What Was Your Worst Summer Job?

It seems that with the heat of summer often comes a wave of peculiar, sometimes awful, temporary gigs. Ryck’s story is just one example. From laborious duties a la “Fear Factor” to mind-numbing, repetitive tasks, summer jobs have chronically earned their own cheeky reputation. So just for kicks (and grounds for venting, of course), we’re currently holding our Worst Summer Job Contest through August 4th. The stories we’ve gotten thus far run the gamut. Here are a couple:

• Monster member anima3d posts: For eight hours a day, I compared the current New York City phone book to the previous year's, looking for new businesses that had cropped up in the intervening 12 months, and when I found one, I noted it on a data entry card. That card would be logged into a computer system that would place the new business on a mailing list to receive solicitations for accounting services. The type on the pages was miniscule, and the light was so poor I had to strain to see it. After several weeks of this, I started losing my eyesight.


• Monster member walden722 posts: My worst summer job was detasseling corn, which is basically like running a three-week, sleep-deprived, heatstroke-inducing, cross-country marathon while pulling the tops off of corn plants. We would work for three weeks straight with no days off and hit the buses at 5 am sharp, usually returning home around 4 or 5 pm. The mornings would start off with the corn being cold and covered in dew and us wearing ponchos made out of garbage bags, as they would only get torn anyway. By early afternoon, the humidity in the fields made it feel like it was 115 degrees, and in order to see the tassels you were required to look into the sun the entire time. I did not know you could sunburn your eyeballs, but it happened to me more than once!

So if you’re slaving through a summer job, read some of the posts on the contest message board. You might feel better about your own situation -- and maybe even submit a story of your own. Heck, you can win a video iPod and perhaps some of your sanity back.

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