Worse Jobs
I’m a big fan of the show Dirty Jobs. Mike Rowe is hilarious. I’m also a big fan of Patrick Lencioni, management expert, and best-selling author of The Three Signs of a Miserable Job.
We’ve all had miserable jobs. Most of us have had dirty jobs. And hopefully we all have jobs that we love.
So was thinking back to some of the more miserable jobs I’ve had over the years. Here are a few of those:
1. Hay Hauling in middle school and high school during the summer in Oklahoma.
2. Building/maintaining fence in Oklahoma, Colorado, and all points in between. Especially barbed wire fence. And sidenote- I was struck by lightning while working on a barbed wire fence in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It’s what gives me my superpowers….
3. Sandblasting oil tanks, and then repainting. Again in Oklahoma in the summer. The problem with sandblasting on hard surfaces is that the sand actually kicks back off of the hard surface and onto your skin. Not good.
4. Stock boy at Reasor’s Grocery Store. It actually wasn’t that bad, but definitely despised having to close the store, which meant you had to mop the entire floor, by hand. No motorized mops- all by hand with an old fashioned mop and broom. Misery.
5. Poop scooper upper- while working at Lost Valley Ranch in Colorado. When you have 150 horses, 200 head of cattle, and a lot of alfalfa and grain, lots of poop gets formed. And the only way to clean it up in the corrals and in areas where guests walked was by rake and shovel. 5 years of poop scooping every day. Wow.
6. Grunt/gopher on home building sites- basically had to clean up trash, gather the unused wood, sweep, pick up more trash, and be a gopher.
What about you?
Growing up in Oklahoma, I have done your #1 through #4. However, my superpowers come not from getting struck with lightning, but from winning the Reasor’s grocery bagging championships for Sand Springs. (Imagine me taking a bow…)
[...] Brad Lomenick reminisces on some of the worst jobs he had, and in doing so, he mentions Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers and Their Employees. Some of his jobs: 1. Hay Hauling in middle school and high school during the summer in Oklahoma. [...]
[...] read this post the other day, and it got me thinking of my past, and how God used some downright dirty jobs to [...]
My first job was painting gas wells in SE Oklahoma. It sounds like my brother and I had it easier than you. We were paid well (for a 14 year old) and only had to paint over the old wells.
My toughest job was Taco Bell.