Meditating on my work history over coffee this morning, I came up with three candidates for worst job ever.

Though I suppose I could have fallen back on a feature that appeared in Texas Monthly back in 1979 that included being a "fulltime resident of Wichita Falls" in a list of the four worst jobs in Texas. (The only other item I remember from the list was the job of chicken sexer.)

I did live in Wichita Falls, Texas, at the time, and while the article was snarky -- funny articles in Texas Monthly tend to be snarky -- I couldn't argue much with the logic. It's a place where the summer temperatures regularly top 100 and where in winter the north wind blows across town with ferocity (they say there's nothing between Wichita Falls and the north pole except a barbed wire fence, and it's usually down). But the capstone is that the city lies at the heart of Tornado Alley -- it is to tornadoes what Florida is to hurricanes.

Maybe the best way to understand the place is to watch "The Last Picture Show" -- which primarily takes place in Archer City, 25 miles down the road -- with an audience of Wichitans. The biggest laugh -- and it's a cynical laugh -- comes when Cybill Shepherd's character says, "I don't see why I can't just stay home and go to college in Wichita Falls."

But there were pluses to living in Wichita Falls, not the least of which was that it was a good place to learn how to practice law -- lots of good lawyers and an easy-to-handle court system -- so despite the fact that the job I held at the time (running a legal services office) was stressful, neither that job nor living in Wichita Falls makes my top three bad job list.

Number 3: The Job That Kept Me in Law School

For some reason I was turned down for financial aid for my second year in law school, meaning I didn't get the all-important work-study grant that would pay for an on-campus job. (I seem to recall that some key person in the financial aid office was later indicted for embezzlement, and I've always thought the two things were connected.) So, since I had neither an employed spouse nor rich parents nor a loan, I had to find a real job.

Clerkships in law firms weren't an option, given that the University of Texas Law School is the second-largest law school in the country and Austin was relatively small back then, so there were way more law students than the local market could handle. Clerkships paid badly, if at all, and rarely offered more than 10 hours/week of work -- not enough for me to live on. Plus they were highly competitive and I was securely nestled in the lower middle of my class.

So I took a job as a preloader for United Parcel Service, meaning I was one of the people loading those ubiquitous brown trucks so that your packages would arrive on time. We worked from 4 to 8 AM every morning, and my first job as a preloader involved unloading the semis that carried the packages in.

I lived way across town -- or so it seemed at the time -- so I had to get up a little after 3 AM to get there if I wanted to stop at Dunkin' Donuts en route for enough sugar to get me through my shift. I lifted boxes for four hours, and then I went to law school, where I struggled mightily not to fall asleep in class. (My favorite class that year was federal courts, taught by the incomparable Bernie Ward, who had once been a Shakespeare scholar and who frequently exhorted us to be "good," but who was notorious for going off when someone fell asleep in his class.)

I learned that marking boxes "Fragile" is a good way to encourage people to throw them. I learned that IBM frequently shipped small but very heavy boxes full of very tiny metal parts that had to be swept up if the box broke open because they were too tiny to pick up one by one. And I learned why it is people with boring jobs go out and get drunk on Friday nights, because I started hitting bars every weekend -- a great plan, except that I usually fell asleep in my beer about 10 PM because I'd been getting up at 3 AM all week.

Fortunately, I landed a summer internship (which turned out to have its own drawbacks) and got financial aid for the next year, where I worked in the Student Attorney's Office and actually learned how to practice law. And much as I hated law school (and while I loved undergraduate school, I really hated law school), the job inspired me to keep at it, if only because I didn't want to spend the rest of my life loading trucks.

However, the job did have a couple of pluses, which is why it isn't my worst. First of all, it paid really well, more than double the minimum wage of the time (way better than clerkships or work-study jobs). Even going out every Friday night I managed to save a bit of money. Secondly, I got into really good shape -- tossing around boxes for four hours a day is way more effective than your average exercise program. Alas, during the summer internship, I lived on hot roast beef sandwiches and gained back most of the weight I lost.

Number 2: Never Work as a Waitress in a Bar Where the Waitress is the Only Entertainment

I once took a job as a waitress in a bar/restaurant. I lasted two nights. The establishment had just opened, and I later learned that the people who started it were in the business of starting minimal restaurants and then flipping them to people who thought they wanted to be in the hospitality business.

There was a large bar, serving an assortment of wine, beer, and mixed drinks. There was a pool table. There was even a kitchen, where they made steaks and hamburgers. And there was me, the lone waitress. I showed up the first night wearing a mid-thigh skirt and a long sleeved blouse, and was told I needed to show more cleavage.

Now I've never had much in the way of cleavage, and I was never comfortable with using my sexuality to get ahead. It wasn't just that I was a feminist; it was that I didn't know how to use hints of sex to get men to do things, and not only didn't want to learn how, but didn't think I was capable of learning how. So I was pretty sure I was in the wrong job.

The first night was slow and I mostly played pool with my boss. The second I spent over an hour waiting on a large group of frat rats and their dates. They didn't like the food, didn't like the place, and left me a 2-cent tip, even though my service was fine. Then my boss started pushing me at an elderly man, who I think was on a fixed income, assuring me that I could get him to support me if I played my cards right.

I called and quit the next day.

Number 1: The Dream Job That Turned Out to Be a Nightmare

I moved to Washington, D.C., to work in the general counsel's office for the National Consumer Cooperative Bank. It was my dream job. For years I had done free, or mostly free, legal work for food co-ops, and now someone was going to pay me to develop good legal structures and help co-ops get financing so they could not just survive, but thrive. Getting paid to do work you were willing to do for free -- what could be better than that?

Lots of things. It wasn't that the bank was a bad idea; it was a very good idea. And it attracted a whole slew of amazing people from all across the country: co-op organizers who wanted to see good business practices, bankers who wanted to be involved in social change, housing professionals who wanted to help tenants become homeowners. I don't think I've ever seen so many competent, idealistic people in one place before or since.

Within two years, virtually all of them were gone. The problem? The president of the bank. President Jimmy Carter had appointed a president with regulatory experience and good liberal politics but with no actual hands-on co-op or banking background. That wouldn't necessarily cause a problem -- the best bosses know how to use people who know more than they do. Unfortunately, she was also the kind of boss who only trusts those who suck up to her and who was unwilling to learn anything from her subordinates.

Her Washington political instincts were fine -- that's how she got the job and that's how she managed to play games that kept the bank from being axed by Ronald Reagan. But she drove off all the good people working there, gutting its real purpose. The bank still exists, but it isn't the co-op development institution that was envisioned.

After I was forced out, I consoled myself for years by outlining murder mysteries in which someone not unlike the bank president was the victim and the list of possible suspects -- all proud to be accused -- was quite lengthy. I never wrote the story, though, perhaps because I couldn't decide who the murderer should be.

I learned a valuable lesson: Bad leadership can cripple an institution, no matter how good everyone else involved may be. But the loss of what the bank could have been was a high price to pay for that lesson. And even though I spent the next ten years working to develop housing co-ops on the local level in Washington, I think what happened at the Co-op Bank made me stop believing that the government could create effective institutions to bring about social change.

That is to say, my worst job was the one that broke my heart.