I spent a summer in college doing temp work and it certainly taught me to respect what some people do for a living. Nothing was nearly so cushy as the bucket job (which is pretty sweet for that type of job, actually). I spent a few days at a factory helping to put the fake wood wallpaper on particle board. I was the guy who had to get these 200 pounds pieces of particle board off of the stack and onto the conveyer belt that fed the wood into the machine that stuck the fake wood grain wallpaper on them. The wood was so heavy and you had to be so quick that the only way to do it was to slightly lift the wood so that a little cushion of air was between two pieces and quickly shove the wood onto the belt. Within 2 days my thumbs were just about useless.
I also had a job where I had to clean spoiled food out of the Mega Foods warehouse. They had an entire section where they brought stuff that had been busted during shipping. They told us (there were about 10 of us) that nothing was over a week old. This was the middle of summer, and we found tons of Christmas stuff. Foulest smell you can imagine, and unknown bugs flying in your face every time you moved something. Awful. I refused the assignment when they asked me back the next day.
The best job I had all that summer was working for Arrow Van Lines. I did that for about 2 weeks at the end of the summer, they have a contract with the military and are responsible for moving people's goods when they get shipped to a new base. I would go in a truck with one other guy and we'd deliver people's stuff. Normally we'd deliver 2 people's things per day. 4-5 hours of each day was just driving to the location, and 3-4 hours was busting serious ass unloading that truck. The inside of the truck was ~140 degrees and you had to really hustle but after all the other jobs I'd done I started to really appreciate what was truly one of the better temp jobs out there.