What is the toughest minimum wage job you have had?

[TlalocW]

62. I don't know if it was minimum wage

Because I think I've been lucky in that I've never worked a minimum wage job... This was the worst one ultimately because of lack of mental stimulation. I've worked labor jobs and enjoyed them, but ultimately, I'm a computer guy so I'm going to play to my strengths, and nothing drives me battier than no mental stimulation.

So the worst one was Sprint tech support. I was laid off from a good programming job and took it while looking for a new one. Two weeks of training which required that we get there at 7 am, which wouldn't have been bad if it didn't take an hour and a half to two hours for the instructor to actually start instructing - had to decide on a topic, go get the overhead projector, go get a different overhead projector because the first one wasn't working (happened more than once - might want to put a sticky note on it), maybe get a few phones, figure out where to go on the computer tutoring system, etc. I started bringing books to read and then said screw it, I don't care if they're monitoring the computers, started surfing the net til he was ready.

Finally got to the actual job. Boss was a devout Christian who liked to belittle people almost to the point of tears, and the first thing he told us was that if we ran into his ex-wife, don't tell her where he's working. Shift kept getting changed so sleep schedule was spotty. Also to get around the no-call list, while we were helping customers - normally drunk ones who just wanted help downloading the latest ringtones - we were supposed to look at their account and offer upgrades.

Boss was a hyper-competitive jerk, and the company was braindead. He constantly berated us for our low participation in trying to upgrade as there was an official contest sanctioned by the company to reward (monetarily) the manager who had the team with the best participation numbers, and he really wanted to win it. I finally asked, "What does the team get?" Nothing was the reply. "Do you possibly see why there's no much incentive then for us?" He stared at me for five seconds while he was processing that then got pissed off at me.

I finally got so fed up with how he and the company treated us that I just quit in the middle of the shift while having a one-on-one with him where he was supposed to be getting on me for not quite meeting the percentage of calls I was supposed to upgrade. I went off on him, quit, got up and left.

We were on the 20th floor of a building, and as I was leaving the final door to get to the elevators, I could hear him calling after me so I took a chance and went into the stairwell and ran up two flights. I heard him burst out the door, calling my name and then exclaiming, "Damn it!" apparently believing he had just missed my getting into the elevator. So he got in the stairwell and started running down 20 flights to try and catch me. I stayed in the stairwell for 15 minutes then leisurely strolled down five flights and took an elevator the rest of the way down.

A week later I was in training for a job approving Yahoo personal ads before Yahoo decided they didn't want to use our city to do that and then switched over to tech support for DirecTV (much nicer) and then finally another programming job.

TlalocW