This is my second submission to My Very Worst Job, so I’m not sure the superlative technically applies. Either way, it was a terrible job.

Just before the end of my junior year of high school, I decided to quit my mediocre job at a large retail store in search of greener pastures. I’m a huge film buff, so I was thrilled when I got a job at a nearby multiplex.

My first shift was on the night that Spiderman opened. For those of you that don’t know, Spiderman broke all kinds of records its opening weekend. I walked up to the entrance and was greeted by massive lines of fans that had been waiting for hours. I slipped into the back were a manager handed me a vest, a clip on bowtie, a schedule of when the movies got out, a broom, and a trash can with wheels on the bottom. I was told to pick up the trash in the theaters after all the patrons left and to do it quickly because they needed to get everybody in for the next screening. And that was all the training I got.

That first night was just awful. My co-workers would constantly go missing for hours at a time to smoke pot in the parking lot and leave me to clean massive theaters by myself. Each theater had an insanely long line in front of it that seemed to be ready to riot by the time we finished cleaning.

Somehow, I made it through. I was completely exhausted when I finished and, for some reason, didn’t quit after that night. In fact, I stayed on for nine more months. Each night I would be amazed at the disgusting things people would leave in a theater. Some of the worst things were cups full of chewing tobacco spit, used baby diapers, and cups full of urine (which, by the way, deteriorates the cups so the bottoms are prone to fall out when you pick them up). Once, when I was emptying the trash in a restroom, a single poop fell out of a rolled up paper towel and landed on the ground. Also, you would be surprised at how frequently people throw up at movie theaters.

I tried to take advantage of the free movies but employees were only allowed free passes on weekdays and only during the day. In retrospect, I have no idea why I stayed that long. I had made a few friends, but it was not worth the work. I guess it was pride or something. I eventually quit after I was denied a raise and then found out that they had started paying new hires more than me.

MVWJ was actually kind of pathetic, but thankfully short. I was 17, had absolutely zero job experience, and needed money. There was a small, trendy coffee shop in our neighborhood that had bounced from owner to owner for the past decade. I went in to interview with the latest owner, who seemed like a nice, professional guy. However, he would not be running the café. He’d bought the café so his wife, who spoke poor English, would have something to do. I spent most of my “training” helping a few of their friends lug huge refrigeration units and scraping the scum from the floor with a butterknife. It was on this day that the couple decided I would be paid national minimum wage, which was actually over two dollars less than state minimum wage. Joy. They paid me with straight cash and told me to come back the next day. I was their single employee, as they thought it was too much money to hire even one more person.

I had to arrive at four thirty to get ready for our five a.m. opening rush, which was a total joke. Maybe three people came in before seven thirty, but I was too busy preparing breakfast stuff to complain. The mammoth cleaning effort hadn’t been extended to the cooking/food handling equipment, which looked like they had been bought in the mid-eighties and hadn’t been cleaned since. I got to leave that greasy horror and run the till later that morning, and another problem became apparent. I had gotten very little training at the till, and they hadn’t briefed me on the drink names at all. So an order would consist of me stammering out “uh, hi” and the customer rattling off their drink order, which I would have to get the wife for. She would snap the drink names at me and get them all herself, skulking off to the back as soon as she was done.(I found out later she was watching me on the security video feed)

Enter a new customer, lather, rinse repeat. I eventually got a little better at orders, but then she would storm out and scold me for not including tax in the total. She didn’t know how to either, and so when she took the till to show me she just spent a half hour fiddling with it. After a few hours of stimulating conversation with our resident crazy homeless guy, I got paid for my shift in cash and was told to call in the next day if I could work. I went home and slept for a few hours, decided that the little money I was given really wasn’t worth it, and didn’t call.

The day after that, she called and chewed me out for not wanting to work, passive-aggressively hinting that I was just lazy and wanted to get money for doing nothing. I hung up after being verbally abused for a few minutes and that was the end of it. Six months later their little café experiment went belly up, and they just locked the doors and walked away, leaving all their equipment and the work of a few local artists (who still haven’t gotten their paintings back) inside.

MVWJ was actually an unpaid internship my senior year in college. Due to a misunderstanding between my academic adviser and me, I had to take 21 credits the last semester of my senior year to graduate. One of those three credit courses was an internship through a local communications company owned by a mega-church, where I was to go in for 10 hours a week (about two hours a day after class five times a week).

Initially, I thought this sounded like a great gig–they owned three magazines, three radio stations and had several websites for things like music and Christian news and I would get to interview bands and hang out at concerts. Big mistake.

My first day, I was told to get the receptionist coffee and to deliver packages to a FedEx office. Not long after, the senior pastor of the church that owned the communications company was going to visit and I was literally given a roll of tape and told to wrap the tape around my hand–sticky side out–and to get down on my hands and knees and use the sticky side of the tape to get lint out of the royal purple carpet.

One of my supervisors was fine, but the other was a pompous bimbo who did nothing but steal articles off other internet websites, slap her name on them and turn them in for publication. How this escaped notice of legit organizations is beyond me. After less than two weeks, I had exhausted all of the writing they had available for me. I was then given tasks such as organizing photos and the supply cabinet and stuffing binders for the church’s next big sermon series. At this point, I was about eight weeks away from a degree in journalism and I felt like all of this was ridiculous.

The best part of the internship came at the end of the semester, when I sat down with my faculty adviser (who was also a professor in three other classes I had taken). The adviser told me my internship supervisor, the pompous bimbo, had written a horrible letter to him complaining about my work ethic, how I never showed up on time and how I brought a bad attitude into the office. She also said I never completed my hours of internship and refused sign off on my class credit.

My professor listened to my side of the story and signed off on my internship hours. Eight years later, I’m an award-winning newspaper reporter and the pompous bimbo never made a career in legitimate journalism. The magazines and websites are also now defunct.

My Very Worst Job was at a cafe/bakery when I was 14. When I got the job, I was told my basic duties would be to serve customers, clear tables, and to do “basic” cleaning.

On my first day, they got me to wash dishes for five hours straight, before sending me home. This happened pretty much every day for my first month, except on occasion I got to clean up grease from around the sink (lucky me), wash the display cabinets, or make breadcrumbs (which meant I ran the risk of cutting off my fingers due to the dodgy food processor). If that wasn’t bad enough, we had no price lists and changed the prices every few days so they were never actually entered in the cash registers, so I ended up just making all the prices, then getting in trouble if I got them wrong. We were also given seven-hour shifts without a break.

One unusually hot day the power went out. I’ll always be a little unclear on the details, but a milk bottle somehow exploded at the bottom of a fridge. Guess who the lucky person was that got to climb into the fridge (it was about chest height) and clean out all the sour milk from this hot, smelly, box of joy? Guess who also had to complete her 6 hour shift covered in sour milk?

My boss also once hit me with a broom for leaning on a machine while cleaning it. Like, actually hit me, across the back of my legs.

You’d think this was enough for me to quit, but apparently not. I was eventually fired for rostering off my birthday. Turned out the boss was a Jehovah’s Witness and didn’t believe in birthdays or in people taking a day off.

MVWJ was at a place that sold exotic birds. There were hundreds of them, and I had to take care of them AND sell them. I had to feed them and change their water, which involved emptying all of their poop-filled water and food bowls into a huge bucket, which turned into the most nauseating smelling concoction ever. I also had to clean their living spaces, which just meant grabbing the poop-covered wood shavings with my hands and dumping it into the garbage. I also wasn’t allowed to remove the birds from their living spaces when I did this, and most of them were extremely territorial. They would scream and bite my hands and arms while I was covered in their poop.

There was this guy that worked there in his 70s who wore the most awful toupee I’ve ever seen. He was very nice to me when I started working there, but I quickly realized that it was because he was a total perv. He would go into the back room with this other older woman who worked there and have sex, leaving me to take care of the entire store. He also had a wife in the hospital. One time he grabbed my waist and told me I had a flat stomach in front of this older woman (who he was trying to make jealous). I snapped and told him he was creepy. After that he told me he hated me (mature) and that he wished he didn’t have to work with me because I wasn’t “nice.”

I finally had enough and gave my two weeks notice, telling the store’s boss everything about this guy and why I couldn’t work with him anymore. A few months later, I learned that he was fired because he was caught on the security camera stealing thousands of dollars over the many years that he worked there

I just quit/got fired from my very worst job about 30 minutes ago. It was one of those typical movie scenarios:  I said “Hey, I quit.” and they followed it up with “You can’t quit you’re fired!!”

Desperate for some extra money while I was completing my social work internship, I decided to accept a part-time job as a janitor for a community health center in my town. I was in charge of cleaning the gynecologist office as well at the family practice.  I could go into work whenever I wanted after the doctors left, so it fit my schedule perfectly. Sounds great, right?  Wrong.

Right away I got a lot of stares. A few of the nurses knew that I am openly gay so that quickly spread around the practice. Eventually I was called into the HR director’s office for a stern lecture about my dreadlocks and my love of only owning and wearing men jeans (I’m a girl), I was warned that if I didn’t basically fem it up, I would be written up. Did I mention that I worked completely alone at night, and the only time anyone saw me was when I was walking from my car into the building?

My first day at work had me on my hands and knees picking up the remnants of Taco Bell cheese and Subway lettuce that the nurses left behind at the gyno office. Did it hurt my pride? Sure. But, I was all about the $12 an hour I was making. The following week, the nurses at the gynecologist office decided to test my will by throwing away KFC chicken, leftover Jimmy John’s, and whatever fast food junk they happened to be eating that day into every single exam room. Even the ones that weren’t used that day, meaning that I wouldn’t usually have to clean them. But, once something is thrown in the trash, it’s considered used and the room had to be cleaned. Eventually fed up with all this food nonsense, I told my supervisor who confronted the nurses, and they were eventually given a verbal warning, and they admitted to everything.

But the bullshit didn’t stop there.

The receptionist at the family practice took it upon herself to “throw away” scissors at the beginning up the day, and of course throughout the day dirty diapers and urine sample cups were piled upon these “broken” scissors at the bottom of the waste can.  Imagine my delight when I lifted up the trash only to have diapers, piss, and dirty latex gloves fall at my feet. This time when I told my supervisor, nothing was done.

The final straw was last week, when I threw away a week old, half-eaten cake that was starting to attract ants. Of course, the next day the nurses were in the mood for some coffee and cake, and were appalled to find that I had thrown it away. After spamming my work e-mail with their ridiculous complaints, I decided to purchase them a new cake. I had the baker write “Sorry about the old cake. From, J.” Obviously this action was completely rude on my part, so I got written up for it. Sick up the bullshit, I quit today.

Although, my supervisor made sure to add that I was going to get fired anyway because the picture frames were too dusty in the building.

I was excited when I got a waitress job in the restaurant of this small family-run inn. During the interview, the owner waxed poetic about being able to go swimming and kayaking on my breaks. It was soon clear there would be no swimming or kayaking—busy days meant no breaks at all. I was thrown in with no training, and overworked to the point where I once cried because my feet hurt so much.

My day started with clearing the thick layers of bugs off the patio tables. As family, the other waitresses showed up when they felt like it. As an outsider, I would have to pull double shifts with no notice, while being sniped at for not working fast or hard enough. The customers weren’t great either. One night I had to take back a ‘gimlet’ because (again, no training) I had put in cocktail pickles instead of cocktail onions. The place had its quirks. I was once reprimanded for vacuuming while the air conditioning was on, which blew all the fuses in the whole place. The owner kept her stinking, disgusting, dying dog in the restaurant, whose barf was my problem, apparently.

I’ll never work for a family business again.

A few years ago, my mom worked as an admin for a janitorial company. I met her boss several times, and when he heard I was searching for a job, he offered me a job supervising one of his cleaning crews. Since I had no experience, he told me I would work for a few weeks as one of the crew to get a feel for it. I was told the hours were 6 p.m. to midnight and it would be a breeze!

My first few nights on the job, I went out with a crew to clean four office buildings. Apparently, the new girl always gets the worst assignment — bathrooms. I never knew it was such a nasty job to clean so many bathrooms! I calculated I had scrubbed 85 toilets a night. I also found out that since they get paid hourly, the crew wants to make the most of it — we stopped for food and cigarettes constantly, and one night we went and parked at the local jail so one girl could wave to her boyfriend.

After one week in which I couldn’t get the smell of urine out of my clothes and I never made it home before 4a.m., I finally quit. Not even a supervisor job was worth it anymore!