First Job: A mindless internship at the US Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. I was 16 and just needed something to do with my summer. For slightly over minimum wage, I pored through stacks upon stacks and boxes upon boxes of thousands upon thousands of printed out expenditure reports and then cross checked them with stacks upon stacks and boxes upon boxes of thousands upon thousands of other expenditure reports looking for discrepancies between the two. Literally it was like "Well, boss... File A6:893 FSC Line A Report 932D USG FedEXPEN Listing X-483D.5.32 says the DAO's office was billed and paid out $562.14 for new carpeting on June 1 of FY 1992 but... Post A File 1 Line 9.65.Y of InterO Report 03A1992.6.1 says FSC actually made a payment of $562.41 on itemized expenditure in question, #AB3902.92. Should I draw up a Form FEB 744 on the 27 cent overpayment?"

Over and over, day in day out, for 3 months. And that was my first job. Not my worst.

Worst: A dotcom start up here in LA initially funded by a Korean company. By the time I arrived to start working there the company was already on the verge of collapse. They had no money to spend on marketing or advertising or technology, after a few months our paychecks stared bouncing, I was the only person in the entire office who spoke English, and you literally had to initiate a 2 week long process fo approvals, forms, meetings and deliberations to get a typo in the copy on the website fixed, the bureaucracy was so out of control. It drove me nuts.