The work sucks soul thread.

[Psy]

Work sucks (ass, souls, money, free time, etc) and you know it.

My customers have no sense of humor. I get asked where's the cinnamon so I have to say "top shelf in the kitchen" or where's the baby aisle "next to the mommy and daddy aisle" and nothing! Not even a chuckle!
Tell me why you hate work. Or what makes it worth it all.

[WhenRabbitsAttack]

i don't have a jobapart from random chores that i don't get paid enough for. i moved six metres square of wood in one weekend and i got paid 50$. do you know how big six metres square of wood is!? its like, three ginormous trees worth of mini little logs for the fireplace and the wheelbarrow i used was faulty and shit.
apart from that life is great!

[Blue_Dragon]

I hate my job because men don't know how to flush the urinal.

Sand belongs outside, not inside with little children who get it all over the damn place.

Toilets clogged and full of crap (again the men's room, almost always. I very rarely have issues with the ladies room--prob. since I don't work at Wal Mart.)

Playdough.

Playdough in the carpet.

Paints.

Eight years of college put toward...garbage.

Under paid ($8.50/hr for an under appreciated crap job.)

Getting bitched at at 3am for...doing my job at a time when NO ONE SHOULD BE THERE.

Boy scouts/girl scouts and their stupid baking events in which they steal my tools to "clean" their mess and leave stank dirty water with either spaghetti sauce or dough sitting all weekend so when I open the closet on Monday, the smell makes me want to vomit. Oh, with the mop soaking up the nasty water, wasting a mop head as it's thus unusable.)

Gum.

People who don't know what is and isn't recyclable (your dirty f*cking tissues and paper towels can't be recycled, idiot. Same people putting their empty cans and bottles in their trash.)

Basically everything. I hate the world.

But I feel for you Psy, because as crappy as my job is, you're probably being paid minimum wage to deal with the public...which isn't worth it. I do like not having to see people (usually. Still, can't wait to be back at my summer Living History job where I'm mildly respected.)

[Psy]

Aww blue where are you working?

Although I work in retail (Dollar Tree or the Taking Tree as I like to think of it) it's not that hard to do so long as you have common sense (don't steal and fallow the rules and you should be fine seriously) my job is doable. I have hundreds of customers to watch like I'm a prison warden, I have to clean up after them all like I'm their mother, watch their kids like a nanny, give them directions to places or to find products or on how to do certain tasks like google, be a janitor/plumber every 30mins, sell as much as I can to every customer, and then there's the managers I have to keep an eye on and make sure they don't fuck up (and I'm not even a manager) like tell them do an audit, your cashier hasn't moved from register in an hour and has had less than 30 customers and his/her front end is thrashed, Customer stealing in can't aisle, Cashiers out of dress code and the DM is in the house, cashier needs a 10, have you checked emails? Crap crap and more crap (they call me Cinderella at work)

I started at $6.75 in 2007 and then it jumped to $8 when min wage increased and now $9 with a raise coming up (more then likely .08 .16 or .25). Unless I can get a promotion. I've worked at the same stupid place for all most 5 years and it hasn't changed all that much so I can handle it but it's freaking depressing.

[Blue_Dragon]

I work for a cleaning company. My boss is nice, but the places I clean are just...annoying. I liked cleaning the factory office better, now I clean a "church" (if it has a school in it, and holds all kinds of money making events, I don't consider it a church. Sorry.) and the Farm Bureau here, which houses various offices such as insurance, finance, U of I extension (they're pretty clean, so is the Ins. co,) etc... I'll be glad to be back home--Lincoln Home! As stupid as tourists are, they love a girl in 7 layers of clothing, so I usually have a lot of fun there.

That's crap, if you started in '07, you should be paid better by now. There's nothing worse than having to deal with the general public in a situation where they feel "superior," even if they're retarded (I mean this in reference to the definition, not the slang.) And I'm sorry, I've shopped at Dollar Tree here, and it's full of ridiculous people who have no power in real life, so they take it out on the cashier. Just a couple months ago, this lady had a ton of crap she was checking out, but she wanted it rung up in two or three different ways. Which would have been okay, but the dumb b*tch didn't have them separated how she wanted them rung up, and got pissed at the checker for scanning something she wanted separate. I wasn't in a hurry, so I really didn't care what she was doing, but I did get irritated when she got snippy with the lady. I made fun of when she left :P But almost got caught, cause she came back in for extra bags (not that I care, cause I can be pretty confrontational when I want to be...but I'm not trashy enough to start anything in a store.) *F*cking stupid.*

Sorry for the long story. Just saying, I can sympathize.

How did you end up having to instruct them on the use of google o_O?

[pajamajam]

I work at a Walmart in an Army town. The customers are just something else. The soldiers themselves are usually pretty respectful, but their spouses never hesitate to get in your face. They seriously try to pull their husbands' ranks on you like it'll make a difference. People act like you're some kind of magician and can make exactly what they need magically appear ("I'm sorry, we don't carry shrimp stock." "I really need it for this recipe." "I'm really sorry, we don't have it." "Well, the recipe calls for shrimp stock."), or the ones who act like you're retarded because you work where you do, or the ones who expect you to know everything about every item the store sells... I love when I can hide from customers in the back.

[Matt]

I'm not sure I agree with "the customer is always right" after working at Big Boy and Goodwill, in that order. Currently, I hold a good job in which I clean a guy's private hanger at the local airport for $9 per hour. I work alone so I don't have to deal with the public. I'm probably overpaid, but I appreciate it. The guy I work for is fair and doesn't try to pin his problems on me (cue the waitresses at Big Boy).

But. To relate to you guys, I'm mildly misanthropic in real life because of my time "serving the public" at a restaurant and a clothing store.

"Can you make this three dollars instead of five?" one lady asked me.

"Ma'am," I replied, "that thing is fifty dollars at Wal-Mart across the street and I don't have the authority to change prices."

Then, women go into the changing rooms with half the clothes on the shelves, try them on, take pictures, chat about random crap for at least an hour, and then leave without cleaning it up. Or buying anything.

And there was another time when a lady pulled a few things off the shelves, stuck them in her purse, and just walked out the door with one of the things--a tie, I think--still hanging out from her purse. The cashier called for the managers, and they didn't get there until she got out into the parking lot. There, we didn't have a legal right to stop her.

Seriously? Stealing things from a store where you already get them for a hundredth of their original price?

Somehow, I enjoyed working in the toy aisle, because the kids never complained about our prices or our changing rooms being full. Once I gave them an answer, they'd leave it at that instead of assuming I could magically make a duplicate item appear (like most of the adult customers).

As a last act of mercy, my boss let me go after I destroyed my ankle during soccer practice. Though this wasn't for my sake, I was glad for it. It put me out of sports for the rest of my life (I hated our soccer captain anyway) and apparently out of more active retail jobs.

--

Working in retail is terrible, but working with food is even worse. First of all, there are social classes within the restaurant. At the top are the waitresses, then the managers, then the cooks, the prep cooks, then the bussers. I was a busser. The waitresses treated me like I wasn't even human. First, they complain about how incompetent me and my fellow bussers are, then they make us wash their silverware even when we're backed up to the door of the dish room, threatening us with "telling the managers" if we didn't hurry up and let them get out by ten.

That wouldn't be too bad, but then there's this thing where the cooks were supposed to help the bussers clean up after hours, and they never did. So, even when we closed early, the earliest I'd ever get home was midnight. The waitresses were home two hours before. The cooks, one hour. The managers left with the bussers, but they rarely helped us.

It wasn't all bad, I suppose. Two of the waitresses treated me well, though it wasn't out of respect so much as they just thought I was good-looking (most of the bussers were, somehow). Those two aside, everyone was condescending toward the bussers. Though the restaurants across the street had the waitresses share tips with the bussers, it didn't happen at Big Boy.

The nicest thing the managers of Big Boy ever did for me was cut me and a few other high school students when school started.

[Celestial-Fox]

I like my job. (: This may be contingent on the fact that I don't work with customers, however.

[jubeh]

The customer is almost never right. I think one of the most unfortunate events of all time was the creation of that phrase. It's been used and abused to no end ever since.

I've worked in retail since I got out of high school and I can say with utmost honesty if you want to survive you have to assume the customer is a stupid sack of shit and be pleasantly surprised when they are not. That means talking to them like they don't know anything and lying through omission. Basically imagine talking to a child.

Selling is incredibly difficult because you're meant to get into a mode similar to maybe an actor or performer but never are you allowed to address your audience like an actual human being. I can never just say, "Uh no that's bullshit." I always have to say, "That's interesting."

I think the funniest thing is when you get a guy who is trying to perform the impossible and will not leave until you give him the answer you want to hear. For some reason people who don't know a lot about electronics will come up with all sorts of crazy logic on why this should be able to connect to that or how these two wireless devices can talk to each other when it's not possible.

You're wondering why we can't just say, "Hey that won't work." It's because once we do that guy will find another employee and try to get a different answer. This goes on until somebody mentions that radioshak might have a solution for them. I feel sorry for the dudes we dump on radioshak sometimes.

Sometimes.

[AlmanacnamedTime]

I like the internship i'm in line to get(guareteed by the company owner if I learn coldfusion) but I have another job where I deliver flyers and the weather always sucks as soon as I start, beutiful day and then it starts raining or gets super cold or super hot. that job I hate.