My Very Worst Job was as an intern at a big cat sanctuary. Basically, it was a place where people take their tigers when they realize they don’t make good pets.  The internship was touted as experience in “animal behavior,” and while it was in the middle of nowhere (in between two towns with populations of 500 and 760 respectively), I thought it would be an interesting experience to work around big cats.

First of all, we worked six days a week starting at around 6 a.m. Every morning we had to prepare around 400 lbs of frozen, raw meat (with bones and organs ground in), saving the blood to mix with medicines the cats required. While we delivered the meat, we also cleaned the cages and picked up poop.  After that was done, we spent the rest of the day doing manual labor – painting, weed whacking, etc.  My internship was in the middle of the summer in Texas, so you can imagine how much fun that was – especially when the cats didn’t finish their meat and we had to clean out the baked meat with maggots in it.  If there was any time for animal behavior education, we were all too exhausted by the end of the day to do anything.

To make matters more fun, my boss didn’t like me for some reason and would critique the clothes I wore outside of work.  She also had no idea how to manage people, but we couldn’t complain to anyone because she was engaged to the only person above her.

The best part of the internship, however, was the tiger poop. Apparently if you put predator poop in your garden, it will keep pests away. But obviously people want the tiger poop in a more palatable form, and who better to do this job than interns! So we had to separate the tiger poop, lay it out to dry, then grate it (and dried tiger poop blows everywhere!) and put it into bags.  Did I mention the pay was $50 a week?

I quit after two months. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.

In the early 1990s, I worked at a computer drafting firm designing tombstones for people and pets. Try to imagine a life where the highlight of your day is designing a tombstone for a cat named “Mama’s Lil’ Pile O’ Shit.” Or designing a marker for a couple who want to be buried with all 12 of their cats, with names and dates of each. Yep, it was My Very Worst Job. The boss routinely accused the staff of stealing business secrets and working against her. She insisted that no one person know how to do a complete job so we could not “sell” her techniques. It took two people to send off a package because if one of us did it by ourselves we could get in trouble for knowing too much. Then she fired me. And this was the best part – it came out that she had planned it almost six months in advance but kept me around to train my replacement. I then learned that the lady who trained me had also been fired this way. About two years later, the guy I trained was fired after he trained his replacement. That was about 10 replacements ago. We’re thinking of starting a 12-step program to recover.