I had one job right out of college that I hated. I got hired as a manufacturing engineer by Chrysler at a time when Daimler was trying to dump them to anyone who would make a realistic bid. On day one my new boss basically told me he's too busy to train me, so until he gets around to it, just make sure I look busy whenever his boss is around. They paid me $53,000/yr for doing almost nothing. That was a high starting salary for the time. Many of my classmates would have jumped at it, but I resolved to quit on day 1. I stuck it out from April to September, because I figured I could handle a summer of shit until the next gig I found started, which was graduate school. From Chrysler I took a $32,000 pay cut to pursue grad studies, and have not regretted it for a single minute ever since. There's nothing like taking pride in the work you do and feeling like you're doing something that contributes (to the world, to your sense of self...whatever, as long as you don't feel like a bump on a log).
I had a job where the sales VP got Metrokane to pitch him on a bunch of shelving for the warehouse and it came in at like $450k. I said it looked like a lot of money so I spent a day reconfiguring everything and came up with the exact same amount of shelving from the exact same company for $200k. I then spent four days putting it up, rather than our company paying Metrokane $50k to install. The sales VP responded by having my 6'x6' cubicle broken into three 6'x2' carels. Same marketing guy had bought the machine shop without acknowledging that the company didn't do any machining so when I put on safety glasses and made chips nobody was willing to question who I was making them for. So I ran a CAT5 cable back to the machine shop, moved my computer in there and made shavings for eight weeks. God I hated that job.