Best Summer Job was 1984. I went door to door doing surveys for a solar heating company. They apparently believed that pretty young women were a good fit for the job, and as such I was one of the only guys that worked there.

I loved my summer job of working at the Zoo, actually, and some of it did involve cleaning out enclosures. From it I landed a volunteer/academic credit position to perform hormone assays on fecal samples taken from captive Malayan sun bears, and I did that for a year.

It was the shit, believe it or not. And no, I'm not making any of this up.

Worst: A disher in your major city's convention center. Anyone who has done this knows you're a privileged mother fuck to have anything else. I'd lick the elephants asshole clean before I went back to such a hell hole.

I fix computers and hang out with cool people all day. When there's nothing to do I still get paid to watch TV and play games. I get to drive all over the state for repair jobs. When I show up everyone is thrilled to see me because I'm making their problems go away. It's like solving tricky puzzles all day long, except if there aren't any puzzles you can watch TV instead.

Worst job I ever had was filing papers at a temp agency. Shitty shitty shitty miserable job with boring stupid people, and the work was boring too. Worst job I ever heard of was folding cardboard boxes all day. Mind-numbingly boring and you're standing all day long on concrete.

I've got it pretty good. This week, last week, and the next four weeks, I'm being a CIT at this day camp. CIT stands for counselor in training. Every week, the CITs go to different groups or activities. This week, I'm at something called Assembly Games.

Every day, I have no work to do from 9:00 to 12:30. When I do have work, it's playing dodgeball or some variant thereof. When I don't have work, I have three real options.
A: Hang out with friends
B: Hang out at the archery field
C: Go to the game room, where they have a lot of stand up arcade games, like Tetris (addicted to!), Mario, Centipede, PacMan, Asteroids, etc. It's great.

jodabomb: Do you have to deal with little kids? Any job involving children is an automatic contender for worst job ever in my eyes.

"Worst: A disher in your major city's convention center. Anyone who has done this knows you're a privileged mother fuck to have anything else. I'd lick the elephants asshole clean before I went back to such a hell hole."

Hey, it's not THAT bad. My summer job two summers ago was working for a catering company at the Toronto Congress Center. It was a lot of fun, though I was never relegated to dish duty, it didn't look that bad. It paid $10 an hour (improved to $11.50 later), I didn't have to work any nights I didn't want to, and the timing was great for me since I'm a night owl. It was usually like 6 pm - 2 am give or take a few hours.

I worked mostly as a banquet waiter, and the best part was that we got to eat the same food afterwards, and a lot of it, and it was all great stuff like steak and spanakopita, and other things that rich white people like. I got to see live performances by The Bare Naked Ladies and Earth, Wind, and Fire. I worked with a bunch of friends, and sue us, but we got drunk on the job quite a lot (wine was everywhere). It made the time and work go by faster and it was a blast, and I didn't make any major mistakes!

In addition, the late nights working meant that whenever I wanted to stay out extra late with friends, I could just tell my parents I was working, which happened often enough that my parents simply dropped the curfew. It was a great run, but it ended when the owner of my catering company was found to have been embezzling employment insurance money. Ironic enough, since I lost my job as a result.

Working there taught me that most employees in the food and hospitality industry care very little about you... the soup of the day is always made out of whatever's leftover or in abundance or cannot be gotten rid of otherwise... there's enormous amounts of waste, I'm talking several huge bags full of wet pasta and sauce that take three people to lift on to a truck.

Emperor, that's sad

Sayjo: Hey, I was that little camper that makes everyone miserable when I was a kid. I don't want it to be my job to make that punk kid happy.

My worst job: counting glass beer bottles for deposit returns (michigan). Nasty mouldy nasty old limes stinky sticky nasty. And they watch you as you count with a horrified look. The automatic counter machine is one of the most genious inventions known to man.

Oh, and some dispute the count. Like 5 off from counting 100 and make you recount. 50 cents!

ag, I really hope you didn't count them one by one. =P

I don't mind working with kids.

I agree with emperor jake, little kids are a horror that are to be avoided at all costs. some people adore them...I just can't manage to do it myself.

Working an abattoir would be bad. Worst off all would in Halal abattoir and being the guys whose job its to slit the throats of the animals. Imagine doing that all day long!
I visited an abattoir once as part of an economics class excursion at school - it was horrible, especially the smell.

Btw my first ever job was as an assistant in nursing in the maternity unit of a hospital (my father is an obstetrician). I had to clean up the mess after birth. Give me elephant dung any day.

I agree with Chrispminis and jman. Some little kids are horrors. There were these two kids in my group last week named Ethan and Noah. They were nightmares. But, there was this other kid name Massimo, he was like the coolest. And yes, I do work with kids, ranging from 4-12

yeah it really depensd on the parents I think, if they raise them to be little selfish brats, or to not have an attention span of more than 3 minutes it's really annoying. however I do know a 5 year old who is cute as could be and is also quite well behaved, mostly due to his parents.

Hey... I said I didn't mind kids.

My daughter is amazing ^_^

Best: Ikea think tank... rofl

Parents send their kids to camp because they are too annoying to deal with themselves.

No... they send them to camp because they still have to work during the summer but their kids have summer off from school. They can't expect their kids to behave responsibly on their own every day for a summer without supervision, so camp is a good alternative that keeps them supervised and occupied. Kids are just dumb.

Chrisp: I know plenty of families where one parent doesn't work and they still send their kids to camp. I must respectfully disagree with your assessment.

Summer camps are also about socializing your little brat, in the hopes that they will learn not to be such a freak.

In all honesty, I love kids, but yes they can be a handful. But weren't we all? I mean, their little brains don't work rationally yet. It's not their fault.

I think spyman wins for the worst job.

I think that kids are held to a very low standard. very often I think that they are expected to mis-behave and just be general knuckleheads. I definitely think that it is possible to raise up good, obedient, socially conscious, children. I don't know how easy it is, but I know that it's possible.

I don't mean to sound like I'm totally bragging, but me and my brother have gotten countless compliments from people on how we behave. I'm the older brother, and he's the younger. I'm a bit older now (teenager) so they don't come quite so much (seeing as I'm not viewed as a child as much anymore) but we have gotten quite a few. I give all the glory to my parents though, they are amazing and will continue to be the greatest parents in the world.