Workplace Best and Worst: The Worst Job

Jan. 5, 2005 — -- Here is a selection of the e-mail responses to the question -- what's the worst job you have ever had?

"I once had a job steam cleaning dumpsters. I had to climb inside of these dirty dumpsters with nothing but me and my steam gun. This was before the days of protective clothing. As an aside, many of your readers have no doubt seen corner reflectors hung on sailboats, designed to reflect radar energy back to the source so that the boat will be easily seen. It turns out that directing steam into the interior corners of a dumpster works pretty much the same way. Everything that was once stuck in the corner of the dumpster gets blasted out and comes directly back -- to you -- covering you from head to toe in an instant."

"Airline job, any one right now, you pick."

"A traveling toupee salesman."

"The worst job I've ever had was a one-week temp job for a hosiery company. They produced lingerie and underwear shows on the catwalks of Paris. Instead of discarding the unmentionables once the shows were over, they shipped them back to the U.S. as a part of their inventory, presumably for tax purposes. My job was to sort through each used pair of both men's and women's undergarments. I was put into a cubicle with a computer and Hefty sacks full of the 'inventory.' I was assured that the garments had been washed.

Scraps of paper were pinned onto each piece written with names like "Jean-Pierre" and "Bridgette." I soon found out both by sight and smell that the laundry had not been done. I became familiar with both Bridgette and Jean-Pierre and gained much unnecessary insight into French toileting habits. Because no one in the office could find me a pair of rubber gloves on day one, I continued my task by pinching them up by the least offensive margin I could find (which is hard to determine with a thong) and inhaled through the mouth, and wished myself Godspeed. I'm pleased to report I finished my stint at Sara Lee two days earlier than expected."

Workplace Best & Worst is a Wednesday feature at ABCNews.com. Each week we'll ask a question -- What is the worst workplace prank? What is the best advice? Who was your worst boss? And then in week two we'll run the best responses.

Bob Rosner is a best-selling author, award-winning journalist, popular speaker and a guy who is still trying to forget some of the jobs he's had in the course of his career.