What is/was the most stressful job you've ever had?
 

Believe it or not, mine was being a bartender. When I was in college I bartended because the hours and money was perfect for a full time college student.

However, on Friday and Saturday nights it had to be the most stressful job ever. When the bar got 2-3 deep of people asking for drinks and you're in the weeds...that shit is stressful as hell!

only had two jobs.. one was straight, second was in adult industry, now I'm webmasturing and this is by far the most stressfull... I can't rely on a steady income

Making sure I do not miss the stress relief program being offered here at GFY

driving a cab.

first night i bartended was very stressful - it was for a banquet hall not a restaurant - weddings etc - so no fancy mixing drinks - just your basics but still i had never bartended anywhere - sliced my hand slicing a lemon too. any job where you are dealing directly with the public is stressful when you arent competent yet - people don't care if you are new they just start bitching and making snide comments. also my first night as a cashier at a drive-in movie theater - i suck at making change - people would be giving me these extra pennies and nickels to make even number change - i had no fucking idea why they were doing it - i just started giving back whatever money i felt like and telling them to move along - waited til the end of the night to see if i was under or over.

oh - and i worked for Avis Rental Cars as a car jockey - just me and about 10 Jamaicans, all of us high as a kite - when a car got returned you had to take it through the car wash - i went off the tracks in the car wash and had no idea i had - was just sitting there stoned out of my head for i don't know how long - and then i heard pounding on the window - the enraged owner/boss banging on the window - that was my last day.

Mailman around christmas :helpme

I might add that it's also the only job I had aside from webmaster..

Being in a combat zone. Nothing compares.

Sheriff Deputy ....

paper boy!

my current one, combining offline biz with the interwebs

This one. I don't have a steady source of income.

Yeah, I think that's pretty much in a league all on its own. I've never been in combat but I have been around combat exercises and I could only imagine what it would be like if someone was really shooting at you.

Another stressful job is being a server. Pretty much for the same reason that bartending is stressful. For some odd reason people are much easier on the bartender than they are the servers.

Bartending in a very busy place can be REALLY stressfull and is hard. Most people just act like they'd do better then the bartender.

I was a converter for a major textile corporation. My job was to oversee order and delivery from 4 print mills and 3 cloth manufacturers to create the drapes, bedspreads, blinds for major Hotel Chains such as Sheridan, Holiday Inn, etc.

I left that place screaming and have had many nightmares about it since.

i did some bartendering work but it was for a very quiet and relaxed pub, it got fairly busy on a friday or saturday night, especially if i was on my own for some reason, but most of the customers were locals and pretty cool except for the occasional asshole.

i worked in a gun club, boring as hell, but it became a hard job at winter, stuck in a snowhole firing off clay pigeons. i had one machine which auto fired when they pressed the pull button, if your fingers or arm was in the way of the mechanical arm then you would get a nasty bruise and smashed clay in your eyes :) - the hardest part was being in the snow for hours sat still, but having to stay alert. i did that job for £10 and a sandwich. i was there for around 4-5 hours or so. so that was pretty shitty.

the most stressful was when i worked as a recruitment consultant though, high targets, crazy aggressive bosses, and lots of cold calling to people who dont want to listen to you, and lying to receptionists.. etc.. "im from cisco - your router just went down put me through to your chief of IT!!!"

I used to run one of London's biggest courier/cab/limo businesses. Open 24/365 we had to meet our advertised service standards regardless of time of day or weather conditions.

Most days started off reasonably calmly at around 5am with the arrival from Heathrow Airport of overnight shipments from all over the world, but as the day went on, our staff and vehicles would end up all over the UK and often further afield. If we had a tour on that involved a well-known band or show-biz person, it might be 3am or 4am the next morning before the day wound down.

Going to combat during the First Gulf War

killer :(

being a damn security guard at Target. damn I hated that job

I managed the group responsible for the availability and performance of the online systems at Sprint. I had people working 24x7 and was always on call. I hate phones.

this one is the most stressful. nothing more stressful than seeing your sales or traffic dip and not know why or how to stop it. other than this job tho i just had shitty factory jobs that required little to no thinking.

Lead Dispatch Supervisor for Charter Communication. Managed 30 drivers 5 underlings and 48,000 subscribers on a daily basis.

im with you on that

Then you must be either very young, or not have had enough shitty jobs, or both.

I've had so many shitty ass jobs, I couldn't possibly recall them all. But seriously, if this little bullshit about traffic and sales dips stresses you out that much, then you need counseling.

I have two kids who depend on me......Stress is when your first child was about to be born and you don't have a pot to piss in, live with your mama, college graduate yet have a shit $8 an hour temporary clerical job, nor any idea of how you're going to make any kind of any REAL money to take care of your responsibilities....THAT'S STRESS!! That's the kind of shit that I went through years ago before I knew anything about porn on the internet.

Now I have an ex-wife that I constantly have to send money to, my own bills to pay, private school for my oldest daughter, etc. etc....and It's all done basically on COMMISSION since I don't eat unless I sell....You dont' know shit about a stressful job...This porn shit is CAKE compared to 95% of the jobs that most people have to suffer through in real life.

I've had jobs as low as shoveling horse shit in the stables at the local racetrack because I needed a $35 a day day job. Anybody in the Cleveland area knows where "Northfield Park" is...well my black ass was in there suffocating from the shit and piss mixed with the straw that made a strong ammonia smell in the horse stables SHOVELING SHIT!...I've had jobs where my sole job was to pick up big bags of powdered resin and put pour it down a hole so the other man could bag it up...My only tool was a wooden STICK where I had to poke the powder down the hole and I was only making $3.75 an hour at the time.

I had better not see anybody else here crying over some "dip in traffic" as being stressful because they seriously need the shit slapped out of them.

Most stressful? I've only had a few jobs, but i'll have to say my 3 week stint at a Captain D's when I was 16. That shit was fucking nuts during dinner time. Black folk and old white folk gathered in like the 2nd coming of christ was taking place. Motherfuckers would cut in line, bitch at you while giving orders, give you hell if you fucked up an order, etc etc etc. I had to take all that shit while having my feet stuck to a coke soaked floor, smelling like piss cause thats what the fish smelled like before it was fried, and all for $5.15/hr.

I remember taking out the garbage and having rats on my shoes. Fuck that shit.

well i did start doing this when i was 20, im 27 now. and no i never had very many jobs before this. probably 5 or 6. and yeah, what you describe is stress and i've had my share tho not in the same areas but i was more talking about the actual job itself, not your life due to its shitty pay. with shitty jobs you basically have to do what you're told and no real though is involved. you can shut your head off at 5pm or 8am or whatever horrible hour you get off at where as with this job its never ending, 24/7. if i don't get enough sales in a month or my method of traffic dies i might not be able to pay rent. at least with a shitty job i know i'll make X amount unless i don't show up.

i know im much better off regardless. i remember busting my ass cleaning up shitty bathrooms for minimum wage. i remember when i got burned with acid at the metal cleaning factory but stayed to finish my shift anyways because it paid a buck more than i usually got and i remember thinking i'd never afford to move out of my parents place. i also remember being so fustrated at some points in this biz i thought i'd be so broke i would have to move back in with them. i've never 'cried' over a traffic dip but sweeping the floors doesn't make me feel very stressed, losing top google ranks does.

Working on a massive pump while oil company excutives were looking over my shoulder.
Investigating a aviation filtering system(which I built) a plane had gone down because of contiminated fuel plugging the filter

Yeah I bartended for like 3-4 months and it was pretty stressful on busy nights I can relate with you. I'd much rather be on the other side of the mahogany ;)

DH

running gels and pcr's in my prof's genetics lab one summer. made be back out of going the science/phd route.

The last one I had before working online. Without all the gory details, it involved treating kids birth-5 years and also having to coordinate a lot of the services they needed. These were special needs kids, some of them severe and profound. The fucked up county that I contracted for start cutting a lot of the essential treatments and therapy, telling the parents that they couldn't find anyone to work for the amount of money they had to offer. Meanwhile, they were redecorating offices, buying new furniture, taking vacations to "seminars" at the beach, and throwing office parties with the money.

I was the one who had to deal with the families, a lot of whom I got to be friends with outside work, and try to explain to them why their kids weren't being treated. It was awful. My hair started falling out in spots as big as half dollars and I thought I had some disease or was dying, lol. Turns out it was all stress related.

Executive Chef at a 600 member owned country club where the membership was about 85% Jewish. :food-smil