing ice. The night shift was the worst, especially when you had to pull the big 8" pick up tube out and up a 20' bank to clean the ice and debris out of the screen on the end of tke tube. Then prime the pump to get it pumping again. Another thing was going out with a flashlight, slopping around in the mud on the hillsides in rain gear and hip boots and using a lath to knock the ice off the sprinkler heads whenever a main or a lateral lost pressure.
You ever go fishing and wonder how those worms got in all those cottage cheese containers? I can tell you. What made it exceptionally bad was when the box-o-worms your boss gave you were olde and the contents starting to degrade. Ick.
I microfilmed every deed book from volume 100 to volume 1300 my sophmore year in high school after school from 3 to 5 in the basement of the courthouse for a title company.
Peddling Newspapers......... Terrible for all the reasons given. I had a 3 mile route w 100 customers afternoons except for the early Sunday paper. I walked the route. All papers had to be on the porch or inside the storm door... no throwing papers.
Collections were the worst. I think it was about a half buck a week. 90% paid on time no worries so there was always enough to pay the newspaper their share. The other 10% was where your income was supposed to be. The newspapers had it figured pretty good. I still managed to save enough over two years for a shiny new Schwinn.
BTW... Only time I was ever bitten by a dog. Mrs. Gibson's cocker spaniel. Learned a valuable lesson.... never bend over to pet a small dog who's growling at you... little sucker jumped up and nailed me across the nose.. my dad had to take me in for stiches.
When I was a young teen we would go picking crawlers at the local golf courses. Part of the job was to count them into the sale containers. I worked part time at the store during the day. Great job at the time. I think we were paid 50 cents/100. You were only paid after counting healthy crawlers a couple days after they were picked.
> Peddling Newspapers......... Terrible for all the reasons given. I had a 3 mile route w 100 customers afternoons except for the early Sunday paper. I walked the route. All papers had to be on the porch or inside the storm door... no throwing papers.
> Collections were the worst. I think it was about a half buck a week. 90% paid on time no worries so there was always enough to pay the newspaper their share. The other 10% was where your income was supposed to be. The newspapers had it figured pretty good. I still managed to save enough over two years for a shiny new Schwinn.
> BTW... Only time I was ever bitten by a dog. Mrs. Gibson's cocker spaniel. Learned a valuable lesson.... never bend over to pet a small dog who's growling at you... little sucker jumped up and nailed me across the nose.. my dad had to take me in for stiches.
Cockers are usually quite friendly. What did you do to irritate it?
When dealing with a small dog, don't bend over, squat. If the dog still acts off, leave.
Of course over the course of years since then, there is a good probability that you have already surmised that course of action.
B-)
Which one to chose???
For me, it was the absolute boredom of running a tractor hour after hour, day after day while my classmates and other buddies were goofing off. No pay involved, just a roof over my head, three meals a day and all the other basics of life. The boredom was the worst part. It wasn't the heat or the cold or the wind or even the rain. It was the mindnumbing boredom of doing one thing constantly all day long. Did I mention how boring it was?
It made hauling hay, working cows, mending fence, picking up rocks and all sorts of other things some might label nasty work seem exciting by comparison. I remember one time where I plowed for thirteen days straight. Drop the plow, adjust the lever as necessary, eventually get to the far end of the field, lift the plow, drive to the return furrow, drop the plow and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat.....all day long for thirteen straight days. The only thing worse was cultivating because it was even slower and any poor driving that resulted in crops getting torn out would be discovered sooner or later.
I would not make it as a long haul trucker or UPS driver, taxi driver or any other occupation where you do the same mindnumbing thing hour after hour every day.
Did those chickens have large talons?
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My Granpa had a vegetable/catfish farm.
Maybe when I was 8 or 9, I got paid a buck a bushel for picking okra.
I did not realize that okra grew with nasty thistles and thorns and that it took a long time to pick a bushel.
He really suckered me on that one.
Randy
If it ain't fun; I ain't doing it...
Never had a job I didn't like; at least that's what I keep telling myself.B-)
I hope everyone has a great day, I know I will.
Radar
