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What's the worst job you have ever had?

Paulie Tandoori said:
i knew someone who worked as quality control in a pencil factory. it sounded like a magnus mills novel.
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Yeh, it does a bit :D

One of my BEST jobs:

Pilkington Tiles had stored hundreds, even thousands, of boxes of tiles in a warehouse that leaked like a bastard.

I was employed for about a month to stand in a shed taking the tiles out of their wet, collapsing cardboard boxes and put them in a dry box after wiping them clean and dry.

I had a walkman and absolute solitude. It was fucking ace. Some jobs are interesting, some are dull but so simple you can totally turn off.

The worst are jobs that are dull but still involved some concentration. Sadly, this is almost all of them :(
 
Omelette factory. Who tf is too lazy to make their own omelette (we weren't only making them for caterers...) and why should I have to wear a hard hat and steel toecap boots just to press down the tops of cheese omelettes to make sure they're properly folded? :confused:
 
Telesales for a kitchen company called Farouche Cuisine! years ago and crane driving for a roadworks gang who tunnelled under roads to fix burst sewer pipes .. I had to hoist up huge tubs of mud and shit and get off the crane and shovel it into piles for a grab lorry.
 
remember them horrid drinks Taboo & Mirage that were popular in the 80s? - well I worked for an agency that send me to their bottling plant in Dartford for a couple of weeks, I had to put the tops on the bottles as they went passed on the line, it was so boring, and the stench of the stuff in the factory was overwhelming:eek:
 
Tracksuit warehouse. Ghastly fucking things. I was once given a job as a theatre critic apparently by mistake.
 
Roadkill said:
Omelette factory. Who tf is too lazy to make their own omelette (we weren't only making them for caterers...) and why should I have to wear a hard hat and steel toecap boots just to press down the tops of cheese omelettes to make sure they're properly folded? :confused:
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There's one of those near here where most of my friends have worked apparently.

I've had a few.
Janitor at Sainsburys. Trying to look busy for four hours a day. They were tannoying me one day to come and clean some human shit off the supermarket floor. :eek: what kind of filthy bastard shits on the floor, then walks in it anyway? I just went out and sat in my car until I was sure someone else had done it.

Builders labourer on a YTS scheme. £17 a week. I was told to lean on a broom and if someone came along to push it (for about 6 months) :rolleyes:

Its too depressing to remember any more of these.
 
Either working nights in a printers doing nothing but taking a piles of leaflets from a conveyor belt and putting them in boxes. With a very noisy printing machine and a man who played cliff richard all night, every night.

Building a temporary grandstand with a bunch of psychopathic, drugged up, football hooligan cunts. Who threatened to kill me because i banged on the side of their lorry when they are about to reverse into my mates car.
 
Door to door gas and electricity sales, for about 3 days. Fruit picking in Mildura, Australia, for a week. 10 hour days with two 10 minute breaks. It was over 50c almost all week. About £2 an hour.
 
Picking almonds off a conveyor belt if they had a bit of brown skin on them in a marzipan factory has to be the most boring, but not the worst job I've had as we got to play word games all day and got given lots of marzipan when I left.
I think the worst job was selling teletext advertising to companies in the US where they don't have teletext. Mind you, it would have been harder to sell if they did get teletext because then they could have seen how crap it was. We had to make out teletext was a bit like the internet but better.
 
Nights in a factory making flywheel bits for Ford was a pretty good one. Had to pick the red-bastard-hot hoops out of the tempering machine with gaunlets that you had to have three pairs of on rotation, because if you wore them for too long they started to smoulder. And working a knackered coldpress with no safety guard at the same time.

Or a nursery. Plant nursery greenhouses in summer are no fun.
 
I've never had a job I didn't like but the most physically demanding was the labouring I did in the utilities industry when I was young. I remember doing 18 hr shifts (only on occassion) in the pouring rain and digging for hours on end. There were days I was so tired I'd be scared to go to sleep because I might not wake again!
 
!2 hour shifts in a crisp factory. Revolting working conditions: boiling hot vats of vegetable fat mixed in with noxious flavourings, so, depending upon which particular flavour was being processed, you had the tendecy to whiff of it. Thus, you came out of the place smelling of a combination of prawn cocktail, hot fat and your own grubby body sweat. To add to this delightful scenario, you'd often see some of the less than hygenic workers dipping their hands into the conveyor belts for a salt and vinegar treat. At the time there was tensions between the hindu and muslim workers, so they had to be separated; one faith working the floor, the other on the raised platform above. Lots of grimacing and insults, and the odd thing being thown.

Happy days ... One of those jobs that it was your duty to get as stoned/drunk as possible after every shift or survival was impossible.
 
On my first job they said asked me to move 200 concrete blocks from one place to another. They said the driver had dropped them in the wrong place.
Seemed reasonable enough. It was seriously hard work for a wimpy 16 year old though.
About a week later they said they'd got it wrong and could I put them back again.
Then a week after that they asked me to put them all back in the original place again.
It was only recently that I wondered if they might have been taking the piss. :D
 
Fire reinstatements. Going through burnt-out houses, assessing the damage, seeing the charred photos and remains of people's lives. Discover the odd toasted pet, the dead people had been taken away by that point.
 
jbob said:
Happy days ... One of those jobs that it was your duty to get as stoned/drunk as possible after every shift or survival was impossible.
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When I worked in a dairy - twelve-hour shifts packing milk bottles into trolleys - many of the staff got as stoned as possible at work, never mind outside it, especially on the night shift. Many times I used to go for a spliff in people's cars during the evening meal break. On that same night shift there was a bloke who used to eat hash-cakes at every break, until by the end of the shift he was just staring into space. All of the supervisors knew about it and didn't care unless you were too out of it to do the job.

On the day shift Ben, a lad about my age, used to 'make the job look all nice and fluffy' by taking ephedrine tablets with his morning coffee and fag - before operating the bottling machinery. One Sunday he came to work straight from a club. He was fine until about lunchtime, when his drugs wore off, and then he was vile until the speed he took to keep himself going kicked in. 'It's a miracle they've not sent him home by now,' said old Scottish Tom as Ben left the smoking room after his afternoon tea break. 'He's stoned oot of his fuckin' box.' But they never did send anyone home. Not even old Peter, the hand who pushed the trolleys about outside, who was well into his seventies and spent half the day swigging brandy from his hip flask before driving home...

The odd thing is, I actually rather enjoyed that job too. :confused: It was hard work and long hours, but there were some great people there.
 
Loads of crappy agency work when younger such as .....

Weeding a 22 acre onion field in the height of summer as the farmer had forgotten to spray for weeds.

Packing denture cleaning tablets into tubes in a room filled with deafening machinery, six of us all sat round with ear protection on in a windowless room.

Various roles working at a factory that made all the yoghurts and trifles for all the main supermarkets.

...and hey lets not forget I'm still in catering and I've had some crap jobs since too!
 
Working as a children's entertainer on Stena Sealink going backwards and forwards to France.

I was Jerry, my mate was Tom and we had a minder. We both had massive suits to wear, which were boiling hot, we looked out of the mouth holes and constantly had kids throwing themselves at us and/or grannies playing with our tails.

£90 a week for 9 weeks over summer at Uni. :D
 
Roadkill said:
When I worked in a dairy - twelve-hour shifts packing milk bottles into trolleys - many of the staff got as stoned as possible at work, never mind outside it, especially on the night shift. Many times I used to go for a spliff in people's cars during the evening meal break. On that same night shift there was a bloke who used to eat hash-cakes at every break, until by the end of the shift he was just staring into space. All of the supervisors knew about it and didn't care unless you were too out of it to do the job.
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Actually, that used to happen the crisp factory too. Several workers were smack users as well.

Roadkill, since I recall you mentioning you're from 'Crisp city', I think you might actually know the factory I'm referring to!
 
Probably the nastiest task when I was in catering was peeling boiled cows' tongues. The smell gets into the back of your throat and you can't eat anything for days afterwards without tasting it.
 
Working in an egg packing plant, fucking shit work in bad conditions for 8 h sifts (16 h shifts before Easter and Christmas).

Isn't it funny nearly all the crap jobs seem to be connected to the food industry :confused:
 
jbob said:
Actually, that used to happen the crisp factory too. Several workers were smack users as well.

Roadkill, since I recall you mentioning you're from 'Crisp city', I think you might actually know the factory I'm referring to!
Click to expand...

What, the one up on the industrial estate in Newtown, near the Highlands pub? If so, I never worked in there but my brother did.

You can probably guess the factories I've described on this thread as well, actually...
 
One of the more fun bad jobs I've done was as a Sainsbury's Customer Service Helper after a store refit.

Management were worried that regular customers would get pissed off at the new layout and desert them for another so I and about four others were employed as floorwalkers dressed in fetching 'Can I Help You Now' sashes to direct customers to the eggs and the soup etc. Good laugh but shit money and arrogant management.
 
oooh, too many to mention. I've had loads of shit jobs over the decades. Sometimes modding here has been shite on a stick.
 
Roadkill said:
What, the one up on the industrial estate in Newtown, near the Highlands pub? If so, I never worked in there but my brother did.

You can probably guess the factories I've described on this thread as well, actually...
Click to expand...

Nah, Beaumont L. And yes, I think I know where you mean.
 
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