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The WORST Summer Jobs- What's Yours?

During my third week on the job, while pouring oil into one of the reservoirs, my oil-soaked cotton glove touched one of the ceramic chutes filled with molten glass. My glove briefly smoldered before bursting into flames. Then the flame ran up my oil-soaked arm and ignited my shirt. I quickly put down the oil can and started beating out the fire that now engulfed my chest and arms. I put on quite a show as I danced along the catwalk, flailing at the flames. Almost as quickly as my clothes had ignited, I’d beat out the fire. And while I stood on the catwalk with singed eyebrows and smoke rising from my smoldering shirt and gloves, the crew below gave me a rousing round of applause. Later that day, one of the machine operators told me that the last oiler had been on the job for less than a week before he’d set himself on fire. Apparently I’d established a new record for survival…

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 a.m. sharp, usually returning home around 4 or 5 p.m. The mornings would start off with the corn being cold and covered in dew, so we wore ponchos made out of garbage bags. By early afternoon, the humidity in the fields made it feel like it was 115 degrees, and in order to see the tassels, you had to look into the sun. I did not know you could sunburn your eyeballs, but it happened to me more than once! Imagine getting a paper cut on your finger. Now repeat that about 10,000 times over the course of three weeks. Even with gloves and long sleeves, you would be bloodied, itchy and cut up more each day. I once cut my ear so badly on a wet corn leaf (the corn is sharper when it’s wet) that I soaked the entire shoulder of my shirt in blood before I knew what had happened. Blisters were not just for your feet, and you would get a set on your hands as well, which made it especially hard to try and grip the tassels.

What was YOUR worst summer job?

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