I've never really had a really bad summer job. But my best summer job was working in the office for a PI, writing reports, going over the videos. .. and going to school. It was great!

Guess what Caroline? My favorite summer job was also in a nursing home, working in the kitchen. I loved it!

My worst was at a sub shop. The lunch crowd made the day go by fast, until about 2:00. Instead of letting me leave early, the egotistical owner would have me sit there until 5:00 listening to him talk about himself. I quit after just a few weeks.

Worst summer job - working at a school for mentally disabled adults. I was only 18, smaller than most of the students and a little bit afraid of them at first. Once I got to know them it was heart breaking watching the ones on state insurance have their meds tinkered with. They would know something was wrong but didn't have enough control over their own lives to make a stand. Then there was the woman that had previously been over 300 lbs but had been chastised so much about her weight that she became bulimic and when i started working there, the staff was struggling to get her over 95 lbs. So heart breaking.

Best summer job. Summer camp counselor for the YMCA!

Worst job- working at Subway. Sadly the more choices you give a customer, the more picky and rude they become. But I could have delt with that. The real issue was that my boss was the biggest ***hole I've met in my life. Back then I thought you're supposed to hate your boss, you just tough it out. Now I know better!

Best job- Tie between Lane Bryant and my first year of lifeguarding. I loved the women I worked with at LB and we got an awesome employee discount. Lifeguarding was my first time in a while working with people my own age. Made some good friends and my boss is pretty cool too. (I still lifeguard there, I like it okay, but it's not as fun as it used to be.)

Worst: a summer research program in Pittsburgh.. not just because I don't like Pittsburgh but because I was put into a lab whose research didn't interest me at all, and I didn't have the skills necessary to do anything productive.

I also worked in an a la carte restaurant on campus in college, but never during the summer. For a while I was always stuck at the "Asian" section which meant deep-frying things and cooking things in a wok. It got painfully warm in the late spring and early fall. I was always covered in this layer of oil droplets by the time my shift was done, it was gross. Not that the other stations were much better.. the giant vat of mayo at the sub station grossed me out, and heaven forbid I got put on dish washing duty.

Best: I worked in Research and Development where my mom works one summer, a company that makes big industrial size mixers (for food production, pharmaceuticals, etc). My primary project was helping to test "gear boxes" (the part that links the motor to the mixer shaft) that probably weighed almost a ton. I tested temperature, noise, vibration, gear contact patterns, etc. Keep in mind I have NO engineering or mechanical experience WHATSOEVER. When my supervisor went on vacation, I was put in charge of testing these things and making sure they were safe to go out to the customers. I was even invited to important meetings and stuff, where I was the only female. It was a blast!

Also, while not during the summer, I spent a year working early mornings (6-10am) at Macy's on the dock, unloading the trucks and unpacking all the clothes and stuff that came in. It was neat to see all the newest items! Come to think of it, I'm not sure why I liked that job so much, lol.. it was very repetitive and meant 4 hours of standing on cement most days. I guess it's just because I knew it was my last paid-by-the-hour, manual labor type job EVER.

Too funny MAYNESS my sister had this same job for 3 years, up until 1.5 years ago, at a Macy's in Illinois. She loved it...it was very hard on her physically since she recently turned 50 and has lupus....but she loved the work...some very cold mornings for her though since she started very early.

Ugh! IU worked at an IGA, a grocery store in ahuge bakery department. I live in a thoroughly French province, and my French wasn't nearly as good then. I wasn't as confident in my language then, the customer service made me anxious, I was everyone's gopher which made me angry, everyone was unpleasant, and I HATED that I got 1 hour + 2 15 min breaks to sit around wasting when I would have preferred to get PAID or go HOME!!! UGH!

I did 2 days!!!!!!

I also tried telemarketing, actually. For 3 hours. 1 hour spent calling old numbers that I knew no one would pick up. I hated it. I'd rather get paid to fart repeatedly in public, which would be less compromising to my integrity.

I was going to say that my worst job ever was picking pears, till someone mentioned telemarketing. I would rather climb up and down a ladder with a heavy bag of pears strapped around my shoulders than do telemarketing again. I was desperate for a job and ended up with a split shift--4 hours in the morning, and 4 hours in the evening. I lasted 1 day. I think I was trying to sell screen doors or something, and apparently I didn't understand the system of marking the numbers off on the call sheet because I got chewed out on the evening shift because my daytime counterparts had accidently called people that I had called that morning.

It was horrible. I hated bothering people; one lady was so angry and upset that I felt terrible for bothering her.

Worst job EVER-walking beans and detasseling corn....welcome to midwest summer employment.

Worked in an ice plant one summer throwing 8 pound bags of ice onto a conveyer belt. It was close to 0 degrees in the ice plant, but the plant was in Southwest Louisiana, where outside it was 100 degrees with 100% humidity. I was so sick that summer!

I agree. Detasseled for two years when I was 14 & 15 and too young to get a job doing anything else. The worst part was getting drenched in the morning with the dew and the be steaming in the afternoon heat, then have that irritating corn dust on your sweaty chest chafing you all day. No, maybe the worst part was having to pee in between the corn rows and having a male supervisor walk up on you in the middle of it (And you just prayed you never had to poop when you were going down the mile long rows.) Or seeing those great big yellow and black spiders in their webs all of a sudden in your face. I am short and I had a hard time reaching the tops of the corn to pull the tassel off and got yelled at a lot for missing them. We felt like slaves when they shortened our lunch times and make us work past quitting time to finish a field. We got paid like $1.50 an hour back then, but thought we were rich when we got paid.

My best summer job was as a nursing student at the hospital where I still work. Got paid a whopping $3. 75 an hour then and we knew we were rich then!

Boy that detasseling stuff borders on abuse... that kind of work puts my after market jobs in grocery stores sound like a dream..

I spent one summer cleaning apartments in an apartment complex that was mostly inhabited by students during the academic year. They moved out and went home for the summer and left behind...
It scared me to death that the people who made those messes were to be the future of the country.
I am by no means a great housekeeper, but compared to what I saw there!!!
The only saving grace of that job was that I worked with a great bunch of people and we had a lot of fun while working our tails off