getting a call from the plant in the middle of the night asking where their railcar of molasses is.

Making a death notification face to face to a mom who's son died in a freak accident working for you.

The son that she lived with who supported her and took care of her.

One of my first jobs was at a canning factory. To can corn, Matt Abbatacola, there are knife machines that cut the kernels off the corn. They sit about 4 feet off the ground on a metal floor that allows the discarded material to sluice through to the ground underneath where there was a drain channel to take it away.

My job was to crouch down underneath the floor with a hose to spray all the material into the drain. This is while all the sticky corn materials rain down on you all shift. For $3.35/hour which was minimum wage at the time. A summer of 6 night/72-hour weeks paid for 2 classes at UofI...and some buckets of Natural Light.

Good times.

I thought you worked at the Daily Herald. What happened, did one of your legmen overdose on caffeine?

One of my first jobs was at a canning factory. To can corn, Matt Abbatacola, there are knife machines that cut the kernels off the corn. They sit about 4 feet off the ground on a metal floor that allows the discarded material to sluice through to the ground underneath where there was a drain channel to take it away.

Some partners and I came very close to investing in a frozen vegetable company. I think it was in Carol Stream. The machines that moved and packaged the vegetables seemed very Rube Goldbergesque. As the peas and carrots were carried on the conveyers some would inevitably fall to the floor. I asked the guy who was showing us around about the waste and he said there was no waste as that stuff was collected to feed animals and/or prisoners. In fact they referred to it as the "prison mix".

Making a death notification face to face to a mom who's son died in a freak accident working for you.

The son that she lived with who supported her and took care of her.

Some partners and I came very close to investing in a frozen vegetable company. I think it was in Carol Stream. The machines that moved and packaged the vegetables seemed very Rube Goldbergesque. As the peas and carrots were carried on the conveyers some would inevitably fall to the floor. I asked the guy who was showing us around about the waste and he said there was no waste as that stuff was collected to feed animals and/or prisoners. In fact they referred to it as the "prison mix".

corn canning plant was the loudest fucking place I've been to and i've been to a lot! what a shitty job that would be!

i work for a company that supplies things to food processing companies. can't get into too much detail.

The ~8months I worked at Radio Shack, one of the days was Black Friday (they called it "hot friday"). It was awful. From 6am until about 10am, it was non stop people pushing, shoving, swearing, yelling, just to get a $10 Bluetooth or a $90 Garmin (after rebates). They advertised a 4gig Zune MP3 player for $60 or something insanely cheap like that, and we had two of them in the store. Two. The lady who was in the front of the line wanted one, and somehow didn't get it which I thought was bullshit. Plus, Local H was playing that night at Bourbon St and I wanted to go.

I asked my boss if I could work a 13 hour shift to have the evening off, the show started at 10 and I asked to be off at like 7 or 8. A reasonable request I thought since I was starting at 5:30am, and would only get a 15min break and an hour (unpaid) lunch. He had me scheduled until like 2pm, with a 2 or 3 hour break, then working 5 or 6pm until close at 10pm. I thought that was insane. That is how they scheduled everybody because we were a smaller location with only about 7 or 8 employees. I didn't know they could do such a thing.

It ended up working out because somebody got sick or had to leave or something so I covered him and it slowed down around 7 so I got to leave and catch the show. I ended up making some decent commission but nowhere near enough for me to put up with that crap again. It was still the single worst day I had working in retail. And there were some pretty fucked up situations with backed up toilets and roaches I had from my pizza days, but nothing compared to the sheer lunacy that was black Friday. Never again will I work a black Friday if I end up in retail. Working the day after Thanksgiving, around Xmas, and New Years Day making pizzas were all joys compared to black Friday.

I worked for the devil in human form for a year. Everyday was terrible.

I sat and watched as they pried his eyes open so they could shove more pepper spray into them.

Takes a special kind of stupid to mess with a cop's horse.

Takes a special kind of stupid to mess with a cop's horse.