THE WORST JOB

No. I just thought of the worst job ever. You can ask some of the Southeast Asia Team and Peru ’04 Team members; they’ll back me up on this one.

Junia, member on the Peru team, hooked us up with an opportunity to raise funds for missions by working for a few weeks in an auto parts factory in Indiana. So for 2 or 3 weeks that summer, we’d wake up for mandatory morning prayer, pray till 8am, and then drive for 2 hours all the way to Indiana. There, we had to sift through 18,000 drive shafts to manually look for defective parts. There were crates and crates of oily and greasy auto parts that we had to pick up, take the bubble wrap off of, see if the part had a little nick, put a marking on it if it did, and put the good parts back in the crate. There were no seats, no amenities, no redeeming feature about the job itself except it did help us raise hundreds of dollars for missions fund and we bonded with one another. After each day, our backs were sore and our hands greasy. Mind you, this was summer, so we were all sweating profusely. It was nasty.

But that was an eye-opening experience. There were other factory workers there, and they did this kind of manual and back-breaking labor for a living to feed their family. For 2-3 weeks, we were all complaining about how hard and tedious this job was; but for some people, this is their life. And yet, they never complained and always smiled while they did their job. Talk about a lesson on humility.

But yeah…I believe that experience tops it all.

brainstorm session conglommerate

after summoning up some repressed childhood memories, i think i win for the worst job ever.

i'm not talking about my job last year at the radiology lab in the basement of the hospital (with no windows), surrounded by all chinese male computer programmers who would sneer at me because i didn't know anything about computers, and who only spoke mandarin (which i don't understand) (not that they talked to me much anyway), working as a data monkey looking at mammograms and excel files all day. that job really wasn't THAT bad, considering the fact that i never went to work.

i'm talking about my first paid job ever. i was 8 or 9, doing factory work for my uncle.

every year my family would road trip from windsor to (the greater) chicago(land area) and visit my disciplinarian aunt and uncle. (=family+our favourite vacation spot).

my uncle runs an import-export business doing much trading of merchandise between china (=my pet peeve), taiwan, and the u.s.
one incoming shipment that year turned out to be somewhat defective. the merchandise in question was an abundant supply of wire plugs, about the size of a thumbtack. on each of the plugs there was a hole with a diametre of 1 millimetre. unfortunately some of the plugs had holes that were malpositioned. luckily for my uncle, he had a slew of extended family staying with him that week. ...how convenient...
the next thing i knew, my uncles, aunts, cousins, brother and i were inspecting each of the thousands and thousands of individual plugs, keeping the ones with the hole in the correct place, and discarding the ones with the malpositioned hole. next we would count, pack, weigh, and label each portion.
after the first two days i had had enough. so, i took off my good-girl mask (=demasking! and layers...) and revealed the inner youngest-child-brat-demon in me (=bad habit). it was tantrum time and i was going on strike. the union failed to show any support, so i found myself pouting alone in the corner for the next few days until the job was done. of course such behaviour did not get away without consequences. in all fairness, my uncle took a cut out of my pay, meaning that i did not get to go to great america (theme park in illinois...that makes illinois, illinois).

ok. i think i'm gonna go to the great outdoors now and think about movie reviews.