It's nowhere near as bad as most of the jobs on here but I find it hilarious in a "life is actually so awful that all we can do is laugh" kind of way. Also my best friend told me that this is a really good story and I didn't even pay her to say that.

TL;DR got a job that I literally could not do, and was told I'd get kicked out of school if I quit. :) :) :)

I had a job interview for my university's engineering co-op program - actually, I had a LOT of job interviews. The way this program worked: every year, about 150-200 job postings would be put up on the program website, everyone in the program would apply to jobs and potentially get interviews etc etc, and then we'd be matched with jobs using a ~super secret special algorithm~.

But before the jobs were posted, we all had to attend mandatory resume review and career advice sessions hosted by human resources employees who had never worked a day in the engineering​ industry in their lives. My particular HR specialist spent the session warning us that we should apply for every single job we can!!!!, because the economy was bad, and if you didn't get a job you'd...? .......?.......?????

(Everyone in the program got really weird and cagey when asked what happened to the people who didn't get jobs. In hindsight, it was actually super sketchy and scam-ish. To this day I still have not figured out what happened to the people who didn't get jobs! And I know they existed because the program published its employment statistics every year.)

(Also this was 2011 in northern Alberta where basically anyone who could walk and chew gum at the same time could instantly get a $40/hour oilfield gig. The economy was not actually bad. We were a bunch of very naive 19-year-olds, though, whose only economic knowledge was vague memories of hearing about the American real estate bubble back when we were in middle school.)

Anyway, I dutifully applied to almost one hundred fifty fucking jobs, during midterms, because life is shit. As it turned out, the job descriptions were so extremely vague and poorly-written that I ended up starting every interview with "so... What exactly is this job?" If, at this point, you're wondering why I included so much unnecessary information on the background of why I applied for this job, it's so that when you ask yourself "why the fuck did she even apply for this fucking job", I can answer you with "I was convinced that I had to apply to literally every job that didn't require moving to a mining camp in Labrador (though I applied to those too), and also, I had no clue what the jobs even were". Plus I wanted to give you more evidence of just how hellishly disorganized and unprofessional this program was.

One fateful interview was a Material Tester interview. As usual the job description had revealed nothing about the job itself so I had to press for details. I was told that the job involved driving to different construction sites and then carrying heavy-ass buckets of concrete around all day. I laughed derisively, gestured at my 5'4" literally 95 pound body and said "do I look like I can lift a bucket of concrete?!" And that was the end of it.

Haha just kidding, out of the 100+ jobs that I applied to, the super secret algorithm matched me with that fucking job. I forgot to mention earlier that the algorithm, in theory, references a rating that the companies give to each candidate that they interview. So, in theory, this company rated me higher than anyone else did, even though I told them at the fucking interview that I didn't want the job. (I know I'm bad at job interviews, but yeesh, was that ever a blow to the ego...)

I say "in theory" because I have a secret suspicion that the algorithm was actually just Satan whispering his evil plans into the ears of the HR specialists.

So as you'd expect, I get to work and I can not actually lift a bucket of concrete. Well, shit. What do you do if you literally physically can not do your job? You either quit on the spot, or hang around and see how many hours you can get paid for before they fire you. Of course I chose the second option because I had bills to pay and also I wasn't really sure what would happen if I quit. Would I be forced to take an extra year of school maybe? Or would I get sent to that mining camp on Labrador's rocky shore after all?

As a blonde 95 lb. 19 year old girl on a construction site, I made it through about a week of politely asking the pervy old men on-site to do my entire job for me, before somebody eventually caught on and I got relentlessly mocked and yelled at until I cried. At least I was on overtime while I got yelled at so I got paid 27 sweet before-tax Canadian dollars to cry at work. Gotta find the silver linings, right?

I tried to quit. The HR specialists said "Actually, if you quit or get fired from this (8-month) job, it counts as getting a GPA of zero for two consecutive semesters, which would disqualify you from your program". Yup, my university's FUCKING co-op program had a rule where getting fired or quitting meant getting kicked out of FUCKING school and they FUCKING CHOSE YOUR JOB FOR YOU. How could that ever possibly go wrong for anyone?!

(Please remember that I told them at the interview to not hire me, and I got the job anyway. So even though a reasonable person might say "I guess that system could still kind of not ruin people's lives, most of the time, maybe, I guess, if you were allowed to turn down jobs that you thought you probably wouldn't like?", that's not how it worked for some fucking reason.)

So I was forced to stay at the job and desperately beg nasty 50-year-old foul-smelling missing-half-their-teeth men on construction sites to do my job for me while they either insulted me or hit on me.

But of course the story doesn't end there. I ended up developing what the useless Alberta healthcare system diagnosed as "probably irritable bowel syndrome I guess, I can't figure it out, but it's probably not going to kill you, and also it's untreatable, anyway I'm paid by the patient and you've been here longer than 5 minutes so get the hell out of my office and let me get paid $150 to spend thirty seconds telling some young parent that cough syrup exists". If you're Canadian you totally know what I'm talking about ;)

Holy shit do I ever get sidetracked when I'm trying to tell stories. My friend who thinks this is a good story must be crazy. So anyway, my "IBS" was me getting violent diarrhea every time I ate food, no matter what I ate, and also randomly all the time even if I hadn't eaten anything. I spent 4-6 hours per day on the toilet and therefore was not capable of driving, walking around, or doing anything that wasn't in a bathroom. And I especially could not work on construction sites that didn't have outhouses, which was most of them, because life is a fucking nightmare.

And whatever this condition was, the various doctors I spoke with insisted that it was probably incurable and untreatable, but potentially caused by stress, so I should quit my job and see if it goes away.

My weight dropped below 90 pounds and I started to look like one of those people with anorexia they show you in middle school health class. I somehow managed to get a doctor's note that said that I should be allowed to quit my job without getting kicked out of school because I was legitimately sick.

I took the note to a meeting with one of the HR specialists at my school. He looked at my skeletal body and my tear-stained face and said... "If you quit you'll get kicked out of school, but if you keep the job until you get fired, I'll see what I can do."

So yeah, I wasn't even able to quit. The next few months were a blur of getting yelled at and insulted by my alcoholic boss, crying in public, shitting every 90 minutes, sleeping 3 hours a night because I was always shitting, getting heatstroke that one time, having my crazy Co-worker drive his truck into mine on purpose as a joke, having to show up to work when I was in so much pain that I just laid down on the ground in front of the outhouse in the fetal position and whimpered like a wounded animal while people pretended not to notice me (I forgot to mention that the constant shitting was accompanied by cramps that felt like getting kicked in the stomach), going to a doctor's appointment literally every week, a co-worker locking our homeless co-worker in an outhouse as a joke (which made me too scared to use an outhouse in front of anyone for weeks), and more "fun" adventures that I'm too lazy to type out.

I don't really know how I made it through. In the end I walked off the job three weeks before my co-op internship was supposed to end and for some reason my boss didn't bother to fire me.

In the end I made it about three and a half months into the engineering industry before I realized that I absolutely despise everything about engineering and I should have dropped out of school when I had the chance. But the comedy of errors that is my life never fails to entertain me and drunk people at parties who are probably not just pretending to listen. My IBS did go away about 4 years after I left that job btw.