July 8, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Michael Valentine Jones (7/8/2008)
I have a hard time thinking of a terrible IT job compared to horrible non-IT jobs.I got a temporary job once where we went to a site for some “digging”. When we got there, we found it was a 6 foot diameter sewer pipe that was plugged with, well, the stuff that goes into sewer pipes, and they wanted us to dig it out. This was in August on a 100+ degree day. One person actually attempted it, and was puking his guts out within 5 minutes.
I helped a veterinarian de-horning yearling cattle where my job was holding their head while the vet cut off the horns and cauterized the arteries. I got covered with spurting blood every day, and came home looking like a killer from a slasher movie.
There were worse jobs then those…:crying:
Agreed - my non-IT disaster jobs were 10 times worse than the worse IT job I had.... Between getting to clean the fry station at a student cafeteria and selling Kirby Vaccuum cleaners door to door in West Philadelphia, I can't really complain about my worse IT jobs....:cool:
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
July 9, 2008 at 5:02 am
Totally irrelevant coincidence, but I sold Kirby's for a (very) short time. Hated it. But, along the same line as Steve, I learnt a lot from the experience.
Like, I will never be a good salesman.
July 9, 2008 at 5:44 am
My wrst IT job was working for a boss, who by his own admissions had 'black periods', and was a total control freak.
For example, he sent around a memo to tell us that we could not have more than one person looking at the same monitor. He warned us not to be sucked into other peoples problems, and should we wish to work like that, please consider a career in road maintenance. He considered that only one person could code at a time, and you should never ask anyone else to help fix a problem!
He even had IM installed on all of out machimes. Then he would send us a message, and if we didn't reply in say 5 - 10 mins, he wanted to know where we were!!
Crunch came when I worked such long hours in the week up to Christmas, I didn't see my kids. Not once did he say, well done, come in a bit later tomorrow. I even had to take my last holiday to get a half day on Christmas Eve.
I kept all the memos he sent, so if I get really fed up in my current hjob, I can read them, and things suddenly seem a whole lot better!!
I wonder if any of my co-workers will read this, and recognise me!!!
July 9, 2008 at 8:23 am
De-horning is not that bad! Then again I grew up on a farm so I have seen plenty of sh...y jobs (literally).
My worst IT job was working for a company that does time shares in aircraft. As a person with 500+ hours of flight time, including my commercial, instrument and multi engine qualifications, I understood better than any of the other programmers what was needed most of the time.
This one project however was horrible.... re-write badly written 4.21 code to work in SQL 7, oh and also find any bad code in the C++ code that their application was written in.
I worked about 12-14 hours a day for 6 months, and being on call 1 of 3 weeks on top of that (we would get called at least twice per week). Got the conversion to SQL 7 done on time.
About a week before I went live, the company decided to give all the other developers that was working on another project over time pay to try to get it back on track. None of these developers had put in any extra time to try to get it done on time. When they denied paying me over time, I called some friends, then handed in my two week notice.
July 9, 2008 at 9:34 am
My worst IT job is amazingly bad compared to those already listed. I worked for a man who did not understand programming. So if something was buggy late etc he would have a total cow. Then if his wife said something (she was his secretary) he would tell her (in front of us) to "shut up" and sometimes throw in name calling for fun. When his son quit he blamed all of us for it and we got a fairly big chewing out. Then one of the programmers said something insulting to me, I said something back then he hit me. I thought he was going to kill me so I hit him back. He calmed down and we had a good relationship from then on... go figure.
When I quit the company after 2 long years the owner said he was going to "kill" my new employer.
And to top it off while our users were nice they were not very smart. We had one customer who managed to insert the floppy in the space between the floppy and the case. Sigh.
July 9, 2008 at 9:41 am
If we're working overtime, worst job from my girlfriend's perspective was the nuke plant.
Went full-time in Sept, had to upgrade radiation tracking over New Year's. I left the house in the afternoon on the 31st, got to work around 5pm.
Came home on the 2nd, about 10am. Most of that time I was awake as we tried to figure out why things didn't work and then late on the 1st, we scrambled to setup alternate paper systems that could be input back in later.
I worked 120 hours the first week of January, > 100 each week for the next 5 or 6. We had 5 people to cover 24x7 support, plus daytime support and 1 of us was a new Mom, so she was days only. I got to basically work 12 on, 12 off, sleeping in the server room with a pager on my ear so I could take up and press the oh-en-oh-eff-eff button twice to reboot the unstable OS2 server.
But I dug in hard and learned a lot about SQL Server from that experience trying to solve things. Eventually we upgraded OS2 twice, SQL from 4.2 to 4.2a to 4.2b until Windows 3.1AS came out and we went to that.
July 9, 2008 at 10:27 am
Anders Pedersen (7/9/2008)
De-horning is not that bad!...
It's not that bad if you do it when they're real young and weigh maybe 100 pounds.
If you wait till they're a year old and outweigh you by 4 to 1, they're a whole lot harder to convince to hold still while you cut off a body part.
July 10, 2008 at 1:31 am
Worst job was when I discovered that my boss was somewhat elastic when it came to financial accounting, as was his boss, as was his boss..........
Best job ever was a Kitchen Hand at a school. No pressure, no commuting, free lunch, chatting with the other women and home in time to collect the kids from school! Plus they paid me!
Madame Artois
July 10, 2008 at 9:13 am
Lynn Pettis (7/8/2008)
I was getting my work done in about 40 hours a week, but others were working 60+ hours a week, and I "should be" also.One thing I have learned, you have to have a life outside of work, especially with a family. I work to live, not live to work.
Boy, do I relate to this. I started looking for other work when an employer complained that working six days a week and putting in 55-60 hours a week wasn't showing enough "sense of urgency". He wanted me to come in on Sunday, too.
Then he was surprised when I gave notice because I was getting a job. He even tried to keep me from leaving, but he couldn't get management to match the 20% pay increase I was offered at the new job. (Not that I would have stayed, anyway...)
July 10, 2008 at 9:20 am
And to top it off while our users were nice they were not very smart. We had one customer who managed to insert the floppy in the space between the floppy and the case. Sigh.
My roommate killed my car CD player a similar way. It had a cassette with room for 3 CDs so you wouldn't need to handle them while driving, and she managed to jam two into one slot. Cost me about $500 to get that fixed, since they had to disassemble the unit and replace the CD player.
July 10, 2008 at 9:25 am
One would be working for the city. Creepy, weird boss (always kepy his suit coat on) that ran all the women in our department off because he thought them mentally inferior. Still surpised no law suits happened from that one. He's since been demoted - no one gets fired in at the city. Worse yet, we had small budget and we used Oracle forms. Argh!
The other was working at a site that supported HMO claims operations in Dallas. All of the people there were from the Northeast. With a few exceptions, all rude to the core. Mutual respect was totally absent. And the claims system was written in Fortran - really! I left after a year and the place has since shut down.
July 10, 2008 at 9:37 am
Absolute worst ever: summer job at Tyson's unloading coops of live poultry from semi trucks onto conveyors. If it rained the night before when the birds were caught, well, you can't imagine. Then, taking my turn in the 'hanging pen' removing live birds from the coops and hanging them (by their legs) on moving shackles. This all started at 5:30 am and went on until around 3 pm. By the end of the day, I looked - and smelled - like a chicken. Most of my co-workers never graduated high school....and some of em were just plain crazy. Best thing about that time? I had a '66 GTO (389 ci, Holley, Hurst) that I bought for a song!
July 10, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Worst job ever for me is to put up 12 - 15 hours/day and working over most weekends for 3.5 years and got a warning letter from HR for my few minutes late to work for more than 4 times a month (Note: I never arrive to office later than 10mins max even if i had to work until 2am!). Got the letter and apology from HR manager at almost the same time, explaining the "formality" of the company standard if they dont issue the warning letters to me, but asks me to disregard the letter. No girlfriend, no life for bloody 3.5 years and get zip for all the efforts. Only thing gained are all the knowledge/skills learnt.
But found another job and work happily ever after, relatively :hehe:
Simon Liew
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server 2008
July 21, 2008 at 11:21 am
I've really only had two IT jobs, and neither has been bad. The first company was messed up, but my job was okay.
One bad job I had was "stickering lumber":
I told a temp agency I was looking for part-time work, and that I could do just about anything up to light physical labor (wasn't in shape for anything heavy), but would prefer something more clerical. (I typed 100+ words per minute at that time, and have years of experience in filing and such.)
So they asked me if I would take a job "stickering lumber". I had this image in my mind of putting labels, "stickers" on lumber. I said I could do that.
"Stickering lumber", it turns out, is a process of taking a frozen-solid stack of 2x10 boards, 12 feet long, breaking the boards off one by one, and stacking them on a pallet, with an inch of so of airspace between each board in a layer, then placing sticks crosswise above each layer as it's completed, to hold the next layer off of it. The purpose is to let the board first thaw, then air-dry.
Of course, each board was saturated with frozen water. The weight was incredible (up to 150 pounds per board, I was later told).
Basically, in the hot sun, in a team of two (one at each end of the board), I lifted my share of several tons of wood and ice, one board at a time.
11 years later, the injuries to my wrists still ache 24x7.
But I can't blame it all on the temp agency. I should have taken one look at the job, and backed out as soon as I knew what it was. Too stupid, too proud.
Even with all that, I still consider the worst job I ever had to be milking goats. Had to do that every day for four years while I lived on a farm. Ditch digging, shoveling manure, etc., just can't compare. Goats are vile.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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