clemsongirl 

No jobs that i’ve disliked. I worked with Médecins Sans Frontières (doctors without borders) for part of each summer stating at 14 and until college. I worked doing research work during undergraduate school with the woman professor i went to that school to work with and learn from. Both of those work periods gave me knowledge, confidence and started the building of my reputation.

The job i have now and have had since finishing grad school came about because of my families help in guiding my education, attitude and work ethic for the positive, thoughtful work which i now enjoy! My lessons from these experiences are doing work helping others and getting an excellent education in the sciences/technoloy can provide a good life…..and gives me the reasons to help my children in anyway i can to do the same!!

canklecat

Best: Health care and occupational safety and health.

Worst: Tossup between telemarketing and working for a computer graphics publisher that expected me to turn out letter perfect copy without a monitor. Seriously. Keyboard. No monitor. For designing text and graphics for publication. I was a whiz on that system with other employers that were properly equipped. But it was impossible to do without visual feedback. I got the impression there was some kind of weird family dynamic going on and they were trying to sabotage new hires to pressure their former designer (who did have a monitor) to come back. Both jobs lasted maybe two days before I left.

TBH, small one or two person businesses are the worst for new hires. That includes family. I prefer larger organizations with clear missions, goals and expectations. With smaller businesses you're always trying to read the minds of the owners.

Job that I expected to be horrible that turned out to be fun for awhile: Selling cars. I did it on a lark between college semesters. Turned out to be an interesting challenge and very enlightening about customer psychology and commissioned sales. I learned more from that job in less than a year than in all of my business related courses in school.

Juan Foote

I feel the opposite in a way. I don't like to work for companies THAT small, but I have a distain for working with Corporate entities with their blind rulings and immovable policies. Always felt like a number at places like that and seemed without fail that the moment you develop an opinion about anything, gone. Seemed about the same in regard to making a certain level of pay. You get there and then wonder how long before they hire the cheaper guy to replace you. I try to target staying in a company with between 5-10 people, where possible.
I feel the same way about places with Union and particularly where it's mandatory. I have NEVER had being part of a Union be a benefit to my situation, just cost me in various ways.

As a side note, I have NEVER gotten a job by sending in a resume or application. Every single job I have ever had was a result of sitting down and talking to someone. Even places that ask me to leave the app on the counter, I generally will ask when the "owner/manager" would be available to talk about the position. I have failed one personal interview and that was because I wanted to about halfway through talking to the boss there.

skidder

I did that for a while in 2003-2004 when the economy was crappy. I already had experience dealing with industrial customers so it was and easy transition. Only thing I didn't like about it was the sales supervisor who was pushy as heck and would give a lot of customers 'invoice' pricing (I'd make almost nothing in commission). Customers were kind of interesting, since once you were able to get the car salesman's stereotype out of a customer's mind, it was fairly easy to find them what they wanted and get the sale done. When I finally quit I asked the G.M. if I could just work weekends (when most car sales occur and the busy summer season was approaching), but he said no. Long hours, but everyone should have some sales experience to learn to deal with customers and clients.

Worst jobs were those with a manager/department head who was big on the latest business management techniques. They were constantly changing procedures and methods, just making the workplace a confusing mess. IF something works, just leave it alone!

Deal4Fuji

My worst job was a summer job at Camp LeJeune NC in the late 70's where they were retrofitting insulation on the sides of a 6 story tall electrical steam plant. We were to climb up scaffolding to about 50 ft up and tie on fiberglass insulation sheets to a chicken-wire like base that would be covered with aluminum after the insulation was installed. This required long sleeves, pants, masks & gloves in the summer heat. The pay was great for a summer construction job, but those conditions and dangerous heights had me quitting after day 1. I found a painting job on base housing soon after for less $ but much better conditions....(luckily we didn't paint in Tarawa Terrace) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK215286/

My best job has been what I've been doing since '06 working for myself managing rental properties. The freedom to set my own schedule after 13 years of long hours in retail management followed by years in the grocery broker business where I was tied to a desk with stressful deadlines. It's manual labor, but I actually enjoy it and am at the point now with most properties paid off where I can hire pro's to do the more strenuous jobs.

Juan Foote

Lol, a friend and I got turned on to a job with a company that did the sheet aluminum siding like that, and also window cleaning. It was a super small company with a big work load and the pay was simply incredible. The owner took us out to one of the tallest buildings in town, which was among their contracts. I have done some climbing and rappelling, and am familiar with the harness' and such. He points to this worn out half frayed rope and harness, the carbiner was worn visibly, points to that and says to use that to rappel to the ground. Shortest possible employment I have ever had. Whole lot of nope!

genec

I work in the tech industry and some of the more interesting work was with small start ups where I wore many hats and did many jobs.... I set my own rules, and drove those positions hard, and learned quite a bit along the way... every one I got by sending in a resume, but ultimately sitting down with someone that knew of me, and talking to them. I worked with start ups as small as 5 people (unrelated... all engineers with a vision) to as big as 700 people (grew to 10,000 while I was there). I have worked with larger corporations, but as you say... blind rules make them act glacially. I once worked for a company that was home based in Japan... every tiny decision had to go to the home office overnight... it was incredibly frustrating.

I have seen a lot of small companies fail, get absorbed, or merge... and only one really go on to great success.

Hondo Gravel

Here are some tools that will get you free food and beer. The youth of today should embrace these tools when sitting in air conditioning.

DeadGrandpa

Best:
Grew up on a farm, worked afternoons and weekends. Back to the farm after college and navy service. Raised turkeys from one day old to market, beef cattle (cow/calf, grass fed), for 27 years.
Worst:
Managed a DIY auto parts junkyard, after retirement from the farm. It turns out that working with animals is much less frustrating than working with people.
In between: Worked as an apprentice in a boat shop that built lightweight multi hulls.

P.L.Jensen

Worst: Roasting peanuts at 16 years old...

Best: Traveling the world teaching workshops where everyone builds their own hollow wood surfboard... hollowsurfboards

Covid related: These shower panels I build in my garage...

Deal4Fuji

My fear of heights has become borderline phobia over the years. I used to help my dad install rooftop TV antennas to chimneys in his TV sales & service business growing up, but I can't do anything high anymore...in more ways than one

FiftySix

I figured you had to be a former rock star living off the royalties.

skidder

Got any pictures of the hollow wood surfboards? Those had a brief resurgence a few years ago and were pretty cool. Way too heavy to carry around, and slow to react in the water/on a wave, but very cool to look at.

Hondo Gravel

Yup those were the days sex, drugs and rock n roll. But grunge music took over the band broke up and I was back to busting rocks turned down that 4 year college scholarship to be in the band. Now I’m lost and have no place in corporate America so I drink too much and ride my bikes too many miles. Now I get hired as a professional bad influence just to get by. I miss the days of easy women the wild times on the tour bus. All I have is the memories now.

P.L.Jensen

Zinger

Give me a skyclimber motor or two with either a cage or tractor-seat depending on the job, and a safety rope and belt and I can get something done. If the compressor dies I'll shimmy 90 ft down the rope. (They have a conniption fit when you do that in a shipyard)

But you put me up on steel beams with no safety rope and I'm hugging those beams close all the way out to my welding cage that hangs on the beams. No chance of an Ironworker's career for this clumsy boy.

steine13

@Zinger:
>> But you put me up on steel beams with no safety rope and I'm hugging those beams close all the way out to my welding cage that hangs on the beams. No chance of an Ironworker's career for this clumsy boy.

Oh man...
We had a lot of growth where I work, so they raised steel beams right outside my office one year to raise a 5-story office building.
This is in mid-Michigan, and they started construction in late October. Up and up goes the steel, and the iron workers walk around on it, only occasionally wearing fall protection.
One morning in December there's s a little snow coming down and as it gets light, the first job of the day for this one guy is to sweep the snow of the I beams...with a broom... four stories up... without fall protection. I closed my shades and left them down until t he spring.
cheers -mathias

jack pot 

worst job > USMC ..... best job > still looking

SurferRosa

Range Rat at Kickingbird GC.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

nomadmax 

Twenty six years of being a police officer; it was absolutely the best and most rewarding job I've ever had.

However, there were also times when it was the worst job I ever had. Not because of the things that happened to me, I expected it and knew that going in. The worst part was seeing/dealing with the awful things a small segment of our society did to innocents. Try as I might, those things I'll never forget.

Hondo Gravel

The worst job ever is the I’m doing now Good thing that heifer has already been sold or that cow would be in the smoker.

Notso_fastLane

Worst would have be a tossup between telemarketing (selling water softening systems), fast food, and working at a horse ranch large enough for cleaning stables to be a full time job.

Even waiting tables at a high end restaurant beat those jobs. I was good enough at waiting that I got to work room service. A result of that is that I got to meet Carl Sagan and have a signed copy of Cosmos.

Best job: I'm in the aviation industry because I love flying craft of all sorts. Although it wasn't the best paying, my job at Erickson Helicopters was the best because 1) the people I worked with were top notch, and 2) I was basically the designated test flight guy, because I actually enjoyed it, and didn't get motion sickness.

About 2 weeks/year, I would get to spend flying around in a Skycrane with test pilots that are some of the best in the world.

I would still be there, but they laid off half the company back in 2015.

Bob Ross

Best job? I was a fulltime professional musician for 20 years, and while I'm not sure I would call all 20 years cumulatively The Best Job I Ever Had there were definitely some particular gigs where I was unabashedly saying to myself "I cannot believe that I'm getting paid for this!"

Worst job? Probably a tossup between
- factory worker in a shop that manufactured printing ink. (This shop's claim to fame was that we manufactured the yellow used for the packaging of Peanut M&Ms.) Small shop, maybe 8 or 10 employees total...all (except me) who had been there for decades. The job consisted of taking a work order which essentially had a "recipe" on it, wheeling a cart with a scale on it around the factory floor to gather the ingredients in their respective proportions -- and by "ingredients" I mean highly caustic chemicals stored in huge industrial drums, which you had to scoop out with a trowel -- and then mixing all that crap together and throwing it all into a machine that was like a cross between a blender and a printing press. Short-term side effects of the job were that your hands were permanently stained with printing ink. Long-term side effects, according to the veterans, were hemorrhoids and loss of hair. I lasted a week before quitting.
- door-to-door car audio salesman. Why would anyone think that car audio could be sold door-to-door? The job consisted entirely of walking up cold to various residences or commercial shops, and striking up a conversation with the first person you encountered using a canned speech that was something about "how great music sounds on a really high-quality sound system and wouldn't you agree? yeah? follow me, I wanna show you something" and then walking out to the parking lot where you had a trunk full of Kenwood and Alpine crap that was probably grey market. I lasted precisely two-and-a-half hours in that job. Didn't get paid a dime (since nobody followed me out to the car in those 2.5 hours) but I did get the pleasure of being able to tell the boss "this job is bull****" before I walked away, something I probably should've done at several other positions I've had since.

FiftySix

I think that's a common problem with jobs in many industries. Somehow tied to aging.

FiftySix

Reminds me when I was a printing press operator back in the day. I ran small lithographic presses and a letterpress for 8 years.

For ink colors that weren't common, I'd have to mix my own depending on what the customer wanted. We used a PMS color guide that showed colors by PMS color code and each color had a ratio of inks required to make that color. I'd weigh out base inks on a triple beam scale and then mix it up. It was almost always a shade off of what the book showed, so I'd add some more ink and get as close as possible by eye.

The chemicals in that print shop always had warnings of internal organ damage, or worse. I'd use latex gloves to wash up the presses, but some chemicals would melt the gloves off my finger tips.

I also remember going into the local major newspaper's color print division in the mid-1990s and the high speed web presses would mist ink into the air. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK). If you touched a wall or panel in that shop, that wall or panel would smear the misted blend of CMYK inks onto your hand or clothes. I bet most long timers in there died of some sort of lung or nasal disease. Cigarettes, ink, chemicals, etc.

Thankfully, I didn't hardly deal with lead type like some old timers did. But, I did on occasion when I'd have to fire up the early 20th century made letterpress, which looked just like the one in the video and photo below. Never came with safety covers. Watch your hands.