Yeah I've moderated a few forums and this forum is probably the easiest one because people here are respectful to each other and can disagree without fighting.

I'm a member of only one other forum that gets along so well and I think that really says something about the members and staff.

Also, Liz: There was chanting.

Sweeet.

I've moderated a forum before. It was easier than this one because it was dead. XD

I wanna be a moderator


Liz, it will be easy moderating that dead forum until it turns into a zombie

When I STARTED it was pretty happening. (I can't think of.. oh. active. Active would have been a better choice.) But once facebook came out, we all added each other on there. There was like...20 of us.

Is being a mod fun?

Nobody ever did anything. Any disagreements were taken to a private chat and since most of us were good friends, worked out privately. The owner had strict rules about that.. The only bad thing was the occasional troll/spambot. That only happened 3 or 4 times.

This has been fun. At first I thought that I didn’t really have any bad employment situations to share. Then I realized that they were all pretty bad in one way or another. Let’s start at the beginning.

When I was little we lived in the country. There was a big field between our house and the neighbor on that side. One year he decided to grow potatoes. He paid us cash to pick rocks up out of the field before he planted. 25 cents per 5 gallon bucket. Now we (the kids around my age) were way too small to drag a bucket full of rocks, so we would pick up all that we could carry and run them back to the buckets on the edge of the field, then run back out to get more rocks. After we got paid the older kids (ages about 10-12 years old I guess) would come over to where we had collapsed under the bushes after getting a drink straight out of the garden hose and sell us candy bars and sodas that they had likely swiped from their parents. At that time you could get a Coke or two candy bars and a pack of gum for a quarter. We would all put our quarters together to buy a Coke to share from those swindlers. It worked out great for a while though since none of us was allowed to have Coke. Then the neighbor realized that the big kids were sneaking over at night and throwing the rocks back into the field so that we little ones could keep earning quarters.

Also I should mention that while we were running all over the place with our shirts full of rocks the neighbor’s beagle would occasionally get loose and try to chase us down for the purpose of humping. That was an overly friendly dog, and what a stink on him. Poor thing couldn’t help the stink. But good grief, what a leg hound.

Anyway after the harvest there were still too many potatoes in the ground for the neighbor’s liking, so he had another job for us 5 to 7 year olds. For every bushel of potatoes we picked up, we could run home with as many as we could carry in our hands. That worked out to about three potatoes per bushel. So I have actually worked for small potatoes.

Grits. . .

I second that. Lol. At least there were no dogs where I worked.

I did construction work a couple of times and while it pays good, the work is extremely difficult. I would always come home so sore after work that all I wanted to do was lay down and sleep. I'd wake up and go back in for another day of hard labor with my back, arms, and legs still hurting from the day before.

It also didn't help that it was 100 degrees outside so I was sweating like crazy and had a hell of a sun burn.

That's one of the cutest stories I've ever heard!

My brother worked construction jobs over college summers. Like you said Kiln, brutal but the pay was excellent. He spent one summer as a roofer and another on a paving crew. After the paving job he learned to wait tables!


All right so here’s the next entry on my resume. When I was 10 we moved downtown where we could walk everywhere (school, friends, grocery store, bank, pool, the projects). I started babysitting for a friend of my mom’s for $2.00 an hour. She wanted me to do some little things around the house to keep me busy (!!) while I was there after school. Seriously, I had her two kids and my homework plus I fed them dinner, what the heck? Since the cleaning wasn’t working out she had me come over on the weekends to clean her house. For $2.00 an hour. I was ten years old. That was before I learned to say, “Screw you.”

A couple of years later she and another friend started up a small manufacturing business. It was literally a sweatshop under the one friend’s garage. In the winter they had to haul in a space heater because it was so cold the paint wouldn’t dry. They paid me $2.50 per hour though, so I was moving up in the world. Plus the one partner was also a caterer and she gave me awesome food. I ended up working for them on school breaks and as a second summer job all the way through my sophomore year of college. It was incredible experience to be in on the ground floor of a company. A lot of what I did opening new profit centers much later I learned as a kid at that company. But there was a funny moment when an inspector came to check their first rented building after we moved out of the sub-basement. We had all sort of forgotten that I wasn’t technically allowed to be working. So when he asked what I was doing there they quickly said I was the babysitter. About two seconds later when he saw the chemicals, power tools and such that were all over the place (because I had been working!) he said to me, “You need to get outside RIGHT NOW.” He was protecting me! Lol.

Oh wow, Grits! Of only he knew XD

Yeah... as I was reading I kept thinking "That is not legal."


I think the worst job I've had was being a cashier at a grocery store. It was mindless work, and then you get the pleasure of telling customers that NO this item is ringing up at the correct price, you just didn't read the sign correctly/at all.

I seriously preferred my janitor job at a factory scrubbing toilets over being a cashier. YEAH.

This post has been edited by King Coin: Mar 11 2013, 06:44 PM

One of my friends works in the Huntsville prison and she says she likes her job better than mine, lol

I think my worst job was also probably being a cashier at a grocery store too. The worst part of it was that I was not really a cashier at all. I was a produce clerk. Somehow I got roped into running a register whenever things got busy at the registers. Given that it was a grocery store, it was always busy at the registers. So I could never get my own work done, because I was wasting all of my time cashiering. I quit that job not too long after.

I've been cashiering since I was 16. I turn 23 in August. I feel like I have an endless amount of patience XD

But I swear, the next person who tells me my job is easy is going to... not have anything done to them because I'll not say anything XD

For me the misery of cashiering is very much a function of the customer base.

I’ve worked at three very different clothing stores. (All legally, lol.)

In one my manager ended up moving me in with her family so I could stay and work two more months, that’s how well we got along. But it was the worst experience because our customers were surly she-hounds who routinely screamed and cursed at us. Thankfully the company cared even less for the customers than we did, so at least we had the satisfaction of sending them away as unhappy as they made us.

The one where my customers were decent people who actually intended to pay for the clothes (imagine that) was also the one where the district manager was sleeping with the store managers. Seriously, when the scandal broke they were ALL fired. Oh, and his wife would come in all the time and give us bad “Secret Shopper” reports even though we all knew who she was and could retell every second that she was in the store. I mean she used her husband’s discount to buy clothes! But even though that was a truly hostile work environment, it wasn’t the worst because the customers kept the sales floor fun.

Some of my customers are okay. The guys next door at the car shops are great, AMD come in every day. Buuuuuuuuuut the management at this company isn't very good. As in, they make demands we can't, as a staff, meet. We don't get breaks because there are only one manager for 8-13 hours because they won't give us enough budget for two pershift. And, of course, payroll is deemed once a year by inventory losses, AMD we lay 3 times the amount we were expected, so no raise.o

Then there's the screaming customers, dishonest employees, the messes, the trash, the stealing... Standing and scanning things isn't hard. Trying to not bash everyone's faxes is.

My phone is acting up and won't let me.correct my mistakes. Guhh.

Are we counting only legal jobs? Because one or two of my worst jobs were not legal.

Out of my legitimate jobs, I'd say my worst was Burner at K-Mart. I doubt that this job even exists anymore. It consisted of sitting for eight hours a day in a small, windowless room down in the basement. In this room was myself, a chair, a furnace and a mountainous pile of cardboard boxes. All the line workers would cart their empty shipping boxes down to this room. And I would feed these empty cardboard boxes into the furnace. I would open the furnace door, shove in a box or two, close the furnace door, sit down and watch the boxes burn inside the furnace. When they were burned I would open the door again, shove in another box or two, close the door, and sit down and watch those boxes burn. The boxes had to be fed into the furnace at a very specific rate. Shove too many boxes in too fast and it would cause air pollution problems and the city would call up the store manager and the store manager would come down and give me hell. But feed boxes into the furnace too slow and the store manager would come down and yell at me because the boxes were beginning to pile up and he wanted me to speed things up.

It was not a fun job. If I hadn't been absolutely desperate for money at the time I would not have kept it.




This post has been edited by Pseron Wyrd: Mar 12 2013, 02:14 PM

Given some of Grit's admissions, I think more than just legal jobs are on the table here. Though you might want to be careful about incriminating yourself in case the FBI is reading...

That burner job sounds horrible. Not to mention ecologically unsound! I am sure that was back in the old days before the word "recycle" had been invented.

I remember back when I was a material handler at a little plastics factory, I had to break down the cardboard bins that the raw plastic pellets came, flatten them out, and stack them up on top of the manager's office. Trouble is said office was a little box standing up on stilts above the rest of the factory, with just a narrow stairway to get up it. I had to balance the huge pieces of cardboard on top of my head, holding each side so it would not tip too far one way or the other and fall off. Then run up the stairs and throw it on top of the pile over the ceiling of the office. If I missed, it went sailing down to the floor 20' below.