Image via Complex Original
There’s a lot of jerks out there in the world, but some places just seem to have a naturally higher concentration of them, like MTV or any high school ever. Some are maintained and even run by the biggest offenders, causing you to take a breath and steel yourself before encountering them during your own daily errands.
These hornets nests’ of douchebaggery can’t all be statistical anomalies. While some vocations may just attract the world’s rat bastards, like used car salesmen and pirates, many will take a pure, kindhearted soul and gradually devolve them into a miserable A-hole. Whether it’s the job itself, via environment, function, or general aura of bitchiness, some jobs can transform any Anakin Skywalker into a stone-cold Darth Vader. Avoid these careers if you don’t want to become an A-hole (if isn’t already too late.)
I.T.
You might assume your office’s computer tech guy is an A-hole because he’s an antisocial computer nerd. But, maybe you’re the reason he’s so snappy and condescending toward you. It’s one thing that you downloaded all those viruses through your Miley Cyrus image searches. But then you and your co-workers go ahead and alienate the guy or girl who is paid to make your job easier by mocking their abilities like computers is still this fringe tech not used by everyone everywhere all the time.
They only went to school to learn the most important commodity in the modern world. But, yeah, keep calling them nerds. Just don't forget they know all your darkest e-secrets.
Retail Clerk
It’s easy to think that every retail clerk was born a total butthole, since, pretty much, every retail clerk is a total butthole. But they didn’t start that way. Their jobs buttholed them up good, beginning by dashing their dreams and rubbing it in their face constantly with every plastic security tag that won’t unclip off the damn sweater.
When they gave up potentially lucrative futures in law and medicine to learn fashion design, folding the same pair of jeans forty-seven times in a given shift wasn’t what they had in mind. It’s that forty-eighth time that finally pushes them over the edge and makes them forever forget how to smile.
Gym Teacher
Except for maybe that one cool one in fourth grade who let you play kickball all semester, every gym teacher is an A-hole. Like many others on this list, they didn’t start that way, but rather landed there after realizing they were living proof of the age-old axiom: Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.
Besides, they are surrounded, day in and day out, by hordes of pubescent, sweaty children too young to use deodorant but too old to not stink after forty-five minutes of field hockey. The whole point of gym class to drain that annoying energy out of the kids so they can go back to being complacent for the real teachers. Gym teachers are the ones taking the hit, full force.
Cubicle Drone
Cubicle workers are like prison inmates: trapped in a tiny cell with no sunlight. Only they receive a paycheck. Still, all the cash in the world couldn't make them immune to their depressing surroudings. Even if they aren’t complete jackasses, the lack of privacy in an office will highlight even the slightest idiosyncrasies of your average white collar worker. Any music is too loud and any phone conversation too public. It only takes a certain amount of time before they replace the stress of walking on eggshells with the who-gives-a-crap attitude of your typical office drone. They want to hear their music, damnit, and they’re going to blast their easy listening all the way to eleven. Enjoy their peacocking assholery.
Musician
A struggling musician can’t be humble. Nobody is going to book you for a gig if you say you’re "alright." That means if they want to make any money from their job, they’ve got to talk nonstop about how their sound isn’t like everybody else’s, how their catchy hooks are “ironic,” and how they’ll never sell out. And, when they sell out, they'll complain about how their original fans are just petty and jealous and just don’t understand their new album. If that's not the mark of an A-hole, what is?
DMV Agent/Postal Clerk/Bank Teller
These folks’ jobs are to sit there and face a never-ending line of people who are in a bad mood because they don’t want to be there, either. These jobs don’t attract A-holes. At best, they attract people who like to sit. But there’s only so many "Window Closed" signs they can hide behind. Eventually they’re going to wonder if they had died after their job interview and have been stuck in Hell ever since.
Your DMV clerk was probably nice to hundreds if not thousands of frustrated customers before facing you and finally going full A-hole. And that was just their first day.
TSA Agent
You could have rescued a bus full of nuns and babies on your day off and then come back to work at the TSA and have everyone in the world immediately assume you’re the rudest, most incompetent person they’ve ever met. You can’t get off on the right foot with someone when you’re making them take off their shoes, and if all you’re going to do is face people who hate you all day, there’s no way you’re not going to be a huge, obnoxious A-hole.
You can’t even go home and have sex to relieve your stress because nothing makes touching butts less sexy than touching lots and lots of butts. Also, everyone blames you for 9-11, so, there’s that.
Barista
Moms brag more about their new Keurigs more than their barista children. If you’re working as a barista, then you probably can’t afford the very drinks you’re making. Nonetheless, it’s still impressive that you can take two hundred latte orders in an hour that are somehow different from the last, like pretentious brown snowflakes. And even if you get a hundred and ninety-nine of them perfectly, you’re going to catch serious hell for using unsweetened vanilla soy instead of vanilla unsweetened soy on that two-hundredth.
It doesn’t help that every customer who berates you hasn’t had their coffee yet. Barista, you never had a chance.
Writer
Writing is the loneliest profession. The only way to get work done is by locking yourself up in a room and putting thoughts to page. You might think writers flock to cafes for the free Wi-Fi, but they really just want to remember what human voices sound like.
Besides the inherent antisocial requirements, almost any writer faces constant rejection, even if they’re eventually successful. J.K. Rowling originally planned for 93 Harry Potter novels, but only got seven yeses. True story.
There’s also a good chance being a writer makes you a double-A-hole, because you’re probably also working as a barista.
Congressman
It takes a certain type of A-hole to succeed in politics, especially higher office, but Congressman, while a key part of the national government, is still local enough to allow earnest idealists running on grassroots principles to make their way to Washington. Unfortunately, once there, they learn they have to compromise everything they stand for, give up campaign promises, and ally themselves with other A-holes, just to end up getting nothing done anyway.
By their second term, they’re almost certainly complete A-holes, but by then they’ve self-medicated with bribes, affairs, and the occasional hit and run. Besides, once you become an A-hole, you can move up to jobs that require you to be an A-hole, and that’s where the real money is.