No matter how monotonous, thankless, or gross a job is, you can bet it’d make a pretty badass video game with just a few conceptual tweaks. Our show this week starts off with five of them, followed by some vague ramblings about sexist Hearthstone tournaments and Nintendo shareholder meetings, as well as a look at your favorite games of the year so far.
Question of the Week
What’s the worst job (or worst experience at a job) you’ve ever had?
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Theme song by Matthew Joseph Payne. Break song is All I Want by The Offspring. Haunting and beautiful New Releases Theme by David B. Cooper.
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I work in a French fry factory. Its hot, smells fucking disgusting and has ensured I will never eat any sort of formed potato product: ovals, tots, etc, ever again. Stay in school kids, stay in school.
I’ve only ever had one bad experience at my workplace and that was with an idiot Nazi of an assistant manager. I work at store called ‘Best & Less’ ( Just like Old Navy in America) and since this place is a franchise, we tend to get a new assistant manager every 12-18 months. This guy was the second assistant manager the store had since I started working there.
I was looking forward to having another guy in the store since I was the only dude who worked there. He was a nice guy if you talk to him in a human to human sense but as soon as it became a professional thing, he became an overly competitive brother.
Every task that any employee did with him, he would treat it as a race, He thought that it would help be a bit faster in every day life but most of us botched the jobs we had to do. He also made me self-concious about my hairstyle (not deliberately) by calling me Justin Bieber.
The Day he was transferred to another store was the most happiest day of my life.
22 year old here, I’d like to confirm that the E.T. Bike scene is awesome.
Sorry I’m over 20!
QOTW: My worst job was a retail assistant at a supermarket, but that’s a boring answer. SO I’ll go with the time I had to flat (basically colouring, without the shading and whatnot,) a Batman comic.
“What? Colouring in Batman? That’s awesome!” I hear you say. Not when one scene involves Joker taking his goons on a rollercoaster ride in his hideout and I have to individually colour every single wooden plank thingy on the track. Took me about 4 hours to colour a single page, for which I got paid $15. It wore me OUT.
My worst job (so far) is my current job, doing tech support for tax preparation softwares. The worst person I’ve ever spoken to fucked someone’s tax return so bad, the taxpayer had to return over $4000 to the IRS.
My only job since leaving university has been teaching English as a foreign language. I’m currently working for a British English language school in Tokyo. I have been working here for about 10 months now and had my fair share of bad experiences since starting my job here.
The absolute worst had to be when I was asked by the school I work at on a Saturday to teach a group of 6 kindergarten students despite having no experience of teaching students that young in my life (only 23 so not had much teaching experience before coming to Japan to be fair). It made absolutely no sense to me why I was asked by the Japanese manager of the school to teach that class because this particular school has 2 other teachers working that day who have 20 years experience of teaching in Japan between them (also plenty of experience with kids classes). It was also made worse by the fact 4 of the students were new and never studied English before (I’m from Northern Ireland so my accent is sometimes hard to understand even for my friends from the rest of the UK).
Anyway all of that said I thought “what’s the worst that can happen, they are only kids”. The first lesson (which is 50 minutes) was a living nightmare because I didn’t plan enough stuff for them to do and like I thought they barely understood anything I said (even with simple language like colors, numbers, etc.). This basically continued for a couple of months before I was told by my boss that he was going to move me to another school on Saturdays.
In the end moving to new school that day is the best thing to happen because now I have nothing but one on one lessons with talkative adults or HS students. Also work less hours.
Overall I enjoy 90% of my lessons but that one class (and school) was a horrible experience that I don’t want to repeat any time soon.
P.S Don’t let this story put anyone off coming to teach in Japan, I’m loving life here inside and outside my job. Every teacher I have talked to here has one class they hate but at the end of the day, that lesson is only 50 minutes of your week. The rest of your time is generally fun.
P.P.S Any of the LT coming to TGS this year? It would be awesome to meet you guys in person. I know a few nice bars where we could have a few drinks.
QOTW: I literally hauled shit water. Cleaning out septic systems on oil field rig sites, working 80 hours a week. I was glad to walk away from that job!
Im disappointed in dave for not responding to grim with;
Lo hanging fruit, more like
Lo Wanging fruit.
I used to work at a community centre for an impoverished part of a town that even though you’re clearly there to help, the residents are constantly angry for the wrong reasons and having a strong yet false sense of entitlement… not sure if that would make a great game, or at least a happy one *thinks back to Papers Please*.
“I invented noticing things.” – Chris Antista, 2014
This episode was awesome! Michel Grimm had been sorely missed, and his arguing with Chris was entertaining and hilarious XD
QOTW: The worst job I have ever and probably will ever have was being a canvasser for a local politician. It was a lot like Mikel’s phonebook story; I had to go door to door and bother people while they were trying to eat dinner and whatnot to vote for this fuckhead and then proceed to get rejected and move on to the next house where the same thing would happen again. Sometimes even in the rain. It was degrading, irritating, and a complete waste of time. It felt like I was living the worst Parks & Rec episode ever. After the first day, I hated it so much that I gave them some bullshit excuse that I could only work 2 days a week, and even then it was still horrible. I hated everyone there, I didn’t care about the cause; it’s been a year since the election, and still to this day, I don’t even know if he won or not. I hated it so much that I went out of my way not to make any friends while I was working there because I didn’t want to look back on this awful experience with any positive thoughts or silver linings. I still have recurring nightmares of having to do this job again. It was that Office Space quote of “Every day is the new worst day of my life.”
This episode was great. The jokes were fantastic. Dave was on fire this week.
Chris’ views on competitive fighting games was interesting.
My first job in University was at a bakery. I worked for about a month before leaving, and by the time I quit I had the most seniority at the place because turnover was so high. I applied as a dishwasher, and with four hours of training I was employed as a baker. During that training we had to make sponge toffee, which got spilled all over someones arm, causing serious burns, and since it gets absorbed into the skin, whenever she would reach into the oven for a week or so, the stuff would start to cook under her skin and the burns would worsen.
It wasn’t uncommon for me to show up to find someone else crying and in a screaming match with the owner about how they couldn’t work there because her emotions would switch on a dime and you’d suddenly find yourself getting screamed at for nothing. I’m still owed around $500.
I got my current job after dropping out of school. I get paid, but one of my coworkers calls customers the n word under her breath, and complains to me about race mixing. On the bright side it motivated me to go back to school, just so I can do anything else with my life.
Moving rocks from a truck parked at my backyard to basically the bare ground in the back yard. It was to prevent it from getting muddy once it rained but that was the most mindless task I had to do. One that was difficult cause of the California sun and how much rocks weigh after an hour of shoveling them around. I’ve done a lot of physical heavy chores but this one was the worst.
Also glad to have Grimm back. This cast was particularly amazing.
Not my worst job ever, but heres a shitty one made better thru the joys of videogames:
When I was a teenager I had a summer job as an assistant custodian, cleaning up the elementary school. Another kid started working there and we bonded over Metal Gear Solid. We brought a little tv and a PS1 into the break room and managed to finish the game a few times over the summer. While working, we’d do some dork-ass stuff like hiding in boxes and entering/exiting bathrooms without triggering the motion-detect lights.
As a BMX flatland rider, I was surprised to hear Pete Brandt (http://petebrandt.com/) – the rider at the SF Clocktower – mentioned on your podcast!
Question of the Week:
The worst job I’ve ever had was probably the summer after I left college, which I spent cleaning out repossessed cars for a car dealership. Imagine the messiest, most hygienically careless time in your life. Now imagine that you’re pissed, destitute, having your car taken away, and fully aware that you can use your trash as a weapon.
The average car was filthy. The worst were booby traps, intended as revenge against the dealership. We’re talking vehicles that had been intentionally pissed in. People hiding used diapers somewhere within the car (it’s like a treasure hunt, but with sun-baked feces!). And the semen. I suppose, if you’re mad at someone taking your only means of transportation away, jacking off onto the steering wheel is a reasonable course of action. I’ve never been in that situation, so I can’t pass judgement.
All of that was bad enough, but the dealership’s dress code required all employees to wear business-style clothes. So I had to take the button-up shirts, ties, and suit jacket that I’d bought to interview for cushy office jobs, and ruin all of them with filth and sweat as I scrubbed and soaked the worst cars imaginable while baking in the New Mexico summer sun. Ever run across the horrible, brown liquid that congeals at the bottom of a dumpster? That was what I smelled like. Right out of college, it was like the universe was saying “Welcome to adulthood, shithead.”
I was an honest to god paperboy for paper with afternoon delivery. I grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee Wisconsin when even small cities could support multiple newspapers. I delivered the Milwaukee Journal on weekday afternoons and Sunday mornings. It was mostly a good job for a 14 year old kid, with two exceptions.
Every holiday season we paperboys were supposed to personally hand out calendars to every subscriber on our route. This was entirely to benefit us as this is when people were supposed to tip, and most people did which was fine. But my route contained this kind of weird suburban apartment complex that was basically where Kirk Van Houten lives after Luann dumped him. I’m not good at knocking on random doors in the first place, but the worst was when people would have to find a checkbook and invite me inside. There was a lady with like 50 cats and a full suit of armor. There was a guy with literally no furniture or tv. Just an empty room with a bunch of newspapers in it. There was one woman who just had her floor covered in newspapers as if she was training a dog. I didn’t see any pets though. Not sure whether that makes it grosser or not.
Anyway, the point is that selling holiday calendars in this place felt like putting your life on the line every time. The hallways were dark, I had to walk by these creepy storage units to get in (oh, this one guy just hung out in his chicken wire storage unit in the back of the parking garage watching a 13-inch tv among collectible statues), and the people were almost all scary.
Also, being 14 and getting up on Sunday morning at 4:00 AM to deliver newspapers is HORRIBLE.
QofW: worked as a “bitch” at a butcher shop when i was 17. Responsibilites included “cleaning all the blood soaked dishes”, “cleaning the grinder and saws”, and “breaking down bloody boxes out back while being attacked mercilessly by bees”. benefits included meatballs and all the free bee-stings you could ever want.
The worst job experience I had was when I was working at Hollywood Video back in the day about two years prior to it being completely shut down. There was this woman who I kept hearing about who thought she was entitled to everything such as brand new releases and would treat all the staff like crap. I only saw her ONCE, but what she did was enough for me to almost say to her to get out of the store and never come back when she didn’t get a new release and told one of my leads that we always had an excuse for not giving her what she wanted.
An experience that was more personal to me however was a guy who wanted to rent Ice Age 2: The Meltdown but got pissed off because I gave him pennies in change instead of rounding the change up to a dime because it was one cent short of a dime. He then told me he didn’t want it and I had him fill out a small slip to tell us why he was returning the rental for a refund, to which he wrote only word on the reason why which was “idiocy”. This of course pissed me off and I told my boss what had happened after I had scratched out hat word with a pen because I did everything in my power to help that good for nothing guy, and my boss in turn wrote a note on that guy’s account that he could not rent anything from our store ever again unless his wife was present.
While I was in college, I worked at JODI MORONI’S SAUSAGE KINGDOM! It was a second rate wiener-schnitzel located inside my hometowns local mall. Normally mall Jobs means you will eventually score with a hot chick or maybe two. But it mission impossible when your work mandated hat has a six inch sausage boner protruding from it. Good luck scoring with a Victoria secret employee when you smell like a lawry’s season salt bratwurst orgy with a slight hint of onions. Plus side when my store went out of business we were given as much meat as we could carry so that fourth of July was epic! Then 9-11 happened two months later; but the terrorist did not win cause I cooked the S#@t out those last remaining sausages because my brauts don’t run!
There’s one single aspect of my older high school job that completely ruined it. In high school, I worked with the cleaning staff of my school system over the summers to clean & prep the schools for Fall. During my last year there, cleaning out an elderly middle school teacher’s room & moving her things, I found a small decorative “Chinese-looking” box with two metallic balls in them, & they had some sort of weights in them. It wasn’t until I got home that I found out they were Ben Wa Balls, a vaginal masturbation item.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Wa_balls
worked at a tree farm one summer, for minimum wage it was the worst. essentially we had to open a green house and spread out the plants so the could grow and then at the end of the fall be moved back into a larger green house! So if the monotonous nature of the job wasn’t bad enough, We were told multiple times not to talk to each other just move the trees.
And as an added bonus it was out in the middle of nowhere so i had to be up at 5 am, and ride my bike to the farm. When they fired me i was sooooo happy!
As someone who was a janitor for a while during highschool it’s actually not a very bad job, you work on your own time with music and every day there’s a very clear and obvious set of things that must be done. I eventually got to be able to get my amount of shift work done in 2/3rds the time and, after doing some above and beyond cleanup I would go lock myself in the special-ed cubical room and play pokemon on a phone Rom-emulator. Also since people seem to think its the worst thing ever it pays quite well :D.
Best highschool job I ever had