Big competition for worst - I'd guess it was proofreading pages of airplane manuals for a publishing company. There were rows of us sitting at tables and each got a huge stack of identical pages of updates to airplane blueprints/schematics/manuals (whatever they were) which we had to scan for places where the type wasn't clear, or there were breaks in the lines of the printing of the diagram. And it was graveyard shift, so just staying awake was hard enough. Add to that a bunch of co-workers who had lost so badly in the game of life as to be on that job (including me), which was just above or equal to picking up cans for the aluminum, and you had a really rotten job, going without the usual upside of at least one fun co-worker... I guess it beat the maggot job in a previous comment - barely...

I just really wanted to know if was good to be king? ;)

The worst job huh?? Well in my long extensive job list *cough cough* I would say being a hostess at a restaurant. Talk about boring!!!! I couldn't sit, I had to talk to bitchy people all day and get up so freakin' early!!! 7AM for a job is just not me! I was just 16 at the time! Oh wait, I worked at Taco Bell for a month when I was 19?? But that was just for the money and I quit just a month later. At least I got food for free! I was the manager in training! I've hardly had any jobs!! Wow, that's odd... I guess me spending the last 8 years of my life raising kids doesn't look too well on a resume huh?

uugghh. sales. Door-to-door newspaper subscription salesperson. My bro got me that one because it was an easy job to get. He was good at it because he's an argumentative prick. I, on the other hand...

Given that I've worked as a bike messenger with a pervert for a dispatcher, dishwasher (loved it!), 'food-assembly person' (accurate term for fast-food worker), waitress (still), 'light industrial' for temp companies who categorized me, in spite of my stellar but aborted college career, as being only worthy of such endeavors as sorting gas-company credit-card receipts by number for eight hours (the peripheral conversation was actually worse than the work), you'd think I'd be more bitter.

(If I were considered by the temp industry to be worthy of higher callings, would I have been forced into inside sales???)

Frankly, I consider myself lucky......

...oh, wait. there was that speaker warehouse assembly and packing job with that prick cowoker -- I didn't even pick up my 3-day paycheck ........ No, still lucky....

I'd like to take this opportunity to extend a rather sexist and potentially incendiary sentiment that I've been harboring since my son was born: I have an infinite amount of respect for men who go to a job they hate every day, 5 days a week, for 30 years, to support a family of gimme-gimme kids who think being raised middle-to-upper class is a right and not a privilege. Needless to say, there weren't a lot of those in my family tree, but one hears of such creatures (friends mostly..). The machinations of these sacrifices have been borne out in my own experience as a parent, and I am routinely blown away by what comprises the word 'sacrifice'.

can't think of any other brutal jobs right now....... I'm sure there's one in the 'archives' somewhere.

My psych professor this semester holds the title for worst job ever. She told us the story of how, when she was a research assistant during her undergrad years, she worked in a lab where they studied maggots. The lab had a small room with a large access door to the outside, where a dumptruck pulled up several times a week and deposited a truckload of cow manure. Her job was to sift through the manure for the maggots and extract them into containers. That... is by far the worst job ever.

I've had so many bad jobs, but by far the worst job was the one I had after I got laid off. It ended up being a temporary job between telecom and the mecca known as "Federal Employment" that I work in now.

I was a recruiter for a Locum Tenens company. Locum Tenens is temp work for doctors. Doctors are soooo special that they have to have fancy latin phrases for everything (it is NOT a resume, it is a Curriculum Vitae, beeyotch).

I was working 50-60 hours a week (but only being paid for 40), doing 200+ cold calls a day to pompous radiologists who it seemed would rather tell someone they found a tumor in their MRI than talk to a recruiter. It was a 1 1/4 commute on a good day, close to 2 hours on a bad one.

I enjoyed it for about a week, because it wasn't telecom. I loathed it for the remaining 8 weeks I worked there because it was everything that I hated about sales (cold calling, sales reviews, sales meetings).