From Hell 

Becky Carney, County Commissioner:

It was the summer of 1962, prior to my senior year in high school. I had made the cheerleading squad, and all the girls were going to the beach. My dad told me if I wanted to go, I had to earn the money. He got me a job as a soda fountain clerk at the Greyhound bus station. At the time I thought I had the world figured out. Suddenly I was having to put on a hair net, a little white uniform, with a handkerchief in the pocket spread out like a flower. I did convince the manager to let me wear my Weejuns rather than white shoes. That was my way of showing people I was normal. When I was at the register, I would stick my foot out so the customers would see my shoe and know I was cool. I waited on a lot of the truck and cab drivers, and one morning this cab driver came in cutting up with me and said, "Little lady, I want a goody." I got real nervous and went over and told my supervisor, and she said "Well, go ahead and give him one." He was talking about a Goody headache powder. I had never heard of such a thing before. So I learned a lot from that job. It was a memorable experience.

Glenn Counts, news reporter for WNBC 6:

It was my first job out of broadcast school in Flagstaff, Arizona at a very small TV station. My sole job was to turn the station's transmitter on and off. The transmitter was located on top of a mountain. You worked eight days on and eight days off. So they would take me up to the top of this mountain, and for eight days I wouldn't see another human being. The only thing there was to do was watch TV -- and all I could get was PTL. One day I'm sitting there watching Jim Bakker, and I saw something move on the floor -- it was one big-ass spider. I killed it and dumped it in the trash. I saw something move across the floor again -- another big-ass spider. I killed it and put it in the trash. I sat back down, something moved -- another spider. I started looking around, and those big-ass spiders were all over the place. It was like a horror movie. I called up my boss and said "Hey, this is it. I'm outta here. Come get me." They said, "We can't come get you until the morning." So I spent the entire night with all the lights on. I didn't sleep a wink. I could see these giant spiders crawling all over the place. Needless to say, that job didn't last too long.

Frye Gaillard, writer:

The one that was really heinous doesn't sound heinous, but it was. During my first year of college in Alabama, I spent the summer crunching numbers for a bank, and it was absolutely mind-numbing. If there's anything I'm truly bad at, it's mathematics. So eight hours a day of doing the thing I enjoyed the least wasn't fun. In high school, I worked a couple of summers on my uncle's cattle farm, and I much preferred shoveling horse manure and branding cattle to crunching numbers. At the time it seemed awful, but it was only when I worked at a bank that I realized how lucky I had been to shovel shit.

John Grooms, Editor of Creative Loafing:

Between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I worked as a janitor at a polyester fiber manufacturing plant, working swing shifts. In the long run, I got a lot out of it; I worked with young black men, this was in the late 60s, and it was a real eye-opener for me and helped broaden my view of life. But the awful part was that one day I got sick and threw up in the hall next to a part of the production process that really stank. After a minute or two, it hit me that hey, I'm the janitor -- I'm going to have to clean this up myself. So I did.

Bob Inman, author:

I was about 14, living in the small town of Elba, Alabama, and my dad bought me a lawnmower and said go forth and cut grass. In south Alabama in the summer it's 100 degrees with 100 percent humidity, and the Bermuda grass grows like crazy. So I would mow lawns all summer long in that heat. By the end of the summer I would have made just enough money to pay my dad back for the mower. But of course by then the mower was shot, and the next summer the whole thing would start all over again. There was a method to my dad's madness, though. He was just keeping me off the streets. Not that there was that much to get into trouble with in Elba, Alabama. But I eventually wised up. After about the third summer, I figured out what he was doing and I got me a job at a radio station.

Sheri Lynch, radio personality on

107.9 The Link:

During high school, I worked as a busboy on the graveyard at a diner in New Jersey, and it was pretty heinous. My shift was 11pm to 7am Friday through Sunday. Every night it was drunks, cokeheads and perverts. What would usually happen is that before I showed up for my shift, I would go to some high school party, have about five too many sloe gin fizzes, and show up for work wobbly and nauseous, with a big hickey from my boyfriend. Those sloe gin fizzes would start wearing off around 2 or 3am, and I would just feel like dung. Because the diner drew from nearby clubs, there were a lot of really drunken guys who didn't understand I was total jailbait, and they would hit on me big time. Also, drunken people at 3 in the morning are only funny to themselves, and they're lousy tippers. There's nothing more repulsive than the smell of stale coffee, cigarettes and greasy food, and having some drunken asshole trying to grab your ass. Just talking about it makes my skin crawl.

Tim Newman, President of Charlotte Center City Partners:

My worst summer job ever was picking strawberries from sunup to noon for a few weeks each summer while in college. On the ground, nasty, and sweaty after five hours of picking, but a strawberry still tastes sweeter to this day from that experience.

Wayne Weston, Director of Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Dept.:

When I was in elementary school in Virginia it was a requirement of my father's that I mow grass during the summers. And it was with an old rotary mower, a hand sickle and hoe. I was also required to have a certain amount of contracts for a quarter a yard. On one occasion, I had done such a good job for an elderly lady she gave me a 50-cent piece. I was so proud, and when I showed it to my dad, he said, "You can't take that money from her." He gave me two quarters for the 50-cent piece and made me take a quarter back.

Darrel Williams, County Commissioner:

My father was a bricklayer, and as soon as I was old enough to pick up a brick, my father had me out there working. All through junior high and high school, during the summer and on the weekends, I had to haul bricks and make mortar. This was in Louisiana, so you can imagine what it was like in the middle of the summer. We used to do rain dances hoping we could knock off early. That was one of the reasons I went to college and majored in architecture. So if something ever happens and I can't do architecture, I can go and do construction work.

James Woodward, UNC-Charlotte Chancellor:

Between my sophomore and junior year at Georgia Tech I put down flooring, specifically tile, in a building at Lockheed, a big aircraft manufacturer in Marietta, Georgia. We started in June, and when I went back to school in August, we were still going at it -- it was a massive space. It was a mindless job that was bad on the back, bad on the knees, and it sure helped me appreciate college. It was interesting for about the first two hours, but for the next 400 it was not. One of the problems was that you couldn't bring it to a conclusion. With most jobs, you start and then you finish. With this one, we started but it just never ended.

Tony Zeiss, CPCC President:

My worst job was de-tasseling corn in Indiana while I was in high school. I had to get in this big machine and go down the rows of corn and pull all the tassels from the top of the corn. Otherwise they would cross-pollinate from one field to the next. And we had to do it in the summer before the corn was ripe. I got corn poison all up and down my arms. It was a hot, thankless job. It took two people. The guy in front was supposed to get at least 50 percent of the tassels, and the guy in back was supposed to get the other 50 percent. I always got the laziest guy in front of me, and I always ended up getting berated by the boss for not getting them all. That caused me to recognize real quick that I needed to go into any profession other than agriculture. *