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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
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...
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?
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"
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)
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?
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.
hit command-w, and you'll be fine.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
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 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 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.
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...
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.
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 Work for SCO... top that!
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.
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 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.
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!
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).
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
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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!
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
(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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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
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
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."
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.
--
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!
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!
No, I mean at -20, that must be pretty tough shit.
...a raincoat and trash can. :(
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 work in Newark, New Jersey. Top that.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
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.
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
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!
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.
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. :)
> 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
. . . 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.
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 work in a Visual FoxPro Shop!!!
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.
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.
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.
guess the current working conditions are illegal under OSHA regulations...
Doesn't that depend on how big your ass is?
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.
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)
Lara Croft Land [goatse.cx]
Goatse is offline, you insensitive clod!
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...
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
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.
Oh, heads rolled that day, I tell you.
--- Ban humanity.
...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.
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.
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.
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
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]
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!)
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.
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!"
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.
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.
I call either troll or real schizophrenia. But I incline to troll.
I've worked with enough schizophrenics (see some of my other posts) to know that what you are saying is exactly what someone with schizophrenia would say--and that you are wrong. Medication is effective, and if you are not trolling, you NEED to go see a competent clinical psychologist. Even if the embezzeling is real, I strongly urge you to seek help from a clinician.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
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
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
Which pays better, programming or spraying shit?
Best Slashdot Co
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
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.
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.
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.
You mean you work for SCO both as a programmer and as a lawyer?
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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)
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.
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
How about not having sex with monkeys for starters?
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?
> How about not having sex with monkeys for starters?
Quit joking around, we want serious solutions: not your unrealistic expectations.
Sex with monkeys is why I work there. Hey monkey, is that a banana in my pocket or am I just happy to see you?
There's vaccines they give you, and I've had plenty of other vaccines that aren't mandatory. I'm planning on riding a motorcycle around Australia and New Zealand. I was going to try to ride round the world, so that's why I've had so many vaccines.
It's a state job, and it's hard to discipline state workers. I think that's why a lot of people don't follow precautions (not washing hands, not washing hands before eating, walking into monkey rooms without masks, sticking pens in their mouth that they used in monkey rooms, stealing tattoo guns from the quarantine monkey labs). Diarrhea runs rampant (bad pun intended). I'm pretty cautious myself, but there are ex-felons & drug users there.
Imported monkeys (ie, Chinese monkeys) are kept in quarantine for an extended period and the folks in that group seem on the ball.
You have to wear a uniform that stays there. When you go into a monkey room, you wear long sleeves, a face mask, a face shield, a hair cover and gloves. Some rooms (monkey AIDS) you wear 2 gloves, and a body gown. I've never been in the quarantine rooms when there's quarantine monkeys, but there you wear a suit that stays in the room.
All and all, it's the best 12 bucks an hour I've ever earned.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
> > 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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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!
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!
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 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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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