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Whose Summer Job Was the Worst?


Hundreds of you responded to our Worst Summer Job Contest with the most bizarre and jaw-dropping stories (our condolences for some truly horrible summer experiences). Coming up with the top five was much harder than we thought.

Now it's your turn to judge: Check out these five finalists' stories (edited for brevity and grammar) and vote now for your best pick of the worst:

Monster member Casey1966 posts:

How I wanted to earn money in the summer of 1983 -- enough dough for hot dates, ice cream and Springsteen tickets. Because my older sister had an in at an amusement park in central New Jersey, I was a shoo-in to get the job at the parking lot detail.
About halfway through the summer, I got promoted to work the end gate at the Safari. My responsibilities were laid out by my manager. He dropped me off at the end gate of the Safari and asked Jose to show me the ropes -- or the bat, that is.

You see, the end gate was a passage to the real world for the monkeys and baboons. The inner fence was controlled electronically as cars drove up to it to exit the final portion of the safari. About 30 yards after that gate was my new post. The gate remained open until the safari closed. Here, Jose showed me how the baboons and monkeys would try to make a break for it by riding atop a car, under a truck or just plain rush my gate. I was trained on how to use the Baboon Beater -- a three-foot-long, six-inch-round bat -- to dissuade our fuzzy friends from exiting.

As weeks went by, the baboons and monkeys learned to respect their new master as I maintained a batting average that would assure me a seat on any major league team. One day, I fell asleep on the job in my booth. As I lay asleep inside my booth, the baboons surrounded me. And they had my bat! I had left it outside the booth against the side. One baboon started banging the bat against the roof of my booth as I awoke in horror. I scrambled to close the door just in the nick of time. I spun the tiny latch and felt a sense of security -- but not for long. They had me right where the wanted me: Stuck in the wooden shed with Plexiglas windows in 90-degree heat. Luckily, I had a radio and called for reinforcements. All this to earn $5.75 an hour and break every child labor law at the age of 15!


Monster member tomato posts:

I worked for a clown for a few summers. He had several fun businesses, and one of my roles was to be the moon-bounce operator at places like air shows, company picnics, etc. For one summer, I was a human patch. The big inflatable moon bounce had a tear in it, and my job was to sit on the duct-taped hole on top of a blanket to make sure it didn't deflate while people were jumping around.

The best event was a drunken event at a college in the Northeast. There I was, 16 years old, with a bunch of trashed frat boys flying over my head doing forbidden flips on the big smiling inflatable bounce.

Monster member Gary posts

I was desperate for a job when I graduated from high school -- so desperate that I finally took a job with the local poultry farm.

This place had four large chicken barns, each about the size of a football field. Each was filled with 40,000 chickens in cages, stacked about 8-feet-high. And every one of these chickens was psychotic. They spent their lives cooped up in a cage with other deranged chickens, trying to peck each other to death -- unsuccessful only because they'd been de-beaked. And any time any non-chicken (e.g., me) came walking within 10 feet of their cages, they would completely and totally lose it. They'd squawk, thrash and throw themselves against the cage in a frenzied attempt to kill whatever infidel had entered their domain. The noise and stench were mind-bending.

Not only did I have to shovel the chicken doo-doo, I had to BREATHE. And with every chicken within 10 feet throwing a raving hissy fit, the poop and dust and feathers and other unimaginably rude stuff all got flung into the air in a fine dust, which, as you can imagine, got everywhere -- on your skin and in your hair, eyes and NOSE. The farmers weren't smart enough to use breathing masks or other air filters, so I didn't either -- and my nasal passages got coated with the nastiest, most loathsome crud you can imagine.

I didn't last long there. I told them I couldn't hold down a job if I couldn't hold down my lunch. And I wasn't exaggerating. For more than a MONTH afterwards, I had the piquant aroma of stale chickens accompanying me everywhere I went. I didn't eat chicken for a long time after that...

Monster member Slatz posts:

A friend helped me land a summer job in the machine shop of a bottle-manufacturing plant. Half of my responsibilities included rebuilding bottle-molding machines while working in the air-conditioned shop. Unfortunately, the other half included lubricating the massive machines on the manufacturing line.

Three times a week, I would wheel a bulky grease gun along the line. At each machine, I would crawl through broken glass to grease hidden conveyor-belt parts and other moving equipment while clouds of sulfur surrounded my head and jets of fire often singed my hair. Twice a week, I would lug a two-gallon oilcan along the catwalk above the line to top off each machine's reservoir. Up here, on hot days, the temperature would soar to more than 120 degrees.

During my third week on the job, while pouring oil into one of the reservoirs, my oil-soaked cotton glove touched one of the ceramic chutes filled with molten glass. My glove briefly smoldered before bursting into flames. Then the flame ran up my oil-soaked arm and ignited my shirt. I quickly put down the oil can and started beating out the fire that now engulfed my chest and arms. I put on quite a show as I danced along the catwalk, flailing at the flames.

Almost as quickly as my clothes had ignited, I'd beat out the fire. And while I stood on the catwalk with singed eyebrows and smoke rising from my smoldering shirt and gloves, the crew below gave me a rousing round of applause. Later that day, one of the machine operators told me that the last oiler had been on the job for less than a week before he'd set himself on fire. Apparently I'd established a new record for survival…

Monster member walden722 posts:

My worst summer job was detasseling corn, which is basically like running a three-week, sleep-deprived, heatstroke-inducing, cross-country marathon while pulling the tops off of corn plants. We would work for three weeks straight with no days off and hit the buses at 5 a.m. sharp, usually returning home around 4 or 5 p.m.

The mornings would start off with the corn being cold and covered in dew, so we wore ponchos made out of garbage bags. By early afternoon, the humidity in the fields made it feel like it was 115 degrees, and in order to see the tassels, you had to look into the sun. I did not know you could sunburn your eyeballs, but it happened to me more than once!

Imagine getting a paper cut on your finger. Now repeat that about 10,000 times over the course of three weeks. Even with gloves and long sleeves, you would be bloodied, itchy and cut up more each day. I once cut my ear so badly on a wet corn leaf (the corn is sharper when it's wet) that I soaked the entire shoulder of my shirt in blood before I knew what had happened. Blisters were not just for your feet, and you would get a set on your hands as well, which made it especially hard to try and grip the tassels.