The following column is a description of my interview for the worst job ever. When you’re elbow-deep in waste at whatever hellhole of a job you work at, just think of my experience and you’ll feel better.

From the description of the job, it sounded like telemarketing, but in person. The boss man told me that the company sets up booths and tables at stores and festivals to do promotions and advertising for clients.

That sounded fine to me; it didn’t sound very pleasant, but I was looking for work. I wasn’t expecting to lay on soft, fluffy clouds made up of children’s dreams and prayers and eat delicious candy while petting puppies. I was expecting to do a job that sucks. Hell, considering it was already July, I would have eaten bees if they paid me.

I was a little surprised, however, when this man told me that I was “invited” to come back for a second interview, which would be a day of observation that would last nine hours. I would come in, not get paid, observe what the company does, not get paid, help out an established employee, not get paid and not get paid. Did I mention that I would work nine hours and not get paid?

So, like the idiot I am, I said, “Sure, OK!” The next day I came in to the same building and saw four other people in the waiting room. I was given a form to sign saying that I knew I wouldn’t be paid for the day (sigh), and if I died during the day it would be my own fault so my grieving relatives wouldn’t be able to sue.

I was introduced to the employee I would be working with. Together, we would go out to a location and forcibly whore our product onto the unsuspecting public. The first thing we did was go to a bingo supply store and buy balloon animals. Right there I knew I was screwed.

We went to an Osco Drug. You might have heard of Jewel Osco, which is the merger between Jewel, a grocery store, and Osco, a drugstore. We weren’t at Jewel Osco. We were at regular Osco. Regular Osco is like Walgreen’s except nobody goes there. Seriously, that store couldn’t have had fewer customers if the entire parking lot was completely covered in sewage.

We were selling products for a for-profit company that makes ID cards for children that, supposedly, will help the child if the child ever becomes missing. For a paltry fifteen dollars, parents can buy ID cards for their children.

Now, I’ve never been a bastion of morality, but even I can see how evil it is for a company to make money by preying on the fears of parents by saying that their children will be disappearing and that somehow the child having an ID card on them will help the child be found again. But I don’t have a problem with that. I’d sell crack to infants if they paid enough for it. But not even I could tolerate the kids DNA bags.

For $10, parents could buy a kit to store their children’s DNA. The “kit” was four Ziploc sandwich bags and two Q-tips. Also, it contained a small card explaining what DNA is (it’s a genetic fingerprint!). Four sandwich bags and two Q-tips would usually cost around, well let me think, nothing. So I do believe that $10 might be a bit of a rip-off.

But I can’t even understand what benefits would come with having samples of your child’s DNA on hand. Assuming your child does go and get his or her fool self missing, having their DNA isn’t going to help. The police aren’t going to capture every single child in the country and take fingernail samples to see if any of them match-up with the fingernail you’ve been keeping in a sandwich bag just because you were a big enough dumbass to buy the stupid DNA kit.

The only way I can imagine having your child’s DNA on hand can help is in identifying the dead body of your child. And that would be if the body was completely unrecognizable, and all the teeth were gone because they usually check dental records first. And if your child’s body is that messed up, I don’t think you would mind waiting up to 48 hours as the police isolate your child’s DNA because you didn’t keep a sample in the fridge.

If you believe a DNA kit would be a good bargain, then you don’t deserve your money anyway so you might as well waste it.

The hook we used to get parents to stop by was the offer that we would fingerprint their children for free, so that the parents could have a record of the child’s fingerprints. Seriously. I know, I wish I was joking.

Once again, I might be missing the point, but if your child goes missing, I can’t imagine that a badly smudged sheet showing what your child’s fingers would look like if they were covered in ink would be a fraction as effective in finding them as a picture would be. But at least it was free.

We also gave away balloon animals, but if I even think too much about that I won’t be able to stop crying.

The crappy products we tried to sell were one reason why I would rather drink motor oil than ever do that job again. We were set up about three inches away from the only entrance to the store. People coming into the store couldn’t avoid us unless they saw us from their cars and said, “screw that! I’ll just go across the street to Walgreen’s,” which is a reaction I imagine many people had.

We pitched our sinister childcare products to every single person who came into the store. The only people who bought anything were senior citizens, who were obviously desperately lonely, and easily fooled mothers. A few people stopped, but obviously had no intention of buying anything; they just felt too guilty to just say “no thank you.”

Nothing I did was actual work or even difficult, but that doesn’t mean it was a good job. For example, it was completely communist. Really. My salary would be based on commission, but not just based on the products I would sell; it was based on the sales made by the entire office.

There are two things wrong with that. First, I don’t ever, ever want my wages to be based on how my DNA kits and children’s ID cards get sold, by me or by anybody. And second, I wouldn’t put anything above a company that willingly sells sandwich bags and claims that they’re child protection products.

I don’t want to be the idiot who sells twice as many DNA kits as everyone else, and then gets told, for 12 consecutive weeks, that the office had record lows this week so I won’t be getting paid. I’ll let somebody else be that idiot. I’ll just continue to be the regular kind of idiot.

But there’s more. One of the reasons I even applied for this job was because the ad in the paper advertised $1,000 scholarships. However, to get the scholarships, I would have to continue to work at these tables until I get to the point where I can train new people, and then train three new people until they get to the point where they can train new people.

In short, if I wanted a scholarship, I would be required to convince at least three people that they should work at a job where they sell plastic sandwich bags as $10 DNA kits and are paid based upon how many of the said DNA kits are sold weekly by the entire office.

So obviously I turned the job down. As I said before, I have my limits. Now I would sell prescription painkillers to preschoolers if their allowance was high enough, but there are some things that even I wouldn’t do.