Best job, worst job

Best Job: Any of the assorted landscaping/greenhouse jobs I've held. In fact, one of the greenhouses was staffed by developmentally disabled people and they had social workers that aided them in their jobs. I loved working with them because it was a challenge, but they adored me. I love working outside, in the sun, digging and dragging and pulling and planting and getting dirt under my fingernails. Those jobs were so taxing, physically, but at the end of the day, I was tired in a pleasant, "I deserve to go home and relax" sort of way.

Worst Job: Any of the office jobs I've ever had. Sitting on my arse all day, zoning out in front of a computer, restless and bored. When I started my first office job, it was right after a summer of landscaping and I gained 20 pounds in a month and a half. And like you described - at the end of the day, you're tired...but it's not a satisfied tired. Ugh.

One of my best jobs was also one of my worst jobs. I was working for a small state agency as the in-house writer/editor & computer guru. We did a lot with a little and it was fun (and people seemed to find our reports useful). Then our boss left and was replaced with a legislator's mistress (who had to be stashed somewhere and we were unlucky enough to have a vacancy just when they needed to hustle her out of her previous position). The good job became a nightmare job.

Soon after the onset of the new boss's reign of terror, I accepted a faculty position at a community college and never looked back. The teaching job became my new best job (and it still is).

Worst job: A desk job with a boss who wasn't happy with me no matter what I did. I was never busy enough for him, even after I reorganized, refiled, and decluttered the entire freaking office out of lack of *actual* work to do. Never a word of thanks or appreciation.

Or the blueberry factory. Yeah, that sucked, but it was very short term and good money. 8-9 hrs in a dark noisy factory, 7 days a week, still bad for the mental health. Plus, politely asking a question was considered uppity.

Best job: Student assistant for the bio department. Sure, most of it was washing glassware and autoclaving equipment, but there was always a sense of accomplishment at the end of a shift. Plus, my bosses were awesome and I got to work either alone or with them. And I am the queen of making frog hooks.

Best job: IT director for an educational outreach program. Lots of freedom to come up with solutions and help students and faculty.

Worst job: night manager for a 7-11 my freshman year in college. Constant danger of getting robbed, not to mention the 11-7 hours. No wait, maybe it was at the furniture factory my 5th year. Had my hand put back together on that one.

Most interesting job: building positron detectors (among other things) for the cyclotron at Michigan State. Yes, it was minimum wage, and yes, it meant i spent my summers in a basement lab with no windows. But i learned things about electronics and machine shops, how to boil aluminum in a vacuum and deposit it on a 1 micron thick film i'd prepared myself....the skills i learned in that job aren't totally applicable to real life, but they all rocked. The people were awesome, my boss was hands off and chill, though a perfectionist, and in general it was great.

Worst job (besides all the waitressing i did in HS and college) was boxing books in the campus bookstore warehouse, another summer job. No AC, barely any windows that opened, giant industrial fans that make a ton of racket, and a variety of drugged out or hostile coworkers. I chose to work in the upstairs by myself where it was much hotter so i could be alone, and working, instead of with other college kids who were blatantly not working and couldn't muster the courtesy to talk to me more than once a day, while i worked my butt off. The bossman was nice enough, but too nice and not enough of a disciplinarian to be on top of the kids who were taking advantage of him.

Burger King (kitchen)
Blimpie's (sandwich shop)
Pat & Oscar's (family restaurant/catering/banquets)
Holiday Inn (dishwasher)
Cleaning Service (houses by day, offices by night)
Senior Community (dining room)
Hospital (housekeeper)
UPS (package handler, from truck to conveyor belt)
History Intern (Yellowstone Nat'l Park)
Library Tech (book withdrawals)

Of all these jobs I have had, I can't really say one has been my best, and another worst. Each have had their benefits and downfalls (maybe a few didn't have their benefits). Burger King was just a first job after high school, and Blimpie's a short job while my family lived with my grandparents for 2 months in between homes. I worked for Pat & Oscar's for almost seven years, at several locations in and around San Diego - I did nearly every position in the restaurant, including management - I only quit working for the company because I moved to Montana, and this is the place where I met many friends I keep in contact with today.

Washing dishes at Holiday Inn here in Bozeman sucked - there was absolutely no respect for this position from the restaurant servers and banquet folks. I walked out one day, never went back. Working for the cleaning company was overall a good job, paid well, but I needed a change. Cleaning houses in the morning and then offices late at night got tiring. This job, however, brought me my wife. Yes, I met my wife over mopping beer/chew/popcorn-smelling bleachers at the local hockey arena... We quit soon after meeting. My next job was very rewarding - I served breakfast, lunch, and dinner to a dining room full of seniors - I got to know these people well, and continue to visit some of them with my son Patrick (Catherine was pregnant while I worked there, and my last day there was the day Patrick was born - so many of the folks felt involved in our life-changing experience). The management there was horrible, priorities were misplaced, and I often said that the only seniors that the management was concered with were those who have NOT yet put down their first payment for an apartment.

Hospital job would have been better if everyone on the housekeeping team pulled their weight - alot of lazies. UPS was a horrible job. I guess I can say this was the worst job I have had, and I only worked it for three weeks. They expected too much physical work in such a short time from 1 or 2 employees - I would unload packages from a truck onto a conveyor belt, and those employees controlling the belt would constantkly yell "Faster! More packages!" In order to appease them, I would have to ignore all the proper package handling advice one learned from 3 hours of training videos. I did not want to hurt my back, so I quit. Plus, the job was from 3:30 am to 7 am. Yeah, that sucked, but we were trying to work out schedules with a new baby.

For the past six months, I have been withdrawing books from the campus library. I like it. I can relate to being at a computer alot, but I also get to move around moving books and such. It is a temporary job, pays well, and my last day is this Friday - that's fine. I plan to enjoy the summer with my son, and grad school will come before I know it...

My worst job was an attendant at a coin-operated laundry. Minimum wage, of course, and part-time employment. Not to go into the whole nightmare but I quit when the owner brought his wife (dying of cancer, in a wheelchair) in to work to give me a lecture on my attitude. At one point in the conversation she told me angrily that I obviously hadn't been reading the employee manual. She wheels to a shelf and pulls out this huge ancient three-ring binder, the kind with brass hinges and buckram binding, and opens it up and shoves it at me.

Inside was a four-inch stack of yellowing typewritten manuscript. It started off with injunctions as to how grateful Wash Palace employees should be for their part-time minimum-wage jobs and then it went on. And on. This wasn't an employee manual; it was a basis for diagnosis.

I closed the binder. "Maybe you should start looking for someone else," I said.

My best job was working as a scriptwriter and consultant for Mondo Media, working on web cartoons right before the big end-of-the-century net crash. I wrote a lot of episodes of Thugs On Film, got to have Bush portrayed as the devil's lapdog on the Warner Brothers website and so on and so forth. Most of the other writers were comedians. Great people, lots of fun to work with, but a comedian is a sensitive soul. Being paid fifty bucks an hour not to laugh at them satisfied greed and cruelty at the same time. Man, I wish I still had that job. Stupid internet crash.

Worst: Working at a Stop-n-Rob. Low pay, lousy hours, boredom, occasional threats on my life and eating too much candy.

Best: None. I missed my calling. I should have been a quality-control officer for a brewery and a mattress tester. Although I shouldn't complain too much about my current job. It allows me to comment on blogs without anybody noticing!

Best Job: where I'm at right now (pre-press operator for a small print shop in Anchorage, Alaska).

Worst Job: where I was before this, working for a miserable piece of go se local newspaper as a graphic artist.

Best AND worst job: legal assistant at a large corporate law firm.

Good: High pay. Had my own office with a door that closed and that I could lock. Didn�t have to interact with the public that much.

Bad: Was around crazed litigators who had no concept of time or most physical laws, really.

worst jobs: Those that have required me to do more than I'm capable of doing (data entry worker for the IRS, computer operations specialist for a university clerical department). Those that have involved trying to persuade people to buy things (a couple of retail jobs). Those in which the management made life miserable for myself and/or my coworkers (proofreader for the IRS, researcher/writer for a publishing company).

best jobs: Those with a lot of "down time" in which I could do whatever I wanted, facilitated by very lenient bosses (information desk attendant at an art gallery, test scoring machine operator at a university). Those involving contact with interesting people, coworkers and otherwise (university work, art gallery work, legislative proofreading). Those with interesting intellectual content (writer/researcher on ethnobotany for a small publisher, archivist for botanical photo collections).

I grew up on a small family ranch in Texas. So I have done all the ranch jobs and it was part of life. Probably the worst thing was marking lambs. You spend the day in a pen full of sheep, 100 degree weather, dust everywhere. Mother and I would catch the lambs, maybe 30 pounds, and carry them to Daddy, who would cut off their tails, make muttons out of the little bucks, and cut an overbar and underbit earmark (right ear for muttons, left ear for ewes). At the end of the day I was coverered with dust, sheep grease and blood , and my shirt was white with dried sweat. But that's just ranching.

I worked part time for the Corps of Engineers in a bullpen with glaring lights and no separation. It whould have been bad except that the other folks were congenial and the section chief was an expert manager. The work was interesting because it was different from being an academic biologist.

Best job, of course, being a biology professor.