Most of us don’t launch out of school straight into the job of our dreams — we usually start out near the bottom of the food chain rather than in the corner office.
In observance of Labor Day, we asked readers to submit their tales of the most unpleasant things they’ve done to earn a buck. While nobody wrote in about their days as an elephant pooper-scooper, we did hear from a former mosquito-repellent tester, an udder cleaner at a dairy and a worker at a fish-canning factory.
If you’ve had a nasty job and moved on to greener pastures, congratulations.
But if you’re slogging it out in the lower trenches of employment and hating it — please accept our gratitude for doing work that many others wouldn’t or couldn’t. And enjoy a few war stories from those who have been there.
Merry Christmas! Where’s the couch?
I once did a part-time job during Christmas, repossessing furniture for a cheap rent-to-own furniture store. A buddy who worked in the warehouse at the store recruited me for the gig, as it took two people to load out people’s furniture. I really needed the extra income.
Most of the time it was driving around, looking for people who were long gone. Sometimes people were hostile or would call you names or spit at you.
The worst ones were when the people were apologetic and would help load the truck, and you’d just leave them there in their empty living room.
— Rich Lindsay, Vancouver
Udderly dirty
I was in high school in 1973, and a “friend” said that I could get a job at this dairy. Of course, the “low man on the totem pole” position was washing udders prior to milking. This guy had about 200 cows, which needed to be milked twice a day. As they came into the milking parlor, the cows were funneled down a chute. I had a little hose and scrub brush, and I had to wash the cow dung and dirt off of the udder and teats just prior to milking.
These cows were nose to tail, doing what cows do best, which is produce enormous amount of manure. Since they really didn’t have any room to let it go, the dung would kind of get mooshed all over their rear ends and tails, which they flick all over the place, including right in your face. After you got done with the milking, then you had to hose out the milking parlor. You did that with a small firehose, ending up hip-deep in freezing cold water mixed with cow poop.
I did it for two shifts, and then quit. I didn’t even go back to pick up my pay.
— Ray Byers, Longview
Chow time
At Oregon State in 1985, I had a $6-an-hour temp job with the entomology department, which had a contract with the Army to test various mosquito repellents in simulated jungle conditions.
They hired about 10 students and put us in a room with a humidifier and the heat cranked up. After applying the repellents, once an hour they would strap a Plexiglas box of mosquitos to our arms and count how many bit us. We got bitten maybe 300 times (150 per arm). They had to have a control site that had no repellent, which, of course, the mosquitos loved. And as the day went on, the repellents lost their effectiveness.
Other than the mosquitos, it wasn’t a bad job. They brought in board games and pizza. They tried to make it fun — when they brought in the big tray of mosquito boxes, they would announce, “It’s chow time!”
The worst part was watching and feeling them suck up your blood and not being able to do anything about it. By the end of the day, the control site had really swelled up. It took a week for my arms to feel normal again.
— Dave Miller, Camas
Itching to death
At 16, I landed my first job with the town’s Youth Commission. Older boy workers were assigned upkeep of the public park and thoroughfares because that job involved gas-powered, manly yard equipment. Girls were given old cemetery reclamation duty. We used hand tools to cut, pull and tug all manner of green, prickly growth that strangled tombstones in various states of decrepitude.
The summer was hot. I wanted a tan. Wearing shorts, T-shirts and sandals — but no gloves — I ended up slathering my tender, exposed flesh with poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac.
The cemeteries were reborn; I was itching to death.
— Lorna Earl, Ridgefield
Nutty work
I grew up working on farms and picked berries when I was 10 and 11 years old. One of the worst picking jobs I did was picking black walnuts at a family friend’s nut orchard every year. This consisted of me kneeling all day for a week or two on rocks, sticks and walnuts, which left my knees very sore.
You had to squeeze the nut out of the rotting black fruit, which stained my hands and clothes black.
We were paid by the pound. The first day I would make about $15, but each day after, the total would decline as my enthusiasm waned and my hands, knees and back got more and more sore. By the end of the week, I was making about $5 to $7 a day. When I would complain to my father, he would tell me that it was more money than I’d had, and I was lucky to get it.
At the time I thought he was crazy, but it really taught me to appreciate what I have.
— Tim Buck, Vancouver
Sticky situation
In 1967, I worked at a plant that made laminated beams in Ontario, Ore., when I was in college. My job was to apply glue with a brush to boards to be pressed together. It was hot, filthy, and at the end of the day, trying to get glue off of oneself was nearly impossible.
— Chuck Ritchie, The Dalles, Ore.
Frozen fish
In the winter in a small southeast Alaskan town in the 1970s, jobs were not plentiful. My only option was to work in the herring processing plant. Located on the dock, the plant was covered but completely open on one end where the fish were unloaded, and temperatures were about 20 degrees. My first assignment was to sort the fish by size on the conveyor belt. Wearing gloves didn’t help. Neither did the vertigo I suffered watching the silver fish fly by. After two hours, I was reassigned to the loading bin with a pitchfork, picking up the fish that spilled over the sides.
It was kind of boring when the fish were not unloaded. But watching the gulls out on the dock made it more interesting, and, I thought to myself, enticing the gulls to pick up fish inside the plant would be even more interesting.
Within a couple of hours, flocks of gulls were flying and diving inside the building.
Next, they put me on one of the very expensive machines that made herring butterfly fillets for the Japanese market. That was a bit better, although we all stood in buckets of hot water in our rubber boots to keep our feet warm. The hand-eye coordination to select fish and put them in the slots was actually fun. Battles raged between stations. And when we returned from dinner at the bar next door, the fun really began, as we missed the slots more often than not.
— Cory Samia, Portland
Drinking on the job
When I was much younger, I started a job in an auto body shop. At 8 a.m., the owner started drinking beer. He kept drinking and getting more belligerent as the morning went on. By noon he was drunk. He gave me $20 to get him lunch. I just kept the $20 and never went back!
— Wally Melendez, Vancouver
Gettin’ grapey
As a teenager in the late 1950s, I got a job as a setup/floor trucker for a table grape operation in central California. I unloaded picked grapes off of flatbed trucks. I rolled large boxes of freshly picked grapes for the sorter staff to process.
I was paid $1 an hour, working in dirty, hot conditions. I earned enough to buy my first car: a 1952 Plymouth Coupe, for $225!
— Frank Hoetker, Woodland
Tots wreak terror
In the 1960s, babysitting fetched 35 cents an hour in Portland. One night I agreed to watch five kids, only to find five more hellions there when I arrived.
The 10 little devils proceeded to terrorize the large house. When the parents finally arrived home, tipsy, they placed $1.05 into my sweaty palm.
Did I go to Woolworth’s and buy makeup or a Beatles tune? I don’t recall. More than 40 years later, though, I can still drive by that house and shudder, vowing, “never again!”
— Jean Laughlin Miller, Vancouver
If you sprinkle when you tinkle …
I worked summers at the Boise Cascade paper mill in Salem, Ore. It’s no longer there.
Men’s restrooms: paper towels thrown on the floor despite plenty of available trash cans, excrement in places other than the bowl, “missing” the urinal, etc. I’m sure these men did not leave those kinds of messes at home. Mondays were the worst. The women’s restrooms? Could hardly tell they had been used.
— Theresa Cross, Salem, Ore.
‘Giant waffle irons’
My worst job was working in a tire retreading plant for two years during college breaks for about $3.35 an hour. The work was really hot, and there was a great chance of going home at the end of the day covered in tiny bits of black rubber.
My primary job was to inspect and patch the insides of old tires to be retreaded, as well as to stack tires in the hot sun, in the hot truck, and in the hot, dark warehouse. As one of the few high school graduates on the staff, I also helped fill the orders.
The tires are retreaded using what look like giant waffle irons that can burn you if you aren’t careful. One winter break, we used them to cook up a hot holiday potluck dinner. It takes practice to work up an appetite in a place that smells like burning rubber, but when you’re 19 years old, you can do it.
— Craig Brown, metro editor at The Columbian
Have a cookie
I was fresh out of college and desperate for a paycheck. A friend who worked for Safeway needed someone to demo Keebler chocolate chip cookies. All I had to do was stand near the display with a plate of cookies and a handful of coupons.
Turns out, people are surprisingly suspicious of strangers hanging around grocery stores trying to give them cookies, especially if they have several screaming children who all want one. I was also stalked by teenagers who thought a quick change of clothing would fool me into giving them another cookie.
After six hours of standing in one place with a plate in my hand, my elbow locked up, and I couldn’t put the plate down. I decided I didn’t need the check badly enough for a second day.
— Diana Burns, senior accountant at The Columbian
Hello, kitty
In the lean years after college in the 1990s, I took a part-time job at a nonprofit cat shelter in Florida for $5 an hour to supplement my income as a restaurant busboy.
The no-cage, no-kill shelter had 200 cats assigned to different rooms based on their health and temperament. The largest room, the size of a basketball court, held 40 cats. My job was to clean all the litter boxes in the building (there were dozens), launder the cats’ bedding and mop the floors. Ten minutes into the job I discovered I was highly allergic to that many cats, but I soldiered on in a Benadryl haze, wheezing and sneezing.
The boss soon made me her assistant and had me organize her office, where three cats resided. Almost every surface was sticky with cat urine. I spent days peeling apart stiff, yellow, smelly documents, forms and bills and sorting them into piles for filing while cats meowed, rubbed against me and knocked things over.
The shelter’s finances were rocky: Our lights were shut off once because we couldn’t pay the power bill, and I couldn’t count on a paycheck on payday. My boss’s demands became increasingly bizarre, and after six months, I bid goodbye to the kitties.
— Amy Fischer, reporter at The Columbian
