The Daily Grind . . .

[Munkay]

As a college student home for the summer, I am in the ever present search for money. This search has led me to yet another ridiculous job.

I received a call from a friend of mine, who said he had a possible job opportunity. I go to a temp agency and fill out a form, and sign up to work the following day at a Kitchen ETC warehouse. The hours were not bad, 7-3.30, at a decent wage. But due to the commute and having to drive other people there, I have to wake up by 5.30. I found humor in this, seeing that the day before I got the job, I had gone to bed at 5.30 am, and now I had to wake up at the same time.

I conned my best friend into the job as well, and the three of us drove to work at the crack of dawn. We are quite a motley crew together: skinny white kids who used to be scensters (slang for kids emo/punk/hardcore kids who spend their days talking about music, and their nights going to see live music). Between us we have gauged ears (large holes), dyed hair, unshaven stuble, and old half sleeve tattoos (half sleeve means covered in ink from shoulder to elbow).

Occasionally we get to unload trucks by hand, which is glorious manual labor (I actually love doing this). But most of the time my two friends work together gathering 'lists' of items to be shipped, while I work what is the weirdest job I've ever experienced.

There is a carousel of rollers, and 21 stations around this circle. In the middle are two women who walk around, and their job is to 'push' the boxes into the correct station as they move by. Once down a station it is my job to scan the station barcode, and then the box. The scanner is attached to my left forearm, and a cord runs down to my pointer finger. Then I take the box, and stack them onto wooden pallets. I rotate around the stations as needed (as well as 10 other workers) until the pallets reach enormous heights. I then loosely shrink wrap them, electronically 'close the pallet.' and push them up a metal ramp onto the shrink wrap machine (which is a very scary job, the metal ramp does not hit the floor, rather hovers above it, and the pallet trolleys have a bad habit of getting hung up on the ramp . . . which always sends fears of being drown in the large pile of boxes down my spine). Then I go back with my robocop-esq scanner machine and continue for 8 hours. Its rather mindless work, but it feels very surreal. Pacing cement floors for 8 hours without mats, or the ability to sit down begins to mentally fatigue you as well as physically.

All in all its not a horrible job, though I can't shake that 'am I being video taped?' feeling.


My question is what are some of the most/least interesting jobs my fellow lurkers have had?

-Munk

[Cryptic]

One of my first jobs when I was younger was doing data entry for a check supply company; very boring. You’d enter their address into a computer with a form explaining what types of checks they wanted, all day, every day. Minimum quota was 75 orders processed an hour. That year was the first time I ever sat down and listened to my entire CD collection alphabetically from start to finish – 17 times. (By the way, in a 40-hour week, you can listen to about 500-600 songs a week, depending on if you want your lunches silent.)
:blink:

The job I got “promoted” to from there was surreal – they called it Error Checking. Basically, you sit at a desk in a very nice office, with a very nice view, doing almost nothing. About 10 times a day, a bizarre piece of paper crosses your desk, and it’s your job to handle it. These are the check orders taken by phone or mail that the keyers and supervisors couldn’t figure out what to do with.

I got one where the customer had kept saying on the phone to send it to an address on “The Peach” in California, then hung up. It took a caffeine-deprived leap of intuition to figure out that’s slang for the Pacific Coast Highway.

Another lady filled her order form out meticulously – but the order form was from 13 years before, and we didn’t really have those swell prices or groovy designs anymore.

Still another was filled out in what was rather fluent Klingon. (You can’t go verbatim English-Klingon with such a small vocabulary, but it was clever.) The keyer was apparently catastrophically bored and had a sense of humor that got him reprimanded; don’t know how that one got past the sup. (Maybe they thought it was Russian?)

My favorite was a phone order slip that had only a name and address, and some poor phone rep had scrawled, “Man is insane, just send him something.” I’ve retained that as my motto for my home / eBay business. It seems to work very well for me.
:P

[ShadowHM]

My question is what are some of the most/least interesting jobs my fellow lurkers have had?

-Munk

As a student, unfortunately, the most lucrative jobs I had were waitressing. Lousy job, split shifts and uniforms. :( There is nothing interesting about waitressing, especially in bars.

I worked briefly as a house painter. I was awful at it, mainly because I really didn't give a damn whether the job was done well or not. I painted over spiderwebs, for example. That job lasted all of two weeks. :P

I had a job working as a flag-man (flag-woman?) for a bridge repair crew one summer. It was wonderful. I got to be near rivers. (Work breaks were swim breaks.) Even when there was nobody coming from the other direction, I had to stop all the big transport trucks and ask them to go particularly slowly to avoid jostling the guy spot-welding up on the top of the bridge. This was incredible fun. I would hold up my little "Stop" sign, and have annoyed and disgruntled truckers be all ready to chew me out for inattention when I walked up to the truck. Then, after a brief explanation, the attitude would change and they would smile and head off cheerfully. Nothing like seeing cranky men change into cheerful men to make a day go well. :D

[pakman]

I have been really lucky with my jobs. During high school I worked at the corporate headquarters of Bank One in Chicago. I worked, literally, in the middle of the city. Mostly I did database management, but I also hung out a lot with a friend I made down there. Working downtown was incredible, there were tons of great restaurants to go to for lunch, shopping on State Street, Michigan Ave, the Taste, etc. However, during the school year, I worked a restaurant owned by a family friend. That was mainly kitchen work and taken orders from customers, it was fun, but I would rather not work in food service again. Last summer I worked at one of the largest civil engineering consulting firms in the country, Consulting Engineers Group. I saw what it was like to be a civil engineer, and how engineers and architects communicated to get projects completed. I worked on a parking garage in Florida, the University of Missouri football stadium, and a prison in Kentucky. That by far was the most interesting job I have had related to my chosen path of study.

[Lord_Olf]

Hail Munkay,

well, let me start with the least interesting job; Sorry in advance as I don't know a lot of the vocabulary that would probably be needed to explain this correctly.
Anyway, I was working in a large "plant" where they print news magazines and the like. As you may know (I didn't but who cares*g*), news mags consist of different parts that are then tucked above each other and added together. It's the same with newspapers (The Arts, Sports, and so on), only that in this case the parts aren't added together by the way of those small metal thingies I also don't know the name of.
The job then was to put those parts into a holder, where a machine would grab them, put on an assembly line and add the other parts to it one after another. So, the job was pretty much like constantly putting paper into a printer that runs in hyperdrive. Very nice thing to do for 8 mind-numbing hours at a stretch. And yes, no Walk- or diskmen allowed... Not something I would like to do for a living, but good money.

The most silly job was selling *grabs the dictionary* fertilizers for room plants on a fair. If you let me get near to a plant, it's bound to die, and there were people asking me how to treat their orchids because I was the one selling the fertilizer and had some orchids standing next to me. Who man orchids that made go to the places where orchids go when mistreated? No telling...

Nice jobs I had so far were renovating houses (a nice work, since not repetetive and you also get to use your brain a bit), working as a roadie (long live Rock'n'Roll!) and working as a diveguide in South Korea last year. Problem is, the last one doesn't yield a lot of money, so I can only do it once every two years... looking to go to Egypt next summer.

Take care,

Lord_Olf