JP

Krista
The Champ!

Kyle

I work at a pet store.

It sounds like fun, hanging around with the cute animals, etc. Well, I have had quite enough.

Every week I have to scrub the algae off of the insides of every fish tank in the place, which amounts to about 200 sq. ft. If the algae is really stubborn, I have to go at it with a razor blade. I usually end up soaked to the armpit. They're kind of sloppy about the wiring of the light fixtures over the fish tanks; one system actually burned down because of live wires interacting with water. I've gotten shocked numerous times; the first time, I though the fish bit me. I have been bitten by several nasty varieties of fish, including one piranha (plus rats, mice, gerbils, hamsters, a snake, rabbits, and birds). But even that isn't the worst part.

They keep the rats and mice in the bathroom, so if you have to go, you barely have room to sit on the toilet. The toilet doesn't even work; to get it to flush you have to pull on a ratty piece of dog leash because the lever is gone. A tiny bathroom inhabited by hundreds of rats and mice would smell bad enough, but in addition, there are always a number of dead ones that no one feels like getting rid of, so the stink is unbelievable. The bathroom also has flecks of rat and mouse blood everywhere, where people have stunned rats and mice (you smack their heads on the floor to kill them before feeding them to a snake. This is to prevent the snake from being bitten, and is a bit kinder to the prey as well) without cleaning up. There is so much filth layered on everything that you could document the entire history of the store by taking a core sample of it.

Once, I had to clean the toilet, and the back of it was encrusted with days-old feces of unknown origin, without gloves. Once I knocked over some coral when I was cleaning a fish tank, and the owner got so mad that he went and bought a rake and made me rake the trash out of the back alley.

It was dark, cold, and rainy, and the back alley is a little narrow path paved entirely with used fish gravel and other used animal products, plus dog crap, old food, dead fish, broken tequila bottles, used latex gloves and surgical masks from the animal hospital nearby, and bugs the like of which have never been seen. I filled up several large trash bags. This, too, was without gloves. This is in addition to all the little annoyances, like sucking dirty fish water into a siphon and getting a mouth full of it, cleaning cages that haven't been cleaned in months, explaining to people who barely speak English why they can't put two betta fish and a moray eel in a 10 gal. fish tank, getting covered with cricket crap, dog crap, snake crap, rabbit crap, rat crap, bird crap, etc., mopping up 30 gal. of water off the floor when a tank leaks, and smelling like a zoo when I come home.

I just hope that when the Department of Health finds that stink-pit that they are able to see past the clean, professional front they put up. They'll probably evacuate everyone within a 30-mile radius.

I work at a Daycare, and I know most people are thinking 'oh that would so fun working with little kids' ... well, think again. Let me take you through a basic day at my job.

First I walk in the door and get ambushed by 20 to 30 screaming 1-3 year olds( and those kids are strong I come home with a new bruise everyday from one of them kicking me or hitting me, not to mention biting.). Then I spend about 2 hours doing what seems like a thousand dirty dishes and sweeping, moping and washing walls.

Oh then comes the fun part, changing dirty diapers. There is nothing worse than that. I have seen it all from diarrhea to multi-colored poop, oh and when you can tell what the kids had for lunch.....ewww!!! I change about 40-50 diapers a day. Then on garbage day I have to stuff the bags of dirty diapers in the cans, and if it was a week when all the kids were there I usually end up having to actually get in the garbage can to stomp on it so it will all fit. Nothing like having to come home smelling of dirty diapers, or end up with some of it on your shoes.

Oh and on top of everything else my step-mom owns the daycare which means no faking sick, when I go home I still have to hear about what happened at the daycare, and I HAVE TO WORK WITH MY STEP-MOM!!!!!

Clean the floor mats.

This involves getting down on your hands and knees and scrubbing 10 mats from the kitchen. They are soaked with grease, and if you don't get it off, the cooks send you back out to do it again. We have to use buckets filled with hot soapy water with ammonia in it. The ammonia fumes really get to you. One time, somebody decided it would be a good idea to put a shitload of some chemical in my water that made your skin really soft. Well, I went out and after dunking my hands in the bucket to get the primordal soup on the mats, my skin was soft. I just scrubbed away, and the old brush had bristles coming out the sides of it. Well, the sides poked right thru my skin, leaving tiny holes all over my fingertips. Since we do this first, I had holes in my fingers that I had to dip in hot, soapy water and other chemicals for the rest of the day. And that stings like a b***h. Also, your pants get soaked from kneeling on the wet mats and you smell like shit from how dirty they are.

Cleaning the kitchen.

For this we have to get down on our hands and knees and go under all the fryers, etc. to get out what's under them. We have found plates under there, and once a dead rat. Then we have to wipe up the stuff laying on anything in the kitchen. This job wouldnt be so bad if the cooks would wipe up their own crap and pick up plates they drop instead of kicking it under the stove. Then we have to scrub everything and dry it off. After that, we have to sweep up and mop. Its almost impossible to keep people from walking on that floor, so you usually end up walking back and forth with a mop for about a half hour more. We're even supposed to scrub the walls, but we dont do that every week.

Cleaning the walk-in fridge.

Not only is it cold, but we have to use water too. First we sweep, then scrub the floors, then wipe the flors, then mop the floors. Then we have to move everything off the bottom shelves, take the bottom shelves apart, and clean the floor under them. You also have to deal with the fat cooks trying to get thru to get things out while you're in there.

Weeknights dishwashing suck too.

There are 3 people there. A bin-runner, a washer, and a put-awayer. The bin-runner takes the bins full of dirty dishes from the restaurant, takes it to the dishroom, and scrapes them off then sets them on the counter. The stuff we have to scrape off is enough to make anybody sick, plus you get other people's food all over you. The washer has to take the plates, rinse them, and put them in a rack. When the rack is full, he puts it in the dishwasher. The washer has to deal with dishpan hands, except lots worse. Your hands look like piles of spaghetti, and are almost pure white. You also have to use hot water that burns like hell. The putawayer has to take the racks out of the dishwasher after it's done. You often get a facefull of steam, which goes up your nose and burns all down your throat when you open it. Then he has to take the dishes out of the racks and put them on the counter. The dishes are hot as hell and give you blisters. Then they have to take them where they belong and put them away. A lot of times there's a whole bunch of people where they belong, so you have to reach across everybody to put away the dishes which can easily weigh 10+ pounds. You also have to cycle them, which means picking up the cool dishes and putting the hot ones underneath, or else the cooks yell and you have to come back and cycle them.

On weeknights, the dishroom people also have to cleanup any messes. Somebody pukes in the bathroom almost every night, one guy decided to shit in the urinal, and a few days ago a guy decided it would be cool to shit all over the floor in the bathroom. Then at the end of the night we have to clean all the containers the cooks used and mop the floors.

The wage is the worst of all.

We do all this for $4 an hour. Our boss has been promising us a raise for over a month. He says if we work harder, we might make a whole $4.50! Oh boy!