Top Five Worst Jobs (Should This Be Bottom Five Jobs?)

I’m taking a break from stressing out over school work, deadlines, etc., in order to bring you another fabulous Top Five.  Someone at an interview recently asked me my worst ever job, and I had a hard time choosing from among the following:

5. Blockbuster Video Customer Service Representative

My first job (besides babysitting and what-have-you) was working the register for good old BBV.  I can still tell you that the New Releases at that time were Bed of Roses, Get Shorty, Casino, and Flipper.  I can still hear the preview reel that we had to play on tvs all around the store.  The Flipper song was especially annoying.  I was paid minimum wage for this job, except when I worked holidays and got DOUBLE minimum wage, which was like a whole twelve dollars or something.  And because I was the youngest and timid, and because BBV is Communist and never closes, the Christmas break that I came back from college to earn some money, they scheduled me for a double on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, another double on New Years Eve, and New Years Day.  Nobody else had to work all four.  I quit shortly after realizing that fact.

4. Dishwasher

When I was an undergrad, I worked as a dishwasher in our cafeteria.  There was a real divide between locals and students, same as everywhere, but there was a real HUGE divide between locals who worked in the dishroom for minimum wage (there’s that pesky min. wage again!) and the students who they saw as spoiled, privileged, and (in today’s parlance) “elitist”.  It took a while for them to stop picking on me.  Again, see: shy and timid.  They told me I worked too hard and made them look bad.  Anyway, this was backbreaking work – hoisting trays and stacks of dishes around, sticking my lily-white elitist hands into a hot dishwashing machine to retrieve dishes, and (the WORST) having to fish around in leftover mashed potatoes for some slob’s dirty fork.  I left my shift every day soaked through with sweat and really dirty, with salad dressing in my hair and ketchup under my fingernails.  And I got paid four lousy dollars an hour, because my school had some kind of deal where they could pay the students less than minimum wage – which was $6.50 at that time, I think, and the highest my college allowed student workers to make was $5.15, and that was only after four years of experience.  Which is one of a couple of reasons why my undergraduate institution will never see a dime from me.

3. Waitress at Cracker Barrel

So, we’re still in the timid and shy days, and one thing you do NOT want to be when working with the career waitresses at Cracker Barrel is timid and shy, because those barracudas will eat you alive.  In every waitressing job I’ve had (and there have been many, at all classes of eatery), I have been brutalized by the customers on one end and by the chefs on the other.  But at most of them, the waitresses take care of each other.  Not here.  Phoo boy, if you so much as brought someone else’s table a drink refill, you got reamed out for making the waitress look bad.   They preferred to serve their own tables, thank you very much.  Sunday mornings were the plum shift, because everybody and their brother wants to have good old home country cookin’ after listenin’ to the preacher on Sunday, and heck, even heathens like a good chicken fried steak on the Lord’s day.  I don’t know that I ever got a Sunday morning shift.  They always shuffled me over to Tuesday night, when approximately three people would come in over the course of six hours, and leave maybe a dollar tip each.  Except one night, when a tent revival got out late, and about two hundred religious zealots crowded in right at closing time, and our manager begged the two of us who remained to stay and serve these people, promising she would help us serve and bus tables and not even share our tips.  We would make bank, she said, and she would get mad props for ringing up such a huge amount on an otherwise slow night.  They filled the whole, formerly empty (and already cleaned-for-the-night) restaurant, and some even sat in the store.   My coworker and I methodically and swiftly took orders, refilled drinks, served, cleared, smiled, and thanked each of them, and once they’d left, we re-cleaned the whole restaurant, refilled the already filled ketchup bottles, re-sliced the next morning’s already sliced lemons, etc.  It was painful to have to re-do all of our closing work, but we figured it would be worth it.  Ha!  Our grand total of tips (which we agreed to split, in the spirit of friendliness), was $16.  It was something like ten cents a person, maybe one hundredth of a percent of the total bill.  That, my friends, is good Christian generosity right there.

2. Waitress at Chili’s

I don’t know that this job was necessarily worse than the Cracker Barrel job, except that while I was working at Chili’s I was also working as a receptionist at a hospital all day, with an hour drive in the morning, an hour and a half from the end of my work day to the beginning of my work night at Chili’s, and then a half hour drive home after midnight, followed by a handful of hours of sleep before getting up at 6 in order to do the hour drive to the day job again.  It was tremendously exhausting.  I had no trouble getting plum shifts at Chili’s – I often pulled doubles on the weekends.  Chili’s patrons tip better than Cracker Barrel patrons, but unfortunately I worked with a waiter who stole money off tables.  He was caught once, and later fired for it, but during my tenure was still freely lifting five dollar bills from a six dollar tip, for example, leaving us thinking all of our customers were just stingy.  The main reason why Chili’s was a tough place to work (besides the fact that they called us “Chili heads” during training) was the order screen.  We had a touchscreen system to communicate our orders to the chefs, but the screens were old and had been touched a few too many times.  Most of them malfunctioned on a regular basis, ordering you a kid’s grilled cheese when you pressed the button for chicken nuggets, for example, or straight up just not registering your touch at all.  I can’t tell you the stress of having six tables, two waiting for refills, two just sat down, one wanting its check, and one with its food getting cold in the window, while you stand and press the button for Buffalo Wings again and again and again.  Also, people at Chili’s like their ranch.  I must have schlepped a vat of ranch dressing in the couple of months I worked there.  Ranch dressing, when schlepped regularly, begins to seep into your pores.  I smelled of ranch for a year after I quit.

1. Middle School Substitute Teacher

During my tenure as a middle school sub, I had a math class full of boys who really were getting into the lesson.  I went over things with them, and they kept asking for my help.  I was getting really excited by their enthusiasm, thinking maybe I should try teaching as a long term career.  I bent over their desks again and again, helping them figure up sums, or whatever arithmetic type thing we were up to that day.  My fizzy joy bubble was popped when I looked up at one point and finally, FINALLY noticed where all their eyes were directed – straight down my V-neck top.  A thirteen-going-on-thirty year old with heavy eye makeup and a jaded air sighed at me, saying “Ms. W_____, honey, don’t bend over.”  I begged the floor to swallow me up, but it declined.