During the summer of 2007, I was fresh out of high school, and was excited to finally become an adult, and enter the working world. Fortunately for me, during high school I had taken quiet a few business management classes, which allowed me to apply for positions in an office situation. I thought that I was doing the smart thing, as people often times told me of their horror stories about working at fast food places, or grocery stores, but how wrong I was.

In July, I finally ended up getting my office job. It was for a shipping company, and I would be a data entry clerk. The job essentially had me taking bills which were scanned into our system, and then I would have to input those bills into our software, but more on that later. My first warning came when I began my training, and I should have realized right then and there that this was the wrong environment for me. When I walked into the building, and walked towards our training room I realized that I was the only male on the floor. There were rows of cubicles filled with middle aged woman.

My next warning came when we started to begin training. The bills I previously mentioned before? It was all by hand input, meaning that truck drivers were writing down all this information and scanning it to us, and no offense to truck drivers, but their hand writing makes a doctor’s signature look neat. How was I suppose to decrypt their crazy algorithmic hand writing? I dared not ask how ever, and continued with the job, eventually ending my training and getting on the floor.

This is when the hellish nightmare of this job truly began to settle in. There was a strict policy of no talking, no use of head phones, no distractions what so ever. It was kind of like one of those cool montage moments in a movie where you see a code-breaker sitting at a computer trying to decipher some cryptic message, and he has a swat team of other hackers around them, and they only have 60 seconds to decrypt this message. Except it didn’t have any cool music, and code breaking never stopped, after I’d complete one, another would come in right away,

So, we had crippling boredom, followed up by impossible hand writing, and the always awkward feeling I had of being surrounded by middle-aged woman, this was really starting to sound like my own personal hell, but hey at least I was inside a cool comfortable office building with air conditioning, right? Apparently it broke, the day I actually started. So I was stuck there, for eight hours a day in work-dress clothes in the sweat box of an office building.

Eventually I was let go, being told I was just not “It wasn’t the quality of your work, we just felt as though you didn’t fit in and were unhappy,” but that wasn’t the final straw. They ended up blocking me from getting unemployment, telling the office that they had offered me another job, and I had refused.

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.