People Are Revealing the Truth About Their Seemingly "Fun" Jobs

Dog groomer. Think you get to play with cute puppies all day and make them all pretty? HA!
Dogs will shit, piss, vomit,and express their anal glands on you. You can find infestations, as in fleas, ticks, maggots, worms etc. Or you find infections like yeast, or open wounds that have festered.

You get at LEAST one dog a day that tries to bite you. There's always the possibility of underlying health problems that can end up revealing themselves for the first time on your table because the a little stressed out such as seizures, heart or breathing problems.

You have hair in your eyes, nose, mouth, your hair, your clothes. You're soaking wet most of the day. You see neglected dogs daily. You're dealing with very sharp equipment with moving targets. They try to lick you or worse lick the equipment.

You're on your feet all day and have strict time limits. And in my case there's a window where store customers or the pet parents can watch you and they knock on the window and excite the dogs more or upset/scare them and don't understand that they're ultimately wasting your time and endangering the dogs and you have to sit there and smile at them.

And if you think it's a job to have because you get along with animals better than people? Forget it. It is customer service driven. And people are ASSHOLES that will threaten to sue you because of things that were caused by months of neglect on their part.

They will scream at you if you tell them that their dog attacked someone because it was scared and unsocialized, or if the hair is a little too short/long, pretty much any excuse to yell, they might. Now I love my job, and wouldn't trade it for the world, there are definitely the good customers and dogs too.

It's satisfying to see the difference in a dog from when they came in to when they leave and I can use the artistic part of me in each groom. And I'm always learning and the industry is always changing. There's a new challenge every day, so it's never boring. I'm not just sitting behind a desk.

And it is an awesome feeling to help out a neglected dog because you know matted hair hurts. And sometimes I'm the first one to notice a medical problem and point them to the vet for help which is pretty cool though upsetting sometimes.

I'm actually the salon manager so have to deal with the challenge of the crazy rude yelling customers and try to find a way to make them happy in the long run. It's very satisfying when I can help them and very frustrating when I can't because they're just being stupid but it makes life interesting. I could probably go on for hours on the pros and cons of the job...

Username: weebunny3

Male pornstar. Yes it's a ton of fun, but not like you really think. Sure you get to fuck tons of hot, and not so hot women, but the reality is you can never stay in a stable relationship and have a stable family with children. Your family shuns you completely.

The money is really good if you're over of the favored actors but it's amazing what you actually have to wade through to get there. Many guys have to start with doing gay porn despite not being gay or bi. I'm lucky this didn't happen to me.

You take a huge risk by trying to do porn because if you're not successful you end up getting shunned by your family and friends and end up not making much money. You also risk never being able to find someone who wants a relationship with you because when their friends find out they always send you pictures or videos fucking someone else and it typically ruins the chance at having a relationship.

I always tell people up front and they usually have a problem with it even though they won't admit it at first. It's difficult to see the disappointment in your woman's eyes when she knows your leaving for set on working days only going to fuck other women. It's difficult to cultivate real intimacy when you fuck someone else all day 4 days a week.

The time in set can be excruciating sometimes. You end up dealing with whiney bitches who need every little thing handed to them and done for them. The smell can become quite overbearing sometimes and can get stuck in your nose. Staying healthy enough to generate enough cum 4 to 6 times a week can be difficult. No alcohol or drugs because of how they affect sex drive and performance.

Taking dick pills and taking shots in your dick to stay hard for hours is a reality. Caverject has saved my career. Constant stretching and penis pumping to stay at maximum size. Taking vascularity drugs to increase vascularity.

Tanning every day for 30 minutes to an hour, depending on if you're outside or in a tanning bed. Getting enough quality sleep to have clear eyes and good hormone drive. You wouldn't believe how much getting proper sleep is for sexual peak performance.

Proper nutrition but that's really become easier since i was able to hire my own chef this last year. Handling all the bitching. Screening for STDs twice a week which includes blood drawing and i hate needles. Having 10 to 15 near misses on STDs.

Dealing with unexpected pregnancies occasionally, but those are handled by my manager and through our contract services. Constantly wondering how long until they decide I'm not good enough for this anymore and then finding the next great young stud to fuck in my place.

Having to deal with unconventional attitudes of big pornstar women who let their egos rule their lives. Most of them are awesome and great to work with, but there's always a few that really get on your fucking nerves. Wondering if you'll ever have be able to find someone to have children with and having those children grow up to know who their daddy is and what he did.

Them having to live with the shame of their friends making fun of them and sending them my videos or some shit. Never feeling the desire to be intimate at home because I'm always exhausted from being onset. I have to take a few weeks off here and there to be alone with my partner to even have desire to have sex again.

I can bust up to 2 nuts a day without losing too much semen volume but that's become increasingly difficult over the last 3 years. I will not fake anything so i hold true to my acting.

Hopefully by now you've been able to detect my bullshit and realize I'm not a porn actor i just made all of that up for fun. If you read this far, you got sucked in, and I'm sorry i just couldn't resist. Hopefully you won't kill me for joking.

Username: km4rbp

I have two for you, security guard and private investigator. I'm not sure if others at one point considered security guard to be a potentially fun job but I did as a teenager.

Get a sharp uniform, keeping people safe, little bit of authority. I thought it would be a blast. Turns out I was dead wrong.

I took a job in between college years over the summer working as a security guard at an abandoned car factory. The property was absolutely humongous, it took me 5 minutes to drive from one side of the other in a golf cart and the property owner was so cheap that they only paid for a single security guard for the entire property which looking back on it is absolutely insane.

For about nine of those 12 hours I was sitting on my ass doing absolutely nothing. My manager was a hard-ass and said that I was not allowed to bring a book or a gaming device or my iPod (2009). It was only me in this gigantic empty building so who would ever know if I brought my iPod?

Turns out a manager would float from property to property where he had contracts and check to make sure that we weren't reading, drinking, jerking off, or be otherwise distracted during our shifts. He would make surprise visits and he caught me with my iPod one time and told me if he catches me again doing something I'm not supposed to be doing I'm going to be fired on the spot.

The most exciting thing that ever happened was me chasing off a group of teenagers who were drinking in the back parking lot of the facility. Private investigator was also pretty bad.

85% of the time you're going to be sitting still in your vehicle in sketchy neighborhoods watching a house 200 ft away or in front of a computer. Trying to find your subject was an exercise in patients a lot of times.

These people often don't have a permanent home, they will get their mail at their grandma's house, their car is registered at their girlfriend's house, they sleep two nights a week at their friend's house, then the next two nights and they spend with their side chick. If you are working any case that involves any kind of interfamilial drama, it's next to useless trying to get any good information out of anybody who has any knowledge of the incident that you're investigating.

People will lie right to your face or will slam the door right in your face, angry that you could do something as offensive as trying to get the truth. I was independent for a little while and that was a 365 day a year job.

If you're not out on surveillance or knocking on doors, you are doing accounting, case research, meeting with clients, editing video, writing reports, so on and so forth. I never assumed that I was going to actually get to go to an event or make it out with my friends or family until after I was already done because I was always checking things like the subjects social media to see if they announced plans for that day that I could follow them to.

Every client of mine wanted me working every holiday because they knew that there would be movement on those days so that's exactly what I did. For 2 years straight I missed every single major holiday because I was doing surveillance. It's a horrible career and I would not recommend it to anybody

Username: [deleted]

Musician and television broadcast engineer here, I'm going to complain about both.

**Musician.** I thought this would be a worthy career growing up as my dad used to be a musician as well; so you possess the talent and the ability to play in front of any crowd, but the reality is you're constantly having to rehearse with your band in some confined room and your songs aren't tight like how you imagine( everyone has their own ideas put into a song you created that it becomes so different from the original idea it ends up sounding awful and the singer always gets managerial because he thinks he/she IS the band.

Most of the time you are on the road, driving to some shitty pub, arguing with what you thought were your friends and then play a 2 hour set to drunken retards who think its perfectly acceptable to come up afterwards and try to play your instrument with their meat fists.

Festivals won't pay you, in fact no one wants to pay you and will often say "you can do the gig for the notoriety" - which is complete bollocks, the organiser will then put his cousin/brother/friend of his wife's band on after you and they will suck and get all the cash, you play the same shit songs over and over and over and the ones you want to play people aren't interested in, they want to hear the one you wrote when you were retarded high at 5am and wrote a song about dicks and pizza as a joke, a lot of people will also assume they can somehow make something from your talents, or promote a song you wrote and get something for it because they "helped you out." A lot of effort for little pay and no gratification.

**Engineer.** Qualified enough that you're deemed somewhat intelligent but too stupid to do an actual degree course that's uniformly recognised as being smart, being a TV engineer is for people who thought they could be filming the next David Attenborough series or out making an awesome documentary. The reality is there are 0 jobs with that description, you can get into an OB company, but you will most likely just be filming one thing and it will be something you hate, be it football, golf, rugby, cricket, baseball.

You arrive to the venue a day early and set up your equipment around the ground, who's keepers will give you endless amounts of hassle for not having a pass on you or not having correct footwear or a high vis, even though they've seen you 100 times throughout the season and know exactly what you're doing will still relish in this minuscule facade of power.

You get spoken to like crap during your training, which mostly involves lifting heavy boxes onto and off of trucks, working 19+ hour days and having no time to eat. Chances are the job you're on will be going out to 300,000,000 people world wide, so a single fuck up that could disrupt the program means your ass is grass and the company gets fined lots of money.

If you persevere the pay isn't that great, still long hours and no job security, why? Because everyone is freelance, the BBC, ITV etc.. Will only hire freelance engineers for the majority of their jobs; yes they have in house camera men and engineers, operators and such but the majority of OB work is all freelance and you need at least 5+ years as a guarantee engineer before you can dream of being picked for that.

So say you don't want to work as an OB engineer and you want to work somewhere in R&D or technical support? Hey awesome! Hope you enjoy having angry middle eastern customers with kit that's 20 years out of date trying to operate a fully functioning studio shout at you when it breaks and is out of warranty because they probably stole it or got it from a bin.

The problems you think you'll be dealing with you assume will be interesting and get you to think, in reality you trawl through countless logs of software reports and try to find the point at which something fucked up, then offer 3 solutions; return it for repair, reinstall the software or restart the unit.

This is after using a perfectly good unit and recreating the problem 10 times before it can be declared a fault for R&D to even look at, which they then don't for months, while your customer gets angrier and angrier with you. Life is shit. Work is shit. There aren't any good jobs

Username: [deleted]

Any kind of job in an amusement park. Sounds awesome at first. Free admission? Hell yeah!

**1. Wristband stations.** * Most rides require certain heights for safety reasons. If you're not tall enough for orange rides, then you don't go on orange rides. Simple stuff. However, it kind of feels similar to being a TSA agent at the airport. You have to figure out what they're hiding.

What has this parent done to improve their kid's chances of being just tall enough for bigger rides? Stuffed their shoes? Yep. Put em in heels? Yep. Teach them how to balance on their toes? Yep.

And then, when you catch them on that, the parents cuss you out and give you a glare hot enough to boil water. As if you are the sole reason their vacation is utterly ruined. All because you follow the rules to ensure that kid's *safety*.

**2. Ride operators. Working any ride pretty much sucks.** * Eiffel tower elevator operator. Imagine riding the same elevator, repeating the same speeches going up and when going down, and then doing that for 4-6 hours straight. You get a 30 min break, have to run across the theme park just to get to the break room with only about 10 minutes to spare before you have to run back and do it all over again for another 4 hours.

Or, you could be stationed at the top of the swaying tower. Your only job is to make sure people don't drop anything or spit through the bars. Your view is *great* too. There is nothing to look at for miles except trees and rides.

You could look down, but you'd have to stare at the odd squares cut out the pavement from people who have jumped to their death and were so embedded into the pavement that they had to cut out a square around their bodies.

* Can't remember the name, but working on one of those boats that goes in a full circle and flips upside down. It doesn't matter what spot you're working on this one. You will be pinged in the head with condoms, tampons, cell phones, or whatever awful crap that people keep in their pockets despite knowing that they're on a ride that flips upside down.

And that ain't rain. It's piss or puke. Or a used condom. * Any ride in the kid park. None of the rides are designed to allow kids to put themselves in the seat. You have to lift the fat/sweaty/poopy kids into the ride every single time.

First of all, this requires you to put your hands on someone else's child, then you have to hope that you don't drop them if they squirm and freak. Once the ride gets going, you'll almost always have to go rescue some kid that starts freaking out and hysterically crying on the 2 mph ride.

* In general, you have to make sure people don't die. Despite all the restraints, it's harder than it looks. How do you tell someone that they're too fat to be buckled in? Or what about when you close a ride for weather or emergence maintenance?

People get belligerent. Oh, it's *only* raining right now, you say? Oh I'm sorry, it's just that you'll *only* be on a giant metal structure in the sky that acts like a massive lightning rod.

**3. Any kind of janitorial work.** * Bathroom cleaner. Sure, you get paid a lot more than ride operators. But they don't have to deal with what comes out of a human being after eating nothing but candy, fried food, ice cream, or whatever nasty food we have all day.

* Sweeper. The people that walk around the park all day with a broom and a pan. People will see you, and will either drop food or trash or push it off the table, just to watch you have to pick it up.

By the end of the day, you hate the theme park so much that it doesn't even matter if you can get in for free anytime you want.

Username: ruemantic

Most airline jobs (especially entry-level, such as crew scheduling). Lots of people think working at an airline is glamorous with the travel and flight benefits and uniforms.

Truth is, I found the industry to be very toxic and cutthroat competitive (although there were some wonderful people I still keep in touch with), the pay is mostly terrible, the hours suck, and if you're a crew scheduler, you work 10-12 hour shifts calling crew members on the phone telling them to report to work, so you get yelled at.

Plus you get to work weird shifts 530 AM -330 PM, 330 PM - 130 AM, or 130 AM - 1130 AM). Overtime weekends and holidays. Fun times.

There are also a lot of companies taking advantage of young, ambitious, and naive people by working them a lot, paying them below living wages, and telling them they just "gotta pay their dues" (when usually in reality they'll just keep them in that position forever or until they come to their senses and quit).

Flying for "free" (standby) isn't as much fun as it sounds. Yes, it's free, but I have a laundry list of airports I've slept in because I couldn't get on flights shorter than the wait time I ended up spending trying to get an open seat on a flight.

I was actually happier when I left the industry and started paying for revenue tickets (regular fares) again. A lot less stress about getting anywhere when you have a confirmed seat.

If you want to be a pilot, plan on paying on average $60k - $100k for training to just qualify for an entry-level job. Being a flight instructor (entry-level for a lot of folks) is a rewarding, but usually very low-paying and dangerous job.

Once you hit 1500 hours flight time, you go to a regional airline and face a lot of the problems listed above. Survive there for a few years and then maybe you'll get a job at a major airline like United or Delta and earn a decent living.

But then you're on the bottom of the seniority list as the new person and you'll be working the worst schedules to the airports no one wants to work at. It'll take a few years before your quality of life improves. Becoming a pilot doesn't really pay dividends for the first 5-10 years, and most people wash out of flight training before getting a flight instructor ticket.

Not to mention the airlines are incredibly strict about rules and requirements, and a lot of things are black-and-white. Not really a bad thing (especially when you're talking about national/international security), but some rules can be deal breakers for certain people.

You take certain prescription drugs with no side-effects for you but they're on the FAA's banned list? No matter what your work ethic is and how much money you've spent, you'll never be a pilot. It's rough.

The good side to the airlines is that it's a very small industry, so sometimes it feels like a close-knit family where everyone knows/knows of everyone else. But then again, anger one person and expect to burn a few bridges.

Username: thelostfinn86

I'm not sure what the correct job title is in English, but a ski center employee/lift operator. Hey, you get to drive snowmobiles, hang out with cute boarder chicks and operate the lifts, what's not to love? Plus you can hog yourself the slope's virginity every morning before the lifts open.

But then it turns out it's like any other customer service job in a place with a high volume of people, many of whom are ignorant, arrogant, pissed off for random reasons, or just plain idiots. The biggest problem aren't even the kids and teenagers, because you know it's in their nature to seek trouble.

You know what you're dealing with, and they listen to your authority if you enforce it. The problem is the 30-40-50-something stressed family man with the utterly idiotic phrase "the customer is always right" stuck in his thick skull.

He will not hesitate to show it when he's displeased with something, and will absolutely under no circumstances listen to any sort of logic. He's the god damn customer, and to him you're a mechanical being whose only job is saying things he likes to hear.

Things people do on lifts and slopes are sometimes utterly idiotic. T-bar lifts are constant victims of bored people doing slalom while on their way up despite this being strictly forbidden. Doing this can displace the cable from the rollers at the top of the pylons, which will render the lift inoperable in the best scenario.

Worst scenario is that upon the cable losing tension the heavy carriage to which each t-bar is attached to drops on somebody. People routinely ignore the light fences set up to prevent access to dangerous areas, slope interchanges, and into lift landings, and will get incredibly pissy when you tell them not to.

I had a 35yo guy yelling into my face how he must have bullied me at school because I keep bouncing him around. It was literally the first time I even saw him.

The work is physically demanding, because it's a constant occurrence someone hits a fence in the middle of a steep slope and you have to go fix it, during heavy snowfall you have to keep shoveling constantly to keep terraces and other such places clear, there are no real breaks to speak of, the hours are long and unpredictable especially in the holiday season, people will blame you for everything whether or not you have anything to do with whatever they're annoyed with or any means to do something about it, etc. Also the pay is terrible.

Then again every now and then something happens that makes it all worth while. Some kid gave me a lollipop because he thought I was a cool guy, and one time an elderly couple wrote a letter to my boss praising me for disciplining kids who were making a mess on the lift. Also driving snowmobiles is indeed awesome.

Username: nulboard

Locomotive engineer. Yes I drive the train 100mph and yes I blow the whistle and ring the bell and travel all over. It is thrilling af,no doubt about it BUT ... people lose their common sense around railway tracks.

I mean the shit I see people do ( and I’ll start off easy here so be ready) like the dad with the two kids on their bikes in the middle of the countryside who see the train and he decides it would be cool to place a coin on the tracks in front of us.

He races up to the tracks and grabs a coin out of his pocket but as he goes to put the coin down he trips and falls in front of us and I lose sight. When I went back, both little kids had pissed themselves and the boy had pooped his pants because it looked like we cut dads head off ( but it was just the top of his skull.)and then it’s a car that stops at a level road crossing and I see the driver looks both ways and just pull right out in front of us and we DESTROY the car and I have to run back and pull him out because the vehicle is smoking and ready to start burning, without a second thought about his severe injuries and he is screaming as I tear him out of the mangled metal because he has flail chest and broken collar bones and broken arms and teeth missing. And I want to yell at him for doing this to himself and to me.

Or the cars that drive AROUND the crossing gates as you’re speeding towards them and you slam into the car dead centre, turning the big car into a crushed tin can that you drag partially under the locomotive til you stop one to a stop and you try to help the driver but he is so badly injured that his brain is all over the car and you have to watch him die because he’s crushed inside the vehicle with the steering wheel almost through his chest

OR The kids on the trestle that were so little, what were they doing there as you round the curve at 80mph and have no choice to look because you’re paralyzed and have to watch as you hit one off the 70 foot bridge into the creek below.

By the time you stop , the run back to the bridge was almost a mile away and when you get there you have to throw yourself down an embankment that was never meant for people to be able to come down and you find his little body broken and draped over a sapling on the edge of the river and you try to hold the monster in your arms as as it reaches for you, with injuries I’ll save you from me describing and when he dies , it’s you that is with him; not his parents or family but a stranger covered in his blood.

When you sleep or close your eyes for the next 25 years you see him on that bridge and you hit him over and over and over and it’s a thud like a baseball bat on steel.

You think you can’t get back on that train but after the coroner and the police arrive and you tell them what happened , you walk back to it like a fucking zombie and when you get there the railway is calling the train, asking when you’re going to get moving again because you have 33 people connecting to Windsor so .. get a move on.

So you go and you don’t talk about it, you try to forget about it but it keeps happening over and over and every time, it’s you that makes the run back to the accident , down the tracks with all of that time to think about what horrific sight you’ll see and you feel guilty because you hope they’re dead because train vs person is disgusting and violent.

When you get to them, you can barely help because their injuries are things like decapitations or severed limbs or brains and more brains everywhere. It affects everything in your life but because you’re a woman, YOU CANNOT QUIT, you’ve worked so hard to get here.

The company asks if you’re a ‘ man or a mouse’ so you go back to work without taking ANY time off and it happens again but this time it’s a 16 year old girl, with beautiful blue eyes and a smile as wide as the sky as she walks down the tracks ,arms open as if to greet her lover.

When you hit her , you’re screaming too and of course, she isn’t dead yet and because there’s snow, the crimson colour of her blood makes you puke just before you get close to her. Her screams never leave. They do grow quieter but the smell of her injuries and always shit and piss permeate your brain and leave their mark alongside all of the graphic looping movies of it happening.

The only break in the action is when you get more material, like hitting a transport truck with an open top trailer with boulders in it (that never even paid attention to the crossing lights and pulled right out in front of you) with a 16000 ton freight train that has dangerous commodities, among other things, as it’s cargo.

Just before you make contact you think”this truck will derail us and the poisonous gas , gasoline, anhydrous ammonia etc etc we are carrying is going to blow and people are going to be killed in this sleepy town’ but amazingly it doesn’t happen and even the trucker somehow survives but you barely get by because you’re so damn broken.

So you finally take some time off and when you come back to work it begins again: the suicides ; watching her cross the tracks then dive in front of your train and the fire dept comes to hose down the blood, brains and guts and you puke in solidarity with them because she is sprayed all over the engine and 4 coaches and when you find her purse there’s only two photos of two sweet little kids and you want to run into the woods screaming.

You finally find her head in the ditch. It was surreal and at first you wondered what it was but then there was no doubt especially in my dreams when that fucking head would ask me what I did with the children as it puked and puked.

So at last you go to therapy and even the counselor cries with you because it’s more than a person should be able to bear and you get your life sorted but never stop wondering if this is the day and EVERY TRIP you watch people take risks with the train, it never stops.

Now, as of 2013, they remove us from the train, we aren’t allowed to continue the trip ( thank you Jesus) and they make us go to therapy and it’s helped but I’m always waiting for the next thud.The engine weighs 175 tons and each coach weighs about 75 tons.

Top speed for passenger trains is 100mph and for freight it’s 60mph. Freight trains usually have three engines and at least 11000 tons behind them. People’s bodies don’t have a chance. Please look, listen and live!!

Username: [deleted]

I worked at a bowling alley in my teens(in the UK in Northern England). I mean for the most part it WAS the best job I ever had. My mates were already working there so I applied - working with your mates, at a bowling alley?! Frick yeah!

Close shifts were THE BEST if you had the right staff on, we’d smoke a reef or 2 when we had to take the bins to the back skips (at like 2am when you were cleaning the place for the next shift) and play the best game of ‘throw the bin bag in the skip’ (which in principle sounds fun... until you miss and the bag splits EVERYWHERE).

We got to play bowling for free as long as the lanes weren’t too busy and got discount on food. We used to get discount on alcohol until the stock levels didn’t match sales so they made us pay full price - pffft.

I also really loved being able to fix the mechanical issues. I was an Alley Cat which is basically a waitress, we would hang out by the lanes and bring food/drink to bowling customers but we were also trained to walk down the middle of the lanes, switch off the units and lift up the front cover and could fix minor mechanical faults like a ball jam near the lane camera etc.

But for bigger faults we would be able to walk down the back of the bowling units, switch the unit off and climb on top of it and fix a Sweep Down or a pin stuck in the table. About 2 years into my job a guy working in the same brand bowling alley but in southern England was crushed - to death - by a pin table..

He’d forgotten to turn the unit off, so from then on we weren’t allowed to touch them. I really felt for the guys family and it was a sad loss of a life but it made it INSANELY difficult in peak times, we’d only ever have a maximum of 2 mechanics working at peak times so the customers would have to wait ages for them to fix the issue.

I always felt a total badass walking down the bowling lanes and fixing the shit out of the fault and walking back, like heck yeah I’m awesome.But you always look back on those times with rose tinted glasses.

It’s EASY to forget the 1,450,623 millionth time a guy would hand his bowling shoes back in, to get his own shoes back and we had to spray the bowling shoes and “Ooh need some of that in my shoes!” *nudges friend - hysterical laughter* or the ever classic “Pffft, need more spray than that in his shoes luv!” Followed by drunken rib nudging and laughter.

Yeah. If I could spray this stuff in my eye and ears to NEVER hear that joke again - that’d be great. But also - touching hot sweaty bowling shoes - maximum disgust.

And serving the drunken customers - including the one guy who managed to not let go of his bowling ball and it went straight in the ceiling. Like I’ve no idea how he didn’t hurt anyone. The ceiling panel remained in place for months before one of the managers (my then boyfriend and now husband) decided it was a safety risk.

I did always look up at that panel that just had a ball shaped hole in it and wonder how on earth he didn’t kill either himself or his mates when the ball came back down. On a close shift you had to return the bowling balls to the racks.

Now bowling balls range in weight from feather light to “I think I shit myself” heavy. I did get reasonably fit doing the job but returning 100+ balls to racks across the distance of 30-something lanes - it’s a chore. It was a battle of working out how many balls I could kick with my feet whilst having some stashed under my arms and then have the light ones on each finger JUST to cut down the to-fro time.

I was a (reasonably) attractive girl at that time and after 2 years of working there I started wearing a fake wedding ring so I could bat the guys away without offending them (and risk not being tipped). I just wanted to work there, with my mates and have a good time - not get hit on by drunk arseholes.

I mean, I wouldn’t say I was overly attractive but I would garner the attention of drunk guys. I also put on a front of reasonable confidence so people didn’t know I was insanely insecure.

There were a few other girls who would hammer on the flirt for extra tips - but then they’d bitch that the guys wouldn’t leave them alone - sorry but you can’t have both. Either you want the attention or you don’t.

And who could forget - the children parties. When I first started I was 17 and was 3 months away from being a legal Alley Cat (because they had to serve alcohol) so I had to start as a party rep - I followed the children parties round all day, made them balloon animals.

After I became an Alley Cat I still helped with the kids parties if I was on an Open shift. I had an AMAZING muscateer (yes, spelt musCATeer for the alley cat reference) hat with the BEST feathers on it (each party rep has to have a cool theme - so of course, I went badass) but id have to constantly swat kids away like little wasps when they tried to take it - keep your children nits head lice to yourself thanks very much.

Someone stole my amazing hat around 3 years into the role and I could never find a similar style hat (this was pre ‘google on your phone’ days). We’d get their food order, prepare the party bags and then have to clean up the lanes after they all left.

I’m talking puke from kids who ate too fast or ate too much sugar, spilt drinks and food, sweets stuck to EVERYTHING - you name it, I frickin cleaned it. Including the one boy who got the runs by the lanes - but I actually felt for him as it must have been embarrassing.

Me and his parents managed to usher him away before the other kids noticed and I cleaned it up in record time - I didn’t want his mates finding out so he’s forever be known as ‘Bowling pooper’ or ‘Pin Pooper’. It’s hard being 7.

But the worst thing. The WORST thing about the kid parties? The music. They’d play the SAME playlist for the kid parties (which was between 1000-1300)... every... time. Even now if I hear one of those songs I’m mentally blasted back to the bowling alley.

If I ever hear the ‘McDonald’s, Pizza Hut’ song ever again, I will jump out the nearest window. It was a great job, don’t get me wrong and I don’t regret it, but there’s so much less fun about working there than you realise.

Username: ipmacs

Lifeguard at a water park. You think it’ll be all crazy tans and goofing off with other hot young lifeguards... and some of it is but most of it is:

-Dads who haven’t had sex since their youngest was conceived trying to be “cool” and saying stuff like “I’ll bet you get hit on all day by creeps, am I right?” Every time their wife turns around to scream at her kids

-above mentioned wife being a Karen and screaming at you when her 4 year old isn’t even remotely tall enough to go down a vertical drop water slide called the “suislide”, telling you she will hve you fired and wants her money back and have you ever had a real job in your life and don’t you know “the customer is always right?!?!”...

-Little kids terrified to go down the slides and their parents screaming at them and berating them saying they “paid for their bracelet so they’re going to get their money’s worth”

-people screaming at you if they get stuck halfway down a slide because they’re wearing an oversized t shirt that you warned them would create drag and it did and now they’re stuck and have to clamber out of a water slide tube and not die doing so

-weird creepy dudes asking you to blow your whistle, if you’ve ever given mouth to mouth, why you’re wearing a one piece and don’t they have any cute red bikinis for a “body like yours”

-pulling straws with coworkers to decide who will have to save the hairiest man in the wave pool who is so greased up in tanning oil that his body hair is bobbing up and down in the waves as he lays atop his tube and blabbers on about how he was an Olympic swimmer and a lifeguard and got “so much tail”

-having to actually try and save him when his greased up fur covered unit of a body comes blasting out of the tube slide and his prescription sunglasses become a projectile and he nearly drowns the both of you as he grabs at you and flails screaming “MY SUNNIES!!!! THOSE ARE EXPENSIVE!!!” In between gasps of air and bobbing underwater

-being screamed at by him when you say you can’t get his sunglasses from the bottom of the pool because riders are coming down the slide and you could break their neck or your own being in the way. If you point to the ten signs about not wearing unsecured glasses, he will say he’s going to have your job by 5pm

-actually chasing pedophiles out of the park when you find them master bating watching kids swim. This happened a dozen times in the five years I was a lifeguard so it isn’t as rare as you need to believe. Never let your kid out of your site there.

-having 17 school buses of camp kids pull in just before opening and knowing they’d make life hell all day whole almost killing themselves and everyone else by defying all the rules - we actually had a man get paralyzed for going too soon down a slide and careening into the person before him. If anyone loved not giving a shit about when you’d tell the next rider to go, it was camp kids.

-holding the double tubes for the riders to get into. The seam would slice open your shin, you’d have to lean down to hold the handle, and brace your body to push against the tube so it didn’t start gliding down with the water pushing it out.

It was always the biggest patrons who would just plop down as hard as they could and the water from inside the donut hole part of the tube would splash up in your face (crotch water at that point) and you were face level with everyone’s crotch and pubes spilling out the sides of their suits and junk visible through swim trunk leg holes...

then when they were sitting they’d launch into how scared they were and blah blah and then you’d have to haul on the handle to try and get the weighted down tube to get going and then jump out of the way before you got ran over by it.

I saw so many newbies get stuck and then pushed down the entire freaking way by a massive double tube going a bajillion miles an hour with momentum. Super funny but terrifying and unsafe for that person!

-heat stroke and sunburn no matter how much sunscreen you use because it’s full sun, high altitude, and you’re sweating it off constantly. We sometimes got “slide breaks” once every four hours but on a 95° day eith 80% humidity, you just died slowly all day

-people coming during rain to “avoid the crowds” and melting down that they’d have to leave during a lightening storm

-people losing rings, earrings, glasses, phones, etc and being mad we couldn’t turn off the wave oool and make everyone get out and go on a deep sea dive

-people who actually shit in the wave pool so we’d have to turn it off, shock it until it was basically poison, give people half day refunds because they’d claim they “only came for the wave pool” and then some poor bastard had to scoop it out using a cup from the gift shop store because, contrary to what people assumed, we didn’t have a designated shit scoop because NOVODY IS SUPPOSED TO SHIT IN A PUBLIC POOL

-being touched by creeps. So many gross dads would offer to put sunscreen on or like touch our lanyards or come up behind you and tap you by putting their entire hand on your shoulder... it was so fucking gross.

All in all, we had an absolute blast just bonding over how absurdly shitty even such a seemingly fun job was. I have so many amazing stories from that job and I’m still friends with most of the people i worked with almost 20 years ago. I will also say I would never take my kid there ahahahsh

Username: IdHiketh4t

Staffing Birthright Israel trips. I was a participant when I was 23 and was with a post-grad group, so we were mature and didn’t give our guides trouble.

The first time I staffed, I had the younger group (ages 18-22). I had taken over for someone who dropped out and had less than a week to prepare. The first few days were fine but then things slowly just got worse.

While the participants were good about not going overboard with alcohol (the drinking age in Israel is 18), the night out in Tel Aviv was all they cared about. They didn’t care about the culture, the architecture, the history, etc. One girl brought her boyfriend on the trip and refused to sit with anyone else.

She also got bit by a feral cat and said she wouldn’t continue her rabies shots back in America because she was a nutrition major. What does that even have to do with anything? So the days were just filled of the kids being bored, hungry and unappreciative.

Even the visit to Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum) wasn’t enough to straighten them out. One of the worst kids was a guy going through weed withdrawal, was spacey, never stayed in line and yelled at me when I told him why we weren’t allowed to go to the market in Jerusalem; it was during the height of the stabbing intifada where Palestinians were going up to random Jews and stabbing them without provocation.

He called me a “fear mongering FOX news watcher.” I made my co-staffer deal with him the rest of the trip. Oh, and one girl got food poisoning. That was the only time we got to be out in Jerusalem after daylight hours since I took her to the hospital.

The second time I staffed, I had the older group (22-26). I figured it would be easier since they’d be mature. Wrong. They didn’t care about getting wasted because they could already drink at home, but I got stuck with the social justice warriors.

We were supposed to see the fire damage in the south, which had come from Palestinians attaching incendiary devices to balloons, condoms filled with helium and to birds. They killed numerous animals, destroyed land and terrorized the children.

This was all documented and, unlike media outside of Israel, actually showed the damage that occurred, not just when Israel, rightfully, retaliated. Well one girl said saying these things was “offensive,” and that condom balloons were wrong to say because they sounded sexual. This.was.all.documented.

Later on, I got scolded for saying that UNESCO has denied Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem (it has) , that the United Nations is biased against Israel (it is) and that Israel never stands a chance at the UN because they always get voted against by the Arab League. This is not an opinion. It’s a fact.

You can see how each country votes and the Arab League votes against Israel every.single.time. None of this was my opinion. It’s all online and available to view. Well, apparently slamming the Arab League was “offensive to Muslims.” Mind you, a Jewish American said this, not an actual Muslim. There are also Christian Arabs.

This has nothing to do with Muslims! And again, the votes for issues are available to view. I spoke very positively about coexistence, how Muslims work on Shabbat and Jews work on Ramadan, how there are Arab-Israelis in every sectors of Israeli society, etc. But none of that mattered.

There was stuff that went on behind the scenes which I heard about later on from one of my good participants. One girl who was the biggest thorn in my side, despite never being unkind to her, had been hanging her thongs on shower rods and freaking out her roommates, going after one of the soldiers even though he had a girlfriend, saying how much she hated white people but that “this group was okay” (Jews.are.not.white), that the group needed to check their privilege, etc.

She also snapped at me when I didn’t have the answer about her trying to get a plane ticket to go to Spain. Also a girl slapped another participant. So you’d think staffing these trips gets you a free trip to Israel, you get to spread the joy of the homeland of the Jewish people and everyone will like you.

Nope. You get partiers, people who just went on the trip because most of it is free, people who don’t care about history, social justice warriors, know-it-alls, tattletales and just plain bitchers. Oh, and people get sick. Had to take a sick kid to the hospital this time around as well.

The doctors were Americans who made *Aliyah*, Orthodox Jews, secular Jews and Arab-Israelis. The pharmacist was an Arab-Israeli. But I couldn’t show this as a social studies lesson for fear of getting yelled at again. I feel bad for the good participants who truly enjoyed the trip and didn’t give me grief. But I don’t think I’ll ever staff again.

I work with toddlers and they are ten times better behaved than these people. Birthright does important work but they get a lot of bad eggs on these trips. One day the world will see the good that Israel does. It’s just never going to be shown by me it seems.

Username: degrassibabetjk

I'm a casino dealer. A lot of people think that a job like that is just a big party and I get paid to play games all day. While yes, I do play a game for 8 hours a day, it's not nearly as fun as it seems.

You have to be hyper-vigilant all the time. Sure, there are cameras everywhere, but they don't catch everything and sometimes the guest can get away with cheating quite a bit before anyone notices. Also, the cameras, and the surveillance team behind them, tend to focus in on you at the worst time, meaning if you aren't following the rules to the exact letter, (down to something as stupid as paying a bet in a particular spot with your left hand instead of your right) they can call your supervisor and have it marked in your file (they won't fire you for anything like that, unless you get caught doing it consistently, but multiple write-ups can result in not getting considered for promotions and additional training for pay raises)

Despite the party atmosphere, you are the bad guy. Many players don't get, or else don't care, that you (usually) want them to win. Being a dealer is a tipped job and people who lose tend not to tip very much. That being said, to some people, it's you who takes their money. Not bad luck, not the way the rules of the game are written, you took it. To them, you are the enemy. I've been cursed at, called names, threatened, and had drinks thrown at me, (luckily the threats and the drink throwers are dealt with very quickly by security) and, for the most part, you have to stand there and endure it.

The jokes. Oh God, the jokes. As I said, it's a tipped job, so my livelihood is based on how people like me. Not only do the cards need to be working right, but I have to laugh at every bad joke guests think they came up with and belong on SNL for (I have examples, but I'll refrain from writing them here for now.)

Repetition. Sure, you can get put on a game you actually enjoy (my favorite to deal is roulette), but more often than not, you're going to be stuck with Blackjack (most tables games sections of casinos are 70-80% Blackjack tables) Even if you like the game of Blackjack, try dealing it day in and day out for weeks and see if you still like it afterward. Even I start to get burned out on roulette if I constantly deal it and nothing else for a whole week.

Dead time. If you don't have any players at your table, you still have to be standing at your table ready to go whenever. This means no phones, no sitting down, and usually no talking to the other dealers around you. If you're lucky, you will be on a table that is facing a tv screen, but I sure hope you like sports, because that's all that ever gets played on the screens at my job (with the "rona" shutting down sports this year, it's just replays of old games at this point)

This is the big one and the last one I'm going to cover for now) The job can get downright depressing sometimes. Gambling addiction is a real thing and it does real damage to people and their families. Numerous times, I've taken a losing bet from someone and seen it in their eyes that I just took away thier rent money, or the money they were going to use to buy food.

I'm sure several area kids didn't get what they wanted for Christmas because Mom and Dad were at my table the week before and the cards turned sour. Now, do I feel responsible for this? Do I think it's my fault? Absolutely not. However, there are times I wish I was able to tell some of my guests "Look, buddy. Things aren't going well right now. Take your money, go home, and cook your family a nice dinner. Please, before I take your rent or electric bill."

We have resources in place for people who want to get help with problem gambling, but, as dealers, we're not supposed to suggest them. And while we're not to put pressure on people trying to leave to get them to stay and play more, we are also not to suggest someone "takes the money and runs" or "cuts their losses"

Now despite all of this, I really do love my job and consider it to be one of the best.jobs I've ever had. My company seems to truly care about its employees and participates in, as well as sponsors, community outreach and charity events as well. If anyone wants me to go into more detail about "casino life" let me know and I'd be glad to fill you in.

Username: stormegeddon017

Being a production assistant in film. The longest hours on set, usually by a large margin. The lowest paid part of the crew....by a large margin. Most aren't allowed to sit except at lunch. Seriously. Being seen sitting down is a huge no no...even if your job is to lock up a corner so no people wander into frame and you never leave that corner the whole time...you're standing.

And even at lunch uou might have to run around doing stuff bc you have tasks that are easiest completed when the set isn't busy as shit and you have 100 other things to monitor. Days on set are usually 12+ hours long for camera wrap...as a PA you're usually there a couple hours after that.

You don't get penalties like the rest of the crew. Penalties are things like if lunch is late bc of filming the crew makes extra. PAs don't typically get that.

You have to find your own work. So not only are you working 14+ hours but the whole time at work you're making sure to kiss ass and network and outside of set you're making sure to stay in contact with people bc often times when someone needs a PA they'll reach out to those they last talked to.

You also have to be attached to your phone bc it's how you get work. Most often if you're asked to work they also asked a handful of other people and the first "yes" gets it. That's a whole other level of stress. Every coworker you meet is a potential ally and competition. They could pass work to you or take work from you. It's insane.

When you start our you'll often be day playing. So you're working a couple days a week give or take a couple days. You'll need a second job, ideally one with a flexible schedule that allows you to take that sudden call at 10pm to be on set a 6am (I knew a lot of waiters)...that or no financial responsibilities so you're always available.

It's also dumb hard to get into. I cant tell you how many people I met that went to film school and say the best thing they got out of it was meeting someone who got them a job. PAs don't even need to know much about how cameras work but they do bc of going to film school to meet people. If you don't know someone then, well, good luck lol.

A lot of PAs are people trying to get into other depts and are there just to network. Those PAs often suck and you have to pick up the slack. PAs are a catch all for every person wanting on crew that hasn't landed the job they actually want and for people who suddenly want into the industry.

But even with so many trying to get into other departments it is still really hard to move up as a PA. The immediate goal is to become staff but that takes time invested to learn the ropes. The ultimate goal is to join the union and become an AD...which takes workong 600+ set days all with documentation proving you did it...and also like 8 grand for fees.

But there are very few AD gigs and way too many PAs. I know and have known so many union ADs who still PA bc they can't get an AD job...there's just not enough slots available and people tend to stick with who they know.

Also I stress nepotism runs the industry. You will have to get over seeing people get gigs you know you're much more qualified for. You have more experience and time and knowledge and you know they're new but they're getting the full time gig or they're being given duties you want to do. It happens. A lot.

Essentially the ideal PA candidate has no responsibilities and/or has a decent second job with insane flexibility. You also are connected with people inside. Basically be born to someone on the industry. Easy enough right?

It just wasnt meant to be for me nearing 30. I know plenty of people on their 30s who PA. Like I said it's a catch all. But I needed better and/or more consistent pay in my life. Im not set up to ruin my body for years in the hopes I'll make money as an AD later. I moved to another dept in a different union.

All that being said I do miss it...you are very integral to the film making process. Once you're established as a PA you are very involved in the day to day goings on and are in the know of everything which is cool. You often get to know the cast bc you're usually bumping elbows with them daily.

That's cool. Once established you do feel valued and you could get a slightly easier go of it (Basecamp PAs get to sit down!). But overall its rough, and especially so when starting out.

Username: lolrditadmins

Working in a cinema. Whenever I tell people I used to work there everyone says "Oh wow, you got to see all the movies for free, right?". Nope.

I used to work for the largest cinema chain in the UK and only managers got unlimited free tickets. Regular folks like me only got the second tier freebies, which were limited in number and only allowed you to see films that had either been out a LONG time or weren't very big in the first place.

Oh, you want to go see that awesome movie everyone's talking about? Either pay full price like everyone else or sneak in and watch it before your shift and probably get a bollocking from the manager if they spot you.

I watched most films in a local Vue cinema rather than my own chain because they charged less and actually looked after the place. "Oh but you could watch films while you work, can't you?" Not really...

**IF** I was ushering that day, which wasn't all that often, my routine would be something like this: check tickets for movie in screen 1, watch the trailers and maybe about 15 minutes of the film, then go over to screen 3 to clean up, maybe get there a bit early and catch the last 15 minutes, then stay to check tickets for the next show.

Watch the first 15 minutes again, then go clean screen 2 which is about to finish. Rinse and repeat. I've seen the beginning and end of pretty much every movie that was out in 2010 but not the middle where all the interesting stuff happens. Then if you do get a break or the timetable allows you to catch the middle between cleanups, you end up piecing the movie together in way that just makes it really quite dull.

I still can't watch Inception properly because I did this so much as it ran for so long that I just got so bored of it. In any case, all the while you are watching something you have to sit at the back and keep an eye on the audience to deal with any complaints or anything else that might come up.

I once had to deal with a guy shouting at me because some arsehole teenagers in the back had been throwing bottles and one of them hit his kid. You can never really relax and watch a film if you're working.

Also, as I mentioned all that would only be if I was on ushering that day. Most days I'd be sat either in the snacks stand or the ticket booth dealing with shitty customers complaining to me about the rip-off prices or why I can't allow their 6-year-old in to see Piranha 3D because it's an 18 cert movie.

Don't get me wrong, it had its upsides; watching the audience's reaction to the end of Inception with the spinning top: the collective gasp, the silence, then everyone talking at once always made me smile. It also got me out of a long stint of unemployment straight after uni and I'm very grateful for that. It's not nearly as bad as some things I've read on here but I am just so glad to be out of there now.

Username: ePluribusBacon

Being a nurse. When I got into nursing school I thought that I would really make a difference. That something I would directly do would save someone’s life! And that’s what I wanted to do. Save lives. Or that I would impact a patient so much to help them for the better.

But there is a lot of bad things about nursing, specifically in the ER, where I am. Many homeless patients come to the ER complaining about pain that isn’t there, to get strong pain meds. They ask about food constantly and make a mess of their rooms.

Because we legally have to take them seriously, despite it being their 5th time in the ER this week, they go through tests just like everyone else. Then when we find nothing wrong with them and tell them they are discharged, they throw their shit (yes their actual shit) at us, yell and curse, and trash the room.

Then there are the entitled patients that expect quick customer service and order tests for themselves. Like they are at a high-end restaurant. We don’t give it to them, deeming it unnecessary, and the lack of a smile from us when they are rude creates a rude patient for the next few hours. And of course our bosses expect high customer service-like attitudes from all of us.

If the ER is slammed with critical patients, and I mean way too many patients to rooms and nurses, they will load up nurses with extra patients. The normal ratio of patients to nurse at my ER is around 4 to 1. But it can go 7 to 1. Many nurses feel and are overwhelmed by this. Too many patients and over stretching the nurse can lead to mistakes.

The nurse can refuse the assignment, and they probably should, it is unsafe for those patients and the nurse’s license is on the line! But walking away from an assignment is considered “abandonment” and the nurse can be at fault, despite the nurse administration being the ones that put the nurse in that situation in the first place.

Nurses are assaulted by patients and not very much comes of it. I remember when I first started in my ER, one of the nurses showing me the ropes said something along the lines of “make sure if a patient assaults you, when you call the police, and they give you a hard time, or don’t send anyone out to take a statement (because those things happen frequently) to ask for badge numbers and names.

Threaten to call the sergeant if you have to. You’ll need to basically force them to come down here”. I’ve seen and heard of nurses being kicked in the chest and breaking ribs, taking lunch trays to the head, and having knives pulled on them.

And finally, during this pandemic, I think things might have been the worst. We are risking our lives to be on the frontlines and not getting hazard pay. We don’t get workman’s comp because “well you could have gotten it at the grocery store”. I got covid and have been at home for 24 days, and my HR nurse told me they might not approve my fmla.

Our managers think about our numbers instead of safe patient placement, putting Covid patients all over the ER instead of in one area and to one or two nurses. Which wastes our precious PPE. We get thank yous and signs calling us hero’s, but our landlords and families throw us out on the street because we might be exposed.

Nurses get shit on. Used and abused by the system. But somehow I love my job. When I spend hours being kind to a dementia patient that’s confused and rude, I live for the daughter at bedside that hugs me and cries and thanks me for my patience.

When i have a super complicated and critical patient, I live for the learning opportunity of how to keep them alive. When I tell a patient that has anxiety that I was diagnosed myself and how I have it under control with no meds, I live for the “wow YOU have it TOO” look on their face.

When Covid happened I hoped that some of our problems would come to light. And they did!! But I haven’t seen any new laws or anything to protect us. We, the people that frequently advocate for you or save your life, need someone to finally advocate for us.

Username: boobytitties

Shift foreman in a large factory. Sounds like a bliss when you're still slaving away on the floor as an operator. I mean, you're the boss. You call the shots. You're the Man's right hand.

You aren't even the Man's pinky. Shift bosses aren't bosses any more than secretaries are. You have no mandate on anything, you can't fire or even issue a warning to someone. You pass orders and papers up and down the ladder.

You can't hang out with the superiors because to them you're part of the horde on the floor, yet the floor guys treat you as a part of the management. In truth you belong in neither, but in a very thin gray zone in between whose job is to transfer and filter like the brain-blood-barrier.

You see others of your kind normally only during the shift change or random meetings where your job is to report that everything's running smoothly. Nobody wants your input on anything even if you have better ideas.

The floor employees are mostly decent, but there are always morons who act like children in the mix. It's very common that someone asks for a day off and upon being denied, the next day they call in saying they have a fever. Or someone genuinely falls ill and the only guy who can act as the replacement decides to rather fake being ill than do the job he's about to be assigned to.

A lot of the troublemakers are related to some other employee or boss, making them very hard to fire because the upper management who have the power to do that don't want to risk causing things getting sour. For instance, a guy on my shift told his coworker halfway through the day that he was feeling ill and would be leaving.

The other guy told him to report to me, but he just said there's no need to do that and left. The thing is, he was the shift's on-duty fireman. Had a fire started, there would have been nobody to direct the firefighting. The only thing he got was a verbal warning from the facility chief.

But perhaps the worst thing is that most of your day is filled with nothing, especially in swing and night shifts. You just sit there doing whatever the corporate firewall allows you to do, and that's it. Nothing ever happens if things are going well, and 8 hours can be hell of a long time to sit around fiddling thumbs. On the floor you have the machines to operate and other guys to chat with.

And don't let me get started on SAP. God help us all. For aspiring shift foremen, I can only say this: You're teflon, don't ever let anything stick.

Username: nulboard

Being a 9-1-1 Dispatcher has it's perks, I suppose. As a PD employee you can sometimes get in on certain discounts proffered by businesses and interaction with officers tend to be MUCH more favorable if they know what you do. You get to take emergency calls without actually having to see the situation or have the risk of being shot at, which some people may think is thrilling, but...

If any of you out there are considering becoming a 9-1-1 Dispatcher here's something to consider: I have ceaseless overtime brought on by a perpetual lack of staff caused, in part, by the conditions of this job not even considering the stress and horror and banality of it all.

If they DO hire a new dispatcher it is a minimum of 6-9 MONTHS before they will be released and can work a shift independent of their trainer. It takes MUCH longer to make a new Dispatcher than it does an Officer, and that is bullshit.

I get no breaks, No lunches, I work every holiday, usually one of my two off days, and most of those are 12 hour shifts. In 12 years I have had ONE Xmas morning with my children. Planning events and vacations is near impossible since the schedule doesn't usually come out until the month has already begun and my leave probably won't get approved anyway due to the staffing situation.

I am essentially on-call, 24/7 and if something happens and my relief doesn't show up to work I am *obligated* to work until a replacement arrives, even if that means pulling a double.

You need to be able to predict sickness to within a minimum of 8 hours ahead of your shift. Be prepared to provide doctor's notes, even for one day. You will earn the ire and contempt from all of your coworkers because of the burden you put on them so you'd BETTER be sick as a dog.

There may not be a job that is more thankless where your efforts are completely invisible. If you do a good job, an officer will get the credit. If you fuck up, you will be thrown under the bus so fast it will make your head spin.

Unlike officers, the department will not stick their neck out for a civilian and there is no such thing for a Dispatcher as paid suspension. If you get suspended, you aren't even allowed to use personal time.

You get no resolution. You send cops, EMT, and Fire out to horrible situations but you very rarely get any form of outcome. Did that person survive? Who knows? Not you. You're a civilian.

You're still a PD employee, so you're expected to conduct yourself as a representative of the department. You are also subject to all the flak people like to give cops nowadays. When people are pissed off, it's the Dispatchers they call and cuss out on the phone. We are the first point of contact.

You are the literal First Responder, but in most states you aren't considered one. Instead you are considered office staff. You must be able to handle all the stress and all the horror without telling anyone. We aren't even supposed to share with our family who, by the way, will get tired of hearing your stories very quickly.

Your life and career become mired in negativity and stress. You sit pretty much constantly, with all the negative health implications that has, and when you finally get off there's a pretty small chance that you feel like doing ANYTHING, let alone exercising. Many of us are stress-eaters, leading to a tendency for dispatchers to be overweight.

Why do it? In my case it's the insurance. Best in my state, and it doesn't cost me a dime. I support a family of 6 with this job. It is sacrifice because, if I were single, there's no way I'd put up with this. If Healthcare was a right in the US, I'd quit in a heartbeat.

Username: Dalivus

I worked manufacturing movie props for 2 1/2 years right after college. You've likely seen my work in large budget Hollywood movies.I didn't need my degree to do the job, but I still had to fight to get the job.

A lot of people want the job and it is a lot easier to get in if you know someone already working there. After working there for a couple months the owner of the company was surprised to see someone he didn't recognize and asked me who's kid I was. Turns out the majority of the people working there are related and get in through their families.

The pay started a dollar above minimum wage for me. Given the before mentioned problem of many people wanting the job they could keep the pay low. They also told us (incorrectly and illegally) we were not allowed to join the union in our department.

They claimed to be a union shop to customers (prop masters and studios), but kept wages low by keeping people from joining the union. My coworkers kept trying to negotiate to get to $15/hr. This lead to one of my Coworkers being told how replacable he was.

Eventually they had to replace people, and the replacements were laid off for not having the skill set for the job, or quit when they found out their pay wouldn't increase.The job could be fun, despite most of it being doing detail work that likely wouldn't even be visible on film.

The job also entailed things like building the boxes for the props. This was an ordeal, often involving cutting flammable toxic foam with a laser (violates OSHA). What made it worse was that one of my bosses would throw in the Box for free to try to sweeten the deal, but not budget hours for it. This made props both late and over budget.

In addition, it was always a time crunch. My bosses tended to give me jobs late and lie to the customers about it. A delayed prop could cost loads of money in delays on set. If you make a mistake you have to rebuild the prop with less time until you get it right.

We usually worked 6am to 6pm, so a 12 hr shift with a 1hr unpaid lunch, and a short paid break at 9. Typically 5 days a week. When work was slow we'd get laid off for weeks with little notice, when it was busy we'd have to work later and sometimes Saturday.

A big advantage of the job was supposed to be the ability to moonlight. It was a well equipt shop full of machines. However, we were usually exhausted after 12 hr shifts, and some of the bosses wanted the shop closed whenever we weren't working on work stuff.

Often we could only make our own stuff on break or during lunch. They often made exceptions for themselves, keeping the shop open for themselves or asking me to help them build things during break or lunch. My good bosses would at least pay me for my time out of pocket, but the boss I'm complaining about the most in this post never payed me for my time.

All in all I had a lot of fun working on stuff people see in movies. However, I am often told by people that they are jealous of my old job. I just have to shake my head, not sure if laughing or crying would be more appropriate. At the end of it all the pay wasn't enough so I went back to school for another degree and have a better job now.

At least half the people I knew there quit or were fired (including the guy who was hired into the position they dangled over my head as a promotion), and the worst possible people took over. There's no reason for me to go back, and I have mixed feelings when people ask me to get them a job there.

Username: EclecticInnovator

Makeup artist. Most people think it’s lalala let’s play in makeup it’s so fun! Doing your own makeup, getting ready to go out is fun. I’m not doing that.

This industry (film, fashion, TV, commercial, e-comm) is about 20% makeup AT MOST. The other 80% and up is Paperwork (I am an accountant, tax preparer, money manager, I receive emails and return them daily, hourly, if I miss an email I might lose a job in three minutes, receipt stacker, insurance is a requirement, I bill clients and keep them on a schedule, have to keep track of business expenses separately from personal, etc etc etc)

Inventory (can’t run out of things I use for every job, have to order things in time to receive them, don’t let things get too old) Website (update after every few jobs, overhaul regularly)

Research (new tech, new techniques, industry changes, is this production company a good one, is this location safe, what are my peers doing, does this company pay on time, who did their last campaign, this trendy new ingredient - is it any good? who is this new brand, who owns this other one, who is this client)

Client relations (one of the few things separating me from other artists is how much my clients like me. Or don’t)
Kit updating (new products, new bags, new technology, new brands, new employees in PR who give me gratis, new trends)

Organization (I have an entire 7x12 room for makeup and hair supplies, the investment of time, energy, and money into organization is exhausting)
Chasing a paycheck (paychecks occasionally go missing - did they not send it? Or did they take out taxes and send it without an invoice number for my records? Who can tell)

Wardrobe maintenance (I must look professional in 90 degree shoots outside, in multi-billion dollar corporate offices, twenty-hour shoots in hundred-year old armory basements, and exteriors in winter. I have totally separate work wardrobes from my regular clothes)

Health management (I’m exposed to sick people all the time. “Fashion Week Flu” is a really thing. This has increased a hundredfold recently)

Budgeting (so I get through months of few jobs without losing my apartment)
Networking (social media, making friends and keeping them, having people I can trust to hand work to and take work from)

Education (that I pay for and take time off for)
Understanding and predicting the industry trends

The psychological drain of talent who isn’t cooperative, producers who think your department is a waste of money, and a crew who think you’re a waste of space.

Not to mention that each job requires a slightly different kit. This means that I have to touch everything in my kit before and after every job. I have basically, three to five different kinds of kit, and they run from a 30lb backpack to about 120lbs in five bags, that requires a car service to transport.

Another not-to-mention is basic sanitation requires me (and always has) to clean everything I’ve touched during and after every single job.

It’s not like I don’t enjoy my work - I’ve been on movie sets, joked around with celebrities, stood on stage on Broadway, chased by paparazzi, been on tv and movies, been hugged by clients, paid 1k for thirty seconds of work, I shop a lot, and play a lot, and get to spend days having coffee with friends and calling it work.

My job is amazing and the creative process is almost as rewarding as the paychecks, but it sure as shit is not putting pink lipstick on a friend.

Username: Constant-Wanderer

Making video games. I had this idea that it's a super fun, super cool and creative process where you can do whatever you imagine. Nope, not at all. The fun and creative part is the very beginning, when all the core ideas have to be found.

That's where you're full of dreams and cool ideas. But when you start actually working on them, reality catches you back. Making game is very slow and comes with a lot of reality checks. The limit is not your imagination. It's time, skills, money, and team management.

The amount of pressure is just insane. Bad communication can ruin a project, the amount of focus you need is huge, and there is so much to do... Like, SO MUCH. Just tell yourself, when you play a game, that for every little detail you see, someone had to spend time and thought to make it.

So much work has been done and didn't make it into the final product because in the end it was bad. So many hours have been spend correcting and fixing stupid bugs that shouldn't happen. So many fights and elongated meetings about various features.

As an indie, you basically spend years working on something not even knowing if it's gonna work out, so maybe you'll just go bankrupt lmao. And if you work for triple A's, you'll literaly have no more life as soon as you're one year in production before the release.

You'll sleep at the studio, work every day without vacation with tremendous stress and for 12hours each day. Oh by the way, sometimes, features get completely given up so basically 2 months of work can be completely erased, and even, in big studios like Ubisoft, they basically have multiple big projects being started at the same time by different teams, and after like 1 or 2 years of development, the producers can come and say "the game won't sell.

Stop it, let's throw it all away, and reorganize the teams. The 3d department will join project X and the devs will help out on project Y". Yes, believe me it happens. Just 2 years of work in the trash. They have the money to do so.

Oh and, no, you don't get to play all day. You'll hate the game you make with all the passion you have. You won't be able to tell if it's fun anymore so you just rely on what people tell you. Even when it's done, you won't be proud to show it because you'll only see what's lacking.

And of course you won't have fun playing it, duh. Not to mention, your experience when playing games will change, because you'll look at it differently and basically analyze everything.

In this industry, the shittiest job by far is QA. It's the guys who test the game to find bugs. It's very low pay, the guys aren't respected depsite their job being essential, and it's just the freacking worst. No, you don't "play" the game. You test chunks.

You don't have time to enjoy the story or whatnot. You don't play and just stumble on a problem and write it down. It's very methodical and yiu have strict guidelines. You play a part of the game over, over, over and over and over again for 2 days.

And then move on to the next. Then you have to write the bug reports for the devs, but make sure to reproduce it many times before ! Straight up hell. If you've thought of doing this, f*cking don't.

Overall, it's a challenging and demanding career, whether you do concept art, game design, 3d, animation or anything. You'll be pushed to the edge. It has its rewards and it's fulfilling, if you've found your place, but it's NOT what you think it is.

Username: [deleted]

Working at an ice cream shop. 9/10 customers will say shit like “Eat ice cream all day? Sign me up!” And simile BS. Can’t tell you how many people have declined a receipt because “they don’t return ice cream” or been too good for sprinkles because they’re “a purist.” Don’t even get me started on the fragile masculinity of many men who walk into the shop.

Seriously, it’s like any other food service, but you’re in a position where most everyone is celebrating something, treating theirselves, or something of high emotional importance- this leads to a new level of entitlement you wouldn’t believe.

Most people are completely willing to hold up a 20+ minute line simply because they’re unwilling to compromise their own experience whatsoever, even at the detriment of others. Likewise, the people who wait in that line will then complain more than normal because they set expectations way higher for their ice cream experience than most other things.

People regularly decide they don’t like flavors they’ve purchased, try to complain after they’ve eaten their entire ice cream about something being incorrect, CONSTANTLY order flavors/toppings/sauces/cones which don’t exist at your store (but they had it once at some shop 15 countries away, so why don’t we have it?), ask what flavors are similar to other flavors they get at other stores (I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with every Ben and Jerry’s flavor which has ever existed, please go to Ben and Jerry’s if you want Ben and Jerry’s), or ask you to “surprise” them- with an assortment of more than 25-30 flavors, ranging from spicy to floral, I can almost guarantee you’ll pick a flavor better suited for you than any server that you haven’t guided in any capacity.

By far the worst thing though, without a doubt, is the amount of people who are horrifically belligerent, mean, or insanely entitled who come in for ice cream. I’ve had a father intentionally let his child urinate on the floor of the shop because he was unhappy with the nearest bathroom being 30 seconds away,

I’ve had people threaten to “call the mayor” because they disliked the layout of the store, I’ve had people smoke meth, people attempt to break things, wasted pregnant women, creepy flirtation, drunks passing out, escorts, threats, forced entries after hours, etc.

I’ll leave you will this:
- If you’ve missed the operating hours, come back another day. Servers regularly stay at (good) ice cream shops until midnight-1am cleaning sprinkles, cookies, and spills from every crevice of every furniture item.
- Servers don’t control the flavors, toppings, pricing, sizing, or really anything else.

- Clean up after yourself, we’re not a full service restaurant and not staffed enough to perform duties as such.
- I’m not hiding your favorite flavor in back if we’re out. I would gladly have that option in the case if it were in stock, I can promise you I’d avoid hearing you whine about having to pick one of our 25 other flavors.

Remember, we’re here to help you and give you a great experience - we absolutely want to do this, most of us enjoy the customer interaction, but please treat us like humans and remember that you’re not God.

As soon as you begin to treat a hospitality employee (in any occupation) as lesser than yourself, you will receive the *BARE* minimum. If you treat us well, I guarantee you will receive some of the best service you’ve ever experienced.

Username: KingGGL

Performing with Disney on Ice. More drama than musical theatre actors, lots of red flags, safety concerns and arbitrary rules that are supposedly for performer safety but are only enforced until it creates a mild inconvenience for the bosses.

People stay with the company long enough and they get promoted to positions they’re unqualified for, then when they want to leave they train someone else, so it becomes the blind leading the blind in terms of management.

You’re on the road 8-10 months a year typically, with no breaks in the schedule. The pay is horrendous if you’re an ensemble skater. I was on a specialty contract or I would not have accepted the job. They often don’t let you see the show schedule before you sign, or resign your contract with them.

They can make you do up to 12 performances a week without extra pay, and as many as 3 a day. No overtime. No holiday pay. No vacation days. No per diem. I was at the venue 60 hours a week because they had no understudy for me and they were making me train a few people for my track before shows every day, without extra pay.

Even after 500+ performance we still had rehearsals almost every week because whatever producer or visiting performance director decided they didn’t like something, or wanted to try something else in a specific scene even though they had zero creative power on our show.

If you’re lucky you get to travel to cool places internationally, but what they don’t tell you is in most international markets you often do 15-20 shows a week without a day off, and after doing that many shows you’ll be too tired to do anything when you finally do get a day off to recover. (I was on a very popular, highly acrobatic show, so the performance fatigue may not be the case for all shows.)

In promotional materials they billed us as elite athletes because of the nature of the show, but didn’t treat us as such. They only fed us on 3 show days, and on travel day our “food stop” was usually a Walmart, or a strip mall with a few fast food restaurants.

Contrary to popular belief, Disney does not own Disney on Ice. It’s owned by FELD, who owned Ringling, which had many serious injuries and safety issues during its run. Lots of the same safety issues were apparent on my show.

I once had to decommission an apparatus because it was unsafe for a performer to use, I was like, 6 or 7th in the chain of command, it never should have gotten to me to discover the damaged equipment. They once put someone on an aerial apparatus they had never trained on, with no safety mat because “they needed that spot filled” even though I told them it wasn’t safe, and that I had not trained them to perform that track. There’s a reason the company is on the blacklist for all the performer unions.

After my first year with them they offered me a $15 a week raise and wouldn’t negotiate when I asked for additional compensation for the understudy tracks and responsibilities I had taken on in the first year that were not in my contract.

Apparently they also don’t negotiate with agents. When I got hired someone told me if I had given the contract to my agent then the offer would have been rescinded. Every performer there complains about how they’re treated but they’re all too afraid to speak up because they think they’ll get fired.

Username: v1sibleninja

Sex store worker. I've worked in a few as a manager, educator, and buyer for the company, not the shady ones with adult theater booths or anything But nicer ones. really frustrating to try to educate the public on how to practice safe sex when everyone is making dildo jokes.

I'm sorry, but after working for a year in the industry I'm pretty sure I have heard it all, and that just after the first year. After a few years it gets REALLY old and annoying. There's definitely a time and place for the dildo jokes. And it's not all the time.

Sometimes it's someone's very first time coming into a store and they've been trying to get courage for a long time and they get scared away because of those people. There's also some medical conditions where people need toys oh, and they also don't like the stigma around it and are super uncomfortable being in the stores.

I remember in particularly when this elderly woman came in, she was probably over 70 oh, she had a couple friends with her who were encouraging her to try to buy a toy because her husband had passed away and she was struggling with lust. These poor Christian women who were from the same prayer group, came into a very popular sex store (that also owns a magazine come on you know what store it is lol) they were very nervous, but the friends were supporting the one Widow.

As I was speaking to this Widow about her needs and how this was completely normal and how it's fine to feel this way a group of gaggling young 18 year old comes in and starts making inappropriate jokes, cursing up a storm, throwing dildos at each other. That Widow saw that and ran away.

She came back like 2 months later with the same group of friends and finally got some stuff that she needed. Something cute is that the toy that she picked out was actually the same name as her husband, I don't know if that's a coincidence or fate, but I love it.

Oh and yes I have had to throw out people for deep-throating the toys. We had a man that we called the Deep-throater that would come around every couple weeks or so and we would literally have to hide every single tester toys that we had out on display or else he would completely take that bad boy down his throat.

Yes he was SUPER CREEPY. never talking just eyeing the toys. Anything he did buy from us was paid for in coins and he would take it right out the package and deep throat it right then and there over the counter and walk out the store with a it down his throat.

Of course you get all of the men that come in there that see you working there and automatically assume that you are a slut and try to give you money to sleep with them. Oh yeah and also you get the weird people who are into taboo fetishes and showing them off in front of you and sometimes those customers can make it be very very very uncomfortable for us as professionals (race play, power plays, treating people worse than dirt dehumanizing them in front of us.) NOT to mention the people who try to have sex in store/the parking lot.

But hey I'm just here to help yall figure out how to get your rocks off comfortably and make you feel all comfy in and with the process.

Username: MelloMS3goddess

Book editor. The pay is horrible in one of the most expensive cities in the world (NYC, in the states). To make it to the very senior level is very hard to do as there are only a few slots for each editor—you have to wait for someone to quit or retire to ever get promoted (which may be common in many jobs, but hasn’t been my experience since leaving the field).

It’s a 100% mentorship position: you start as an assistant and work your way to where you can get your own assistant. So if your boss sucks and is controlling, you have no options to show your worth or get the experience needed to grow. Or, if your boss is overworked/lazy/loves you they never want you to get past their assistant because you do all their grunt work + real work.

You don’t read books all day. You do clerical work all day (at least until you get promoted, which, see above) and read shitty books on your weekends to try to find a piece of gold. And even if you do find gold, you might not convince the sales team to put their effort in, or the upper editors might be too wary to give someone lowly such a good book and “steal” it.

One book flops and you lose all trust to get a big enough budget to buy another manuscript, and if you don’t have the budget to buy a good manuscript then SHOCKINGLY all your next books flop, too.

You get into publishing because you love reading, and you leave publishing because it has ruined reading for you and you mentally edit everything you read for fun. And if you still read for fun you think about how you should be reading for work instead.

Oh and it’s insanely competitive to get hired and then even worse after you’re hired. There’s a limited budget to pay for manuscripts, so you always want your cubicle mate to fail so you can get more of their piece of the pot to buy better manuscripts and get more trust and work your way higher only to have even less free time because now all eyes are on you and you are in bidding wars for every book. But if the marketing team doesn’t like the cover art, that $$$ you bid could cost you your career.

There are so many factors out of your control. But I really quit because I saw the life of everyone higher up and didn’t want their job. I worked for the biggest US publisher in one of the biggest editorial departments and every senior editor was divorced or single, commuted long hours, and when you asked what they did for a weekend or vacation they would tell you excitedly how many manuscripts they read. That was it, that was your life in NYC, the most amazing city to explore.

I quit the business about 8 years ago and everyone I started with had also since left, save for one or two. The ones with trust funds or connections or both. When I tell people what I used to do, they are shocked i left a “dream job,” but I am so much happier, healthier, and fulfilled in a much less glamorous job for a no-name company (and make way more money).

But it WAS amazing to tell slush pile authors you were buying their book. Literally making dreams come true. I am still in the thank you pages of a few authors I discovered that way and it’s the tiniest bit of private happiness.

Username: idafr8

I once worked as a pool service technician for about 5 months. In other words, I was the "pool boy" - I think everyone knows the joke. It was a nice contrast from the five years I spent working for McDonald's - working outside and seeing new places was a huge plus of the job. However, the reality of it was somewhat different.

I initially scored this job through their manager who just so happened to drink at the same pub I did. I told him about how I quit McDonald's and he immediately offered a spot for me at the pool shop he managed. They just let someone else go and were seeking another to fill the spot.

I jumped at the chance because A, f**k McDonald's, and B, I'll give anything a go. Turns out this manager had a lot of loose ends - two kids he never sees, a crippling cocaine addiction and a hit-and-run charge that our boss never knew the full story of. Basically, this guy was an idiot and his issues started becoming more and more prevalent as time progressed.

Anyway, moving on to the "not fun" aspects of this job;
- Nosy, arrogant customers
- Tight, cramped working environments
- A LOT MORE heavy, manual labour than one would expect

- Handling of dangerous chemicals without proper PPE (e.g. risking calcium burns from stirring calcium pellets and pool water with your bare hands, risking inhalation of hydrochloric acid fumes, etc. etc.)
- Not having any of the right qualifications to be on what were technically construction sites, but the boss didn't seem to mind

This is not without mentioning the fact that I was also left alone to load and unload the truck, do all the driving and clean the truck at the end of the week while the manager and the boss sat on their asses doing nothing.

Nearly five months into this job and I'm at my breaking point - up until this point, the manager was treating me like an expendable piece of crap and I just copped it sweet. The last day I worked consisted of what I thought was just a pipe repair job, on a property about 35-40 minutes away from town.

We get to the place and start repairing the pipe. Then, the manager tells me to get two bottles of algaecide (algae killer) out of the truck. He didn't tell me that we needed two bottles of algaecide when we left the shop that morning. So I give him the bad news and he starts losing it at me, telling me how useless I am and that it's my responsibility to make sure that we had it.

I had copped this crap from him for long enough - I barked back, telling him that if he was doing his job correctly as a manager, we wouldn't have this problem. He muttered a few words under his breath and immediately shut up once I asked him what he said.

The next morning, I rang my boss to tell him I wasn't coming in because I had injured my back due to the 200kg worth of salt I was expected to carry each day. I quit via email without notice a week later, it was the best decision I ever made. No more getting paid a measly $20/hour to put up with listening to Brantley Gilbert, Jason Aldean and Three Days Grace all day. Oh yeah, the dude also had terrible taste in music.

Username: beerb4breakfast

Truck driving. This is my experience in the UK, it may be different elsewhere. Firstly the 'driver shortage' myth. You'll see adverts from training companies saying there's a shortage of 30,000 drivers and you can earn top money as a driver. It's all lies. The industry is actually flooded with cheap labour from Eastern Europe.

Most firms now outsource their logistics to one of half a dozen large 3PLs like the one I work for. Every 3-5 years the contract is retendered and often changes hands based on cost. That saving usually comes from eroding the drivers pay and benefits.

Many are quite happy to be paying out to agencies for staff to avoid pension liabilities, employers NI, holiday pay etc and have the ability to bin drivers at any point, with or without cause and with little notice. If I'm at a store and their recycling isn't presented correctly I can refuse to take it with no fear. An agency driver *should* be able to do the same, but they know that one customer complaint and they aren't booked again tomorrow.

The agencies all compete against each other for work and undercut each other, again that comes from the driver's pay. Agencies are no fonder of paying for holidays than their customers so they spent years encouraging drivers to set up as ltd cos and be in fake self employment.

The drivers get an extra quid an hour and make most of their extra money from minimising tax take. It's an IR35 contractor scenario now. Obviously loads of people being happy to take £12 an hour knowing they're keeping £11 of it suppresses the wages of the people who probably need to be earning £15 an hour to keep £11. Then they encourage you to blame the foreign drivers but that's another story.

When you have shelled out the best part of £3k for your licences and managed to find yourself a job you'll probably be working 60 plus hours a week for a flat £9-10 an hour. If you're lucky you'll maybe get a couple of quid an hour extra once you've done 50 hours.

If you're lucky you'll get a job that pays about £13 an hour but you're strictly limited to 45 hours a week with no overtime rates. Unsociable hours, weekend premiums, overtime rates have largely vanished from the industry.

If you're a 'tramper' (sleeping in the truck every night) you'll struggle to get parked in services. If you do it's expensive, the facilities are dirty and unhygienic, and there's no security whatsoever. Then they'll charge you £25 (or your company if you're lucky) for the privilege. Failing that you are parking in a layby or industrial estate and crapping in a carrier bag.

If you're on RDC work you will usually have your keys taken from you and have to sit in a waiting from for possibly up to four hours whilst you are unloaded. This is basically like a hopsital waiting room on uncomfortable seats. The worst was three hours on a metal chair at a Sainsbury's RDC.

Then you've got all the traffic, roadworks, towns that hate trucks and try to make life as hard as possible for you, planners chasing you to find out where you are every five minutes and so on.

Username: DarkLordTofer

This question was made for me.I work at Medieval Times. For those who dont know, we are essentially a novelty chain of resturaunt across the US, which is supposed to be themed as 14th century Spain, all of our locations are shaped like castles, we serve a three course meal with a show of jousting, tournament style games, displays of well trained horses and a falcon presentation. The food is pretty good despite making it all in mass quantities of 1300 for a sold out show.

Obviously, it's a fun time and it's a great place to go for birthday parties or corporate events or anything like that because its pretty unique and the atmosphere encourages you to let loose and have fun. It's not too "Larp-y" because you are not required to wear a costume or anything and you dont have to talk in a weird accent if you dont want to, you can just come in plain clothes and still have fun as 99% of our crowds do, and obviously some go the extra step and get all dressed up.

So many guests assume that it's so much fun working there. However, as the server, I am not being served massive quantities of roasted chicken and beer, I dont get to sit down and enjoy the show much.

The show is 2 hours long and our service schedule is spread out throughout the show, and we essentially have arena style seating so theres alot of stairs and as you can imagine, in order to fit a full house of 1300, our building is very large so some parts of the arena is about (I'm just guessing here I've never really thought about it til now) ~500 feet long. Our kitchen is constantly in the high 90°-low 100°, and the arena itself is about 2 stories tall as far as elevation goes.

So for 2 hours, I need to constantly be interacting with about 30 guests while attempting to stay in character, serving food at a rapid rate, cleaning off old bowls and such as I go, while constantly running up and down 2 flights of stairs, carrying 7 pitchers of soft drinks on a tray on my shoulder, serving the majority of my time IN THE DARK (this is the worst part of it tbh), and the only time I really have away from guests is when I'm standing in the kitchen waiting to grab a serving tray straight out of the oven in the kitchen to carry it back down the stairs on the other side of the building to serve in the dark again.

All to come to the end of the night to have typically 25% of my people who were all smiles and friendly to me and asking for extras of this and that to leave me an empty tip tray for my service for the past 2 hours. The bright side is that I have amazing cardio and coordination. The whole thing is honestly harder than most workouts I'll do at the gym.

Please tip your servers people (Americans, this is directed at you, you should know better. As for visiting tourists, I understand your waiters and servers make more hourly and dont rely on tips, but in america it is not a kind gesture; it is an obligation to tip. The meals are cheaper because the price of service is not included in the bill, which allows you to tip based on the quality of service you receive.)

Username: Brothersunset

Landscaping in my area is common for most hispanics or construction. At my school I over heard through a wall which is thin and that day we had a quiet work day. The other side were new freshmen and my class was a junior class so we hear alot of crazy stuff from them.

One day the teacher was talking about them needing an education so they needed to study. One guy was saying nah I dont need education ima join the landscapers. Ive been a landscaper in my family owned company and its hard as he'll.

You have to wake up early, head to get the truck, load up equipment,get food or get extra workers close to bakeries or donut shops and recruit workers, then if you work in rich areas then they will most likely have a policy of when to make noise or work. If you get a job where there are pets and the owners dont clean upafter them then you better watch out for there dump.

If the owner is a cheap person then there will be a chance that you wont be paid. This mainly applies to self employed people. There is also your equipment and supplies. My family company does remodeling lanscaping, tree trimming and palm tree, irrigation, and clean up hill sides.

The worst ones are usually hill side clean ups since there are dangers of falling and in my area its mainly desert or hill sides and snakes or rodents live there. Then there is all the roberies. Weve been robed like 8 times over the span of 15 years. Weve lost 2 weed wackers. 1 chain saw.

Two bush trimmers short and long ones. We've also lost a few tools and 2 leaf blower. So yeah plus there is also the hard labour. As such if your gonna go into this buissnes I suggest you find work in the rich areas cause most of those places pay well and the work you do is also limmited plus most of the clients wont be out besides a few times to ask you to come in a day before an event or to do a certain task.

If you get individual houses as in middle class houses you will need more houses and will also be over worked. Small houses have smaller yards but you also have to take care of more. They have a lawn you mow it every week or two if its slow.

You have bushes your gonna need to trim them down, worse if the owner wants it to look natural trim. There's no grass then there will most likely be rock or bark then there will be weeds growing. A tree is there the leaves will fall and make a mess.

If its the fall then the trees leaves will be more easily droped because of some wind. Thats most I've the reasons small houses arent good. Plus you will get payed less than a bigger and wealthier area. Thats why I some times tell my friend that land scaping isint a good place or pay as well.

Most of them tell me that I'm already making dough and I just say he'll I'm already getting health problem. Not all landscaping is the same but the majority will be hard labour. Espacially during summers in heat. So I suggest find a better job.

Well sorry for a long one just had to say pros and cons. Hope those freshmen dont go down that path. I dont think they will last long out in the heat or cold.

Username: REXER_rex

I am an auto racing driver who works at an auto manufacturers experience program where anyone (yes ANYONE) can come drive the cars on a track with an instructor. Every day people tell me how lucky I am to have this job, all they see is us driving these relatively boring (to the instructors) street cars vaguely fast around a track. We all feel pretty whored out.

The best way to describe the job is teaching several adults every day their first 30 minute piano lesson again and again, while they’re mostly just interested in the novelty of sitting behind a piano and taking selfies. Also being polite is so difficult.

No one says before their first piano lesson “I’ve never played piano but I’ve always been interested and I listen to a lot of piano music so I’m fairly confident” and then ask their instructor “So how great was I?” Like bro you just spend 30 minutes doing this what do you want to hear? We teach about 4 sessions a day, and it’s 4 times of some moron not realizing how close they where to seriously totally a six figure car.

A lot of people also think the instructors are just there to “baby sit you” and make sure you “don’t drive too fast.” Like dude no one is worried about you driving too fast, we’re worried you’re going to scare yourself and hit the brakes somewhere stupid and upset the balance of the car and because you can’t react quick enough because you’re not used to sliding a car faster than around a parking lot or roundabout you’re going to spin it. All while going probably 15mph slower through that same turn than a professional would.

On your first couple hours of trying something new, you’re not going to even approach the level of someone who has only done that craft from the time they where 15 to 30. Yeah you drive your corvette fast in the mountains, I’m sure you have fun. That has nothing to do with the hours I spent pouring over post practice session data and video for weeks before a race.

More than that, let’s say I’m a track day hobbiest who works here out of boredom or for fun, why would you argue with an instructor who spends 10 hour days, 4 or 5 days a week, on the same track in the same cars?

The worst thing are people who brag about “scaring their instructor” because they think they were fast. No... you made your instructor nervous because you weren’t listing and you were making tons of mistakes but still trying to push the car to the limit.

It’s shocking to me when people can’t even correct a small slide or wiggle over in our safe area (where we let you play somewhere safe to make mistakes and you can’t hit anything) and yet that want to drive at the limit on a track. If the car steps out on track over 90mph it’s gonna be a lot harder to catch than at 20mph on our soft concrete!

I am fully ready to quit this job. It’s cheap thrills for morons. I can’t believe I typed all this out finally. I’ve been needing to get it off my chest for a long time.

Username: SpectrumwireandREEEE

Club DJing. When I started out, I threw a monthly event in collaboration with a local skate shop where I would just play punk rock and hip hop for the most part, while we played skate videos on the TV's and had crazy giveaways like full decks or apparel or free drinks from whatever booze company was sponsoring me that month. It was a great time cuz mixing wasn't really part of the game so I basically did whatever I wanted as drunk as I wanted to be and still managed to pull in hundreds of people and dollars every time.

After a year of these monthly events, it got tired and I decided to retire the event but in that year I got to learn a lot about mixing and real DJing and so I was asked to be the new in house DJ for the club and play sets every single Friday night. The money was REALLY good but I managed to pick up a nasty booze and drug abuse problem thanks to free/discounted drinks and patrons eager to share their coke or speed.

So that's the first shitty part of the job. If you have little self control or an addictive personality, you're fucked. By year two, I couldn't afford not to DJ because of massive drug debts and beer tabs.

The second shitty, but less heavy, thing about the gig was dealing with drunk college kids. Particularly college aged girls. I know dude-bro's get a lot of hate for the kind of shit they pull at bars and clubs (and I'm coming for them in a sec), but from a DJ standpoint, there is little worse than dealing with drunk, white, 19-21 year old girls.

They're always the ones who come up to the booth and say some racist shit about the music, or come in and spill their drinks all over my expensive equipment that I couldn't afford to replace, or treat my work area like it's their VIP coat check.

Nearly once a night, I'd have some drunk white chick remind me that she paid a whole $6 to get in so I better play Ja Rule or else she and her friends are leaving. They're literally Karen's in training.

And lastly... And the heaviest... honestly, after a while I felt like I was providing the soundtrack to sexual assault. I could see everything in that club from where my booth was, and the grab-assing and the predatory behavior exhibited by men on that dance floor bummed me the fuck out, and I felt like the soulless pop music about getting fucked up and getting laid that I was playing was encouraging it.

No matter how many times I'd have security investigate something I witnessed or how many times I called out a douche on the mic or how many times we took to social media to let people know that this was a female-friendly club and that behavior was absolutely not acceptable there, it just wouldn't stop.

A guy dumped his beer over my girlfriend's head because she rejected him and I said that's fucking it, I'm done. And I'm glad I quit because it made it much easier to get sober.

Username: moneenerd