I thought I’d share My Very Worst Job ever with you, since I haven’t ever met anyone with a worse story than this one. I found myself looking for work last year, after the economy had tanked. Unemployment in my part of the country had jumped, so when I finally got an interview with a local hotel chain, I was pretty excited. I was hired right away, and asked to start the next day.

My first indication that this would not work out occurred at about 10 a.m. on my first day, when a homeless man, reeking of alcohol, stumbled up to the desk and asked for a room. Since he couldn’t afford one we sent him away, but a few minutes later the janitor came in to tell us he’d found him in the bushes outside – with a hooker.  That’s when I realized who the parade of slutty women paying monthly rates in cash were.

Later on I was shown the emergency procedures book, which included policies in case of drug raids, suicide attempts, rapes, assaults, hostage situations, and bomb threats. I was told that I likely wouldn’t need to use most of them, but last week there was that guy who overdosed, and on Thursday there was a major assault in the lobby, and some guy died in his room a few weeks back.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, I then found a note about a spate of car robberies happening in the parking lot.  I basically spent the rest of the shift watching my own car through the front window. I quit over the phone that night and never came back, not even to pick up my paycheck.

Fortunately, I haven’t had anything nearly as bad since.  I moved to Australia a few months later, and wound up in a couple of great jobs. Since I’ve been back in Canada the job market has really picked up again, so I’m hopeful that I will never, ever need to work in the kind of hotel that caters mostly to prostitutes, drug addicts, and one room that was either about illegal labourers or human trafficking – I left before I found out which one.