But today it is very 'in' with preppers and living 'off grid'. With all the nuttiness in society and the eventual total devaluation of our money with the resulting reset, I retrofitted an antique barnhouse with insulation, a small woodstove, oil lamps and a composting toilet. It is really a fun little place and with food storage and the fact it is on my producing farm, I can pretty much live on nothing if need be. I loved my jobs shoveling manure and taking care of large farm animals because they were physical but a lot of friends turned up their noses.
@Mary Miller Ah, but you had a "back-up" existence in place outside of the barnhouse? Our year in the woods of northern Arizona took place at 6700 feet altitude, very cold winter, no running water or electricity, no phone service, no plumbing, 26 miles from closest town, several miles from closest neighbor, and his sign ominously stated, "Trespassers Shot; Survivors Shot Again". We never met him. Frank
Actually yes. and We have a hydrant so we can get water or a pond if we can't. I was going to use a small trough for bathing but my daughter won't stay there long because we don't have a shower. My concern is that we might have to live there for a time because of societal nuttiness. I love the sign idea.
That experience must be what people refer to as when they talk of pioneer stock moving west. I'm older than some here and some of my early years were spent with out electricity or gas and we hauled our water in barrels or five and ten gallon buckets. I wasns't a pioneer but the son of one.
It wasn't the hardest or even the lowest-paying job that I have had, but the job that I hated the most was when I went to work with a fiberglass boat company in California. I had been employed by another fiberglass boat company - Yar-Craft - which has since gone on to be a pretty big company, but I felt like a valued employee at Yar-Craft. They even shut down a second shift because they couldn't find anyone who could operate the chopper as well as I could, so I worked doubles when they had an order they needed to get out quickly. At any rate, I felt comfortable working in any part of the job at Yar-Craft, the only one I hadn't filled in on being the grinding booth. So when I moved from Michigan to California, I looked for a job at a fiberglass boat company, I forget the name of it now. They built the same kind of boats that we built at Yar-Craft but they wouldn't let me even prove that I could run the chopper, which is what I did best and could have done a whole lot better than the guy who was doing it there. I was doing the entry-level position, which was rolling out the chop after it was applied to a deck or to a hull, which was fine, given that I was new there, and all. However, the chop was uneven and it would have been a whole lot easier to apply the chop evenly, to begin with, than to expect the rollers to spread it out evenly after it was applied. Of course, being the new guy, no one wanted to hear about how I could do it better, nor would they give me a chance to show them that I could do it better. I pretty much hated everyone there, and I was working eight, ten, or twelve-hour shifts with them, and that made it even worse. I quit after a couple of weeks.
I can't recall any WORST Job. I have had a number of jobs over my lifetime but was always happy to have the job and making some money.
Chasing obsolete C130 parts still doing it going on 36 years another one was being in the infantry it's not for sissies having said that Ide do it again
I worked one month for a company whose name I don’t remember cleaning cattle hides. there were vats after vats of smelly acids and different wash solutions. Wet the hides were heavy and we poled hides from one vat to another. sometime we had to stand on the.edge of the vats. A number had died after falling into one of the acid vats so it was said. The heat inside the building was horrible and stifling which made it all the more difficult to work there. I lasted a month. There were only two of us working. The other guy was an older man. He was my boss and had worked there several years. He said it wasn’t so bad. You got used to it and nobody bothered you except once in a while they wanted you to get a few more hides a day. A month was all I could I could take. I was sixteen years old.
None of my worst jobs were as exotic as some of these above, but nonetheless soul-killing. Phone answerer at a family owned insurance brokerage shelf stocker at a drug store receptionist at my dad's law office as a teen babysitter as a teen In contrast, some of the best jobs included: on air intern reporter for WEAR-TV, Pensacola college newspaper editor public affairs officer, Bitburg AB, West Germany managing director of an alternative community center, Seattle teaching Counseling and Spirituality and Grief and Loss in Midwifery classes to naturopathic medical students, Bastyr University
Hi Von, wow your description here takes me back to my days as a civilian PAO on several air bases ( Germany, Utah, South Korea ). I loved when the uniform of the day was flight suits and fatigues because then I felt like I could wear jeans to work.
Although it wasn't my first job, the one I disliked the most was working for a retired farmer when I was 17. Pulling weeds, cleaning stuff up, handing him shingles when he was repairing the barn roof, etc. Nobody else around, very boring. He paid me 75 cents/hour. I had my first car then, a '61 Corvair, and my first girlfriend. I made $16-18 dollars a week. I'd fill my tank, take my GF to the drive-in, and still have a few bucks left over at the end of the week, lol. Life was good.
If only you still had that Corvair! A damned shame it was forced off the market; they were in reality very good cars. Welcome to the forum! Frank