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.

My Very Worst Job was when I started working at a retail shoe store when I was about 18. I was hired on as a “full time management trainee,” basically meaning that I would work for two weeks, then learn to close the store, do that for a week and then learn to open. I would then become an assistant manager so it sounded like a good gig for me. The day before I was to suppose to learn how to close the store my manager walked out and didnt come back. I came in the next morning waiting for the only other person who could open the store. I waited an hour past when we were supposed to open, but when he got there and let me in, he proceeded to throw up in the bathroom and then left. He didn’t come back, which should have been a sign about this place, but I really needed the money. That day I got yelled at by my district manager for not doing what the manger was suppose to do even though he left (keep in mind I had been there two weeks and still didnt know a lot). We did end up getting a new manager and another assistant manager. I didn’t get my promotion right away. It ended up being six months later and only because the assistant manager got promoted.

Looking back now it wasn’t the greatest idea to take the promotion as it came with a $45 a week increase, but lost out on commission because I had to look after the staff and do all the paperwork being a manager. Along with that, because it was just me and my manager we both had to do what they called “Slam Shifts” twice a week, which would be working 9:00 am to 11:00 pm. Along with these epic shifts I got blamed for anything the staff would do. If they called in I had to find a replacement employee, if we didnt sell enough accessories or beat our sales numbers, it was my fault. Also on top of that, being a manager, I was told that I had to stay in the store on my breaks which meant I didnt get one. If i wanted food i was suppose to get an employee to go get it for me. On those slam shifts I would be deducted a half hour break regardless if I got it or not as well as any other shift I had. My “breaks” would be spent doing paper work when I wasnt getting called out on the sales floor to deal with upset customers. I couldn’t have a sick day, my boss told me, and I quote, “Even if you’re so sick you can’t stand, we’ll put a chair at the front of the store and you can sit there and greet people.” I left the job.

When I was 17, the summer camp I was working at folded, and I was left without a job for the summer before university. Luckily, my friend Eric had recently quit his job at the fish market and found gainful employment as a clown in a balloon store.  He was pretty sure he could get me a job.  I liked kids, and figured, what the hell.

I got the job without an interview (warning bell number one), and soon went about learning the trade of a clown, tying balloon animals, doing magic tricks, and so forth. So far so good.  It turned out, though, that most of my duties revolved around adults, not children. I only did one kids’ party the whole time I worked there (warning bell number two). The rest of the time, I was a singing delivery clown–you know, the kind that shows up at an office with a bunch of balloons and sings “Happy Birthday” to some cubicle gnome. OK, I thought, surely this won’t be so bad. I don’t consider myself to have a good singing voice, but my boss told me not to worry about that (warning bell number three).  Aside from being bad-tempered, he was also the cheapest bastard I’d ever met, and refused to shell out the few extra bucks for clown make-up that didn’t run.

I got shown the car I was supposed to drive–it was an old rustbucket that some previous clown had run into a tree, so the whole front end was accordioned in, and it was missing its sideview mirrors. It was also stuck in second gear. I had to drive the thing in second everywhere I went, including on the highway. The back of the car was always full of balloons, so I could never see out the rearview, and my boss wouldn’t pay for a decent sideview mirror. I took my life in my hands every time I changed lanes (eventually he found an old sideview from a Mack truck or something, and bolted it on the side of the little car…making it impossible to fit into small parking spaces). Also, because it had no reverse gear, I had to park it, get out and do my clown thing, and then when I got back, perform the following ritual: I’d open the driver’s side door, grab the wheel, step on the clutch with my right clown boot, and push off with my left foot, rolling the car backwards until I could hop in, start it, and drive off in second gear (warning bells galore).

A word on clown delivery services: nobody is glad to see you. Businessmen usually order this sort of thing to embarrass their coworkers. I once made a delivery at the end of the day to a high-level government department.  It was the hottest summer ever, and my makeup was running down my face in rivulets. I had five o’clock shadow under it, and I was sweating like a bastard in my stupid suit (the car had no A/C, and I couldn’t open the windows because the balloons would blow around and either fly out the window or blind me). I was late, and double parked the clownmobile outside next to a military truck.

I went through security (not easy), and waited awkwardly for the guy to come down from the 18th floor. In the meantime, all my balloons exploded on the stucco ceiling, and so an angry, impatient man was called away from work to receive limp bits of damp rubber on the end of some string from a melting, shaggy clown who sang “Happy Birthday” off-key in the reception area. I didn’t get a tip.

I also made deliveries to people I knew from high school (mortifying), and to a man who was contemplating suicide (depressing and scary).  I finally threw in the towel when my boss told me that he was expanding the clientele of the balloon store, and that my new duties would include dressing up as Tarzan for middle-aged ladies’ parties.

I never really forgave my friend Eric for getting me this job.

In 2005, got a job as a graphic designer for a well known print company in my area. I even bought a baby gift for the designer I would be temporarily replacing while she was on maternity leave. My work day ran from 5:45 AM to supposedly 4:00PM, but often I went home at 6:00PM or later. I was Designer, Secretary, Printer/Copy Person, Press Film Developer, Front Desk Clerk, Press Order Taker, Janitor, and cut/folded/scored paper products like business cards and brochures as well. I made $10 an hour and got a half an hour lunch break. This is actually not the bad part. My boss was the bad part. Never mind the numbing job of deleting of 200+ porn spam messages in the email inbox each day, never mind that we did not recycle anything, never mind that my boss was often called on by the town for dumping developing chemicals down the drain (well, actually do mind that).

We still made film and plates in 2005. The shop ran Mac OS 9 on candy colored iMacs and “beige boxes” from the late 90s. They used gigantic file folders because everything was on film and paper. This was all livable though. The horrible part of this job was my boorish boss. He had an air of superiority about him, but was very cheap. So, when he brought us a new computer it was actually a beige box with Mac OSX 10.1 running on it (by third party software), proudly declaring, “This isn’t supposed to run on these but I got this software – so it does!” I’m afraid I actually laughed. Abashed, he later bought a Mac Mini and a software set. Unfortunately I had already given my notice by that time. All because of old computers, you ask?

Oh no. Because of the extremist talk show he played at high volume. Because of loud rude phone calls: “Wait, this is American Express, right? THEN I WANT TO SPEAK TO AN AMERICAN.” He would later walk around the shop gloating to everyone about his wit. The last straw, however, was Hurricane Katrina. He said, “Nothing but the dregs of society live there. We should just leave all the blacks to drown and then build up a good city.” He was completely, dead serious. It’s 2010 and I still have nightmares about this job.

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.

I struggled to get a job in my second year of university and desperately applied to a seedy new adult video store on the bohemian hub street near my apartment. The manager readily took me, saying he’d had no other applicants and he was just as desperate as I was.  This should have been a warning, but I needed to make rent.

Here’s what happened: It didn’t matter if I (a girl) went into work wearing a stained sweatshirt and baseball cap or didn’t bother taking a shower… the customer base were all people who had been blackballed from other adult stores in town and were constantly asking me how much I charged (for me, not for the videos) and thinking they could rope me into threesomes with their wives and girlfriends. Children would tire of street hockey and come into the store swinging sticks, knocking down all the teetering shelves of merchandise. I won’t even go into detail what people thought they could get up to around corners where they thought they couldn’t be seen!

The worst was the owner, not the manager. He would reel in drunk from the blues bar around the corner, clean out the till and blow the entire takings and float on booze. Conveniently for him he never remembered this and accused me of stealing. Alarmed, I hastily quit before he could press charges because I had long suspected that the “security” camera was a decoy and I couldn’t prove a thing. I immediately applied to the hip indie video store down the street and begged the owner for a job, telling her what had happened at the adult store, and, luckily, she agreed to hire me.

When I was 16, I got a job working as an office assistant at the new dentist my grandmother went to. At first, it seemed like a great first job. The dentist was young, handsome and seemingly nice and the other ladies that I worked with were great. After about a month or so, things started to go wrong. The dentist would continuously screw up relatively routine procedures (for instance, he would perforate the sinus on every surgical tooth extraction he did) and often did more extensive work than was necessary so the patient would have to pay more. Then his weird mood swings kicked in. He would get into huge screaming fights with his wife on the phone, then mess up a procedure because he was mad. Finally, the office manager quit and since he couldn’t find anyone else to take her place, I got to work 50 hours a week (for six dollars an hour!), processing insurance, being a receptionist, cleaning and actually assisting on procedures. I screwed up the billing the first time I had to do it and accidentally sent out bills to people with insurance pending. This brought a wave of people into the office, many with receipts stating that they had paid in cash and upon investigation, I found out that he had been taking the cash payment out of the computer system and creating phony insurance info.

The final straw came when he made me (remember, I was 16 and untrained) assist on a surgical extraction, holding the thing to suck the blood out of the wound. I quit then and there. His increasingly apparent coke habit, the porn that he had delivered to the office, his rages and the unethical and illegal things he did to peoples’ mouths was just too much. He (surprise) couldn’t find a replacement, so I came back for the last few weeks of the summer for 10 dollars an hour (a lot for a 16 year old) and spent the remaining time running an audit trail to send to the insurance companies. I recently found out he’s still in business, though I can’t imagine why. We did report him to OSHA, the Health Department, the insurance companies, and the IRS (he wasn’t paying our taxes that he took from our paychecks), but apparently they decided he was still okay to operate on people.

While I was in high school, during the summer, I used to work at an amusement park selling the photos they take of people going down a roller coaster. At first I thought it was going to be an easy job, but soon realized that I had to deal with some incredibly rude people. They could fit 32 people on each train and we would get about 32 new people every two minutes. Most would just look at their photos laugh and continue on their way. Then there were the people who would do profane things and find their photo got deleted and would yell at me. On the opposite end, sometimes a profane picture would accidentally get through and we would have someone yell at us for having to see an offensive image. It seemed like usually one out of the 32 would have and issue and I spent huge amount of time being yelled at. This happened everyday, but there have been so many individual ridiculous stories that have happened, there isn’t enough space to list them all.

There was the time when a rabid bat flew into the store and we were able to trap it behind a door, while waiting for Animal Control. Customers would then try to go through the door even after warning them about the bat. There was also the time when a fight was brewing in the line of the roller coaster and basically erupted into 20 huge guys wailing on each other outside my store. Afterward all these mothers yelled at me for not doing anything to stop it and having their kid witness such an event, even though I had called security about five times when I heard a warning about the fight. It was just a very negative place, but I ended up working there the entire summer. I don’t know how I survived it.

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!

I worked in a store selling leather jackets, wallets and bags for three months. Our sales manager was a really poor leader and the store’s policies towards employees really sucked. We always had to be at work 15 minutes prior to the store opening, to clean the floors and get everything ready. For my first timesheet, I put those 15 minutes down as working time, but was told that the policy was not to include that in the hours, nor the time taken at the end of the day to close the store. Essentially, this was half an hour that we didn’t get paid for. In addition to this, we were constantly given shifts that lasted 7.5 hours – an 8-hour shift would have meant a half hour lunch break, which we didn’t get.  The manager was unable to give feedback directly, but just passive-aggressively left notes or told other employees to pass on messages. Employees were constantly given feedback about not cleaning the stores properly and told that everyone had to chip in equally to make the store look good, but the manager never participated and left the store in a mess for us to clean up.

Since it was a “specialty” store, on some days sales were poor because we just didn’t get enough customers who were willing to pay up for expensive jackets and bags. On those days we were told we weren’t trying hard enough and that we should fix our attitude to make more sales. When we did make lots of sales, we were rarely, if ever, were given positive feedback. None of the stores had proper break facilities, just a toilet in the back, so when we had our coffee breaks, we had to sit on the toilet lid, drinking our coffee! The manager seemed to despise all the younger employees, especially if they were pretty, and hassled us no end. None of the older employees had any problems with her, but she kept us all terrified of losing our jobs over the tiniest little things. She even told off one of my colleagues for wearing a sleeveless t-shirt on a warm day, and was told that store policy forbade armpits showing. The manager herself always wore really low-cut blouses. Obviously boobs were less offensive than armpits. We always received our shift timetables at the last minute, and never had two days off in a row, which made it impossible to ever go away for a weekend.

Just before I quit, one of the older employees was sacked for stealing thousands of Euros from the store by selling jackets and bags for cash without logging the sales in the till. I was almost disappointed that she was caught.