Worst Days on the Job – Part III
(A three-part series)
March 7, 2003

This is our final installment of our "worst days on the job" stories. If you haven't read parts I & II, I'd highly recommend it before proceeding. Click here for part I.

This month, we visit the extremes of bad days. We start with stories from temp job hell, move along to pressure-cooker journalism, and then ultimately to the worst job of all – life.

Thanks for reading. We hope these stories have made you feel better about your own pathetic job, realizing that there's always a worse job then the one you're doing right now.

Temporary Summer
by Mike Spinney

Worst job? That's easy. It was the summer of 1989 and a watershed year in my personal development.

Eighteen months earlier I had been honorably discharged from active duty following four years in the United States Navy. Rich, a Navy buddy whose discharge came about six months after mine, made plans to bicycle across the country in the summer of 1988 and invited me along, but I declined, insisting I had "big plans" of my own for my first summer as a civilian. Apparently my big plan was to watch reruns of Hogan's Heroes.

So, when the summer of '89 came around, I wanted to make up for lost time. I worked my legs into shape and, on a sunny day in early June, hopped on the saddle and started pedaling. I rode from Portland, Maine to Detroit, Michigan where I met up with Rich and spent a week or so drinking and gambling before returning to Portland, satisfied that I had accomplished a life-changing journey.

The only problem was, when I got back to Maine, I was broke and had no prospects for employment. Plus, I had enrolled in the University of Southern Maine and needed to start putting coin in the purse to pay my tuition and college expenses. I was also seriously Jonesing for as much beer as I could possibly swill as often as I could swill it. Tough duty on my budget of zero dollars.

To bridge the financial gap between my pedal-powered journey of self-discovery and my soon-to-dawn new educational morning, I signed up with a local temporary employment agency.

While registering for temp work, visions of assignments to some local steno pool danced in my head. In my fantasy, I would be the sole male employee sent in to do heavy lifting among a veritable harem of hot typists looking for any excuse to take the buns out of their hair.

Then came day 1 and my orders. Schlep on down to Schlotterbeck and Foss.

Hardly a covey of comely young females, Schlotterbeck & Foss was a manufacturer of specialty sauces for the likes of Friendly's Restaurants, Annie's of Vermont, and L.L. Bean.

Efrem, a decent floor manager afflicted with a nasty case of halitosis, placed me on the salad dressing bottling line between a heat-shrink machine and a mountain of cardboard boxes.

My job was to make sure bottles of Annie's latest concoction, a gourmet blend of balsamic vinegar and honey pesto (something like that), didn't get jammed in the heat-shrinker during safety seal application. I also had to pack boxes with the finished product. Mindless, monotonous drudgery. To keep myself entertained, I engineered a number of "accidents" that sent a couple bottles tumbling to the floor, necessitating a halt in process for cleanup. The definition of entertainment is a relative thing.

Day 2 at S&F was much better. I was issued a hair net and sent up to the 'refer where I convened with a number of temp agency vets. There we formed a circle around three fifty-pound sacks of onions, sat on five-gallon buckets, and commenced with a morning of onion peeling.

The camaraderie was good, and conversation jocular. We all cried compulsively in the sharply pungent air while laughing and trading tales of drunkenness. I learned our piles of peeled onions were to be combined with chickpeas and some other assorted ingredients and rendered into hummus paste. I did not figure in the rendering plans, however, and spent the rest of the afternoon assembling boxes with a tattooed punk rocker who groused about "poseurs" the entire time.

I finished out the week armed with a high-pressure hose, stationed on the backside of a canning line washing off five-pound drums of chocolate and butterscotch sundae sauce as the machinery shat them out in rapid-fire fashion. There was plenty of quality-assurance testing going on at this station. I volunteered to act as guinea pig as often as possible, spooning gobs of thick, sweet goo into my mouth – just to make sure it was good enough for the fine folks at Friendly's.

Having survived week one in good shape, I looked forward to heading back to S&F with my short-term comrades. Instead, I spent most of the next week on the night shift order-picking at a hardware distribution warehouse.

The hours were seriously cutting into my Mike Time, so asked for a change and was told that my Friday assignment would be at a company called New England Energy Alternatives. "Fabulous," I thought, figuring I'd be exposed to cutting edge solar technology, or perhaps be given some responsibility on a fuel-cell or wind turbine project. At worst, I might be helping to assemble woodstoves.

As it turns out, New England Energy Alternatives was shockingly inaccurate nomenclature. Located in an industrial park on the outskirts of town, I commuted via bicycle to the given address only to find a fiberglass insulation assembly plant.

NEEA's business model was simple: take giant bulk rolls of pink fiberglass insulation and affix various adhesive backings to the stuff. Narrow rolls with foil backing for pipe wrapping, broad panels with waterproof backing for metallic industrial buildings, smallish chunks encased in plastic for insertion into deadspaces. Not very imaginative. Not very cutting edge. Hardly an "energy alternative."

Nevertheless, I was eager to prove myself to be a worthy employee, more valuable than the princely wage of $6.85 per hour I was earning. So, fresh off a 20-minute pedal, and with a light sheen of perspiration covering my body, I grabbed a pair of gloves and began cutting and assembling insulation to the specifications I was given.

I worked like a prisoner in a Russian gulag all morning. During my lunch break the shift supervisor approached me and commented that I was doing a great job –"one of the best workers the agency's ever sent us," he said.

Sweet! The crew seemed like a decent enough bunch of lunch-bucket brigaders, and I was proud to be recognized for my contribution.

Thusly energized, I dove back into my assignment until shift's end. I turned in my time-slip for verification and received another attaboy. "You did great. We'd love to have you come back on Monday," I was told. Flattered, I promised I'd be back.

On my ride home, however, I noticed my skin had started to turn reddish and irritated, and started to itch. Not a good sign.

With time to contemplate my situation, I quickly connected the dots and realized I'd worked all day in an enclosed space with fiberglass insulation steadily accumulating in my skin and clothing.

I had not been offered any protective clothing, save for a pair of gloves. No goggles, no smock, no hat. I'd spent enough time in attics and crawl spaces during a short time in the construction game so that I should have known better, but in my desire to prove myself, I never thought to ask.

Immediately upon my return home I stripped naked and jumped in the shower, where I spent the better part of an hour soaking and scrubbing, trying to rid myself of my fibrous affliction. No dice. I was miserable with skin that itched and scratched and burned and crawled. And so it would be for the rest of the weekend.

When the temp agency called Monday morning to confirm my return to NEEA, my agent said she'd gotten good feedback on me and thanked me for my efforts. I told her there was no way I was going back. I barely survived the weekend with my sanity let alone my skin, and I was absolutely not going to put myself though such torture again.

Offering lukewarm sympathy, my assigner agreed with my situation and offered to find me a new placement for the day.

I'm still waiting for the call – and holding out hope that I'll get assigned to the steno pool.

Truth and Consequences
by Stephan Finch

"A lie," Winston Churchill said, "gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." I'm a journalist, and I guess you could say I'm in the business of helping the truth get dressed and out the door. Since I started in this business, I've really been surprised at how much intelligence, courage and patience it takes.

The truth is like Brian Wilson. It wants to hide out in its bedroom. I'm not just talking about TRUTH, as in the weighty central meaning of it all. I'm talking about perfectly ordinary truths. Truths that would bore any sane man to tears.

My worst days on the job all resulted from trying to get at truths that somebody powerful didn't want me getting at. One particular experience stands out. It was 1995. I was 28 years old, living in New York and holding my first paid position as a journalist, for a newsletter published by Institutional Investor. It was a pathetic job, working at a commercial real estate newsletter: skyscrapers, hotels, apartment buildings, warehouses... Real Estate Finance & Investment wasn't exactly a scintillating read.

The idea was to generate "scoops." The Pentagon Papers these were not. If the owner of a skyscraper in New York was hunting around for a new mortgage, that was a story. A front-pager was when somebody sold a building worth more than $100 million. Honestly, I thought to myself when I first heard all this, who gives a shit who owns which buildings? Then I found out that people were paying $1,500 a year for subscriptions to these newsletters. They put a fair amount of faith in what we had to say.

To get these people the scoops they'd paid for, I spent 60% of my time desperately making phone calls to track down and confirm rumors, industry speculation and, you guessed it, lies. Thirty percent of my time was spent actually writing the stories. But the most excruciating 10% was spent agonizing over whether the rumors were true.

If Joe Landlord denied up and down that he was selling his Fifth Avenue skyscraper but all my best sources said he was desperate to sell, did I go with it? I could maybe put out a story saying he was "eyeing" a sale and include his denial. But that wouldn't be enough to get me off the hook if I was wrong. Because when the newsletter came out on Monday, Joe Landlord was going to get phone calls from buyers. And if in fact he wasn't eyeing a sale, he was going to be pissed. At me.

Problem was, Joe Landlord wouldn't take my calls before the story came out. And even if he did, he'd lie 90% of the time. In real estate, you never admit you're selling. If you do, people will wonder if you're going broke, then low-ball you on price. Most sellers would rather pretend that, in fact, they don't need to sell at all. But, you know, if the right offer came along...

In November or December 1995, I got a killer lead, bigger than anything I'd ever dealt with. It had to do with Mutual of New York, the big insurance company that likes to go by the nickname "M.O.N.Y." If you know Billy Idol's cover version of "Mony Mony," by Tommy James, you perhaps know that James was inspired by looking out his hotel room at Mutual of New York's logo atop 1740 Broadway.

My source told me Mony was thinking of selling its real estate management business, named Ares, like the Greek god of war. We were talking about an entire company, not just a building. People's jobs at stake. And Mutual of New York's reputation. After all, it's bad enough for people to be whispering about Joe Landlord's financial troubles. It's worse if they start whispering about a huge insurance company's problems. Would you ask a company with financial troubles to insure you?

But then, in 1995, a lot of insurance companies were getting out of real estate. I wasn't that surprised that Mony would consider it. I called the spokesman for Mony's real estate division, told him a good source of mine had said the company was thinking about unloading Ares, that I'd be trying to confirm it with other sources and asked him to comment. I wasn't surprised at all when he said he wouldn't. It was a friendly conversation.

Madly working my phone, I finally found two more people who were able to firm up my source's information, albeit in only the most general of terms. The Mony spokesman hadn't seemed particularly upset about the prospect of this story appearing. That in itself seemed, to my hopeful ear at least, a kind of confirmation. To be safe, I wrote a story that said Mony was weighing a change, possibly a sale, etc. Left things a bit vague because, quite frankly, my sources said the deal was far from done.

Just to be sure, I put in one more call to Mony, leaving a message for the spokesman that we'd be going with the story and if he wanted to comment, here was his chance. "Tell me anything you can," I said. "Even off the record." That was my mistake. I'd told him, essentially, that he could "be honest" and I wouldn't attribute anything to him. Thing is, that only works if you're expecting a spokesperson to tell you what you want to hear. Instead he called back and told me that "this story is dead wrong and you'll be really embarrassed if you publish it."

I was screwed. It was Friday morning. This story was going to print in an hour or two, and it was on the front page. If we pulled it, we'd never be able to fill that hole. I fought back and forth with the guy. I told him about my sources. He said they were full of it. I asked him why he wouldn't just give me an on-the-record denial. He said the company's policy was to not comment on rumors. I told him that even if the story was nothing but a rumor, real estate people were talking about it and that, at least, made it worth writing about. All he'd say again and again was that this story was wrong and that I was going to bring huge amounts of shame, grief and embarrassment upon myself and the publication.

In the end, I stuck to my guns. Actually, they were more like peashooters; I had no choice. The Mony guy had called in so late. Plus, my sources weren't lying.

Still, I walked out of that office on Friday feeling about as low as a person can feel. When I got into journalism I had never expected to be writing about the battle between good and evil, rich and poor, not insurance conglomerates and real estate investors. I was about to become a casualty of a war that I didn't believe in, that nobody knew about. This wasn't Omaha Beach. It was Mutual of Omaha.

I wandered up Fifth Avenue to Central Park. Sitting on a park bench and staring at the skyline had always been a thrill, but now the tall buildings sneered at me like disapproving members of some club I'd been blackballed from. I wandered further into the park, cursing myself, hanging my head. Dusk was settling in. Men in superior suits passed me by on their way to comfortable, welcoming homes on the Upper West Side where Beethoven and Brahms played softly.

I was desperately searching for some meaning in it all. I stopped at the skating rink. As I watched the lumbering pool of New Yorkers turn its amoebic circles, I realized that not a one of the hundreds of people out there was a very good skater. They all seemed to be just barely able to stand up. What did it mean? New Yorkers can't skate.

But then I focused in on this one kid, probably about twelve years old and wearing hockey skates. He was whizzing around the entire lugubrious bunch, dodging in and out of the stragglers on the outside, clearly not giving a damn how many people he upended along the way. He wasn't exactly wrecking it for everybody. But I could see people complaining, yelling "jerk" and "punk" after he'd zoom by. What did they expect? The kid obviously knew how to skate and, being immature, he didn't know enough to realize it wasn't okay to let loose. And he was having a ball.

I'd been the exact same way when I was his age. I'd show up at the public-skate sessions at my local rink and spend the entire time skating mad circles around the hapless duds fumbling along with bent ankles in the rink's standard brown rental models. Somehow, I felt some meaning. It's hard to put into words. Something along the lines of needing to be in the right arena.

I know it sounds a little corny, but I decided right there to leave the newsletter. I quit in January. I was scared. Journalism is a tough nut to crack. People look on you with suspicion if you fail at your first real job. It's a black mark. I applied for a job at Willamette Week, an alternative weekly newspaper in Portland, Ore., and I was turned down. So I took a temporary job working as a bond sales assistant at Morgan Stanley. Believe it or not, that job felt less like selling my soul than working at the newsletter did. Because it was just a job.

Eight months after I quit, I was back into journalism. I even started writing about real estate again. But this time, I was with Dow Jones. I was fortunate to have bosses who'd heard it all before. They saw my quitting the newsletter as a good sign. And they knew how to help me feel better about dealing with the lies and the self-serving bull that companies constantly try to put out there. They steadied me. I'll probably never get the chance to pay them back.

In early 1997, I saw an interesting story cross the newswire. Mutual of New York, it seemed, had agreed to spin off Ares to a group of investors who included top managers there. The deal later fell apart. But I guess there was something to that story of mine after all.

Choose Life
by Jimmy Ray Thudpucker

"Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin' embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life. 'Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it's thair fuckin problem."' – Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

My worst job? That's easy. It's a tie between my last job and every other job I ever had.

Jobs suck. The hell with jobs. Quit yours today. I quit mine two months ago and I've never been happier. Fuck it! Of course, I have no earthly idea how I'm going to pay rent beyond April, but you know what? I'll figure something out. You always can.

I know, you can't quit. You've got a mortgage to service, a student loan to pay off, four hungry children and a crop in the field. If you could, you'd walk away, stop overbilling clients at that consulting house and go teach
yoga. But you can't, and that's that.

I'm here to tell you: You can – you can walk away tomorrow. Sit down and think about it. Do you really need a $40,000 car? Do you really need to live in a $300,000 apartment? Do your kids really need to wear shoes?

Okay, some things you need. And to get them you need a paycheck. Just don't sell out to get it. Eventually I'll get another job, and with any luck it'll be challenging and rewarding, enjoyable and worthwhile. If it's not, or if it ceases to be, I'll have two ways to go: Quit or Work to live. The latter involves the surrender of ambition and the acceptance of the fact that jobs are necessary evils. The former is much more complicated and difficult. But if your job sucks, you need to quit. Here's how.

Quitting requires a strategy, some savings and a vast reserve of self-confidence. You'll need to know how long you can live on your savings, how you'll spend your days once you've cut loose and what kind of work you might find before your savings dwindle below the solvency line. You'll also need to put in place strict budgetary constraints – figure out how much you can get by on without starving or sending the kids to school in milk-carton sandals. This budget should be drawn up and implemented well before you quit. Doing so will bring treble benefits: you'll get a test run to see how much you really can live on, you'll start getting used to disciplined spending, and you'll be able to sock away those last few paychecks. Also, before you quit, get yourself a credit card with a high credit limit and put out the word to anybody who might be able to help you find contract or freelance work.

Now let me confess that I just made all that shit up. I didn't do any of it. When I quit, I had no plan, no savings, no high-limit plastic, no freelance contacts. Again: Fuck it! What I did have was the third leg on the quitter's stool – self confidence. A good set of balls beats a rolodex and a Mastecard any day.

I had spent a year moping through a job that had lost its appeal, going through the motions and bitching through the coffee breaks. What I needed was to cut myself off from my supply lines, march into enemy territory, and see what I was made of. Just like Grant at Vicksburg, baby. So I resigned, and worked my last day on new year's eve.

Since then I've done all sorts of memorable stuff. I've driven a Korean sedan through the South with three cool Stockholmers. I've hung out with my mom in Kansas while she recovered from abdominal surgery. I've gone on a three-day bender at a Quebec ski resort for my former roommate's wedding. I've written some fiction and read some books. I've thought a lot about what to do with my life and whether to do anything.

And I've done this: on a cold Monday in January I've danced in my living room with my girlfriend's dog, hopping around and waving my hands at him while in the bedroom, the Old 97s blared, singing, "Success on someone else's terms don't mean a fuckin' thing...I'm goin' over the cliff."

I'll remember that moment, that dance, as long as I will the road trips. And a damn sight longer than any day I ever spent in the office.