Slashdot Mirror
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 ...)
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
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.
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 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.
I can't top the original poster, that's for sure. I've had two vile working environments, though.
The first was an office, writing SGML. (Bad enough) The office was actually a corridor, no windows, linoleum floor, and rather than desks, the working area was a length of kitchen worktop down one side of the corridor, where I worked with three others. The corridor had used to be a fire escape, 'til an extension was put on - so at the end of the corridor was a door with a sign on it that read "NO EXIT". Demoralising isn't in it.
Before working in IT, I did some warehouse work. This was the second worst working environment I've dealt with - working for a supermarket chain, this particular warehouse simply cleaned the green plastic trays that held vegetables and fruit in the supermarkets. So yes, there was plenty of opportunity for rotting fruit/veg too.
The actual work consisted of two jobs - you could either load the trays onto the cleaning machine, or load them off the machine and stack them. Soul-destroying.
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
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.
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.
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.
I used to change tires at the Firestone cold weather test track in West Yellowstone Montana.
We would get out there at ~3AM or whenever we hit low temp, typically -30 degrees fahrenheit, and try to keep tires on cars driving fast on a deiced track.
The wind would bite, the hours sucked, and if you've never had to emergency jack an SUV at 50 below at 3AM, you've never felt true cold before.
An unrefrigerated morgue in the desert. Some of my utilities still have that smell in them...
All's true that is mistrusted
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.
--
Back when I was running the network at MCB Quantico (Circa 1992-94), we had to inspect the campus fiber cable plant because the as-built wiring diagrams had been misplaced.
This entailed crawling through tight tunnels all over the campus, through puddles from leaky or venting pipes, in pitch blackness.
Did I mention that these leaky or venting pipes were full of steam? (Back when Marine bases were being built, centralized steam heating was all the rage. USMC: Doing more with less since the very beginning.)
Did I mention that the temperature in the steam tunnels frequently exceeded 130 degrees?
Did I mention that because they were installed during Quantico's primary expension, in the 1930s I think, that they were wrapped in tattered asbestos insulation?
Sorry about the crapstains on your jumpsuit, but I dread the day the a doctor looks at my chest x-rays, and says to me, "Hey, what the fuck have you been breathing?"
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
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 shit you not, every time somebody would call on this line, a fucking klaxon goes off.
I believe that. I used to work in the helpdesk of a large company back in the late 80's. At that time, Ethernet networks were fairly new to the company (cards cost $1000+ for 10 Mbits/sec). On occasions, the odd card would either start transmitting unrelentlessly (referred inhouse as jabbering), start sending out truncated packets (runts), or just not talking at all (sulking). We actually had two Ethernet backbones; if one failed, engineers would run relentlessly up all 15+ floors of the building switching lines until the network was restored and the offending PC was identified.
The precursor to all of this was a single telephone call... Has anyone noticed that the network is dead?
Quickly followed by an avalanche of a thousand plus callers, all asking the same thing.
To keep the PHB happy, everyone had to run around frantically, to appear as if they were actually doing something. Sitting down quietly at a LAN analyzer and an Ethernet address map of the building was the last thing management wanted to see.
I have to back you up on the PCB fabriction plant. I'm a PCB designer and have toured a few plants. On the most recent tour, the Salesman, who isn't even in the plant that much sounded like he had half a lung left. He wasn't overweight, but he was huffing and puffing just strolling around the lines and talking to us. His skin didn't look right either. He commented that some people talk about the distinctive smell of a PCB plant but he had no idea what they meant because he hasn't been able to smell anything in years.
Whenever things in the office are bad, I think about that guy, or the etch line technicians.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Let me tell you some other happy stories:
The firm I worked for got a call about a cockroach. Big deal right? Well it was an albino and the size of your fuckin' hand!
Now this wans't in some run down dump, this was in some very ritzy high-priced exclusive shops in an historic section of a major city.
So we're out there looking around and the newbie (new trainie) opens a manhole cover, and out comes running *thousands* of huge albino cockroaches! Running to escape from the light, anywhere and everywhere, into the ice-cream shop nearby, the photo-mart near it, all over the place (including up and over the newbie)
Seems a pipe had broken from one of the toilets, and was feeding raw sewage into a runoff designed for normal water only. Roaches had a field day there, and (pardon the pun) did the shit hit the fan when that was found out. *Serious* damage done to the tourist trade after that!
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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.
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.
...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 :-).
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 once worked on a cable crew, installing several hundred miles of a backbone to the internet. Six conduits, a few hundred strand of fiber...sounds like a dream, right? All that bandwidth (most of which isn't even lit up seven years later, btw) in the palms of your hands...
Except I was on the cleanup crew for this project. And we weren't union (they paid extra because we weren't -- a LOT extra). This meant mandatory 13 hour days, six times a week, followed by a half hour trip to a cutrate hotel that was also a brothel. We were working alongside a road, two hundred miles from home, with cars going by at 70-80 mph, and were not allowed to use U-turns (meaning going BACK a mile meant a 45 minute round trip).
The machines we were using were run by a guy who spiked his iced tea with VODKA. We discovered this one day when they had used our water jug to clean a dirty rock drill bit, and stole a drink from his jug when it proved to be the hottest day of the summer. This was the guy who'd hollar at us to "get in thar' and grease that bit" while it was still spinning. This was the guy who'd spill diesel or boring solution, and yell at us to bury it before the environmental inspectors showed up. The boring solution was a sticky mass of silicate silt with a warning not to breath it. We breathed it every day.
None of us were allowed to turn the key of these machines because we weren't trained on them. We had to travel ducked down in the bed of a dumptruck full of roadcones.
Speaking of which, "laying down the pattern" was fun. Walking into a road during rush hour bumper to bumper traffic with only the authority of an orange flag between a speeding SUV and your flannel shirt takes BALLS. Especially when they're on cell phones. Oh, and some truckers like to play "baseball." That's where they hit your barrels and see how far they can make them fly into your site.
Actual work was mostly mindless and consisted of using a shovel without stopping. Even if this meant digging a hole and filling it in again. Boss didn't want people calling to say that his crew wasn't working -- that was the inspectors' job.
There were fun parts, though. Like the one afternoon where we all relaxed with our lunch and watched a car burn at the rest area. Or the way the superviser would call us "niggers," despite the fact that we were all white kids. Or guarding the machines at night from the local union, who would monkeywrench the project until we hired their boys. And nothing in the world is more satisfying than coming home to your girl on Friday, covered in dirt with tanned muscles bulging out everywhere. Doesn't matter if you got them holding 200 pound pipes over your head for a half hour while the welder did his thing.
Oh, and being able to say "I built this internet with my blood and sweat." That's awesome.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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.
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