I found the following list of truly crappy jobs.  I may disagree with some of these jobs being on the list but thought it was interesting nonetheless.

Number 10

Model

Hours: 10 a.m.-10 p.m.
Wages: $50 per job
Drawbacks: Humiliating, Disgusting
Modeling isn’t all coke and catwalks, you know. If you want someone with an enormous beard and you’d like to splat their beards with custard pie for a kids TV program, then you’d call my agency, who’d call me. The custard and the children were bad enough; I’d grown thick skinned about such humiliation over the years. But you would have thought they’d let me wash before kicking me out of the studio. When I finally made it to the station, at the peak of summer rush hour, my congealed, putrid beard was beginning to smell. I got onto my train, with sweaty, grim-faced commuters, for the half-hour journey home. After 10 minutes we stopped. Three motionless hours later the stench was medieval.

Number 9

Crap Potato Chip Chucker

Hours: 3 p.m.-11 p.m.
Wages: $7.15 per hour
Drawbacks: Disgusting, Soul-Destroying
In a futile attempt to finance my second year of film school, I had heard about possible summer employment in the “quality control” division of a potato chip factory. It was a five-minute drive from my house, full-time hours, and it paid two dollars above the minimum wage. I signed up and was hired on the spot.

10 minutes later my immediate supervisor (later to be nicknamed “The Dragon Bitch”) delivered me to a room that could only be described as human oven. It was then that I came to the grim realization that the entire job consisted of standing (and sweating) in front of a very large conveyor belt for the entire eight-hour shift. With my well-manicured bare hands, I was required to dispose of all the blemished, newly cut, deep-fryer-hot potato chips that whizzed by at Warp 9, while the heavy, oil steam that emanated from the conveyor belt found refuge in my open, teenage pores. If there was a black or green spot on a chip, it had to go.

I didn’t wear gloves, I didn’t wear a hairnet and I wasn’t even required to wash my hands (or turn my head when I felt the urge to cough or sneeze). Think about that the next time pop open a bag to serve at a party.

Number 8

Holiday Cleaner

Hours: 40 hrs per week
Wages: $2.50 per hour plus lodging
Drawbacks: Disgusting
It was 1988 and I was 18 years old. I was young, free and single, and looking for a good time. An older sister of mine had done something similar a number of years before and had enjoyed it so I thought I’d give it a go, feeling sure I would meet some like-minded people and that I could spend my summer working and drinking with others of my ilk.

Along with 20 or so other new recruits I got off the bus at the camp and we were shown to our staff chalets. These “chalets,” which we had to share with someone else, were tiny and shoddy, consisting of two single beds, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, and a sink. The toilets were in a block, so it was not uncommon for people to relieve themselves in the sink. In fact, I knew somebody who kept half a pool cue by his bed in case he needed to take a dump. He’d use the cue to poke it down the plug hole!

And as for my fellow staff, as I’ve said, I had expected to meet people like me -- young, laid-back, carefree, etc. What I found were people who were on the run from the police or debt collectors. Some people had come to work there to escape paying child maintenance, and others just to get over a failed relationship.  In short, what I found was the West Country’s equivalent to the French Foreign Legion.

Number 7

Battery Breaker

Hours: 8 a.m.- 6 p.m.
Wages: $2.25 per hour
Drawbacks: Soul-destroying, Dangerous
Back in 1983, I answered an ad to be storeman in a battery warehouse. When I started, I realized what we really did. We were to spend all day, every day, breaking batteries to retrieve the lead cores. These were batteries from trains, and weighed about a hundred pounds each. You’d drain the acid in a trough, slam the battery at an angle to break the pitch seal and then the lead core would fly out.

Your protective gear was a boiler suit, rubber apron, goggles, boots, and long rubber gloves. Now, to pick up something that heavy, you need to hold it close to your chest. The acid always found a way in. Everybody got burns on them. I got them on my belly, legs and ball-bag, as well as the odd splash in my eyes.

Number 6

Sperm Tester

Hours: 9 a.m.- 6 p.m.
Wages: $15 per hour
Drawbacks: Disgusting
On any given day, I perform approximately 400 tests on samples taken from various patients, for many different reasons or diagnosis. Apart from the miserable stool culture, the examination that I hate the most is the “semen analysis.” After all the men’s intense toiling and exertions to “acquire” the semen, I subject it to all forms of cruel testing procedures. I attempt to measure the sample and then spend a good couple of seconds “sucking” the specimen up a pipette and expelling it numerous times back into its container. The only problem with this part of testing is that frequently while I am “playing” with the specimen, a slight whiff of the specimen reaches my senses, and I am then forced to fight back the dreaded gag reflex. A few more of those actions and it’s then time to squeeze the semen specimen back in the jar and cap it tightly before something unfortunate happens.

According to Carl, the cleaner, his job is much worse than mine. Apparently not all the semen makes it into the jar and he has to wash down the chairs and the carpet after men with no aim have occupied the cubicles. Maybe that’s where they’ve been going wrong.

How does smashing rats with a hammer sound as a career choice

 Number 5

Plastic Tray Checker

Hours: 9 p.m.- 9 a.m.
Wages: $4.50 per hour
Drawbacks: Futile, Soul-Destroying
The factory was based in Chorley, Lancashire, and made plastic products. I had the job working nights (with my brother and a few of my mates) checking plastic food trays for minute imperfections (holes, cracks, etc). All night long we squinted at trays together working under a bright lamp. To say we felt like lab rats would be an understatement. We each had 10 pallets waiting to be checked.

After three hours, we gave up. It was a 12-hour night shift but to finish the shift would have been a living hell. We all walked out together with a permanent squint in one eye and left behind the princely sum of $4.50 an hour. Bastards…

Number 4

Rodent Exterminator

Hours: 8:30 a.m.- 4:30 p.m.
Wages: $5.15 per hour
Drawbacks: Disgusting, Immoral
It was hopeless miscasting -- a full-on animal rights activist and vegetarian getting paid to skulk around an airplane hangar-sized shed stuffed with squawking, filthy, terrified chickens, looking for rats to kill.

My weapon was the latest advance in biological warfare (for 1980): a hammer. How was I going to catch -- let alone kill -- a rat? I was at least 50 pounds overweight and had no reserves of energy whatsoever. My only hope was if an arthritic, senile rat hobbled up to me and asked me to put him out of his misery. Suicidal rats with a good command of English are pretty thin on the ground though.

After about 15 minutes I’d had enough. I dropped the hammer and walked into the autumn rain. The boss hollered at me as I trudged across the field, “Wuzza Matter? You chicken or summink?” I couldn’t even be bothered to figure out if he was intentionally trying to be funny.

Number 3

Sigmoidoscope Cleaner

Hours: 9 a.m.- 5 p.m.
Wages: $14 per hour
Drawbacks: Disgusting, Humiliating
The worst job I had was in the sterile supplies department in a large London hospital. I had to clean out sigmoidoscopes. For those of you who don’t know, sigmoidoscopes are used for looking up people’s bums and were unsurprisingly usually covered in sh**. The room was unbearably hot and steamy and stank to high heaven. You’d had a good day if you managed not to get a hypodermic syringe stuck in your finger and hadn’t had a placenta drop on your shoes. Somehow I managed to stick it out for three months.

Number 2

Pig Wanker

Hours: 8 a.m.- 4 p.m.
Wages: $12 per hour
Drawbacks: Disgusting, Humiliating, Immoral
I worked at a fast food restaurant in Liverpool. I didn’t get any stars. I failed all the tests, even though they merely involved copying the answers from the fast food restaurant’s test answers questionnaire. Also, I had to work twice as hard as a few of the other staff, who were junkies and couldn’t be trusted to operate the deep- fat fryer. They were very good at cleaning though. They could polish one square yard of stainless steel for eight hours. Meticulous, if not efficient. As bad as this was, I have to say it beats working in an office any day. Even standing on the gangplank of a ship for 12 hours while working as a security guard at Seaforth docks was better than bleaching my mind by staring into a monitor for a decade. When I think about it, I once met the man with the worst job in the world. I was at a party and he was introduced to me as the “pig wanker.” That is, he manually stimulated pigs until they filled a beaker with their issue. I said, “Let me shake you by the hand.”

Number 1

Recruitment Consultant

Hours: 8 a.m.- 5 p.m.
Wages: $16.75 per hour
Drawbacks: Soul-Destroying, Immoral
I was set to work hiring staff for a large call center. The jobs were mind-numbingly repetitive and badly paid. Plus, due to the 24-hour, seven-days-a-week society we insist on living in, they all had punishing long shifts. Initially I was able to employ every druggie sociopath in the city. However, things soon took a turn for the worse, and instead of hiring, my role was reversed. Because all employees were on temporary contracts, all could be made redundant (fired) on a manager’s whim, and so the bosses preyed on the defenseless like a pack of shabby, feral cats. One person rang complaining of being ill -- sacked; another went to the vending machine at the wrong time -- sacked; another late back from lunch -- sacked. I had to forcefully remove their ID badges and get security to boot them out the door. I was even given the nickname “The Undertaker” as I cut a swath through the company. Eventually, having sacked 20 people in one day, the manager called me into the office to inform me that I was being sacked too. What goes around comes around.