Well, let’s see. In college I briefly worked a lunchtime shift in the ticket booth of a theater in Times Square that showed “adult films.” I remember being surprised at how well-mannered many of the businessmen were. Of course, that was balanced out by the ones who asked “how much?”
In grad school I worked evening shifts “word-processing” for law firms – those were the early days of computers, but before the internet. The floor supervisors, had they lived in the antebellum south, would have felt very much at home with whips in their hands. I often thought during job interviews they must have been asked “have you had previous experience being a driven, abusive asshole? You have? You’re hired!”
Then there was my first job doing home visits as a social worker. I remember my last home visit on a particularly rough day – I had gotten fleas and stank of cat piss from an earlier visit – and the elderly client came to the door with a large snake draped around his shoulders. Without even thinking, I barked “put the fucking snake away!” I immediately thought, “well that’s it, he’s going to complain and I’ll get fired.” But he was totally blasé, took it in stride, and just said “Sure. I know Rocco isn't everyone's cup of tea."
The Grand Hyatt! When I say that I’ve never seen or been in a Trump property that wasn’t hideous or worse. The Grand Hyatt, besides the hideous exterior, also had awful public spaces -- the first floor event space, the claustrophobic bar... And don’t get me started on Trump Tower.
Anyway. Unspeakably awful job: essentially running the practice of a disengaged, disinterested alcoholic narcissist. An awful human being. Only happy day on the job was the day I walked away from it.
Damn. Now I think the happy hour’s going to start real early today.
I've spent forty years in the admin game. I gave up the supposedly 'prestigious' role of executive assistant sixteen years ago after five years working as admin to a religious official that went a long way toward making me the atheist I am today. 😜 I worked a lot of restaurant and retail over the years to piece things out, but I'm grateful I knew how to type and didn't have to fully support myself on service jobs.
Probably my low point was in my early 20s, in the late 1980s. I was late on my rent, I had no car, no phone, and I was surviving on temp jobs for a year. Ever tried to be a temp with no home phone? I don't recommend it. 😆
So many to choose from, both I guess I’ll go with Fish Processing Boat in Alaska. 16 hour shifts, sometimes 24, hard, repetitive physical labor with many genuinely stupid and/ or crazy and/or violent people. One of the first things I noticed when I got to Alaska was that a lot of people were missing teeth, and I was to see several examples of why. But I think the best anecdotes concern how I rose rapidly through the ranks. My first job was the lowest of the low, which was grading fish from 1 to 3 and putting them in different pans accordingly. This process was overseen by a specialized from the Japanese buyer boat that was always tied up to ours. The morons I worked with who had been doing the job for a couple days were constantly arguing with the Japanese professional about how to grade fish and you could see his frustration steadily grow. Unfortunately, it was I who caused him to lose it, not because I don’t respect him, but because I hadn’t slept for several days. He yelled at me shaking the mid-graded fish in my face, tossed it up in the air and stormed away. It came down on my shoulder and I didn’t want to, but in that situation I did the only thing I could do, picked up the fish and threw it, hitting him in the back of the head. Everyone thought I’d get fired, but I was treated as a hero and promoted. Then the man came to me with the Japanese boat captain and very formally apologized. I truly felt like shit. I could go on (and on) with examples of how shitty that job was, but suffice it so say, it was shitty.
I don't know how we're supposed to compete with getting hit with a chair by a mobster, cross-dressing as a tomato or Quiche and Tell.
Friend of mine was a store manager for PetSmart. We were hanging out one night and I started bitching about how I've been trying to save up a down payment up for a larger house but in Bush the 1st's America, a guy just couldn't get ahead. I had a pretty good job - marketing director for a Hyatt Hotel - but shit, between three kids and real life I just couldn't get ahead.
He says I got a good part-time job- I need bather/ brushers in The Grooming Department. You can make 10 bucks an hour with tips.
I've been a dog owner all my life. How hard could it be? 10 bucks at the time was OKmoney
The first dog I worked on drew blood. An Airedale scratched my face so bad I had to go to the emergency room. My buddy called me up to see how I was doing and to make sure I was coming to work the next day because it was going to be really busy.
I learned right away that most dogs really hate going to the groomer. I only worked 2 days a week. Every week something got nip or scratched. The money was actually okay but before long I was to the point where I couldn't sleep the night before a shift I dreaded it so bad.
One of the things we had to do was trim the dog's toenails. Dogs really fucking hate that. For the big dogs we had rings on the floor where we would tie the leash and work on them. I got talked into coming in for a Sunday. I usually did the dog grooming on weekdays. The hotel kept me busy most weekends. The night before I was supposed to come in I was at the hotel for a very large banquet. It went well and we celebrated with drugs and alcohol out in the parking lot for most of the night. I went home slept for an hour, got up and went in to take care of some dogs.
First dog that morning with some kind of Bull Mastiff German Shepherd mix that needed his toenails trimmed. I tied his leash to the ring on the floor, picked up his front paw and proceeded to trim his nail. The instant nail was cut big dog lunged at me and tried to bite. He missed my nose by an inch. I was in a corner of the room. I scuttled up against the wall, just out of reach of the dog. I couldn't leave the corner without going back within his reach.
He would lunge at anybody that came near. I was stuck in the corner for a half hour with Cujo barking in my face until the city Animal Control people came in with their Hatari lasso rig and dragged his viscious ass away.
Just one? Hard to pick but one memorable day in hell was doing telesales for Lincoln Center, which compromised calling lapsed subscribers to re-up... after a few hours of having The Greatest Generation hang up on me with disgust after hearing their assorted, toothless rants about what a putz James Levine was I walked out without even trying to get paid for the day. Elder abuse in reverse!
I had so many shitty jobs in my first 20 some working years that it’s a tough assignment just to pick one. Like Roy’s, most of them paid barely enough to scrape by. (I used to wonder what the word “career” meant, but then I was also unfamiliar with “college dorm” and “spring break.”)
It wasn’t the shittiest, but the scariest job I ever had was as a driving instructor for a school in Brooklyn that had seen better days. It was risky, but at least I had my own brake pedal. I swear I took people out on lessons who had clearly never even been in a car before. Like one of my first students, a young guy from someplace in the Caribbean, who put the car into Drive, got it up to 40 on a residential street, and then asked “Where the brake at mon?” And I almost got killed the time I was looking down to light a cigarette (those were the days ) and looked up to see we were about to plow into the front grill of a Mack truck.
Then there was the poor young woman who suffered from strabismus, where one one eye looks straight ahead while the other drifts off to the side. I felt really sorry for her, because having two separate vision inputs would sometimes confuse the hell out of her brain. One day, she was making a simple left turn when this confusion occurred. She completely panicked, spun the wheel in the opposite direction while hitting the gas pedal and headed for the nearest parked car, whereupon the tires squealed as I slammed on the brakes. There we were, inches away from the parked cars and perpendicular to the sidewalk, when a Brooklyn gentleman walking his dog looked at me and said, “Jeezus, pal, that’s some fuckin’ job you got.”
I too have done hard time in restaurants but I’ve blanked a lot of it out. Perhaps because when the shift is over, it’s over. Unlike corporate gigs, in which you can be tortured with the same project for literally years.
So here’s one from the wonderful world of advertising. Sitting in a pre-production meeting for a shitty commercial for a giant consumer products company. That company had a Head of Production, which I think was a made-up job for some emeritus executive they couldn’t push out the door. He came to all of these for the chance to get out of Cincinnati, and to lord his tremendous power over the agency folks.
My co-worker sitting next to me got bored (PPs are dull) and starting passing me notes with “funny” cartoons. I could see it was being noticed and did not react or respond.
Couple weeks later co-worker and I were called into the office of someone many levels up in the agency. Big trouble. Head of Production wanted us fired for “mocking him” at the PP. (None of the jokes were about him, and he could not have seen them anyway.) In order to save our jobs we would have to call this guy and grovel; if and only if he accepted our apologies, we could remain employed.
Co-worker went first. After the call he reported that Head of Production wasn’t a bad guy at all, in fact they had a great call, lotta laughs, what a sense of humor.
My turn. Head of Production ripped me to shreds. Can’t remember all the deets, it was brutal. But I’ll never forget his closer: he knew I — whom he’d never met before — was going to be a problem before the meeting even began because I had “a weak handshake.”
He granted that I could keep my job, but I left pretty soon after.
Funny the stories that came to mind first when I saw today’s REBID all involve shitty white men drunk on power. (Although I have waited on Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and lemme tell ya, that’s an experience.)
Not a shitty job, but definitely the shittiest day at work I've ever had:
Back when I was writing/editing a magazine on aircraft maintenance, I used to work for a maintenance shop that specialized in a certain kind of twin-engine airplane. Each engine on these things had two turbochargers, and it was a regular thing to change them out because they were worn, broken, etc. So one afternoon, I changed out two of the four turbos on one airplane--one turbo on each engine.
A week later I'm driving to work. It's snowing hard and traffic is crawling. On the radio, I hear a report that the cause of the backup is a plane crash. Since the shop was on the way to the office, I stopped there to wait out the traffic and maybe find out more about the crash.
I walked into the shop and could instantly see that everyone was shell shocked. The airplane that crashed was our customer, and the very same airplane I had worked on a week earlier. The pilot had reported that both engines had quit. There were no survivors.
I spent the next year wondering if I had killed two people. It wasn't until the accident report came out that I learned the pilot had managed to starve both engines of fuel by doing something the flight manual specifically said not to do. But until that report hit my desk, well, that was the worst and longest day at work I've ever had.
Think I'll go with a grad school story, since no one else has tapped into that particular well of suck. I spent a year basically inventing an instrument to measure shear deformation in high-temperature composite materials, when the asshole professor I was working for fired me (Can you get fired in grad school? Well, I sure could.) Let's just say we had interpersonal issues, which means I hated him and didn't make much of an effort to conceal it.
Anyway, the instrument. The day after my firing, he tells me to put the instrument in a box and give it to the lab manager before I go. So naturally I disassembled the thing, down to the tiniest screw (and this thing had a LOT of parts to it, as a designer I tend towards overcomplication.) All the parts go into a box, then shake vigorously.
The next day, he asked me if I had put the instrument in a box. "Oh yeah, it's in a box, alright."
I took a job as a telephone solicitor (I know, I know...). In my defense, it was for an actual worthwhile arts organization in the DC area, so I figured that it might not be so bad. (Pause for dramatic effect.) I worked one day, left my money on the table, and never went back. Worst. Job. Ever. And I had once spent an entire summer crawling under houses killing termites.
I worked in a restaurant - one of those Big Boy places - for maybe three months the fall after I graduated high school. It convinced me a career in food service was not the best choice for me, culminating in burning a quarter-size patch on the back of my hand with oil from the fryer and having the manager try to convince me to finish cleanup before seeking care.
It was a fitting start to decades of being screwed over by capitalism. The coup de grace came in 2019, when at 67 my job changed from a contract position to one done by an in-house employee. I suspect my age had something to do with why I was not offered the job, as had happened in previous instances. But they did the same thing to three of my co-workers, of various ages, giving them cover for dumping me.
Can't entirely blame them - it would have been expensive to buy out my contract for the three years left before my planned retirement at 70. Damned inconvenient though. The extra Social Security money from working until 70 would come in handy these days.
So: beginning to end, my employment history involves a lot of getting fucked, or at least having the attempt made. I suspect my experience is far from unique.
I was in college during the first of Reagan's economic downturns and needed to get a job. Unfortunately, John Deere was on strike (or there had been massive layoffs, I'm not sure which) and I couldn't find anything in fast food and nothing that would fit my schedule of classes. Then a gay friend recommended I apply at an adult bookstore out on LaPort Road. Long story short (and I still remember lots of stories, the place had movie booths with glory holes)-I got the job. 1am-9am. One night, after the 2am bar-closing rush, I was at the counter when a guy grabbed a Debbie Does Dallas blow-up doll off a display table and headed out the door. I immediately ran out after him and was in the middle of the parking lot when the voice in my head woke up and screamed WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? YOU ARE GOING TO BE SHOT DEAD FOR A DEBBIE DOES DALLAS FUCK DOLL! I did a ridiculous crouch and weave scramble back into the building and called my boss. She said Call The Police. So I called the police. The police arrived, they were giggling assholes, and I was a sleep deprived college student. It didn't go well. I stuck to my determination to file a police report because I had to have one filed for The Company (which was mob-owned, but that's a few other stories). The doll had Vibro-action and was over $50! I did not have to go to court, thankfully, because they never found the guy or his expensive new girlfriend.
And then there was the guy who came in with his very drunk wife and insisted on buying me as a birthday gift for her...
I worked at the bookstore for just short of one year, I think. I needed to eat (and drink!). Part of my job was to drag a bucket of clorox water and a mop into the back and swab out the booths before the early morning rush. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed it.
My worst job was my first, newspaper delivery boy. Every day after school, unbundle the papers dropped at my house, fold ‘em, put ‘em in a shoulder bag, walk from house to house placing them on the porch and then, on Fridays, trying to get these well-to-do households to pay up. The pay was literally pennies a week unless someone took pity and tipped. I would’ve quit but “in this family everyone helps out by working.” Good old Depression ethos. The only compensation was the times one of the beautiful high school girls answered the door on tip day. Eleven or twelve year olds couldn’t pretend to ever speaking with one of these goddesses under any other circumstances. I heard one of them later hooked up with Hunter S Thompson, to her mother’s dismay, according to my mother. Anyway, there’s lots of unpleasantness in medicine but it’s still the best job in the world if you aren’t talented enough to be a Rolling Stone (oh, how we dreamed of that life when they fired Brian Jones).
Well, let’s see. In college I briefly worked a lunchtime shift in the ticket booth of a theater in Times Square that showed “adult films.” I remember being surprised at how well-mannered many of the businessmen were. Of course, that was balanced out by the ones who asked “how much?”
In grad school I worked evening shifts “word-processing” for law firms – those were the early days of computers, but before the internet. The floor supervisors, had they lived in the antebellum south, would have felt very much at home with whips in their hands. I often thought during job interviews they must have been asked “have you had previous experience being a driven, abusive asshole? You have? You’re hired!”
Then there was my first job doing home visits as a social worker. I remember my last home visit on a particularly rough day – I had gotten fleas and stank of cat piss from an earlier visit – and the elderly client came to the door with a large snake draped around his shoulders. Without even thinking, I barked “put the fucking snake away!” I immediately thought, “well that’s it, he’s going to complain and I’ll get fired.” But he was totally blasé, took it in stride, and just said “Sure. I know Rocco isn't everyone's cup of tea."
The Grand Hyatt! When I say that I’ve never seen or been in a Trump property that wasn’t hideous or worse. The Grand Hyatt, besides the hideous exterior, also had awful public spaces -- the first floor event space, the claustrophobic bar... And don’t get me started on Trump Tower.
Anyway. Unspeakably awful job: essentially running the practice of a disengaged, disinterested alcoholic narcissist. An awful human being. Only happy day on the job was the day I walked away from it.
Damn. Now I think the happy hour’s going to start real early today.
I've spent forty years in the admin game. I gave up the supposedly 'prestigious' role of executive assistant sixteen years ago after five years working as admin to a religious official that went a long way toward making me the atheist I am today. 😜 I worked a lot of restaurant and retail over the years to piece things out, but I'm grateful I knew how to type and didn't have to fully support myself on service jobs.
Probably my low point was in my early 20s, in the late 1980s. I was late on my rent, I had no car, no phone, and I was surviving on temp jobs for a year. Ever tried to be a temp with no home phone? I don't recommend it. 😆
So many to choose from, both I guess I’ll go with Fish Processing Boat in Alaska. 16 hour shifts, sometimes 24, hard, repetitive physical labor with many genuinely stupid and/ or crazy and/or violent people. One of the first things I noticed when I got to Alaska was that a lot of people were missing teeth, and I was to see several examples of why. But I think the best anecdotes concern how I rose rapidly through the ranks. My first job was the lowest of the low, which was grading fish from 1 to 3 and putting them in different pans accordingly. This process was overseen by a specialized from the Japanese buyer boat that was always tied up to ours. The morons I worked with who had been doing the job for a couple days were constantly arguing with the Japanese professional about how to grade fish and you could see his frustration steadily grow. Unfortunately, it was I who caused him to lose it, not because I don’t respect him, but because I hadn’t slept for several days. He yelled at me shaking the mid-graded fish in my face, tossed it up in the air and stormed away. It came down on my shoulder and I didn’t want to, but in that situation I did the only thing I could do, picked up the fish and threw it, hitting him in the back of the head. Everyone thought I’d get fired, but I was treated as a hero and promoted. Then the man came to me with the Japanese boat captain and very formally apologized. I truly felt like shit. I could go on (and on) with examples of how shitty that job was, but suffice it so say, it was shitty.
I don't know how we're supposed to compete with getting hit with a chair by a mobster, cross-dressing as a tomato or Quiche and Tell.
Friend of mine was a store manager for PetSmart. We were hanging out one night and I started bitching about how I've been trying to save up a down payment up for a larger house but in Bush the 1st's America, a guy just couldn't get ahead. I had a pretty good job - marketing director for a Hyatt Hotel - but shit, between three kids and real life I just couldn't get ahead.
He says I got a good part-time job- I need bather/ brushers in The Grooming Department. You can make 10 bucks an hour with tips.
I've been a dog owner all my life. How hard could it be? 10 bucks at the time was OKmoney
The first dog I worked on drew blood. An Airedale scratched my face so bad I had to go to the emergency room. My buddy called me up to see how I was doing and to make sure I was coming to work the next day because it was going to be really busy.
I learned right away that most dogs really hate going to the groomer. I only worked 2 days a week. Every week something got nip or scratched. The money was actually okay but before long I was to the point where I couldn't sleep the night before a shift I dreaded it so bad.
One of the things we had to do was trim the dog's toenails. Dogs really fucking hate that. For the big dogs we had rings on the floor where we would tie the leash and work on them. I got talked into coming in for a Sunday. I usually did the dog grooming on weekdays. The hotel kept me busy most weekends. The night before I was supposed to come in I was at the hotel for a very large banquet. It went well and we celebrated with drugs and alcohol out in the parking lot for most of the night. I went home slept for an hour, got up and went in to take care of some dogs.
First dog that morning with some kind of Bull Mastiff German Shepherd mix that needed his toenails trimmed. I tied his leash to the ring on the floor, picked up his front paw and proceeded to trim his nail. The instant nail was cut big dog lunged at me and tried to bite. He missed my nose by an inch. I was in a corner of the room. I scuttled up against the wall, just out of reach of the dog. I couldn't leave the corner without going back within his reach.
He would lunge at anybody that came near. I was stuck in the corner for a half hour with Cujo barking in my face until the city Animal Control people came in with their Hatari lasso rig and dragged his viscious ass away.
That was my last day as a bather/ brusher.
Just one? Hard to pick but one memorable day in hell was doing telesales for Lincoln Center, which compromised calling lapsed subscribers to re-up... after a few hours of having The Greatest Generation hang up on me with disgust after hearing their assorted, toothless rants about what a putz James Levine was I walked out without even trying to get paid for the day. Elder abuse in reverse!
I had so many shitty jobs in my first 20 some working years that it’s a tough assignment just to pick one. Like Roy’s, most of them paid barely enough to scrape by. (I used to wonder what the word “career” meant, but then I was also unfamiliar with “college dorm” and “spring break.”)
It wasn’t the shittiest, but the scariest job I ever had was as a driving instructor for a school in Brooklyn that had seen better days. It was risky, but at least I had my own brake pedal. I swear I took people out on lessons who had clearly never even been in a car before. Like one of my first students, a young guy from someplace in the Caribbean, who put the car into Drive, got it up to 40 on a residential street, and then asked “Where the brake at mon?” And I almost got killed the time I was looking down to light a cigarette (those were the days ) and looked up to see we were about to plow into the front grill of a Mack truck.
Then there was the poor young woman who suffered from strabismus, where one one eye looks straight ahead while the other drifts off to the side. I felt really sorry for her, because having two separate vision inputs would sometimes confuse the hell out of her brain. One day, she was making a simple left turn when this confusion occurred. She completely panicked, spun the wheel in the opposite direction while hitting the gas pedal and headed for the nearest parked car, whereupon the tires squealed as I slammed on the brakes. There we were, inches away from the parked cars and perpendicular to the sidewalk, when a Brooklyn gentleman walking his dog looked at me and said, “Jeezus, pal, that’s some fuckin’ job you got.”
I too have done hard time in restaurants but I’ve blanked a lot of it out. Perhaps because when the shift is over, it’s over. Unlike corporate gigs, in which you can be tortured with the same project for literally years.
So here’s one from the wonderful world of advertising. Sitting in a pre-production meeting for a shitty commercial for a giant consumer products company. That company had a Head of Production, which I think was a made-up job for some emeritus executive they couldn’t push out the door. He came to all of these for the chance to get out of Cincinnati, and to lord his tremendous power over the agency folks.
My co-worker sitting next to me got bored (PPs are dull) and starting passing me notes with “funny” cartoons. I could see it was being noticed and did not react or respond.
Couple weeks later co-worker and I were called into the office of someone many levels up in the agency. Big trouble. Head of Production wanted us fired for “mocking him” at the PP. (None of the jokes were about him, and he could not have seen them anyway.) In order to save our jobs we would have to call this guy and grovel; if and only if he accepted our apologies, we could remain employed.
Co-worker went first. After the call he reported that Head of Production wasn’t a bad guy at all, in fact they had a great call, lotta laughs, what a sense of humor.
My turn. Head of Production ripped me to shreds. Can’t remember all the deets, it was brutal. But I’ll never forget his closer: he knew I — whom he’d never met before — was going to be a problem before the meeting even began because I had “a weak handshake.”
He granted that I could keep my job, but I left pretty soon after.
Funny the stories that came to mind first when I saw today’s REBID all involve shitty white men drunk on power. (Although I have waited on Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and lemme tell ya, that’s an experience.)
Not a shitty job, but definitely the shittiest day at work I've ever had:
Back when I was writing/editing a magazine on aircraft maintenance, I used to work for a maintenance shop that specialized in a certain kind of twin-engine airplane. Each engine on these things had two turbochargers, and it was a regular thing to change them out because they were worn, broken, etc. So one afternoon, I changed out two of the four turbos on one airplane--one turbo on each engine.
A week later I'm driving to work. It's snowing hard and traffic is crawling. On the radio, I hear a report that the cause of the backup is a plane crash. Since the shop was on the way to the office, I stopped there to wait out the traffic and maybe find out more about the crash.
I walked into the shop and could instantly see that everyone was shell shocked. The airplane that crashed was our customer, and the very same airplane I had worked on a week earlier. The pilot had reported that both engines had quit. There were no survivors.
I spent the next year wondering if I had killed two people. It wasn't until the accident report came out that I learned the pilot had managed to starve both engines of fuel by doing something the flight manual specifically said not to do. But until that report hit my desk, well, that was the worst and longest day at work I've ever had.
"In some ways life’s easier when you don’t give a shit."
Gold.
I got stories (not epic) but I'm late to life today.
Carry on, carry on...
Think I'll go with a grad school story, since no one else has tapped into that particular well of suck. I spent a year basically inventing an instrument to measure shear deformation in high-temperature composite materials, when the asshole professor I was working for fired me (Can you get fired in grad school? Well, I sure could.) Let's just say we had interpersonal issues, which means I hated him and didn't make much of an effort to conceal it.
Anyway, the instrument. The day after my firing, he tells me to put the instrument in a box and give it to the lab manager before I go. So naturally I disassembled the thing, down to the tiniest screw (and this thing had a LOT of parts to it, as a designer I tend towards overcomplication.) All the parts go into a box, then shake vigorously.
The next day, he asked me if I had put the instrument in a box. "Oh yeah, it's in a box, alright."
I took a job as a telephone solicitor (I know, I know...). In my defense, it was for an actual worthwhile arts organization in the DC area, so I figured that it might not be so bad. (Pause for dramatic effect.) I worked one day, left my money on the table, and never went back. Worst. Job. Ever. And I had once spent an entire summer crawling under houses killing termites.
I worked in a restaurant - one of those Big Boy places - for maybe three months the fall after I graduated high school. It convinced me a career in food service was not the best choice for me, culminating in burning a quarter-size patch on the back of my hand with oil from the fryer and having the manager try to convince me to finish cleanup before seeking care.
It was a fitting start to decades of being screwed over by capitalism. The coup de grace came in 2019, when at 67 my job changed from a contract position to one done by an in-house employee. I suspect my age had something to do with why I was not offered the job, as had happened in previous instances. But they did the same thing to three of my co-workers, of various ages, giving them cover for dumping me.
Can't entirely blame them - it would have been expensive to buy out my contract for the three years left before my planned retirement at 70. Damned inconvenient though. The extra Social Security money from working until 70 would come in handy these days.
So: beginning to end, my employment history involves a lot of getting fucked, or at least having the attempt made. I suspect my experience is far from unique.
I was in college during the first of Reagan's economic downturns and needed to get a job. Unfortunately, John Deere was on strike (or there had been massive layoffs, I'm not sure which) and I couldn't find anything in fast food and nothing that would fit my schedule of classes. Then a gay friend recommended I apply at an adult bookstore out on LaPort Road. Long story short (and I still remember lots of stories, the place had movie booths with glory holes)-I got the job. 1am-9am. One night, after the 2am bar-closing rush, I was at the counter when a guy grabbed a Debbie Does Dallas blow-up doll off a display table and headed out the door. I immediately ran out after him and was in the middle of the parking lot when the voice in my head woke up and screamed WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? YOU ARE GOING TO BE SHOT DEAD FOR A DEBBIE DOES DALLAS FUCK DOLL! I did a ridiculous crouch and weave scramble back into the building and called my boss. She said Call The Police. So I called the police. The police arrived, they were giggling assholes, and I was a sleep deprived college student. It didn't go well. I stuck to my determination to file a police report because I had to have one filed for The Company (which was mob-owned, but that's a few other stories). The doll had Vibro-action and was over $50! I did not have to go to court, thankfully, because they never found the guy or his expensive new girlfriend.
And then there was the guy who came in with his very drunk wife and insisted on buying me as a birthday gift for her...
I worked at the bookstore for just short of one year, I think. I needed to eat (and drink!). Part of my job was to drag a bucket of clorox water and a mop into the back and swab out the booths before the early morning rush. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed it.
My worst job was my first, newspaper delivery boy. Every day after school, unbundle the papers dropped at my house, fold ‘em, put ‘em in a shoulder bag, walk from house to house placing them on the porch and then, on Fridays, trying to get these well-to-do households to pay up. The pay was literally pennies a week unless someone took pity and tipped. I would’ve quit but “in this family everyone helps out by working.” Good old Depression ethos. The only compensation was the times one of the beautiful high school girls answered the door on tip day. Eleven or twelve year olds couldn’t pretend to ever speaking with one of these goddesses under any other circumstances. I heard one of them later hooked up with Hunter S Thompson, to her mother’s dismay, according to my mother. Anyway, there’s lots of unpleasantness in medicine but it’s still the best job in the world if you aren’t talented enough to be a Rolling Stone (oh, how we dreamed of that life when they fired Brian Jones).