Dead-End Sh*t Jobs ... Yours?

[Schmidty]

I bartend at a nightclub in downtown Santa Barbara, CA. At 22yrs old, working every night making $200+ in tips, I thought that what I was doing was great for my age. But after reading the Millionaire Fast Lane, I now deem this job as shitty and am now on the constant pursuit of taking everything in my life to the next level.

I've never been one for posting in forums, but I see this one much different. This is my first post of hopefully many more...

 

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[SteveO]

Blaming jobs or anything else for being at a dead end is the real dead end.

Remembering where to put the emphasis when we write something online is critical, right? This is something that I learned from the B&P.

BLAMING jobs or anything else for being at a dead end is the real dead end.

This should be clearer.

 

[NoLackey]

I currently work for a large bank working with delinquent real estate taxes.

I wouldn't say it's dead end, as I could continue to progress and move up, but it's not what I want at all. It's simply a means to pay the bills. I despise office politics and that is how you get to the top, especially in this type of industry. My team consists of people who do everything by the book in hopes of getting a pat on the back from the manager. It's soul sucking.

 

[IceCreamKid]

1. Age 12 illegally working under the table for cash at Jamba Juice. Less than minimum wage.

2. Worked in a factory during freshman year college manufacturing computer parts alone in a room for 8 hours a day. Had to quit that job because it was literally mind numbing doing the same repetitive task over and over again...thought I was going insane.

3. Professional chocolate hustler salesperson for Godiva chocolates. That job was actually fun because all of my co-workers were potheads who just wanted to have fun haha but the pay was garbage.

The truth is you learn something from all of your shit jobs, so nothing is ever truly a bad experience unless you choose to look at it through the victim lens.

 

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[dfontes1188]

1. Supermarket- 8 years. Started as a bagger and worked my way up to a supervisor in 1.5 years. It was fun at first, but now political correctness is more important than common sense. Whatever, I just read my books on copy while I'm there.

2. Mall Security - 2 year. Supervisor. Embarrising. But nothing to do here except read and talk to suppliers, build an ecomm store.

 

[Stubbers]

My first job at 16 having already been accepted into the British Army was emptying street rubbish bins in Glasgow! It was the best paid job for my age and full of real hardcore Scottish characters ... The guys there were a real scream! I knew nothing else would ever be that bad

 

[Deleted0x8687]

I'm posting this here in Your Fastlane Plan because sometimes, dead-end jobs are a necessary evil. We all have bills and obligations to pay -- sometimes dead-end *shit* jobs are just the bandaid we need to pay the bills while our greater focus is put into our efforts on business growth.

So with that said, what Dead-End *shit* jobs have you had? Do you currently have?
I was thinking back to all the crap jobs I've had and I am amazed I had the fortitude to endure it all.

My list:

1) Pizza delivery (Had to mop floors too)
2) Subway sandwich lunch driver (Lasted 3 weeks)
3) *Student* Painter (Lasted 6 weeks)
4) Charity organization can collector
5) Bus boy, Chinese restaurant (cockroaches in back!!!)
6) Wholesale flower deliverer
7) Plumbing day laborer
8) Stock boy, Sears Roebuck
9) Newspaper delivery at 3am in the morning
10) Hospital TV system auditor (lasted 2 days)

Much of these jobs I had after college graduation. :nonod:

If you find yourself in a *shit* job, take a deep breath and reassure yourself that it is only temporary. Your job is no predictor of your true potential but only a byproduct of your circumstances and your choices.

I did my best thinking while enduring these jobs -- I remember mopping floors and coming up with ideas as well as stockpiling motivation. The thoughts "I'm better than this!" builds and builds until the fire under your a$$ can no longer be tolerated and leaping into action is no longer an option, but a survival move.

This is great. I've had many shit jobs, too many to list (or remember), but MJ has an interesting point that he did his best thinking during these jobs.

I just quit my $75K a year job because it was too CONSUMING. Yeah I was making okay money and I had prestige, but I also had a 3+ hour commute and no energy by the time I got home.

I was writing every day until I started this last job and now I'm actually looking forward to another (temporary) shit job while I get back into writing and working on a fastlane business.

 

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[Trivium iz rC]

1.) Coffee Shop General Manager
2.) Automotive Technician For Ford Motor Co.
3.) Currently working 3rd shift for a Coffee Shop/Sub Shop doing baking, prep work, and other food business things to pay the bills. While working on my business during the day. Even though the work I do is shit work, The only benefit from working third shift, besides paying my bills is i'm the only one in the store and I get a lot of reading done while working, kinda like in TMFL when MJ said he'd be using his time efficiently. While clients were in the local pub getting hammered he'd be reading books to keep growing the business. I'm hooked on audible now.

 

[Disobey]

1. Flipping burgers at McD's (3 months) Became quite chubby
2. Poker Player (6 years) Made decent money, lost my soul and almost took my life. Stay away from gambling peeps!
3. Snow removal (2 months) freaking cold
4. Delivery boy for an italian restaurant. (2 months) My advice: Stay away from the chef's daughter.
5. Meatpacking at a slaughterhouse (1 week) I couldn't eat meat for 6 months after that.
6. Construction worker (5 months) Felt like digging my own grave, endlessely.
7. Painter (2 months)
8. Stock clerk (for almost a year now) At least I get to help some people out at this one. It's not much but I feel less empty.

This year is gonna be the last I work on someone else's dream. Can't stand beeing at the bottom of the food chain.

I'm at war right now. I wan't my independence, and I'm gonna get it!

 

[Andrew C]

Like some other posters have said, although the jobs were dead-end in nature, I have taken some valuable lesson from each job, even if the lesson was that I HAD to hustle and figure out how to get out of that job by upgrading my value.

Some jobs were:

• Door-to-door Census taker
• Concert ticket sales by phone
  
• Calling people to participate in Gallup polls/surveys
• Selling pre-paid card systems to businesses door-to-door
• Retail sales at an airport electronics store
• Banquet waiter for pharmaceutical convention
  
• Drying hundreds of cars assembly line-style after they had been washed for car auctions
• Personal Assistant to an Ego-Maniac real estate developer
• Selling shoes at FootAction
• Museum security guard
  
• Bussing tables at Houlihan's restaurant
• Cleaning and inspecting glass to be used in computer screens
  
• Cold-call selling merchant accounts by phone
• Calling doctor's offices to refill their drug samples
• Re-organizing massive piles of documents into file folders so they could be put in storage

... I know I am forgetting some...

 

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[Runum]

It's graduation season. Time for this to go to the top again.

 

[Gray0920]

Currently working as a telemarketer. 300 bucks a week. It's a soul destroying job.

 

[Guest]

SwEet thread! Like many people said, there is always something to be learned from any experience.

1) Hometown Buffet (6 months): Most labor intensive job. I did everything - reload soft drinks, food, dishes, utensils, mop, mascot, host...you name it. Gained nearly 10lbs.
What I'd learn: I wanted a raise and know that I deserve it but scared as hell to ask, I was 16. Told myself either ask or quit, mustered up my courage and asked anyway, got a 25 cent raise. It was a minimum wage job but I got more satisfaction knowing sometimes..you do get what you ask for. Quit a week after that.

2) Sears (2y2m): Electronics salesman: Gained the most knowledge for obvious reason. Shitty because people steal your customers.
What I'd learn: How to BS, how to talk my way out of trouble for BSing.

3) Sears (7mos): Loss Prevention : Transferred within same store to catch the bad guys. Most memorable experience, when a 14yo girl stole some bras. I was on cctv, our female agent followed the girl into the ladies dressing room since no cameras are allowed in there. Girl came in flat as a flat screen TV and came out double Ds. She stole 14bras and wore 'em all. Get into fights with bad guys but never had a knife pulled on me.
What I'd learn: How dumb people can be when they think no one is looking at them.

4) Clerical job, data/entry (6mos): Most boring job, also went around canvassing neighborhoods and get people registered to vote.
What I'd learn: Jack! I know this contradicts what I said above, but I really had nothing to gain from this job.

5) Ridemakerz (1yr): This place allows kids to buy toy car parts and you help them put it together like a 'pit crew'. Knockoff of Build-a-bear but for guys. I yelled and cheered for kids during this time more than all the times I've yelled in my entire life! Lost my voice for three days. Shitty kids, shitty parents.
What I'd learn: When it comes to their kids, parents will spend a fortune.

6) Disneyland (1yr): NOT the happiest place on Earth. I won't say much, don't want to ruin you're experience, but oh man, does shit go down there. Mickey Mouse is a girl.
What I'd learn: Working at a place where 17million people visit a year makes you realize you are a speck of a person in a sea of people on this planet. And unless I do something with my life to be somebody in this world, I will get drowned (metaphorically).

7) Industrial Designer (2yrs - present): Slowlane, nuff said.
What I'd learn: Slowlane will kill me in a very short amount of time.

8) Currently working on a master plan for the fastlane.

 

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[cautiouscapy]

I've had boring office jobs, but my brain was always designing systems for their stupid disorganised, inefficient workload.
Got quite close to getting one outline design turned into a system (interviewed IT contractors and companies) but fell out with the a**h*le boss and it got shelved...they did do exactly what I'd suggested 18 months later, after I'd left.
Was working towards a career doing the above until I realised I hate working for someone else!

Worst jobs - when I was a student, I worked in retirement and nursing homes. Including washing old people and some far yukkier jobs. Very eye-opening and sometimes rewarding though and I don't regret it (but wouldn't go back to it now - I did try in one lean patch but could no longer stomach it).

 

[LIkeafox]

I've had so many shit jobs over the years, I'll just share some highlights

• Dunkin' Donuts - learned to clean chewing gum off of asphalt and how degrading it was to clean the tiles of a vestibule with a toothbrush during a weekend morning rush. I should have learned here to just never work for someone else again. I lasted three or four weeks.
• Dishwashing (one semester) - worked with an insane person who wasn't allowed to have access to knives since he chased the person who previously had my job around the kitchen because of some kind of screw up.
• Working in the bottle redemption place at a grocery store (a summer break)- breaking bottles and killing bugs that have taken up residence in empty bottles for minimum wage!
• Delivery person for Rent-A-Center (three months) - this should have been my wake up call. Renting furniture to poor people would make a great fast-lane business. You rent shit to people for x amount per week, if they make all their payments for the next two years they get to keep the item and end up paying about a 400% mark-up on the item. If they miss some payments someone like me would come by to pick it up and take it back to the store. Here's the great part though, you rent the item back out, but you don't give it to the next person for just the number of weeks left on the original contract rather you decide how new the item is based on it's condition. So if you rented a couch to someone who kept the thing in really great shape and then defaulted after 70 weeks, you can re-rent it out as being almost new and get another 90 or more weeks on the item. The highlight of this job was repossessing a washer and dryer from a house with countless numbers of mangy little dogs and dog shit almost covering the entire floor and smeared all over the washer and dryer. Awesome job.
• Landscaping (1 day, about a month to get paid for that day) - No. Actually I wouldn't like to be paid in a discount to buy some records at the store you own. I'll take some cash please.
• Selling meat door to door (three hours) - My first lesson in deciphering scams in classified ads.
• Grocery store cashier (two months) - the only job I've had more mind-numbingly boring than this is to be a grocery store bagger.

Those are the real shit ones, but I've also delivered newspapers on a bike as a kid, in a car as a high school student, worked at Burger King (ok ,that's another shit job, but I was over-weight when I started there and after a couple of months working there I was so turned off of even the smell of food that I lost a ton of weight really fast), delivered Pizza, delivered other food, worked in a record store, worked in a bookstore, various temp positions, worked for Kinkos, worked the overnight shift in a gas station, worked in a library, delivered AV equipment to classrooms. I think that just about covers my illustrious resume of crappy jobs.

 

[RWH3]

#1 Drywall hanger and finisher (growing up)
#2 Dishwasher for summer camp (1 month)
#3 Server in 5 star restaurant (9months)
#4 Pizza Delivery-Food Prepper-Close Cleaning for Pizza Hut (3 months)
#5 Work for my neighbor servicing the poultry industry (install and repair equipment in pig/chicken houses) 1 year current. (off/on w odd jobs between)

 

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[mosdef]

Any job is dead end.... or not. It is all in your frame of mind. Jobs are jobs. Sometimes you need them. You take your life in the direction that you want to go.

Blaming jobs or anything else for being at a dead end is the real dead end.

wow this is hard to swallow but dont make it less right

 

[mosdef]

cashier at a grocery store- 3 days

A billing company, sitting on the phone and helping people pay there bills- 1,5 years. Saved almost all the money and invested it in the middle east, now getting 350 dollar each month from it.

Samsung: mobile consultant- showing off samsung products to people and helping stores learn about samsungs products not allowed to sell anything here, only show and educate. 1 year

A gamling company and the only one in sweden- helping the companys customers(only companies) with everything.- 1.5 years and still going

 

[Unknown]

I actually have a really good boss, but at the end of the day I'm still tethered to a desk from 8-5 (well with a lunch break of course). I kind of do my own thing within the given guidelines, but again I have to be here. It's that feeling of freedom that I'm searching for. Only people on forums like this understand what I mean, because everyone else just thinks that you only get that feeling when you got on Social Security.

I wouldn't trade this job for any other job, but I'd certainly trade it to spend my days with my family instead of working.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Oldie, but goodie.

 

[VegasMan]

A few of my more memorable ones:

• landscaper (glorified lawn mower)
• fence painter (ok, it was really just one LONG-a$$ fence)
• sound and lights guy in a metal bar (once got yelled at by the singer of Quiet Riot)
• mall photographer for kids sitting on Santa's lap (torturous, but chicks dug it)
• painter for a funeral home (not the bodies, but washed my brushes in *that* room)
• forklift driver (once put the forks right through the side of a semi trailer and once through a barrel of oil)

And still thankful I never had to flip burgers!

 

[MKHB]

If you gonna fail-fail up-and try to make slowlane moves that can benefit you in case the job doesn't work out.

Always have your eyes and ears open, learn-learn-learn, especially on someone's dime. No matter how menial the position - there is always something to learn that will benefit you down the road.


Truck Driver (fired)
Hardwood Floor sander (escaped)
Cable TV Tech (fired)
Electrician (fired)
Warehouse Manager (fired)
Electrician (fired)
Project Manager Commercial (fired)
Commercial Property Manager (fired)
Asset Manger (fired)
VP Sustainability (quit)

• 100% of our net worth (wife and I) has come from starting ventures related to jobs that I had, where I discovered needs that weren't being while on the inside. Also, every penny of our profit sharing plan 4013b has come from "windfall" years as a wantrepreneur.

• Goes to show you: I did it everything about as wrong as you could (slowlane and sidedwalker) in self started ventures, they all failed, and I still came out way better than if I worked a job.

• My wife on the other hand, has worked here entire life, never been fired or let go - been a superstar at almost every one of her positions, promoted constantly - yet she is miserable, always hates her current job, and has never saved one red cent.

 

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[Iwokeup]

Janitor
McDonald's
Concrete (driveways, etc)
Dollar Rent A Car
Chemistry supply clerk
Jarhead (haha)
SAT prep (God awful job)

 

[MKHB]

But the job itself was only part of the misery....

What about the miserable, unreasonable, always dissatisfied, "valued customer" and the a$$ kissing manager that could never understand why you couldn't win over the miserable, unreasonable, always dissatisfied, "valued customer."

After all, she was able to do it when she was in your position...uh ...16 years ago.

And yes, I said she.

 

[94blackbird]

Janitor
McDonald's
Concrete (driveways, etc)
Dollar Rent A Car
Chemistry supply clerk
Jarhead (haha)
SAT prep (God awful job)

Wonder how many will catch that!

 

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[94blackbird]

I've been:

Harness maker (pony and horse fine (show) harness)
Stable mucker
Pottery Factory Outlet sales person
Advance Autoparts delivery driver
Kmart department lead
Race shop (former boss is an a$$, only reason I list it as a shit job. Otherwise racing Nitro Funny Car is cool as sh!%!)
Racecar transporter (my own rig. Maintenance sucks)
Apprentice CNC Machinist (current)

Leatherneck (ok not *really* a shit job, but definitely lots of shitty stuff that goes along with it)

When I look back on all the jobs I've had in the past, I've learned a lot. While the jobs may have been shitty, I had a lot of really, really good, hard working bosses who each taught me a lot of things, either things I want to emulate or how to be as a boss, customer service techniques. I was also saw and learned how I don't want to be as a boss, as a business owner and definitely how I don't want to treat my future customers.

Probably the biggest thing I've learned that I knew subconsciously all along but only now has it come to my conscious mind, a job may be a job, but you are still at the end of the day working for yourself, despite the terms of the contract. Your boss at your job is in reality your customer, and your services/skills are your product that you are trying to sell. Even a shitty job can still teach you about being an entrepreneur if you look at it with the right attitude. Basically everytime you interview, you are polishing your presentation and sales skills. From there if you get hired, you will get regular feed back about your product (you) and how it relates to your customers operations (your boss and the job you were hired for). Either you adjust to better meet your customers needs or you learn how to politely say "I'm sorry, but I don't know that my product can meet the standards of service that you require" and move on to your next big sale (job interview/opening your own business etc.)

 

[andviv]

And yes, I said she.

I definitely do not understand why the fact that is a woman makes any difference.

 

[Ikke]

Probably the biggest thing I've learned that I knew subconsciously all along but only now has it come to my conscious mind, a job may be a job, but you are still at the end of the day working for yourself, despite the terms of the contract. Your boss at your job is in reality your customer, and your services/skills are your product that you are trying to sell. Even a shitty job can still teach you about being an entrepreneur if you look at it with the right attitude. Basically everytime you interview, you are polishing your presentation and sales skills. From there if you get hired, you will get regular feed back about your product (you) and how it relates to your customers operations (your boss and the job you were hired for). Either you adjust to better meet your customers needs or you learn how to politely say "I'm sorry, but I don't know that my product can meet the standards of service that you require" and move on to your next big sale (job interview/opening your own business etc.)

I must agree on this. It's is one of the most valuable things I learned at my previous job.

 

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[SenGracic]

• Dishwasher
• cleaning tables
• Waiter
• Cafeteria guy
• Foot Locker
• Sales rep ( Telecom companies )

I learned a lot about the restauration business while working in different positions... and one of my future projects would be to open up my place + franchise it.

As a sales rep in telecom companies I had to deal with all kind of customers and it's a lot of customer support with people from 10 years old to 92 years old ( the guy had an iPhone yup.. will always remember him ).

I still have a lot to learn when it comes to closing my sale and I'm reading a lot about it.

I'm really shy in my everyday life so I don't talk much to people I don't know so this job gives me an opportunity to talk to people I don't know and work on my shyness.

All my jobs are and were slowlane but I believe I'm learning something from them so I can apply it into the fastlane once I understand how haha.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Truck Driver (fired)
Hardwood Floor sander (escaped)
Cable TV Tech (fired)
Electrician (fired)
Warehouse Manager (fired)
Electrician (fired)
Project Manager Commercial (fired)
Commercial Property Manager (fired)
Asset Manger (fired)
VP Sustainability (quit)

Wow, some decent stuff there-- at least it makes for a nice resume.

Probably the biggest thing I've learned that I knew subconsciously all along but only now has it come to my conscious mind, a job may be a job, but you are still at the end of the day working for yourself, despite the terms of the contract. Your boss at your job is in reality your customer, and your services/skills are your product that you are trying to sell. Even a shitty job can still teach you about being an entrepreneur if you look at it with the right attitude. Basically everytime you interview, you are polishing your presentation and sales skills. From there if you get hired, you will get regular feed back about your product (you) and how it relates to your customers operations (your boss and the job you were hired for). Either you adjust to better meet your customers needs or you learn how to politely say "I'm sorry, but I don't know that my product can meet the standards of service that you require" and move on to your next big sale (job interview/opening your own business etc.)

Thick face, black heart... how you do anything, is how you do everything.