I worked at a Peoria Goodwill while attending college. Quick tip: NEVER use a dressing room in a Goodwill. NEVER.

There were these two Asian albino twins that would come into the store, grab female shoes off the rack, and then go beat off in the dressing room. It was like seeing a lunar eclipse or a unicorn.

getting a call from the plant in the middle of the night asking where their railcar of molasses is. Plant is shut down without the molasses. knowing your ass is going to get chewed out by the general manager in the morning. fun times.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Is the plant manager Wyle E. Coyote?

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I was running a staffing agency that supplied waiters and cooks on catering jobs. There was no end to the headaches. Imagine the phone ringing at 3:30 a.m. with a guy calling off that morning's job that is supposed to begin at 5. Now, I've got to get up and start calling through my rolodex to find a guy who can make that job. Most likely I won't be able to so then I've got to call some corporate chef at an Aramark location to get my ass chewed.

But the worst was when some moron fucked something up at a private house party. I had done my best to clean up the staff and only use smart, competent people at these high end house parties. But the broad that I worked for had a bunch of losers that had been with her a long time and she always wanted to send them out to these Gold Coast or North Shore parties. And there were some big hitters. We worked an Obama fundraiser at Penny Pritzker's house, we did a party at Ann Lurie's house, and Chris Kennedy's wife was a regular customer. Those are just a few that I remember.

Anyway, one time this goof- I'll call her J.J.- the owner sent her out to a private house party as a captain no less. The thing went well through the service, so far, so good. But when the time came to clean up J.J. was loading the dishwaher and she couldn't find any dishwasher soap, Cascade or whatever, so she used the kind of dish soap that you use for hand washing, like Palmolive or Dawn, and put that shit in the dishwasher. It wasn't long before the kitchen was covered with soapy bubbles seeping out of the dishwasher. It was like a fuckin' episode of I Love Lucy. Guess who had to take that phone call and futilely try to placate that irate customer?

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Lunar eclipses are pretty common. There was one actually a couple days ago.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

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.

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

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

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.

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You know me like that.

Mendota Doc?

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Industrial accident before my time in the media.

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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".

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

We should have a drink and I can regale you of tales of measuring peas for hardness and determining the size of freezer peas while being showered in pea soap in the pea pit.

There must be a signature in there somewhere.

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You know me like that.

I was lucky when I did my obits they were over the phone. They still weren't easy to do.

Animal feed is what I run into more than not.

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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!

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

May I ask what you are doing in canning plants?

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

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Allan Canning or Gerber?

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my first job was mcdonald's. i don't recall if anyone ever tried to eat 80 nuggets. but at this time, there were no message boards. maybe someone on compuserve made a dare.

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.

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You're a real Local H fan, Frank. If you weren't you would have worked your whole shift, gone home, and watched them on Youtube.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I love my job. I do have some good student stories that would make you fear for the future but my worst stories are actually about other faculty members.
The one who is the coordinator of my program (not my boss, but does all the scheduling and planning of courses) is the worst. She is crazy. One year I was shadowing her for taking over a research conference here (I was the 'assistant'). She would send me materials to create a program for the conference at 8:00 am on a Saturday (with no notice before hand) and would want me to have it done by 10. I didn't have it done - I was busy with my kids at a christmas village/ice skating thing, so after 10 am she emailed me every 15 minutes. I emailed her and told her it was Saturday, I was busy with my kids and I would get to it when I had time. She was so pissed that she did call our dean to complain I wasn't doing the work. He called me and asked me why I hadn't done it and I explained why and he said he would placate her. I got it done but she was furious...actually she still is. That was four years ago.

Side note: I took over as the conference coordinator after that semester. I changed the timeline to get the work done for the conference so it wouldn't be last minute and now I have more posters and presenters in the conference than she ever had. However, she is still pissed at me and took away two of the classes that I love to teach and I basically teach only Introduction. I should have taken Freamon's advice from "The Wire." I should have never let it slip that I loathe teaching introduction because that's where she put me when she found out that I hated it.
Obviously, I have a million stories like this.

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

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

I can't remember a job that I completely loathed but the worst one probably had to be working at Foot
Locker in Gurnee Mills. This was back in the mid 90s. The job had its benefits of course with 40% off
discounts on merchandise and seeing all the newest stuff. I worked there for a number of years and
eventually convinced them to have me work on projects in the back like stocking new shoes or doing
inventory checks since I didn't really like working with customers too much. As a part timer during
the school year I was relagated to the back half of the store which was all the stuff on clearance including
racks and racks of shoes racked by size. My job was to walk the aisles and tuck in shoe laces and keep
the area nice and neat occasionally helping people get clothing off racks high on the wall with a shepherds
crook. The holidays were the absolute worst and some of the customers were professional shoplifters.
My main job was trying to stop people from stealing shoes. The worst losses we took were the baby
shoes. Just nuts what people will steal.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

It's not on the level of "Tales from food factories" but when I was a lab TA in college I finished teaching the introduction to the programming lab project and then watched people start. Within the first 5 minutes, one of the girls in the class started crying and told me she can't do it. It actually is a pretty terrible position to be in because you aren't supposed to help them too much because the point is to learn themselves but I doubt we are supposed to let them cry for an hour then go home(I save that for the bedroom). I was able to calm her down and help her out and get her started. She ended up doing the rest of it herself and survived the semester.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Used to be a parking lot attendant for the Rosemont Horizon / Allstate Arena. You got paid essentially nothing, but you got to see many of the concerts and shows for free. In the end, it really wasn't worth the time or energy. You would stand outside, usually freezing your balls off, while cars came flying at you filled with enraged assholes. Every type of crowd had their own special brand of asshole. When Pantera played in the 90s, this dude tried to pull a Blazing Saddles and punch out one of the cop horses in the middle of the parking lot. Every cop in Rosemont jumped the guy and beat the shit out of him. I sat and watched as they pried his eyes open so they could shove more pepper spray into them. Whenever we really hated the crowd, we would box people in five or six cars deep so that we knew they would be sitting and waiting for a long ass time. On top of all this, I'm pretty sure the planes flying over were dropping jet fuel on us.

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Great story. Rich and compelling.

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

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

A guy I know from Chicago Heights had a police dog set loose on him so he killed it with his bare hands. The cops acted like he had just killed one of them. In fact, I believe the call went out as "officer down".

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don