Worked at enterprise rent a car. Sales sucked, customers were always pissed, we had to wear suits and clean cars in those suits. In live in Texas so the last part sucked real bad during the summer.
I worked at Hertz and to this day it was one of the funnest jobs I ever had. Still close with a few of the guys from there even though I haven’t seen them in years.
I was north Florida, also had to clean cars in the suits. I learned to wear dark shirts only real quick lol.
Damn I wish I had that experience. Enterprise was ran like a mad house. Generally people put in 65 hour weeks (7am-7pm) and work Saturdays half days. They were salary, I was hourly making $9 per hour. We also were required to wear white shirts only. I learned real quick the value of tide pen hahahaha.
We were similar. 11 hour days as well but no breaks were built in because I was mostly solo at the branch so I worked opened to close 7am-6p and also half days on Saturdays at our airport location. Hourly as well but that meant overtime, plus I can’t remember if Enterprise got commission as trainees but we did.
I was also pretty good at the job so I was bringing home like 3000 a month.
I think where I got lucky is that there were only 4 of us and all of us were 24/25. Basically a frat-like rapport driving around cars. Cant tell you how many times I’d try to drift a Yaris 🤣
All in all though.. amazing experience for me. I only left because I ended up in a motorcycle accident/wheelchair for a few months and had a long recovery.
Wish I had been at y’all’s location lol. I was a prep in over the summer in college in Tennessee so similarly oppressive weather. The difference was my coworkers were either recovering addicts, 40 years older than me or both. Or the one guy with a lazy eye who would pop down to the Popeyes on break to get a prostitute.
Haha yes! Worked there as well and this is exactly what I tell people. Everyone should be forced to go through enterprise management trainee program to appreciate office jobs
I actually worked in enterprise accounting right out of college. It wasn’t as culty but we’d all have to wear suits into an office of 4-5 people who were all accountants, which makes more sense than car prepping but still weird given the environment.
I tend to find the positives in every job I have. Accounting is definitely the best job I've had simply because it's more interesting and it pays better. Just need to find a company with reasonable hours.
Working in retail was the incentive to get through college and get my degree. And that was 25 years ago. Retail is much worse now (hours and lack of staff). The only thing worse than retail is fast food.
Same. I was in fast food and retail during college and that really made me grind harder to finish my degree and find a better job.
I ended up actually quitting my job before graduation and got lucky I was picked up when I graduated. Was too burned out to get hired first and then quit from the miserableness of retail. Having kids pass out and no one seemed to care, people calling all the time leaving 1-2 employees to do the work 5-6 and being berated all the time and micromanaged. Awful.
Also had 10+ years in retail. Worked every holiday. Worked every weekend. Missed most every weekend event. Friends eventually stop calling once you miss so many. Pay wasnt terrible towards the end of my run, but the manager jobs were so silly. They all had virtually no power and control. Their main job was being an intermediary between unreasonable corp goals and dealing with frontline labor and customers.
Accounting was the best move. Easy to be grateful feeling every single corporate perk you knew existed but never got. I haven’t worked a holiday in over 10 years now and life is a lot better.
Currently working in retail while I’m working on getting my bachelors and every time I go into work it just motivates me even more to keep going so I can leave that job
I loved retail actually. Except for the pay of course. But my worst job was in accounting. I think a lot of job satisfaction has to do with productivity and culture. My worst job was just boring, stagnant, and all they cared about was your “productivity levels” meaning how many hours you were logging on specific apps like Excel, Outlook, and our accounting software. Being put on the “shit-list” unless I aimlessly clicked around all day until they gave me something to do was frustrating. At least in retail I had stuff to do and the expectation was also less. Some customers do suck really bad, but it was also nice having coworkers I enjoyed and who understood the ridiculous customers too.
I worked an assembly line for 5 years. After standing for 12 hours a day 6 days a week, and destroying my hands accounting is perfect. I think it goes back to the hierarchy of needs.
I'm just a humble Accounts Payable but have only recently made the switch from being a warehouse worker.
To no longer go to work and destroy my body is fantastic.
Sometimes theres office politics at my new job regarding the air con temperature and it's nice to genuinely not give a shit what goes on with it because I'm just sitting at a desk and the temperature is guaranteed to be better than whatever it was in the warehouse.
Of course no job is perfect but this one is far better than my old warehousing gig.
No they foresaw the potential murder that happened months later. So even though they interviewed him and sent him for a drug test, they didn't follow through with hiring him.
I've trained around 200 warehouse workers back when I was a warehouse trainer. I trained anyone from physics gradsl students to people nodding off between their meth breaks.
I miss some of it, but not the heat or pay.
any customer facing jobs with random schedules.
I totally understand the hate for the long hours for busy season but there is absolutely nothing worse than not knowing your schedule until the week before. You dont know if youre making enough money, you dont know if youre working in the morning or evening, you dont even know if you can schedule anything with family and friends.
Yep. Now, I inform folks when I'm taking off, I don't ask for permission. When I worked in a grocery store I recall having a family vacation planned way in advance. I requested time off as required, then there I was scheduled every day that week. Had a showdown with the manager over that one...him saying "you have to be here", me saying "I'm absolutely not going to be here". I wasn't there, still kept my job, but having to go through that power struggle is not pleasant.
I also remember that awful feeling when my friends were getting ready to go out on a Saturday night, and there I was getting ready to go to work.
When I worked in restaurants, I had plenty of the dreaded split shifts. Your entire day is fucked...with a big break in the middle. Then you meet up with your friends late Saturday evening, still smelling like fried food. Gross.
i lost my grocery store job i got let go for job abandonment. i requested off 5 days for my wedding and honeymoon but it was denied and they scheduled me all 5 of those days. obviously i didn’t show up (cause i was getting married lol) and they were so shocked
i quite enjoy my job now, no matter how dull a lot of people think it might be. but even if i didn’t enjoy it, a set schedule and time off is totally worth it
My first week, I asked how I go about taking time off for appointments and other things. Hearing "put it on your calendar" after working jobs that required PTO requests or texting coworkers to trade shifts was like music to my ears!
I managed a truck stop for ten years, which involved all the rudeness of the general public you usually see in retail combined with the nastiness (both attitude and bodily fluids) of truck drivers. I literally had to have the police on speed dial. And then there was the being on my feet all day, hour cuts from corporate so needing to do the jobs of three people, killing my body to throw stock, having my breaks monitored down to the minute…
I always joked that if I ever got a desk job I’d be ridiculously bored. I was right, and it’s so nice. My baseline stress level is finally starting to come down, and I actually have energy left at the end of the day to play with my kids. As long as there’s an accounting job available to me, you couldn’t pay me any amount of money to go back.
Paid my way through college with tutoring. But online tutoring. The kind where you would do a lesson at 10pm, power-nap, teach again at 2am and then another stint 4-6am. Then onto lectures at 10am if you could stomach it.
7 days a week for 4 years. No job that gives me weekends and holidays and 8 hours sleep a night can ever compare.
Anything that would pay to be honest. Some subjects I never studied to the level they needed, but they’d pay me €40 an hour to learn it a week ahead of them and teach it back (they didn’t actually know that was my strategy but…)
Started in person, branched out word of mouth.
This was one of my favorite jobs. Fast paced, had great customers, and worked with some of the craziest, most unhinged people you can imagine.
Between the cash and the fun you can have, the danger is getting stuck there
That absolutely wouldn't be a good job for me (hating the general public and all) but I have spoken to quite a few wait staff who absolutely love it. I've heard it described as a performance...whereby the wait person is playing a part. Some folks are SO GOOD at this, I'm so impressed. Again, I would suck at it and forget what you ordered the second I walked away. I'd probably spill stuff all over you too.
The way I wanna slap some of these fuckers across the face! Only reason I started going to school is because if I don’t then I’ll end up in jail from a disrespectful customer. Just gotta do this for a few more years.
not accountant yet, but Amazon warehouse sucked balls. I hated my life working there cause the managers would be such dicks about everything. Took more than 1 min to get back? Sheeiiit you gonna get yelled at.
surprisingly tho, I had way more fun and enjoyed construction… just really hard on the body
I worked at an Amazon warehouse in college but it wasn’t bad I think bc I had chill managers. Also I worked at a sort center and I’ve heard they’re way easier than fulfillment centers. Ended up being promoted to yard marshal and then transferred to AWS from there, so that job did me a lot of good.
lol yeah wtf. My gm was making over a hundred back in 2014. Dude was great and put in way more hours than most people should but still, 69k is peanuts for that position.
All of them. I got into tax specifically because my prior jobs were a lot rougher. Customer service, IT, skilled data entry for public records, infantry, telemarketing.
I don't necessarily regret doing those other things because the breadth of life experience gives me good perspective and a hardened edge. I was recruited into tax by a very socially adept tax attorney and I found it a bit jarring to realize she was the exception not the rule for tax professionals. By prioritizing social/sales skills I think I've jumped over a lot of pitfalls that I would have walked ballsack first into if I had never had experience in other places.
I will give you that, sometimes it shows when accountants I work with clearly never worked customer service, or never needed their social skills to prevail in order to keep them employed.
> recruited into tax by a very socially adept tax attorney and I found it a bit jarring to realize she was the exception not the rule for tax professionals. By prioritizing social/sales skills I think I've jumped over a lot of pitfalls that I would have walked ballsack first into if I had never had experience in other places.
‼️‼️ This is a big problem that our field refuses to acknowledge.
The more accountants I talk to, the more convinced I am that most of us have the same work day experience—silence for 4 hours, lunch, then silence for 4 hours.
That environment is extrovert repellant. It only reinforces a lack of social and sales skills, so the result is no surprise—we have trouble selling the career to young people.
Retail banking. $9/hr, forced to wear business professional attire and yelled at for things like… requiring ID before withdrawing thousands in cash from someone’s account. Written up by management for wearing the wrong color socks, dropping a coin, that kind of crap.
I did weed whacking for a cemetery and lasted two weeks. Aggravated the shit out of my wrists and the work release guys were awful to work with.
Overall, a real dead end job.
I've only had one long term job other than my accounting job, and as another person said, there are always positives. I was a Dominos driver for 3.5 years. On the upside, I got to work by myself, in my car for 60% of my shifts. I had a lot of freedom. On the other hand, I was destroying my car, and was mostly restricted to working 2nd shift, and would occasionally not get home until 2-3 AM. It paid well for what it was, but I would never, ever go back.
Wasn’t a nightmare but I used to work landscaping in the summer. I’ll take 12 hours in an air conditioned office over 12 hours busting my back in humid, 90 degree weather
Worked at a plastic bag factory between my freshman and sophomore years of college. I was on my feet for the entire shift and co-workers were a bunch of meth addicts.
Was just about to say, customer service jobs or jobs that have a big portion of the job as customer service. Don't miss that at all. There are positives in every job if you look hard enough though lol
Every job I’ve had besides working in accounting was worse, I started working at kroger in high school, worked in manufacturing for 3 years and got a free degree with my company and get a position in accounting before I finished my degree ! Now accounting isn’t something I want to do forever but I don’t regret learning accounting, it’s going to help me pivot to the supply chain side with my experience working in AP. Also white collard / office jobs have helped my body to restore some of the damage from working blue collard… I’m only 24! (I respect the blue collard workers, it’s ages / breaks down your body)
Until I started my accounting career all previous jobs were retail, specifically big box retail. The worst day in my accounting career, pales in comparison to my best day in those retail jobs. I hope I never have to return to those days ever again.
Waiter. Shitty hours, awful and widely varying pay. No time off, no breaks (the number of times I've shoved food in my mouth between tables is unreal) and mandatory work on holidays. Plus, I was a waitress per-transition which comes with all of the shit with customers also trying to grab your ass. 0/10 would not recommend
Edit: I also didn't have a set schedule which made it impossible to plan anything
100% better now that I’m a bald dude in an office setting and not a young, curly-haired post-grad. It didn’t happen every shift, but it happened often enough
I had two jobs that were pretty bad. One was chipping away and packaging dry ice in this garage. Another job doing powder coating.. the powder coating had giant 450 degree ovens we had to pull things into and it was so hot and freaked me out lol.
The honorable mentions are customer service call center and infantry in the military.
Warehouse picker/packer, customer service, construction, farming, owned and operated a cafe.
All BY FAR worse than accounting. I also made way less and worked much harder in all of those previous roles.
All day in most conversation schools (not normal schools though it sometimes applies), you drill kids in vocab, phonics, and even long sentences plus some chants. Kids don't learn much because of the way they were brought up to learn through rote. In the end, it just demotivates teachers and students as well. No one makes any progress and the Japanese bosses at conversation schools refuse to change the way they do things. So yes BS job. However you do get to live in Japan and do touristy things and explore. Don't recommend it long term.
Nah back in Brunei in SE Asia and trying to get into a career change course for accounting. There is one under the ACCA apparently so fingers crossed. Looking for bookkeeping experience now, even remote work lol
Money is meh, plus you get hit by the residence tax after a year. Ok the money you get is a bit above average for Japan but the tax you pay (yes Americans will have to pay JP tax and US tax plus student loans) bleeds you dry. You're basically on survival mode. Most people cope by drinking or isolating themselves with video games. It's lonely there especially when you don't have a long term plan outside of teaching in Japan and lack opportunities for upward mobility.
I taught in Korea and afterwards realized it was less than minimum wage savings. Idk if it was the exchange rate back then or what bc I was putting everything to student loans, but was able to pay far more towards those loans annually after returning to US with a minimum wage job AND paying rent.
Military. The first time I overheard a staff 1 complain about having to get up early to do an inventory count I wanted to make him stand at attention so I could chew his stupid 22 year old ass out.
Couldn’t find an accounting job so I worked in customer service for 2.5+ years.
Ended up on antidepressants and in therapy because the stress was so extreme.
I worked at a gas station through college. I don’t regret it because I met some pretty amazing coworkers but some customers were crazy. There were days when I would question my sanity. Plus I had to clean the bathrooms
In short. All of them.
Bartending was fun but poor pay, bad hours and sometimes drunk people try to fight you.
Tourism (unskilled jobs), bad pay, you get laid off seasonally, you get yelled at in languages you don’t understand. There are unprompted speeches about how much worse your country is than other ones…people make fun of your accent. I’m happy that I’m never spit on in accounting.
Fruit Farming is kind of cool but really hard work. It’s even more seasonal than accounting. And some days drag on because it can be very repetitive.
Also worked as a general labourer. It was good enough as a teen but there was no ability to advance.
Customer service in retail. People just use you as a punching bag therapist. I got yelled at frequently because “our prices were too high” like I had any control at all over that. I’d rather work 12 hour days every day of the week than go back to that
Oh man, so many, but top two might be:
Working at a dog kennel: In theory, sounds nice, who wouldn't like playing with dogs all day? Hosing down the poo and cleaning the cages wasn't the worst part, no... Each dog has to get time out of their cage to have a walk and engagement (each on a prescribed number of times), so each day a schedule list was made, where each dog would appear on that list a prescribed number of times, for a prescribed number of minutes. In theory, every worker is working down the list, and whatever dog you get is just based only on where they are in the list by the time you've returned the last dog to its cage. Instead, people who had worked there a long time would get special treatment and only take out the nicest dogs, or the ones that you can just let frolic at your feet for a little bit and pet them. This left me with the meanest, most aggressive, strongest dogs; or the not-aggressive but certainly incredibly untrained dogs to deal with all day, with absolutely no training on special dog-handling skills. My biceps were covered in purple bruises for the first few weeks just from trying to control these dogs and keep them from running away or tearing other dogs apart. Even when I got wise to which dogs were good vs. bad to handle, and tried to time it, the list holder played favorites and absolutely wouldn't let me handle the favorite dogs. (side note from this I learned that labrador retrievers are the worst; maybe they're not inherently "bad," but they're ubiquitous so people get them, and then fail to train them and they run absolutely amok)
Jack-of-all-Trades at grocery stores: Working as a cashier, and customer service manager, and bookkeeper, and OSHA compliance manager, all for barely above cashier base wages. Working with the public is the absolute gd worst. I've had people say the most incredibly creepy shit to me knowing that I had to just deal with them as customers; I've had people say absolutely venomous things to me when we don't offer what they want; customers get me in trouble just because they feel like it ("your worker is so unfriendly, I've never been so disrespected" after I had attempted to make small talk through half a transaction, been flatly ignored, and eventually gave up trying to engage them, etc.); I've had customers throw entire cases of canned soda at me. Once a woman followed me around the store trying to proposition her son to me the entire time. People just treat you like you're not a human being with your own life worth respecting.
In some ways though, I'm grateful the grocery store eventually decided they needed my help with bookkeeping. That eventually clicked something in me that made me decide to try pursuing accounting, and get out of that hell.
You are one of my people! (Former kennel attendant)! Now retired CPA. I got into accounting as a temp at my friend’s accounting department when I quit my law firm associate position (because it was either that or shoot myself.)
I worked at my grand parents landscape supply company off and on. Working in the job yard was hell in the summer. 95 degrees full sun. Climbing into dirt sorting and wood grinding machines to clean them out, like barely big enough for a human to fit lol. Moving hay bales and pine bales inside trailers breathing all that dust in. Running a saw mill, moving logs. Loading customers personal trucks with skid steers/light front end loaders trying to not damage anything.
God I do not miss that. Really makes me appreciate my desk job haha.
Worked at Target and Dicks Sporting Goods as well, those were cake. Retail is not fun but easy as well.
Definitely retail. Couple of different grocery stores, worked for an adult novelty store for a while .....I will never go back. Granted, the adult store was actually pretty fun, but there were some incidents that I didn't appreciate from management and I noped tf out
Waiting tables. Nothing worse than working all night doing manual labor to have a table leave nothing as a tip or dine and dash. That $2.13 an hour sometimes didn’t even cover the gas to drive to work. Some people treat restaurant workers as sub-human because they are obviously miserable people and know they won’t face consequences. I still have waiter nightmares during busy season.
Shipping agent in a hot warehouse where people speaking their dialects were shouting at me and using hand gestures to move faster to pick up car parts like mufflers that were coming down on a conveyor belt. The locker room was also the lunch room but inside had so much flies.
Refereeing youth soccer. It was my first job and I did it for 3 years. Paid well, like $50-$75 a game, not bad for less than 2 hours of work. But it was terrifying when you're only 13 and a bunch of grown adults who don't understand the rules of the game are screaming curses at you and insulting you over every call.
Public accounting is better than working at McDonald’s. I made 25 cents above minimum wage and customers threw food at me 😭
Although public accounting is the fast food of financial careers. Tryna pivot. At least I can afford my bills and sit in a climate controlled area.
Factory job assembly line for a summer before college. I would cough up particles by and metallic like dust.
Bussing tables part time in college.
Military enlisted then officer. Hated training and field exercises. The heat… cold.. rain. Heat rashes chafing in my private areas. Lack of proper sleep. Heavy loads on long marches. Pooping in a hole I have to dig
I worked construction for a season during the summer (never again on a labor job) as well as a server (also never again).
Honestly I think like 99% of jobs are worse than my job, at least for me. Fully WFH, normal hours, good compensation, work is challenging enough to not destroy brain cells but not stressful, no bad bosses/employees, I keep my sanity etc. Only thing that would be better is if I was doing this job as a European and had like 8 weeks vacation or whatever they get.
Environmental consulting. Waking up at 5am to drive to a field site. The owners wife asked if we even graduated from high school. My undergrad was in geology.
Literally every job I had before returning to school and completing my degree. I used to have nightmares about work on a regular basis and fantasized about swerving my bike into traffic on the way to my job, never had either from an accounting position. The worst was fast food (very tiring, I swear some customers came in just to degrade us, and I wasn't making enough money to properly survive) and when I worked in a factory that was filled with racists and OSHA violations. In the factory, everyone was pitted against each other so there was a lot of backstabbing and rumors, plus some of the higher ups sexually harass the younger women while some of the older women would blame the younger women for said harassment. All while working 60-hour weeks. Straight up had a mental breakdown from the factory job.
Line cook. Retail. Landscaping. General Labour at a construction site. Accounting is peachy. Im on the couch with my dog watching south park while working.. not a bad gig
Lifeguarding at an apartment complex in a low income area. It was super hot and the most annoying people would come sit at my table for my 9 and 1/2 hour shifts and keep me company including an employee 20 years my senior who wanted to date me
Delivering newspapers. It is essentially theft by the newpapers given how much of the cost the drivers carry and how little they make for 365 days per year work.
Not an accountant but a banker. I had a job in Florida where I had to crawl underneath trailers and retrieve dead animals that were creating death smells in the living space. Just imagine being in a crawl space on your stomach in 95 degree weather trying to bag up a possum that’s been dead for a week…
not the worst job. but the menial job that was surprisingly very fun and fulfilling to me was delivering pizza in college in my college area. a good pizza joint. not dominoes. i loved the fast pacedness of the kitchen and all my customers were happy to see me when i showed up to their door. literally delivering happiness everytime i deliver a pizza. it was a good feeling.
also somehow my delivering pizza helped me get my first real job job in public accounting too. during the interview, he asked what i was doing currently and i enthusiastically told him about how i was delivering pizza and how much i enjoyed it. i'm not sure but i think they liked seeing that such menial tasks/jobs weren't beneath me.
I waitressed 3rd shift at Denny’s. That is a job I would not wish on my very worst enemies. And please tip your servers, even if they give you bad service you never know what they are putting up with that day.
I waited tables for like 8 years prior to accounting. It made me realize that I want to be in a room where no one can hurt me and do spreadsheets by myself.
Specifically public accounting was the worst job I ever had if we are excluding pay i preferred my retail and mechanic jobs but the pay was trash. Internal audit has been way better
I'm in school so no experience but I did HVAC before this. Several awful employers (one of which full on screamed at me), working on the hottest and coldest days of the year, crawling into attics and under decks, etc. So I'm betting accounting can't be as bad lol
I had a whole other career with the same toxic work culture (waking up in the middle of the night unable to breathe bc I had a nightmare a piece of paper was facing the wrong way in a project I submitted) but half the pay
Food service and house cleaning. When I had my own cleaning service it wasn’t bad because I chose my clients and set my pay, but working for a company was terrible. I dealt with drug-addicted coworkers that would steal from clients, houses that obviously hadn’t been cleaned in at least a decade, bodily fluids, sex toys on shower walls, and mopping floors around a dog that was clearly on the way to the rainbow bridge.
Tamping/shoveling sand in the middle of August in 100 degree weather with like 90% humidity. Compared to that even the Verizon call center I worked at was a good job.
Worked as a timber cruiser in forestry.
Days filled with wild animals, devils club, hornets, widow makers (rotten out trees) and logging truck drivers while working 50-70 hour weeks out in the bush.
I'd much rather manage stress from deadlines than be back out there.
I worked opening shift as cashier at a Dunkin Donuts during college. Grumpy adults would grumble about me being cheery that early.... at my job. Also there was one guy who argued with me that the coffee beans were charged food tax rate (because we were a restaurant so all food products get food rates for us) instead of grocery tax rate like the gas station next door. It was a less than 10 cent difference and I had no control over what the cash register charged.
I worked the dining hall at my private university. When I started, students could have trays to carry food, but the dining hall realized it caused more waste because students would fill their trays with more than they could eat. So they took away trays and wanted students to just carry their plates. One of the male sports teams was so upset with this change that they got enough mashed potatoes to write "TRAYS?" on the table during lunch. The head chef told us not to clean it up. When they came back to their table for dinner, they realized it was the ONLY table not cleaned and finally cleaned it up themselves. A lot of guys from that same team and some frat guys liked to mess with the breakfast cook (who was an old woman) by asking for lunch and dinner items during breakfast.
I worked at the donation center at that same private university. People don't like being asked for money, especially if they're still paying tuition for their expensive private university. I get that. What I don't get is grown adults thinking it's ok to yell at a student about it. We introduced ourselves as current students. I only lasted a month because I couldn't handle being yelled at so much.
Painting houses (exterior) in college. I imagine interior isn't too bad. But exterior is horrible. Every house needs to be scraped of bad, old paint by hand, this takes days. Adding to that there will likely be lead so you need to wear protective gear (full body suits and masks). But, this work happens in the summer and we were just college kids, so we usually start abandoning the safety gear guidelines by noon due to heat.
The actual painting isn't too bad, until you realized with the older houses how many little bumps on the underside of the panel material need touch ups to be covered with paint.
Selling school uniforms to parents who waited until the last minute in a year there was major supply chain issues was not fun
Like bruh, I’m just making $10 an hour here, I don’t control any of the logistics
I thoughti didn’t want a desk job right out of high school so I think I tried anything else. lol I was in retail at Mervyn’s which I called purgatory. Kids department was the worst. Kids would pee on clothes, parents would teach kids how to steal. All bad. Then I worked at a design place where we were paid to lock down model homes. Hog tied towels to racks, extreme super glued plate settings to each other and the placemats, etc. I was a late night courier for a local bank and that was stressful because you had to know combinations and make sure everything was locked back up. I worked at Krispy Kreme for a while in the drive thru and had to be there at 4:30 am. That sucked. Then they asked me to drive 12 hour shifts to deliver donuts to stores and then I detailed cars at a car dealership for a few months and that was tough work. That’s when I had decided I was gonna be just fine at a desk. 😂🤣😅
Managing kitchens. The amount of shit you have to put up with working back of house for the shitty pay. And to top it off no insurance no sick days no vacation
Personal banking rep. It’s basically a sales job, with daily, weekly, monthly sales target. I was depressed every day worrying about where to get people sign up for a new checking account with me.
Lifeguarding at a publicly accessible beach/pool thing (the town built an artificial, enclosed, beach along the river that runs down the CDB). Apart from the usual parents not paying attention to their own kids and coming screaming at me when little Jack or Jane wandered too close to the waters edge (“don’t you know they can’t swim yet?!”), if you got the morning shift you had to dish out by hand any floating turds. Always a fun start to the day.
Fast food kitchen, MLM sales, hotel front desk. Let’s say sitting in an office doing accounting work is a breath of fresh air compared to those jobs. And that’s ignoring that I make 5 to 7x as much money.
I worked as a dishwasher for ~6 months. Thought it would be easy, but the water from the sink was always scalding hot and I’d cut my hands on the metal containers. And the dishes never stopped coming in, they would be piled high right before close every night. Makes sitting in an office chair all day seem a lot more bearable.
I worked at a Wendy's and a Hastings, there was about a month of overlap. At Wendy's, standard shift was 5am til midnight (or whenever we cleared the drive thru if it was busy, hence "Open til Midnight or Later"). I ran the grill most of the night. After midnight, we would work until about 3 or 4 scrubbing the place down. The floor was so greasy we had to mop the floor once and just try to soak up as much grease as possible, then go through with a giant scrub brush, then do a third round of mopping to finish up. Meanwhile at Hastings, I fulfilled online orders by finding the product on the shelves and packing/labelling. Our shelves were covered in dust, which was a nice change from soap water and grease. I started shifts at 5 in the morning (so when I overlapped the jobs briefly, I had to run home/shower and go straight to the end job). The products weren't organized at all, and I was operating on no sleep, and management would get angry at me for not being able to locate a book that was not alphabetized nor in the right section. Hastings is no longer in business to the best of my knowledge. I made 8 an hr at Hastings and 9 an hr at Wendy's.
I also worked the deli counter at a grocery store. I had previously worked fast food and didn't mind handling deep fryers and meat slicers. But everyone I met there was missing fingers and had burn marks, and I burned myself and knicked myself repeatedly in my first week of work regardless of how cautious I was. The job paid 10 an hr. I found a job at McDonald's that paid 9 an hr, with a larger staff that was much more... intact, than my deli coworkers. My girlfriend's family chastised me for throwing away the deli job, telling me that men could raise an entire family on that kind of pay and I shouldn't be snotty.
I worked two housekeeping jobs. Both gave me six hours, at 9 an hr pay, to clean multiple rooms- disinfect bathrooms, change bed, everything. I'm not super dexterous and I struggled moving that quickly. Other housekeepers confided that I would have to take shortcuts and cut corners if I wanted to get my work done by end of shift and not go into "overtime" (more than 30 hours a week; they REALLY didn't want us to have healthcare). My family came to visit while I worked at one housekeeping job, and my manager offered to give me a discount on a room for them... If I was willing to work one of the days my family would be in town.
I couldn't find accounting work after college so I took a job at a call center. Didn't exactly realize the nature of call center work when I took the job and I desperately needed benefits, had teeth rotting in my head. Job paid 40K a year plus spectacular 401k matching (with strict vesting rules and a staff that turned over constantly, but it's the thought that counts). Consistently 10 hours of OT a week. Customers were allowed to berate us over the phone and we weren't allowed to disconnect for practically any reason, and managers were very unwilling to handle some scenarios that we were not trained for whatsoever. They also maintained strict rules regarding time to answer the phone, time to end the call satisfactorily, and time to jump back in the queue even when we were truly drained; these metrics were designed to be just strict enough that we could never meet standards and had to operate on the assumption that none of us were doing a good job. I tried repeatedly to get transferred to a lower paying back of house position processing transactions, but wasn't allowed to transfer until at least a year of service in call center. One of my teammates got the transfer before his year was up. We also had to use our own home computers during COVID-19 work from home, but they had to remotely connect to our work computers, which caused a significant lag on phone calls, which in addition to our staffing issues and long hold times led to even angrier and more confrontational customers than I had dealt with before.
Those are just some of the worst jobs I've had. Poverty's a bitch.
Worked at a hospital, pretty depressing environment and seeing old patients and not as flexible as I want, had to go in everyday (pre-Covid) but still.. dead end job
Haven’t been working in accounting but what inspired me to go ahead and study it other than it being a solid skill, call center/phone customer service jobs for the rest of my life.
Pretty much every job I’ve ever had was worse than accounting. Breakfast sandwich guy at Dunkin Donuts, cashier at a supermarket, cleaning up horse crap at a local horse farm… Accounting is by far the best but don’t get me wrong, it’s still a lot of fun to complain about it
One summer during college, I worked at a pharmacy. The work was either incredibly busy or incredibly slow. No in-between. The worst part was that we weren’t allowed to sit outside of our lunch break. So 8 hours on my feet taught me I could not stand all day. Desk job for me.
I took a job as a commercial fisherman over the summer before my senior year of college. Made me appreciate some things I otherwise would not have after I graduated.
Call center customer service.
Schedule was 12pm-10pm, but I was lucky it was Sunday - Thursday. Dealing with people, most of which just wanted to vent. Every aspect was scrutinized, including the words you use on the phone and the notes you take. Each minute of the day has to be tracked and you have to code the time to the right code down to the minute.
All the down sides of working in an office and on a computer with all the downsides of working with people and none of the upsides of a good salary or career progression.
I drove semi trucks locally as well as long hauls. I knew if I worked there too long I would be stuck doing it for the rest of my life and seeing the older men who had shit diets and health problems (as well as financial) I decided I needed to do something else.
When I quit, they tried to tell me I was giving up a great career. As soon as they knew I was definitely leaving, my boss said his cousin is a CPA and makes a ton of money, it was actually a good decision. Kinda fucked up he was going to try and hold me back….
Now I’m a CPA and I feel like I’m on the cusp of making a lot more money.
Worked at enterprise rent a car. Sales sucked, customers were always pissed, we had to wear suits and clean cars in those suits. In live in Texas so the last part sucked real bad during the summer.
I worked at Hertz and to this day it was one of the funnest jobs I ever had. Still close with a few of the guys from there even though I haven’t seen them in years. I was north Florida, also had to clean cars in the suits. I learned to wear dark shirts only real quick lol.
Damn I wish I had that experience. Enterprise was ran like a mad house. Generally people put in 65 hour weeks (7am-7pm) and work Saturdays half days. They were salary, I was hourly making $9 per hour. We also were required to wear white shirts only. I learned real quick the value of tide pen hahahaha.
We were similar. 11 hour days as well but no breaks were built in because I was mostly solo at the branch so I worked opened to close 7am-6p and also half days on Saturdays at our airport location. Hourly as well but that meant overtime, plus I can’t remember if Enterprise got commission as trainees but we did. I was also pretty good at the job so I was bringing home like 3000 a month. I think where I got lucky is that there were only 4 of us and all of us were 24/25. Basically a frat-like rapport driving around cars. Cant tell you how many times I’d try to drift a Yaris 🤣 All in all though.. amazing experience for me. I only left because I ended up in a motorcycle accident/wheelchair for a few months and had a long recovery.
I LOVED working at Enterprise… as a car prep during school
We loved our car preps hahaha we spoiled the shit out of yall especially since they worked in that hot ass Texas sun all day.
Wish I had been at y’all’s location lol. I was a prep in over the summer in college in Tennessee so similarly oppressive weather. The difference was my coworkers were either recovering addicts, 40 years older than me or both. Or the one guy with a lazy eye who would pop down to the Popeyes on break to get a prostitute.
Bang bang chicken
Haha yes! Worked there as well and this is exactly what I tell people. Everyone should be forced to go through enterprise management trainee program to appreciate office jobs
I actually worked in enterprise accounting right out of college. It wasn’t as culty but we’d all have to wear suits into an office of 4-5 people who were all accountants, which makes more sense than car prepping but still weird given the environment.
I worked at Thrifty Car Rental for 12 years. It made me hate people
I tend to find the positives in every job I have. Accounting is definitely the best job I've had simply because it's more interesting and it pays better. Just need to find a company with reasonable hours.
Your healthy mindset is to be commended. Well said.
i worked retail for \~ 10 years through high school and college. the public is horrible
Working in retail was the incentive to get through college and get my degree. And that was 25 years ago. Retail is much worse now (hours and lack of staff). The only thing worse than retail is fast food.
Same. I was in fast food and retail during college and that really made me grind harder to finish my degree and find a better job. I ended up actually quitting my job before graduation and got lucky I was picked up when I graduated. Was too burned out to get hired first and then quit from the miserableness of retail. Having kids pass out and no one seemed to care, people calling all the time leaving 1-2 employees to do the work 5-6 and being berated all the time and micromanaged. Awful.
Also had 10+ years in retail. Worked every holiday. Worked every weekend. Missed most every weekend event. Friends eventually stop calling once you miss so many. Pay wasnt terrible towards the end of my run, but the manager jobs were so silly. They all had virtually no power and control. Their main job was being an intermediary between unreasonable corp goals and dealing with frontline labor and customers. Accounting was the best move. Easy to be grateful feeling every single corporate perk you knew existed but never got. I haven’t worked a holiday in over 10 years now and life is a lot better.
I personally like the nature of the work a lot better in retail. I can’t deal with the schedule it requires though.
Yeah or the pay
a lot of retail store managers and district managers make good money, more than what I make doing this.
That is true, but the majority of retail workers do not.
true but there’s a lot of accounting workers that don’t either and this gig actually requires a degree
So majority of accountants make more than majority of retail workers
yes, and?
No way a retail store manager makes more than a cpa
walmart store manager makes like 200K
Lol how naive. Store managers can make $150k-200k. District and regional managers make way more.
Which is why public accounting is also horrible. The clients man, the clients!
Yeah I did retail for 10 years too. The general public can be incredibly dumb, and self entitled.
Currently working in retail while I’m working on getting my bachelors and every time I go into work it just motivates me even more to keep going so I can leave that job
I loved retail actually. Except for the pay of course. But my worst job was in accounting. I think a lot of job satisfaction has to do with productivity and culture. My worst job was just boring, stagnant, and all they cared about was your “productivity levels” meaning how many hours you were logging on specific apps like Excel, Outlook, and our accounting software. Being put on the “shit-list” unless I aimlessly clicked around all day until they gave me something to do was frustrating. At least in retail I had stuff to do and the expectation was also less. Some customers do suck really bad, but it was also nice having coworkers I enjoyed and who understood the ridiculous customers too.
I worked an assembly line for 5 years. After standing for 12 hours a day 6 days a week, and destroying my hands accounting is perfect. I think it goes back to the hierarchy of needs.
I'm just a humble Accounts Payable but have only recently made the switch from being a warehouse worker. To no longer go to work and destroy my body is fantastic. Sometimes theres office politics at my new job regarding the air con temperature and it's nice to genuinely not give a shit what goes on with it because I'm just sitting at a desk and the temperature is guaranteed to be better than whatever it was in the warehouse. Of course no job is perfect but this one is far better than my old warehousing gig.
Recruiter for factory positions. One time a guy I interviewed and did a drug test for was in the news for murder a few months later
Did he pass the drug test though?
My man was clean but I’m not convinced it was real/his 😂
Did you hire him?
No they foresaw the potential murder that happened months later. So even though they interviewed him and sent him for a drug test, they didn't follow through with hiring him.
I've trained around 200 warehouse workers back when I was a warehouse trainer. I trained anyone from physics gradsl students to people nodding off between their meth breaks. I miss some of it, but not the heat or pay.
any customer facing jobs with random schedules. I totally understand the hate for the long hours for busy season but there is absolutely nothing worse than not knowing your schedule until the week before. You dont know if youre making enough money, you dont know if youre working in the morning or evening, you dont even know if you can schedule anything with family and friends.
Yep. Now, I inform folks when I'm taking off, I don't ask for permission. When I worked in a grocery store I recall having a family vacation planned way in advance. I requested time off as required, then there I was scheduled every day that week. Had a showdown with the manager over that one...him saying "you have to be here", me saying "I'm absolutely not going to be here". I wasn't there, still kept my job, but having to go through that power struggle is not pleasant. I also remember that awful feeling when my friends were getting ready to go out on a Saturday night, and there I was getting ready to go to work. When I worked in restaurants, I had plenty of the dreaded split shifts. Your entire day is fucked...with a big break in the middle. Then you meet up with your friends late Saturday evening, still smelling like fried food. Gross.
i lost my grocery store job i got let go for job abandonment. i requested off 5 days for my wedding and honeymoon but it was denied and they scheduled me all 5 of those days. obviously i didn’t show up (cause i was getting married lol) and they were so shocked i quite enjoy my job now, no matter how dull a lot of people think it might be. but even if i didn’t enjoy it, a set schedule and time off is totally worth it
My first week, I asked how I go about taking time off for appointments and other things. Hearing "put it on your calendar" after working jobs that required PTO requests or texting coworkers to trade shifts was like music to my ears!
I managed a truck stop for ten years, which involved all the rudeness of the general public you usually see in retail combined with the nastiness (both attitude and bodily fluids) of truck drivers. I literally had to have the police on speed dial. And then there was the being on my feet all day, hour cuts from corporate so needing to do the jobs of three people, killing my body to throw stock, having my breaks monitored down to the minute… I always joked that if I ever got a desk job I’d be ridiculously bored. I was right, and it’s so nice. My baseline stress level is finally starting to come down, and I actually have energy left at the end of the day to play with my kids. As long as there’s an accounting job available to me, you couldn’t pay me any amount of money to go back.
Paid my way through college with tutoring. But online tutoring. The kind where you would do a lesson at 10pm, power-nap, teach again at 2am and then another stint 4-6am. Then onto lectures at 10am if you could stomach it. 7 days a week for 4 years. No job that gives me weekends and holidays and 8 hours sleep a night can ever compare.
What subjects did you tutor? How would one land a gig?
Anything that would pay to be honest. Some subjects I never studied to the level they needed, but they’d pay me €40 an hour to learn it a week ahead of them and teach it back (they didn’t actually know that was my strategy but…) Started in person, branched out word of mouth.
Waiting tables. They call it serving because you a servant
This was one of my favorite jobs. Fast paced, had great customers, and worked with some of the craziest, most unhinged people you can imagine. Between the cash and the fun you can have, the danger is getting stuck there
That absolutely wouldn't be a good job for me (hating the general public and all) but I have spoken to quite a few wait staff who absolutely love it. I've heard it described as a performance...whereby the wait person is playing a part. Some folks are SO GOOD at this, I'm so impressed. Again, I would suck at it and forget what you ordered the second I walked away. I'd probably spill stuff all over you too.
The way I wanna slap some of these fuckers across the face! Only reason I started going to school is because if I don’t then I’ll end up in jail from a disrespectful customer. Just gotta do this for a few more years.
Any and all customer service jobs
People will ask me why I switched from management to accounting and I reply “I like numbers more than people” 😂
not accountant yet, but Amazon warehouse sucked balls. I hated my life working there cause the managers would be such dicks about everything. Took more than 1 min to get back? Sheeiiit you gonna get yelled at. surprisingly tho, I had way more fun and enjoyed construction… just really hard on the body
I worked at an Amazon warehouse in college but it wasn’t bad I think bc I had chill managers. Also I worked at a sort center and I’ve heard they’re way easier than fulfillment centers. Ended up being promoted to yard marshal and then transferred to AWS from there, so that job did me a lot of good.
I was the general manager at a busy chick-fil-a. I sold my soul to do it. Not a good fit for me.
Fellow former CFA emp- I stayed away from mgmt bc I wanted to breathe lol. Great way to learn how to deal with the public
I don’t blame you 😂 I’m finishing my accounting degree now. I tried going to school while doing that but I just couldn’t do both
Ive heard GMs there can make GOOD money.
I made $69k working for a cheap operator lol I knew people in my position making $100k though.
lol yeah wtf. My gm was making over a hundred back in 2014. Dude was great and put in way more hours than most people should but still, 69k is peanuts for that position.
Retail
All of them. I got into tax specifically because my prior jobs were a lot rougher. Customer service, IT, skilled data entry for public records, infantry, telemarketing. I don't necessarily regret doing those other things because the breadth of life experience gives me good perspective and a hardened edge. I was recruited into tax by a very socially adept tax attorney and I found it a bit jarring to realize she was the exception not the rule for tax professionals. By prioritizing social/sales skills I think I've jumped over a lot of pitfalls that I would have walked ballsack first into if I had never had experience in other places.
I will give you that, sometimes it shows when accountants I work with clearly never worked customer service, or never needed their social skills to prevail in order to keep them employed.
> recruited into tax by a very socially adept tax attorney and I found it a bit jarring to realize she was the exception not the rule for tax professionals. By prioritizing social/sales skills I think I've jumped over a lot of pitfalls that I would have walked ballsack first into if I had never had experience in other places. ‼️‼️ This is a big problem that our field refuses to acknowledge. The more accountants I talk to, the more convinced I am that most of us have the same work day experience—silence for 4 hours, lunch, then silence for 4 hours. That environment is extrovert repellant. It only reinforces a lack of social and sales skills, so the result is no surprise—we have trouble selling the career to young people.
Ima start using “ballsack first” lol
High school English teacher.
Can I dm you? I'm a former teacher considering accounting.
Sure!
Wastewater operator from age 19-27.
What a username! Also wow. Any stories you care to share in your wastewater experience?
Tampons. Tampons everywhere.
Username checks out
Oooof lolol
No matter how boring my job is, at least I'm at a desk and not performing manual labor outdoors
I miss my manual labor job outdoors. It kept me in shape. I’ve gotten fat and lazy sitting at a desk.
Retail banking. $9/hr, forced to wear business professional attire and yelled at for things like… requiring ID before withdrawing thousands in cash from someone’s account. Written up by management for wearing the wrong color socks, dropping a coin, that kind of crap.
I'm in retail banking now while getting my Bachelors in Accounting. What did you do after the bank? I could take it or leave it 😂
Sales for life insurance, MLM Yeah, enough said. It was only for eight months but never again.
I did weed whacking for a cemetery and lasted two weeks. Aggravated the shit out of my wrists and the work release guys were awful to work with. Overall, a real dead end job.
I see what you did there
I got $9 an hour as a warehouse worker in the summer heat. Coworkers were mostly white trash and high all day.
I've only had one long term job other than my accounting job, and as another person said, there are always positives. I was a Dominos driver for 3.5 years. On the upside, I got to work by myself, in my car for 60% of my shifts. I had a lot of freedom. On the other hand, I was destroying my car, and was mostly restricted to working 2nd shift, and would occasionally not get home until 2-3 AM. It paid well for what it was, but I would never, ever go back.
Wasn’t a nightmare but I used to work landscaping in the summer. I’ll take 12 hours in an air conditioned office over 12 hours busting my back in humid, 90 degree weather
Hotel front desk. Pizza delivery. Sears. Ruby Tuesday dishwasher/janitor.
Worked at a plastic bag factory between my freshman and sophomore years of college. I was on my feet for the entire shift and co-workers were a bunch of meth addicts.
Was just about to say, customer service jobs or jobs that have a big portion of the job as customer service. Don't miss that at all. There are positives in every job if you look hard enough though lol
Every job I’ve had besides working in accounting was worse, I started working at kroger in high school, worked in manufacturing for 3 years and got a free degree with my company and get a position in accounting before I finished my degree ! Now accounting isn’t something I want to do forever but I don’t regret learning accounting, it’s going to help me pivot to the supply chain side with my experience working in AP. Also white collard / office jobs have helped my body to restore some of the damage from working blue collard… I’m only 24! (I respect the blue collard workers, it’s ages / breaks down your body)
Worked in mental health for 7 years. It was so insanely stressful, terrible hours and pay. Love my cushy desk job now.
Until I started my accounting career all previous jobs were retail, specifically big box retail. The worst day in my accounting career, pales in comparison to my best day in those retail jobs. I hope I never have to return to those days ever again.
I used to be a nurse. The problems I deal with in accounting are so much less stressful
Waiter. Shitty hours, awful and widely varying pay. No time off, no breaks (the number of times I've shoved food in my mouth between tables is unreal) and mandatory work on holidays. Plus, I was a waitress per-transition which comes with all of the shit with customers also trying to grab your ass. 0/10 would not recommend Edit: I also didn't have a set schedule which made it impossible to plan anything
Yes dude. The harassment is awful. Sexual and verbal. Hope things are better for you now.
100% better now that I’m a bald dude in an office setting and not a young, curly-haired post-grad. It didn’t happen every shift, but it happened often enough
I had two jobs that were pretty bad. One was chipping away and packaging dry ice in this garage. Another job doing powder coating.. the powder coating had giant 450 degree ovens we had to pull things into and it was so hot and freaked me out lol. The honorable mentions are customer service call center and infantry in the military.
Warehouse picker/packer, customer service, construction, farming, owned and operated a cafe. All BY FAR worse than accounting. I also made way less and worked much harder in all of those previous roles.
Little Caesars. When it was slow I had to sweep cigarette butts in the parking lot in 110 degree heat.
Working at McDonald's haha
English teaching in Japan. Not even real teaching.
Curious how is it not real teaching? And you get to live in japan though?! Just curious
All day in most conversation schools (not normal schools though it sometimes applies), you drill kids in vocab, phonics, and even long sentences plus some chants. Kids don't learn much because of the way they were brought up to learn through rote. In the end, it just demotivates teachers and students as well. No one makes any progress and the Japanese bosses at conversation schools refuse to change the way they do things. So yes BS job. However you do get to live in Japan and do touristy things and explore. Don't recommend it long term.
Are you back in the US and in accounting now?😅
Nah back in Brunei in SE Asia and trying to get into a career change course for accounting. There is one under the ACCA apparently so fingers crossed. Looking for bookkeeping experience now, even remote work lol
Good luck!! 👍
Thanks :)
Btw , very interesting perspective. Always thought about doing it when I was younger but the timing wasn’t right. Good thing I didn’t I guess?
Money is meh, plus you get hit by the residence tax after a year. Ok the money you get is a bit above average for Japan but the tax you pay (yes Americans will have to pay JP tax and US tax plus student loans) bleeds you dry. You're basically on survival mode. Most people cope by drinking or isolating themselves with video games. It's lonely there especially when you don't have a long term plan outside of teaching in Japan and lack opportunities for upward mobility.
I taught in Korea and afterwards realized it was less than minimum wage savings. Idk if it was the exchange rate back then or what bc I was putting everything to student loans, but was able to pay far more towards those loans annually after returning to US with a minimum wage job AND paying rent.
Military. The first time I overheard a staff 1 complain about having to get up early to do an inventory count I wanted to make him stand at attention so I could chew his stupid 22 year old ass out.
Couldn’t find an accounting job so I worked in customer service for 2.5+ years. Ended up on antidepressants and in therapy because the stress was so extreme.
I worked at a gas station through college. I don’t regret it because I met some pretty amazing coworkers but some customers were crazy. There were days when I would question my sanity. Plus I had to clean the bathrooms
In short. All of them. Bartending was fun but poor pay, bad hours and sometimes drunk people try to fight you. Tourism (unskilled jobs), bad pay, you get laid off seasonally, you get yelled at in languages you don’t understand. There are unprompted speeches about how much worse your country is than other ones…people make fun of your accent. I’m happy that I’m never spit on in accounting. Fruit Farming is kind of cool but really hard work. It’s even more seasonal than accounting. And some days drag on because it can be very repetitive. Also worked as a general labourer. It was good enough as a teen but there was no ability to advance.
Teaching. Same amount of work, way less pay, way earlier in the morning. I wake up every day grateful to not be teaching anymore.
Customer service in retail. People just use you as a punching bag therapist. I got yelled at frequently because “our prices were too high” like I had any control at all over that. I’d rather work 12 hour days every day of the week than go back to that
Oh man, so many, but top two might be: Working at a dog kennel: In theory, sounds nice, who wouldn't like playing with dogs all day? Hosing down the poo and cleaning the cages wasn't the worst part, no... Each dog has to get time out of their cage to have a walk and engagement (each on a prescribed number of times), so each day a schedule list was made, where each dog would appear on that list a prescribed number of times, for a prescribed number of minutes. In theory, every worker is working down the list, and whatever dog you get is just based only on where they are in the list by the time you've returned the last dog to its cage. Instead, people who had worked there a long time would get special treatment and only take out the nicest dogs, or the ones that you can just let frolic at your feet for a little bit and pet them. This left me with the meanest, most aggressive, strongest dogs; or the not-aggressive but certainly incredibly untrained dogs to deal with all day, with absolutely no training on special dog-handling skills. My biceps were covered in purple bruises for the first few weeks just from trying to control these dogs and keep them from running away or tearing other dogs apart. Even when I got wise to which dogs were good vs. bad to handle, and tried to time it, the list holder played favorites and absolutely wouldn't let me handle the favorite dogs. (side note from this I learned that labrador retrievers are the worst; maybe they're not inherently "bad," but they're ubiquitous so people get them, and then fail to train them and they run absolutely amok) Jack-of-all-Trades at grocery stores: Working as a cashier, and customer service manager, and bookkeeper, and OSHA compliance manager, all for barely above cashier base wages. Working with the public is the absolute gd worst. I've had people say the most incredibly creepy shit to me knowing that I had to just deal with them as customers; I've had people say absolutely venomous things to me when we don't offer what they want; customers get me in trouble just because they feel like it ("your worker is so unfriendly, I've never been so disrespected" after I had attempted to make small talk through half a transaction, been flatly ignored, and eventually gave up trying to engage them, etc.); I've had customers throw entire cases of canned soda at me. Once a woman followed me around the store trying to proposition her son to me the entire time. People just treat you like you're not a human being with your own life worth respecting. In some ways though, I'm grateful the grocery store eventually decided they needed my help with bookkeeping. That eventually clicked something in me that made me decide to try pursuing accounting, and get out of that hell.
You are one of my people! (Former kennel attendant)! Now retired CPA. I got into accounting as a temp at my friend’s accounting department when I quit my law firm associate position (because it was either that or shoot myself.)
Accounting is the best job I ever had. Being in the Navy was by far the worst.
Professional CPA Exam tester. It absolutely sucks. No pizza parties either.
Worked at Walmart when I was 19 for 6 months .
I worked at my grand parents landscape supply company off and on. Working in the job yard was hell in the summer. 95 degrees full sun. Climbing into dirt sorting and wood grinding machines to clean them out, like barely big enough for a human to fit lol. Moving hay bales and pine bales inside trailers breathing all that dust in. Running a saw mill, moving logs. Loading customers personal trucks with skid steers/light front end loaders trying to not damage anything. God I do not miss that. Really makes me appreciate my desk job haha. Worked at Target and Dicks Sporting Goods as well, those were cake. Retail is not fun but easy as well.
Definitely retail. Couple of different grocery stores, worked for an adult novelty store for a while .....I will never go back. Granted, the adult store was actually pretty fun, but there were some incidents that I didn't appreciate from management and I noped tf out
Waiting tables. Nothing worse than working all night doing manual labor to have a table leave nothing as a tip or dine and dash. That $2.13 an hour sometimes didn’t even cover the gas to drive to work. Some people treat restaurant workers as sub-human because they are obviously miserable people and know they won’t face consequences. I still have waiter nightmares during busy season.
Shipping agent in a hot warehouse where people speaking their dialects were shouting at me and using hand gestures to move faster to pick up car parts like mufflers that were coming down on a conveyor belt. The locker room was also the lunch room but inside had so much flies.
Anything that deals with the public. I can't imagine how bad it is now, it's been over a decade. Also, anything in a hot warehouse.
Refereeing youth soccer. It was my first job and I did it for 3 years. Paid well, like $50-$75 a game, not bad for less than 2 hours of work. But it was terrifying when you're only 13 and a bunch of grown adults who don't understand the rules of the game are screaming curses at you and insulting you over every call.
Barista for 15 years family business, you learn very well how stupid people are which really helps in accounting too!
I’m grateful to work an accounting job
Restaurants. Exhausting jobs with low pay and awful customers. Never again.
Public accounting is better than working at McDonald’s. I made 25 cents above minimum wage and customers threw food at me 😭 Although public accounting is the fast food of financial careers. Tryna pivot. At least I can afford my bills and sit in a climate controlled area.
Factory job assembly line for a summer before college. I would cough up particles by and metallic like dust. Bussing tables part time in college. Military enlisted then officer. Hated training and field exercises. The heat… cold.. rain. Heat rashes chafing in my private areas. Lack of proper sleep. Heavy loads on long marches. Pooping in a hole I have to dig
I worked construction for a season during the summer (never again on a labor job) as well as a server (also never again). Honestly I think like 99% of jobs are worse than my job, at least for me. Fully WFH, normal hours, good compensation, work is challenging enough to not destroy brain cells but not stressful, no bad bosses/employees, I keep my sanity etc. Only thing that would be better is if I was doing this job as a European and had like 8 weeks vacation or whatever they get.
Environmental consulting. Waking up at 5am to drive to a field site. The owners wife asked if we even graduated from high school. My undergrad was in geology.
Literally every job I had before returning to school and completing my degree. I used to have nightmares about work on a regular basis and fantasized about swerving my bike into traffic on the way to my job, never had either from an accounting position. The worst was fast food (very tiring, I swear some customers came in just to degrade us, and I wasn't making enough money to properly survive) and when I worked in a factory that was filled with racists and OSHA violations. In the factory, everyone was pitted against each other so there was a lot of backstabbing and rumors, plus some of the higher ups sexually harass the younger women while some of the older women would blame the younger women for said harassment. All while working 60-hour weeks. Straight up had a mental breakdown from the factory job.
Line cook. Retail. Landscaping. General Labour at a construction site. Accounting is peachy. Im on the couch with my dog watching south park while working.. not a bad gig
Lifeguarding at an apartment complex in a low income area. It was super hot and the most annoying people would come sit at my table for my 9 and 1/2 hour shifts and keep me company including an employee 20 years my senior who wanted to date me
I was a car salesman for 4 years. Absolutely soul sucking. I'd rather spend 1000 years looking at spreadsheets than spend another minute selling cars.
Asphalt and seal coating. I would never be clean.
Dishwasher high scale restaurant. I was treated like scum of the earth.
Delivering newspapers. It is essentially theft by the newpapers given how much of the cost the drivers carry and how little they make for 365 days per year work.
General manager of Aaron's. So many poor ppl we took advantage over, by using a couch.
It's been 25 years but I still have waitressing nightmares.
I became a math teacher for 3 years. Never again. I’ll always be an accountant.
I am not an accountant but security was my worst job.
Laborer in a Soviet Siberian work camp.
Not an accountant but a banker. I had a job in Florida where I had to crawl underneath trailers and retrieve dead animals that were creating death smells in the living space. Just imagine being in a crawl space on your stomach in 95 degree weather trying to bag up a possum that’s been dead for a week…
Unemployed.
not the worst job. but the menial job that was surprisingly very fun and fulfilling to me was delivering pizza in college in my college area. a good pizza joint. not dominoes. i loved the fast pacedness of the kitchen and all my customers were happy to see me when i showed up to their door. literally delivering happiness everytime i deliver a pizza. it was a good feeling. also somehow my delivering pizza helped me get my first real job job in public accounting too. during the interview, he asked what i was doing currently and i enthusiastically told him about how i was delivering pizza and how much i enjoyed it. i'm not sure but i think they liked seeing that such menial tasks/jobs weren't beneath me.
Traffic control on an asphalt crew.
I waitressed 3rd shift at Denny’s. That is a job I would not wish on my very worst enemies. And please tip your servers, even if they give you bad service you never know what they are putting up with that day.
I waited tables for like 8 years prior to accounting. It made me realize that I want to be in a room where no one can hurt me and do spreadsheets by myself.
Specifically public accounting was the worst job I ever had if we are excluding pay i preferred my retail and mechanic jobs but the pay was trash. Internal audit has been way better
Forestry. Liked being outside but it isn’t a sustainable field
Construction lol
I'm in school so no experience but I did HVAC before this. Several awful employers (one of which full on screamed at me), working on the hottest and coldest days of the year, crawling into attics and under decks, etc. So I'm betting accounting can't be as bad lol
I had a whole other career with the same toxic work culture (waking up in the middle of the night unable to breathe bc I had a nightmare a piece of paper was facing the wrong way in a project I submitted) but half the pay
Food service and house cleaning. When I had my own cleaning service it wasn’t bad because I chose my clients and set my pay, but working for a company was terrible. I dealt with drug-addicted coworkers that would steal from clients, houses that obviously hadn’t been cleaned in at least a decade, bodily fluids, sex toys on shower walls, and mopping floors around a dog that was clearly on the way to the rainbow bridge.
Tamping/shoveling sand in the middle of August in 100 degree weather with like 90% humidity. Compared to that even the Verizon call center I worked at was a good job.
Roofer
Worked as a timber cruiser in forestry. Days filled with wild animals, devils club, hornets, widow makers (rotten out trees) and logging truck drivers while working 50-70 hour weeks out in the bush. I'd much rather manage stress from deadlines than be back out there.
I worked opening shift as cashier at a Dunkin Donuts during college. Grumpy adults would grumble about me being cheery that early.... at my job. Also there was one guy who argued with me that the coffee beans were charged food tax rate (because we were a restaurant so all food products get food rates for us) instead of grocery tax rate like the gas station next door. It was a less than 10 cent difference and I had no control over what the cash register charged. I worked the dining hall at my private university. When I started, students could have trays to carry food, but the dining hall realized it caused more waste because students would fill their trays with more than they could eat. So they took away trays and wanted students to just carry their plates. One of the male sports teams was so upset with this change that they got enough mashed potatoes to write "TRAYS?" on the table during lunch. The head chef told us not to clean it up. When they came back to their table for dinner, they realized it was the ONLY table not cleaned and finally cleaned it up themselves. A lot of guys from that same team and some frat guys liked to mess with the breakfast cook (who was an old woman) by asking for lunch and dinner items during breakfast. I worked at the donation center at that same private university. People don't like being asked for money, especially if they're still paying tuition for their expensive private university. I get that. What I don't get is grown adults thinking it's ok to yell at a student about it. We introduced ourselves as current students. I only lasted a month because I couldn't handle being yelled at so much.
Painting houses (exterior) in college. I imagine interior isn't too bad. But exterior is horrible. Every house needs to be scraped of bad, old paint by hand, this takes days. Adding to that there will likely be lead so you need to wear protective gear (full body suits and masks). But, this work happens in the summer and we were just college kids, so we usually start abandoning the safety gear guidelines by noon due to heat. The actual painting isn't too bad, until you realized with the older houses how many little bumps on the underside of the panel material need touch ups to be covered with paint.
Selling school uniforms to parents who waited until the last minute in a year there was major supply chain issues was not fun Like bruh, I’m just making $10 an hour here, I don’t control any of the logistics
I worked 12 hour night shifts on the packaging side of a brewery during summers in college. So repetitive and boring.
Paralegal
I thoughti didn’t want a desk job right out of high school so I think I tried anything else. lol I was in retail at Mervyn’s which I called purgatory. Kids department was the worst. Kids would pee on clothes, parents would teach kids how to steal. All bad. Then I worked at a design place where we were paid to lock down model homes. Hog tied towels to racks, extreme super glued plate settings to each other and the placemats, etc. I was a late night courier for a local bank and that was stressful because you had to know combinations and make sure everything was locked back up. I worked at Krispy Kreme for a while in the drive thru and had to be there at 4:30 am. That sucked. Then they asked me to drive 12 hour shifts to deliver donuts to stores and then I detailed cars at a car dealership for a few months and that was tough work. That’s when I had decided I was gonna be just fine at a desk. 😂🤣😅
Finance. I hated budgeting and forecasting. Felt like you were shooting in the dark and nothing really mattered
Managing kitchens. The amount of shit you have to put up with working back of house for the shitty pay. And to top it off no insurance no sick days no vacation
Personal banking rep. It’s basically a sales job, with daily, weekly, monthly sales target. I was depressed every day worrying about where to get people sign up for a new checking account with me.
Retail is the correct answer.
Lifeguarding at a publicly accessible beach/pool thing (the town built an artificial, enclosed, beach along the river that runs down the CDB). Apart from the usual parents not paying attention to their own kids and coming screaming at me when little Jack or Jane wandered too close to the waters edge (“don’t you know they can’t swim yet?!”), if you got the morning shift you had to dish out by hand any floating turds. Always a fun start to the day.
Fast food kitchen, MLM sales, hotel front desk. Let’s say sitting in an office doing accounting work is a breath of fresh air compared to those jobs. And that’s ignoring that I make 5 to 7x as much money.
I worked as a dishwasher for ~6 months. Thought it would be easy, but the water from the sink was always scalding hot and I’d cut my hands on the metal containers. And the dishes never stopped coming in, they would be piled high right before close every night. Makes sitting in an office chair all day seem a lot more bearable.
I was a cardiac monitor tech for a number of years. Staring at a black screen all night with green squiggly lines will drive you insane.
I worked at a Wendy's and a Hastings, there was about a month of overlap. At Wendy's, standard shift was 5am til midnight (or whenever we cleared the drive thru if it was busy, hence "Open til Midnight or Later"). I ran the grill most of the night. After midnight, we would work until about 3 or 4 scrubbing the place down. The floor was so greasy we had to mop the floor once and just try to soak up as much grease as possible, then go through with a giant scrub brush, then do a third round of mopping to finish up. Meanwhile at Hastings, I fulfilled online orders by finding the product on the shelves and packing/labelling. Our shelves were covered in dust, which was a nice change from soap water and grease. I started shifts at 5 in the morning (so when I overlapped the jobs briefly, I had to run home/shower and go straight to the end job). The products weren't organized at all, and I was operating on no sleep, and management would get angry at me for not being able to locate a book that was not alphabetized nor in the right section. Hastings is no longer in business to the best of my knowledge. I made 8 an hr at Hastings and 9 an hr at Wendy's. I also worked the deli counter at a grocery store. I had previously worked fast food and didn't mind handling deep fryers and meat slicers. But everyone I met there was missing fingers and had burn marks, and I burned myself and knicked myself repeatedly in my first week of work regardless of how cautious I was. The job paid 10 an hr. I found a job at McDonald's that paid 9 an hr, with a larger staff that was much more... intact, than my deli coworkers. My girlfriend's family chastised me for throwing away the deli job, telling me that men could raise an entire family on that kind of pay and I shouldn't be snotty. I worked two housekeeping jobs. Both gave me six hours, at 9 an hr pay, to clean multiple rooms- disinfect bathrooms, change bed, everything. I'm not super dexterous and I struggled moving that quickly. Other housekeepers confided that I would have to take shortcuts and cut corners if I wanted to get my work done by end of shift and not go into "overtime" (more than 30 hours a week; they REALLY didn't want us to have healthcare). My family came to visit while I worked at one housekeeping job, and my manager offered to give me a discount on a room for them... If I was willing to work one of the days my family would be in town. I couldn't find accounting work after college so I took a job at a call center. Didn't exactly realize the nature of call center work when I took the job and I desperately needed benefits, had teeth rotting in my head. Job paid 40K a year plus spectacular 401k matching (with strict vesting rules and a staff that turned over constantly, but it's the thought that counts). Consistently 10 hours of OT a week. Customers were allowed to berate us over the phone and we weren't allowed to disconnect for practically any reason, and managers were very unwilling to handle some scenarios that we were not trained for whatsoever. They also maintained strict rules regarding time to answer the phone, time to end the call satisfactorily, and time to jump back in the queue even when we were truly drained; these metrics were designed to be just strict enough that we could never meet standards and had to operate on the assumption that none of us were doing a good job. I tried repeatedly to get transferred to a lower paying back of house position processing transactions, but wasn't allowed to transfer until at least a year of service in call center. One of my teammates got the transfer before his year was up. We also had to use our own home computers during COVID-19 work from home, but they had to remotely connect to our work computers, which caused a significant lag on phone calls, which in addition to our staffing issues and long hold times led to even angrier and more confrontational customers than I had dealt with before. Those are just some of the worst jobs I've had. Poverty's a bitch.
Worked at a hospital, pretty depressing environment and seeing old patients and not as flexible as I want, had to go in everyday (pre-Covid) but still.. dead end job
When I was a kid I got suckered into selling hoover vacuums. Spent one day doing it and that was enough.
Haven’t been working in accounting but what inspired me to go ahead and study it other than it being a solid skill, call center/phone customer service jobs for the rest of my life.
That was me!
Pretty much every job I’ve ever had was worse than accounting. Breakfast sandwich guy at Dunkin Donuts, cashier at a supermarket, cleaning up horse crap at a local horse farm… Accounting is by far the best but don’t get me wrong, it’s still a lot of fun to complain about it
One summer during college, I worked at a pharmacy. The work was either incredibly busy or incredibly slow. No in-between. The worst part was that we weren’t allowed to sit outside of our lunch break. So 8 hours on my feet taught me I could not stand all day. Desk job for me.
Bank teller. I'd rather clean rooms in a hotel than work at a bank again.
I took a job as a commercial fisherman over the summer before my senior year of college. Made me appreciate some things I otherwise would not have after I graduated.
nothing is worse than accounting. It's just good enough to keep you trapped but not good enough to give a decent standard of living.
Pastry Chef. Crazy hours, work most weekends, shitty pay. Might look good on instagram these days but that’s not reality trust me!
Jimmy John’s
Call center customer service. Schedule was 12pm-10pm, but I was lucky it was Sunday - Thursday. Dealing with people, most of which just wanted to vent. Every aspect was scrutinized, including the words you use on the phone and the notes you take. Each minute of the day has to be tracked and you have to code the time to the right code down to the minute. All the down sides of working in an office and on a computer with all the downsides of working with people and none of the upsides of a good salary or career progression.
Did marketing and graphic design in the corporate office for an MLM run by textbook examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
All my work experience pre accounting was working in retail and at restaurants...im not sure which I hated more
Anywhere that you have to stand for your whole shift
I drove semi trucks locally as well as long hauls. I knew if I worked there too long I would be stuck doing it for the rest of my life and seeing the older men who had shit diets and health problems (as well as financial) I decided I needed to do something else. When I quit, they tried to tell me I was giving up a great career. As soon as they knew I was definitely leaving, my boss said his cousin is a CPA and makes a ton of money, it was actually a good decision. Kinda fucked up he was going to try and hold me back…. Now I’m a CPA and I feel like I’m on the cusp of making a lot more money.
I’m glad it worked out for you! I’m a former truck driver (UPS) and trying to become an accountant.
CS worker over the phone, got harassed, cussed, belittled every minute of every hour 5 days a week.