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The Absolute Worst Working Environment?
goodEvans writes "As I write this, there is a window open behind me with a small jet engine outside. This is supplying vast amounts of compressed air to the aircraft undergoing heavy maintenance in the hangar right outside my door. There is a 6-inch diameter air hose going through the office and out the door. All this requires that I sit at my desk wearing a body warmer to keep out the cold, and both ear defenders AND ear plugs to keep out the noise! And this will go on for half a day once a week! What are the worst conditions you have ever had to work under?" Can you top that? (If top is the word ...)
I had to get up in the morning, at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill and pay mill-owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves, singing Hallelujah!
Oh, ay. And you try and tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you.
Back in early/mid 80's we had to power the computers with coal-fired generators. The geeks would take turns going into the mine to dig out a few buckets of the stuff. We'd lose two or three people a month in "the pit", but dammit, the data had to flow! Pink slips would fly if a single 110/300 baud modem lost power. We were dedicated!
Now all these young punks with their Just-Plug-Into-the-AC-Outlet-and-Let-the-Power-Co
Harummmmph...
Remind me to tell you how we put the hole in doughnuts back in the day...
Trolling is a art,
Yeah, well, I'm sitting here in my Aeron chair, in my private office, working on a computer with a 400mz Pentium II processor and a 5-year-old CRT monitor which is running Windows 98. I think I've got it worse.
.)
(Not that I'm offering to trade, mind you . .
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
It's interesting how different cultures attack the problem. Here's my favorite approach: Feng Shui
Yep, you guessed it.
S-C-O
Ed.
I had this job once where they expected actual output! And they wouldn't pay me unless I "produced" something!
/. at work.
Thank goodness that nightmare ended and now I can suff
I once had my office on a sales floor with about 20 women. You think a jet engine is annoying, try that out for size!
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
The concept was simple enough. I opened latch one and placed the hose onto the opening. This was provided that the second hatch had not failed and excrement flew everywhere. If things worked correctly, I placed a hose onto the opening and released latch two. Everything would go down via a simple gravitational setup. Often, however, the second hatch failed and would get stuck. This required removing the hose and opening the second hatch by hand and hoping that the excrement had not already released while in transit, and therefore reside behind hatch two. The lever would often fail and there would be a race to reapply the hose before the shit hit the fan, so to speak.
I could give a better description but I don't feel like reliving this. Back to work...
Dispite how cool it looks on Star Trek/Wars, you get blasted by cosmic rays (bad) and loose bone/muscle mass (bad).
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
5 bob and a ferret, and I'd be cleaning chimneys all day for rich folk with letters
need i say more
At my company they make me sit in a small gray box with a computer. The walls are only about 6 feet high!
And it doesn't end there. My small gray box is just one in a sea of boxes, it's like some cruel farming experiment. Every so often, yet another manager comes by and asks about some memo or putting a stupid cover page on some report. And they expect me to just sit here all day and type stuff into this PC.
Think outside the box? How?
any job with a name tag. ...
AT CHRISTMAS!
Runnin' On Empty
lying flat on my back for 12 hours straight sorting out some underfloor cabling with a laptop next to me which I had to type using one hand, by torchlight in a 2.5ft gap. Fun
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
i work in an environment which consists mainly of windows 98 machines.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
where Homer Simpson's "Everything's-Okay Alarm" was installed.
Being the only tech support rep, and having no authority. For four years. No holidays or weekends.
Beat that. I was every customer's verbal-abuse toy.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Assistant Crack Whore
Assistant Crack Whore everybody, worst job in the world.
Not that bad, but my first computing
job was in a test area where they
were trying to destructively smash
components until they broke. The noise
was pretty bad at times.
Worse, the halls outside the computer
room door were full of forklifts buzzing
here and there. I always wondered if
a known hazzard of software development was
being run down by a forklift on the job.
I shit you not, every time somebody would call on this line, a fucking klaxon goes off.
This company was extremely strange in other ways. The guy who founded it made tents for the Israeli army. He comes into my office one day and sees me debugging code. Mind you, this was a Mac shop, and the debugger on the Mac (Macsbug) does have an unusual appearance. He takes one look at it, and tells me I have a bug. Well, no shit, that's why I'm using the debugger! He says no, that the debugger is a bug, and that he can tell because of the way it makes my screen appear, and to please remove it immediately.
And how did he get his funding? A really big investment firm whose name shall remain, um, nameless. Turns out that one day they decide they're curious about what this guy is doing, so they send one of their drones over to take a look around. We sit him down in front of the lead programmer's computer, and show him the software that was being worked on. Mind you, this was a fairly involved piece of software, and though I didn't like the framework being used (THINK Class Library) it was nevertheless rather impressive. The drone followed the presentation carefully, or so it appeared, intently staring at the screen during each step of the presentation. Finally, about half an hour later, the presentation ends, and the drone is asked if he has any questions.
So he asks one.
"What's that little box in the lower right-hand corner for?"
He was talking about the grow box. You know, the thing that makes the window grow bigger and smaller.
So we demonstrate how you can change the size of the window. This, it turns out, was the most amazing thing he had ever seen! He starts nodding appreciatively, as if he's sure their investment in this company is a good thing after all. Then he leaves.
I think this is when I started smoking pot.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
An 8*8 (ft.) dorm room that I pay 700 dollars a month for because it is in downtown Boston.
14 digits of Pi are all we need.
I once worked in a cubicle while several guys used a jackhammer to cut a doorway through the wall.
You aren't working under live artillery fire.
90 decibles worth of fan & computer noise in a 50 degree F room with fans blowing all over you streching a phone (cell won't work) 20 foot so I can sit on the floor and use the keyboard with the monitor 5 foot above me. After a week I found a monitor box to sit on. I miss working at Global Crossing! hah
20 below zero (F - that is) spreading cow manure using a tractor(John Deere 2630) with no cab on it. Not to mention there's a 10-20 mph wind.
I worked in an office inside of a manufacturing facility where raw fiberglass insulation products were being processed (read pounded into submission by 300 ton presses) that caused much of it to be ejected into the air.
Many people who started work there rarely made it past lunch time the first day.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
I once had a job where I did photo-etching from 6PM to 6AM. Basically it involved running sheets of metal through hydrochloric acid. The problem is, being that I was a temporary, I got to work with the OLD machines. We had to hang the sheets overhead... they'd come out dripping with acid. The acid would run down my arm... I'd end up with brown stains all over my arms and clothes.
It was also LOUD, HOT, and Humid.
When the morning shift would come in, they were all bald, had thick glasses, and a couple were missing some teeth.
I didn't stay too long.
hit command-w, and you'll be fine.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
During the .com boom I was a consultant to an ecommerce startup that was in a warehouse with picnic tables. Problem was that they had nails and staples sticking out of them. After one or two injuries we spent a couple of days repairing picnic tables before we continued coding.
I also worked as a consultant at a oil comapany that put four of us in a printer closet. We actually had to enter and leave in a certain order so we could all get in. If you had to pee you had to announce it so everyone could file out and back in in the correct order.
Finally at another oil company I spent 2 months with workman grinding on the outside of the building directly in line with my office. You learned to ignore it but it would vibrate your desk and you had to find a different office to hold phone calls.
Those sucked but I'm not sure I can top a jet engine.
OH THE HORROR!
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
I wouldn't want to be the alien that has to do all the anal probing. I mean c'mon! Have you seen the people that get abducted?
[ Don't reply to this ]
Try working 8 hours with crazy diarrhea and no bathrooms.
People with IBS know what I mean...
...from Macs to Dells running NT 4. I was the only computer support guy there for 100 Macs. Once the Windows shit started rolling in...
That was years ago. The bedwetting stopped, but the occasional nightmare still wakes me up, screaming.
Trapped in a small box, using my nose to type through the one air hole in said box. My job is testing boxes to see how long people can live inside them.
Try working inside a chemical weapons plant, wearing a gas mask that you can barely see or breathe in, with chemical agent alarms going off and people evacuating upwind.
"No, you have to stay and secure the servers."
Try working in an assembly plant for a while where you breathe clouds of oil based coolant and it drips off the celing after condensing. Even IT guys have to work out there on the PLC's and network hardware.
.. your 'bad job' is just an irritant... Be happy you are employed and quit whining.
How about a PCB etching line where you have clouds of nitric acid..
Try a coke processing plant ( the black coal stuff, not the drink ) or a casting plant that uses graphite as a release agent.. Both will cause black lung, among other things...
This stuff kills you
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think the worst conditions are psychological. If the company is gonna restructure, and everybody knows it, but your boss doesn't know what's going to happen or when and you don't know, and the execs aren't being too free with the info, so you don't have any clue what's up. Even though you're good at your job you still think, well, they shut down a whole department last year...
And you have to worry about a mortgage and doctor's appointments for your newborn...that's pretty bad.
Of course, this is not happening here.
"It's real and we can touch it, so least we know where we stand." - Jack Burton
It doesn't get any worse than that.
He actually quit this job...
He worked for a high class strip club. As a bouncer. So not only did the girls cuddle up to him all night long, but they were usually nekkid when doing so...
I've had trouble accepting that they actually PAY him to do this... But to find out that he left that job, because he didn't like the working conditions...
WTF?
I used to be an OSHA/EPA-type inspector. I've seen shit that will melt your eyes.
How about inspecting a toxic waste dump, recently uncovered in a marina, left over from the Vietnam era days, drums and drums of Agent Orange.
Asbestos factory plants shut down an abandoned, with asbestos piles higher than most apartment complexes.
Lead reclaimation factories that never should have gotten permits to begin with.
Frat-boy dorm rooms (I had to wear a gas mask in one section, it was so bad)
Public housing projects where aborted fetuses are hidden under stair cases, along with use diapers from the other kids.
You got nothing on what I have seen...
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I had to cover a wounded Norwegian citizen at the San Fermin festival. It was incredibly crowded everywhere and I had to write an article sitting on the pavement among piles of wine-induced vomit and write it as this was the only place to sit down. Thousands of drunk USAians and Australians raved around me and spilled wine on the laptop.
Apparently it was structurally OK but the drywall was completely ripped away at one of the building junctions. You could see plenty of daylight and pigeons started nesting in it. It took UCLA three years to bother to fix it.
Still better than this job, though...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I had to install some robotics equipment in a contained lab. There was a whole procedure for suiting up (including booties and a puffy hat), many rules about what to do and not do inside and then a whole procedure for leaving (disposal of the suite, scrubbing down, etc.). I had to get a vaccination for HepB, which requires constant updates (and is one of those painful globulin injections). No vaccine for HepC or HIV though obviously.
There was a definite incentive to get the H/W and S/W right because I did not want to have to come back.
I used to work in a factory built(poorly) in the 40s. The warehouse roof was caving in. It was down to within 1 foot of the top of the stacked pallets.
The whole factory was poorly insulated. In the winter, it got down to 35 degrees. In the summer, it got up over 110 in west central Minnesota.
That is just the physical environment. The work included cleaning tanker trucks with chemicals that OSHA required safety equipment to use, but we weren't given the equipment.
The job also included lying to health inspectors and rabbis.
The law was broken a lot, but they were the best paying job in the county, so no one complained.
-
"Vengeance is fine," sayeth the Lord.
This kind of reminds me of this old story.
nothing could be worse.
The "Insert Quote Here" line is almost as predictable as inserting an actual quote.
i could either go with having to give people aol at compusa, or living in the woods in the himalayas trying to get comms with a crappy radar that runs a 1.83mhz x86 over crappy 8 gauge steel wire...i think the aol selling tops that one out
nuff said.
this sig has been rated E for Everyone.
Well, I'm working for a group that's on the other side of the country, and the company doesn't have any office space within 20 miles of my home.
I'm working from my living room, and my primary task is training folks on what I did at my last company. I got paid over $100 (I'm hourly, with a very decent rate) to sit on my couch with a headset phone and wax philosophical for a while yesterday.
Oh, you said worst? Sorry, my bad.
Much more than this...
(truthfully, it's gotten a little better... A Very Little.)
On how I didn't put the cover sheet on my TPS Reports. So I decided to go into construction instead.
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
They put me in the server room once.
The server room was the HVAC room and it was about 30 degrees in there at all times. The AC was so loud I had to use a phone outside the room and I only knew it was ringing by a red light hooked up (by me) in the HVAC room. When the AC clanged on it would suck papers off my desk, and pulled my hat off more than once. When I told them they had to move me the told me to quit.
I did.
This
I worked for Toshiba before they sold all their US assets, so I got to work in a clean room in the SDRAM manufacturing facility...wearing the full giant condom suit, surgical gloves, face mask, etc. Trying to lug around pcs, run cables, and replace network cards wearing all that crap was a treat.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
It didn't happen to me, but a friend once had an intern position on a movie set in which he had to stand in six inches of cold water and keep two electrical wires in contact.
*******
"What good is science if no one gets hurt?!" - Professor Chromedome
I Work for SCO... top that!
I had to work admining not one but every single version that has ever existed of MS Windows, Windows Server, Exchange, Office, Outlook, and a few other MS bits and pieces.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
Currently I work in a biological diagnostic production facility. We manufacture testing kits for the diagnosis of enteric and fecal parasites. All the components must be tested in-house for FDA compliance. This means that the labs stink like poo.
Imagine working at a bench setup in a public restroom, and everyone that came in to use the can had an intestinal problem. That's what it's like.
I had a server room at an old factory that I admin'd at. The room had a partly failed Liebert line conditioner that powered the circa 1970 HP 3000. It made a tone loud enough to prevent going into the room more than a few seconds without hearing protection.
The unit was so old that the Liebert rep had never even seen one before, much less find it in his manual. The electrician couldn't order the part to fix it himself (he knew what was wrong with it) because the whole system was due to be replaced in 18 months and they didn't want to sink money into it.
As a result I got hold of the maintenece head and asked him if I could borrow his decibal meter. He asked me what for, and followed me into the server room.
This was a plant that had hearing protection in different areas, beyond the typical hearing plugs due to OSHA and worker safety concerns (they had to undergo anual hearing tests to monitor for damage). I ended up with a several hundred dollar pair of 40db rated earmuffs - that I was to wear over normal ear plugs, the very next day.
...you could be working for SCO.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
A poem:
In the bowels of a military hospital,
working 11 hour shifts
on death march.
Some Asshole in the next room
where-in lies the thermostat,
Decided that they should
turn the temp down
and lock the door
over the holidays
To save energy.
Not realizing,
in the bowels of the hospital,
in a room once marked O.R.
That turning a thermostat to 45,
will
in fact
make the room 45...
and not just settle
on ambient temp.
11 hour shifts, trying to
type with a coat, and hat
and gloves on.
I brought a space heater.
It helped a little.
I was very unhappy.
meh
I've been bled on, coughed on, crapped on, pissed on, and vomitted on, but the worst is butt pus...
Of course, it pays better than piloting a cubicle...
A clor-alkali plant. Mercury, asbestos and chlorine.
'Nuff said.
Terrible place to start out but at least you can tell your friends on Slashdot.
Help fight continental drift.
They aren't necessarily bad, but they're humourous. I live in Canada and right now it's -20C outside. My desk is right under an air conditioning vent that cannot be turned off so it blows cold air. The windows nearby are drafty so it's pretty cold where I sit.
My manager felt sorry for me so he bought me a space heater for my cubicle. Very nice! Except that when I plug it in and it runs for more than 10 minutes it flips the breaker and everyone on the floor loses power.
The office itself is just outside a very large steel mill and when it's cold outside and they add water to the molten steel mixture it causes very loud explosions that shake the entire admin building where I am. I have gone through three keyboards so far this winter from the shaking of the building causing my coffee to spill on the keyboard.
Buckets?! We used to dream of having buckets. We'd have to carry t'coal in us mouths for twenty six hours a day, and when I got 'ome, me dad'd trash me to sleep wi' 'is belt. If I were lucky.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
One company I worked for was a small partenrship. The partners would argue amongst themselves everytime the two came together to talk. The arguments were shouting matches that everyone heard, full of cussin' and carryin' on. Eventually, I had to break them up one day when they got into a bloody fist fight at work.
Top that.
I worked for a guy that was an outspoken racist (with me). I quit my job after dealing with his crap for a couple months (he was also starting to say some awful things about my bro-in-law) and he tried to convince the higher-ups that I was trying to defraud the company.
He claimed that I was not doing my job while I was there (despite telling me and my co-workers that I was great and he would like me to fill his shoes if he got his promotion -- he didn't get it)
When asked by HR what my problems were with the company, I told them the whole thing. Within a day or two, they were taking his side.
They threatened to sue me multiple times (for taking a paycheck but not working. ??? They never did a thing) During the whole ordeal, my wife got so stressed out that she miscarried.
It sucked.
I'm on a chair.
Once I worked at IBM in Toronto. I had to work in a nicely coloured cubicle. There was this cafeteria with delicious meals at reasonable prices, cute female employees, break rooms set up to look like a waterfall oasis, or an english library, pool and ping pong tables, and dedicated networked gaming machines.
:-(
It was pretty horrible.
Working for a small company run by liars is the worst environment I have experienced so far.
What made it so bad is that they did not realize they were liars.
I had to do 15 hours a week but I had 2 hour lunches.
There was a company Porche I could use for free.
We had an in-house restaurant that did 5 course meals for $1.
I was able to get freebie with the companies girls when I was off duty.
But had to pay for the condoms!! can you believe it? Those total utter bastards!!
Needless to say I left there the second my 10 year notice period was up.
Now I work from Microsoft
but please dont tell my parents they still think I work at the whorehouse.
Having a boss is the worst nuisance I've ever run across, and it seems like there's one at every damn place I work.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The thermostat in the operations room in a datacenter was kept at a frosty 57 degrees ("for the computers"), but actual air temps were in the forties. The room also had floor to ceiling glass walls that reinforced the whole "Fish in a Bowl" feeling. Oh yeah, and the control panels for _all_ the building systems were on the back wall, meaning that any time the temperature on the roof got above 110 degrees (frequent in the summer) or the humidity got above a certain level (frequent in the spring), an ear-piercing klaxon would go off. This would, of course, occur randomly.
'yields false when preceded by its quotation' yields false when preceded by its quotation.
I had to program on a machine without Windows once! They had a third-world country OS called Lunux or something like that, can't remember, but it sucked so bad!!! Climatic conditions don't help, but having the wrong tools is definitively a big problem. It's like putting nails in with your bare hands or something like that.
Today we all came in, brought a side dish, and my two supervisors brought in bratwurst. I just got finished eating one of the best lunches in my life. I think it's safe to say I have the WURST working environment.
I'm sorry, it had to be said. Don't blame me, blame the mods for posting this story 10 minutes after I get done eating them.
OK, I don't really have it all that bad, but I read something about office temperatute and had to chime in.
I heard a report (NPR, if I recall) that 80% of all thermostats in the office are phony. Rather, they control nothing.... probably don't even have any wires connected to them.
I live/work in the Minneapolis area... and it gets pretty cold in my office in the winter. I wish my computers generated more heat!
Aircraft noise was the motivation behind Dr. Amar Bose, founder of Bose, to start thinking about noise reducing headphones and the rest is history.
Free XBox, PS2
When I was a kid, our family lived in a hole in a highway median. For breakfast, all we had to eat was sand, and at night when we got home we had to have a bowl of cold poison and go straight to bed.
We didn't have enough money to go school, and I had two jobs. In the mornings I worked in a coal mine. They beat us before we went down the shaft just for the fun of it, and we were forced to toil ceaslessly in the mine wearing only loin cloths while standing in freezing water up to our waists.
After working in the mine, I went to my second job in a Chicago meat packing plant. Fortunately, I only had to haul buckets of entrails and excrement; I still have most of my fingers!
We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in 12 systems!
then digging a foxhole "to spec" in hard Georgia clay. Then a 26-mile forced march back "home". I DO so miss the Army!
Don't know if I would call this "topping" that, but here's what I did 3 days a week one summer for the State of New Mexico.
I (using a truck and hose, of course, dirty slashdotters!) sucked feces and piss out of a portajohn. And for some reason, we had what we called a "mad shitter" on the prowl.
Yeah. Oh, and don't get me started on the time the hose backed up.
Nasty.
Nothing says I need a new job like a gob full of feces stuck to your shirt.
Does this top loud noises and cold? Maybe.
Sent from your iPad.
If you have enough free time to read Slashdot, then there are people working under far worse conditions than you. If you can even access the internet or a computer full stop, then by definition, your life, and therefore your job is unlikely to be that bad.
I could start rambling about people in third-world countries walking miles to get clean water for their families, or some 8-year-old kid in a sweatshop, or whatever.... but you get the picture.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
i spent a week working with a network provider to fix an ATM connection that they had misconfigured. The building it was going into was unfinished and the demark was in the attic (the downstairs wasn't at all done so no wiring extensions were in place) this was during the summer east coast heatwave of a few years back. i brought a thermometer with me and it was easily over 130 in the attic where i was. lucky there was no cell phone access there, (and no copper lines into the building) so i had to run outside to a pay phone to speak to the provider's techs. (the solution btw, was that the setting for payload scrambling they had given was incorrect)
last winter i installed some parabolic antennas for a point to point wireless connection on top of two aircraft hangars. this was naturally during the extreme cold weather that we were blessed with (both of these things happened in NH) standing atop a scissor lift extended to its max height in 30 knot winds with tempuratures right around -5F, I kind of wished i was back in that attic.
Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
Millennium Crisis Line: 0890 900 2000 [calls cost 50p/min]
I too have been subjected to unreasonable rules and regulations: I have worked in jobs where we did not have internet access (making researching simple problems difficult at best), were not allowed to use the phone or email for personal conversations, and were forced to run Windows on the desktop, complete with spyware that loaded from a login script each time we logged on to the domain.
What is sad about these jobs is that bad software environments are a form of psychological torture. Originally intended to make workers productive, they often have the opposite effect, forcing workers to get approval and jump through hoops to perform simple coding tasks that their competitors can do within seconds because their machines were not locked down. This is one of the main reasons that American companies are losing ground to outsourced workers in India: our managers feel that they need to control and micromanage the workforce as much as possible, whereas the foreign workers are so plentiful, expendible, and primitive that they can just be replaced if their productivity is below par. American companies would benefit immensely from adopting this simpler model and giving us tech workers the freedom we deserve in the workplace.
The great thing about working at an airport is nobody complains if you turn up the stereo.
Anybody can work under ideal circumstances. -- Jeff K. (January 4, 2001)
I'm sitting in the middle of a printing area without even a cubicle to call my own. There is one cubicle wall behind my desk but no side walls. To either side of me are two noisy printers and on the other side of the cubicle wall is a noisy photocopier. Behind me is a row of semi-public computers (for other employees to use when they need windows rather than linux or if they dont have a computer at their desk). I feel like I am in the middle of a hallway with so many people walking to/from the printers. My computer is a Dual P3-450 with a 21" CRT running red hat 6.2 that is doubling as a webserver in adition to the (not web related) work I have to do on it.
Gaze! Gaze upon the horrifying work conditions my roommate is forced to tolerate.
Man. What people will do for a paycheck. Poor guy, in a cube all day...
--Dan
I was going to make a crack about an OfficeSpace like big mutual insurance company where I was consulting, but then I got to thinking a bit more. I think that we all probably have pretty good working environments, all things considered. Think about these environments (among others):
Me too!
I've had this sig for three days.
I did a stint in high school with the local parks and recreation service (community service) and all I have to say is, you would be surprised at how often people will crap in a urinal...
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
goodEvans writes: Hey, everyone, listen to me whine for a minute, then I will spend all day listening to you whine. I guess there isn't really a question there.
I worked for a TV network affiliate...
That was hell.
Work for 1 hour, and then sleep IN AN OFFICE CHAIR for 3 hours, only to work another 90 minutes later.
And they paid us, the whole time, including meals.
It sucked. Office chairs are NOT the place to spend the night, or morning for that matter.
That and the fact that we could only surf for pr0n when no one else was in the office. That really bit it for me...
I had to leave that job eventually, it just got the better of me...
you have some of the original code in your subject, you'll be in for it.
I worked at a mental health agency that a few years prior diagnosed me with schizophrenia - hearing voices, seeing visions, etc. Anyway, I quit my meds and my brain began working overtime so naturally I make a great programmer. While working at the agency I find out that they're embezzling money and after a while they realize they can't trust me. So what did they do? They started simulating the symptoms of schizophrenia. Totally serious - they'd go by my cubicle and blurt out words such as "nigger" or blame things I had nothing to do with on me.
You had coal-fired generators?
We had to power our generators by pedaling bicycles.
Hence the term "cpu cycles".
My last contract was as Senior Support Engineer at a software company. I worked on the 'Hotline' answering all the really sticky calls from clients.
My boss was French and her management style consisted of screaming instructions at the top of her voice so that everyone in the room could hear. Sometimes it was management by fear, other times she just seemed to make it up as she went along.
Just to add insult to injury the bonus scheme the company ran was so skewed that nobody ever qualified for the full amount even if they worked eighty hour weeks and cleared every call. What finally made me quit was that the product we were supporting sucked, big time. There were so many bugs that the fault reporting system couldn't cope and used to crash on a regular basis.
In the end I just quit and promised myself that I would never again work on telephone support or for a French boss. I sleep every night now and the gray patches on the beard are almost gone.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
But I can't blame anyone for this: I was one of the owners of the company. Cheap bastard.
Try reading Slashdot on a DoD computer.
*cough*
"Privacy does not exist on Government computers; users should therefore not expect it."
(That's how my user agreement at work reads.)
Excuse me; there's someone at my door...
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Nothing beats military service for unsafe working conditions. I'm just glad that's the worst thing I had to do; I got off pretty easy compared to a lot of the people I know.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Hey man, if you don't like your job, quit! Getting shot and dying is just part of the job description for some.
I haven't had a job with a window for three years.
1972, Loring AFB ME, mid-January, temperature -30F before wind chill. I was working on a B-52. I didn't have it bad. When I got done I could go back inside. The security cops had it bad. They had to stay outside and when it got to -35, they took the dogs away from the cops because it was cruel to leave the dogs outside. Cops had to stay
Ken
Ever hear of "flock?" It's the crap that makes those fuzzy red Christmas ribbons fuzzy. It's the stuff that makes fake velour. And it's made almost by hand. A chopper chops dyed nylon fibers into one hundredth of an inch high pieces. Then the flock fibers are loaded into a hopper. The ribbon or whatever fabric you're using gets a layer of glue put on it. The flock is electrostatically charged and shaken onto the substrate which has an opposite charge. It's then baked in a 400 degree F oven and rolled onto huge rolls, and sent to ribbon or fabric manufacturers.
:) -- The people walking around covered in red flock like they were dressed up for a costume party but forgot the pitchforks.
The server room was directly above the "flock lines." The little pieces of flock get everywhere. Vent filters don't even keep it out. All the keyboards and monitors are covered with a fine layer of this crap. You vacuumed your server twice or three times a day. Best of all, my office was right next to a flock line oven, in an overhead mezzanine. And when do you run Christmas ribbon (red flock?) YES!!!! IN JULY!! A four hundred degree oven. Bad airconditioning. The smell of the glue getting you high -- okay, so it's not all bad.
And don't even remind me of the cretin who decided to wire the whole place with silver satin cable terminated, God help me, with wire nuts. And he always vetoed the Cat-5 upgrades because they were "too expensive" but never thought about throwing people all day at the obvious data integrity problems.
Ah, thanks for bringing back THOSE memories.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Joe Banks (played by Tom Hanks) in Joe Versus The Volcano has the worst office environment in the world.
I cannot elaborate; perhaps someone with stronger willpower can.
-Mark
Thirty-seven degrees out, it's been raining for three days, it's going to for at least a week more. You know you'll be outside in the woods and the mud for all of it, with nothing but a poncho and what you're wearing to stay warm with. The twenty plus mile road march back to the bay is looming in your mind like a reprieve from ths cold damp hell.
Your job today is to dig a foxhole or guard your buddy digging the foxhole, you trade off occasionally. Your options are either being waist deep in very cold mud, trying to shovel it into nylon bags, or shivering in the bush to defend the guy in the mud. Later tonight you're going to have to "fight off" the guys in bravo company who are serving as your "opfor" for this particular training exercise.
You can't remember what it feels like to be warm, or dry. Hypothermia, and later on tonight, frostbite, are very real threats.
Could be worse though, no one's really shooting at you, and the electronics that have been dying ad becoming more dead weight to hump back could be really important.
Yeah, I think I've had worse days in conditions that might, charitably, be described as worse. I can think of several folks I know currently undergoing worse than the above.
Body warmers, jet engines, and hearing protection? I won't question that it sucks. I won't question that it's irritating, but you shouldn't have to look hard at all for people with worse working conditions.
-H
"If there's anything more important than my ego, I want it caught and shot now." -- Z. Beeblebrox
My job was to shovel the s*** and the old, wet (use your imagination) bedding into a wheel-barrow, then push said wheel-barrow outside, up the hill (a literal pile of old, decaying(-ed) horse s***) and dump the contents.
If that won't teach you the value of higher education, nothing will!
I'm one of SCO's lawyers
IAAL, and this is certainly not my area of expertise, but requiring you to wear ear plugs for 4 hours a day under those conditions sounds like an OSHA violation.
-A
In a previous lifetime I worked as a machinist in a little ramshackle shop near Chattanooga, Tennessee. One day we got a job making some asbestos parts. No safety equipment whatsoever - the air was full of asbestos fibers. I got a dust mask and put it on for what little protection it might provide and the boss made fun of me - told me I looked like a Martian. The first guy who worked on the stuff was out sick the next day so they put someone else on the job. That person was out sick the next day so they put a third person on the job. That was 20 years ago. I wonder how they are all doing now.
Worst working environment eh?
How does working in France for 3 weeks in the summer sound? Oh, did I forget to mention that it was 32c outside and there was no AC? Oh, did I mention that the guy who sat across from me (no cubicles) was about 280lbs and did not believe in deoderant? Or that he smoked cigarettes and cigars all day long? Going home with a headache everyday was fun... Pretty hard to code in those conditions I must say!
L8r
Darcy
My worst job ever? Artificially inseminating chickens. Many a hard day at work. The job environment, however, was better than most offices: thousands of chickens, shit everywhere, 110 degrees F, and loud country music.
The worst work environment I have ever had to work it was...Taco Bell!! (dun dun duunnnnn!!!) Yes, Taco Bell. It was my first job when I was 16, and I worked there again for a short time when I was 23 after moving to a new city. It was dirty, rediculously understaffed, irate customers, the frier was broken and splashed hot grease on you when you removed chalupas, the toilet was backed up and made the whole building smell, and most hidiously of all: Are you ready for the horror? The sheer terror of it? I, a 23 year old decent looking male full of piss and vinegar, at the prime of my still unfolding life, was being told what to do by a zit faced, fat ass, braces wearing, pinto driving, body odor emitting, Lewis Skulnik laughing, Poindexter glasses wearing 17 year old dork!!! AAAAUUHHHHHHGGGGGHHHHH!!!! They're dogs! And they're playing poker! AAAAHAHAHAAAAHAHA!!!!
Dude. Dude. Dude. Dude. DUDE!!!! Duuuudde. Yeah, I guess you have a point there. (Baseketball)
(note: I have NOTHING to do with SCO)
Think about what it would be like to be a bit slinger at SCO in Utah:
First of all, SCO is looking to hire people in India - in other words, you know your job is going to be outsourced soon.
Second of all, you likely are a Unix or Linux programmer - and your company name is reviled in the industry you are in.
Third of all, if you ARE looking to move, nobody wants to hire you for fear of SCO suing them for some imagined infringment.
Fourth of all, the only company that MIGHT hire you as a bit slinger is Microsoft.
Fifth of all, you know points 3 and 4 won't change until AFTER the company collapes - and then you are out of work.
Granted, unlike soldiers in Iraq nobody is shooting at SCO employees or trying to blow them up (AND NOBODY SHOULD, EITHER!). But still, for tech jobs, being a programmer at SCO has to blow.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Sick days have a purpose, giving out bonuses to people who don't use them is as hazard to the workplace.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How about elephant dung santitation worker??
I'm in charge of Microsoft's Secure Computing Initiative.
"Nothing is impossible for the man who refuses to listen to reason"
My first job out of college was to write an inventory control program for the Bell warehouses. I ended up coding most of the program on a computer sitting on a door between two sawhorses with forklifts whizzing by behind me. It wouldn't have been so bad, except that the forklift operators kept coolers of grain alcohol punch in the warehouse and got quite dangerous by the end of the day.
My worst job environments / moments:
- Working through university one summer-first job was to crawl inside the saw at a saw mill and pull the build-up of gunk out of it. Three of us started on the same day-two weeks later I was the only one not on disability.
- Same summer-quit the saw mill job, got job at the local hospital. Part of job was to throw medical waste (needles, body parts, etc.) into incinerator.
- Few years ago, one of the Chem guys in my current job was running tests on jet fuel. Test involved burning massive quantities of the stuff, inside our office (paraphrased quote-he'd have used the Chem offices, but that stuff makes you sick!). Entire office gets good and loopy, I managed to hold out the entire workday.
- Last year, power goes off in Austin TX in June. No AC, no coffee. Office is on wellwater, so now no water and no bathrooms. Left after 20 minutes.
It's all been a learning experience. The first two taught me what kind of job I might have if I dropped out-stay in school, kids! The second two taught me I can handle just about anything as long as the coffee, AC and toilets hold out.My first job out of college in Florida was at a fledgling cell phone manufacturer. The development lab had sealed windows and a inadequate window air conditioner mounted through a wall. By June, when the temps started hitting 90+ outside, the AC just wasn't cutting it.
One morning, I came in to find that the boss had aimed the AC vents at himself. When I griped, he scolded me that I did not understand thermodynamics as well as he did, and the new direction of the vents would, over time, make everyone equally cool. Right.
The surreal part of getting this lecture was that the boss was a Czech immigrant, and the blatant stupidity of what he was saying combined with the accent instantly made me think of the dumb things that the "wild and crazy" brothers on the old Saturday Night Live would say "to pick up chicks".
Many hospital IT shops are an afterthought especially the ones in long established buildings. The worst I've ever had to work was located in the basement of the hospital, right next to the morgue. There was a constant smell of chemicals used to 'dress' the bodies, in addition to the humid musty smell of any basement. To top it off there was a strong magnetic field from a generator room next to us that caused severe ghosting on all the monitors.
Don't get me started on the time one of the waste pipes burst through the ceiling onto the VAX.
You can quit, can you?
Top this:
I program in VB. Help me please!
Worst computer job: I worked in the early 80's on a project where we had lots of minicomputers to integrate before deploying them to several sites, therefore we needed lots of floor space. So our customers provided us with a converted blimp hangar. In the winter, the inside temperature was about 48 degrees, and that was in one of the choice seats near a mini. People worked at terminals with their coats and hats on, wearing woollen gloves with the fingers cut off. To make matters even worse, the pubs nearby were crap: Watneys, urgh.
Worst non-computer job: Applying pitch to roofs in southern California in the summer.
I'll leave out the dangerous jobs, that's a whole different category.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Before i degreed myself, I cleaned petrochem tanks. Who knows what I exposed myself to, but wading around in 3-4 feet of parafin enriched petro-sludge was good exercise, but I didn't see friends for weeks at a time because the only way to clean this stuff off was stripping down and soaking hand cleaner. That was one of the easier tanks, cleaning out tar tanks was worse, in the winter, they thought it was easier to knock out with a jackhammer, except the tar dust collected everywhere, ears, hair, etc... I had to get a haircut to get all that crap out.
The worst office job since being degreed? In the desk right outside the copy room where ammonia was used to make blueprints. Or possibly the job where my boss left a sticky note attached to a Y2K article saying "fix our system(s) so this won't affect us".
i'm in a windowless 10x10ft room with an alarm panel that alarms at least every 15 minutes for 30 seconds and a copier next to me with a broken fan (very loud). and above all.. i'm required to use Windows! oh the humanity!!
Many of us understand and some of us were even there at one time. There is a fate worse than having a 'crummy job'.
Stay safe.
could top your conditions hands down, walking away.
Used to work in a data mining. It was dark and dusty, and several of my coworkers have since succumbed to hexidecimosis or more commonly, bitlung.
But it could be worse, I know I guy who works on an offshore programming rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
Unknown host pong.
- In the middle of a crowd of 5000 bikers (Hell's Angels, etc.) when the headlining act (Steppenwolf, famous for Born To Be Wild, etc.) tells the crowd that there will be no concert because the idiot keyboard player set his laptop-controlled sequencer rig up in the sun, where both laptops proceeded to melt down. Crowd is understandably pissed off.
- 8:00 PM in a mexican ballroom in Texas: The crowd has been drinking since they were let in at 6PM. They were told at 8PM that the band (from Mexico) that they had paid $50 to see had been deported and would not be showing up. Took me less than 20 minutes to do 75 minutes worth of work getting my equipment back into my truck and getting my white ass out of there before bullets flew.
Some days I'd rather be in a cubical. Luckily, the feeling passes.NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
I needed a big heater in the trailer in the winter to keep my fingers from stiffening up so bad I couldn't type. Summer time, of course, meant it was an oven. Not so bad, until you add the 5 megawatt microwave radar just outside that would make my monitor get all wavy when it turned on and the sidelobes irradiated me.
I work for a small town maintance dept. One of the task was to monitor a sewage lift station. Once a month or so the trash pump would get bound up with rubbers and tampon strings. The only way to free the pump was to reach in up to the shoulder and pull it free. I told my supervisor where he could purchase shoulder length gloves.
The year was 1988. I was the guy sitting in the trap house all day keeping the pigeon thrower full during an annual competition... the booth was mostly underground, of course, half full of water, and I had no freedom of movement if I didn't want the thrower arm to take off an extremity. They allowed me a small cooler for lunch and stuff to drink, although drinking was Ill-advised for obvious reasons. It was about 95 degrees outside, and because the roof of the underground booth was shingled and tarred, it was about 110 inside. There was not even a kill switch within my reach - no way for me to disable the machine if something were to go horribly wrong. Also, on about every 50th throw, it would misfire, throwing the pigeon right into the small overhang from the roof at the opening of the booth - causing shards of broken clay to fly around everywhere in the booth. Luckily I had safety glasses...
I remember a particularly bad day, troubleshooting on a missile test site:
Working at 3am,
30 feet below ground,
Standing/sitting in stagnant water mixed with diesel,
an incredibly loud diesel engine running 3 feet from my head,
testing and cannibalizing 30 year old equipment,
rat shit and nests everywhere,
and it was cold.
*whimper*
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
I was paid $12 per hour.
The one good day was when instead of being a toy soldier I had to dress up as a teddy bear. Lots of pretty girls gave me big hugs.
I work for NASA and I was doing sattelite verification work, where we strap all sorta shit to the belly of a P3 Orion aircraft that basically mimics a sattelite, fly over the ocean and compare the data with the sattelite to see it matches. So we fly through thunder storms in the P3 which is a 4 prop, unheated hell chamber. Fly high and the temperature suddenly drops to nothing and we all wear thermals, then we drop back down to the deck and the temperture jacks up, we sweat buckets and the terbulence sets in. Couple this with the instrument im in charge of going on the blink so there i am strapped to a metal chair in this flying gas can with a radiometer ripped open, doing voltage equations, multimeter in hand, writing code to do tests, sweating my ass off then suddenly freezing in my own sweat, having to get up and the terbulence is dangerously bad star-trek level insanity with people flying thru the air (i almost got knocked out at one point). Now throw in the sound of all the korean grad students barfing their brains out and smell of tuna fish vomit smackin me in the face like a can of beer in a pillow case while i try to do calculus that has to be correct enough for me not to blow the whole package up when i go to test something out. Fun.
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
I was working as a telecom relay technician for a large oil company in the Gulf of Mexico. After being impressed at being flown out to a platform in a helicopter I asked where the relay was and where was the equipment that was delivered, etc. The equipment was in a steel box of a room in the middle of the summer in the gulf. After wiring it up I go to connect the mains. The only power conduit I can use is underneath the box under the platform. I call the head office, they tell me to get my ass out there and hook it up. So, afraid of heights I am in a tether hanging under an oil platform 20 meters over the water running cables. Heat, heights and being a looooong way from land are scary.
I still sometimes make the "brain cloud" gesture when I'm trying to explain why I act so (apparently) confused sometimes.
While I was in college, I worked construction for a Harvestore agent in Nebraska. You know, those blue and white grain silos you see all over the Midwest.
One time the construction crew was required to go take down two silos that had been used to store bone meal (basically all parts of an animal you can't feed to humans ground up to be made into dog food) at a defunct rendering plant so they could be moved to the plant's new location. Off we went.
We arive at the sight, and drive down what looks like a gravel road, next to a nice little lake. Evrything was fine until I stepped out of the car. When I did, I realized that the road wasn't gravel; it was bone, and the lake was blood red. I was so shocked I stepped off of the road and into six inches of rotten grease that had turned rancid in the Nebraska summer sun. I won't even bother to describe the smell.
It averaged 102 the three days I was there. Everything looked like I was watching a bad TV with static on it, because flies were everywhere. You couldn't walk without tripping over a horse's leg, or a cow's tail. Part of my job was to be inside the silo (omg the smell of rotten bone meal) pulling out bolts while another member of the team used a blowtorch to burn the carcinogenic caulking off of the outside to loosen the bolts. Inisde the silo it was probably 130 degrees, filled with black choking smoke, and the stink...
Those three days, more than any other, convinced me to finish my college degree.
The conditions are not inhumane, but it's damn f***ing hard to concentrate.
SCO Licensing Rep.
I work supporting lawyers.
I once had to work (programming) in a warehouse for a dot com company that sold framed posters on the internet. The office space was full, so the consultants were banished to the unairconditioned metal building, where it was about 120 degrees in the summer. Worse, the air stunk of glue fumes all the time from the framing work going on, which tended to make me dizzy. The last straw came when they ran out of desks and made us sit in a folding chair hunched over a tower desktop on the floor with the monitor propped up on top
It's a volunteer army, dipshit. If you complain, you are just supporting the terrorists.
(then there was the time I mapped a network by physically looking at the cables running between a bunch of labs. Under the floor. Manually pulling up floor tiles, sticking my head down and looking with a flashlight as far as I could see then walking to the next stop, pulling up a tile and following it further... fun)
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
Try patching fiber optic cables in a sewer and not puking...
Even working on the pig farm when I was a kid was pleasant compared to that!
Kenny P.
Visualize Whirled P.'s
Are you kidding me?
Two words. "Mall kiosk."
You could shove that hose up my ass and it would still be more enjoyable. Jesus. Tell me where I can send your boss my resume.
My
Limekiller
My first job out of college was with this startup that rented space in an old warehouse of some sort where the landlord would turn off the heat on the weekends. So Monday morning it was a good 40-50 degrees in the place. We would microwave glasses of hot water and carry them around in between bouts of typing to keep the fingers from going numb.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Nothing I've seen here yet compares to what I have to endure day in and day out. I'm involved with managing supermodels, and all day long these gorgeous, scantily clad women parade in and out of my office. Do you have any idea what it's like to concentrate on /. when a supermodel dressed in nothing more her panties comes into your office?
No, of course you don't. You have no idea.
This is past, but laying in aspestos strapping wires in cable gates, and working above flames from a calcium carbide 30-40MegaWatt owen
with a CO detector on you (nothing like getting 1000ppm alarms when you're stuck)
At least I calibrated the CO alarms myself, or else I would probably be having some serious issues by now.
A week after we had a majore explotions in the Owen and 3 floors with wires was burned off, me and 6 others worked on shift over 2-3 days to get new wires up the snow outside come down (some of the boards of the side on the building had melted down)
Note, this wasnt a US factory, it was owned by an US company. (company went bankrupt 1 year after I left)
Pulling a single 150' BNC cable out from under 200+ CAT5 wires which were all under a 9" drop floor with carpet glued at random intervals.
1) Remove carpet - get gluey
2) Attempt to locate BNC - flashlight, upside down for quite a while
3) Locate BNC - pull correct carpet/floor
4) Pull BNC while upside down maneuvering around desks.
5) Repeat, but do not damage the BNC cable...we may need it someday.
Through that job I foudn out that my entire body can fit under a drop floor...and that people loose shoes in the damnedest places.
This type of "You got nothing to complain about" comment always comes up in discussions like these. This thread is about somebody with a loud, comedic work setting. It does not detract from what our (or anybody else's) soldiers have to endure, nor from any other dangerous vocation. Get over yourself.
You can't ride two horses with one ass
Normally we can get one engine done in half a day, then we pack up and move on to the next jet engine in the next hangar.
It goes on like this all day, every day, 5 days a week.
I look at the other people sitting inside the buildings and think how lucky they are to only have to put up with this for 1/2 a day once a week.
I like microcars
We owe those folks a lot.
Dorm room. Virtually no heat. Broken printer. Net connection that went from "decent" to "off" every 5 minutes. Weather would go from 70 degrees and sunny at 9:30AM to snowing at noon to raining at 2PM, with no accurate forecasts. Antisocial roomate who never left the room, wouldn't speak to me, and always ate Peanut M&Ms & Snickers despite my constant reminders that I was highly allergic and the odor alone could kill me (no joke). Neighbor whose feet managed to make the entire hall smell. Guy down the hall who used to make fishsticks, stinking up every corner of the place. Collapsed cot-mattress. Chair covered in unidentifiable stains. One toilet for ~30 guys. No car. Depressed city (slum) in the middle of nowhere. Etc.
Ah, memories of freshman year... It really wasn't that bad, but it sure looks terrible on paper.
G
Feb-Mar1975, off the Alleutian Islands on a ship rigged for tropical waters. No cold weather gear, no working heaters when we first got there, wind chills so low our on deck watches were rotated back inside every 10 minutes. Never been really cold since. Everything is relative.
You have a window!?!?!
Hi, my name is Mr. Chair. Not just any chair, but Cowboyneal's chair. Have you seen him lately? This is not a good working environment for me. Especially since he's taken up typing in the nude. Oh man, not good at all. Why couldn't I have been Tyra Banks' chair, or Natalie Portmans? Mmmm, hot grits... but anyway...
;)
Mr. Cowboyneal, if you are reading this, please put your pants back on!
I once worked in a plant where they made Chapstick. If you can imagine sitting in a huge noisy room smelling Cherry chapstick 12hr a day...
Occasionally it'd be some kind of mint that would just make your eyes water. Ugh.
Get enough of the big boxes in a room and you need hearing protection just from the fan noises..
:)
I know a lot of older DP guys, and keypunchers, that are now 1/2 deaf.
But at least you are guaranteed a nice temperature to work in
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I work as the fluff person on gay pr0nos...
Well, as a tech support rep, I was DDOS'd once.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I worked at the university doing tech support for students in the dorms. The section I worked in was filled with the sororities. As such you can imagine the computer problems (they varied from computer is physically destroyed to bonzi buddy won't go away). Of course the challenge was fixing the computer in a room with 6 19-year-old, very attractive women while they were changing (literally). My highlight was attempting to defrag a drive (so this is basically watching the bar go across the screen) while 3 girls where dancing and singing around the room. They were in towels just out of the shower and waiting for me to leave.
Sure, the conditions weren't that bad, but you try fixing computer equipment under those conditions; it's not easy!!!
Yes, and the phrase you're looking for is: "I hate you."
Yes, thank you to the brave men and women ensuring that Halliburton will be in business for hundreds of years to come. A toast to the pawns!
This gentleman has made a valid point and should be up-moderated tout de suite.
An unrefrigerated morgue in the desert. Some of my utilities still have that smell in them...
All's true that is mistrusted
I drive 2 hours EACH way to work, just so I don't have to pay MD or VA taxes...not to mention I woul dhave to sell the house I just bought a few months ago. Suck.
huh?
Being a Paramedic in NYC, our "work enviroment" can get interesting:
An HIV+ patient (who also has Hep B/C) in cardiac arrest face down in a pool of his own vomit. The SRO (single room occupancy) he lives is described as follows: The walls are yellow from filth. Roaches are EVERYWHERE. The floor is non existant, it's just one seamless sea of garbage. None of the lights work, so we are using our Surefire Tac lights and the ambient light from a LifePak 12 to wrok the arrest. There's no ID anywhere that can be found and there are pill bottles dating back years.
He's in asystole, but not rigor, so we can;t realy pronounce him dead. He's on the floor, so one of us has to get on the floor to try endotracheal intubation, without getting said vomit, blood, feces on our uniform.
The poor soul hasn't showered in months and the apartment reeks of bad body odor and dried vomit. It's to narrown to work him up in the hallway, so in the apartment we stay. Doing CPR in a sqaut/sittting postion isn't very comfortable after 5 minutes. Trying to find a place to rest the drug bag without it tipping over is a pain in the ass. Keeping track of all your sharps and making damn sure they are properly disposed of in the sharps box.
The heat is truned on so high, you feel like you in a pizza oven and the windows are painted shut from years of paint being applied layer after layer.
So after about 20 mins of working this patient up you have/are:
Sweating profusely with a severe case of sweaty balls.
Your uniform has come in contact with dirt, dried feces, mouse droppings, rotting food, roaches, dust balls, urine/blood soaked rug.
Your drug back asunder all around the apartment. Intubation kit is a mess with a dirty handle and used bristo-jets everywhere.
Oh, and just in case you patient does get some spontaneous rhythm back and you happen to be on the fifth floor of said SRO with no elevator, guess what prize you get???
Show 'em what he gets Johnny!
You get to carry this guy on a flat longbaord down five flight of poorly maintained staircase!! That's including stopping at every landing to give a few squeezes to the BVM (bag-valve-mask) on the way down. Sometime they weigh 100lbs secondary to severe weight loss, somtime they can way upwards of 200lbs.
But it's worth it in my book. Plus after a call like that, we hit the diner for some rare burgers with a side of chili.
--
The part that I'm having trouble with is the amazing and total lack of professionalism here. If I step away from my terminal for more than 10 seconds, I must lock it. The programmers here sit and wait for unattended terminals -- when they find one, they'll send out an e-mail announcing "I can no longer hide my perversion" with a graphically detailed message describing some sexual perversion .
Then there's the language. I feel like I'm living in a Tarantino script. I thought purpose of profanity was to indicate strong emotions when something really bad happens. These guys use "fuck" like it was a helping verb. Yesterday the tech support guy was talking to a customer and the head programmer was having a problem compiling (compiling! it's not that big a deal). "Fuck me!" he screams, "Just fucking fuck me you fucking dickwad compiler! Kiss my ass!" I'm wondering if the customer will upgrade.
Then there's the guy who, when he's annoyed sneezes as LOUD as he can. "AAAWWWWWWWW -SHIIIIIIIT-chew! To which everyone else screams "Shut the fuck up!".
This is just a sampling. It goes on 8 hours a day. It probably goes on longer, but I'm not willing to stay here and listen to it more than that.
Maybe I should submit an "Ask Slashdot" ...
Does it make me a prude to think that some micro-amount of civility should be present in the workplace?
When I worked at the National Data Buoy Center, a division of the National Weather Service, one of my tasks was to install and qualify new meterological payloads in ocean buoys. Try sitting down inside a 40 foot diameter discus buoy, 50 miles out in the ocean, in 3-5 foot slow swell seas. Add in the tropical air temp of 95 degrees. Now try to stay focused on a electrical drawing while the world rocks to and fro.
We kept a convenient bucket (we called it the chum bucket) with us sized correctly to fit between your feet as you sit on an equipment rack. I could survive by going topside every few minutes, but others didnt fare as well.
Of course the smell of the old diesel tanks that used to power generators that ran the buoys before solar power, was tasty, and the bilge slime was equally aromatic. Combine that with vomit and the strongest of us would eventually yield to the urge.
Where the people you're trying to help are trying to kill you every day?
Anyone?
Anyone?
Bueller?
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
All ya pansy coders out there with your ooh-so-bloody-fancy optimized compilers and step through debuggers...when I started codin', there were only 1's and 0's...and we couldn't afford the 1's!
Several come to mind:
The factory in Gilmore CA that makes Garlic powder
The fish processing plant in Guaymas, Sonora
(both on olfactory assault charges)
Any class 10 clean room (those bunny suits, hair covers, double gloves, booties, and face masks are not easy to wear for the full shift.
My brother-in-law had a string of really terrible summer jobs to help pay for school. After his second year, he took a job tarring roofs all summer (not the best time to be messing about with tar). He hated it so much that the following summer he decided to take a job with a chicken processing plant. His job--and I am not making this up--was cleaning the de-feathering and beheading room.
This might just sound bad, but the reality of it was much worse. The chickens would enter the room upside-down with their legs held to a chain in an assembly-line-like fashion. They would then be manuvered into something resembling a band-saw which would relieve them of their heads. They would then be manuvered around the room to a system that would remove the feathers (and this isn't entirely clear, but apparently it involved water and electricity), bleeding out as they went. Now, by the end of a typical two-shift work day, the floor of this room was 24-36 inches deep in conjealed blood, effluence, and feathers. Since nothing is wasted, those responsible for cleaning this room were required to use snow shovels to chop this lovely gelatin into rough cubes which were then shoveled into a system used to reclaim as many feathers as possible (I assume through some sort of washing), and god knows what else. This shoveling would take about 6 hours. The remaining 2 hours of their shift would be spent using a pressure washer and steam cleaner to get everything the shovels missed and make the room neat and clean.
I guess the job paid pretty well, and he could've gone back the following summer and been promoted to cleaning the ominously-named "de-thigher", but he decided to spend that last summer going back to tarring roofs.
in a muddy pen, in the rain.... Now that would be the worst....
They stuck us in a back room a substantial hike from the restroom. The room was filled with junk and trash and had to be cleaned, starting off with snow shovels to get the biggest piles and working our way down to brooms. Once the room was cleaned we sat down to admire orr handiwork. While they sat there, a half-dozen factory workers came in and had lunch, dropping their trash on the floor. We had to padlock the room. We also had to keep an eye out whenever we rearranged the tables. Apparently, there was a furniture mover's union . . .
Once we finished we were able to work there, but a half-dozen minicomputers with no air-conditioning kept the room stifling. We couldn't wear shorts, so we made do with short-sleeve shirts and a steady supply of cold sodas from coolers. Of course, drinking all that soda meant that the distance to the bathroom became more problematic.
Ahh, the good old days.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
My company was sub contracted by IBM for Sony so I had to fly to the main Sony building in New Jersey (which sucked already), then as a lead developer I had to review a years worth of spaghetti code in a small room, day after day, with no windows and 5 Indian guys who stunk like the most potent mixture of curry and B.O. you could imagine. ...I actually lost weight because lunchtime would come and I'd have no appetite.
The Indian guys were cool but man did they stink! That was the worst condition I had to endure.
1. Corn embedder in the shit factory.
2. Spaghetti remover in the Slashcode factory.
My boss decided to help me out by having the Telecom department install an extra telephone ringer bell - a very loud one - in the center of the computer room. He was proud of himself for this, because anytime my phone would ring, it could be heard from all of the labs, the computer room, and my office.
But there was a problem. Something was wrong with the circuitry supporting that bell; occasionally it would miss the "start ringing" signal (which is OK; I'd miss one ring, but hear the next one). BUT, sometimes, it missed the "stop ringing" signal! If I picked up the phone between rings, and it had just missed the stop-ringing signal, it would keep ringing continuously until the next phone call!
Of course you can't call yourself to make your own phone ring, so I had to walk thru the computer room directly beneath the loud bell, into the lab, and call my office phone from the lab phone, just to get it to stop.
That would happen about once every couple days.
I once spent a week helping convert an abandoned wood warehouse into a wind tunnel component factory. The place was full of pigeons (and doves) and therefore full of pigeon crap. Fortunately, someone else had the job of cleaning the pigeon crap out of the place (it was about the size of a soccer pitch), but I did have to clean out one of the drains.
I have a clinet that decided that the men's restroom would be a great place for the telephones - and slowly by surely, we've added all the internet-facing computers to the same room.
About a year ago - I stopped thinging that it was a burder, and now I think it's a benefit...
I can sit on the crapper with a Thinkpad on my lap and administering the servers, and pooping at the same time.
I'm multitasking!!!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I once worked for 3 straight weeks, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day in a hot trailer, no window and no air conditioning, 98 degrees, 96% humidity with a rescue inhaler on my hip and a hard hat with a little stick-on indicator dot. If this dot turned black, I had exactly 7 seconds to put on the inhaler, after which point, there was no point. The area used a poisonous gas called phosgene, used as a weapon during World War 1. All the while I'm loading apps on Win NT workstations. Oh, and did I mention the alligators sighted earlier that week on the grounds? I did mention this was in Louisiana, right? For lunch, they provided po'boys (big sub sandwiches) and mudbugs (crawfish or prawns). FUUUUUuuuuuUUUUUUUNNN!!!
Ididn'tdoitnobodysawmedoityoucan'tproveanything!
On my first day of work at a large corporation I walked into my assigned office. It was on the west wall of a converted warehouse, but had no windows.
The walls were painted light gray, the carpet was medium gray, the lights flourescent, the desk black with a white top, and the chair dark gray and black.
Someone with a dark sense of humour had hung a black-and-white poster on the wall. I felt like I had walked into a Twilight Zone episode!
_Tim
No, I mean at -20, that must be pretty tough shit.
Okay, so about two years ago, I decided that I had enough of the Bay Area. So, I was able to convince another co worker and my boss to open a a remote telecommuting office. Sounded like a cake situation....
Well, we now have a nice 1200 sq ft office. Sweet! I am living the high life!
Back to reality: my boss decided that we should all sit in a little room about 13x13 in size, have our desks connected, and work in a hive. So, now I work literally 2 feet from my boss, our comp screens are next to each other, and he is a hardcore micro manager. So, I am watched alllll day... Add to that the fact that he is on phone conference calls ALL day on a speaker phone, and when he is not on a call, wants to bullsh!t. I have headphones I wear to try to block out the constant noise. If I turn them up too much (to block out the constant noise...), I am told he can hear my music, and that I have to turn them down.
Oh, and in the summer, he likes it HOT, and in the winter, likes it COLD. You see: AC and heat cost money...
I think I would take the jet engine over the micromanaging.
Posted anonynously.... It is a small world.
At NASA Ames, in Mountain View CA there is a Navy Base right next door where they often have the NASA U2 take off. That's loud!
But even worse was the entire year when they were working on the harrier VTOL jet. Every day, it would be out there less than 200 yards away, hovering about 50 feet in the air for hours!
You can imagine how loud a hovering jet aircraft is, and how distracting that would be 200 yards away even if you are indoors.
ah science...
The worst job i ever had, was building a tunnel boring machine for a hydro project, that was down at the bottom of a pit with a waterfall running onto it . my job at the time was to attach the cutting head bolts (6" thick by 2' long and 150lbs a piece. i did this job for 3 days in -5 deg C weather (that below freezing for the metric impaired) in a waterfall, which was only in a liquid state due to the fact that it was moving water. i was sent home the 2nd day because of hypothermia, sent home, as in not to hospital where i should have been sent. and the third day i was fired for climbing out of the pit and going up to the "dog house" as it was known to warm up. Needless to say, i was awarded big $$$ later when i sued for wrongful dismissal and endangerment. so it worked out in the end, i was only 18 at the time, so i healed quick, made all the money i needed for the next years school, but it still sucked..
Funny how I, and others with a similarly unpopular opinion feel the need to post anonymously... If only there was some rule that you could say what you want without fear for repercussions.
Where is this place, outside, that you speak of?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
...a raincoat and trash can. :(
Try combat you ungrateful fucks! ... being forced to live in the jungle with a bunch of commie slant eyes making it impossible to piss, sleep or do about anything else is worse than anything you bastards can complain about.
Delivering papers for 6 cents / paper in -30 degree weather (-50 wind chill) at 6:00 AM on a day when school was cancelled.
I worked in a restaurant on a grill where the waitresses had to cross behind me in a 3 foot space. I had to be pretty careful about swinging a burger around to the counter on the other side. That was annoying but the real hole was that the "break" room was in the basement which was dark, fetid, and filled with roaches who were well fed.
I am not making this up!
One of those suckers trundled up to the takeout counter once. As I was giving some tourist directions I noticed it crawling across the counter from the corner of my eye. Picking up a napkin I had to wait until the tourist turned away to snatch the bug. He turned back and gave me a quizzical look wondering why I had moved so fast. The managers were mercenary Neanderthals, too. That company is in much reduced circumstances now.:-)
Apologies to Dave Barry for stealing his line. Please don't sue.
I can easily top it, with two words! Lotus Notes.
I was working as an electrician's apprentice when we had to do some major electrical work in a dead animal removal/processing plant, while the plant was in full operation, in the summer (100 degree plus days), with no AC...
One could smell the stench for miles before actually arriving at the job site. The floors were constantly covered with old blood and such. In one spot there was a hole in the floor the size of a semi trailer where they would shove off all the junk they couldn't even use to make dog food. Definitely walked carefully near there...
LarryD
Bush makes our troops prey...
I was forced to work in Visual Basic for 6 months while on co-op in college. I'd take the jet engine over that crap anyday.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
I work in Newark, New Jersey. Top that.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
This happened to a friend of mine about 15 years ago. He worked in McDonald's, and he had the important responsiblity of getting new boxes of frozen chicken nuggets from the freezer when they ran out. So one day he goes back there, and they had just delivered new nuggets, and the boxes were stacked floor to ceiling. He's this little scrawny 16 yr old kid. He tries to get a box off, and something happens and the whole pile of HUNDREDS of pounds of nuggets and boxes drops on him, pinning him to the floor! So there he is in the freezer, not wearing any protection becuase he was just going to go in and out with a box of nuggets, but now he's freezing his ass off, trapped under a ton of frozen nugget boxes, and the door shuts! He thinks he gonna die, and he's sitting there on the cold floor shivering stuck for like an hour until somebody comes in to get something and sees him and rescues him from under the boxes. I know it didn't happen every day, but even spending an hour trapped under 20 boxes of frozen McNuggets in a freezer, while wearing a T-shirt, and then being ridiculed for the next six months by McDonalds employees is the worst I've ever heard.
Of course, this is news for nerds. This is a geek oriented site. We are not asking "what is the shittiest job in the world". We are asking "what is the shittiest environment YOU... A GEEK... READING SLASHDOT... has ever had to deal with.
You know.. it's a bit like a bunch of nurses having their own website where they talk about the most ridiculous situations they've been in, in the nursing profession. Nobody is comparing themselves to a frontline soldier here or a kid dying of cancer, so get off your fucking high horse.
When I was in the Marines, we would go out into the field for weeks at a time. No matter the weather or time of year. Running around in the woods all day and all night. Getting a few hours sleep at a time. And the sleep was sometimes when you were on ambush when every other person was allowed to sleep. So you would be sleeping on the ground with all the bugs, sometimes in the rain, sleet, or snow. No hot food for days at a time. This was all training and not even war time. You train like you are at war. Mind you there are people out there doing this right now as we speak. I think about it every time I think I got it rough. axehind
putting together a lan on a US cruiser in the mid 1990's, our server was secured to the deck with twine so it wouldn't slide across the room when the ship rolled. once, the ship's firefighting system was activated and the entire space was filled with 4 inches of salt water. our mail connectivity consisted of a 14.4 modem connected to a satelite phone which only worked when it was sunny.
If we're talking about IT, I ended up doing some of it during the gulf war (if you're the guy who can do it and you're there at the time, then you do it). It's hard to concentrate on what you're doing when artillery is falling.
I worked as an Software Whore for a company who's building was 1/4 mile from the east-west runway of a major international airport. All was well until the summer of '02 when the airport closed the north-south for maintance. So, the east-west became the primary runway. I could look outside, and see inside the wheel well of 747's and what not and see with great detail.
That was bad enough, then the land behind us was bought, and they proceeded to drive pilings into the ground for 10+ hours/day for a month and a half straight. Now, to top this all off; my boss was a micromanager
Wearing goggles at coding accross a room with a powerful flashlamp based Alexandrite laser at eye level accoss the room from me. With the thick rubber goggles on, trying to read the Masscomp's display in a monochromatic green haze. Removing the goggles and taking a reflected beam could yield instant blindness. Walking around the table to get to the loo with the boss saying, "don't look at the table, I've got reflections"
Not to mention the mind numbing 10hz banging of the HV dumping its juice into the flashlamps.
Hedley
PS: But it was a fun place to work!
As long as someone in the world is:
- getting shot at
- selling sex
- selling organs
- having to shoot others
- having to torture others
- risking life & limb in otherwise dangerous situations...
nobody gets to complain. So, just suck it up with your crummy desk jobs.
And no complaining about those monster executive salaries & perks either - they've also got hard jobs and deserve every penny.
Summer of 1995, Indiana State Trap Shoot.
Same setup, but the traphouse was not full of water, I had no cooler, and I had more frequent misfires. I did have a fan, which coated me with clay dust. At least I did have a kill switch and a flag to make the shooters stop when I had to.
I'm a computational physics guy. When I started we didn't have terms. So a couple weeks into the job we go shopping for computers for me and another new guy, at the universities used computer store. We get a 166 with an ancient 14 in monitor and a 400 celery with 19 inch monitor. We work it out between us that I get the 400 with the crappy monitor, and he gets the big monitor(because he mainly does the plotting of the code I run) with the crappy processor.
Well what do you know? I get the crappy processor with the crappy monitor. So I'm running 20M dollars worth of supercomputers, from a term with a harddrive to small to install gcc on! Plus you can't use the internet, because modzilla takes a good minute to load, and 20 sec per webpage.
Add to that, that due to firecode we are not allowed to lock our cubicle space at night, and so stuff keeps getting stolen. When you need 100 pounds of text books and papers to work, you can't exactly take them home with you each night!What's more is I was given admin responsiblity on the dept distributed system. I'm installing new software, and configuring it, all of a sudden I can't log in as root. One of the other prof's grad students decided that I didn't need root to admin the system, so he changed the password on me! His supervisor, which was the guy that gave my the job of admining the system, just says oh well, and I can't do anything. This is after putting off my research so I could read through 200 pages of tech manual, and tinker with the system for 2 weeks. Ergh.
My worst? Working on rabies emergency. First day on the job I was preparing specimens for the lab work - which generally involves some kid's dead puppy and a hack saw to the back of the neck in order to get to the brain.
Creeps me out to this day.
This is a logic flaw. Usually those repercussions are things which other people want to say. As such, they would be unable to say what they wanted to say (the reprecussions) due to repercussions existing a priori (the ban on reprecussions).
Part of free speach is the fact that we still have to deal with the assholes.
Where I work, we had a stray bullet come through a window and pass through where someone would've been sitting, had she/he not gone to lunch early that day.
Two people were stabbed to death right across the street. Two 70-year-old women, in a flower shop, during a robbery.
Our buildings are filled with asbestos. We can't drink the water due to bacteria in the pipes. The HVAC is constantly messed up: my boss' office is about 58 degrees F (14C) right now, but a couple weeks ago they had to send us home because it was 90+F (32C). Occasionally, we've been stuck without water for flushing toilets and washing hands.
One time, a sewage backup came out of one of our (already unusable) water fountains.
Ceiling tiles have collapsed on people's desks or right in front of some people from the GSA (Government Service Agency - they own the buildings) here to tour the building. Leaking pipes are the norm.
One time they told us to open the windows to encourage ventilation due to microbes in the air. Then they told us not to open the windows due to lead paint being used on the windows.
Here's an article from 2000 summarizing the problems.
These are the conditions US Census Bureau employees have to work in. Many, many people leave because of the problems.
--RJ
Try going to sea for months on end in a submarine. It's boiling hot or freezing, the engine room air is full of atomized oil, you can't hear a thing, blah, blah. Anyway, here's 101 reasons Mc Donald's is better than a Submarine...
<ol>
<li>
No McORSE.
</li>
<li>
If you have to take a piss, you can go take a piss. No questions asked.
</li>
<li>
You'll never have to go port and starboard on the fryer.
</li>
<li>
Better pay.
</li>
<li>
The sun.
</li>
<li>
Air.
</li>
<li>
The boxes of food at McDonald's aren't stamped "Rejected by Hardee's" or "Not fit for human consumption".
</li>
<li>
The ability to call in sick.
</li>
<li>
The ability to quit.
</li>
<li>
McDonald's doesn't get their uniforms from the same company as the state penitentiary.
</li>
<li>
McDonald's doesn't deploy.
</li>
<li>
They have actual janitors, and they use mops, not sponges.
</li>
<li>
No McDrills.
</li>
<li>
The grill breaks, you CALL someone to fix it.
</li>
<li>
At least your boss accepts that he's a clown.
</li>
<li>
No McResin Discharge.
</li>
<li>
No all night hydro on the fryer.
</li>
<li>
One word: Overtime.
</li>
<li>
Every day is slider day!
</li>
<li>
At McDonald's, you will never, EVER, worry about being put in prison for ten years because you told your wife what the secret sauce is.
</li>
<li>
They pay you for training.
</li>
<li>
You'll never die a horrible, excruciating death from the crush depth implosion of a McDonald's.
</li>
<li>
No steam piping.
</li>
<li>
No time at McDonald's will you hear your boss give a thirty minute dissertation over the 1MC on the importance of being at the register 5 minutes early.
</li>
<li>
They won't ask you about Taco Bell operations on the advancement test.
</li>
<li>
You get to leave work EVERY day at the end.
</li>
<li>
McDonald's will eventually fire the really stupid employees.
</li>
<li>
Two words: Happy Meals.
</li>
<li>
McDonald's doesn't look like a big black turd.
</li>
<li>
Grimace don't do Vulcan Death Watches.
</li>
<li>
McDonald's has a slide out back.
</li>
<li>
To do something at McDonald's, you look at the color coded chart, not OP umpty-squat, chapter whatever, reference 3, ACN B, rev 17.
</li>
<li>
If McDonald's catches fire, you LEAVE.
</li>
<li>
No McSmall Valve Maintenance.
</li>
<li>
No McCOB.
</li>
<li>
Leaving McDonald's in an emergency doesn't require a Steinke hood and a lot of praying.
</li>
<li>
The coffee's better.
</li>
<li>
Someone else makes the water.
</li>
<li>
You don't have to live there to work there.
</li>
<li>
The only cones come from the ice cream machine.
</li>
<li>
McDonald's doesn't go into dry-dock (again and again).
</li>
<li>
ALL the tests are multiple choice.
</li>
<li>
Their TV commercials are a lot cooler.
</li>
<li>
Nuff said...
At a former employer, I had to use Windows, and was forced to wear a tie. I'm not sure which was worse: the microsoft or the tie...
Worse, we're pretty much controlled by MS (by pocketbook) and our legal department (by policy), which means nothing -- NOTHING -- gets done without six sign-offs and a bunch of awkward "would it maybe be okay if" calls to MS where we ask if it's okay to do things in roundabout ways while ensuring we don't force them into a position where they've technically told us to do something.
About the only benefit from my job is that the stock's been on a steady rise over the last year, and I have a bunch of really, really cheap stock options, but since our company's in the spotlight right now, I can't even exercise them without a bunch of negative publicity and even risk of legal action. I'm afraid by the time I can cash out, we'll be down to 10% or less of current value!
color me stupid
You had 0's? Looxury. We would have bitten off our left arms for 0's - we had already eaten the right arms for tea.
They allow you to post on Slashdot? You lucky bastard.
#!/
But the worst mental environment was at a shrill right-wing newspaper in the Midwest. I clumsily tried to write editorials, which the then-editor rarely ended up agreeing with as I stand somewhat to the left of folks like Michael Savage and Robert Bartley. (As does most of America....) The editor routinely spiked articles that might offend his buddies and insulted his staff in widely-leaked management memos that sometimes included graphic slurs. (Ah, journalism in the days before Romenesko!)
One day, after getting back a scathing set of reviews from an employee survey, the guy locked me and the other four writers from my department in a darkened room, where he harangued us for almost an hour about our "bad attitudes" and threatened us with even worse treatment unless our morale improved.
I swear, Scott Adams should have sued the guy for copyright infringement.
Why is it called COMMON sense when so few people have it?
Back in 1996, I worked for a Cyber-cafe type operation. With a few days til launch, the "bricks" side of the operation wasn't complete. (To be fair, neither was the "clicks" side)
They were still doing construction, so there was sawdust and paint particles in the air. My partner and I had to wear respirators and goggles for two days while we wrote code.
The worst part was that we had to do some motherboard surgery one night. We didn't finish, so we left the PC cases open and put up a big sign that said "DO NOT PAINT IN THIS ROOM".
Of course, we came in the next day to find the room freshly painted, along with the motherboards. They used a power sprayer which coated everything in the room.
Yeah, that sucked.
I used to work for a buffoon at Walt Disney Feature Animation. Though I've worked for worse managers (albeit not many), he was the only manager where people regularly talked about killing him. So many people. People that didn't even work for him. His name rhymes with "Dean Schiller".
Anyway, last winter, we were redesigning the office, so we all had to be cramped up in small spaces while the new offices were prepared. And a lot of equipment had to be stored away. Our new, sound-proof 2 by 3 meter sized testrooms were perfect for storing lots of prototypes, tools, sharp pieces of metal etc.
This was great if it wasn't for the fact that I had keep a few machines running as well in one of the testrooms in order to find a very nasty memory-trashing bug. Did I forget to mention that the rooms weren't just soundproof at the time? They were airproof as well. So the heat was way above 35C in the morning, before I turned all computers and test equipment on and put on my earprotections.
But the worst thing wasn't neither the heat or noise. It was actually the fact that the total free floor space was three small areas, each being the exact size of a foot, located half a meter apart with lots of equipment inbetween. Operating a machine or computer in that area required a masters degree in ballet, with a missed step not just a slight fall, but it surely would mean a severe accident, since all pieces stored away in that room had _really_ sharp, metallic edges, and really seemed to be in the perfect path of my head if I would fall. Each time I moved within that room I would remind myself of my wounded knee which still hasn't recovered from a small incident in a similar environment.
I spent approx 3 weeks in that room before I finally managed to locate and fix that bug. I surely don't miss that time at all.
work in a massive call center doing tech support for cable modem users.
vile i tell you! vile!
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
cus the only way to feed him is to sleep with a man for a little bit of money
I once worked in a plastics factory. The job involved endlessly pulling plastic doodads out of huge injection-molding machines. The worst part of it was the sheer number of co-workers who had lost fingers on the job.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Be very sure you get this brand. When you get home, lock your doors, draw the curtains and disconnect the phone so you will not be disturbed. Change into very comfortable clothing and lie down on your bed.
Open the package and remove the thermometer. Now, carefully place it on the bedside table so that it will not become chipped or broken.
Take out the literature and read it carefully. You will notice that in small print there is a statement, "Every rectal thermometer made by Johnson and Johnson is personally tested". Now, close your eyes and repeat out loud five times: "I am so glad I do not work for quality control at Johnson and Johnson."
BTW...I do work for Johnson & Johnson, but thankfully, not in QA. :)
My worst working environment ever, is a company that has plenty of important stuff I could be doing. But my boss always wants to put off the work. So I usually am doing nothing. I know it sounds crazy, worst environment is where you don't do any work? Yes. I'm the kind of person who likes to keep busy. If I'm gonna get paid for doing nothing, you might as well just let me leave the building and get paid for this job while I go work at McDonald's. I'll take a tech salary and work in food service anyday. (Less whiny customers!)
One day the team leader said to me and this bloke Tom, "listen I don't want you to both go to lunch at the same time because it's really busy, go seperately".
Me: Why
Her: Because i need more work done
Me: Yes but if, say we do 100 an hour ...
Her: You'll do more than that!
Me: Yes, okay, but assume we do. Then if we both go for an hours lunch and then come back, by 2pm you'll have 200 done. If go for lunch for an hour, when I come back there will be a 100. Then Tom goes to lunch and when he's back at 2pm there will be 200. No difference.
[long pause]
Her: No sorry. Doesn't work. By 1pm I'll have 100 more than if you went together. So you're going to lunch seperately.
She wasn't the brightest spark in that factory I can tell you.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Once, I had a job where I basically assembled palettes of batteries. Sometimes we would get 100+ pound boat batteries. Sure, the heavy lifting and repetitiveness got old, but what really sucked was your clothes dissolving. I think I went through a shirt each week. Oh, and there was occasionally a really awful smell, probably acid. There was kindof a "well, duh" joke about how much lead was around, too... people (the ones who actually assembled the batteries) were constantly failing the blood lead
tests.
Being a brush dragger for a tree service was not really very fun in the summer. I had nightmares about being sucked into the chipper.
Um lets see... Once I worked in Alaska on a floating salmon processing factory. This place was waaay below health and other federal standards. I worked 16 hour days, 7 days a week for a month and a half. Damn, I was a stupid fscker.
So... needless to say, I am very appreciative of my web design/sysadmin job I have now!
Jeans, shirt, full body flame retardant nomex suit over that, plus a full body rain suit, tall leather steel toed boots, hard hat, safety glasses, heavy gloves, hearing protection, in 90+ degree temperatures and direct sunlight, working six inches from pipes and heat exchangers running at over 700 degrees while standing in six inches of rain water with petroleum products floating on the surface, surrounded by distillation columns covered in warnings that they're full of carcinogens.
Thankfully that was a one day assignment. The next day I went back into the climate controlled, blast resistant building and sat at a desk.
> lying flat on my back for 12 hours ... type using one hand
"Alright where the fsck is Rus NOW?
The router is choking on PORN and the IP is Rus's laptop.
Why are you all smirking?! Where the HELL is he?"
"um... you are standing on him, sir. He's crawled under the floor again."
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
My buddy had the job of going into sewage treatment plants after they were drained for the anual cleaning. All the sediments and other heavy 'objects' (read: the odd animal, or bird that had fallen in the tanks, condoms, etc etc) that wouldn't fit through the filter grates had to be shovelled out or picked out by hand. Basically he climbed down into the large tanks that usually store huge volumes of raw sewage and anything else that gets flushed down the sh*tter and scrubbed 'em clean.
I'd say this probably isn't the worst job out there, but its pretty shitty. Tee hee.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Not the worst, but pretty mind-numbing...
A student job at some Big Ivy U keeping the library card catalog up to date, before there were computer databases.
Monday: "We got 3000 new books this month; please insert these cards."
Wednesday: "These 1000 books are no longer in the library; please remove their cards."
In a million book stack, with 1000 cards per tray and 1000 trays. And of course, the requests are not sorted yet.
Because you can never really leave work.
One time I had to snowmachine about 20 miles to a malfunctioning telecom tower. The trip was invigorated by the fact that my thermometer stopped reading at -30 f, that's not including the wind chill so I really don't know how cold it was.
After arriving, had to climb the smallish (40 ft) tower plug my laptop into the router and type in exactly what my boss said. (She was the telecomm guru, I was the hardware tech.)
After about 10 minutes the LCD screen cracked, but we had got the router into semi working condition so she could remote control my laptop and finish the configuration before the laptop froze completely (about another ten minutes.)
Inspite of the cold weather gear I ended up with some minor forstbite on fingers, nose, and cheeks.
And I had a kidney stone attack on the ride back, that's not really part of the job. It was just icing on the cake of truely evil day.
Then there was the time I was working on a computer in the wheelhouse and someone set the office I was in on fire by welding outside it...
*A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer.*
Maybe he was referring to the Iraqi civilians.
klaxon definition
Try working 60-300 ft in the air in the night, wind, rain, around voltages 110-500kv. One bump into those lines and you really are toast. Oh yeah, you are held up by 2, .5 inch steel spikes on your shoes. I like my job though.
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My grandfather had to work 16 hour shifts on the island of Attu in the Aleutians as a soldier during WWII. He had to drive the backhoe to dig the trenches for the first part of the job, and then had to drive the bulldozer TO PUSH THE BODIES OF THE DEAD JAPANESE TROOPS INTO THE TRENCH. This was done in near arctic weather conditions. As a member of the quartermasters corp., he had to run boxes of ammo and other supplies to the front line during battles when things ran low, handing them out under fire. Quite often, you were advised not to go to the bathroom alone while in the field because you might not come back. I can't think of any job where you get to sit at a desk and don't have to fear for you life as being so bad after realizing what he went through.
As a consultant for a large telecom company, I worked in Saudi Arabia for six months. Rhiad wasn't too bad. In Jeddah though, the streets were filled with begging children, many of them with missing or crippled legs. I was informed by one of the locals that most of those childred had been maimed on purpose by their "pimps", so as to attract more sympathy, and hence more handouts.
Sorry for the downer story, but there are some pretty crappy "working conditions" out there.
That says it all.
My worst job conditions were performing underground thermonuclear testing in the early 1980's. The DEC PDP 11's used real core memory as it was non-volatile (AC power was unreliable as the utility poles usually got snapped by ground motion). We also had about 150 milliseconds to write to the RL02 disk before a relay would close dumping DC current directly into the actuator and suck the heads clean off the drive before the "bump" arrived.
Eventually, we ran out of real estate and had to test beneath old above-ground sites. You could always tell as the vegation actually grew greener in a broad circular area. Probably left over fission products for fertilzer. Oh, and the fused silica was also a hint.
I once worked for a company that had a data center in the basement of a shopping mall, and we had several other basement offices. There was some remodelling going on, so I had to put up with the occasional pounding of a sledghammer on cinder block walls. So far, no big deal.
One day after most people had left, I was working at my terminal when the sledgehammer pounding was particularly loud. I mean REALLY loud, my desk was shaking. Suddenly, accompanied by flying chips of brick and concrete dust, the head of a sledgehammer came crashing through the wall in front of me. Seems they're supposed to take out that wall, too.
I still needed to finish up what I was working on, so I dragged my desk back a few yards, threw up some plastic sheeting to keep dust out of the monitor, and kept on programming while workmen destroyed the concrete block wall in front of me, putting up with the occasional shower of rock chips and dust.
-- Alastair
. . . For 14 months now. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I was a ride attendant at an amusment park and one day a group of people decided to set themselves on fire while in line for the ride I was running. (this was during a religous event that was happening in the park that week, and is the busiest week in the park)
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
I'm sitting in the middle of my ~120 sqft. office (yes, with a door) typing this on my 2.4 GHz P4 running WinXPPro (every silver lining has a bit of cloud) looking out the window across the hall at the scenic view of a lake with foot trails running around it.
The hell of it is that I'm just a contractor here... the actual employees have larger offices with real desks (I have 2 small tables instead) and windows in their offices instead of across the hall.
I get paid good money to do database programming, simple UI design and development and advanced database support (ie, 3rd level, little direct contact with users). Since I'm a contractor, I go home when my 40 hrs are up. Did I mention that I just got my new 1 year contract in the mail last night?
Oh, what's that? This is supposed to be about BAD conditions? Oh... never mind!
First thing that comes to mind: having the barn cleaner chain jump its drive sprocket halfway through a run in the winter. What does that mean? Well, a barn cleaner is basically a chain with "paddles" on it, that snakes its way through the gutter that the cows shit in. The chain is driven by a large electric motor, and the paddles pull the shit through the gutter, outside up a ramp, and into a manure spreader, which was previously parked underneath the high point of the ramp. The electric drive motor sits at the top of the ramp, where the chain does a 180 and goes back into the barn. Naturally, this is the point where the chain always decides to jump the sprocket. And always after half a load was complete, so the spreader was significantly loaded. So how do you fix it? Well, you go outside in the bitter cold of upstate New York with no gloves on (because you need fine finger control to adjust the workings of the machine), climb up into the spreader (which is now half full), reach up above your head, and restring the shit-covered chain back on to the shit-covered sprocket, while standing knee-deep in shit and having shit drop down on to you. At least the shit keeps your fingers warm.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This post should have been headed with "Get Some Priorities, People!". Your illegal derivation of a copyrighted work has been reported to the TPAA (Troll Poster's Association of America).
So I'm 19 years old, nailing the super-hot product development manager. You know the one, fit, big boobs, tight butt--the woman all the geeks drooled over. But I couldn't brag to any of my fellow Sys Admins about it. . . It was really hard to work in those conditions. -i
In the end, I lasted 9 months, which was way too long for me. On the plus side, I got to know a few good people (nothing like friendship forged under fire), and have a war story that is hard to beat.
Last I heard about the owner is he is now a spammer.
Maybe I've said too much....
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I spent a few days debugging a linux box with modem problems (which turned out to partially be PBX problems) a few years ago (it was running Red Hat 3). It was the system that provided flight information to the LED displays throughout Huntsville International (Alabama, not Texas). The computer was in a closet below the main terminal. The room the closet was in happened to be the power plant and had all of the blowers, electricals, turbines, etc. Louder than hell and I was too stupid to bring a jacket or ear plugs the first day and forgot them once a couple days later.
Luckily it was my last few days with the company I worked for and I got to drop the problem in someone else's lap before it boondoggled.
When not working from home nowadays my 2nd most common work environment is in airports waiting for planes. Sometimes I'd rather be in the turbine closet than stuffed in with a few thousand folk, so I guess the closet wasn't -that- bad, but boy did it suck.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
I'd tell him to shut up or to take it somewhere else, but I've only worked here for two months, and I'm not sure if he's one of my "superiors" or not.
Me dressed in a bunny suit sitting in front of a large black desk comprising a built in Gene Sequencer and PC. Me, hacking on the box to optimize memory settings in DOS. Memmaker, EMM386, QEMM. Mad German bastard standing over my shoulder ranting his bewilderment over how his home tuned OT-EKZEK-BAT blew up. Say OT-EKZEK-BAT 20 times a minute for a half hour.
Oh and don't forget the shuddering, moaning, shrieking, dying, diarrheal monkeys deliberately infected with the Simian Immuno Deficiency virus equivalent to HIV who were stacked against the wall 5 high and 7 wide directly behind the Mad German.
Many years ago, I did a job for a Big Bank ... in the "raw plastic" division. That's where all the blank, unprinted credit cards live. Those things are worth an enormous amount to, say, a criminal, and the bank considered the liability very seriously.
I've worked in highly classified military environments that had less security than the old Raw Plastic Division. Not just the man-trap on the way in, mind you, they had redundant video cameras covering everything, roving armed guards, multiple safe doors locked behind employees, etc. I wasn't allowed to bring anything in or out of the facility.
But what was worst was I had a computer terminal set up in a hutch in a strange little U-shaped cement column. Basically, it was like being in a broom closet, with my back to the door. This meant that I had no idea what was going on behind me... which wouldn't have been a problem, if my employer and the security guards (who pretty much universally hated "that nerd kid" who earned $7/hr when they earned less than half that) would come up quietly behind me, clap me on the shoulder, and shout "How's it going?" I'd usually jump half out of my skin, and they'd look at me with feigned surprise: "oh, sorry to startle you."
After a month on that job, I was a nervous wreck. I finally went to the boss, and told him that it was adversely affecting the quality of the code. His response, of course, was that I'd better see to it that it didn't, or they'd find another programmer.
Still, that helped pay for a lot of college expenses. $7/hr was a lot of money in those days...
The other bad environment I once worked in was a job on a space-related military base. I was long-haired and wear an earring. I'd have to go onto the base via a road with multiple guards and cement baffles (where the road winds back and forth so you can't go faster than a few miles per hour). So one time, the guard at one end of the baffle checked my ID, waved me through, and then had second thoughts, seeing my hippy-mobile (old Volvo station wagon with leftist bumper stickers). So he radioed ahead to the guard at the other end of the baffle, who whipped out her rifle, pointed it at my head, and re-checked my ID for a few minutes. I had guns pointed at me several times during the course of that job. The base was on alert, so I suspect the guns were actually loaded. Staring down the barrel of one of those evil looking Colts really makes you reflect on life. I guess I'm glad I don't have to do it daily. I realize that people in a lot of places have to deal with that all the time.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
I was a consultant many years ago at a nuclear power plant. After 3 weeks of crap to get a security clearance (the administrative offices are all in the secure area, for no apparent reason),
I finally get to the job site and I'm in a small conference room with 5 other programmers. All of whom were good practicing Catholics. It's that time of year, so they all 5 decide to give up something for Lent. They could give up chocolate, or peanuts, or sunflower seeds, or chewing tobacco, all of which were present in the little tiny conference room and annoying the piss out of me. But, no. They all decide to give up caffeine. So I was stuck in a small room with 5 people going through caffeine withdrawls: Headaches, grouchy, temper on edge, and prone to make stupid mistakes and get ludicrously defensive about them.
Plus all you could eat in the cafeteria on Fridays was fish sticks. Gah.
"Man is a wolf to man."
I had this thought yesterday (which is relevant to this thread). I wondered how it was that employers could create such shitty job environments, how those who work in corporate America make it a habit to use and abuse people under them, how people can come to a point where they no longer treat other people like respectable humans. Did these people not grow up with any parents? Or did their parents never read them stories that have nice cute animals with morals?
I mean, seriously, I don't understand how half the people who seem to have this fucked up notion of how to treat people are created. Is it repetitive evil encountered in working environments? An "either it's you or me" mentality?
Someone, please explain. Was Hobbes right?
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
at the peep show
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
I recently had to work out of my 74 year old incredibly annoying jewish mother's house!!!!! After that I gave myself a root canal..for FUN!!!
Poopsmith
Right before the dreaded Earthlink somehow convinced/forced Charles to sell Mindspring, we had our top story AC go out.
For those that 'served' in Atlanta, it was the tech support floor -- all 140 of us. Yeah, I should mention that this was in July... in Georgia... where the humidity hovers around 90% during that time of the year. Imagine 140 people talking at once. Imagine 140 computers (struggling) and the hot air THEY put out. Now imagine a lot of people-types whom don't always wear deodorant, and many whom don't even shower but when it rains. Stupid people on the phone. Over 8 hours of this.
Fun times.
Marvin the Paranoid Android said it best, "It's the people you meet at this job that really get you down."
To me, the worst working conditions are the ones that put one in contact with the worst kinds of people, whether they be annoying, dangerous, or just frightfully stupid.
Like sales directors who delete files and then blame me for not instructing them to not do that, or that call up customers and tell them that their order didn't arrive on time because I screwed up filling out the FedEx forms (when it was in fact because he gave me the wrong address), or that want to use a PowerBook without ever having to learn anything about operating it.
I used to work in a camera store, and an elderly woman came in and wanted to return the Kodak camera kit that she got for Christmas. She said it didn't work at all, and she was just absolutely disgusted. I noticed that the two AA batteries that came included with the kit were still in their shrinkwrap and hadn't been removed from their little cubbyhole in the styrofoam packing.
"Did you put the batteries in at all?" I asked, wonderingly.
"What? You mean it takes BATTERIES?" she yelped.
"The camera has a flash and an film auto-advance motor, of course it takes batteries," I explained calmly.
"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard! A camera that takes batteries, it's absurd!" And she was serious.
Yes, to me it's not working conditions that suck, it's people that suck.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
What are the worst conditions you have ever had to work under?" Can you top that? (If top is the word ...)
Scotland. It doesn't matter where or what you do, it is just the worst place. There are two possibilities now:
a) you laugh loud and say "AY!" to your wee colleague, which (of course) wears no underwear and continue eating a fried Mars bar and a sausage pizza. Later you walk trough the corridor, it rains because it always rains in scotland, everywhere, and a horde of fat girls grab your ass (dont wonder where they come from, actually they are everywhere). Possibly in the afternoon the management will ask you to reduce some unecessary features in your current project, they suggest removing the GUI from an application for mobile phones, and seriously discuss if unit tests are suitable for a board member presentation. After looking to your work colleage and you are nodding to each other about the non-outspoken question 'they are nuts?', you are realising that you are not fallen asleep over a Dilbert cartoon in your daily email... you shockingly realise you are still traped in Scotland and its worse than any cartoon nightmare. It doesnt matter how modern your working environment is, how good the free coffes is... it is the f*cking hell on earth. Believe, come and visist me.
b) you decide to mod me down. Well, years later you end up writing a posting on Slashdot about rain, people eating fried mars bars, asking for help to escape from this job in Scotland!
Please help me. However, Loch Ness is cool and meanwhile I own a kilt.
Visual Studio! The editor is so bad it made me smash the keyboard. Then I realised that you can get XEmacs for Windows!
... being forced to pair with someone totoally clueless doing pair programming.
Sure - a plywood box at Kandahar Airfield - sorry to those who think that servicemen (and women) are too stupid to read Slashdot - those of us who served, or are still serving, realize from hints dropped here and there in posts that a lot of us (who did volunteer to defend our country) do, in fact, have the mental acuity to log on to a website, read, and post. So it's prefectly reasonable to ask if you got shot at, or if your co-workers were killed by an IED, or if a rocket landed just a few hundred meters from your "office" last night... And if you still feel bad about your "demanding" office job, trust me, I, at least, am happy to let you wallow in your ignorance.
I worked for a few years bartending at a dance club. Once every year or so, the sewers would back up. Primarily behind the bar and in the bathrooms. So on those nights I'd be serving drinks while standing in a lake of excrement. While listening to some godawful song at a very high volume for the 40-bazillionth time. Sounds like something out of Greek mythology, almost.
I work in a Visual FoxPro Shop!!!
what exactly? cheap oil? GWB's re-election? I must be the confused one...
So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life.
I worked in a place where we consultants were placed in a long narrow gap between cubicles. If the person on the end wanted to go to the bathroom, we had to all stand up so he could get out.
When we complained enough, we were moved to our own cubes...in the middle of the customer service call center.
Personally I don't understand the logic of hiring expensive people and cramming them in a small environment. If you put two people into the same cube, I'd bet you aren't getting the work out of those two people that one undisturbed person would manage to get done.
Peoplesoft is still the best book on the subject. Buy one and leave it on your manager's desk.
A co-worker tried to blow the whistle on our supervisor - the main conduit through which the organization was embezzling money - and our supervisor and his co-horts harassed him in a similar manner as they later did me. Thus, they truly were embezzling money (there is no question about that - they got in trouble for a similar thing about twelve years before my working there) and used their diagnosis as a method to drive me away from the company.
I can tell the difference between a voice that someone says and one that comes out of the sky, etc. and after this do you really think I'd ever take a med from a shrink again? No way.
My old boss would always spout that one out whenever anyone compained about the smell.
We were, after all, a fish processing plant and towards the afternoon, on a hot summers day, all the fish gore that had been trimmed of could *really* put a dampener on your day.
And just for that little extra fun, the computer room was next to the main processing area as it was a refrigerated building and "we have to keep the systems cool !".
It was a treat going home, frozen and still having the aroma or rotting fish embedded in your clothes.
This will seam like a dream job to many but once you live it for a while you realize it is not. I got paied to pritty much do nothing. there was maybe a total of 1 to 1.5 hours of work for every 8 hour shift. The job is called Computer Operations. I finaly got another job (a programming job). But 8 hours with no real work to do, it is just not fun, at first it seams like it would be a great job. I passed the time by looking for projects to do. I ended up writing two programs for the job, that make the job worse by autimating some more of the tasks, so now there is even less to do there (they still use my code)
I do miss one thing about it though, we got to do some tech support, I did enjoy doing that.
And frankly, I'm older than Frank. At least he had ones and zeros. We had to pick slivers of flesh from our arms to make ones.
My desk...
'nough said
http://www.pbase.com/efatapo
I worked for a previous Dot-Bom that moved into a decomissioned hospital. The IT department, which I was in, was put in the morgue.
I once had a log ("sharks" as a chinese ramper called them, with the greatest accent 'shawks!') that hit my arm on the way out. I had a nice big chunk stuck in my watch band.
I have seen at least 2 people take some bad stuff (cargo DC8 and a DL767) directly to the face/mouth.
Courtesy of The Guardian
State of the Union address - discuss it here You are signed in as
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Started by wepollock at 03:21am Jan 29, 2003 BST
President Bush last night declared the US to be on a mission to "lead the cause of freedom" and claimed his doctrine of pre-emptive military action had advanced the cause of democracy and non-proliferation around the world.
Read the full Guardian story and the full text of George Bush's speech here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/
Please note: this talkthread was originally set up to discuss 2003 state of the union speech.
Guardian Unlimited Talk
Top | Previous | All messages | Outline (468 previous messages) macthebrief - 11:00am Jan 21, 2004 BST (#469 of 486)
Stench of the Union Speech:
"Trust me, your captain and we will fight the evil-doers from the outside and keep you safe on the inside"
Works every time.
benni - 11:16am Jan 21, 2004 BST (#470 of 486)
George Bush = Peace? Count the words.
Terror/ist/s/ism x 20 - Kill/ed/er/s/ing x 11 - War x 10 - Good x 8 - Peace x 5 - God/'s x 3 - Love x 2
guilttrip - 12:31pm Jan 21, 2004 BST (#471 of 486)
what the fuck was that about ashley pearson? he's used that stunt before and blair used it at conference (remember the little girl whose family couldn't afford an alarm clock until labour came to power?
junior; '..and ashley...if you see a man in uniform.................say.... "thank you..." '
Irgalmatlan - 02:05pm Jan 21, 2004 BST (#472 of 486)
It's 9/11, 24/7 until 11/2......
What would this administration have done without the horrific attacks on New York?
I haven't seen any evidence of either they, or the wars that followed, "getting in the way" of other policy agendas that had to be put on hold due to these lamentable circumstances.
rose - 02:26pm Jan 21, 2004 BST (#473 of 486)
Bush said. "And one reason is clear: For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible. And no one can now doubt the word of America."
Like Saddam had WMD?
rose - 02:29pm Jan 21, 2004 BST (#474 of 486)
"There is a difference, however, between leading a coalition of many nations and submitting to the objections of a few. America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people."
Didn't he want the world's permission to free the people of Iraq? Or is he still saying Saddam had WMD?
rose - 02:39pm Jan 21, 2004 BST (#475 of 486)
"As part of the offensive against terror, we are also confronting the regimes that harbor and support terrorists and could supply them with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. The United States and our allies are determined: We refuse to live in the shadow of this ultimate danger."
He continues to state that Saddam was behind 9-11. But I understand the man; once you start lying you have to continue and it gets worse and worse. But Congress? Do they have to cheer when he says this? And the US media? And the US public? Has a whole nation gone mad?
rose - 03:05pm Jan 21, 2004 BST (#476 of 486)
"We are working with Iraqis and the United Nations to prepare for a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty by the end of June"
Si this is why Bush has been courting Annan these past few days. Just so that he could insert this part into his address.
evilissimo - 03:28pm Jan 21, 2004 BST (#477 of 486)
so Ive just read the speech - what's the deal with all the interventionist government bullshit? "defending" marriage with Consitutional ammendments? lecturing big name athletics? "encouraging right choices" in abstinence and drug use?
what business is it of government to meddle in these things? Republicans go on and on about being the party of small government, and personal responsibility, and push all this paternalistic bullshit on the public? what assholes.
Poke
I used to work for a small high-tech firm that was set up above a machine shop. There was a lot of milling, grinding and machining going on below us, and there was next to no air quality control in our offices. I'd go home every day, blow my nose, and the tissue would be black with the stuff I'd been breathing into my lungs all day....I'm never going back there.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
I taught a calculus class in a room that shared one wall with a bowling alley. Sometimes the crashes were well placed.. like cymbals in a standup comedians routine. Most of the time it was just hard to concentrate.
I woke up this morning, it was -42 degrees in my room. I had to start a fire in the fireplace because it snowed too hard last night and the snow got down the chimney and put out the fire. The water pipes in the basement burst thanks to the lack of heat, and the four inches of water on the floor down there is mostly frozen now.
Seems like a good day to do some overclocking, I thought to myself.
Then I proceeded to go to work. My boots are frozen solid into the basement floor, so I couldnt wear them. I try the car. It makes a very bad noise at me, so I open the hood. The block has cracked, thanks to my antifreeze freezing. Good to -40, it says on the bottle. Bastards.
Outside I discover its rather windy. Thus, I trudge through massive amounts of snow, with no boots. The way the snow fell, I might as well be climbing a mountain. Its steep. Of course, by the time I come home, the wind erased my tracks on the way out. Steep on the way home.
You british think you've got it bad. Try doin all that stuff when its -40!
guess the current working conditions are illegal under OSHA regulations...
I had to share a small office with a guy that farted all day long. He maintained that they got trapped in his chair cushion so it was ok but some of them clearly made it through.
I tried air freshener but the orange/ass mix was almost worse than just ass. In the end I made him move near the window and leave it open with a fan going.
Alright everyone, we've got a smash hit on our hands here. We've got to release an English translation to rake in the dough in the western hemisphere; what would be our most cost effective solution?
Hey, didn't Mr. Ishikawa take a semester of English during his senior year at the university?
Oh, yeah, let's have him do the translation!
Here is one example of the results.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
The department I work for is so underfunded that fully half our PC's (so around 300) are STILL running Win95b... 200 of the PC's are P166's.
yech
until we get decent funding, I'm making sure that management keeps the oldest PC's... it's not like they do any work anyways, right?
I work on computers in prisons. I think the worst experience I had was in a prison in New Jersey. I was supposed to fly home and not even go to this prison, but they needed me to install computers there ASAP (long story, not worth telling). So I've been away from home (st. Louis) 8 days already, now I have to spend two more in this prison and I have to get the job at least mostly done. I've prepared for the extra days by washing socks and underwear in the hotel sink.
So the first day I'm there, I get there around 7:00 am. Breakfast is a vending machine donut. Mmm. Then it's down to the actual prison, with inmates wandering about. I have to install a rackmount server without a rack. It sits up on a high shelf, monitor, keyboard, etc. So once it's up there and I need to configure it, I have to stand on a stool and still reach. I also have to wheel around a cart with 6 other computers on it and install them in various nooks and crannies around the jail. For those of you who have never been in a jail, they are smelly, dirty, cold, dimly lit, and badly wired. So I finally get all these machines in and configured to see the server. It's maybe noon by now. So back we go to the server, which needs some adjustments, and then I have to work on the client machines in the office next to the server. A relatively pleasant place to be BUT...the cafeteria is right down the hall. And it's being renovated. The only way to renovate concrete is to use a freakin' jack hammer. So that's going on all day long.
I've skipped lunch by this point, hoping to get out and get dinner at a reasonable time. At this point, I have to configure our software, which requires a lot of accounting knowledge and asking the customer what sorts of accounts and transactions he needs. This takes a good long time, yelling over the jackhammer and with a pounding headache. Once that is set up, i have to hand key in the data from their old system, because the vendor of the old system refuses to provide any sort of electronic export of data. Even a comma seperated text file would work. But they won't do it. They claim they can't. So in all this data goes. By 6:00 or so the jack hammer has stopped, but I will still be there for 3 more hours before I'm done. So much for timely dinner.
At the end of it all, I do get dinner, too tired to have a beer though. Back to the hotel with the knowledge that I have another day of this ahead.
That was pretty bad, but it could be worse...
-LD
When I lived in El Paso for a summer, I worked for my father at a Mexican Foods company making salsa, canned/jarred jalapenos, chiles, and so on. During the summer, I had to wear a respirator from Sears and goggles all day, every day, and in September they started dicing jalapenos, and then the respirator made no difference. The juice infused the air so thickly it'd make you cough from outside the factory. I wore the respirator and a surgical mask at the same time, and it didn't help much. The most interesting part of it was this contigent of hispanic women who worked the line, they showed up for the 4 month jalapeno canning season, and they would work a 10 hour shift stanning in the midst of all this with only a medical mask on. They'd work the chiles with only latex on, which generally didn't do anything for you (a lot of people wore heavy kitchen gloves and long sleeves every day) and never complained. Interesting stuff.
This one time at work my boss said I needed to code a script in Perl... AND MAKE IT READABLE AND MAINTAINABLE!!!
Doesn't that depend on how big your ass is?
I was on location with my boss, several thousand miles from home, installing a machine at a client, when it suddenly dawned on me that maybe my boss had something to do with the recent dissapearances of some of my co workers.
He was keeping a pretty close eye on me, and I was wondering whether to contact the authorities when local cops and FBI stormed us, locked him away, and left me suddenly catapulted into being in charge of satisfying a boatload of unhappy clients, several employees short, with no clear view of how we were going to get paid, with my nutcase boss harassing us from prison.
I should have walked. I'm not sure why I didn't, but I learned a lot about customer loyalty, and the legal system.
The day before the interview for my current job, I was called and told to bring a cigarette and a blindfold to the interview.
I have to work in an environment where this kind of crap is very common: >desc table_foo; year number(4) month number(2) day number(2) > That's how dumb the "table designing department" people are. We are given tables like these to work on, and there is nothing we can do about it.
While I agree that for the most part, sweatshops are awful things relative to what we see in the US (I can't speak for other countries), I saw a news piece (I think on 60 Minutes) about sweatshops. They pointed out that after one sweatshop had closed, a lot of the workers went into prostitution. This information was provided by UNICEF.
Read this article for more details:g mab_sweatshops031011-1.html
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/GiveMeABreak/
And on the topic of prostitution:
I'll go out on a limb and say working in a brothel is worse than a sweatshop.
Remember, a lot of the issues around manufacturing jobs going overseas are similar to tech jobs going overseas, i.e. overseas workers are cheaper than domestic workers, and the jobs provide these people with better lives (higher relative incomes than their other options). And for the record, I hate offshoring as much as the next tech geek, although you can't argue that it leads to some good... just not for us...
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
Working in a computer room with a thousand fans with constant temp of 63degrees operating a slow ass Unisys A mainframe with windows 98 PC.
I actually liked this job: Large shop, no air conditioning or ventilation The shop would be over 100 degrees in the summer, lots of work had to be done outside, or worse IN one of the busses which had been sitting in the sun all day. All the mechanics were on the brink of carbon monoxide poisoning, the diesel fumes were bad. We had few faulty 16 ton air jacks, so every once in a while a bus would fall on you while you were under it. At the end of the day, everyone was covered in diesel and motor oil which we all know causes cancer. It was fun though, working on big diesel engines is a nice way to pass time. I was getting about $8 per hour.
TallGreen CMS hosting
I don't have a job you insentive clods.
Veramocor
I have to work in an environment where this kind of crap is very common:
>desc table_foo;
year number(4)
month number(2)
day number(2)
>
That's how dumb the "table designing department" people are. We are given tables like these to work on, and there is nothing we can do about it.
The other part of my job was to clean glassware. We cleaned it in a mix of sulfuric and nitric acid. Once, someone didn't rinse the gloves off and I accidently brushed my cheek with them. Ouchie. We didn't have a water purification system in the lab, or lab carts for some reason, so I was dragging a 50L carboy down the hall to fill it with water and then carrying it back full. 50L is 50kilos. At the time I weighed maybe 54kilos. I had great upper arm strength by the end of that summer.
I love science.
I used to be a plumber and pipefitter, BEFORE I was in the plumbers/pipefitters union.
Well we had this one job, we used it to initiate newbies, imagine a charged stack (a 6 inch sewer pipe full 6 stories up) and being in the basment and having to remove a cover that would release all the contents, VERY quickly I might add,
The trick was leaning WAY over and hiding under nearby shelving and giving this bragg plug a whack with a 5lb hammer. The newbies of course didnt know this and would always ask why all the other guys were wearing raincoats.
Tampons, Diapers, Condoms, You name it all stuck to the ceiling afterwards (and it was a 10ft ceiling)
Even though its not my office, but the project manager of an IT team at our hospital has a window right next to where the emergency helicopters land. Yesterday I was sitting there during a meeting and *WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP* for like 5 minutes.
The worst I've ever had to deal with, and I know others can top this, is to do extreme temperature shake tests of vehicles. Basically this means freezing a vehicle overnight to minus twenty (F), then spending about 30 minutes sitting in said vehicle to evaluate its performance. Mind you, this means the vehicle is tossing around on giant hydraulic cylinders like you're driving over the worst (non-)road you can imagine. Then, the heat lamps come on, and 8 hours later we do the same test after soaking the vehicle at 150 F. Do three times a week for 4 months straight. It's always fun when you come out of the minus 20 freezer to the plus-twenty outside temp and need to take off your coat. Also remember not to lean up against the heat-lamps, you might catch your coat on fire...
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
As a teenager I worked in a potato packing plant. I had to bag, sew, and load 50# and 100# bags of potatos and load them in train box cars and semi-truck trailers. I once had to fully load an 18-wheeler which had just come from Nevada where the AC had broken down while the truck was loaded with beef. This was in July or August. I can't remember how many times I threw-up while loading that trailer but lets just say it was more than a few.
I guess it's not as bad as Letterman's old list of worst jobs. #9 and #10 were "Crack Whore" and "Assistant Crack Whore".
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
Lara Croft Land [goatse.cx]
Goatse is offline, you insensitive clod!
I'm not sure I can top the original poster, and I know there are people with more dangerous jobs than I had too.
That being said, I used to work at a steel processing plant, though as a technical personel. In the plant area there are several huge cutting machines that cut the sheet steel as it rolls down the line. The presses make very loud noise when they cut steel up to 1/2 an inch thick. I'm not sure how loud in decibels, but several of those machines running and cutting makes for an extremly loud work environment. Imagine 1/2 inch thick steel on a coil rolling off and bending up into the air off the conveyer as it is being cut since it cannot roll and be cut at the same time, but the machine keeps feeding so the steel bows. When the steel flops back down it makes quite a ruckuss too. It was the loudest thing I'd heard short of working on pulse jets and tesla coils with a friend.
Now for the danger part, you know you're in big-boy land because instead of the usual pictures with a hand and a NO circle around it, you have a picture of a hand with the fingers severed and blood drops between! Those presses would cut through any part of your body like butter!
While filming safety videos, we sent bananas through the pinch points on the machine, it was funny, but scary all the same as you watch mush come out that could just as easily have been a hand, arm, etc.
During the same shooting, a guy was leaning over the tin cutting line (which runs very fast since the tin is so lightweight) to show what not to do, and at the same time a sheet was ejected from the cutting die at quite a high speed and just barely cleared his head. We were a few millimeters from a funeral.
Steel workers have some of the most dangerous jobs, working near multi thousand degree blast furnaces, pouring molten steel, rolling multi-ton coils and beams around, etc etc. A run-away coil could easily flatten a man.
I was lucky enough to be a tech worker and not out in the plant area every day, but I appreciate the work they do!
Had to drive 3 hours to and from work each day. Had to fill my gas tank every other day. Butt worn thin from constant sitting.
Hey, thanks for the layoff.
-----------
Adam
When I was just out of High School, I worked on a oilfield crew that disassembled drilling rigs, moved them and reassembled them. The work was so dangerous that nearly everyone who had been there for very long had a finger, toe or eye missing. Another crappy job was stacking cow hides in a boxcar in freezing cold winter weather. The hides were covered in cowshit and salt and were soaking wet. I made $1.50/hr.
The Truth About Slashdot
I have a pretty horrible working environment story. When I was in high school my dad got me this job working as a summer maintenance guy for the county courthouse. This was in East Texas during the summer , so it was 100 degrees+ outside with 100% humidity almost every day. At the courthouse, there was an old jail that started on the 10th floor and went to the roof on the 14th. It hadn't been used in 25 years and had been sealed off from the rest of the building. Someone thought it would be a good idea to renovate this and use it for storage. As a summer worker, it became my job along with the other two high school kids to clean this up. When we unsealed the door, the heat was almost unbearable. We took a thermometer up on the third day and it was 145 degrees fahrenheit. There was dust 3 inches thick on the floor from the decaying lead paint and debries. There were dead rats, pigeons, and spiders everywhere. We had to wear three dust masks to keep our lungs from being coated with this crap. To top it off, we had to saw the old bars out of the jail with hacksaws. There were windows everywhere, but they were sealed shut, so sunlight and heat got in, but no air got out, and there was no air circulation. We finally ended up breaking some of the windows to let some of the heat out. I hypothesize that hell is pretty similar to this environment.
Try doing a stint in the military during prolonged combat operations.
If someone is not shooting at you on a more or less daily basis, then your job conditions aren't THAT bad.
When I worked for IEG (Internet Entertainment Group), I had to look at porn all day. Doctor, my eyes...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I was briefly in jail -- so I used to drink too much, mind your own business :( -- with a nice but not-too-bright guy who used to work at a company that reconditioned the drums that turn around on concrete trucks so that the concrete doesn't set. He described being in the drum welding while a guy was outside reshaping the drum with a sledge hammer.
Tough job!
I once worked with a kid right out of college. I was connecting a up a computer, strafing the lines with a ground wire.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
Good opportunity to teach him something "What would you guess I am doing?"
"I don't know, that's why I asked" he replied
Fair enough after all he holds a CS degree. "I am removing any excess charge on the connector so we don't short out the computer. It is an ESD safety measure." I informed him.
"Oh. I didn't think you were straightening the lines or anything" he quickly replies. Okay he doesn't know when to shut up. I continue connecting the computer and he still moves in to see what I am doing. Since we are connecting this at 10 at night trying to start a series of 3 hour tests I am agitated and yell at him to back off.
"I just want to see what you are doing"
"I'M TAKING THE MALE CONNECTOR AND STICKING IT IN THE FEMALE CONNECTOR!"
"... What's a female and male connector?"
Others good ones are him not being able to operate a rental car hand brake. Calling into meetings that are down the hall and asking for clarification 4 times or more. And the mother load, hitting on the bosses daughter, with her asking me if that is what he is doing, in front of the boss.
After all he is a CS major. Try working with a pointy haired coworker.
Yes, I work in the entertainment industry. So, a lot of the time im no more then 40ft away from the 120db or so.
3 different ones come to mind, all in the great outdoors. For the most part I loved the work, but 3 still give me the willies:
1) Geophysical/Geologic studies for 3 months straight in the Chihuahuan desert in Mexico in the summer. Lived in a tent and went into town once a month for a shower and supplies. Learned to love rattlesankes.
2) Geophysical survey/data reduction in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains in New Mexico in the late fall...working as high as 14K feet in the snowstorms.
3) Same kind of work in the Cascade range in Washington in the winter, up to 9K feet.
But then again, to quote Roy Batty, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..."
Although I've never been to Iraq, and am not currently working a "sh*t job" (I'm currently unemployed), I do think I've been in a pretty bad work situation.
Back in the summer of 2001, I worked for a highway construction site flagging company. We were the people who set up all the traffic cones, signs, etc. and stood out there all day (often 12+ hours) trying to get people to slow down so that they wouldn't hit anyone or ram their car into one of the big 4-ton excavation machines.
At first, all I had to do was stand around, wave my neon-orange caution flag, and "look pretty," as my foreman would say. Not a real problem; the deisel fumes sucked and the long hours did a number on my (already screwed-up) feet, but it payed 10 an hour and the foreman was a really cool boss who knew what she was doing, so it wasn't so bad.
Well, after the first week, things picked up as we switched jobs from curb work to a full-fledged re-pavement of a stretch of the main drag / highway in this particular small, western town in the desert. I was promoted (thankfully) to "relief flagger," though I didn't get an actual raise (the job payed 11 an hour for every flagger except the foreman).
Since I'm in a rush right now, here's a list of all I (and most others on the job) had to contend with: brats on the radio trying to disrupt our communications (almost ended up in an accident), a minor flash flood, old tourists in RVs who couldn't drive (we had four people with injuries to their hands, and one person with a broken neck thanks to five seperate drivers who couldn't drive in a straight line), enraged business owners who threatened to shoot us (cops came and left, but didn't do anything), incliment weather (with highs around 106 and lows of below freezing, and winds above forty MPH), a broken gas main and the panic in trying to get five hundred people to shut off their engines and -not- murder us becuase of the fact that we couldn't move anyone who wasn't an emergency service worker (this included an FBI agent who "just had to get beyond the break so that he could get to his investigation"), at least one rattlesnake, severe sunburn (one poor guy forgot his sunscreen and ended up with 3rd degree sunburn; he was back on the job the very next day), and a lot more that I can't recall right now.
All in all, though, that wasn't the worst job I've ever had. Just goes to show that it's the boss that makes all the difference, I guess.
~UP
Eat the Path.
Alright, I can top that. I work in a company that not only masters karaoke, but also allows the general public to come in and record. We're two doors down from a studio... Now, about three months ago, our heater for this section of the building went out so we've been at the mercy of the weather, with an outside door being beside our office, leading to the employee outside smoking area. So someone's in and out every 10 - 15 seconds... Then to plus all this, mandatory employee name tags were started this month along with a health care plan at about $75 a week.
If it dosen't beat ya, then at least I'm at par...
Well I dont know what you guys think... but to me the worst working environments are the ones where they make you do actual work. I mean c'mon! I should be able to take long naps, eat at my desk, and spend all day reading Slashdot. I mean, don't get me wrong, I do get about 15 good solid minutes a day of work in. Like right now I'm sitting here typing up this stupid comment, with my feet up in the window sill, notebook on my lap and my chair in the fully reclined position. Woops gotta go check my IM conversation...
I currently work in a call center for a major printer manufacturer, doing technical support. Up until recently, we were actually located in a makeshift cube farm, located in the company's warehouse. There were people packaging boxes and forklifts driving by while us grunts on the phones were straining our ears to hear customers trying to tell us why they couldn't install their brand new printers. Try forcing already angry customers to try and communicate with representatives who can't hear them, along with forklift and beeping sounds in the background... it sucked. All day I had customers asking me if I was working outside or in a warehouse or on a street corner.
Not that it's much better now... we're on the 3rd floor of a building with a constantly broken elevator and no heating, while it is -15 degrees Celsius outside. And our cubicle walls are only 4 feet high, providing absolutely no sound blocking at all, so I hear the guy next to me trying to explain where the Start button is, while I'm still straining to hear my customer explain his installation woes. All of this, coupled with inept management is making me a very bitter person. Then again, call centers aren't really a good place to work anyway...
you mean kelvin....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Shipbreaking seems a bit tough.
I worked in a motel that had a sewage treatment plant. Every morning (summer in the south so it's hot), I walked down, donned a yellow glove, and pulled condoms from the grate. I tossed them into a bucket. When the bucket got full, I dumped it into the dumpster. Then I turned off the jets and scraped off the shit that had collected on the sides of the tank with a broom. Then I reversed the jets to clear them. Then restarted the plant.
All of this with a hangover.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Looking for cheap mod points, I see.
One job we were sent on was to unload this freighter that had been in port for a couple of weeks but behind a picket line. The strike was over but the stuff on board had sat in the heat for far too long. The local longshoremen wouldn't handle these skins and other ex-meat products so they got us in there. We rotated being in the hold and out on the docks, but it really didn't matter where you were within a block of the place; it stunk so bad we were wearing masks to breath. I had to throw away the clothes after the week we were at it.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
Oh, man, I forgot about the time they sent us a message that said some servers would be offline that weekend so they could be moved to an "environmentally sound" facility. Nothing about moving the employees, though...
That did a LOT for morale...
--RJ
It blows my mind when a desk jockey bitches about his/her job.
I dare any of you to spend 5 minutes on a pouring floor or running a snag grinder in a foundry.
one small mis-step and you are fricking dead or horribly maimed. I saw a guy lose his foot the worst possible way, a runout in a steel ladel poured directly onto his leg, burned out the protective suit and then filled his boot within 2 seconds.
How would you like yo lose your foot by having it burned off you. or having a snag grinder wheel explode and what doesnt embed in your body thorws you against a steel wall.
Let me know when your job is actually dangerous and you get paid almost nothing to do it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
RJ? Are you Rick Jones down in cubical 3C? Wow man, I didn't know you read Slashdot. And to think we work together!
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
I worked software technical support for a company that decided to add this type of business. Their existing business was packaging software on assembly lines. I worked next to a giant garage door where trucks would back into loading materials. The assembly line workers were mostly illegal immigrants and very bitter people.
There were two bathrooms - the executive bathroom, and the "other" one. There was a war for a while where the white-collar tech support dweebs felt they deserved a proper office bathroom. At one point, they stopped letting us use the nice one and made us share with the assembly line workers. I have never seen such a disgusting bathroom, and I have travelled the country by motorcycle. At one point, it was so bad that someone crapped on the floor - either in protest, or because they couldn't bring themselves to sit on the disgusting seats.
When they pull all the employees aside and threaten to fire whoever they catch crapping on the bathroom floor, you know you've got it bad.
# Erik
I see your point, and have a suggestion that might help. I'm allergic to both dogs and cats, and ragweed. Funny thing is, just over a decade ago, I got a dog anyway. After a few weeks of trying to tough it out with anti-allergy medications, I decided to stop taking the pills. What followed was a few weeks of pure hell, then ... no more allergy to dog fur. Coincidently, hay fever season is also a LOT less trying - most years, I don't notice it.
Hope it helps...
I have to take chemical handling safety classes due to state regulations which classify my office as a chemistry lab. (The real lab is down the hall.)
...
But that's no problem for my coworker who used to work next to the local police department's firing range: edit, compile, link, BLAM! edit, compile, link, BLAM!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Several years ago, I had the job from hell.
I worked in a pre-clinical drug development facility (read "drug lab") that did everything up through animal testing at my location. I was responsible for the system that collected data. Despite having contractors and program managers who were responsible for everything outside the data center, I was periodically forced to put on scrubs, gloves, booties, mask and boufant and trudge through animal rooms testing data ports.
Like I said, this was definitively someone else's job, and they were paid quite well for it, but I still got stuck with it. The worst came after a 24 hour system upgrade, where I finished my tasks and was then sent in for another four hours in the animal rooms. Hazardous environment, not my job, physically stressful, and adding several hours of physical labor to the end of an already 24-hour shift. Dogs, monkeys, mice, rabbits, and they made me dress funny, too.
I was already unhappy with my job and looking to leave. Finding out that they were willing to treat me worse than the lab animals motivated me, but wasn't a real surprise.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
I had a contract gig in the early 90's at a call center in Chicago. I was fixing their software which was a POS (Pile Of Shit) running on SCO. My "office" was a closet. My "desk" was a door sitting on top of milk crates. My "chair" was a couple of milk crates, one on top of the other. I had to go across the alley to steal the milk crates from the Jewelle/Osco. I had to provide my own computer. The worst part was my "boss" who spent most of the day sitting at his desk doing shots of Tequila, cleaning his guns and verbally abusing the women who worked their. I was never so glad to leave a job.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
A breif description of my job includes offering technical support for Tire retread plants, you know those huge tires you see on tractor trailors. Well when I first started this job they require you visit one of these plants for an installation.
So I took a train up to MA and headed out to the plant. When I got there I had been warned that they are by far some of the dirtiest places you will ever see. Boy was that an understatement. Everywhere you look there is tire rubber dust, in the air, on the ground, on everything! The floor itself was a grey concrete, though I couldn't see this until I scrapped about an inch of the rubber dust away(took a few minutes). Once I was introduced around they started educating me on how a retreaded tire is made. They didn't warn me about the monorail, I learned that myself. During my education I started to hear a metal grinding sound. I turned around and caught one of these hooks carrying a 50 lbs tire on the monorail in the forehead. I flew to the floor landing squarly on my ass.
Once I was helped to my feet and brushed off what I could of the tire dust I knew this was going to be a week to remember. I spent the rest of the time at that site watching my ass for those tires weigh almost half my weight.
The memories of that week will forever remind me "I don't have it so bad". Though I will say, those Khaki pants I had on will never be the color of khaki again.
-Certified TechnoWeinie
I went to a casting plant that was closing to help auction off some of the equipment over the Internet (back in the boom days).
I was amazed! We had to inventory stuff in storage rooms that had literally 6 inches of ultra-fine black power over everything. It was even 3 inched deep in low-traffic areas of the main floor.
When I was in the plant, it was shut down. But I could just imagine this place running full tilt in the summer. Must have been pretty bad -- probably 100+ degrees, lifting hot castings, breathing in this fine, black crap. Yech.
The thing about it was that we met a bunch of the workers that stayed to help out. If they were trusted to stay and help they must of been some of the better, more loyal workers. Even these guys seemed sorta happy that the plant was closing.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
One of the storage rooms in our building used to be a bathroom. The waste drains were (poorly) plugged and flew off the pipes one day. A co-worker and I had to get in there to re-plug the pipes (fortunately we managed to weasle out of the clean up). The smell was so bad we had to put Vick VapoRub under our noses and wear the resiprators from the paint booth.
My lack of God, it's Trotsky!
We used to make hundreds of grams of the stuff at a time, wrapped in Kevlar with ear defenders on and huge safety shields. Everything was by hand signals.
Making things worse was the fact that we were working in a bunker in a remote part of a western state that only had one life flight helicopter for the entire state at the time, and no level 1 trauma center. The local hospital was 70 miles away from any major city, and really wasn't up to fixing anything more complex than hangnails.
Miserable, wretched job- making explosives nobody else would make, under horrible working conditions. Fortunately, my boss was great. He and I made some truly dangerous compounds, and got away without so much as a scratch- a combination of skill and luck.
Whine, whine, "woe poor me".
There's three potential reasons for your unemployment, the sooner you deal with it, the better:
a) you're not very good at what you do, otherwise your talent would be well-received
b) you're not a nice person to be around or to deal with on a daily basis, which is why no one wants to extend your contract, hire you full-time or recommend you to their associates
c) you think you're too good to find a low-paying job to get by, so instead you sit at home angry at the world because you feel you deserve a programming job
Grow up and have a nice cup of STFU. We don't care, we all have our own problems.
> because you can't tell a blind woman to move her fucking dog.
Move it when she ain't looking, you goddamned pussy.
Doesn't anyone watch Six Feet Under?
My first job out of school was working in Seattle on the 7th floor of a high rise. The view from my desk was Mt Rainer, the Cascade mountains, and Sea Tac airport. Visitors would ask how I could get any work done with the view. Does being overly distracted with a view count as a bad work environment?
back in my day we didn't have "cat-5" or "network cable" we had ferrets in tubes with binary shaved into their backs!
I was on a sub tender while we were undergoing a refit ourselves. Tied up at Guam, the air conditioning was off so the 92 degrees F/95% humidity weather was unmoderated. The heat was oppressive, but that wasn't the real problem. On the weather deck below my office they spent a week and a half removing the many layers of paint, non-skid and rust down to bare metal with a variety of paint chippers. The noise of pneumatic needle guns was one thing, but the drum chippers resonated at the same frequency of a dentist's drill. The vibrations reverberated through the deck at my feet. So, all day long as I worked I felt like I was in a dentist's chair getting my teeth drilled.
The potato it is uninformed.
Fairly widely acknowledged in the real world (tm) that the worst jobs are roofing (+/-40c + tar + slant) and road paving crews (heat+more tar+idiot drivers). Mindless repetition and fumes are bad for the brain.
only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd
I had a boss who doled out an endless amount of analogies that made no sense, and required explanation that we never got. "Business is a lot like eating food, digesting, and taking dumps." And then he'd walk away. I considered this a lot worse than having to work in a freshly-painted office with no ventilation.
So who were you having sex with in the bathroom door, and how on earth did you get inside the door in the first place? Or was this some sort of glory hole setup?
My first amazing disaster Day Job was at Two Guys. Two Guys Department Stores don't exist anymore. They were too far ahead of their time, in a sad and evil way. They were huge -- truly enormous - stores that had everything from groceries to stereos to clothing to lumber to car parts- like a WalMart on steroids. Unfortunately, their merchandise was second rate and they treated their employees poorly, ultimately dooming the store to failure.
For minimum wage, my job was to scrape bubblegum off the floor, and then wax the floor before the store opened. I would spend the rest of the day attending to emergencies as they developed. In principle, it was an OK summer job for a long haired arty musician type barely out of High School with no job skills. In practice it was a torture pit.
The place was run by this monstrous and abusive asshole we called Ming - from the old Buck Rogers movies- Ming The Merciless. To call him a creep and a jerk would be an insult to the nasty fiends and sentient nodes of evil in our world and the next. He was simply one of the vilest creatures Mother Nature has ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of this Earth. Everyone hated him, and everyone hated Two Guys, even the people who shopped there. There was an underground river of merchandise leaving the store in the pockets and cars of the customers AND the employees. It was an enterprise so universal, the manager of the electronics department was even caught shoplifting- by Ming, no less!
The thieving manager was pushing one of those giant tacky fake wood console TV/Stereo/turntable/Radio sets out the door at closing time. Ming saw him struggling to get it out the door, and asked,
"Why don't you have one of the kids move this? Where's the customer's TRUCK to haul this thing away? Hey - isn't that YOUR VAN parked there with the door open and motor running???"
Busted...
Morale was non-existent. Employees would regularly sabotage the place just for the sake of something interesting to do that would irritate Ming. One fine afternoon, some whack job let all the gerbils out of the cages in the Pets Department. The fuzzy little guys, being hungry little critters, quickly hopped off to the Grocery Department, where they merrily tucked into the lettuce and surrounding produce. A little old woman with rhinestone cat's eye glasses rattled some celery at me and shouted in a thick Yiddish accent-
"My boy- der's RATS in zee lettuce! Call zee Police! Do zomsink!"
We chased them all into the back of the building and set up little food stations for them.
One day, we, the porters of Two Guys, the lowest of the low, had had enough of Ming's white glove treatment of the crappy linoleum floors, and figured- we have to shut this place down. We took all the rubbish, display cases, boxes -- anything we could find- and packed it into the trash compactor room. A clothing rack was quickly heaved into the compactor, and in moments, the compactor's motor burned itself out. Then the trash REALLY started piling up. The next day, we anonymously called the health and fire departments for numerous violations. Yes, it was a stinking mess. Yes, they should have been fined and closed until it was fixed. Yes, we needed a day off. But Ming met the inspectors at the door with a case of booze for each of them. They never set foot on my polished linoleum. The reports of Two Guys's crimes against man and nature were never made, and the store opened as usual. Ming had us compacting trash by the afternoon.
This kind of open warfare between workers and management (actually, the sides were unevenly divided into: Everybody versus MING. Even the department managers hated him, and would regularly work to sabotage him.) was a regular feature of the workday. As a porter, I had free range to the entire store. Regular retail employees were required to stay in their departments, so, I would cruise through the store and see w
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I spent the day for 3 weeks int eh summer of 1987 in a level 5 federal prison. Level 6 in for the Hannibal Lector's of the world. Get the picture.
The inmates I was training to run this software were a murderer(not his first), a armed bank (Not his first) robber, and a Maimi Drug lord.
I got to walk in each day and be surrounded by violent felons. No escort, no kevlar.
This was the only time in my life I was glad to were a pressed shirt and tie. I help me stand out from the inmates. I had to buy new pants when I got there. The standard uniform was tan slacks. So I did not want to wear any.
One day I left after most of the staff. After the guards let me through the exit, a voice booms from the sky. Stop where you are. It's amazing that the red dot did not make me shit my pants. Then the voice said, "Show me your ID badge." I did. Then, "You may go." And the little red laser dot went away.
A little cold and noise. WIMP! Be around people would would volently assault you because you looked them in the eye at the wrong moment!
It seems like I've always had shitty jobs..
Once I've been hired as a programmer for projects at *somebody's home*, with terribly annoying people. It turned out to be the project from hell.
They did not have coffee or anything to eat or drink, except for some mega-caffeinated drink, which resulted in programming with a rapidly beating heart and sweaty handpalms. No shops in the neighborhood to get food, either.
Did I mention the 12-hour workdays and total 3 hours+ travel.. the annoying and clueless sales-like types constantly looking over my shoulder, asking for progress and reports, smoking nonstop... and the project manager, who was introduced to me as 'experienced developer with golden hands': he turned out to be a nitwit who heard a few bells ring. He had spent 8 months developing a data layer with ADO, which I rewrote in about a day. After that, he did not like me very much.
The wage seemed ok; however, after a month or two, I was so fed up with the situation that I quit. They didn't pay the final bill ($3000) because they 'accidently forgot' to sign the timesheet. It still pisses me off..
See my other reply. I'm currently working with someone to start an official probe in their embezzlement and I'm sure that forensic auditors can find enough evidence to indict them. As for the voices, etc. I'm positive I know what the root cause is (demons) and the only method to counteract them is with the power and authority of Jesus Christ - medication doesn't work.
you government employess get paid pretty well and have great benefits.
As I'm writing this, the crews continue to clean up the mess that is a direct result of a burst water main. It seems that in Connecticut, sub zero temperatures are not the norm and people are just not used to realizing that pipes can freeze over the weekend when the heat is down. I came in on Monday with the carpets sopping wet after the owner and his friends pumped the 2" of water out... For two days now, there have been industrial fans and dehumidifiers running, creating a whitenoise that causes telephone conversation with clients near impossible... all that and I haven't even mentioned the smell.
was my worst job. Cleaning the "viewing booths" made the job unbearable. I did meet some interesting characters at that time of night.
After my first year of college I worked the summer at a high value resistor factory. They made the resistors the went into pacemakers, guided missiles, and other random things that needed obscure resistor types.
I would bike to work, which was about 10 miles away from where I lived. I got hit by cars 2 times that summer. If it was pouring rain, I would pack a backpack of extra clothes to wear once I got there - not that the dress code was strict, I just didn't want to be wet.
The place was essentially just a huge warehouse with different stations in it. My friend and I would maintain the network, and then do any odd job that needed to be done - usually because whoever was supposed to do it didn't show up that day (without warning).
Nearly everyone that worked there on the floor was Russian and worked at least one other job - they barely spoke English at all. They nearly all had PhDs and were professors and other random cool things in Russia, but left for whatever reasons one leaves such a place - likely due to whatever religion they felt they wanted to practice.
Everyone that worked in the office was related since it was a privately run/owned company.
The owner of the company just sat at his desk all day and would demand the fastest/best computer. We tested him by "installing" new parts which meant that we took his computer apart one component at a time so after a few days was just an empty shell. He never complained - just kept bragging about how his was faster and that we needed to keep him updated.
My manager went to a community college about 5 years after she graduated high school - she hadn't heard of the college that my friend and I went to - so we told her it was a community college. The fact that it was in another state from the one in which we lived didn't seem to phase her or make her take pause.
She fancied herself to be quite the artist and she would post up her work around the office - usually of wolves, the moon, and desert scenes - it wasn't truly awful - but it was in no way good and at best she could have sold it on the side of the road in Mexico and a few trailer park types might have bought it.
The Russians would smoke every single chance they go - the instant they got outside, they were smoking. They also would taunt us with "BOTTLEOFVODKA!!" which seemed to be interchangeable for really anything you wanted it to be - an insult, a question, slang... I think they just liked the way it sounded.
One of the Russians told us that his daughter worked "at the salad bar vendor Vendy's" - I always found that amusing - as if they sold salad bars there.
The two other Americans on the floor other than myself and my friend (it was his extended family that owned and ran the place), there was an older woman that was very nice, and very very dumb.
Her sole job was to run the powder coater, and she had done this for many years.
Technically it wasn't a particularly healthy job, but she was happy if they had the radio on and she could take smoking breaks.
Then there was a guy that was our age, but instead of the college route post high school, he dropped out of high school and got a few girls pregnant. He drove a brand new Neon Sport which he installed a very loud stereo system into. He would drive us to lunch in that, the stereo so loud and distorted that you didn't really know what was playing, and the only thing keeping you from shitting yourself was if you focused on how much the glass in the car was rattling.
He would routinely find great amusement in swerving out into the oncoming traffic if he could scare high school students trying to learn to drive with their driving school placards on the roof of their car.
He would also lean out the window and whistle and hoot at elderly women telling them the sexual acts he wished to perform on them.
And he would yell at women pushing strollers that their child was "hot" but in fact "too old" for his tastes.
As classy as this guy sounds, he was actually relatively smart all things considered. He
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I live and work in my home in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. I live 4 blocks from the beach and have to somehow manage to get work done with all these women in bikinis passing by all hours of the day. How am I supposed to get anything done? I don't know why I put up with it (and just as I'm typing this, my 4 beautiful German neighbors walked by, so excuse the typos). God my life is hell.
tout de suite
Traitor!!! Bush 2004!!!
Well here, at our work, they make us use Ant, but instead of using a proper build.xml file for each module, we use a top level file only and have the Visual Studio solution file build all the sub modules. It is a madhouse.
While in college I worked in a research lab that did neurological testing on cats. The worst part of the job was going into the room with the cats to take one out for study. From the outside you could hear them meowing and crying, but them moment you opened the door they would immediately shut up. It was the most unnerving experience walking into a room with 30 silent cats staring at you. They totally let you know that they were aware when a cat left it never came back.
creepy
It was at this point that I thought of making a crack about working for the government in D.C. Little did I know how close I was to the truth.
Oh, heads rolled that day, I tell you.
--- Ban humanity.
Running a fluorescence spectrometer on a 33Mhz 486. It has a custom window manager atop DOS (it's pre-windows), and it has a dead MB battery, so every time you boot, you have to enter the bios setup and remind it that it has a hard drive.
...and not my job, but a friend of mine had one of the worst jobs I've ever heard of.
He worked for a factory that makes cement and delivers it to building sites in those big "mixer" trucks. Back then, the cement containers on the trucks were chain driven (I think they're mostly hydraulic now). Sometimes, the chains would break. If a drive chain broke while a truck was loaded, it had to be *quickly* returned to the factory to be unloaded.
Sometimes, the cement would "set" before it could be unloaded. And thus, my friend's job...
He had to crawl into the container with a jack-hammer, break up the cement, and throw it out. Just imagine the noise of a jackhammer operating within a giant metal trash can. There was also one additional hazard -- the "blades" attached to the container that mix the cement. The cement basically acts like a grinding stone and sharpens the blades until they are like razors.
Whenever we would sit around at talk about really bad previous jobs, he was not allowed to play :-).
Christmas. Toys 'R Us. And I worked in "Boy's Toys"
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Modpoints are free (but stay-tuned, and they'll probably become cheap soon-enough!)
me
As a matter of fact, yes. I have been shot at and I returned fire.. All in All, I still think the tech support job I have is the shitiest job I've had and the Marine Corps was one of the best. If I wouldn't have been injured (different situation) I'd still be in.
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
You are confused. These soldiers are the victim of this policy I'd imagine many don't even realise it. Don't diminish what they are going through because the policy they are implementing is wrong.
I used to think that cubicles were an inefficient idea. They offered no real privacy and they turned offices into mazes. But then I started temping at this one company and was led into a room where I was seized by this Joseph Conradian Heart of Darkness terror when I saw that there were...no...cubicles... Just 50 heads all fully exposed to one another, all on the phones or typing, trying not to look at one another. I immediately flashed back to the movie "9 to 5" and wondered when Jane Fonda was going to start shooting a shotgun at Dabney Coleman with a plastic waste bin on his head.
You stole my post! I will be filing suite against you in federal court over your callous disregaurd for my intellectual property. I bought that post and all of its assosiated copyrights years ago. You may, however, licience it from me as an end user or in source form. The end user license is $699 per post, but only for a limited time.
Imagine a place where you spend a month writing a detailed design document for a simple project, then when you start to code it, the boss gets agitated when you don't see him daily.
Imagine being a developer with 10 years experiance having your code read daily, then being criticized on the following:
Variable names -- BlueDog change to DogBlue, but changed back the next day
Can't use pointers in C++ code, because the manager doesn't understand them. Must use almost useless references.
Can't use INI files because Microsoft is going to remove support for them from the OS.
Can't use byte or short because the compiler is faster with ints.
Must use undocumented, non-standard, made up variable names.
Then to add to the stew being threated with:
Contractors fired exactly on the 3rd week.
Contractors fired for voicing an opinion. Any opinion.
Contractors criticized for receiving personal phone calls.
Contractors being fired after being told no one was going to be fired.
Being told you need this job more than we need you.
Perhaps this doesn't sound like much, but when it occurs day in, and day out, for months on end, it's a very hostile and unpleasant working environment, indeed.
While I do get along well with the traders, it sounds like a madhouse here until the early afternoon. They use squawk boxes and lound shouts to communicate what they cannot over messaging. They are also constantly joking around to relieve the real stress of what they do. Jerry Springer blasts through at certain times, weird noises, weekly screaming matches.
My music is turned up to the max and I still hear them. It was culture shock at first, but I am fairly productive now.
This is a rough depiction of the last couple of minutes:
- JML
In other words, you want the freedom to speak without allowing others the freedom to speak about what you said.
Vilseck, FRG - SNOWED my first day in country. July 5th, 1985!
I can live with a little engine noise and cold. In the cold, moonless nights on guard duty, with terrorist/bombers and wild boars, now that is rough working conditions! We weren't even at war then.
HQ 3/35th Armor, US Army
God Bless All Soldiers, Everywhere.
Peace,
PaGeN
When a Ball Dreams, It Dreams it's a Frisbee.
Jesus, you'd think for a census guy he'd be a little more precise than just saying "...Many, many people..."
At least your window opens.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I was once hired as a programmer and ended up spending about half my time taking tech support calls at random times throughout the day, all the while the boss's skanky girlfriend would run around chit-chatting loudly and occassionally breaking down into crying fits of hysteria.
A few years ago, the consulting company I was working for had me traveling. A big chemical company was upgrading their servers and workstations.
All went well until we arrived to one of their plants in North Carolina. The plant itself was fine. It was the Chicken processing plant next to the chemical plant that was the problem. Image the smell of chicken fat fermenting in an open vat... for a day or two.
Occasionally, we would see a semi-truck with a trailer. You know: the trailer has four sides, an open top and it typically used to haul coal or dirt. Now, instead of hauling coal or dirt, it hauls a slimy chicken goo which is in some sort of liquid form. And to top it all off, the driver likes to take corners a little too fast so that the chicken goo splashes over the edge and splatters on the ground. (We kept our windows rolled up whenever we drove in/out of this place... just to be safe).
On the plus side, it was December when I was there. The chicken goo had to ferment several days in order to get that throat-gagging smell. Imagine being there on a hot, steamy and overly sunny July or August day.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
In Edwin Muir's Autobiography, (a must-read!) he described a pretty bad working experience as an office clerk in a bone factory. Bones from all over Scotland, some no longer fresh, were reduced to charcoal that was later used to purify sugar. "The bones, decorated with festoons of slowly writhing, fat yellow maggots" lay outside the building in a railway siding until the furnace was ready for them. The smell of the roasting bones, Muir wrote, "was a gentle, clinging, sweet stench, suggesting dissolution and hospitals and slaughter-houses, the odour of drains, and the rancid stink of bad, roasting meat." A room Muir rented around this time looked out on a graveyard; nothing could have been more apt. "Absorbed in my own dissociation," Muir observed of his Glasgow period, "the world retreated from me in all its shapes."
In effort of understatment, I'll just add that that would kinda suck.
-Tom
I used to work as a sample prep technician in a geochemical analysis lab. My job was to grind core samples into a talcum powder-like consistency using a "ringer" (kind of like an overgrown paint-shaker from hell). Since the samples were being analyzed to detect asbestos, gold, arsenic - we didn't want to breathe that dust in or get it on our clothes so we had to wear heavy rubber suits, isolated breathing units, goggles, heavy rubber gloves, hardhats and steel-toe boots. The worst part? It was in a corrugated aluminum shed in the middle of the summer and it would hit about 45' Celcius inside between the machinery and the easy-bake oven we were working in. Also, it was full of illegal immigrants who would do all kinds of entertaining things like have packing-knife fights in the lunchroom and loose fingers in the rock chipper.
Some poor schmucks had been up in those mountain peaks for years, with nothing to do but watch a horizon that doesn't change. Oh, and try just about anything to keep from freezing their asses off. And no one to talk to but the other poor schmuck, who probably did something terrible to get assigned to this duty.
Now, that's a sucky work environment, even if you are just a motion-capture CG effect.
normal(adj)- people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots [DECS]
That sucks about your working environments. I work from home mostly and my girlfriend does to. She likes to get frisky under the desk while I play final fantasy on the clock.
Try a coke processing plant ( the black coal stuff, not the drink ) or a casting plant that uses graphite as a release agent.. Both will cause black lung, among other things...
That will give you this disease Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Damn !, I've been waiting since I was 7 years old to use that word for more than "I can say the longest word in the dictionary !"
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
I once had to work a few feet away from the guy that was sleeping with my wife.
(She and I were getting separated, but geez, what are the chances he would get a job where I worked!)
I worked for a company that made plastic bags that your newspaper goes in when it is wet out. This place DID NOT have airconditioning, or heating. The machine that cuts the bags uses a heat bar, heated to between 700 to 950 degrees F. I worked on a two machine set, in between these heat bars during the summer in mid Missouri. The average temperature inside the production area during the summer was 130 degrees. To cool off you actually went outside where it was 98 degrees with 90% humidity.
The hottest was a afternoon when the temp hit 143 inside. All but three of the workers when home that night. I wasn't one of them.
But, what can I say, for a summer job in college, the money was great.
eh, this sucks, I am going back to bed....
I used to work in restaraunts and washed dishes all day, not just for a half a day once a week. I made $3 an hour and had to work my ass off. At the end of the day I stunk like grease. The sad part is that I was only a teenager, so it didn't matter, but there are many people in this country working shitty jobs as busboys and dishwashers and they are adults (of course they are Mexican so I guess they don't matter either).
Cry me a river, at least you have a window and a chair and you probably make more than minimum wage.
LoRider
When I was 16 I got hired by this African immigrant who was sending used clothes over to the homeland. I thought that it sounded like a good cause and I figured that minimum wage would be fine for that. Basically my job consisted of driving a u-haul truck around to the dumpsters behind thrift stores and emptying the dirty, smelly, nasty clothes (these are the ones that even the thrift stores don't want) into the truck's cargo area. When I had a full truck load (the big trucks, mind you) I would take it back to the warehouse where I would then unload it. I would then reload the clothes into a baling machine. I was the only one working and I would create about 8 bales a day that weighed well over 1000 lbs. each.
And then it started getting bad...on my first payday the boss decided to buy lunch for me. I thought, "Hey! Cool!" Well, as it turns out, he did that only because he didn't have money to pay me. Again, I thought hey, it's not that big of a deal - it's for charity, right? Well, on the next payday the guy actually had a check for me! However, when I went to cash it, the teller said that she couldn't do it because there weren't sufficient funds. and then came the shoes..
The guy's next project for me was to organize second-hand shoes. He takes me to this warehouse that was literally jammed full of shoes, from floor to ceiling. I had to sort the shoes manually, all by myself.
Finally, I discovered that this was not so charitable of a foundation as I had originally thought. Apparently this guy was charging a LOT of money (even by modern clothing price standards) to these poor countries. I soon quit..
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, gets on my tit worse than some guy approaching me and saying, "I'm going home to [insert name of Carly Fiorina's latest pet country]. Will this work on 240 volts?"
I've wound up serving the very people who have displaced me. I loved my old job. I cared passionately about my work. Maybe not passionately enough. These days, whenever I have a few hours, I work on a personal software project. Meanwhile, I wonder when I'm ever going to get out of this purgatory.
Easily. I'm a farmer.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Infantry have it even worse: we've at least got the beast to haul our stuff.
And that was peacetime. I was never shot at: feel for the folks on the front lines. They're doing a shitty job for almost no pay and they might come home in pieces.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I can't top the original poster, but I once had a job driving a support vehicle for a bicycle trip. The route took us through the wilderness of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming... often many miles from the nearest habitation. So far so good, as it was beautiful country. But there were times when I thought my boss (the leader of the trip) was going to attack me and no matter how beautiful the wilderness was, I would have given anything to be within earshot of a police station or hospital, or at the very least someone who would pull the jerk off me.
When I first started selling computer in Calgary, I had this boss who was the cheapest man on the planet. The local TV station used to have on-air auctions and local businesses used to put stuff up for auction. The deal was, if the item you auctioned off was worth $1000, you would get $2000 worth of air-time for commercials. It worked out to be a pretty good deal, but my boss, being the ass he is, took an old MacSE 30 (this is in 1999), and a whole whack of software he couldn't sell and bundled it together and auctioned it off claiming it was worth $2000. Some poor old schmuck paid over $1500 for it at the auction. Then when that poor old schmuck came to pick up the computer and software, the boss dodged out the back door and left for the day, leaving me as the only person there to help him load.
So i quit.......
I spent five years trying (with all my co-workers) to keep our small manufacturing company, that at the time it was purchased by a multi-national corporation was at the top of it's game and the leader in it's market, from being moved to South Korea where they were killing the quality of our products but manufacturing them much cheaper (never mind the 60% failure rate they introduced).
We actually had machines being built in Korea, QA testing in Korea, failing, being but on a boat and shipped to us in the U.S. where we had to rebuild them (keep in mind these are brand new machines off of an assembly line) so they would work, put back on a boat and shipped back to korea to be shipped to customers... wait for it... in the U.S.
Well, the poor overseas manufacturing put our competitors on top with our customer base and thus made it reasonable to move the entire company. Don;t ask me... it still doesn't make any sense to me either.
I'd happily work sitting on top of a jet engine rather than spend five years wondering if today is the day they fire all of us.
Worked for a month in a grease-processing factory in Portsmouth, VA called Divers Processing. We were issued chemical-resistant boots and gloves once a week; they usually lasted a day and a half before springing leaks. Extra pairs came out of your paycheck. Workday started at 6am and ended when the boss said you were done. Sometimes that was 10pm or later, even on Saturdays and Sundays. Even the rats hated the place; they looked absolutely miserable. A big horsefly landed on my arm once and apparently got a mouthful of what I was shoveling at the time; it died instantly. I used to come home and run my clothes through four wash cycles before the water stopped changing color. It was two weeks after I quit before the smell wore off my hands and arms. Whenever the EPA needs some extra income, it sends an inspection team to assess a six-figure fine. The owner gladly pays because it's cheaper than actually cleaning up the mess.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
I got my first post-grad "dream" job at a biotech firm, thinking I was on the way to glamour and glory. My job was to manage the stock samples of viral testing kits. What wasn't told to me was that all of these kits were stored in racks in a freezer. I spent 8 hours a day in a 20 degree freezer, bundled in an arctic parka with a clipboard looking at little vials going "Fetal Sample - Bovine - #136A....check....Fetal Sample - Porcine - #17562C...check...." ad infinitum
----- And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word...UNLESS.
In my second job during HS, I had to support PCs. Machines running Windows 95. Man was that unsettling. ;)
At my current job, the heat is out today. It wouldn't be an issue, but this is in New Hampshire. Nothing like a bunch of techies working in their parkas-- good thing we have dozens of computers running to keep us warm.
That's all I got.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
I work for an insurance company, and during a recent re-org, I was moved to a new cubicle. On the third floor, in a back room, no windows, and a strong chlorine smell, which the building maintence "can't smell".
What's worst about it is the cubicle I moved into. It's been vacant for two years. The guy who sat here before me died over christmas break at his parents house. All I could think of is that this cubicle is open because the last guy sitting here died!
Creepy....
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
I work at a University. I had this professor call me into his office and he starts into me about being 7th on the list when he searched his name on Google.
He was genuinely pissed when I told him that I couldn't change that. He picked up the phone and raised his voice, "Who do I have to call to fix this!"
I told him to call Google. Still that wasn't good enough. I told him I'd come back at a better time.
I noticed that the first link was a dead link to one of his web old web pages. I hacked it with a refresh to his website. He was so happy that I fixed the problem and made him number one again. I'm going to put a bumper sticker on his car that says, "Only you can prevent narcissism."
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I want to kick you square in the nuts...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Someone in the company decided to play lite rock over the intercom. All the cher, bryan adams, celine dion, and cyndi lauper the world has ever produced. Suprisingly OSHA has no laws against this.
postmodernsideshow.com
I did a temp job cleanup detail at a factory that made... metal powder. The idea is the stuff can be stamped into parts and heat-treated until it's solid. Funny, at the time my father worked at a factory that USED the stuff. But anyway.
So the main grinder, well I guess it's a grinder, a big hundred-foot-long horizontal spinning thing that looks like a scale model of Babylon 5, one end of it leaks. Metal powder mixed with oil and water drips down from the bearing at the north end, and guess whose job it becomes to scoop that out. "Clean" it out they said. Not sure what they mean, while it runs it refills the pile, no way around it.
Thus two days of shoveling metal mud. Stuff so dense it broke the buckets we were shoveling it into. Nearly caused accidents when they brought in the overhead crane to lift up the bin we were told to put the stuff in, it was too heavy for the crane. Now, I'm down there shoveling this, more or less underneath this Babylon 5 contraption and its insane noises. Right next to my head runs a trough of BOILING oil. Beneath me, the metal mud that runs off from the bearing has caked up and formed layers of black metal rock on the floor. Rivers of mud and oil run along it through eroded chasms from various leaks in the machinery above. It's dim yellow down there, where the lights don't reach, clouds of steam obscure everything, and you don't need to guess how hot it was.
In short, a day in Hell. Very nearly literally.
Oh, and did I mention that the factory air was constantly full of metal dust, so fine it goes right through dust masks and many layers of clothing. I rusted for three days afterwards. The orange color from the rusted metal powder wouldn't wash off! Maybe there was a trick to cleaning it off that I was never told.
This job lasted two days and I counted myself reasonably lucky it was only a temp thing. Do we have no more to say for ourselves as a species than to make people work their entire lives in such conditions?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I worked for Electronic Arts Tiburon in Maitland Florida for a little under a year. They had me working in an air conditioning closet. The AC unit leaked air and it was so cold that I had to always wear a jacket. I got sick serveral times. There were pipes and things sticking out all over the place in my "work area". Twice the fire marshal came in to check us out and my manager had me move my desktop and hide that anyone was working in there during the inspection. The working environment there was poison. Very conservative and corporate like for a game company.
Thank you very much and all that. You should have got here sooner though because I almost died because you were so lazy getting here.
I guess I don't get out much, what with reading Slashdot and downloading pics of Eric Raymond to masturbate to.
John,
Forgive me if I get parts of this wrong.
But, my buddy John worked at the sewage treatment plant. Of course since he was a high schooler and everybody else was part of the gobn (good-ole-boy-network) he got to do the dirty work.
And from my understanding it was dirty.
Apparently every once in a while a valve would clog. So it would be his job to strip down to the bare essentials, jump into the muck, reach his hand down into the pipe, and yank out whatever was clogging the valve.
He detailed an interesting variety of items which made their way into the system. I will not go into that subject matter. Your imagination will suffice entirely.
That's my friend's contribution...
Caution: Contents under pressure
Men get it too, it's just more common in women.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I spent 4 years working admin at a strip mine and a coal fired power plant. The mine wasn't too bad, except everything had an inch think layer of coal dust on it. The power plant was different. My office was in the front of the building and the maintenance dept was at the back (about 1/2 mile in distance- big building!) to reach them you had to walk through the furnace room - 4 three-story furnaces full of coal roaring away - so hot you couldn't get near them (in winter it was -20F outside and 100F inside) - when they spin them down to reload the coal you have to leave the area to keep from being burned--> One after noon a vibration tech asked me to come look at his PC - printer problems - I told him I would get a new cable and head back. As I was leaving my office the alarms went off and everyone ran for it. When everything had been settled down they found that a 1200PSI/2000 degree pressure pipe had blown about 3 feet from where I had been talking to the vibration tech - they found his body parboiled. If I had been 2 minutes faster or slower they would have found me right beside him...I work in a renevated coffin factory now, testing flat files...much nicer :)
Yes, a post like that is pretty predictable. And yes, it kind of misses the point of the original article. But not egregiously so -- for what harm is there in taking the 5 seconds required to read the short post and remember that it could be worse?
The poster made his point with brevity and without sourness or dogmatism. If I were you, first I'd get off my high horse and then I'd work on chilling out a little bit, friend.
So here I am in western Louisiana, lying down in 6 inces of mud, motionless, waiting for a convoy of vehicles to come down the road. It's 40 degrees. It's raining. My "waterproof" gortex socks are only serving to keep cold muddy water inside my boots. I'm next to a tree that I hope is big enough to persuade a 100 ton main battle tank not to just run it (and me) over. The mosquitos are eating my soul; don't ask me how they are out in 40 degree weather because I don't know, but I'm in danger of being carried away. I can't slap them because someone might see me. I've been in this position for three days, but it's only been raining for two. I've been out in the woods for a couple weeks, and the smell of myself is about to knock myself out, all by myself.
Here come the vehicles. Shit, they've got Bradleys. The problem with Bradleys is that they have thermal optics and can shoot their 25mm cannons through anything I can hide behind. They also have another problem which I am about to encounter. I can't get a good shot off from this postition because the convoy is stopped just past a little rise. So I crawl forward through the mud a little ways, hoping that it serves to hide my thermal signature. Uh oh, the turret traverses toward me and they are running out the back hatch. Guess they spotted me. I get up on a knee and fire my RPG off, not seeing if it hits, and start booking it. These eight guys are the other problem with Bradleys. They get to ride around all day while you are humping through the woodline, so when they chase you they are fresh and you are smoked.
So I'm running through the woodline and I fall in a hole. Did I mention I was in western Louisiana? This is the biggest hole you've ever seen, and it's full of water. Oh, I didn't mention that it's pitch black out and I can't see too damn far. So here I am with 40 pounds of equipment, one assault rifle and one RPG weighing me down, trying to climb out of a pitch black hole full of forty degree stagnant disease ridden "water". Then the guys from the Brad come up and wax my ass.
Well at least now that I've died I get to go home and take a shower. I work at JRTC at Fort Polk. I scoff at your complaints!
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
You Python-quoting bastards!
I did work in a pit in yorkshire - just outside Hull. The working day consisted of getting up at 5:30am, setting off at 5:50 arriving at the charcoal pits about 6:30 - think of giant power station chimmneys, half-height with the tops blocked off. We'd get changed into our disposable overalls and face-mask, enter a bunker which was lit by giant and very very hot floodlights. A big truck would be backed-up against the doors and we'd start unloading it. This meant climb up, grab a sack of charcoal, carry it back into the bunker, split it with your knife and tip it out. Go back again. Split it, tip it, go back again. Split it, tip it, go back again, etc. We did three bunkers a day, four hours a bunker. We'd take a break between each one - a fourteen hour day, not counting travel. We got 4 quid an hour.
You'd have a shower when you got back, but it'd take a hour to get properly clean, and even then you'd still cough up black stuff for the rest of the night. And my god, did your back ache!
And you try and tell someone how lucky they are to be working at a computer, and they just don't believe you!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Working outside in a snow storm in the middle of a Saskatchewan winter is not fun. The ramps get covered with ice and your constantly falling down trying to get into the truck. The people your moving are constantly closing the door trying to keep the heat in so you always trying to juggle a dresser and open the door at the same time.
Matresses and boxspring have the added bonus of acting like giant sails in the wind. So your always being thrown all over the place.
I used to work on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Not only was it cold and noisy, but there was always the possibility of getting killed too.
Proverbs 21:19
afk, tornado.
At mit crawling through steam tunnels is a recreational activity..
The summer after I graduated high school, I got a job with a miniatures casting company here in Dallas. Grenadier, I think. This was in 1978, and D&D was still something new and cool. Well, it was to me anyway.
So it's summer, Dallas, 100+ degrees outside. I'm inside a warehouse with no air conditioning, pouring molten tin/lead mixture into these heavy rubber molds to make miniatures. Have to wear work gloves and long pants for safety reasons. Got a nice hot flame going to keep the metal at the right temp. Calling it hot and uncomfortable would be an understatement.
Only two good things... we had a couple of fans to keep the air moving, and we got paid the princely sum of $4.50 an hour.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Well, it's not -50 here, but the 4-wheeling group I'm with go on snow runs, which often include some all night wheelin, cuz it's crazy and fun. Well, fun until somebody gets stuck or breaks. Ever swap out a Birfield at 2am in 3ft of snow?
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
(1) Sharing a computer in a cubicle with three other people. Doesn't sound tooo bad, but the cubicle was only 5 by 7.5 feet. (2) Installing a computer in a computer room that was still under construction. Had to wear a hard hat to be safe from welding flmes from above. (3) Office was a halway, 3' wide and 40' long with no electrical plugs. I did have a desktop computer though.
In high school, I worked in my uncle's slaughterhouse and, since I was a young unskilled guy, I had the pleasure of picking up the entrails, head and other waste and placing it all in "gut buckets" that were hauled off each morning. It was horrible and it's probably not a surprise that I never eat meat.
How about: Working 7-hours on, 7-hours off, then 5-hours on, 5-hours off. Repeat. For days and days. Job consisting of sitting and staring at a RADAR scope trying to find little blips that might signify physical objects (air or sea depending on which position you are sitting at), in a dark room with a bunch of other semi-grumpy people that you are tired of looking at because you have been doing this for 21 days in a row so far (some ships have gone much longer than 21 days at sea, so I consider myself lucky that the longest I ever spent between port visits was 21 days). Throw in the sound of the ventilation system and the gentle (mostly) rocking of the ship and just TRY to stay awake. If you are lucky(?) enough to be working on an aircraft carrier, you may be lucky enough to only hear the muffled roar of the jet engines while working in the tower. Or you may be unlucky enough to work in Combat directly below the flight deck. The launch of the aircraft isn't too bad, it's the 'traps' that are ungodly loud. And if they miss the cable, the sound of the tailhook slamming into the deck and dragging across the deck is horrible. At least you won't fall asleep. These are the working conditions of Operations Specialists in the (U.S.) Navy. Actually not too bad considering some of the other posts, but the schedule was just a killer. And it was non-stop until you got into port. Oh! Yeah, here is the kicker, in your non-watch time, there were often times General Quarters drills that would last from 2 to 3 hours. EVERYONE on the ship is up and doing something -or at least waiting at their GQ station to do something. THEN you get to go back to sleep. Oh wait! Don't forget to shower, eat and maybe send a letter home. Or nowadays, try to find an empty computer and send email home. Oh! Yeah, then make sure that your collateral duties get done too. Ok, now you can go to sleep. Ooops! Too late. Time to go back on watch.
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
I used to work for Industry Canada, refurbishing old computers for the 'Computers for Schools' program. Our 'lab' was in the basement of the National Printing Bureau, in Hull, Quebec. It was a dirty place, where we assembled the oldest of computers; computers donated from corporations or government agencies because they were obsolete.
The dirt in the computers was bad for me. Not only from inhalation, but the skin between my fingers started to get eczema. It dried up, cracked, and opened up. I bled. Medication helped a bit, but could not overcome the filthy dirt. I even found a large bug in a computer one day, and it was such a weird insect that I didn't know what kind it was.
Strange government documents were always around. They would get taken away with the computers I guess, and somehow arrive loosely in between the monitors or computer cases that came in large boxes. I even found an extra laminated 'security pass' that could get anyone into the building, underneath some old monitors.
After a few months of this, all of the employees got pulled into a tiny room, with chairs and a sort of 'U' formed by tables. There were about a dozen seats, and fifty or so employees. For two hours, they discussed something in French. (I only understand English.) Afterwards, a bilingual coworker told me the gist of it. Our contracts were invalid because of some technicality, so we would all have to sign a new, corrected contract. Otherwise, all aspects of our work would remain the same. And that took two hours.
I left and never went back, and my hands got better, too.
"We have reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us". -Kang
One bad monkey spoils the whole barrel.
I live 500 yards from a coal-fired generating plant. So, I guess that means I have a coal powered athlon-xp processor. Runs great (a little dirty, cough, cough...)
You are a bastard.
http://www.snopes.com/humor/jokes/thermometer.asp
This thing has been circulating forever.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Many years ago I did embedded work on a contract basis for a company that built gauging and inspection equipment for the auto industry.
I agreed to write the software for a system to gauge truck axles at a Bendix plant in Ohio near the Pensylvania border.
What I didn't know at the time is how far behind they were on the job. I was busy on another programming job (for the same company) so they hadn't even told me about the truck-axle job until I was done with the previous one. Oh, and they hadn't told the customer that no software had yet been written. They were told that I was there to "make a few final adjustments" to the software.
They told me that they were facing a tight deadline, and that I would have to write the software IN THE AXLE PLANT while their hardware technician fiddled around and pretended to be taking his time to wire-in the panel.
What they hadn't told me is that they were already several days late, and had basically left the customer hanging, wondering where we were.
So, we arrive at this axle stamping plant, and immediately some guy starts YELLING at us, "WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU GUYS BEEN?!"
Now, I'd been in auto plants before, but only for brief periods for tests, to diagnose problems and the like. I once did some programming on a test line at the GM Tech Center (controlling a machine to put the goop on a windshield prior to installation) but the workstation was in a nice glass booth isolated from the floor.
For the next two weeks, my working environment was sitting out on the line of an axle stamping plant, with an Altair computer (see, I said this was a few years ago...) writing assembly code from scratch and on the fly. I had some REALLY basic specifications.
The sound was deafening. The place was filthy. Fork-lifts went wizzing by.
There was no other place to work - not even to sit and noodle on paper. Fat chance the guys that yelled at us on the way in were going to give us a DESK in a quiet area. Besides, we had to carry on with the "final adjustments" charade.
The line was down, of course, waiting for us to complete the job, and every minute was lost $$$ and mounting pressure. The guys that run the line were standing around twiddling their thumbs.
Actually, they were pretty good (unlike the nasty plant bosses) and I used them to help design the UI.
(Yes, there was a little UI - some heavy-duty buttons on a pedestal, and an LCD display that could read-out some diagnostic values).
Nothing like having USERS right there to help you design stuff interactively!
I was an admin for a security company where the owner was a very creepy 80 year old guy who loved to have his car painted. the problem was that there wasn't much ventilation at all and myself and another guy got much of the paint fumes. Also the pipes in the bathroom leaked and there was black mold all over the place. Besides the dangers of working there our bosses got fired and that just left an admin and a designer.... with no direction or anything to do.
I changed the oil on import cars during the summer. The air temp is 95, the car engine temp is 200 and the exhaust which is located right next to the oil filter is glowing white.
I had a job with Frito Lay one time. The potatoes would come off of the trains and get washed. All of that garbadge off of the potatoes was supposed to go to a large underground tank then get pumped onto a large field to get rid of it. Sounds efficient. Well, the sand clogged the pumps in the tanks. It was my job to go down into the tank, let the tank partially fill with water. (there was a three foot dia pipe in the wall that I would yell go and the guy in the building above ground would thur a switch and water would com flooding in.) I then adgitated the wand a sludge and held the end of a pumper and pumped all that stuff out.
My job was to stand on the "hero deck" (i.e., gangplank), strapping plankton nets onto the winch line, dropping the line messengers that opened the nets at depth, etc. This meant being immersed at least up to my neck every minute or so when we were working blue water.
Did I mention my motion sickness? Well, I would do my job & puke during the minute I was out of the water & then be immersed in 50 degree salt water for a minute, then repeat the cycle. When we were "on a station", this might go on for 2-3 hours.
When we were running between stations, I would shivver in my bunk outside the galley while the mate would invariably cook something with a lot of garlic or make hogshead cheese sandwiches. I kept a bucket by my bunk.
This is how I switched from marine biology to freshwater ecology, learned some stats & started programming computers. It's also why I do not think trips to the beach are any fun any more.
Well, that's my story & I'm sticking to it. I know its not as bad as what some of my neighbors are experiencing as reservists in Iraq right now, but it's the worst working environment, I have ever had...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
I (who does cool things in design and database work) am at time working in an office where I am only viewed as a Windows problem solver/installer and nothing more. I can't think of any job that can be more degrading.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Location:
Outside, middle of the winter, -20c, windchill = -30c.
Duties:
Write code on laptop while standing.
No gloves.
Amenities:
Nearest washroom ~ 50km
Nearest coffee ~ 50km
Nearest heat source - 1996 Ford Taurus station Wagon.
I worked one summer at a Toyota dealership as a mechanic. I was not ASE certified, so I was often stuck doing oil changes.
The 4 cylinder engines in the older Camrys are not fun to work on when they're hot. Customers would drive their cars around all day, in 90deg heat and then come to have their oil changed. The only way to change the oil filter is to reach between the radiator and the exhaust manifold.
Also, having a $50,000 3ton SUV over you on a lift is not fun.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
But a cluless user story that parallels that one. One of my family members was totally computer clueless when she got a computer. I mean totally. Worse, she was scared of the thing so had a tendency to not actually read and comprehend instructions and errors. So one day she calls me up for computer support and asks me how to right click. I question her for a bit, not believeing that she could really be asking me what she was asking me. Yes, turns out, she really didn't know what it meant.
Funnier still is all the things she DID try, like clicking and dragging the mouse right, moving the cursor to the right side of the screen and clicking. It really was amazing all the things she tried, other than the really obvious one of clicking the button on the right side of the mouse.
It was then that I realised that Apple was NOT underestimating users by using only single button mice.
You are a character from a Jean Paul Sartre book, aren't you?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I was stationed at Camp Zama Japan with the helicopter unit there. We had to fly up to Hokaido for a week in the dead of winter. It was -5F and I ended up having to replace the main rotor hub for a UH-1H. THAT was the most awful job I've ever had to do. It was worse than replacing the main mod for a UH-60 in the middle of a snake infested rice patty down near Hiroshima.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
I worked for a riverboat casino as a systems administrator. The IT department and server rooms were under the gaming floor, which put us at about 6 feet below water level. They had huge flood doors on the hallways leading to IT. However, the doors weren't to protect us if a leak occurred, but instead to keep any flooding (or people, I guess) from leaving the IT area and sinking the boat. On top of that, the Buick-sized UPS was in the same area, so if we were flooded, we would get locked in with the rising water AND a fully-loaded power supply. I left to work for a nuclear facility because it seemed safer.
I went to college for this?...
Smelling the shit of pretty women all day...
Depending on your perspective, that might be a bad or good working environment...
Personally speaking, it's puts just a little too much reality into the women I work with...
Roughneck, floorhand on an offshore rig for several summers. Working with Caustic Soda (an acid), Bauxite and Aqua Gel (made everyhting sticky and slimey. 12 hours a day seven days a week.
Only got burned once (eyes), and fell of the rig three times (once due to unsecured door, once to dynamite explosion and once due to smart ass boat crew).
Yes, those were the days of good working environments.
Oh, and of course, how about cleaning out separator tanks without any air hose, mask or oxygen tanks. You could only shovel for one minute thna you had to leave the sludge of green/gray hydrocarbons behind for some fresh air.
Maybe drilling in the Atchafalaya River Basin (off the Mississippi River) where the alligators would eye you waiting for you to fall off the rig and where the snakes would sun themsleves on the lower decks (poisonous, of course).
Or maybe digging pipeline by hand in the East Texas town of Moss Hill known for exploding without warning. Chevron (Warren Gas) had to move the entire town because homes regularly exploded without warning. I used to work there digging up pipes that no one was quite sure if they were live pipes or just abandoned and the Salt Domes regularly leaked out hydrocarbons that would explode on contact with a hot surface (like tail pipes from passing cars).
Oh yeah, those were fun times, and I never had any protective gear - it wasn't available.
Enjoy.
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
Damn funny And I'll burn my own Karma here to salute you!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I used to work in a strip club as a doorman. Part of my duties were to take down the Jello wrestling pool on Sundays. This required hosing out a large inflatable pool covered in sticky orange Jello out in the back parking lot. I guess it doesn't top the poster's thing. In fact, apart from the insultingly low pay, getting free lemonade and seeing naked girls all day sort of made it worth it.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
Where I work, we had a stray bullet come through a window and pass through where someone would've been sitting, had she/he not gone to lunch early that day.
Two people were stabbed to death right across the street. Two 70-year-old women, in a flower shop, during a robbery.
It was at this point I asked myself whether you worked in Baltimore (as I have). Silver Hill Road? Pretty close guess considering the size of the U.S., eh?
I never had any work related problems there but my work partner had a habit of punching commuters at stop lights who pissed him off on the way to work. So he was pretty mellow by the time he was around me.
Well this may not even be seen since there are so many comments for this story already BUT...
I used to work for a submersible sewage pump company. I was a field and shop tech. This means that I would have to drive out to where the broke pump was, pull it out of the hole, try to fix it there, and if I couldn't, take it back to the shop and do it. These were submersible pumps (Flygt). So they are at the bottom of the well, swimming in sh*t.
Since we were only called out when they broke and not pumping, sh*t would of course be overflowing out of the well, all over the place, by the time we got there. So you would be stomping around in human feces, trying to swing a winch with hook on the end to hook on the pump so you could pull it up out of there and fix it. Of course this would take some time. Sewage is pretty murky so you couldn't see the hook to guide it. You had to swing blindly, feeling for the bang that would happen when you struck the pump with the hook. We would have to swing the winch around quite a few times usually before it would hook.
Now add to that the fact that it would be around 5 degrees F, night, windy, and snowing. So you now have frozen turds on your hands and knees (you had to kneel over the well while trying to hook the pump), plus whatever else people flush (think safe sex, and that time of the month).
Now for the icing. You would drive back with the heat on. Since the heating systems suck in commercial vehicles, you had to put the fan on high with the vents pointing at you. So at this point the sewage would begin cooking in your clothes. Actually the smell of cooked sewage isn't all that bad once you got used to.
And BTW, I never had a problem, but people did die in this job from asphyxiation. Sewer gases at the bottom of an enclosed well can be pretty serious.
I was a labourer in a sewage lagoon. The aeration motors had been incorrectly installed, and had scrubbed holes in the clay liner of the lagoon. We diverted flow, drained the lagoon into an adjacent river and set to work. Our task was to seal the holes using a bentonite mixture. I would walk out into the middle of the lagoon, and initially I noticed how the ground seemed to move beneath my feet. On further inspection, I determined that it was not the ground itself, but the thick layer of worms which no longer had human feces to digest and were slowly starving their little selves to death. I didn't suffer an ill effects, other than the fact that minor cuts and scrapes refused to heal until after I had completed the job.
I once had a summer job (when I was student) at a pork slaughterhouse. somewhat thankfully, I was soon assigned to the freezing department.
that meant working at a temperature of about -26C for an 8 hour shift, and taking breaks and lunches outside when the summer temps were on average over +30C.
we would go outside in full subzero protective clothing, and on hot cloudless days, you'd see water vapor rise from us.
If by "Body Warmer" you mean "pants", yeah, they make me wear those here too.
...some fucker keeps stealing it. asshole.
The boy that mows Michael Jackson's yard.
Right now I'm sitting in an office populated by three people, and a number of active black mold spores approaching infinity. The building we rent space in is owned by an allergist. He hasn't had a filter or humidifier on the furnace for as long as we've been here, and according to our neighbors, considerably longer than that. Everybody is constantly allergic to the building. There are no firewalls between offices as required by code, and the electric circuits are not seperated out by office, so our neighbors running their microwave kills the breaker we're on (which is burried in the supply closet of yet another neighboring office). Our UPSs get a workout.
To top it all off, the building is right next to a goddamn swamp, and _stink bugs_ come in through the cracks in the building and wander around the office blending in with the brindle ugly 70's carpeting such that you can't always see them, and at least once a week somebody rolls over one with a rollie chair and the whole place becomes uninhabitable for about 15 minutes while the pathetic ventilation system slowly wheezes along. It's also drafty, and anytime before noon there is terrible monitor glare. They also use fiberglass drop ceilings which drop little itchy bits on you, and the ligts are all the ancient high-flicker flourescents. Bleah!
Boy, did I ever need to get that out of my system.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
As we were telling our "war stories," one co-worker (a guy who grew up in a Southeast Asian country) sat quietly listening. When the last person had ended his tale of a nasty landscaping job he'd had as a teen, our co-worker jumped in. "Well, when I was fourteen, I was walking through a swamp carrying a rifle over my head..."
Needless to say, our stories paled in comparison to his remarkable (and sometimes painful) stories of his childhood. The moral I took away from the situation was that there is always someone out there who has it far worse than you.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to whine about our jobs, but its always good to keep a little perspective.
Taft
I was an environmental geology tech, trying to work my way towards my RG cert. I worked for a mid-sized environmental firm that did mostly pump & treat and SVE hydrocarbon work. Since that was coming to an end at our locale, we were branching out to more nasty stuff like halogenated hydrocarbons, and chromium contamination.
We landed a contract with a large chrome plating facility that had basicly ignored several years of letters from the local groundwater regulatory authority. They called us they day a registered letter arrived informing them that they were going to be shut down. Somehow, my managers saved their bacon, and allowed them to continue to operate while we performed an investigation. We drilled some wells in the ground around the plant.... The water came out of the ground dark "you're dehydrated" piss yellow. It was Cr 6+, the evil carcinogenic chemical from the movie "Erin Brockovitch". The regulators (rightfully!) went ballistic.
We started a containment and remediation plan, while all kinds of regulatory agencies, swooped in for the kill. The next call was to help them stop the leaks. My managers tried to help them, despite the fact that we were not a hazmat response company. My office manager and I went out to the plant, and ventured inside.... Inside were vast tanks of hot acids, and all kinds of associated plumbing. The air was choked with acid fumes, and I could feel my lungs start to suffer. The piping under the tanks smoldered, and dripped on the degraded crumbling concrete floor. All the stairways and walkways were made of acid damaged wood.
So there stands my boss in a suit and polished wingtips, at the bottom of some creaky wooden stairs leading under some boiling acid vats, and he wants me to step into a yellow puddle of who knows what to take some measurements for a containment barrier. I tell him "hang on a sec while I suit up", intending to at least pull on a Tyvek suit, some yellow "nuke boots" and gloves, and a acid fume mask. He replies "Oh no... We don't want to scare their employees! It's just pH zero water."
For those that didn't take chemistry, pH is a log function of the hydrogen ion activity. The closer you get to zero, the more acidic it is. But note... You can't actually get to zero!
Somehow... I managed to keep my calm, and stare him right in the eye and say "and what about this scared employee?"
I never went down those stairs. My company backed out, and informed the client that we were not set up to do incident response. I had a new job a couple weeks later doing computer consulting for a large company that was trying to roll out Unix based intranet web servers... that I just happened to have learned all about in my last 2 years of college, thanks to a guy in Finland, and some people Illinois.
Temkin
Which pays better, programming or spraying shit?
Best Slashdot Co
Construction.
I was actually helping a friend out. We needed to dig holes for concrete piers for some cabins. In November, in dirt filled with sandstone, on a nice windy 30-degree day it decided to snow.
18 holes had to be dug 18" in diameter and 30" deep.
Running a rented jackhammer in the mud wasn't so bad. Then I lost a glove in the mire. When you get down to 24" deep or so, you can't shovel the debris out of the hole effectively anymore, so you have to get down on your stomach (in the mud) and scoop it out. At 30", you're stretching your arms to get to the debris in the hole and your face is in the muck.
And then, when it couldn't get worse, you're squirming around in the mud on your stomach and get a bunch of Prickly Pair needles in the head of your........
Thankfully I don't do things like that for a living.
Worked for a TV station that was having HVAC problems. While getting ready for a show, the air started smelling smoky and we were told that the AC repair guys had done some welding before they left for the day and it was just fumes from that. Turns out they'd set the insulation on fire in the part of the building with the asbestos in it, but I still had to sit there coughing and try to build the technical part of the show with eyes watering because (as management told us) "the show must go on"!
The worst part... the competing station up the street had already sent their camera crew before we knew that our building was on fire.
Also, during the winter, sometimes they would warm up the trucks in the garage instead of outside. So we would get carbon monoxide fumes in the office, which were equally nauseating. I don't want to think about all the brain cells I lost during the 15 months I worked down there. The good thing about my job, at least as far as working conditions were concerned, was that I had to support PCs and networks in other buildings on campus, so I had plenty of opportunity to leave my desk and walk around outside. When the stench got really awful I'd take a laptop and work from one of the other buildings.
Luckily, I got another job where I eventually got my own office with an actual window. And no sewage smells.
Lousy minor setbacks! This world sucks! -- Homer Simpson
After all, you are the Merovingian, the ruling elite of Ancient Feudal France.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
I think the award would have to go to pretty much anyone with a last name ending in "stien" in Germany in the 40s...
Casca
The reality is he has a plasma monitor (good!) but left the computer on without a screensaver (bad!). So it's really just a case of burnin, though at least he doesn't have to turn the computer on anymore...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Worked there myself right after 9/11 with plenty of fun inspections of our bags and the anthrax investigation of the mail room.
... if you're writing letters to slashdot on the job. Maybe if your boss stuck one of your hands in the engine you'd realize the value of a hard day's work.
Man, that is ironic. After all, if census workers don't count, who does?...
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
Once again, jackass, that wasn't the spirit this article was brought up in. This article was brought up in "what is the worst environment you've had to work in" as in - presumably - the tech field. As in - presumably - most slashdot readers are techies to some degree.
Before our new office building was built alongside our current corporate building, our datacenter (if you could call it that) was in our Winery. Well, in order to make one of our 18% products, they add grain alcohol to the mix... and they store the product in big tanks... right near the IT department. So, needless to say, the fire dep't is expected to respond VERY fast if our alarm goes off. Not inhumane conditions, just something in the back of your mind that reminds you that the entire block could be leveled rather quickly.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
I used to work in a laboratory writing code for
data collection devices. We would test aircraft tires
and landing gear. Occasionally we would test
the tires for the Space Shuttle. The testing
on the dynamometers was loud enough but every
once in a while the engineers would deliberately
blow one of the tires up by applying too much
force to the tire. They would generally warn
us beforehand though. When the Space Shuttle
tires would explode the entire building would
shake.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I work for SCO. And we run WindowsME in my department
Actually was out of work 9 months this time.
Best Slashdot Co
I did a marathon 40-hour programming session in a workshop once. Besides the noise and fumes, my clothes, hair, and skin were coated with a fine layer of yellow paint. I also coughed up yellow junk for the next two days. I'm sure the stuff was toxic.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
How about working from home with kids jumping on everything, screaming, watching annoying tv shows, and dirty diapers everywhere? I hate my job :p
I had a job at an adult web site. We created all of our own content using professional adult models, actors, and performers. Every day there would be a new shoot (excuse the pun). I was constantly surrounded by naked women walking up and down the halls.
One day, I was particularly aroused when I went out of my office to get a soda from the machine. On the way down the hall I bumped into this gorgeous 5'11 blonde. She had a 52" bust. Her pussy was shaved "landing strip" style. Her hair was a mess. She smelled like she was freshly fucked.
She obviously had no pockets to carry change for the soda machine so I offered to buy her a soda. Diet Coke was here preference. When she opened the can, diet coke sprayed all over my shirt. She apologized. I said not to worry about it. I had a spare shirt in my office and I could change there.
She followed me to my office as we discussed "business". Along the way she said her name was Kandy (with a "K"). In my office, I removed my shirt to reveal bare chest. The Diet Coke had soaked all the way through to my chest. Kandy offered to lick the diet coke off my "6-pack". How could I refuse?
The Diet Coke dripped down my chest and into my pants. Kandy politely unbuckled my belt and opened my pants to reveal the stream if Diet Coke that was making its way to my fully erect cock.
Unfortunately, Kandy was not fast enough lapping up the sweet soda that now moistend my dick. Fulfilling her promise to lick every drop of Diet Coke from my body she deftly inserted my dick into her mouth and began sucking back and forth, in and out. The pressure was exquisite. Not a drop of Diet Coke could escape the seal of her lips around my tool.
I moaned with pleasure. Kandy took this as a sign of approval and began to massage my balls with her left hand. I warned here I was about to cum with my dick in her mouth. She started to suck harder.
I couldn't hold back any longer and I exploded my full wad into her hot, wet mouth. She immediately removed my cock from her mouth while licking the tip to assure not a single drop of my cum was left. She swallowed with a loud gulp that I'm sure could be heard down the hall.
She pulled my pants back up and buckled my belt. She picked up the can of Diet Coke and drank what was left in one chug. Kandy kissed me on the cheek and said "Best Diet Cock" I've ever had.
Kandy has never worked for use since. I don't even know her real name. To this day I can't walk past the soda machine without thinking about Kandy. But I know I can never get another soda with sporting a 10 inch erection.
Oh shit, this is Slashdot. I thought it was Penthouse Forums. Fuck!!!
I was a Supermarket porter. I had to clean out toilets that the bottle people bathed themselves in, defeciation on the floor and don't forget about cleaning out the can and bottle recycling machines. Beer/Soda/Saliva juice all over me when I go to throw that crap on the tractor trailer. Changing garbage and playing with all those cleaning chemicals made it fun after awhile. I am so glad I went to College.
I have the pleasure of having a relative with schizophrenia. I was raised with her rantings, lawsuits, and her telling me that the phones were bugged, and people were out to get her.
I realize that the person who has these thoughts beleives they are real. But you'd have to ask why would that one person believe that everyone is out to get them. That they believe they are part of something so monumental and important that people would want to harm them. It's just messed up.
You really need to go back to the psychiatrist. Schizophrenia doesn't cure itself.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
When I was a freshman I worked over the summer doing research at JPL. Since I was doing research, I got a desk. The desk wasn't actually in an "office", per se. It was actually out in the hallway. In the basement (the JPL researchers had their offices in the second floor). And about 2 feet away was the door to the radiation test lab. I had a wonderful view of the big red "Radiation source on" light beside the door. Between the lack of a computer and my work being experimental in nature, I did not spend much time at my desk.
One of my first jobs was as a programmer for a tiny company (3 employees (including me), plus boss).
The employment contract basically said "Anything you think of, at any time while in our employ is ours," among other things. I thought that was weird, so I took it to a lawyer, and he said "Don't worry, none of this is enforceable." I think that's a bit strange that one should be such a control freak, but everyone seemed very nice, and the pay was better than the other prospects I had, so I took the job.
I worked there for a few months. Everything was great. Then one day I walked over to my colleague's office and found her crying. I asked what the matter was. Initially she didn't want to tell me, but eventually I found out that our boss had just called her. Hmm.
Another time, I went into the receptionist area, where the other programmer and the receptionist were talking. The phone rang, and both women JUMPED, one spilling coffee, the other RUNNING back to her office. When the other programmer was safely in her office, the receptionist picked up the phone. I guess one shouldn't be away from their desk.
Eventually they told me a few stories from their history there. There used to be another programmer. He was a single guy, raising a little girl by himself. He also had an obesity problem. Our office was on the 3rd floor, and his doctor told him that if he kept working there, his knees were going to give out, and he would be in no condition to take care of his daughter.
Distraught, he comes into work and asks is there is someway that he can work at home, or if they can work out some other arrangement. The boss says no, and asks him if he is going to quit. He tries to explain what the doctor told him, but the boss slammed the door in his face, and told him not to come back, and wouldn't even open the door so that the sobbing man could get his stuff.
"What the hell did I get myself into," I started thinking to myself.
There were other things, but I think this example will suffice. Things gradually got worse, and I planned my exit to another company that payed me less money, but extracted less sanity.
I was a platform worker doing inspections of steam generators inside the reactor building in a high radiation area. Shorts and a tee-shirt, two cotton jumpsuits followed by three plastic jumpsuits, three pairs of plastic gloves, four pairs of plastic booties all taped together with duck tape, a full face respirator three cotton hoods and two plastic hoods on top of that. The 2 foot thick steel steam generators remain at 140 degrees for a week after the shutdown. You are wearing all this with the air temp at about 130 ten feet from the generator. You have a headset on so that the hungover drug addict that is you boss can screem at you to fix stuff. your shift is 12 hours unless like me you double as an electronics tech and have to fix stuff for 8 hours after your containment shift ends. (I did get a short break when I passed out from heat stroke) The drive to and from the plant was one hour. Should I eat or sleep for the two hours I have off? I choose to sleep for the first three two hour breaks I had and ate a stale sandwitch on the third day. All the plants shutdown in the spring and fall because that is their low demand time so you fly from one plant to another and work a minimum 14 hour day for about three months. Then you get layed off for five months and have no choice but to take the same job again if you cant find work. Now I'm in IT and can't find much to complain about.
Telecommuting! What about socialization?
Haha, I was about to apply for a job there when something else came up and I decided not to. Maybe I made the right decision.
I worked at a bank where, like most companies, the computer people are worse than red-headed step children. We worked in a room under the parking garage, we shared 1 computer between about 15 people to enter the resolution of trouble tickets. The table in our lab would seat about 10, yet only had 5 chairs. The walls and ceiling where completly unfinished, so all you got to see was the wonderfull brick structure. Right out side the emergency exit was Two V-12 train engines that ran the backup generators. There were no windows, and of course be under the parking garage, about every 10 seconds, you heard that wonderfull little bounce that cars and trucks make going overhead. I quit after about 2 weeks. Oh yeah, I probably shouldn't meation the banks name but the Initials were FU. They have since been bought out.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
How cool is that?
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
Personally I have done IT support while living in a tent with no AC in 40 degree C heat, getting shot at a couple of times a week, peeing into a hole in the ground and eating nothing but boil-in the bag - and i'm not alone, there are guys doing it at the moment. This on top of normal soldiering duties.
Strange how these days they ship in the satcom uplink and install a LAN before getting decent heads and a kitchen.
So you can all stop your complaining.
I was stationed on a Destroyer Escourt back in the early '70s. Many times, the sea was rough enough that I had to sleep holding on to something because if I didn't, I'd roll out of my "rack" onto the deck. One night, a man in the top rack of three let go at the wrong time. The ship rolled so far that he woke up in the bottom rack on the other side of the corridor. I've been up to the Alutians, where it was so rough that all ship's work was stopped except for watch standing and keeping the ship running, and that went on for over a week. Oh, yes, did I forget to mention when we were on the Gun Line, off 'Nam? Four hours on, four off, with extra duty for re-provisioning, re-arming and re-fuling, mostly when we should have been asleep. Add to that a stupid Executive Officer that didn't understand that we were in Condition Two, designed for fire support missions, and would send us to General Quarters (Battle Stations) an hour before we were expected to shoot, and keep us there for an hour after it was finished.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Didn't a whole bunch of people also get fatal brain cancer from working in a room full of old, improperly shielded mainframes?
The worst assignment I have ever had the misfortune of enduring is the annual cleaning of the crap built up on the bottom of the grainry. There was usually about 6" of rancid barley/corn caked on the concrete floor. It stunk. It was incredibly dusty. There was no air circulation. These are made out of corrugated(sp?) steel, which wouldn't be so bad if I were given the choice of doing it any time other than THE HOTTEST DAY OF THE YEAR!!
The temperature outside was always above 100 degrees F. The temperature inside was above 120 and the humidity was near 100%. The last couple of times that I did it, I kept track of a few things. In one day, I drank almost 3 gallons of water an still managed to lose about 6 pounds. That was over about 5 hours.
Oh yeah, the floor was slanted and once most of the top layer of rancid grain was removed, it was very slick.
A close second would be the cleaning out the screening room at the lime plant that I worked at. Temerature above 150 deg. You put on a plastic lined bunny suit, respirator, gloves, and boots and hope that the duct tape keeps the dust out.
The dust, by the way is Calcium Oxide. Sweat happens to be mostly water and in those suits has nowhere to go. For those that skipped chemistry class CaO + H20 => Ca(OH)2..
Calcium hydroxide is very caustic an leaves some nasty burns.
The reason the Calcium burning job wasn't rated higher(lower) is that I was getting much higher pay.
$0.02
matt
20 crystal-clear raisins at that. Did anyone catch the reference?
-- n
The management here at Slashdot would like to make an announcement.
THIS IS OFFICIALLY AN HUMOROUS TOPIC.
This thread is for humorous and semi-humorous accounts of real-life working conditions that our readers have found themselves in. This thread is not meant as a universal declaration of having the most horrible life imaginable, but only as a mild diversion wherein one can pass along a humorous anecdote or perhaps one-up the previous storyteller, much as in the Southern Oral Storytelling tradition.
IN NO WAY should this thread be taken as a claim that an office job, no matter how badly ventilated and/or soundproofed, is in any way worse, more hazardous, or more deserving of pity and uplift than legless South-American orphans forced to eat garbage and feces for sustenance or soldiers, police, or other liberating and/or opressive forces who frequently come under live fire.
The management of Slashdot would like to reaffirm the personhood, manhood, womynhood, and all-round diversity-empowered victim status of any person past or presently living who has ever been made in any fashion uncomfortable.
To sum up:
SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU WHINY LIBERAL GODDAMNED CUNTS! IT'S A MOTHERFUCKING BUNCH OF JOKES! FUCK YOUR GUILTY CONSCIENCES THAT WON'T ALLOW YOU TO JOIN IN WITHOUT MENTIONING SOLDIERS OR GODDAMNED RPHANS! YOU MOTHERFUCKING HUMORLESS *ASSHOLES*!!!
Read my journal and you will see why the statement was not taken out of context.
Sounds more like you are biased against freedom to me.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I used to code it all up on those little paper sheets and then, when the machine wasn't being used for production work, type it all in. (Or use the "punch terminal" which allowed you to type -- get this -- directly onto 8" floppies.) Compilation of some of those programs took 4+ hours, pretty much had to be done overnight or on weekends.
Not that that was a bad job, mind you. I can't really say I've had any bad jobs. But I don't miss RPG at all.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
tho I still play pick-up-shits for 30 dogs, first thing every morning
I work with my mother-in-law.
Try that for a single day, and then we'll take about work place hell.
Never try to beat a professional at his own game!
I did some contract work at a Children's Hospital. It had the usual downsides... boss was a butthead, etc. Then you hear your first "Code Blue" over the PA system and you realize that somewhere in that hospital a little kid is dying. You go to eat in the cafeteria and all around you are kids sicker than you ever imagined. My oldest was two at the time and my wife was pregnant with #2. I have NEVER dreaded going to work so much or flown out of the buidling so fast at the end of the day. When they called me six months later for more work I told them that there was just no way I could go back. When my second was born I was never so happy to see all ten fingers and toes.
With evil. I've made myself sick with how absolutely vile I can be. But the trick is to do with a sort of outward serinity. Like an evil Budda.
;-)
BE karma. Just don't be stupid or violent, manipulative and dirty are good though.
Quack, quack.
Riding in the back seat of a and army car, better known as a HUMMWV, in Iraq from March 20, 2003 until we hit Baghdad.
That sucked.
Someone took my red Swingline stapler. And I haven't been paid. And they stuck me in the basement... Where's my lighter?
Imagine yourself on a navy ship ( a really big metal box) in dry dock in Portsmouth, VA during middle of the summer. Barnacles and other sea life rotting on the hull while the sandblaster makes its way from bow to stern. You have to wear a hard hat, respirator and hearing protection because the noise of the sandblaster will drive you deaf in no time.
There's no ventilation (let alone AC), drinking water has traces of diesel fuel marine (DFM) that truly loosens you up inside (great with unsweeted tea). The doc tells you its within acceptable limits.
You have the priviledge of sleeping in a state room directly beneath the black fight deck with, maybe, an inch of insulation between your space and the deck. Temperatures are 100 degrees plus well into the night with dust comprising of lead paint, sand, pulvurized sea life and lord knows what else that got into everything. There is no water for showering. Working toilets are few and far between due to the repair work in progress.
During the day, you oversaw repair work to your spaces and equipment or did paperwork that was covered in drops of gritty sweat.
Your day started at 4:30am with Officer's call at 5:30. It ended at 6pm (unless you had duty).
Top it off, the enlisted guys had it worse.
Fortunately, when the work was done and we put out to sea, the work was worth it and life onboard wasn't so bad.
They decommissioned the ship two years later.
Not the worst, but considering that over 2,000 employees are registered on the boards, that's a pretty bad company.
Iraq
Big floating Cans(i.e boats)
Flight Decks
29 palms,CA in the summer
Korea in the winter
It's all Politics
I didn't see that anywhere.
No contest. Walking through fields on the hotest summer days picking up rocks. How can anything be worse?
Last year I was hired as a consultant to "untie the IT mess" for a manufacturing company that made really BIG stuff. They couldn't figure out the little stuff though, such as computers. The IT Director was this goober that was stuck in the 60s (and even dressed like it). It was a paying gig, so I bit my lip and went on. First day in, they took me to the "computer room". I kid you not, there was a 10Mbps hub suspended from the CAT5 cables coming out of the patch panel! I didn't realize they were being specific when they said "untie"! The room was peaking 85 degrees, the only place I could sit was straddling the server (no kidding) which was a large clone tower about 5 years old running Windows 98. Unbelievable was the server...125 people connected to this Win98 box. There were 10 hard drives in this thing, each with a different share password--their idea of security. The place was a fire hazard from all of the papers and just junk from every box, piece of software, etc they'd ever purchased. They couldn't have ever thrown anything away! And I mentioned it was a manufacturing company, right? Right outside the office was the welding shop. So it smelled great! And ever so often the exhaust fan would start and blow all of the papers all over the place. The IT Director said, "Hey, it's worked for this long...why change it?"
wow slashdot has really gone downhill allowing crap like this to pass for front page news... who the hell gives a flying *#$(@*#$ about this moron and his stupid job? if it sucks so bad, just quit and find another job... and what's with the moderators? is slashdot no longer about news, and instead becoming a giant blog for people to rant about their personal lives? fsck that!
I worked for a company that did inventories for stores. This meant standing around for 3 hours at a stretch with some oversized calculator thingee hanging on a belt on your right thigh, and you would count and pick up cans or whatever with your left hand. that was torturesome enough! However, once they got the contract to inventory the food stores at West Point... This was at least 10 years ago but I remember thinking this place was a veritable maze. Anyway the bad part was the cold storage! They had a cold room kept at -40' (negative forty degrees!) and you would put on one of their special jumpsuits, go in with a couple of their guys and inventory. This would go on for about 1/2 an hour at a clip...
The bunny suits weren't a big deal, nor was typing with rubber gloves.
What sucked was that several of the fabs were operating before all of their safety mechanisms and gas alarms were operational. In the States, OSHA would have shut them down. In western Europe, there would have been a public outcry like you wouldn't believe. But in Asia....
I remember someone coming over the intercom once in Mandarin sounding a bit flustered, but I didn't catch what she said (my Chinese sucked). Then everyone started running for the door. I kinda looked around, and decided that I *really* didn't want to be the last one out. As I got near the exit, two guys were suiting up in Haz-Mat suits.
Apparently the gallium arsenide gas chamber was leaking on one of the machines in a big way. The place was shut down for 48 hours - something you don't see often out there.
Wasn't the first time, either. Also had random rashes that always seemed to correspond with stains of unknown origin on whatever bunny suit I was given that day... Oh - and being 6' tall in some of those places means you've got perma-wedgie in the suits made for 5' people.
Plenty of people have it worse (including the teenage factory workers in some of those places), but I was awfully happy to change industries later on...
I write code.
It was sub zero and had to push carts of Nitric Cellulose to the press. NC is safe when wet, dangerous when dry, extremely dangerous when frozen.
One day in the spring lightning hit the pole outside our mixing house. I never ran so fast in my life.
ether was used in the mixing process. That was the good part of the job.
One day the press exploded killing two. the top of the press flew about 50 yards from the building.
got fired along with all other undesirables, (blacks, long hairs and Mexicans.) They marched us off the property together by an armed guard. No reason given.
I won't get into my working on the farm or cutting tobacco in the August sun, or slaughtering chickens all day.
photosMy Photostream
...having not eaten in two days, you're out of water, you're closest "coworker" is bleeding while the next closest coworker is trying to explain to someone over a radio what is going on. And what is going on? People are trying to kill you - people who aren't even from the country whose cold icy mud is slowly working its way up your asscrack - are trying to kill you so they can establish a fundamentalist dictatorship in the country whose secular dictatorship you've just toppled. And back home, people are saying that you're doing this for nothing, and it won't make your country safer.
Now quit your bitching and throttle up.
Ahhh, the Honey Wagon. I remember the day...
I should've mentioned that they're building a new building, which will be ready for some employees to move in in a few years. Certainly that'll be a lot nicer, but it's unclear what the cubicle situation will be like: it seems it's going to be lots of cubicles with no real walls. Not many of us are looking forward to that, but the fact is that conditions will be so much better that no one is raising a stink over it.
--RJ
You mean you work for SCO both as a programmer and as a lawyer?
Past jobs in roughly chronological order:
Maintenance guy/janitor in small town McDonald's - cleaing Micky D's bathrooms and grease traps, and "fun..fun" annual septic tank cleaning and service.
Laborer in Timber Services contracter, doing post logging cut clean up, slogging around torn up forest land spraying plant killer on anything not a tree, while a half drunk helicopter pilot tries to set everything but you on fire with jellied gasoline.
Infantryman in the Army, joy of joys, from helping to blow up river ice in sub-zero winters in Korea (can't have tanks driving across it after all) to training in Panamanian jungles with Air Force pilots who can't remember which side of the road to drop you on (the other side was a wild game preserve, and we weren't doing live fire training).
Crewman on an traditional rig sailing ship, yippee from hanging upside down in the engine room bilges trying to repair a faulty bilge pump under a foot and half of oily water to going 60' aloft to the topsail yard to furl topsail, both of these while the ship careens through 15 to 25 seas, in 30 to 40 knots of wind, at night. (problem for the mathematically inclined: your 60' up, the ship rolls ~40 degrees to either side for a total of 80 degress with a period of ~2 seconds, what kind of accelerations are you experiencing? ps: don't worry about the 30' to 50' of up and down caused by the waves)
All in all I would trade the job I have now (corp IT consultant) for any of the previous, at least I didn't risk jail from strangeling various C?Os.
my old sig is obsolete, and I haven't come up with a stupid enough new one yet
A few years back, I wen to work as an in-house software developer into some graphic arts studio (fairly big actually). We were already cramped for space, and ended up sharing the already small office of the VP (~100 employees!).
There was no desk available for me, let alone any place for a desk.
My improvised work space consisted of a 20" monitor BOX, in all it's brown glory, on wich a 13" monitor stood (mine to squint at). The machine was on the floor (the "desk" was too soft for it), and the chair was at the height of the "desk".
Had to work with the keyboard on my knees, and the mouse on some little space provided for the sole purpose of mouse-ing, on the VP's desk.
This went on for 3 months, after wich the company moved into more spacious premises, when I eventually had my own office. My window gave view to a large lot of grass, trees, flowers and... tombstones.
Swell.
When I changed job, some 4 years later, my new employer was, too, located in front of another cemetery. Fate was set.
At my current client site, they're making me develop with PowerBuilder. {Shudder}
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Yeah, they're gonna move us out of this old building into a cube farm sometime soon. We're thinking of putting in a rail line on the tops of the cube walls for fun (IR remote control, wireless train-cam, automatic drawbridges at the cube doors, that sort of thing;-)
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I worked as a temp in a clinical lab analyzing blood samples and was never asked about, nor offered, hepatitis vaccinations.
I could kill you, sure, but I could only make you cry with these words
I worked in a shop that used IBM model 29 electro-mechanical calculators. If required about 40% humidity. They worked fine...
They bought a mini (a real piece of crap from Keronics, a Datya Gene knock-off) which would practically give of sparks when you went near it.
The chief consultant/vendor rep turned up the humidity.
I walked in and I thought I'd gone blind. There was cold steam blowing out of the humidifier and it was raining, (raining!) on the equipment. The guy who took care of the card punch equipment and the cards was having apoplexy at watching the company's accounts receivables dissolve before his eys.
I laughed so hard I almost choked and went up stairs and quit on the spot. No notice. No farewell. I had a job in a mainframe shop the following Monday.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I spent a few years as a parachute infantry officer in the 82d Airborne. Rifle and mortar platoon leader was fun. Except for having to bust dopers (this was the late '70s), this was the sort of macho stuff I had dreamed of. Then one day I was pulled into battalion and told I was to be the support platoon leader/assistant supply officer. Arrgh! The guys in that shop were paratroopers but not infantry--they were truck drivers and generally stoned. My 'office' a such as a desk on the back of a loading platform where assorted trucks sat beleching fumes. Even when the doors were closed, it was still miserable. The windows wouldn't close because the security bars had been welded on during the summer (when the windows were open) and fitted too close to let the windows swing up and back in place. We froze in winter.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
I worked at a sulfur reclaimation factory in the early 80's. We had a mountain of sulfur and potash about the size of a small Hawaiian island that when it rained the runoff was sulfuric acid with ph of about 2. We used to have to go test the runoff and then spread crushed limestone in the streams to neutralize the acid. Back at the reclaimation plant we had this huge steam-heated bin (about 12 feet wide, 30 feet long, and 12 feet deep) that we dumped the sulfur and potash mixture into to melt and run through the filters to remove the impurities. This thing stunk like an old sour milk carten full of rotten eggs thrown into a pile of burning tires! If ever there was a direct portal to hell, that was it! It was truly awful yet it held your morbid fascination like nothing else. Through the length of this chaldron of hellish delight ran a conveyor belt made with iron links and held together with brass bolds. The conveyor was needed to keep the sedament stirred up and the brass bolts were needed to prevent sparks as the conveyor was dragged through this giant urn of demonic soup. Every week something would spark in the satanic stew and which would incite a hellish onslaught of sulphuric acid gas and fumes (you would think that satans minions would have used this orofice to enter our realm). We would have to go into this corrosive atmosphere of all-consuming fumes and scream incantations while dousing the beast with a firehose of near-holy water. It would inevitably succumb to our efforts after many hours and retreat to its netherworld lair while we went back and recharged our respirators for the next episode of battle. It rained alot so the sulphur mixture mixed with mud and made a sort of acid-armour on everything it touched. All vehicles had a coating of this substance that encased its victim while corroding it from the inside. Every vehicle that ever came out to the site got it on it and when its exhaust system would heat up, it smelled like you were driving around in a vehicle made of steel, rancid meat, rotten eggs, and butt-cheese. Over time the fenders of the vehicles looked like old moth-eaten clothes pulled from some old chest from the bowels of some ancient castle. Basically your personal property became consumed by the foul elements of the site. The sulfur permeated one's very pores. When you sweated, you wreaked of rotting eggs, when you showered, the run-off had a yellow tinge. You couldn't own a pet fish as the acidity of your very presence would foul its environment and bring about its untimely demise. Curiously though, no one who worked there for any length of time ever got sick, ever.
For two years we were starting a business and the "office" I shared with a fellow employee also housed 40+ servers. This room was about 20x12. In the summer time the room would be 95 degrees at 7am, easily toping 110 by mid-day. This is in Northern NJ where outside temps never reached much above 100 very often.
:)
Not to mention we had to turn off monitors if we had to print something to avoid tripping a breaker and there was the constant supply of wasps coming in the open window, being attracted to our empty soda cans. The contant hum of 40+ computers drove you crazy. Our desktops were on a work bench with rough cut edges that left indentations on your arms and was quite irritating. Only nice thing about that office was we had nice chairs
The building had A/C, or so it was claimed but it was impossible to keep that room below 100 degrees in the summer times. The A/C would frequently drip and the ceiling in the bathroom collapsed. We ended up covering the window with cardboard to prevent sunlight from heating the room up more and even setup an intricate scheme of fans to get heat out of the room to little avail.
Thank god those days are done with.
The absolute worst job I had was as an audio technician at a public theatre in Saginaw. While getting to see the shows was cool, it was absolute hell trying to stay awake through 3 days of technical conference talking about the different uses of silicone (and not, they didn't mention "medical products" like breast implants once). The conferences were 12 hours a day for 3 days.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
I spent several summers working in a fish processing plant - which was bad enough - but one day, the boss came up to me with an evil smirk on his face and said he had a "special job" for me.
Now the parts of the fish that don't get eaten - the heads, tails, blood and guts, collectively known as gurry - get collected in a large bin and are periodically trucked off (to who knows where) to be disposed of. But this particular day, someone had left the lid off the gurry bin and allowed a whole flock of gulls to land in the bin. Gurry being an oily substance with the consistency of quicksand, the gulls were now stuck there. My job was to get them out.
So I climbed up to the top of the gurry bin with a dip net, balanced on the edge trying not to fall in myself while I netted the birds. I counted about 80 of them in total, in various stages of distress. About a third of them had gotten completely covered with gurry and drowned. Another third of them had climbed onto the backs of the drowned ones and were in relatively good condition (good enough to bite me, the ingrates!) The rest were somewhere in between. I don't remember how long it took me to fish them all out of the gurry bin, but after than, I was happy to return to the menial labour that was my regular job.
Installing loose fiberglass insulation in ceilings wearing shorts and a t-shirt during the summer. It doesn't seem bad once you start, but the days after of constant itching and coughing are lovely.
no, he's a fuck'n god actually...
i'd have turned around, bolted the front doors(you know the whole place is the same as that room), and burned the place to the ground.
(some background at http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/com/an-msq -114.htm)
I had the pleasure of spending many a 12-hour shift manning a MSQ-114 terminal somewhere overseas while enlisted in the US Army. The 114 is pretty much a self enclosed Satellite NOC, designed as a in-theater ops center.
It consists of a trailer, about 2/3rds crammed with 19" racks with all the up/down converters, power meters, amplifiers, etc. necessary for the up/down link. The other 1/3rd is a tiny office where the two on-duty controllers do their jobs. There are desks at both sides of the tiny office, and the walls are covered with equipment too, so with two chairs there is not a hell of a lot of room if two tall guys pull the duty.
Any climate control in the unit is there for the confort of the equipment. That means that in the summer whatever time you are not spending to keep the satellite network running will be spent making sure the air conditioners won't die on you. If the AC dies, you are screwed.
In the winter the AC sort of works, but your heater won't. If you get a space heater then it is sort of bearable.
Towards the back of the equipment area of the trailer (which is about 40 feet or so long) there are a couple of ancient disk drives that weight 300 pounds and use platter cartridges. If you steep too hard on the floor, the hard disks will crash. If you crash the hard drive, it is *your* turn to get the dolly and the winch to replace the damn thing. Step lightly.
It is also loud as hell. There is zero noise insulation for the office side of the trailer, and you are listening to a couple dozen 19" racks being ventilated, plus the noise from the air conditioners. Not very good for your long term hearing.
We were slightly lucky. Ours had a little balcony in the back of the trailer, made out of steel and it had a roof. With this we got a 5-ton truck with a maintenance module/shelter/whatever connected to it, so we could walk out of the trailer and into the van to use the microwave or coffee pot or to use the benches to fix stuff. If the weather cooperated with us we could maybe grill some steaks.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
During college I helped supplement my tuition with odd winter jobs. I got a job for a month delivering 100lb propane tanks to lower-income houses north of Baltimore in the freezing December cold. One day, the dispatcher told us that we had to turn off someone's gas for months of non-payment. The driver gave the job to me. So as I walked to the side of the house to turn off the people's gas and collect the tank, I saw kids staring at me from the window (of a house about to get bitterly cold)...on Christmas Eve. I never felt so bad. P.S. The end of the story is that someone paid the bill that evening, so someone made a special trip the next day to turn it back on.
Shouldn't you be working?
I've had two crappy jobs. In one, I had to clean out the oil filter bags at the Ball can factory. It involved climbing into a greasy box at the top of all the machinery,3 floors up, and the hottest part of the factory, about 110* F. The box is approximately 10' deep by 30' by foot wide by 6 foot tall, and pitch black inside. So you step into one of the many hatches on the side. The first thing you notice is that there is no floor. The second thing is it's a long way down the ductwork, and probably ends in machinery that will maim you if fall didn't kill you. Next, all you had to walk on are 1 inch steel bars that run from one end to the next and all you have to hold on to are similar bars near the top. After that you notice the slippery greasy goo of the oil and its byproducts coating everything, and making it that much more treacherous. After a short bit of time the fumes start to get to you making you dizzy. And if that didn't make it dangerous enough, I had to unhook the bags weighing roughly 50-75lbs. each, carry them one handed back to the opening and drop them into a waiting plastic bag on the ground floor, and go back crawl into the box and start all over again, 50 times, each time becoming more and more coated with greasy, smelly slime.
/. I don't complain much.
This is also the same place where you climb into the scrap aluminum room which is about 10' wide x 30' deep and about 20' tall, which is full almost to the top with razor sharp bits of aluminum and aluminum dust, and use a snow shovel to fill canvas bags full of the shit, so the cannery can recycle it.
At another job at the local coal-burning power plant. I had the unfortunate job of cleaning up the coal dust and debris around the plant. The power plant and it's machinery were old, and often would jam up and spill mounds of coal into the building. If the jam went unnoticed for any length of time it could easily fill up 10 whole stories of the building. No joke, and to clear them out they hired teams of people to shovel the stuff into wheel barrows where it was moved to shafts that fed the machinery. Coal dust is everywhere and most people that worked this job were stupid and wouldn't wear a protective mask. (Frankly, the masks were uncomfortable, but it's still better than getting black lung.) Anyway, in this job invariably you'd come home covered head to toe in coal dust and soaked to the bone with water, it was back breaking work, and you tried to finish the job before the sun came up because otherwise it would easily reach 130* F with massive humidity. Did I fail to mention the fire hoses used to wash things.
Now you could be assigned anywhere in the plant, but the worst place, was this pit about 100' below where the trains unloaded they're coal into a bin that had a conveyor that carried the coal up to the top a tall mountain of coal.
In this pit, it's dark. The only light is from a few scattered dim argon lights set in the wall casting a strange orange hue to everything. The sound of trains roaring above and unloading the coal into the bin is near deafening. The floor is flooded 3 foot thick with water and coal dust that needs to be shoveled up, and everything is either coal black or rust brown. The raucous sound, orange lighting, sweltering heat, back-breaking work, wet misery, coal dust and extremely high humidity all coalesced to form a pretty good approximation of Hell, and because of the similarity the Pit seemed to such the life and hope right out of your chest. It doesn't get much more demoralizing than that.
Now I work doing end-user tech support at a high school. I have my own office, and get to spend at least some of my time posting on
cat sig >
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Working in a packing shed. 115 degrees fahrenheit outside. Steel building didn't keep out the heat, but it did manage to prevent air circulation. Tomatoes were washed at one end of the line, jacking up the humidity level to absurd levels. The work itself was incredibly rote. I stacked boxes 10 to 16 hours a day. When I went home at night, in my sleep I would try to stack my pillow all night long.
No, that was NOT the worst working environment. I was lucky. I was on the packing end. It was the pickers who had the worst lot. They're out in the fields by five AM, but only have to work until noon. Why? Because they would get heatstroke if it were any longer. Seven hours bent over double picking tomatoes in the heat, standing in the mud. It took them a good five minutes at the end of the row to stand back up straight.
They were out their with their entire family, kids and all, picking to survive. Technically they were being paid fairly good piece wages. But their "undocumented" status or ignorance of the law and language, left them open to be exploited by labor contractors.
Never bitch about your job or working conditions, because there's always someone who would gladly trade places with you.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
if you can't tell the difference..then yes...you should too
I decided today I need to find a cube mounted 19" rack.
I'm assuming this is in the US...
Hearing-protection or not, this arrangement almost certainly violates one more workplace safety regulations at the state or federal level, or both. Were you threatened with any kind of punishment (eg, firing) if you didn't work under these conditions? Are you the only person affected? Did you make any efforts to get your employer to make reasonable accommodations, like temporary relocation of your office? Since it's only one four-hour block per week, did you offer to work a non-standard schedule instead of working in the office during that time? If you had a problem with your boss, and it's a company of any size, did you talk to your HR representative? Larger companies almost always have people in HR who are well aware of work-safety requirements, and whose job is to keep ignorant or asshole supervisors from getting the company crosswise with the law.
The question is about WORST working environments, not dream jobs.
I am Darl McBride's personal humility coach.
Pray for me.
Yep :)
:D
So, how many Lab puppies would you like??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Imagine being the guy who has to mop the floors of Adult Bookstores. (imagine video booths.) ugh. THAT is the worst job ever.
I've had 27 different jobs in my life:
groundskeeper, photographer, construction worker, car salesman, telemarketer, bill collector, restaurant manager, cook, pizza delivery boy, cashier, PC technician, project manager, software engineer, just to name a few.
One of the worst conditions I ever dealt with was when I was doing groundskeeping work. I worked on the estate of a multi-millionaire businessman who owned several thousand acres in the Pennsylvania country side. He had acres and acres of pine trees he was growing to sell at Christmas. But he decided that he didn't like that idea any more, and so he wanted them all cut down and uprooted so he could put in his own personal golf course. So during one of the hottest summers ever, I would trundle out with the 3 other guys in my jeans, boots, t-shirt, flannel shirt, hat, and gloves to cut down pine trees with chainsaws, and then heave them into the trailer to be hauled away. I got heat exhaustion 3 times that summer, and so many rashes from the needles and sap, it was awful. We asked the millionaire if we could work 4am until noon, and enjoy some cooler temperatures, but he didn't want his sleep disturbed.
Same millionaire would have us go out and wash his airplane at the local airport whenever it rained. No lie. It would be pouring and we'd be outside in the rain with brushes and soap scrubbing down the exterior of his jet. That, and when it rained, we'd go clean his turkey pens. He would throw lavish Thanksgiving parties and have fresh turkeys from his coops killed. So we'd go in and sweep up turkey shit and breath in all those nasty feathers and shit. I mean, literally, shit. Hourly pay rate: $4.25
Worked in an office that used to be a janitor's closet, and it doubled as the server room. It was the width of your standard cubicle. Day-time temperatures of over 100 degrees. The company required suit and tie as well.
The company I work for now is great, but the facilities suck. Mold growing up the walls and in the ceiling tiles, the roof leaks horrendously and we've had lights short out above us because of leaking water. There are crickets and mice all the time. The fire alarm just goes off at random, so you never know if you're supposed to get up and leave or not. For the entire month of December we had no heat at all, and they had to send us home some days. The other guys in my office bought a space heater to help us out, and it blew out a circuit. Now it's over 80 in here, and the heat's rising. You always think you're smelling something burning, but you can't be sure. There's only 3 toilets for over fifty men (on average), except the one's always busted, so we really only have two. They keep saying that they're going to fix the toilet but they never do. We don't have any windows, and no way to get fresh air. We'd like to turn off the lights overhead and use desk lamps, but oh, no switches to control the lights. This office used to be a chemical lab and there are still portions of the office that haven't been converted to "Class A" office space and still have drums of whatever sitting around. Love the company, but the location is killing us.
these (slashdotted earlier) have got to be pretty bad on any scale, not just in science.
Popular Science Mag: The Worst Jobs In Science
(slashdot reference)
I had a summer internship in New Jersey at a brand new factory making water cooler and milk jug bottles. You worked a 12 hour shift with only 40 minutes of break. The bottles would come out and burn your hands through the flimsy provided gloves. The grinder that recycled the bad bottles was as loud as a banshee.
But here's the worst part: The machine worked by drooping a molten 'sock' of plastic from the top of the machine. When it reached the right length, a mold would clamp over it and inflate from within into a bottle. Because this was a new factory, they were always tweaking the rate at which the sock drooped. If it came down too fast, it'd waste plastic. If it came down too slow, the bottle wouldn't be incomplete. BUT if just slightly less than the right amount came out, it would EXPLODE like a BOMB and because obviously you couldn't see inside the mold you would have no idea this explosive shock was coming.
Shiver.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
I was in SLC in 1986. A few of us were downtown, near the pagan temple dedicated to the angel Moroni, and came across a bunch of street kids from out-of-state hanging out and trying to appear menancing. I couldn't help but laugh as the leather-clad leader popped open a cold one on the street and brashly threw back a swig of the stuff in a defiant, testosterone-driven act of rebellion. His poison? Classic Coke.
Surreal.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I would have quit on the spot if I was that poor newbie. I don't freak out easily, but that would have sent me running to the hills.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I also worked in my dad's Dry cleaners store, in the summer time. Temperature averages 40 C (104 F) with very high humidity, and breathing in tons of carcinogenic Perchloroethylene (the stuff that smells like banana in dry cleaners).
People would walk in and complain about the heat. I invited them to walk next to the machines spewing out skin-burning vapours, but they never took the challenge.
There's also the time I worked putting asphalt sealant on driveways to keep the bourgeois driveways nice and clean. There's nothing like walking on hands and knees breathing the fumes of this tar-like substance and getting it all over yourself.
I also worked tech support in the late 1990s in a Montreal ISP, right after the city was paralized with a huge power outtage for days. Generatoir power was going only to vital systems, and there was no heating. It was pretty cold, and funny to have to wear a down jacket and gloves in an office, and seeing vapours coming out of your mouth as you spoke.
You are hand-cuffed to a desk with a i386SX/16mhz, 4mb system running Windows95. Multitask, bitch!
Worst working conditions I had was as a non-union employee working on a project in a union shop.
It just reinforced the fact that I will never work for a union!
... if that's your best, your best won't do... - Twisted Sister
Running a Bill Payment Center.
no heat, except for the computers.
Employer had a sign out front which claimed we took Charter Bills... but we didn't. Just SBC and Consumers Energy.
One day I sat in that little cube with the big bullet proof glass window all day and sold two money orders... that was it... and it was to the same people.
Coincidentally enough, it later became my best job ever. Tired of using dialup access, the employer got a DSL line. Then I had a day where I only sold two money orders and spent the rest of the day here.
it's not fun. have you ever removed a 6 month old tampon? i did. enjoy your dinner
oh yeah?
How about working inside an 8x20 trailer in during the summer with a 450-lb ex-wrestler with almost zero sphincter control?
The guy farted so often it just became background noise, and there's no way the ventilation allowed by the trailer door could keep up with his CFM. When contronted - he's say "hey, in all those years of wrestling I tore a lot of muscles - it isn't my fault".
Another problem in the trailer is that it was so small he'd have to squeeze by me to get past my desk and out the door. Invariably this lead to another outburst. At least when that happened I knew it was coming and could lean a little out of the way.
Just as I was starting to look for another job I got lucky - the place hired other new guy, and so I only spent two weeks in that trailer.
I was part of a contracted three-man software development team that supported the Marines in Mogadishu, Somalia during Operation Restore Hope in 1993. We were there to make sure that a PC-based software application that provided deployment and redeployment support operated properly.
Our office was out of the US Embassy. Unfortunately the Embassy had been gutted so there was no furniture, no windows, no plumbing, and no air conditioning. There was just concrete walls and ceilings. Our toilet facilities consisted of a public plywood outhouse with half barrels beneath the seats. Once a day, the barrels would be collected and some diesel fuel thrown in. The contents would then be burned, usually upwind. The smoke added to the smell of decomposing flesh since the Somalians buried thier dead under piles of loose rock. Many nights there would be firefights on the other side of the embassy compound wall to add to our joy and excitement. The sand was as fine as talcum powder and blew everywhere. It eroded our keyboard contacts and so we needed to make field repairs to keep up and running. We slept in general purpose tents at the embassy golf course that was nothing but sand since the irrigation system had been looted. We got showers about once a week and laundry even less frequently. We had to deal with dengue fever and quinine resistant malarial mosquitoes. Thank God I was young, then.
All that said, it was an experience of a lifetime. We modified the Marine system to work with all four Services and that application is still around today. (Ported from Clipper to PowerBuilder/Sybase though) Gave me a real appreciation for the work that our Service men and women go through on a daily basis. We were only there for six weeks and it seemed like a lifetime. The Service people were there for months.
I would have to occasionally fix pallet wrappers at a dog food manufacturing plant.
Hopping out of my service van, I'm greeted by 50 gallon drums full of rotting something. Flies everywhere, and the stench is so strong, I try just not to puke.
I walk up a flight of stairs which has a big blower in the wall, blowing right over, yes you guessed it, one of the fetid barrels of innards. So a refreshing blast of it right in the face.
The machine is mounted between the freezer and the loading docks. The floor is icy from the freezer, and quite nicely coated with animal fat from processing.
Here comes the forklift! Anyone see a forklift fishtail? I have. Trust me, a forklift speeding along on a lard covered icerink will. And it comes by, slides to a stop in front of me with a pallet of frozen sheep tounges 6 feet tall. While in the background I can hear the grinders and saws cutting up Buttercups human inedible bits.
yummy yummy yummy.
Or another place was a fish packing plant. Go there to fix there equipment. No wonder it wasn't working, fish bit/guts were tangled up and preventing the pulleys/gears/wheels from turning.
I used to work for a small firm specialized in control systems for still mills. For several weeks I happened to work near EAF's (Electric Arc Furnace), trying to setup a MMI typing on dust covered keyboards, frequently uncovering floor tiles to check ethernet cables connections, near a roaring furnace throwing sparks all around occasionally making loud explosions...
One fine day I said myself, ok that's enough. Now I mainly work in pharma environments...
"linux" is a very common word and was not included in your search.
I once had to spend 2 days working in one company's machine room, transferring data from one fileserver to another via tape, in an office building a company had recently move to.
The machine room had been built for the previous occupants, a regional office of British Gas, and the room had handled a number of mainframes and other large equipment. The air conditioning system was still configured for this operation, even though the room only contained two medium sized Compaq Systempros, some hubs and a router.
It was close to freezing in that room. I couldn't leave the door open for more than 5 seconds, as the alarm system would start to go off.
Luckily the work was little more than waiting for the tape units to back up and verify, and therefore I had to spend little time in that room actually working.
You're lucky. My employer is a heroin addict. I hope to be out soon.
This sig no verb.
Working on porting a compiler to a UNIX system in the mid 80's the hardware that we delivered required a 240v Power Supply. Being too cheap to install an extra one in our machine room we grabbed the one that was feeding our industrial strength microwave machine in the kitchen. But where to put the huge, hulking beast? Too cheap to buy extension power cables we put the machine in the women's bathroom next to the kitchen with the door propped open. Stayed that way for about three weeks. Luckly we had a number of female engineers who pitched in to do the "hands on" work on the console in the bathroom (Thanks Anna!).
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
This reminds me of my internship. I interned in the IT/AppDev department of one of the big timber companies. In the 6 months that I was there, there were 20 fatalities (falling trees, trucks rolling off cliffs, etc.).
Just shows that many jobs are dangerous, and you don't hear about it unless you're in the inside.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I've never really had a job that was too terrible, but an ex-girlfriend of mine worked as a lab technicican at an unamed state animal disease lab. Own of her primary functions was to crack open the skulls of horses and remove the brain. After removal, she stuffs the brain into a blender to liquify it. These is done so the brain matter can be tested for fungus. Not that it matters for the horse in question any more. Nice, eh? If you want to request this done to a horse ask about the Fumonisin screen for only $15.
I once had a job counting pallets of butter. It involved (in the middle of summer) being in a warehouse kept at -5 degrees C. And clambering up 20 meter high towers of stacked cartons.
Or there was the 8 years as a youth spent milking cows. And being covered from tip to toe in cow muck for most of the day.
Maybe these early jobs were what triggered my move into computers? Now I have a comfy chair, a nice view, filter coffee on tap, a decent stereo in the office and a desktop with 1600 times more memory than Bill Gates every thought would be necessary.
- RimuHosting - Linux VPS Hosting
Ah, but that's what makes the discussion so interesting.
You're an infantryman in a foreign coutry getting shot at by someone who doesn't want you there. When you decided to be an infantryman, did you expect something else?
If you were trained as an underwater diver and intended to work oil rigs, you wouldn't get to complain about the lousy conditions either.
HOWEVER, let's say you spent $40,000 of your (or, more likely, your parents) money and four years (or more) of your life to get a college degree so that you would work in primarily climate controlled, professional office spaces with other (supposedly) intellegent people who rarely want to shoot at you with the kind of firepower afforded to those in combat.
Now, if you fall ito the latter case, and find that you are in a situation where the conditions are significanlty worse than one might expect, you've got a reason to stand up and be counted.
Let's review:
soldier = getting shot at for money
programmer = holding down a chair with your butt
Both people find themselves in a drafty building with no heat or air conditioning with dangerous or gross things happening all around them. Which work environment has the greatest contrast to the expected situation? The programmer, of course, and that's the point.
I'm thankful that some folks, like you, have chosen to join the military as their vocation. Nonetheless, as one of the people who pays for your salary, healthcare, training, and other benefits I find your attitude disappointing. I can only hope that if and when you have child(ren) you let them know that the military, in your opinion, is not a worthwhile career path.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Well, now that I work in the EU, I'd have to say most of my jobs in the US.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Not to beat an OT discussion to death, but no where does it say you have to be professionally trained to be part of the militia.
In the time of the writing of the constitution most members of the militia were never part of any 'organized' army in their past, thus most were as you say 'self-trained'. ( though I admit, many were poorly trained at best )
And in fact if you are professionally trained and currently supported by an organized army, it disqualifies you from being a member, by definition.
So yes I do have a federal constitutional right, and the states don't have the right to infringe on the federal restrictions, since it was already clarified by the founders as a federal issue....
And as far as any supreme court 'deciding otherwise', I could care less. They just infringed on the 1st amendment recently as well. They have nullified any decision as far as I'm concerned, and should be disbanded for violating their oath to uphold the constitution. I do not respect, nor follow any law that is contradictory to the absolute law of the land ( i.e.: the constitution and the FIRST 10 amendments.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
At my work there is a huge fluorescent light probly 10 feet long about 2 feet from my head when I sit at my desk, the thing is so bright it drives your eyes to close so you and you just want to go to sleep, maybe its just me but I feel really tired after sitting infront of it for a good hour for the next day or so...
if it's only half a day once a week, I think you should still be thankful you have a job. If what you work on involves jet engines or a company involved with such, then it's part of the job...
I had an internship at a company in their IT department. And since they weren't an IT company, they stuck us in the basement. Every time it rained the sewers would back up into our work area and conference room (durring the 3 months I was there we lost multiple power strips and a couple of computers because they either fell off their stands or someone set it down and forgot about them when they went home). Being an intern, mop duty allways fell to me...
[Please, if you have and pity for your fellow lunch-eating slashdotters at all, mod this up.]
Do not, I repeat, do not read the comments on this article till you've:
I still can't finish my yoghurt.
-Malloc___________________ I want to be free()!
I'm a salesman in IT.
The sort of position where you are asked for both "Team Spirit" and "Sales Target"...
Can you repeat your question about the stabbing and shooting thingy ?
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
My worst job was working for the beach department. It was my the summer before my senior year at high school. I had to report to the main beach house at 8, then ride out to my assigined beach. The lifegaurds would show up shortly after, they were always nice and would bring me a coffee and donuts. The rest of the day, I would sit and check the cars coming into the parking lot for resident stickers, sending the non-residents to the pay-lot up the street. At about noon my dad would come down with lunch and we would sit on the sea-wall and check out the hotties. At about three o'clock or so the ice cream truck would drive by, and the driver would always set me up with a free cone (turns out she had a crush on me, but I was too much of a geek to identify this). At 4 I would break down my setup, then I could go swimming or windsurfing, until it got dark sometimes.
Yeah, that job sucked... Flourescent lights are sooo much better for the skin.
http://www.clientsbitch.com
Cripes, if even half of these stories are true I've only this to say: Take charge of your freakin' lives!
If life means so little to you that you're willing to sell it, one hellish day at a time, for a few pieces of funny green paper, you need to do some pretty serious evaluating of who you are as A_Human_Being.
I read The Coming Plague (Laurie Garrett) when the disease craze came out, and it seems like there were an awful lot of monkey diseases that were not good for people (some sort of simian herpes that caused encephalitis and had a 20% survival rate?). Do they give you vaccines or teach you other ways to deal with the potential hazards?
First half of last year, I answered a job in the paper asking for people with computer skills. I was told I would be coordinating some database backups and other miscellaneous things for local banks and ATMs. It seemed easy enough. It was a night job, from about 10 to 2 at the latest. I thought it would be fun to try. I was unemployed and needed the work.
After the very first night, I came home freaked. The mainframe was a big IBM OS/2 machine, but connected to it were several absolutely ancient terminals running custom-written FORTRAN operating applications. These things were so horrible that I felt as though I had been transported back in time 20 years. Green and black monochrome screens, strange keyboards with weird keys I'd never seen, and lists of tabular data with no sane cursor control--for instance, to set an option for a certain batch job, you would have to move the cursor down through the list to the two underline characters sitting to the left of it and enter it there. It was a free cursor you could move anywhere over any text--apparently the software just checked if there were characters typed at a certain location on the screen.
Along with that, you set things by typing in "P" or "Q" or whatever else into those little areas. There were entire sequences of function keys, letters to put next to jobs, certain ones to put in at certain times, and sitting beside these terminals a big tape drive machine. Behind me were two walls filled from floor to ceiling with garbled tape names like "PVADGH6," divided by day, week, and year. There was a sequence to these that I had to remember, or I would have to start all over. We're talking bank data here, so it would really fuck things up to get it wrong.
Along with learning that, there was a huge, massive printer I had to learn, and during the process, I also had to go over to some Windows 95 machines and use batch commands to dial in and update ATM machines. I also had to go to other rooms in the building and type in arcane commands to do certain things there, but dependent on other things. I'm barely skimming the surface here--there was an entire four-to-six hour process literally consisting of step after step after step after step, all completely arbitrary and insane. The only break was one of about 45 minutes somewhere in the middle.
The operator training me was a redneck guy who had been here so long, the entire process was completely memorized to him. He smoked smelly cigars, was annoyingly talkative, and was constantly making fun of the gay guy who worked next door and who would come in late sometimes to work on things. He kept trying to What's worse, he wasn't computer saavy at all--he had just had this process memorized, and it contained all his unintelligent quirks.
On my last day, about a week into it, he had decided to let me start tackling things by myself. I get the first few steps down, because that's how you learn after just a week--the first parts first. I'm still trying to remember crap like "set all P jobs to J, but make sure GH828G6 is in drive A before pressing F8, but only after the SHEV jobs have gone through by midnight," and I totally start fucking absolutely everything up with the tape back ups, with the job sends, with everything. He actually gets annoyed with me, and doesn't criticize me directly but says things as he fixes them, like "Now we have to wait because all this other shit is running." I think I was there until 6 or 7 in the morning. The sun was up when I got to the car.
I just didn't bother to show up the next Monday. I collected my check later and left. The boss handed me the check in the lobby, but before he did, he asked me if there had been any problems, if I had been treated nicely. I said everything was fine, but it made me wonder afterward why he would ask, as if he's seen this sort of reaction before. There was a young guy my age before me who also up and quit after a short time (the redneck loved to talk grudgingly about him...no doubt I've joined that
I may just have to take his damn red stapler
I work upstairs in a large engine manufacturing facility, there is an air vent right above my cube. I swear the ventilation system is sucking metal filings from the cylinder boring department and depositing them on my head. Once a week I have to clean a layer of chunky black dust off my cube and file cabinets. I'm going to be the first IT worker to contract black lung disease.
--If 50,000 people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
I have to get up at 9 in the morning and work for a whole 8 hours. FIVE DAYS A WEEK! Geez.
That was my title for 4 years. A Student Laboratory Technical Assistant, or more correctly, a highschool student you slipped under the radar and have working in a university animal lab.
My duties included changing the wood shavings of some 3000 rats, washing their cages, and feeding them whatever crap was being tested on them. That was for the first two years. Then I got "promoted".
The next year was spent taking care of 1500 rabbits housed in wire cages in quonset huts. A channel ran under the cages that would catch the shit and piss. I'd have to use a squeege to clear the channel and collect it all in the holding tub at the end of the rows. Then using a wheelbarrow, take the tubs outside and dump them on a concrete slab so I could mix the mess with wood shavings. The smell was bad enough, but the rabits would try to bite you if you got close enough to the cages. If they couldn't bite you, they'd try to piss on you as you emptied the channel below them.
From there I got a transfer to take care of the Primates. I thought the rabbits stank! Monkeys are worse, and they love and I do mean love to throw their shit at you. Nasty little bastards.
On the bright side, it got me ready for my first IT job. The owner of the company would tell you how useless you were and how much of a waste you were to your co-workers. But in client meetings, tell the clients how much she depended on you and how valuable you were to the company. After the meetings she then chew you a new one saying that if she had any trust in you at all she wouldn't bother going to client meetings, but did anyway because she knew that you'd screw it up.
But I'm much happier with my new employer now and have been here for almost 4 years.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I went to a job interview recently. Upon arriving at the city dump, I double checked my directions. Yep, right address. My gut instict was to immediately run. I didn't, I poked around till I found this little office building on the edge of the dump (2 car lengths to the pit). It wasn't on dump property, but butted up against it's line. I went into the office to see little green tree air fresheners hanging everywhere. I asked at the desk for the person I was to interview with. He came out and I shook his hand. Then he announced that I had mispronounced his name, and proceeded to make red marks all over a pad. The interview went downhill from there with him telling me how stupid I was that I couldn't answer any of his questions properly. The real surprise was the job offer arriving, apparently I was the only one who actually showed up after seeing the location.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
worked at this consulting shop. One of the places I had to work at was a wire manufacturing firm. I worked in this small, cold office where they were building a new line just below me (very loud).
Going out in the "plant" was worse. They had dirt floors and no A.C. Very dusty. I felt bad for the mostly immgrant workers there. I would have to troubleshoot these computers running my program that were in sealed boxes with air filters/ventilators.
did I mention that the "software" I was extending and maintaining consisted of about 150,000 lines of VB code scattered in seven major programs and uncounted "utilities" that talked to five or six Access databases on the backened? Oh, and the whole system passed data to an old accounting system that we only had a 16-bit ODBC driver for, so all communication consissted of shelling out to Access 2.0 with a commandline switch for the macro file you had to build at runtime, then reading the result code back to see if it worked.
Also, I had to print bar code labels with these narly serial-port printers by sending raw commands directly to serial port...
Man, those were the days . I kept that job a whole six months!
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Really, they do.
I'd rather work in the cold jet engine testing hangar described by the original poster than work in the best office there is for a complete rageaholic micromanaging nimrod compensating for his inferiority complex by constantly putting his subordinates down.
take care,
Jester
Oh, once you mentioned a corridor with no windows, I suddenly remembered my most-hated workplace. Exodus co-location facility.
... On a brighter side, these conditions "encouraged" me to do a good job, because when my servers worked well, I didn't have to be there!
Due to the layout of the rack, I had to mount keyboard at just below my shoulder level when I stand up. I used to keep a really high stool there, so I could sit up high, but somebody stole it (So much for the false sense of security, thanks, Exodus!). So, I had to stand on the floor, typing at my shoulder level in freezing temperatures (that was back when their air conditioning at the Seatac location was still working). Keeping my hands up makes blood drain from them, making them very fatigue and tired; the cold temperatures accelerate the process. Gloves are not an option, because they slow me down making me stand in that freezer box longer than I absolutely have to. My knees and feet (and back) get really sore from standing in the same position on the hard floor for hours. I can remember the horror as if it happened yesterday!
Jobs? Which jobs?
While I was in college, I needed a summer job, and signed up for factory work at Herco Technology Incorperated. I was promptly shuffled into their HASL (Hot-Air Solder Level) department, working on the HASL-C Alchemy machine. This is a conveyor belt which takes unfinished circuit boards and places solder on them (the solder sticks to exposed copper, everything else on the board is masked with a green layer already).
It first goes thru an acid wash (sulfuric acid, and two others), then a dry-heater, the actual solder bath, another wash, and another dryer.
I was in the graveyard shift, which does maintanence on the machine. Every night I got to open up the solder bath, and wearing 1/2 inch thick heat gloves and a plastic face shield, remove the soldier manifolds from the 500 degree hot oil, and place them into a bath of alcaline. Then I got to scrub the pair of manifolds that had already spent the night in an acid bath (that stuff slowly eats away at your skin if you get any on you) and put that back into the hot oil.
Every other night, I got to give the thing an oil change. This entails first filling up several buckets with fresh oil (using a hand oil pump), un-plugging the soldier bath, and pouring in the new oil while the old oil drains out into a pan. Someone (me) gets to sit next to the pan that is slowly filling up with hot oil and molten solder, and use a scoop to move the oil into a large oil drum marked for waste product. If you go to slow, it will over flow, and if you touch anything, you will be burned.
Apart from the gloves and face shield, we got goggles and workshop smocks. Anything else would be too hot, since the room temperature when working on the soldier bath was about 100+ degrees.
Everyone who worked there had at least one scar. I only worked there for 3 months, and I walked away with a small one which is now almost invisible.
There was more (lugging 50lb buckets of waste solder, dragging tubs of sulfuric acid, etc) but I think you get the point.
Oh, I got paid $8/hr.
When I asked the 40 yr old man who I worked with why he was still there after 5 years, he said: because I have a family, and dont speak good English.
"Sorry Im not more user-friendly."
I have a friend who does contract programming. One of his clients was INSISTING on using lookups for alphanumeric fields. Not something like partno -> partno-desc-location-fru_number...
Instead the client wanted to store the something like "Lower pinch roller" with each character being a lookup in the alphabet table. I'm not kidding.
Another wizard wanted to have all of the possible combinations for parts groupings pre-built rather then using dependant joins or sub-querys. Estimated size of *just* the parts table? 4.2TB.
A little knowlage is a very dangerous thing!!
And what is so bad about linux?
Irregardless of what the current policy being generated by the Executive branch might be, (whether you agree with it or not), you owe those folks your thanks!
I once worked for a major aircraft manufacturer, in a temporary building sitting on the tarmac next to the factory. Just outside, they were digging a huge ditch, and then using a steamroller to pack the dirt in once they'd finished doing whatever they were doing. And the steamroller vibrated as it went. The entire building shook all the time.
And then they started painting the inside of the building (why, if it's "temporary"?), and the fumes where horrible.
And then came the day the temporary sewer pipe broke, spewing stinky sludge, in various shades of brown, all over the parking lot. I almost puked.
I spent a summer working for duPont in Beaumont Texas. Their facility there actually consists of 7 different factories that the centralized engineering team supports.
Every time I had to visit one of those factories, I had to don steel-toed shoes, ear plugs, safety goggles, hardhat, and a full-body flameproof jumpsuit. No so bad until you take into account that during most of the summer, Beaumont usually runs around 100 deg.F (38C) and 90+ % humidity.
Any trip out outside pretty much ensured you completely soaked your entire outfit (expected to be nice shirts and pants for that position) with sweat.
Miserable F-ing hot. And I quit that job by the end of the summer.
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
Cleaning the bathrooms and 2 times a year cleaning the grease trap in all of the sinks that were in the donut prep area. If you don't have an idea of how bad 6 months old grease and etc... smells then I can't convey to you how bad of an experience this was. There was no amount of material that you could use to cover your nose and mouth so you couldn't both taste and smell it. It would double you over and force you to vomit until all you could do is dry heave, only then could you proceed to do the dirty duty.
Enjoy....
Goldstar in Korea working in the cleanroom. I'm not fat but a big guy and I had to work 12 hour days with a cleanroom suit that was too small (tight and acid resistent so it didn't breath at all) and shoes that were 5 sizes too small. I couldn't fit my heels into the shoes so I had to walk around like I had high heels on or something. To top it off they made you take off your pants and put on clean room pants before putting the suit on. This was about 3 1/2 years ago when South Korea was having major money problems in the semiconductor industry. So even worse they would not wash the suits very often to save money (in addition to other money saving things like turning off the lights in all the stairways which you had to walk in your socks until you got to the area to put your cleanroom shoes on). The suit I had all over the right arm had a chemical (I'm hoping it was some kind of slurry stain) that looked like human blood dried on it.
> So, how many Lab puppies would you like?
What an outrage! Puppies should not be raised in a lab, it's inhuman! [continue this train of thought yourself, as you can probably do better than I]
in North Chicago? Those animal buildings stunk.
There was one super monkey producing tons of antibody, it got (nearly) fatally constipated. Ever give a monkey an enema? Stand clear of the blowhole.
I'm sure this isn't as bad as some of the things on here, but I thought it was hell.
I work in a factory at home during my summers off from school. The Second summer I was there, I got put pulling parts of the brake booster ecoat machine. One person would hang the parts on the racks, the racks would go through, get dunked in various chemicals to clean them, then in paint, and finally they were in a 400 odd degree oven for 15 or so minutes. When they came out the other end, my job was to pull the parts off the racks, and distribute them to their respective boxes to be shipped off to be assembled. This really wouldn't be so bad if not for 2 things.
1) the damn parts had just come out of a 400 degree oven.
2) the machine cycled every 90 seconds.
This meant that every 90 seconds, I had to pull between 24 & 36 (depending on the model we were running) hot parts off the racks, put them in their boxes (6 to a box), put a label on the box, stack them 4 high and send them down the line. This line does not stop. For lunch and breaks someone has to come and relieve you since if you stop it and parts are still over the chemicals, they come out bad. Nothing like walking 6-7 miles a day, 6 days a week.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
My first job out of school was at an automotive parts plant. One of the main parts was throttle bodies and intakes that would actually need to be tested with actual fuel before being shipped. As I'm getting a tour of the plant, they take me to the room where the testing is done. To get in, you first need to enter a rather large room (big enough for a forklift with parts to get into) and wait for the room to pressurise to the actual test room. Once inside they tell me about how they test the parts & that the gas they use to test is still extremely flammable (i.e. quite explosive in fact). In case of emergency, there was an emergency exit with a huge butterfly valve above it to help quickly reduce pressure in the room (well, most likely in an emergency the room would explode anyway). Well, when they went to test the emergency exit one day, the tester went to push open the door & was promptly blown about 50 feet out of the room. Needless to say, they had to install a gate about 5 feet from the inside of the door that wouldn't open until the room had pressurized properly.
The good new is that I didn't have to work in the room, that bad news is that my office sat on top of the room. The first time I heard a loud rumbling sound, I simply bent over & kissed my ass good-bye. (When I didn't die, I went out of the roof of the plant and reaized the Blue Angels were flying around buzzing the plant.)
I won't even bother telling stories about shoveling horse crap when it was 10 below zero outside in the middle of a Michigan winter since it's not computer related...
- factory kept at 35 degrees F
- I frequently stood in half an inch of water and turkey guts
- you do not want to know what is done with the turkey that doesn't appear in the nice deli-sliced turkey breast packages in your grocery store. Seriously. Two words: vacuum cleaner.
- boredom got to be so bad after a few days that I would try to work out random square roots in my head to keep my mind occupied whilst toting 200 pound empty gray plastic bins (used to hold turkey carcasses on ice) over to the washing station. I am not making this up, and I'm also not a big fan of arithmetic.
- woke up before 5 AM daily in order to drive to this place. I had a "uniform" of clothes I wore only to work and nowhere else, and I left them outside the house because they were soaked with turkey water, the smell of which no amount of cleaning could remove. My car was unsuitable for human habitation.
- The immigrants that I worked with, mainly from south of the border, speaking little to no English, were VASTLY more intelligent than the local boys that worked there. After a few days, I just didn't say anything to anybody - conversation with the English speakers was simply too painful, and my Spanish isn't good enough for extended dialogue.
- the final straw was the mandatory overtime on not just Saturday but Sunday as well. 2 weekends in a row.
Suffice to say, I have a very deep respect for the immigrants that many of us Americans look down on, doing jobs we'd never do, and being thankful for the opportunity. Those of us born in the States have been impossibly blessed by that fact alone.illum oportet crescere me autem minui
You can put things in a jar.
PERL:
All of the power of Voodoo with most of the understandibility!
Whilst I was a poor student I got a job at a pet supplier. I was presented with a broken garden fork and directed to a large shipping container in the back of the building.
What I spent the next few hours doing was shoving sawdust into a vacuum hose connected to a Silo. I stuck it out for a week then quit.
I share a T1 with about 200 other people, and a good number of them are geeks downloading ISO images.
So there.
We'd go into the "office" a single wide trailer at the south end of the Fort property at 3 am. We had 5 "servers" in 1/3 of the trailer where 4 of us worked. The middle of the trailer had 4 XWindows terminals, and the last 1/3 of the trailer was where the Military personnel hung out, it is also where the air conditioner was. The outside temperature would be in the upper 60's (Fahrenheit, I'm too lazy to convert the temps for the rest of the world, Do it yourself if you need to.). Not too bad, even with 90% humidity. My boss would crank the A/C to max. Bringing the interior temperature into the low 60's.
The sun comes up, and by 10am the outside temperature is 75 degrees, inside is also 75. By 12:00pm, the outside temp is 85-90 degrees, and the inside temp is around 95.
From 12:00-6:00pm the outside tempurature's go into the upper 90's the inside tempurature is in the 100's with the windows open, doors open and non-essential equipment turned off.
The STENCH of the port-o-potty 20 feet from our door was strong enough to taste!
We'd get dinner at 6pm, get some sleep and do it all over again.
Some of the other items that made this situation bad was:
Needless to say after 2 summers, I was done with this job!
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
> > One as a half-assed programmer, the other cleaning monkey shit
> You mean you work for SCO both as a programmer and as a lawyer?
Come on, SCO is a software company... They don't hire programmers.
Well, after this was done, and the furnace was opened, there would be a bunch of plated arsenic on the inside of the furnace. This would interfere with the next crystal growth run, so it had to be removed. I'd get suited up in a bunny suit, wear two or three layers of gloves, a heavy duty respirator, and Tyvek booties to clean this thing using a metal scrub brush. I'd spend 6 hours in this suit, which was boiling hot since it didn't breathe at all, the whole time contorted in weird positions to get at the inner surface of the furnace with my brush.
By the time I was done, my muscles were sore, I was extremely hot, and there was arsenic everywhere. No matter how hard I tried to seal myself up, I always managed to get arsenic powder in my hair. And who knows what I was breathing through the respirator. All this for just over 6 bucks an hour. Who needs grad students- undergrads are even cheaper!
when we buy our server (soon I hope), my "office" is going to be in our server closet (note that it is literally a broom closet) that I just cleaned out. I set up a little chair in there for me etc. Oh and I get to share my "office" with the heater and a big ol' transformer.
Sorry I can only talk about the best working place...
Currently I work for a organisation wich is a youth care foundation. The headquarters is in the middle of nowhere in a forrest. If is even so remote that many mobilephone doesn't work here.
I live about 7 or 8 km from that place at the other side of the forrest. Because is just a nice distance to walk, I try to go on foot every day. When you walk a avearage speed, it is about 70 or 80 minutes walk. Often you see many wild animals like birds of prey,deer, squirrles and currently you will see many geece flying over.
Often It is dark when I go home. At someplaces it's often so dark that you can't see a hand for your face. Fortunate I know that forrest like mine pokkets. So it's no problem to find the way home, but it's still a nice experience to walk in the dark.
The building in where i work isn't verry beautifull. I have a nice big office and share it with 2 other. The office has nice big windows, and I looking at a small zoo outside.
I can go outside, just near mine office. When the weather is nice, it's easy to go outside and enjoy the sun. Because it's in the middel in a forrest it is a verry enjoyfull place.
Most of the colleges are woman, with different kind of proffesion. I'am part of a small division (6 people) and have alot of freedom, mine job is verry varied and i only need to work foor 32 hours in a week.
NICE!
I remember coming in one day and finding four 2000 pound bombs outside my office. Yes, the bombs were labled "live". Yes, they were guarded my nice men with MP badges and automatic weapons, which also had "live" on their ammo magazines. No, I was not a member of the armed forces, I was a contractor.
The thought of 8000 lbs. of explosives outside my office was very disturbing. I really doubted the 1/4" of drywall between me and them would be any protection in case of an accident. I enquired about hazzard pay with my site manager. He asked why and turned white when he looked outside my door. Apparently the bombs came in after the early morning crew.
I was getting paid for PC maintenance so I took my tools and went to the far side of the base. I refused to come back into the office for the rest of the week, calling in to meetings from another building. I wasn't getting paid enough to deal with MPs or explosives.
There were no accidents, and the bombs disappeared as silently as they appeared. Much to our relief.
Yep, a client had his server room inside of a womens bathroom. Everytime someone came in .. I had to go out. Plus been in plenty of server rooms with rats and large animals walking around.
You know, nothing I've seen posted here sounds that bad after reading this guide to male prostitution.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
while I was still in high school and not yet legally old enough to work, durring the summer my pop managed to get me a job through one of his buddies at the "lodge" at the local waste recycling plant. My job was quite simple this: to paint the sewers. I was convinced I had the worst job in the world. So, I'm down there with 3 other guys one day, we're slackin off as usual, drinkin on the job, after all who the hell is gonna check if we painted the sewers, right?. We decide to walk a bit forward (why, I don't know, we were kids) and then we saw HIM... the man with the worst job in the world... a man in a SCUBA diving outfit whose job it was to unclog the clogged drainpipes and gutter, as well as dive in the the waste disposal systems when they got too mucked up and find out what was clogging them up.... and I though that my job at the time stunk...
That's nothing, I work with 7 fat old men with long beards alawys talking about eunuchs.
I work for the government. Beat that.
I used to spend my summers working on a hog farm. Hauling bloated, rotting corpses around, shoveling shit, etc. But there were days when in order to get at the problem we were trying to fix (broken water line, etc.) I would have to strip down to my skivvies and stand NECK DEEP IN A PIT FULL OF PIG SHIT, trying to work under the water by touch.
I have a girlfriend whose name doesn't end in
On a ship, directly above the engine room. Next to the Gausing coil cable... Always noisy, constant vibration, temperature ranging from 90 to 110, humid (from the steam), the screen skewing to the side from the magnetic field and displaying funky rainbow colors.
screw the content filter
There is nothing like a little self-inflicted human suffering to make my day brighter.
A flaming group of nuts puts out PLENTY of brightness...
I use to run a sound company in S.W. Virginia. We'd run sound for bands at frat parties. VA Tech and W&L weren't too bad but Hampden Sydney and UVA were the worst! Most of those frat houses I'd have to haul the equipment down a flight of stairs. Once the party was in full gear it was always packed. I'm talking NY-subway-at-rush-hour, wall-to-wall packed! And of course about 110 degrees. Beer bottles and other debris randomly flew through the air. I had to be sure everything on stage was set before the show because there was no leaving the mixer once the show started. Forget mixing the band, I was just trying to keep the beer off my stuff. At the end of the night, the floor would have a quarter inch of broken glass covered by 3 inces of beer, puke, and piss.
I now work in a cube and I'm not complaining.
-Steve
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
I had to work for Phil Hughes of Linux Journal.
I had to dig holes in the frozen earth to plant trees working for a nursery. Instead of using the tractor to drop the 150-200lb. trees off of semi-trucks, the boss made us lift them by hand. Faster that way. And when Friday rolled around, the boss/owner gave us our checks and would "tug" on our paychecks as he was handing them to us...he despised paying us.
He was a ba$tard!
It was summer. No air conditioning. No natural light. Strong smell from the nearby margarine factory. I was sitting on a non-ergonomic chair, working on a 286 with 2MB of RAM, WordPerfect 5.2, amber monitor, sat on top of a wheeled trolley that I couldn't get my legs under. And what was I doing with this world-class equipment? I was sorting 5,000 entries in New Zealand Who's Who into alphabetical order. Had to create a whole bunch of small files and copy and paste endlessly.... And they were paying me $12.50 an hour, presumably because of my master's degree. Lots of you guys have had worse jobs but that was my low point. ___________
Attract flames, have an opinion (any opinion).
Wow! I can't say that I can beat that one... But I do have my own Mac workplace horror story of sorts.
After I went for 6+ months without a job (laid off in an I.T. support role for a corporation that was going through hard times), I finally found a job from a newspaper classified ad that simply said "Computer technician wanted." (plus something about Mac experience needed). Although I'd been in the computer field for 12 years by this time, the last time I worked on a Mac was a Performa system I had back in 1996 (for all of 3 months, before I decided I didn't like it, and resold it). Still, I figured most of the basics would be the same as the PC (bad RAM is bad RAM, and so forth) - so I applied.
To prepare for the interview, I gathered up anything I thought might be relevant. I had my CompTIA A+ certification paperwork, some Dell certified technician papers, a certificate proving I completed a management development course, and so on. When I arrived, it turned out the guy had his business running out of his home - and he really had no clue what he needed. He never heard of CompTIA, and didn't know there was such a thing as the A+ certification. He explained that he had been collecting up older Macs for quite a while, and was trying to get a start-up business going refurbishing them and reselling them (primarily as starter computers for kids). Well, I liked the idea of seeing old machines recycled for a good cause - so I was willing to give it a shot. (He hired me on the spot, probably because it was obvious I knew more than he did about computers in general. Nevermind I had to figure out most of the Mac stuff from scratch while I worked!)
Well, things really got interesting at this point. The "workshop" was an oversized garage, heated in the winter by a wood burning stove. It became one of my primary job responsibilities to make sure the stove was always fed with wood, and I had to mess with the logs every 15 or 20 minutes to keep them burning properly. It never did heat the place effectively though - so I had to wear a winter coat the whole time I worked.
The majority of the systems were Mac Classics, LCII's and LC550/575's - mostly in really poor shape. It turned out he was buying these things at auctions by the truckload and everything was sold strictly "as-is". Many systems didn't even have RAM or hard drives in them, and he never bought spare drives. I was just supposed to make it all work by "scavenging parts from the machines in the worst condition". After I got the first 20 or so complete Macs going in this manner, it was obvious we needed more parts. PRAM batteries were dead in just about ALL the systems, and again - my boss never bought any spares. (Heck, he didn't even know what kind to get until I taught him about them!)
Finally, we started getting decent numbers of the things finished - but I quickly realized this had no way of being a profitable business. The time invested in getting a single Mac back up and running cost more in payroll than what we could sell it for afterwards. (Not to mention the hundreds of dollars I had to put on his charge card to order batteries, working used SCSI drives, additional RAM, and the like!)
Every week, I wondered if he was going to just give up and tell me it was over - but nope! He just didn't want to "run the numbers" and refused to believe it couldn't magically become profitable somehow. So I stuck around for about a year, building and selling these things at a loss until I finally got a better job and quit. (To this day, though, I still have a few "regular" customers from daycare centers who call my cellphone, trying to place orders for more used Macs. So once in a while, I make a trip back out there on a weekend to build a few Macs and deliver them, and throw a few bucks his way for them.) Last time I was out there, he hired a Bulgarian lady who couldn't speak English to help clean up the machines and tag them with prices. I guess he still thinks he can make some money out of the mess....
Wait 'til they move him to the basement and entrust roach removal to him then snag the stapler - final nail in the coffin, as it were.
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
Worked a beer cart in the mid-80's, at a theme park in the Midwest (K.I.) in the steaming summer, selling beer to other people. OTHER PEOPLE! The horror. And they'd just barf it up after getting off the bigger coasters, and some maint knob would come along and toss orange sawdust on the barf. Wonderful place.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
A few years ago I was an ensign on the flag ship. Some git caught a cold due to a defective T-cell, and the dimwit doctor cured it by creating a virus that flipped one of his genetic switches. Well that virus got out and mutated us all. I heard the XO was mutated into a caveman or something. We were turning into all kinds of animals. I had the misfortune of turning into an African Sparrow down in engineering. Everybody thought they were funny by quoting Monty Python at me. Assholes.
"Derp de derp."
I worked one summer at the City's Department of Recreation. Turned down a job working maintenance at a water park (late high school/early college female lifeguards) because the Dept. of Rec. paid more. What a horrible tradeoff.
The city manager's assistant who hired me was excited - not because I was in college, but because I still had a valid driver's license. All of our equipment was handed down from other city departments who no longer wanted/needed it. The truck I drove had been used to clear snow off of ice-covered ponds, until it fell partly through the ice. That stopped the 4WD from working, so they simply disconnected it. The Special Deluxe topped out a 30 mph, but I did have a yellow light on the top that alerted motorists to my presence on the city streets.
The death threats: Not only did we have the worst crew (Supervisor demoted to Dept. of Rec. due to pending child pornography charges; the two other employees excepting me were permanent-part time, alcoholics who would pick up their first 6 packs on the 6 am ride into work - couldn't drive b/c no licenses) but the Dept. of Rec. also had work release convicts that did much of the work.
The first death threat was from a convicted crack dealer from Bay City, Michigan. After I conveyed our supervisor's orders, he strode up to me, poked me in the nose, and told me that he would "kill me" and that if his brother wasn't in prison, his brother would also "come and kill me as well." I didn't point out the logical fallacy within his argument at the time. The second was a B&E (he stole guns and some money) convict from Alpena, Michigan. I wasn't as worried this time; he only wanted to use the truck, and it's not as if he had the guns he had originally stolen to fulfill his death threat this time.
All in all, it was still better than selling Kirby Vacuums door-to-door.
hehe
I used to work (officially) as a grounds keeper. This was for the government housing authority (providing dwellings for low-income baby machines, etc).
When I wasn't mowing lawns while being watched for up to an hour on end by slack-jawed kids, I was cleaning up the absolute filth that was left behind by those who were evicted/moved/skipped out.
Filth is the only word to describe it. And it's like many of them just dropped what they were doing and... left. Mouldy mac & cheese still on the stove is the lightest of it. It's all bad, but the kitchen is always the worst.
I'd also help the handyman-guy sometimes on the REAL bad places. Doing things like ripping up the rotten feces and urine stained carpets, gagging steadily, to replace not only the carpet and padding but also the rotted floor, etc.
One place I had to clean out was post-fire in which a kid died. The scorched place was mostly soaked (due to fire dept)and I was cleaning the place out prior to the rebuilding/repairing. I'll just say that it's very interesting to see what people have to leave around when they don't have time to hide it. I also found a couple pairs of children's underwear with old blood on them jammed behind boxes of junk in the basement.
The weird part was, while it qualifies as bad environment... I *LOVED* that job. I never knew what fucked up thing I would see next. Incredible. There was something that clicked with me - possibly the fact that I was seeing the things that other people did not.
Unfortunately my city isn't really a shithole, otherwise I'd do a career change into crime scene cleanups or something. Or health inspector.
Well, I admit, that I would not want to have to put up with that myself. But it is only half a day. For three years I endured much worse. Try moving by foot, 100lbs of kit strapped to your back, at night, leading 80 pers cross country, temp 1 degree celcious, have to cross a river in flood, then dig in to a defensive position. Yep, had to actually dig my own office, and hold said defensive position for four days, conduct night patrols every night, then withdraw to another position, by foot, some 3 kilometers away, and hold that for another two days. Or spend 2 weeks in the North West Territories in February, living in a tent where icicles hang down from INSIDE the tent, piss literally freezes before it hits the ground, and by the time you bring your coffee to your lips, there is a film of ice across the top. Or spend 3 weeks in the middle of high summer in the Maritime Provinces of Canada conducting endless hours of advance to contact all day long, attack after attack, day after day for a week at a time, then having to go out on patrol all night long, and start again the next day. When you have done all that, you may feel free to complain about your half day a week of mild discomfort. Huah!
... You worked for Scaife?
I work at Dell.
12:50 - press return.
Our computers were powered by diesel generators
fuelled by our own fat deposits, continuously
removed by liposuction pumps (pedal powered,
obviously).
I spent 2 months going to different doctors trying to find out why I was weak, tired and out of breath, only to find out that they'd torn up a wall that had been infested with toxic mold that had been spreading through our whole area.
I found out AFTER they installed new filters to clean the air. After TWO MONTHS. I was relieved that I wasn't dying from some new and exotic disease, but really pissed off too.
I work for a research institution that focus on the power industry. Before turning into a full fledge sysadmin I had to travel an help senior researchers with their field work. That help was usually troubleshooting software (read 'changing the whole program on the go') that controlled the measurements of large electrical equipment (the code was C and C++ mostly, that was before the widespread use of LabView). Once I accidentally overwrite a data file that had cost us hours of work. My punishment was to redo the tests, but not at the industrial laptop end, I had to take the place of the electric technician holding an electrical terminal (at the end of an isolated rod) on the exposed rotating nucleus of a large (and very live) generator. It was near the turbine end so heat and noise was overwhelming, even with ear protectors.
16,777,216 comments ought to be enough for any forum!
Thank god. I thought I was the only person who noticed how bad that must be.
Even if they did 1 month tours of duty. A month on a mountain peak, looking in one direction, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Chris
Ok, the original poster has my story beat. But I'll tell it anyway. The area where my cubical resides is very noisy. Mostly it's rude people having full volume conversations, laughing, or yelling into phones (or speakerphones!) in cubes nearby. But the guy in the next cubicle takes the cake. He sleeps regularly in his chair. A few times his snoring has been so loud as to cause the "prairy-dog effect". He used to smoke a lot so he spends a lot of time trying to cough up his lungs. We're talking real gross sounding coughs here, with a "loogie hawk" thrown in. (To his credit, he's quit smoking now.) He regularly gets phone calles from his mother and has loud conversations with her ("Well, hello Mudder!"). But the strangest noise he makes is whenever he "does something" like successfully compile a program or edit a file or whatever. At that point he makes this strange sound that I can only describe as a loud "quack". I have no idea why he does this, but it sure makes me wish it were duck season....
This is why everyone working at a job within 50% of minimum wage should be issued a microcasette recorder. During any "down" periods when I have to re-enter the commodity labor market, I bring a tape recorder. I've never had to use it, but the reason why I've never had to use it is probably because they know it is there.
The ______ Agenda
My 1st "tech" job out of school was with a computer cleaning firm; yep we vacuumed out pc's/kybds and printers. Spent a week on Zug Island on the Detroit river; where they make steel or as far as I could tell burn coal. The smell was unbearable and I noticed the employees were coughing and gagging all day long. This is the infamous downriver area near the Rouge (Ford)plant.
Get up!
Frankly, I think boredom makes for the worst jobs. I worked as an intern at the Superconducting Supercollider the summer congress canned it. Those were some slow, depressing days. But I did get to learn UNIX on a sparc2, which got me lots of street cred.
Not that you need actual work to avoid boredom. Best job I ever had was driving the campus escort shuttle in college. I'd sit in my dorm room from 10PM-2AM, watching MST3K with my roommates. Whenever the campus police radioed, I'd drive my little golf cart out to pick up some safety-conscious girl at the library and drive her back to the dorm room. And man, did I show them a thing or two about safety! (I'm not sure what that meant).
I was once on an Aircraft Carrier (USS Midway), and my assigned bed and living quarters were right below the flight deck....This might not seem bad at first, but this was the END of the catapult, and where the catapult stopped after shooting jets off the ship.....24x7 of "sshhhHHHH BOOOOMMMMM!....clang, clang, clang, clang, clang...sshhhHHHH BOOOOMMMMM!....clang, clang, clang, clang!".....not to mention when the jets landed.......BBBBBOOOOOOMMMMMM!!!!! All day, and all night....for weeks at a time....And to add insult to injury, I had to share 4 showers with 180 other smelly guys, and wait in line for EVERYTHING! When I say EVERYTHING, I mean, from waking up to going to sleep, and everything in between....yes, I had to wait in line to pee...
I suppose one could claim that an undocumented feature has no semantics.
I ain't gots no breaks, can't make no bling bling or benjis in Amish town. They talk that dutch-rectangle-state gibberish and don't drive cars but do have blinkers WTF!!!
Yah whutevah, you knows i be right foo'!! I PITY DA NOOB!!
I'm an STE in Windows.
I currently work at a college in a room that used to be a shower for a pool which the cube farm outside my door is built on top of. The room I'm in has a shower drain in the floor with thin carpet thrown over it, but the slant around the drain still exists and so the tables wobble unless propped. There are cracks in the walls along with asbestos as this particular building was built quite some time ago. Pipes, which criss-cross above and down the walls, make constant running water noise when it rains (and it rains often) which sounds like chinese water torture. As there are no windows, my only source of light are those horrible flourescent lighting, similar to the one's that were in Joe vs. The Volcano (in the beginning). Let's not forget that there are rats and odd multi-legged bugs that run about. Of course, there are grey cube walls which is disgusting as well. Yes, this is where I work and it is in fact true. Besides the office space, everything else about my job is actually relatively nice. ;-)
On my last day of active duty in the Coast Guard, as an Electrician, I was sent into the holding tank to fix some limit switches that activated the pumps. SEWAGE pumps that is. Yes, I was up to my waist! But, I had a whole table to myself at lunch :-)
...Just a moment! ...Just a moment! ...Just a moment! ...Just a moment! ...Just a moment!
Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking...
Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking...
Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking...
Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking...
My team was working in part of a building that was still a data center for some supercomputers. They ran out of space, and built a cube farm on the raised floor, walled off from the systems. Besides the noise, they couldn't get the aircon balance right, so they gave up. Four words
Snow Parka's in July.
The guards thought it funny to see the day shift come in from 100 degree weather with a ski parka over one arm. Some days you could literally see your breath in the middle of the afternoon, and it would be T-shirt weather outside.
-G "We love to buy books, because we are buying the belief we have time to read them" - Warren Zevon
Any Semi Plant, is chock full of fun Chemicals I worked with some guys who regularly had to clean silicon off equipment parts. This involved a lotttt of HF ( Hydrofloric Acid ), the nastiest crap there is. Funnily enough, both of them had really bad stammers ( I'm not joking !) I always meant to ask if the stutters pre-dated working with HF :-)
OK, let's leave this in the IT business.
One of my earliest jobs was implementing industrial process control systems in a slaughter house. That means many days of working next to the killing chain, listening to the screams of animals being killed, smelling the horrible stench of death and internal organs, seeing the glistening pouches spill out from the corpses as they swing back and forth from the skid (which used a digital ID embedded within it....)
Oh, and to top this off, the chain ended in the freezers, with close to freezing temperatures, where one had to work for hours at a time, trying to get the process operational.
No wonder I switched to be a vegetarian....
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
This job had it all....
wading up to waist deep in other people's excrement, operating air drills in confined spaces deep underground (think splashing and loudness), risk of death by gassing or falling and drowning, darkness, working with idiots....
Oh yes, operating flow meters (small propeller) which regularly clogged up with pubic hair which then had to be removed. Condoms falling on your head. Cockroaches (some of which had been bleached white by their environment!).
My friends used to refer to me as a 'turd surfer'.
Yes I feel better now.
It wasn't the condition, per se, just the boss that drove me to quit.
...she was in her mid 30's.
Working in the computer lab at college (nights, no less) seemed like an easy enough job. Keep the labs clean, help people with technical problems and log people in to computers.
Well, one night I go in to work and sit down at the desk to start checking people in since the other techs are in the labs helping people. I'm there maybe two minutes and a friend of mine is leaving. She stands there and talks to me as she's putting her stuff away and as I continue to check ID's and give people login info. After a few minutes of this flirting/working (my most fond multitasking memories), my boss bellows from her desk a few feet behind me "Are you going to sit there talking all damn night or are you going to get to work!"
I said 'goodbye' to my friend, gave up the seat to the astonished tech who had just walked in and left to monitor the labs for the rest of my 5 hour shift. Not once did I return to that office or get within feet of my supervisor until Miller time.
The next night, I was having a lovely evening with two other girls in my dorm (aaah, the days of my Harem) when I noticed it was about 20 minutes to working time. Not really feeling up to another night of pointless abuse, I said "Fuggit!" and never set foot in that dreadful lab again.
fs
Afterword: About a year later, the same supervisor was fired for faking a mugging. Seems she'd stupidly spent money she needed to pay creditors and lied about the mugging to get sympathy (and a handout) so she wouldn't have to accept responsibility.
Ok so generally the job sounds awful, but sent home because the work environment hit 32 centigrade?
For some reason the office we work in is perpetually ignored when it comes to aircon.. and in the summer, even with the windows WIDE open and the door open to encourage a draught we are usually a pretty constant 36 centigrade.
Its awful, really it is. But health and safety laws state a minimum temperature for a working environment but no maximum temperature. Go figure.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Night shift at a convenience store in a bad neighbourhood.
I've seen all of these:
And this was in a medium size city (pop 100k) in Canada. This is why I've gone back to university despite it sending me deeper into debt.
looking back at past jobs i have come to realize i'm a masochist...
in the late 70's i was hired every summer by the county to dive approx 120 feet deep into an old quarry (which was flooded into a nice deep lake) and retrieve bodies. we'd get a few a year, some suicide (cliche drive car into quarry thing) and some homicide
became a grave digger shortly thereafter...two of us would dig nice rectangles by hand from dawn til dusk
currently a special ed bus driver for the state...
5 hours of driving a day with kids that drool on themselves, arent housebroken, repeat the same thing a few hundred times an hour...oh the joys. love state benefits though.
Working in an illegal diamond mine. Hot as hell, hard to breathe, little food, you get shot if you don't find anything or enough.
Sounds like a "weekend" field office upgrade.
90+ degrees, 30 hours of work, little food, and you get fired if you don't have the upgrade completed by Monday morning.
The black dot was on the hard hat? The hard hat that is on your head, right? The same head where your eyes can only see what's in front of you, right?
Well, looks like your employer had your best interests in mind.
Sysadmin for a server that got /.'ed. Once by CowboyNeal and then again by CowboyNeal after he took his midday nap. My users were at each others' throats thinking the next guy was overusing Kazaa.
Now watch this drive.
The worst environment I've worked in was a company who hired programmers from those 'private training institutes'.
They had no idea about coding and it was sooo frustrating having to work with them.
If I wanted to work with clowns I would have joined a circus.
I'm not afraid to name names here. Joi Internet (aka Hawk Communications), is the IT equivalent of a sweatshop.
They pay $2-3 less than the market value for so-called "tier 2" representatives, that take all incoming sales/service/support calls.
There are no cubicles, you're forced to sit at a desk with another person, two pc's on the desk, two chairs crammed next to each other, with all the cables strung across the floor waiting for you to trip over them. The AC/Heating cuts off at 10pm nightly, and doesn't come on at all on weekends.
The doors are keylocked to get in *or* out, and most access cards stop working at 2am (locking the overnight people in the call center until 8am, preventing bathroom breaks)
The half hour of breaktime per day is all you get, and they make you split it up into two 15 minute breaks, which doesn't give you time to run out and get food. They make you pay $50/month for parking, or $3.50/day to take mass transit round trip.
They promise benefits (crap medical) 90 days after hire, but rarely follow through, even when harrassed.
Some of the desks are hand made from 2x4's and countertop (such as you'd buy at home depot), and are quite splintery/rickety.
The so-called 'kb' is Chasm's help desk page that was wget'd, then edited out to remove all of his logos.
No one at the company except the president and vp, and a few select others, has any power to cancel accounts. Customers must email, fax, or write a letter to cancel, they cannot do so over the phone. Billing issues are always sent to the black void of billing@domain, and are mostly ignored until the user contacts the bbb.
Server outages are common, usually happening nightly, with no explainable cause, and no communication from the network admins as to when they expect it to be fixed.
They provide nothing other than a water cooler and instant coffee (no cream/sugar) for refreshment. There is also no eating at the desks, so you have to blow your breaktime to eat in the closet of a breakroom.
They don't offer direct deposit, and the day you get your checks is questionable, as is the amount you're going to get paid (they use an electric time clock, but don't round up or down to a quarter, they get you down to the minute), and the checks are mailed from Israel, so if you expect to come in on the first and get paid, you may be out of luck.
I've had a few memorable jobs: I worked as a mechanic in a seasonal bike shop and the owner wanted to keep the shop open through the winter to sell ski equipment. Unfortunately, there was no heat in the shop. None. And in Wisconsin it gets cold in the winter. So the owner, in his benevolence, got a single kerosene heater for the shop. I spent the whole winter feeling like I'd been standing behind a bus all day, and it was still damn cold in there. I never took my jacket off at work, and only took off my gloves to work the cash register.
At the other end of the spectrum, I spent several years working as a (gas) welder in a factory. The nature of the work meant I had to wear a leather apron, long pants and long sleeve shirts year-round, even when the outside temperature was over 90F and even higher on the factory floor with dozens of welding torches going. I used to run a compressed air hose under my shirt and apron to keep some air moving next to my skin...
But you do need to see a psychiatrist to get your meds worked out.
BTW in every country they have studied %1 of the population is schizophrenic. How many registered /.ers are schizophrenic?
Yes, but that's European 36. American 36 is MUCH hotter. ;)
It was actually more than 32C, hence the + sign after the 90. Air circulation was very low. At least 34 C (94 F for us Americans) in our office, and I'm told there were offices that were even worse.
This was caused by a relative heat wave (temperatures in the 60F/15C region) after the HVAC had been switched from cooling to heat. They told us that they couldn't switch back to the Air Conditioning and be able to "meet demand" when the temperature dropped that weekend.
The "funny" thing was that when we came in the following Monday, after it was cold all weekend, it was COLD in our office. So, yeah, they couldn't switch to air conditioning because they wouldn't be able to handle the cool weather on the weekend...but then they weren't able to handle it anyway. Frustrating, to say the least.
--RJ
I guess I can't complain, but I worked at a place where my office was next the to cleaning closet and I would often come to work and find a bucket of foul smelling cleaning chemicals in front of my office. They were very irritating my eyes and nose. I checked the MSDS on the chemicals and one said, "May result in death". I did some research and found some non toxic chemicals and asked the facilities manager to switch. She stonewalled, so I asked my manager to help. Next thing I know the "human resources" woman wants to talk to me. It's obvious that they consider this my problem. A couple weeks later I was called the HR managers office and fired on the spot with no serverence. I should have contested on grounds that they did it to retaliate against me, but didn't have the heart. It was very disappointing because I was working hard and I thought this was a simple problem with a simple solution, but I guess it's all about politics.
Jizz Mopper. That's the worst, period.
I did my graduate work at Brookhaven. Outside the counting house, it would often be either Long Island hot (summer) or Long Island cold (winter). Inside the counting house, I always kept a jacket because the temp was in the 60s. In the lower level, to keep the electronics cool, there was also a 30 mph wind. In addition, when the beam was on, we'd be exposed to roughly 2mr/hr. 25mr/day some days, depending on where you stood. Every three seconds, the beam klaxon would sound to let you know a spill was occuring. In between the klaxons, you could hear the chipmunks going off (background radiation monitors). And you had to get up every five or six minutes to change out the 9-track tape. 9 hour shifts, seven days a week, when things were going good.
Not to mention the overhead crane, the flammable gases, the 1T magnets that regularly ruined watches and credit cards, and the inescapable mullets and plaid shirts.
But you got used to it. I used to sleep on the ratty old couch there in the summer because at least it was air-conditioned.
try this,
..as I like to refer to that period) ...an electrical zap every now and then was unpleasant ...ever seen a big natural gas pipeline explode?
It's December, I'm 100 miles north west of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, it's -20 degrees Celcius, it's 12:00 AM, I'm lying horizontally underneath a large pipe, in a makeshift hole that has been dug in a swamp, consisting mostly of smelly muskeg. Four to five inches of my body are submerged in the swamp water. I'm surrounded by high current electrical equipment as I examine cracks in the metal belonging to a 36" diameter natural gas pipeline that has been depressurized to a measly 1000 psi, that was the day I decided to go back to school.... that was not an uncommon event in my previous life (
I'm in the infantry and if you have ever been there you'd agree that it sucks. My platoon commander is a sissy college boy who has no leadership potential, no guts, and no common sense. All career opportunities are given out to people at random. Therefore there is no incentive to work harder than other people. Its like being in a communist organisation. The new commander of the military(Canadian) is a WOG (without guts) and is getting rid of all the good jobs from the infantry (good job == recce, mortar, pioneer, anti-armour) so there are even less places to progress too.
Sorry to bitch so much but it helps to blow off some steam.
Really, genuinely, depressing. Obviously, a lot of people who have since gone on to better(?) things have worked in really crummy situations, and that means there are innumberable people who haven't gone on to anything better and are still working there. I'm becoming convinced that humanity exists just to take advantage of each other and that the only universal human trait is misery. I know this is supposed to be a funny thread, but it sure makes trying to improve anything seem futile.
Try flying in a tin-can of a plane from Panama City to Armuelles, a little dink of a "village" that you can't even get to by road, to upgrade their PC's for Y2K compliance.
How any computers functioned in that environment is beyond me. A pleasant 100+ degrees during the day, only to go back to at night to a simple room in the low 90's. No Ritz Carltons in this neck of the woods.
When people you work with walk around with machetes on their hips, you gotta be careful what you say.
Fucking /. herd mentality. Some little fucker whines about being unemployed, when obviously he has nothing better than to jerk around /. all day.
And then the other lemmings who sit in their parents' basement because they're too lazy to work, mod the fellow sub-human "Insightful".
"Off-topic", or "Whiny white bitch" is more appropriate.
You people are pathetic.
First it needs to detect the computer ..
This is the 3rd winter I've had to spend working in a Mid-Atlantic hangar. Same temperature inside as out (with windchill). Demos demand 18/7 (blue hands).
Management chills with clients.
I worked for nearly two years (doing programming) in a metal factory building with rain and cold air blowing through cracks in the wall next to my desk, and a pair of big air compressors a few feet away that would automatically start every few minutes. There was also a furnace that heated the building over my head that roared pretty loadly. I wore hearing protectors most of the time. And there was always dirt all over the concrete floor and grit got all over my computer (and regularly destroyed my floppy drive). In order to get to my desk, I often had to climb through narrow spaces around big banks of storage batteries.
What's your skills, dude ?
Computer ones, of course.
Part 1 of job involved going into the plains of Alberta, working outside, in -40 degree weather (note - no scale - irrelevant ;) with a good 50 mph wind for 3 straight weeks. The "shelter" for short respites from the outside consisted of 2" plywood with a heater in it that had a thermometer at eye level that read 98F, but the hot coffee that hit the ground froze before you could even bend over.... Fortunately I had some serious underwear :)
Part 2: worked in a windowless computer room vault for two years with a computer room HVAC system right next to my desk. Turn it on, hear nothing. Made for a good excuse for ignoring phone calls though...
Wacking the kids with rulers. Is it good, or is it whack?
I work as a programmer in Japan. I guess it's not so bad, though hard to get used to the fact that my boss constantly threatens to kill HIMSELF if I screw up.
Having to work with him tops everything here
I wore a full bio suit in 100 degree weather while cleaning out a swimming pool full of beaver excrement.
This doesn't top the original post, but here goes.
My first job was assembling computers in my boss' fruit cellar under the stairs. Motherboards with the bottle peaches, sound cards with the tomatoes. Cases were under the tiny card table he managed to fit in there for me to work on.
Still it was better than when I worked as a programmer for the the government! (Foreign Service Institute) During the 6 months I was there, our team was unsuccessful at filing the forms to get our room vacuumed. Once, we even tried bribing the cleaning guy as he was vacuuming the hallway outside our door. To the credit of this government employee, he wouldn't accept the bribe.
I agree, the lower class once they move to middle class move out of the neighorhoods where they could impact change with their higher income. But instead they leave and so the money goes out of that location into a middle class neighborhood and so on and so forth leaving behind those who were in a rut still there.
It amazes me that a top University spends so much money on RFID research when they could instead spend money on improving the lives of the worker who does robotic type actions. Blimey, have a robot make the burger at MCDees, and let the human being go onto a job that gives better satisfaction.
But that's the downside. Where money doesn't flow to what should be done. But in terms of a really bad job.... listen up, there's no job in the US that is worse than some jobs in the 3rd world. Fact is in the third world, i.e. in some countries, sanitation workers have to go in without protection, i.e. just regular shirt and shorts into the sewage line. Come on. Where's the joy in that?
So, things have improved from when all of the "first world" also had unsanitary work conditions. Things do improve, but at equally for all people? No. There is perpetual bad as man is selfish, and sometimes ignorant of history. But there has been progress i.e. look at emancipation, equal right to vote etc.
Things do change if enough people make it a point to look and change things. If everyone just says oh-what's-the-point and doesn't take a second look at how they might help bring about change...then the moneyed types and corporations make it less easy as time goes on. Then a few will control the well being of many. So hang in there.
Also, dejected and negative mindset keeps the educated techies from voting. So, how many of the
jobless techies will go out and make themselves heard? Why is the percentage that vote so low here in a civilized and first world democracy?
Do not let the bad things affect your ability to influence the future. I like best the quote by
Edison..
"If we all did the things we were capable of we would simply astound ourselves."
cheers,
M
Even funnier is that you and I BOTH saw a female name and went to look at her other posts right away, like we've got some chance of... um... getting our... semen swallowed.
But in all seriousness Anna, welcome to Slashdot! We can be rude and crude at times, but I'm sure you'll enjoy your stay. Don't forget to read the Slashdot FAQ, which can deconfuse a lot of things for you.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
My present job involves a huge amount of cell culture. I'm down with the laminar flow.
Oh yeah, baby. Just finished changing the media on those transfected cells to selective media. Ask me about the nice bruises on my upper arms from hitting the edge of the front of the hood. Ask me about the three hundred 15cm plates. Ask me about the total lack of ventillation and AC in the tissue culture room. We were pushing 90oF in there the other day. Just ask me.
I dare ya.
130 Degrees F (~55 C) all year 'round
100% Humidity
105+ dB
Molten Metal flying through the air
Had to wipe the grease off the monitors of the floor computers to see each day.
Had to replace said monitors every 4 months
but...
You could have all the free (as in beer) gatorade that you could drink !
Did I mention that it was hot and dangerous?
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords
How about having to listen to Jive Talkin' over and over while you're trying to write code?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I got to stand out in the middle of a field all day in 9 degree (-12.8c) weather with high winds (20-30mph) manning a radiation emmitter known as The Sterilizer for people running tests from a heated building half a mile away. There was a tin shack with a heater, but it was broken, and had been for years. I wore my full snowboarding outfit including the huge boots, snow pants over pants, thick coat over flease and shirt, lobster gloves with inserts, hat, hood, neck gator/face mask, and I still froze my nuts off. I ended up leaving my car running so I could take breaks in it and warm up.
Oh, did I mention how we aligned the testing tools? They strap a laser to their sensor and shined it at me. When I saw a blinding red light I raised my hand so they'd know it was aligned. Yes I'm serious.
It was slightly worse than my previous asignment. I was in basically a warehouse running tests where the noise was non-stop and the levels were WAY above OSHA limits. Because Lockheed (and our later owner BAE) banned the use of shareware and freeware (it could have viruses, you know), we had no terminal program capable of running scripts AND logging results. Thus, I was a script for 8 hours shifts, (1 of 3 a day) for 2 weeks. I would punch a few keys, wait a sec, press "y", wait for the test to run for a minute or less, press a few keys, press "y", for 8 hours straight. The only break I had was every 3 hours or so I would have to change the temperature of the test chamber, so I had to find a guy to press the button for me. The terminal program was written in-house by our incompetent software people. It could either log data, or run a script, but not both at the same time, which is why a human had to be the script if we wanted to log the data. The log was only 300 lines long or so, so we had to click "select all" and "copy" and paste it somewhere quite often. Of course, the "select all" and "copy" menu items were on the same menu and right next to the "permanently delete entire buffer" button, and of course there was no "undo." I often wondered how much data was lost and then... reinvented... It was only life-or-death military equipment.
The rest of the time I sat at a shared cube no where near any window and where the temperature was ususally around 80 degrees, hotter at night, year round. At night bats would fly down the halls (every night) and some racoons were spotted. I spent a while in the finished basement which of course had radon and I also heard carbon monoxide issues. The whole building probably had lead paint and there was an asbestos settlement with employees a few years previous, and a big pile of asbestos contaminated dirt in the parking lot they had to keep covered and wet. The air ducts would occasionally eject chunks of what looked like coal or creosote. One cube got this all the time, so it was draped in cheese cloth to make it easier to clean. The parking lot was a great place to have you car vandalize and broken into. My oh-so tempting '95 Corsica was broken into, and I had parked under a light right next to the building by the cameras, but security refused to let me view the tapes. I heard of people being attacked in the lot, and someone murdered their spouse there, too.
Then there was management issues, and pay issues, and ethics issues, and purchasing issues, but I don't want to get too off topic. Lets just say Dilbert doesn't know how good he's got it.
Oh, I don't work there anymore.
When I was younger, and before my brains were fully developed, I climbed radio towers for a living. Right up the side, several hundred feet, replacing light bulbs, installing antennas, etc.
One morning my partner and I were packing the truck to go climb a tower at a pulp mill (where wood pulp is boiled to--eventually--produce paper) in a nearby town. Just as we were starting the truck, the boss comes running out, waiving his arms and telling us to stop--he'd just received a phone call from the mill; the tower collapsed the night before! Apparently, the corrosive exhaust of the the mill had weakened the tower to the point that it wouldn't support its own weight.
My partner and I told ourselves that we would have spotted the weakness in the tower once we got there, and wouldn't have climbed it anyway; nevertheless, our usual pre-climb tower inspections were done with significantly more attention to detail after that.
Windows. No, seriously... I'm a UN*X sys admin, converted to an OS X deployment tech due to my previous experience working at Apple and my OS X fanaticism, converted to... a Windows build engineer. Kill me now. PS, first post ever... w00t!
This is not the signature you are looking for...
My office building was on a Superfund site in Silicon Valley: it was a field where toxic chemicals had been dumped back in the 1970's, and large amounts of money and effort were being spent on cleaning it up. In particular, a system of pipes ran water deep through the soil, then gathered it up again and brought it up into a tower where it was aerated to release the harmful chemicals.
My office window was right next to that tower.
*twitch* *twitch*
I worked as a machinist before I became enlightened to the benefits of a higher education. At one job we machinists were swapping stories about the worst holes we had ever worked in. My friend told us about a shop he worked in. It had a particularly dangerous machine that a person had lost his thumb on. The thumb (now several years old) still hung on a piece of string by the machine to serve as reminder. In my profession it was always interesting to follow the new trail of blood to see where it would lead.
she should check out the unofficial slashdot faq too.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Hey, I've actually worked at jobs where I wasn't even _NEAR_ a computer!!!
Work is just like middle school, except being unpopular has worse consequences and being insecure has worse expressions.
But then there's the issue of compensation and markets. Markets are extremely efficient, for what they try to balance -- which is money. But this tends to skew the value system, because a lot of values are simply external to the market system governed by money -- things like pollution (if someone else pays to clean it up), economic impact on labor forces (if outsourcing is cheaper), etc. And, so long as the only value is monetary value -- and having a certain monetary "score" is a requirement to continue playing the game, or making progress -- it isn't surprising that the people in charge decide someone must make sacrifices. And most people are much better at deciding other people need to make sacrifices than they are making them themselves.
So, the answer is that you have to find a way to bring those non-quantifiable factors (working conditions, environmental impact, development of a software monoculture, chilling effect on the open source movement, whatever non-commoditized factors you want to talk about) into the scope of the market system. OSHA tries to do this, as do most types of government regulation. Unfortunately this tends to prevent people from making as much money as they could, by forcing an additional cost onto the system (that would otherwise be paid by Somebody Else). Couple that with the some-would-say-irresponsible libertarian ideas that have always existed in the US and that work in the interest of people who want to do whatever they want to get more money, and you have the anti-government-regulation attitudes that tend to dominate in today's US. (Never mind whether they are borne out by experience in any particular instance; regulation is probably a good idea in some cases and a bad one in others, but the prevailing sentiment is any government involvement in the economy -- even just to internalize market externalities -- is Communist, or Evil, or Contrary to The Interests Of Business, or Bad For The Economy, etc etc.)
But, yeah. To be brief -- the rewards structure is set up so that people are rewarded for mistreating their fellow man. People are not innately wolves, they're just good learners and perceptive of a payoff system that -- without public-minded balancing -- rewards taking advantage of the weak. When morality makes money, it'll get really really popular.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
A: My mom runs Windows ME and I have to give her free tech support over the phone.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I would honestly prefer nearby jet engines, and having then to wear earplugs etc, over the office conversations I've had to put up with. Not inappropriate topics, just so interesting that it was impossible to ever focus on writing software.
Please, give me a job with nearby jet engines.
I started as a programmer in a factory just finishing up big new additions. The programmers were on the second floor of an outbuilding above a garage area. In el-cheapo fashion, it was a mini-cube farm. 5 foot high dividers enclosing your very own student desk 3 ft by 1 1/2 ft surface area. 4 cubes shares a phone which ended up sorta balanced in the middle. The dumb terminals were limmitted to 2400 baud due to the distance from the computer room. Printouts were from a fanfold line pinter pounding away in the corner cause these laser printer things were too expensive for mere programmers. Fold out the fan fold prints and they fall off the desk, cause they are too big. This building was beside a bulk unloading station and its air intake (when working) was at the same hight and location as the exaust fumes from the unloading trucks. Most of them had vibrators to get the last of the stuff out. So you get a buzz on from exhaust fumes and the the bulding starts to shake. Glorious.
This building was planned to be demolished at the end of the project so there was no maintenance. The heat came on in January (in Canada). Programming in mittens just does not work. Someone would figure out how to turn on the air conditioner on some time in September. We would be sent home due to the heat on a regular basis.
A minor math error was made in the initial design so all the computers were severly overloaded. The only thing we could do online was edit, everything else got submitted as a batch job. Look, my compile is #43, lunch time is 9:30 am today.
Since it is a factory, & I am luckey enough to work in the machine control area, we get access when the whole place is shut down. It's a food factory so these shutdowns involve "Fogging for insects", beter know at filling the place with nerve gas. My instructions were: "It only hurts insects, but don't breath it. Now get out there and test yer stuff." More head rushes.
Oh, and the department manager had a mental block when it came to my face & name. Couldn't remember either. Every month or so he would walk over and ask who I was and what I did. The goof HIRED me.
And the best part was the environment with our customers. Lets just say that the Denver airport bagage system was a good rollout compared to this place. Nothing worked well enough to justify the hundreds of millions spent, so meeting with the customers began with the refrain, "Rip that shit out!" & usually went downhill from there. Then there were the users in the union who had a litle problem with management and their forced overtime. You WILL come in & we might let you go home after a 60 hour week, if we can. The instruction to me was "Stay away from the houly people."
Back to the cube farm,
There was a co-worker who had a hobby of getting people she didn't like fired. Missing a department softball game put you on the shit list. One of the flakier developers was the only tea drinker. So in usual cheap-o fashion, the company bought a electric kettle with a "it's-hot-enough" auto shutoff that would not boil water. So Skippy (as he was known) wired the switch down. And then got distracted. The melted plastic burned through a counter top and then the smoke REALLY started. The mechanics downstairs complained. Loudly. But we did learn that the fire alarms were not connected to anything.
Eventually the head count horseman was let loose and things got worse. Nothing like supporting software that does not work while being watched by a spineless supervisor who needs documented proof of incompetence to help lower the head count. Tended to chip away at ones sanity. Luckily I got drunk at a party and mouthed off to the manager that I could do better job than the other department goof-de-juere who just happenned to be sacked the next day. Instant transfer. Happy times.
Tech Support for Microsoft.
If you're a router weenie, I got you covered too.
Tech Support for Ascend.
Sitting in a tent at a military test site coding c++ while the nearby artillery range is being used.
Did they take your stapler, too?
That's Hillarious!
What a coincidence... I'm a Network Support Analyst for a Regional Health Authority (a collective of Hospitals, Personal Care Homes, Community Health Offices, etc.), and one of our server rooms happens to be the old autopsy room, right next to the morgue (which they still use today).
It's quite clean, no strange chemical smells or magnetic fields, but it comes complete with sloped floor with a drain in the middle, exhaust vent, and an extra-large door. Almost everything you'd want for a server room.
As an added bonus, there's also direct access to the morgue via a side-door, but for some reason my coworkers choose that area to block with some shelving. *grin*
I won't forget the day when I was working in the server room soon after we claimed it when there was some shuffling and banging noises coming from the door to the morgue. Somebody (or something...) from beyond the door tried to push the shelving out of the way! Thankfully, they eventually gave up.
I do completely share your pain that most hospital IT shops are an afterthought, though. Our I.T. Department wasn't even around 10 years ago.
\/\/\/
The 1950's called, it want its hat back
Although I'm not allowed to go into much detail, let's just say it was unpleasant sitting behind a computer in a mobile building made of popsicle sticks in the middle of the desert with red dust clouds everywhere, dozens of planes flying inches from your skull, and the occasional earth-shaking (literally) boom of the world's most powerful x-ray source going off right next door.
I hope you return from time to time to read replies to this post.
This story disturbed me deeply, to the point where I started thinking about what _I_ could do.
I have something that may help the situation a bit. Actually, quite a lot; at least to her, and it will give you a sense of being able to help, too. No violence is involved. No exchange of money, either.
Mail me at smallhelp-jan21@dickwa.com.
(and yes, this is just for my good karma, I'm not expecting anything in return)
Going to a meeting from another, passed an intersection and then bang. I think around a couple of dozen killed or so including a car a few minutes behind us with the driver of a friend of mine. This was bad!
A long time ago, I was assigned to share an office with a young, female programmer who I thought was quite attractive. The desks were arranged such that if I looked slightly past my monitor, I would be staring at her.
But then, I didn't want to stare at her because I didn't want to make her feel unconfortable. But then, well, you can see that the conflicting impulses could be terrible!
your gonads didnt stand a chance
After that, what do you do, go back to the hotel. Sorry, it was also bombed. The web ref for the details is here amongst other places. Oh thats ignoring the usual problems like dysentary and so on. Btw, this is one of Bushes 'friendly' countries.
A BA in CS and Math? Shouldn't that be BS (of Science)? Maybe he DOES have a BA... which would account for his unemployment in the programming field.
In my IT department we are all crammed in a small room with 8 desks, 8 workstations, and 12 PCs, 2 UPSs and 1 big net printer used to support our website. We have your air-conditioner on 24 hour 365 days a year. We pile the PCs on our desks to have more walking space.
Last week we had an extreme cold spell with -35 degrees outside but inside it was a sauna.
We keep the air-conditioner running non-stop. We open and close the window all the time. The air quality is very poor because on our floor we keep a gold smelting furnace with produces a film of sutt on our desks over time. In my drawer I keep a gas mask just in case if I ever smell amnonia in the air.
Eventually I will get sick from the dust and get lung cancer or asma. I also get sick all the time. Did I mention the work is stressful too?
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
...my weekends in High School
This was July and my office went up to about 40C. Oh and it was the kind of company where the servers were in my office, and just as an aside they were running an old version of SCO UNIX on the servers.
To keep us happy they put a huge exaust fan in a window outside in the main office. Which did absoulutley nothing to cool my office, but did make a tremendous noise.
As you can imagine it didn't take long for the servers to start crashing so to add to my pleasure I had managers coming in to yell at to me because the machines had crashed.
Six months later they installed the new A/C they had bought because of machine problems. They decided that it would be best used in the Marketing office.
But it was all OK because I could look out my office window and be happy I was living in Bermuda.
Oxford New Zealand Dictonary Words and their origins
dag, n.1 [f. Brit. dial. dag: see OED n.1 3; AND 1891.]
1. Often pl., a clot of matted wool and excrement found on (or cut from) the hindquarters of a sheep; such daggy wool removed from a sheep. Also green dags, those still soft or moist. See also sheep-dag (SHEEP 1). [ ... ]
2. Special Comb. dag-boy, a young dag-picker; dag-crusher (a) a machine to crush dags to enable the removal of wool; (b) a person who operates a dag-crusher or dag-crushing plant; dag-crushing, the crushing of dags preparatory to removing the wool (also attrib.); dag-cutter, a dag-picker who cuts wool from dags; dag cutting, the cutting of wool from dags; dag-heap, the pile or heap of daggy wool awaiting picking; dag-picker [AND 1907], a shedhand who removes wool from dags; dag-picking vbl. n., the cutting of wool from dags; dagwool, wool cut or otherwise produced from dags; dag-rattling ppl. a., see RATTLE v. [ ... ]
When I was in high school, I had a job at a fresh fruit and vegetable market. We had a trash compactor where you'd toss any garbage from the front of the store (packaging in the pre-recycling days, anything gone rotten, etc). There was a sign next to the chute that said "After throwing anything in compactor, press green Compact button." That button started the compactor, obviously. If anyone ignored the sign, eventually we'd end up with a situation where stuff would get jammed in the chute, and wouldn't reach the compactor at the bottom.
When that happened, the job of the newest stock boy (also known as the "company bitch") would be to slide down the compactor chute and toss the offending trash bags out. Guess who the most junior stock boy was? That's right: ME! Lucky me... that has to be one of the most repulsive things you can imagine. Sliding down that greasy, slimy, stinking chute, chucking out heavy bags filled with some of the nastiest stuff imaginable, and then trying to get back up that slick, treacherous, stinking chute without sliding back down again. And to top it all off, someone up top might decide it would be fun and games to hit the Compact button while you were down there. Ha ha, what hilarity!
Mind you, the compactor didn't move that fast, so it's not like you were in much danger. The first time someone did it to me, I nearly shit myself, though. Thought for sure I was going to end up as a WarAmps kid, doing those TV commercials pimping those little numbered key tags. So, to summarize, you're a wuss. I'll take noise and cold any damn day over the stench, filth, revulsion, and general potential for limb loss that I experienced that entire summer.
that's a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility... basically a safe, protected against intrusion and surveillance, that is large enough for a human being to work inside. The advantage is that you can do things like leave top secret documents lying around... disadvantages include:
- muzak must be playing continuously to mask out secret conversations. if muzak wasn't bad enough, the one i was working in only contained two working tapes (it can hold ten).
- the procedures for getting in/out of the SCIF are so onerous, once you get in, you pretty much stay there the whole day. this means getting sandwiches handed to you through a little door (actually two doors, like an airlock) and occasionally peeing into a bottle (or just deciding not to drink much at all).
Any GOOD son would have at least upgraded her to Win2K. Linux if she didn't beat you as a child.
I mean, look at it this way. The people with the luck, skills, and fortitude, tend to be in the more cush jobs. They have often worked hard, and gave up many things, to be in a position to obtain the cush job. The people in cush jobs tend not to the ones that partied though high school, and skipped college for the money that a low-skill job would deliver. This is not always the case, as some just luck into a good job, and some people just have limited skills, but the point still stands.
And, if I may be so bold, why should we listen to a soldier complain, especially when he or she willingly applied to the service and dutifully collected the payments. It is not like it is a surprise that service men and women get shot at. It is not like it is a secret that the U.S. occasionally sends troops into action. It is true that recruiter will lie to get recruits, but is anybody, even a 16 year old, that gullible (I know the answer to this is yes, I have seen it). I mean really, how is coming to work in a fancy office building then getting a office that is not in compliance with US laws similar to being sent off to do your job? Yes the job is shitty, but is what you signed on to do. I know for many, these jobs, especially the military, is thier only hope. These kids are put in a difficult situation, and i feel for them, but at least they are getting three squares a day, some discipline, and hopefully a skill.
I really wish that people would not have to work in shitty jobs. I wish that every company in the US was forced to comply with OSHA rules, perhaps shoot the non compliant managers and replace them, repeat as necessary. I wish the insane leaders of the world would not treat god's children as cattle to be sacrificed as needed.
I reminded of this quote from Wilson when he declared war on the Axis powers
Think what it was they were applauding. My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Nastiest contract job I have every worked....
For those that don't know what they do:
Farmer Brown's cow dies of some disease or car or something and cannot go to the slaughterhouse.
Rendering semi truck pulls up, throws out some chains with hooks on it.
They hook the cow, turn on the chain motors and drag it into the truck and move on to the next location.
Finally the truck stops at the rendering plant.
A huge metal door slides opens underneath the truck and the truck bed bottom falls dropping a
huge load of dead bloated cattle and other animals!
Delicious! The fecal urine deathrot grease stew smell is everywhere.
I made it through the whole day inside but puked outside after seeing a large puddle of
water blood urine and a flourecent floating piece of plastic with a number on it.
This was an ear tag.
**Complete with ripped off ear and part of the scalp.**
Inside are several 50 foot diameter 30 foot tall open tanks. BOILING! Metal staircases go over the
tops of the open vats. When you put your hand on the stair rail your fingers sink deep into the
sqishy rancid grease before hitting metal.
Very similar in consistancy to refrigerated butter but it's all very hot. Grease penetrates your
lungs and it's well over 100 degrees (F) inside.
I slipped twice on the stairs almost sliding over the edge into a farm sized fry-daddy.
The workers said you *don't* get accustomed to the smell. I'm not weak when it comes to things like this but the scale and potency.. sheesh.
After pressure cooking Bessy and friends they separate all the catrilage and bone and grease
and such grinding them up for later refinement.
Outside were various tanks and piles of product
with spray painted customer lables like Maybeline, Max Factor, Quaker Oats, etc.
None of this of course is for human consumption but makeup doen't count as food.
I was there trying to troubleshoot a chemical pump automation system for odor control which led me
all through the place.
I used a bottle of dishwashing soap to get clean, threw away my clothes after several washing attempts.
Much respect to those work there.
Firefox &
Who'd of thunk that an office with a "hangar right outside" the door would be noisy?
What a jabberhead
Honey Dipping.
:)
If you don't know what that is look it up
The office I sometimes have to work at (mostly I work from home) is situated on the waterfront looking over Port Phillip Bay (in Melbourne, Au). It has these huge bay windows.
Now, you're asking, how could this possibly be bad?
Imagine it gets warmer (as it does occasionally here). The beach becomes quite attractive to those who don't have to sit in an office (and some who do). The lovely bay windows fill up with people flocking to and frolicking on the beach.
It's bloody distracting!
One of those days was the hottest day on record in Perth, Western Australia - 46.7C (116 F)
I had to throw out some rancid milk. This meant spending quality time amongst 3 industrial bins, all in the sun, which we shared with 1. a fruit shop and, you guessed it, 2. A fishmonger.
I will take that smell to the grave!
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
A gob can mean a mouth in English English. It sounds awful when you read it like that. Took a while before I realised you mean a lump, or a blob.. :)
Get your own free personal location tracker
I know exactly what you mean. I have 5 sorority neighbors (which is just fine), but they found out I knew computers. One day they told me that their new wireless NIC card they put in wasn't working, and could I take a look... the OS didnt seem to know anything about any new card, so I opened the case... and there was the card, sitting (not attached in any way whatsoever) inside the case. I I told them something about a flux capacitor problem, so that they wouldnt feel stupid.
I worked as a Help Desk Supervisor with my U.S. Army signal unit in Afghanistan. The worst conditions I ever had to endure was the daily mortar shelling from the local Taliban remanants. The blazing hot summer and then the frigid winter in canvas tents was fun too. And to think that the Signal Corps was cushy! We still loved what we were there to do and were proud to do our part for our country.
SGT C.
327th Sig Bn (ABN)
Ft. Bragg, NC
Many years ago, myself and another guy were programming day to day in an office without proper heating. We would wear our snowmobile suits all day and had a room sized area drapped off with plastic sheeting and had a milkhouse LPG heater (Kinf of like thos kerosense torpedo heaters) heating the area. Of course, the fumes from the heater would make you ill and the Carbon Monoxide was not good either. The heater was also noisey and the building was infested with bats so it really stunk too. We did this day after day sitting at our vt100 terminals working on our little PDP-11/23 running RSX/11M.
I work at a glass plant for a major beer company. We produce the beer bottles. One of the three positions I work at is in the basement. You see, a 85-90% packing rate vs gobs dropped from the furnace is a very good day. The malformed bottles (this can be anything from a malformed finish to a speck of dust) are dropped into the basement. When the IS machines (pneumatic machines which contain the molds, automagically pressing and blowing the into the form you get to see) reject a gob, be it from being the wrong weight, a secion of the is machine is down, or a myriad of other problems... it falls down there. A number of things can happen when a 2000 degree gob of glass gets down there.
1. oil fire. This machinery takes a TON of grease to run, it's everywhere.
2. Explode. Concrete and hot glass don't mix, concrete explodes sending shards of semi molten glass everywhere.
3. Lands on your head. Self explanatory... man third_degree_burn, ouch.
That's not the best part of it though.
When an IS machine goes down (the entire machine, not just a section). You're talking approx 300 tons per day of molten glass falling down that you have to eventually clean up. 12.5 tons an hour. Not exactly something I relish the thought of shoveling up.
Ex developer turned glass monkey... god I love our economy.
I am currently working in Baghdad...yes the one that is in Iraq. I don't think I really need to say much more. OK I will. No beer, no women, no chewing gum, no swearing, (this is harder than it sounds) and because I am on base as a civillian, all of my emails and phone calls are recorded. Why am I here? $$$$$$$! It still sucks though.
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
Health Hazard Data
LD50-LC50 Mixture: LD50 (ORAL RAT) IS UNKNOWN
Route Of Entry - Inhalation: YES
Route Of Entry - Skin: YES
Route Of Entry - Ingestion: YES
VAPOR/AEROSOL CONCENTRATIONS >1000 PPM IRRITATE EYES & RESPIRATORY TRACT.
INGESTED:SMALL AMTS ASPIRATED INTO LUNGS MAY CAUSE MILD TO SEVERE PULMONARY INJURY.
Carcinogenicity - NTP: NO
Carcinogenicity - IARC: NO
Carcinogenicity - OSHA: NO
Explanation Carcinogenicity: MFR LISTED NO INFORMATION ABOUT THE CARCINOGENICITY OF THIS MATERIAL.
Signs/Symptoms Of Overexp: INHALATION:HEADACHE, DIZZINESS, ANESTHESIA, DROWSINESS, UNCONSCIOUSNESS, BRAIN DAMAGE & POSSIBLY DEATH.
Med Cond Aggravated By Exp: EXISTING DERMATITIS.
Emergency/First Aid Proc: EYE:FLUSH WITH LARGE AMOUNTS OF WATER UNTIL IRRITATION SUBSIDES. SKIN:FLUSH WITH LARGE AMOUNTS OF WATER; USE SOAP IF AVAILABLE. REMOVE GROSSLY CONTAMINATED CLOTHING AND LAUNDER BEFORE REUSE. INHALED:REMOVE THE EFFECTED VICTIM FROM EXPOSURE. ADMINISTER ARTIFICIAL RESPIRATION IF BREATHING IS STOPPED. INGESTED: DO NOT INDUCE VOMITING. KEEP AT REST. GET PROMPT MEDICAL ATTENTION.
they used to test 12 foot diameter industrial fans outside my office.
the wall might as well not have been there.
naturally this was after the supervisor left.
Heh, I worked at the one in Hackensack and later at Modell's on Rt 17 in Maywood. Same shit----
While I do hard work for a living,and I can relate ,I just thought I'd pass this on :
Yea , sure yer job sucks , but ask a firefighter from Chernoble how he feels about his toughest day...
My job ain't so bad... =)
Though it didn't seem so at the time, some of the jobs I've had and the places I've worked were downright deadly.
I dropped out of music school to play full time with a band back in 1980. Some of the venues were actually pretty nice, like the hotel bar that would give us a suite as a dressing room. Nothing beats a nice hot bath between soundcheck and the set.
But most of the places -- nightclubs with capacities between 100 and 1200 people -- were veritable Black Holes of Calcutta. CBGBs was pretty typical (first played there in '78, last time in '98). Men's room had about two inches of standing liquid on the floor (and I don't mean water). If at all possible, we'd find a quiet restaurant or bar in which to chill between check and set (a span of four or five hours). But in some towns, hanging in the club was unavoidable. Sucking in the second-hand smoke and having to listen to opening acts of dubious talent and skill really begins to wear on one's patience. But hey, most of the time the beer was free (as in beer).
Sometimes I managed to eke out a living doing this, but most of the time I had to have a day job. Up until '92, this meant driving and/or dispatching taxis.
I've seen a lot of pretty bad workplace environments among the comments, but very few that had sudden death listed as a hazard. I consider myself lucky: I had only one major accident while driving (t-boned by some kids out joyriding...no seatbelts in the cab because of the partition installation...got tossed around and broke the taximeter off of it's mount with my head) and had only one attempted hold-up (at knifepoint; mine was bigger so the perp made a tactical retreat).
Trauma wasn't the only hazard: just the fumes from driving through the harbor tunnels back and forth to Logan Airport (BOS) a dozen times a day was enough to take ten years off my life. But hey, those ten years come off of the end, so I probably won't miss them.
After a couple of years of driving (5 or 6 12hr shifts/wk.), a dispatching position opened up in the radio room. "No more exhaust fumes!" I gleefully thought. Tough luck, kid: the radio room is right over the garage, in a rickety wooden loft. Below, a motley crew of mechanics worked at keeping the fleet running, mostly by removing emissions controls (they had their own state inspection station) and reaming out the catalytic converters with air drills. About once each year one of the operators would start to get nauseous and faint, and all of us would have to go to the hospital for a blood gas exam.
Ironically enough, for the last ten weeks I've been working part time as a dispatcher at a cab company on Cape Cod (though it's my last week there, as my other employer, a computer services outfit, wants me on a full-time basis). In between the cab gigs I've been a recording studio owner, and a freelance graphic artist and animator, working out of the comfort and privacy of my home for the most part.
One note about the Cape Cod cab company: it's all computerized. The calltaker stations are VT-100-like terminals hanging off a SCO OpenServer box, feeding an NT4 server that runs the business logic. The dispatch station is a dual-monitor W2K box with a map display that shows the position and status of all of the GPS-equipped cabs. Each cab has a mobile data terminal with an 8x40 LCD screen. Back in Boston, all we had were little slips of paper and a microphone. And we liked it...
No. We hated it. Do you know how hard it is to explain to a recent immigrant the difference between Arlington St. and Armington St.? Or which of the 13 Washington Streets within the city limits he's supposed to find?
I still have nightmares about that job.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I work with my wife.
Try to top that, my friend.
Pretty good, right?
So I go to training, and they tell me they don't pay for training, which lasts 3 months.
Um, ok, I guess it's worth it...
So I'm in training, about second or third week, and my boss tells me I have to learn what I'm going to be hiring people for. So he hands me a bag full of cheap generic perfume, drives me 75 miles from work, drops me off and tells me to sell 50 bottles for $40 each before he gets back in 8 hours, and drives off.
So I'm standing there, with this bag, selling this crappy perfume in this mall parking lot, all damn day. He gets back that evening, takes the money (sold about a dozen bottles) and perfume, drives me back to the office and tells me "I'll see you tomorrow".
I never came back. Don't remember the distributor I worked for but the company's name is Scentura, look them up if you don't believe me.
Could have been worst though, I've heard some people go through the same crap but get arrested for soliciting without a license and the boss doesn't even bail you out.
Now that would really suck.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I used to be a research geek with a $250K slush budget. My company stock went into the toilet and then I got the axe. Now I test software at that same company. No budget, no respect, no fun.
The worst for me was August 1973. Heavy smog inversion layer in LA, 100+F. Fixing washing machines in the worst slums in LA. They'd lock up several large garbage bins with rotting garbage in the unventilated room with the washing machines. Kids pissing in the hall.
Oracle and unix guy.
the slob outside my door farts all day
You're all lucky.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
In this plant they would kill and bone several hundred cattle a day. The live cattle would be put onto the killing line, where a guy with a large pneumatic spike, would drive the spike into the cows brain to kill it. The dead cow would then pass down the line wehere the entrails were cut out and then on to be skinned and boned. The floor of the killing line was raised by about 18 inches. The part of the line where the cow was killed was covered with metal grating so that the blood and bits of cow brain flowed into the channel 18 inches below.
My friends contact was to basically redraw the plans for the underfloor plumbing. Except that the orginal plans had been lost. So he had to redraw the original plans, before he could create new ones. He had to open the grates on the killing line and crawl through several inches of clotted, decaying, putrifying cow blood and brains. 200 hundred yards he had to crawl, just to find out where the pipes went. He gave that job up afterwards. Can't say I blame him. I think thats the worst job I've ever heard of.
Damn.
I really wrote to indicate that, yes, we were being shot at. Or at least shots were occurring very near to us. Definitely not the glamorous life I'd imagined as a statistician. I just kind of got on a roll, though...
--RJ
I had to work in this chicken coup one summer. It consisted of rows of metal cages with chickens packed so tightly they could barely move. Underneath these cages was green chickenshit 2 feet deep kicking up ammonia so bad you could barely breath. You have to wear a mask so that you dont swallow the millions of bugs in the air but every moment or so you still eat at least one.
The Job consisted of grabbing the chickens up by the legs (which half the time snapped because they were malnourished) and sticking them into even tinier cages to be hauled off to the soup company.
At the end of the day you would have a couple bleading cuts from the chickens pecking at your arms all day.
I couldnt eat chicken for years!
You were stupid for doing that.. If you cant see past a scam of "Pay your own training", you deserved it.
When I was looking for any type of job, I was pulled in by a 3'rd party for a car dealership for sales (which OPERATED the classes at the dealership). Second day is when they told you the 'cost' of a low low 599$. 10 people did pay the money (I didnt, told them to shove this class up theirs). Nobody got a job at the car dealership as sales.
My worst tech job was once a year for several years I had to setup a LAN in a tent, in a dirt field in the middle of nowhere. The tent was for a western store that set up shop at the rodeo. They sold a sickening amount during 3-4 days (as much as a mall store in a month). Since it was so important they wanted me to stay, but in their cheapness they wouldn't get a hotel - instead I go a mini-van to live in for a week. To top it off I had to dress like a cowboy, not that the cowboy look is bad - just not my style or comfort zone.
So the picture is: Network geek in Wrangler's, boots and a big black hat (feeling out of place) looking just like he slept in car for a week trying to keep computers running that are full of dirt and cow shit.
The only upside was the 'Beer Barn' at midnight (not just a name either) and the cowgirls wanting to have some fun.
My manager was the single worst person I've ever encountered on the planet. Every minor issue was greeted with abuse. Every time you reported something, he'd ask if you'd stake your job on it, then ask again, three or four times to see if you'd get nervous and change your answer. On of my co-workers asked for a day off to take his wife in for surgery. The manager asked why he couldn't just drop her off and have her get a cab home.
After a year of him screaming at me, his manager gave him a pair of hockey tickets to give to an employee who'd been "kicking ass". He gave them to me, made sure his manager knew he'd rewarded an employee, then assigned me a "rush" project the night of the game so I couldn't use them.
Shortly therafter, I decided that no amount of money was worth this kind of abuse, and simply walked out the door one day. When HR called to see what had happened, I told them my story. Word got back to me that he'd told HR that I was a fuckup from Day 1. The next week another of my co-workers quit and the manager told the same story. A month later, a third quit, and HR got suspicious. People rarely quit Microsoft, and to have three leave a single 9-person team in less than two months in unheard of. Morover, you can't claim they were ALL bad apples when they all report an abusive boss.
At that point, I guess manager decided he had a problem. He blew the morale budget (We had a morale budget? Where was that going?) taking the remainder of the team out for a gourmet lunch via limo. He honestly believed that one gesture would make up for all the abuse. There was no andmission that he'd done anything wrong, and as soon as everyone got back to work, the abuse continued.
As far as I know, he's still there, happy as a pig in shit knowing as long as tech jobs are in short supply, he can do whatever he wants to his employees because they're afraid to quit.
Interociter
-=What do I want? I'm an American. I want more.
My first job was at a chemical plant. Something had gone wrong and this 15 feet wide 100 feet high tank that should have gases going through it was now filled with a solid mass. My job was to get it out.
So my work place that I shared with one colleague consisted of the inside of the tank, 15 feet in diameter. I had to enter it through a hole, 4 feet in diameter which also let in the hoses for the jack hammers and the truck size vacuum cleaner. Imagine the noise of two jackhammers, the vacuum cleaner in a round room with metal walls. Shifts were 12 hours on, 12 hours off, so we would get pretty sweaty and smelly. But we would not be able to smell it because the stuff we were excavating smelled so bad nothing could overpower it.
The good thing was that the work place got bigger and bigger because we were basically removing the floor. Bad thing was that the tiny hole we entered through got higher and higher.
But enough complaining. I am still happy I was not the one who reached the end of the solid mess, only to find out that it did not reach all the way to the bottom of the tank.
Of course the people don't want war...
I worked successfully at the corporate finance department of a large company. In three years time I received six awards, a promotion and a lot of favourable attention. I converted and became a Christian, and was baptized. From that day on my boss could not stand it anymore to be around me. He became nervous each time. I guess he didn't even know what was happening. He also turned 180 degrees and gave me bad reports and tried every mean thing to get me out of his face. He put pressure on my colleagues to ignore me and most did ignore me. I quit. I have learned that some people can't stand the Holy Spirit. I also learned that most people are - unfortunately - not trustworthy.
Try cleaning out chicken barns.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
I left a job this past October after 5 years... literally was on the brink of going insane. You'd go insane in this environment too.
The building was a non-descript structure without any external signage. Just a bland brick building like every other in this section of Portland, ME.
Inside, the office, was... well, entirely comprised of gray. The office floor was wall-to-wall carpet... a bluish shade of gray. Moving up, the walls were gray... about shade #DDDDDD. Moving up to the top, the ceiling was the same shade of gray as the walls.
So, lets say you're an office furniture outfitter... what's the first thing you do when you walk into an empty office with completely gray floors, walls and ceilings? You guessed it... you fill it full of gray office furniture. Gray cubicles, gray filing cabinets, gray desks and gray computers.
Then, the old *gray* haired guy that ran the company, who really should not have been authorized to operate a software company in the first place, hired a couple of talented programmers to maintain some old school crappy over-priced DOS app written in Qbasic. Sweeeeeeeet!
On my first day, they ordered my standard issue business cards... can you guess what color?? Blue? No. Red? No. Fluorescent orange? No. Fucking gray!
I really thought about slitting my wrists to put some color on the walls.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
At least you've GOT a job, you insensitive CLOD!
"If there's hope, it lies in the proles..."
Well I gather that you won't be answering the phones during that time... Surely you can take a laptop, preferably with a wireless connection, to somewhere you can work confortably for half the day that the small war in your office is on... A case in point for the benefits of the mobile office/computing.
ogglelog
I used to maintain the alpine race course timing system, doing fine wiring in 30 mph winds, -20 F (-80 wind chill). My ski boots cracked from the cold, my fingers froze to the wires, and I nearly got run over by a snow groomer. Howzemapples?
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
I once had to work in Newark.
Beat that.
I used to wash garbage trucks...the inside of them. I can't even begin to tell you the foul things that I have seen, smelled and worn on my clothes for an entire day. Trust me, it is absolutely horrifying to go back and think about it now.
I worked at Blockbuster video. Sometimes, when you tell customers that they have a late fee, they'll punch you.
You drink too much coffee, I drink too much stout.
Every single morning I go to work, make some tea and read slashdot. Then I check my email and maybe do some coding. Then I take a nap. Then I read my email again and check out some porn- all without leaving my house! Oh wait, I am unemployed, nevermind...
I wouldn't call my place the worst but here is my job:
Middle School Vice Principal -
585 Students
Grades 6 - 8
Only VP in the building
I've been thinking of getting a less stressful job but it's hard to find a job wrestling alligators or defusing bombs nowadays...all the best.....
How about a Nerve Agent Chamber (VX, of course, only the very best for our boys) where some bozo coats a HMMWV with the stuff and then you have to clean it off with a scrub brush. Just to, you know, show you could do it without dying. I'm not going to dwell on the blood tests before, during and after the proceedure, but nothing like establishing a baseline for putting the fear of god into you.
.50 cal Machine Gun? If thats not good enough for you imagine the time where at 3 AM your doing your thing trying not to fall asleep and the row of sandbags in front of the box erupts shooting a fine sandy mist up into the air around you. I think the total silence of it all was worse.
How about standing in a wooden box for 12 hours a day (six on six off) in 130 degree heat (Yes, it was Africa hot, literally) while manning an M-2 Browning
How about the day after your nearly killed at 3 am by some schmuck with an AK you hump through the streets of an unfriendly city with your react patrol and check out the building the shots came from and you realize thats not dirt all over the floor. No, it's six inches of human feces, and you gotta wade through it to get to the stair way
A jet engine for four hours a week and an open doorway? Heck they even toss in ear-muffs, ear plugs and put a roof over your head?
What are the worst conditions you have ever had to work under?
Can you imagine what Mars Rover's reply would be if you have asked this question to the Rover!!
woot
Vietnam.
Second word (later): Federal prison.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I work in an U.S. Embassy. The worst. The computers are old, the building is falling apart, 2 out of 10 people want to kill me. I live in countries where the water will kill you, the food will made you deathly ill, and if your lucky you get "Mild" Malaria, (which beats the side effects of the meds.) Most countries I've been to have no pavement, children with AK-47's, [note:} it's not the guy standing around with the machine gun that's the problem, it's the guy walking around with one.} My car is checked for explosives when I come to work, my swimming pool doubles as my drinking water in extreme emergencies, (note, a 4" sq concrete hole with no filtration is what comes with most houses, so I use the term pool liberally.) Power is bad, UPS' designed for U.S./E.U. power just freaking throw up here. My phone is spotty, 14.4k internet service either requires a bribe, or you get your e-mail previewed for ya, forget the RIAA, corrupt gov't secret service types are a real bother. No 911/hospitals, you don't notice that until you are driving down a road and note oncoming speeding buses/autos think turning off headlights saves gas. Also, you have to call other gov't workers for support/supplies. 'nuf said. I think I am in the running for the worst job only until some peace corps geek writes in But, then again, they dont even have computers.
Three day rotation: One day North-South, one day East-West, one day grid roads. If I saw road kill, I buried it - the whole concept was a little macabre, and believe me when I say the smell of a dead fox lying bloated in sun is best left to the imagination.
One day we got the call to go pick up a dead deer from a farm. At any rate, it had been in standing water for at least a few days in the hot sun and when we tried to load it onto the back of truck, well wouldn't you know it, the old girl just broke in half...
the cynicalman - http://blog.geeksmithology.com
I had to dig out the sewer line of a small medical building, I was up to my knees in half frozen feces, urine, and assorted medical waste 12 hours a day digging...and digging. And the other guy working with me was out on bail after killing his girlfriend.
But it wasn't nearly as bad as working at Dell.
You haven't lived until you've been on a canning floor full of pressure cookers and giant kettles of soup or worse - corn relish in a Chicago summer.
I was a food scientist before I was a computer geek. Whenever my job stresses me out I think about the day I was a QC tech in a canning plant and I went outside for a cool breath of air. It really felt good. I later found out it was over 100 degrees out there. It must have been over 110 inside with 200% humidity and a lot of heavy lifting. What was worse, was that QC tech was a lightweight job compared to some of the production workers tossing around 80# tubs of beans. I had to lift a lot, but only 30 -40# at at time.
It got me enough money for graduate school and a future of working in air conditioning.
At work, I have no computer, nobody to talk to, and my rounds are 2 miles long, and I do at least 8 rounds a shift. If it's icy, they don't want me driving the patrol truck and nobody else shows up to work, so I get to walk my rounds and if I get hurt, nobody will know until the next shift comes on and starts looking for me after I don't come back to the shack after my rounds. It's also pretty loud (tractor and truck shop, always engines the size of my apartment running someplace on site, and a major international airport that shares runways with a state air force base is just across the slough.
Dangerous working conditions, low pay and practically no benefits. So much for the labor movement.
Help us build a better map!
I used to install computer instrumentation for a chain of dairys. They had this milk fat testing lab where farmers would submit little samples of raw milk, the little cups would go down a conveyor, under a little sample tester, then the probe would lift out, shake itself off and fling raw milk on everything within a 3 foot radius. The wall near the tester was caked with rancid fat about an inch deep. The smell was so bad, I'd retch and want to puke after just a few minutes. To this day, 25 years later, I cannot stand even the SMELL of milk.
I was employed by the US Marine Corps at the time.
Shooting was one thing we normally didn't have to worry about. Even the mafia there didn't normally use guns.
I remember when that was the norm. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Oh sure, you say. Greatest job in the world, you say. How could I complain, you say.
It was gay porn.
And I was the bottom.
You might think that your boss is fucking you now but you know nothing.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I'm a freelance designer. I work in an unfinished basement. No windows, the air quality is less than perfect. The basement is split by a plywood partition -- the other side belongs to the neighbors, who have a cat whose litterbox is apparently right next to the partition. Fresh cat shit smells wonderful.
Let's see, there is a washer and dryer about eight feet from my desk. If my wife is running both, I have to turn off one of my computers, or the circuit can't take it. There is, for some bizarre reason, only one circuit in the basement, and I've got a ton of equipment plugged into it.
And finally, it gets down near freezing in the winter. I have to work in longjohns, three shirts, a coat, gloves (with the fingers cut out), and lately I've had to wrap a blanket around myself as well. I have a space heater, but I can't use it when either the washer or dryer are in use, and in any case, it doesn't help much.
But, I get to set my own hours and spend more time with my daughter. So, no complaints. Or, not many.
Summer job. In the dessert :)
:)
Rigging up a DST well test seperator with 2 7/8" tubing "chiksans" which are loops of solid steel pipes with swivel connection on each end, and a hammer union in the middle.
Each chiksan weighed in at about 100 pounds and there were about 10 of them.
These joined the pipes together, when we had to turn a corner. The pipes were about 20 feet long and weighed about 200 pounds. They were stored on the unit at shoulder height, so you could easily get them onto your shoulder to carry.
The system we set up was about 500 feet from end to end, and one end was on the rig floor, about 3 stories up. No elevator. Lots of heavy, expensive gear.
When you had everything together, you sent around with a full size sledge hammer, and hammered tight all the joins. Looked easy, but I tell you, swinging that hammer for about half an hour is hard enough when your not aiming for a 1 inch square tab of metal.
Then, you took 2 pieces of iron fence post (called "star droppers" because of their cross section) and pounded them 2 feet into the rock hard ground through a steel ring over the pipe to prevent "bucking". Bucking is where the 3000 PSI gas/liguid in the system has a pressure surge, and the pipe lifts up, easily decapitating you.
The site was 3 hours drive on "new" roads
It was 125F (52C).
Not only did I drink copious amounts of water (not juice as another poster mentioned) but there was a guy who's job it was to spray us down with water as we rigged up.
At the end of the day, the test was a fizz, and we rigged down and moved out.
I drank about 6 liters of water and never pee'd once.
--- I hate my sig
You go ahead and laugh. It's not all fun and games you know. "Oh, you get paid to fuck around" you say.
It was gay porn.
And I was the bottom.
You might think that your boss is fucking you now but you know nothing.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
The only consolation while working there was to help several clients to covertly replace their SCO boxes with various Linux distributions.
My (ex-)boss found out about one of the installations and sent a long letter which basically said - "You get no support"... Luckily that is of little consequence as IT JUST WORKS on all of the linux distributions. All of the clients still on SCO call up at least once a week, generally for expensive manual data repairs after their server has (once again) crashed and corrupted a $10mill pay/invoice run.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
I worked in a slaughterhouse, in humid 35 Celcius+ temperatures, cutting the throats of (on average) 2500 hogs a day. The smell coming from the barns attached was marginally worse than the smell coming from the hair burners on the other end of the room. The hogs would get stunned with electricity, get hoisted up by an ankle in front of me, where I would dutifully tear their throats out with a big double sided knife, and then get showered with blood, urine, and anything else the poor bastards would care to release. The gripping of the throat wattle with my left hand blew out the large knuckle of my middle finger (which to this day resembles an olive on a toothpick as a result... and aches when the air pressure changes). To reach this dream posting I had to walk though an area where the most horrid, unfit for consumption nastiness was wailing down a chute into a cave in the basement (I don't WANT to know who worked down there) that smelled so bad that you started each shift with a round of dry heaves at 6:30 am. They actually had a barf trough set up because of that. I had to eat salt tablets because the heat would cause people to dehydrate and pass out into a puddle of god knows what. We had to wear earplugs and eardeafeners as well because of the screaming of the pigs, the hollering and beating noises the guys with bats in the barn were making to herd the hogs to their hotdog fate, the roar of the flaming units, the clattering of the racking system, and the giant KAZOTT noise the shockers made.
Noise, stench, oppressive heat, and illiterate jackasses as co-workers. OH... and after each shift, you WOULD have to dump out your big rubber boots full of blood and pee.
It's amazing I have no nightmares... and that I am still quite fond of pork.
1.
My uncle was a cop in rural australia and was often the first person on the scene of an accident. He was called out to an abandoned car one day and found a corpse in the car that had been "ripening" for the last week or two in the 40 degree Celcius heat.
The car was cleaned and put up for sale by the next of kin, but 8 years down the track the car is still up for sale... it doesn't matter what you do, nothing gets rid of the smell of death. It just seems to permeate all surfaces, even the plastic!
2.
When I was going to uni, we had just gotten the lease on a large run-down "student hovel" nearby and was in the process of moving in.
One of the neighbours suddenly appeared saying "Hi, I work in a morgue and the smell coming from that house is the very distinctive smell of a putrefying human body."
My reply was something along the lines of "Oh".
So we all troop inside the labyrinthine house and start searching. As I worked my way towards the back of the house the smell got stronger, I found a small door going under one of the downstairs internal staircases and opened it. At the back of the tiny cupboard the wall lining had been jimmied off the struts and inexpertly replaced.... I was starting to get a bit nervous as I peeled back the gyprock, wondering if a rotting corpse was going to fall onto my lap.
Nothing dropped out and I crawled around the dirt under the house with a torch and a few snakes... but no corpse.
Eventually the neighbour came round and told us that she had run the rotting leaves (from a tree at the back of the house) through a spectrometer at work and found that it releases exactly the same proteins as a rotting human corpse.... cool.
It is known by the common name "Tree of Heaven" here, although my friends and I all renamed it "Tree of Death" after this experience. It's not a nice feeling to search your house for a corpse.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Q.
Insert Signature Here
I was born in Kansas, and just about any job there stinks. Most especially the jobs outside.
I've only had to do that job a tiny little bit, and no doubt about it, it's brutal. My father grew up on a farm in North Dakota, and he had to do that all summer, every summer. The pictures of him when he was a teenager are just scary. He is all chest shoulders and arms.
He said that was a prime motivator for him to get his education. (Master of Divinity, go figure)
A suburban paper route doesn't have the same punch, I think.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
I was working on a project for a company to integrate barcode scanners into their product (apologies for being vague). Frankly, I read the spec for the task and then went and talked to main customers who were interested in the integration. What they wanted was so far beyond the spec and a far more interesting task. So I did what they wanted, rather than what the spec said they wanted. It turned out very cool, if I do say so myself.
The head of development was also very impressed. He decided to arrange for me to do a presentation for the president of the company. The president wasn't quite as impressed with all the work that I'd done. He was far more impressed by a fifteen minute hack that I'd put into my version of the software which displayed a picture on the software's "desktop". He wanted that added to the shipping product immediately!
This is when you know you're working for clueless people.
but I did notice an email address used by one of my co-workers that did the walk-by-cubicle-saying-things routine. It turns out that that particular email address was used to use someone else's credit card to view porn on the net. In fact, I basically left the organization scratcing my head like, "Why were they so cruel to me?" because I did not realize the scope of the embezzlement. It was only in 2003 - two years later - that I contacted that particular co-worker that tried to blow the whistle and he told me what he did and what the response was.
When this was all occcurring I did not realize what they were really doing - I figured they were jealous of my programming talent and/or just didn't like me.
If this is your boss's name, you have the worst job in the world.
Calling atheism and agnosticism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
So be quiet.
Certainly not the worst in this list, but it was annoying anyway.
We had an huge NMR and MRI room on the place where I did my traineeship.
Of course we were warned (already at the uni) that NMR has a tendency to corrupt electronic devices, and even can be dangerous if it attracts keys through your pants, but that is usually not as bad as stated. However one of these baby did eat stuff.
The expensive machinery (several millions each, had 3) was shared with a different institution and heavily used, so we made it a habit to come in an hour late, and stay an hour longer to use the NMR stuff after normal hours. Of course we were in a rush to go home, and you sometimes forget to empty all of your pockets.
Watches, any card with a magnetic strip, PDA's, totally wiped out or dead. One trainee left keys
in his pocket, and he lost the pocket of his levi's when changing a probe on the machine.
We all bought "Seiko Automatics" (these are the older, fully mechanical eq of Seiko Kinetics) watches because they were mechanical, but while it seemed to work at first, after a while they were dead also. Probably the magnetic field twisted the delicate mechanical parts after a while. While Kinetics lasted the longest, they were also significantly more expensive, so we were back at roaming the fair grounds for cheap watches
My previous employer was involved in stress testing large diesel engines. They hooked PC's up to the Engine's Computer, and ran it through various test cycles.
... so I think it was all a M$ Conspiracy.
Well, it was not uncommon to have VERY specific testing criteria for these simulations.
So, one day over the Christmas break (I came in for the Holiday Pay, plus OT -- good stuff), there was a test running. The PC driving it was running NT4.0. This holiday shutdown, the guys at corporate thought it would be brilliant to push SMS out to all my lab computers. Bad idea. The test was running with very low oil, and constant RPM shifting (to simulate hilly terrain). It BSOD'ed during an incline, and the PC forgot to tell the engine to shut-down, so the RPM's kept increasing. They called me instantly, and I came out as soon as I could. Right about the time I got there and found out what caused the BSOD, the engine exploded. Shrapnel went everywhere.
And it was about that time that we found out the blast-proof door wasn't so blast-proof. We all hit the deck, and hot engine flew everywhere. It is a miracle that none of us got hurt any more than we did.
That was about the time I started playing with Linux at home
Remember, a truly wise man never plays leapfrom with a unicorn
i would have to say being in 125 degree heat in full mopp gear(Chemical biological weapon protection gear) under heavy artillery fire and missle bombardment. I was setting up and maintaining field networks so the officers could sit in their air conditioned tent and look at pc screens. that was a screwed up time.
ender_pete
since 1967 it's been "kelvin" not "degree kelvin". html
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/kelvin
- The pedantic physicist
I'd hate to think what ESR's place is like.
I was hired to do some very low level programming in the middle of a big aquisition. It meant doing a lot of the same stuff over and over. I was also the print distributor. The boss would come in at 5:30 am and start doing my job until I showed up at 6. The boss was an overweight workaholic who chuckled/snickered constantly. Almost like Muttley from the cartoon series: "Catch the Pidgeon". It was mostly women who loved nothing more than to stop work, walk in to the boss and complain that a report they didn't need had been delivered to them. The reports had absolutely no header information. You delivered them based on how they looked. When the other company had been consumed, the programming ended and I was a print operator full time. It lasted about two months and I walked out. There is a hiring freeze on so I guess the boss is still doing my job. I still get flinchy when someone walks up behind me and starts yelling. When the current job gets me down, I just think of that one and I feel much better.
You want a bad job?
;)
Try working as an assistant in a recording studio. You get all the exciting jobs (going for coffee for example), you get to crouch in front of a drum kit placing microphones while the drummer warms up, you get blasted by sound in the control room EVERY SINGLE DAY for up to 14 hours at a stretch (sometimes with music you find offensive), and you get paid less than you would stacking shelves in a supermarket.
Fortunately I'm an engineer, so the assistants work for me
After 20 years in IT, "lowest of the low" sounds like a pretty good job description, and "no one IN MANAGEMENT knows what IT does", of course. IT work is blue collar, except you don't get overtime. The hours and working conditions stink and you are treated worse than the guy who cleans the bathrooms (which I have done).
My coldest job: I worked in a jelly factory where they would put me on a truck loading dock washing 5 gallon cans that had been filled with frozen strawberries. We had to stack the washed cans in a tractor trailer and it was January and 0 degrees F. Ice was everywhere and we got soaked really good. THEN the forman would put us outside unloading a railroad freezer boxcar (-20 F) of the filled cans. We would be out there for a couple hours lifting and carrying those cans and it seemed like we never put a dent in the number of cans left in the boxcar.
My hottest job: I worked in a supermarket bakery in the Summer. The oven where they bake that square white bread was about a block long converor belt and open at both ends. At the front end we would load the pans holding 4 family sized loaves, placing lids that looked like metal cafeteria trays over the pans (to keep the bread square). Once the oven was filled we would go around to the back end to remove the now dangerously hot lids and knock out the cooked loaves. The bakery proper was about 120 F, but working at the oven it was over 300 F, so we would shiver when we stepped away into 120 F. It was very easy to get badly burned (most people who had been there a few years had nasty scars up their forearms).
I wouldn't even try to guess what my worst IT job was, but I have worked in government, non-profit, and corporate (Fortune 10) accounts and I have been a contractor and employee Systems Programmer and they were all the pits. I remember one particlar datacenter migration where I drove 100 miles on the Turnpike at 3AM in zero visability fog (all the truck drivers were parked!) but the customer expected me to be there. I always really enjoyed working 24 or more hours in a row and then crawing into my car to drive over 120 miles home in an ice storm or blizzard because my manager would not pay to let me stay over (MY fault: I should have paid out-of-pocket). Perhaps the worst was being a telecommuter for 8 years and the company never supplied me with as much as a modem. Everything that I needed for work came from 1-800-JIMPAYS. This was while we got excuses for raises and the CEO knocked down $200+ million while he laid off 5-10% of the staff each quarter.
I've been laid off now for over a year, and my real blue collar jobs still look a lot better than my IT experience except for the pay, but then I never tried dividing my salary by the 70 to 100 hours a week that I worked. It probably would have been much better to work in a factory and collect overtime - and not be on 24x7 on-call.
Is your sig a quote from Dirda? Just curious; it sounds like something he might say....
Let my epitaph be. Karaaaaaaa. (JJ)
I had a summer job (just one) when I was at school. It involved not much more than doing boring, dull jobs that no-one else fancied. Things got off to a bad start when it was explained to the foreman that he couldn't treat health-and-safety for me in the same way he did for the Indian / Pakistani women. The word "fuck", together with its various suffixed featured prominently. So of I went to get kitted out with blues, gloves and safety specs. On to what was christened "the Bombay Bus". Filled cans would come whizzing down the production line, all I had to do was screw a cheap lid onto a poor thread. No mistakes or the cans would start to back up, topple and spill. I remember it being quite a warm spot when I first arrived. Add the safety gear and it became very warm. Once the cans start arriving it got very, very warm. Gloved hands, crossed threads, steamed safety specs and a vocabuliacally challenged foreman. Fortunately he subsequently found me a job carrying a plastic hose through a small, dirty gap, slightly reminiscent of the sort of chimney children climbed up in pictures of Dickensian England. And more money than I'd seen in my whole life.
I know the truth and I know what you're thinking
I worked electronic maintenance at Morton Thiokol rocket motor facility in Utah. One day our pipefitter was sick and we had a busted steam line that provided heat for a curing oven. A couple mil worth of missile motors were curing in there so they needed it fixed fast. The leak was in a tight spot so I had to lie on my back in a full flame retardant suit (required in the facilities)on TOP of the oven working a hand pipe-cutter and threader to replace a section of pipe. It was only 135 F up there and after an hour they had to pull me out and lower me as I was too weak to climb the ladder. I literally poured about a liter of sweat from my boots. Never ever EVER again...
I was 19. My Dad got me a summer job working with a local surveyor team. Day #1 they took me to the site of a new 6-mile section of highway that was being built. They had paved it and all and the surveyors had come along with their doodads and marked an x along each side of the highway about every 40 feet with chalk. My job? To use a 20-pound sledgehammer and a steel pointy spike to pound a hole in the pavement deep enough to accept a long metal tube with a cap on the top (that would mark the official edge of the road on both sides). I was in OK shape at the time but after 5 days of doing nothing at all but throwing a 20-pound sledgehammer for 10 hours a day in the blazing sun on top of new, jet black paving I was ready to die. The job sucked but by the end of the summer I was all muscle.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When I was 17 or 18, I was working in the Wine & Spirits Dept. of a large merchandising w/saler.
On one ocassion, I was required to enter an emptied wooden Rum-mixing Vat to clean the bottom.
Wearing gum-boots, and using a 3v.lightbulb mounted at the end of a 3foot copper tube for illumination; I held my breath as I picked up wood shards, etc. from the bottom.
Vision was almost useless as my eyes were tear-filled from the fumes. The bottom was still covered by a fraction of an inch of H.P. Rum!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
I love that routine...
[We see Mark on a table, with two strange white "lights" folded down near his head. A sequined blanket is draped over him, and he lies down with his knees curled up into his chest. We see two aliens stand around him. One alien holds a strange device that looks kind of like a lightsaber, but with a solid white plastic piece where the beam would be.]
Kevin: Ready the anal probe.
[Dave switches the device on as it begins to glow. It looks like a lightsaber with a small white beam]
Dave: Anal probe is ready.
Kevin: [nods] Commence anal probing.
[Mark screams loud and long as Dave sticks it where the sun don't shine. He pulls it out, after two seconds and pulls off the white plastic part [to sterilize it?]
Dave: Quick, erase his memory!
[Kevin waves a hand over Mark as the two lighted "paddles" come up. Mark stops yelling and gets a calm look on his face]
Kevin: Memory's erased. Get him out of here.
[Two other aliens come and start to wheel Mark off]
Dave: Move it. [pauses as he moves closer to Kevin] Ah, boy.
Kevin: Something wrong?
Dave: Ah.. it's nothing really....
Kevin: I think you could use a cup of coffee.
Dave: Yeah. [sighs]
[They move to a lounge where Kevin pours two cups of coffee. They keep talking as Dave sits down]
Kevin: So what's bothering you?
Dave: Ahhhh.... Lately I just keep wondering... what's the point?
Kevin: The point?
Dave: Yeah. What's the point of what we do?
Kevin: Sorry, I don't follow you
[Kevin sits down]
Dave: Well, I mean, we travel 250,000 light years across the universe, abduct humans, probe the anally and release them.
Kevin: Yeah... AND?
Dave: Well, doesn't it seem kind of point-LESS?
Kevin: I really don't think about it.
Dave: Well don't you think you should?
Kevin: No, I don't think I should. I don't think I should question the leadership of our Great Leader
Dave: Oh, come on! I mean, we've been coming here for 50 years and performing anal probes and all that we have learned is that 1 in 10 doesn't really seem to mind.
Kevin: Well, do you have a better plan than our Great Leader?
Dave: Yes I do, I do have a better plan. My plan is that we DON'T travel 250,000 light years, we DON'T abduct any humans and, this is the best part, we DON'T do any anal probing.
Kevin: [sarcastic] Oh, great plan! Do you realize how many people Intergalactic Anal-Probing employees?
[They see that the next victim is ready. They put down the coffee and do the same motions as before, except Dave is very reluctant this time.]
Kevin: Well back to work.
Dave: Awww..
Kevin: Ready the anal probe.
Dave: [unenthusiastic]Anal probe is ready.
Kevin: Commence anal probing
Dave:[rolling eyes, exasperated] Couldn't we at least abduct their political or religious leaders instead of just any idiot in a pickup truck?!?!
Kevin: I'm sure the Great Leader has his reasons
Dave: [sarcastic] Well, I'm sure the Great Leader is just some sort of twisted ass freak!
Kevin: [calmly] All right. I am now officially ignoring you. Commence anal probing.
[Dave inserts the probe. This victim doesn't scream. Rather, he smiles and looks happy.]
Dave: Well, that's a relief anyway. Erase his memory.
Kevin [going through motions] Memory is erased.
Dave: Get him out of here.
Kevin: [to interns wheeling victim out.] Come on, kid. Move it. Move it!
[They move to the window and look out on the moon and the Earth]
Kevin: You know what you need? A hobby. I know it helps me.
Dave: Yeah? What do you do?
Kevin: Well, I don't like to toot my own horn, but I'm a pretty good amateur rectal photographer. Would you like to see my portfolio?
Dave: No. I would hate to.
Kevin: Fine. Screw you.
Dave: Well, Screw you.
[Kevin moves off, leaving Dave staring at the Earth]
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Only in the geek world does the Slashdot Karma Boost make up for horrible and/or life-threatening experiences.
Bah. You marines are wimps. At Caltech and UC Berkeley, people go tunnelling for SPORT.
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
I enjoyed reading your response and I definitely think you're on to something. However, I guess I was speaking more on the fundamental level of man. I understand how the markets work and how regulation works, but the basic question is "Why do humans need to be prevented from exploiting the system in the first place?"
You kind of answered that when you said, "People are not innately wolves, they're just good learners and perceptive of a payoff system that -- without public-minded balancing -- rewards taking advantage of the weak." Reading this, I can't help but find myself thinking about the Chicken-and-the-Egg paradox. The responding question to this is why, even if there is a payoff system, do people take advantage of the weak? Don't people have morals? Didn't people grow up with parents that read them stories like Little Red Riding Hood, etc?
Maybe it's because I grew up in the church, but I can't really see how people come to the point where they love money more than they do their fellow man (from a theoretical point of a view).
When morality makes money, it'll get really really popular.
And, therein, lies the paradox! (which maybe you intended) The popularity of money is inherently based on greed (which is "evil").
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Seriously, I looked at the pictures of the campus tunnels, and believe me when I tell you that the tunnels at Quantico are similair only in that they too are referred to as "tunnels."
The Berkeley tunnels are spacious, and the steam pipes don't appear to be that large.
The Quantico tunnels, one the other hand, are very narrow, and the huge steam pipes (ranging between 18" to 24" in diameter) take up more than half the available space. To get through many of them, you have to crawl, and frequently you have to squeeze between the pipes and the wall while holding your breath just to fit past.
The Berkeley tunnels also seem to enjoy some form of lighting... Quantico knows not this lighting of which Berkeley speaks.
I also notice the absence of muck-filled puddles, but maybe they just eluded the photographer.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
I am posting this from downtown baghdad after a 15 hour road trip from Turkey through northern Iraq..
Damn sat dish stopped working didnt it..
How does that rate??
Truth be told, it was one of my first thoughts, but her machine is old now and was el cheapo when she bought it: 64MB of RAM. (Linux would be beyond the pale for her.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Well, it's better than raising Lab rats! [g]
;)
(I'm not sure this is a train of thought, tho in dim light it might just barely be a bus. A creaky old diesel-smokin' hippie-painted 16bit bus.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
> A creaky old diesel-smokin' hippie-painted 16bit bus.
Damn diesel smoking hippies, get off my lawn!
And don't leave any of your corrupted data behind, either! ;)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Hmm..I only heard that phrase when we got sent to nam
I'd imagine an IT job in the military would definitely be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
...too bad nobody realizes that the military has a huge need for IT. Stupid, fat, lonely, nerds picking on big, burly, killing machines.
P226
Win2K and WinXP will run in 64MB. Not great but they would run.
PS.
Perhaps its time for a memory upgrade before SDRAM prices go up too much. Better act now as the prices are already higher than DDR.
...for $3.50/hour, 6 days/week, 2 6-hour shifts with 2 to 4 hours in between, standing outside selling merchandise in the cold bitter enough to make my hands and feet go numb within the first hour of each shift. All of this while being homeless and not being able to afford better clothing.
Then: dealing with a knife being pulled on me, shots fired where I work, and the ever-oppressive NYPD. No time off, medication, or healthcare during colds and flus. A guy collapsed once close to where I was working and my boss wouldn't even allow me to cover him with a blanket (because it was for sale) while we waited for the ambulance. The most depressing part of it was seeing hopeless cynicism about humanity take root so deeply inside the people I worked with.
The second worst conditions were as a street sexworker, which despite all of the involved risks was actually much better. It paid better ($20 to $100/trick) and it didn't suck up all of my time (several hours/week). I did however, have to put up with some pretty disgusting and hygienically challenged men with somewhat bizarre tastes accompanied with negative attitudes.
I have a hard time imagining what is going on in less privileged societies and/or 3rd world countries, but I hope to see a day when abusive occupational conditions and exploitable situations in our world are abolished.
Was twice at Dome C in the center of Antarctica, living in a tent at -40deg temperatures (in summer) and doing hardware and software data acquisitions. Once they didn't give me the right kind of hardware and I ended up for an afternoon my a trusty HP Vectra outside to reprogram an eprom that couldn't be moved. Here's a picture.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I once worked on contract (back in those days, the one CAD/computer guy was isolated in a seperate part of the trailer because of the smel^^^^ sensitivity of the equipment) onsite at a chemical processing facility. We were the guys that had to wander around the plant and take dimensions, notes and data from the equipment in this Carbidely Unionized place.
We were all in construction trailers making drawings while normal plant operations went on around us. It was always a bit unnerving to see HazMat-suited teams emerge from the unit we were supposed to survey.
Since then, I've found the third arm to actually be useful and a hit at parties.
Yup. Worked Wyle field service at LaRC. Had one of those trailers with the busted heater.
We were between the Hypersonic Tunnel and the end of the Langley AFB runway (F-15s with afterburners). Loud, but not painful.
No varmints, however.
gewg_
In my days as a cal tech, I had to go into one or another of those small PCB shops
with (illegal?) immigrant laborers for 2 days about every 2 months.
I'd have a headache for 2 days after finishing. Pity the guys who did it daily.
gewg_