What's the worst job you have ever had?

[d.a.s.h]

Worked for a few years' in a typesetters in Scotland. Just about everyone there was a raving Orangeman and Rangers supporter. Many working days ended with an improvised Orange Walk around the workplace, in which a drum was made from an upturned wastepaper bin and steel compositors' rulers were held to the mouth like flutes.

Musical accompaniment came courtesy of 'The Sash' played on the workplace ghetto blaster, which had a small stack of tapes next to it featuring the likes of the 'Easterhouse Truth Defenders' and the 'Silver Skull Flute Band'.

The boss was particularly tight-fisted and the joke was to shout "Hey Billy, someone's trying to get into your wallet!" if a car alarm went off in the street outside. It was said that his brother was equally mean, and that if they went to the pub together, they'd spend all night there without either of them buying a drink.

It was good to leave that place.

 

[Roadkill]

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

The dairy used to have a right reputation locally, didn't it? Long hours, hard work, full of wankers etc etc. People used to ask how I stuck at it, but actually I quite liked it. There were some very sound people there (although there were some vile twats as well!), and the money was better than I could have earned anywhere else. The last I heard it had closed down, sadly.

 

[Dovydaitis]

ive got a few, but i think the worst was when i worked on the community doing home help. the joys of helping old people get up and ready whilt they are hurling abuse at you for waking them up/being rough/not washing as they would like, for them to be covered in shit when you did the 30mile round trip to give them their lunch and somehow they blame you!!!

the comapny were shite as well, didnt pay petrol nor give you travalling time, so this meant i would start at 5.30am and finish after 10pm, just to get up and start again. and it was minimun wage

i lasted 2 1/2 months

 

[Mrs Miggins]

Pork Farms pork pie factory in Nottingham
As a vegetarian
The place was fucking filthy as well.
Toilets on the shop floor
Floor covered in congealed meat and pastry
People picking food up off the floor and chucking it back onto the line
No requirement to wash hands at any point and very very few gloves around.
You came into the factory in your outdoor shoes which were caked in muck by the end of the shift
Disgusting

AND they used the same line for the cheese and onion rolls as for the sausage rolls
Without cleaning it.
I would advise against eating any of their products

 

[cypher79]

house clearances.

ever seen the tv series 'life of grime'? well that sort of thing i had to do, first day we had to clear out this dead smackheads house, syringes, piss and shit everywhere, we even found a rotting dead cat in there.

the fucking wanker boss didnt even supply us with any gloves, luckily a kind lady from across the street gave me a pair.

needless to say my first day was my last.

 

[Final]

I used to drill the holes into pads of A4 paper.

 

[Chester Copperpot]

I use to work in a power station which burnt chicken poo. My job was to climb on the lorries which delivered the poo and have a dig around and take a few samples which I had to test for moisture content to make sure it burnt efficiently.

Mixed in with the poo were flat chickens which looked like Frisbees

 

[Final]

I use to work in a power station which burnt chicken poo. My job was to climb on the lorries which delivered the poo and have a dig around and take a few samples which I had to test for moisture content to make sure it burnt efficiently.

Mixed in with the poo were flat chickens which looked like Frisbees

Could have been worse, you might have been estate agent or something.

x

 

[Final]

Mixed in with the poo were flat chickens which looked like Frisbees

Just out of curiosity, we you able to 'frisbee' them?

 

[Chester Copperpot]

Yep - they make fine frisbees.

 

[Stigmata]

I've been lucky with jobs so far. The worst was a Sainsbury's night shift thing. 9pm to 7am, and there were no windows so i'd go for days without seeing the night sky. All the other people who worked there seemed to be ex-convicts and middle-class businessmen who'd had nervous breakdowns. They piped the local radio station over the tannoy, which meant I had to listen to Maroon 5 about eight times a night. I still get stressed when I hear any of their songs.

In the end I just left at the end of one of my shifts and never went back.

 

[Thora]

Prep room in a sandwich factory. Hours of sticking blocks of cheese through the slicer, opening huge cans of tuna and sweetcorn, and all the time wading about ankle deep in brine, mayo and unidentified gloop as everything we didn't use was just tipped onto the floor "to drain away". I had to hold my breath every time I walked through the meat store cos the smell made me gag.

Not as bad as my dad's worst job in a chicken factory though.

 

[TopCat]

oh god i thought i couldn't contribute to this thread but i've just had a flash back to working on the litter picking teams one year when a private contractor took over and we weren't allowed water breaks when it was 90˚+. blokes with megaphones ordering pickers back because they'd missed a fag butt. being told we were "the scum of the earth" was quite funny when we rebelled though

by contrast the year we got onto a before festival shift was

Glasto really retains it's radical edge eh?

 

[TopCat]

So many..

Probably making coleslaw in a factory in the height of summer

I would wager that you never eat coleslaw. I knew several people who have done this job and they will grab coleslaw out of your mouth in your best interests of course.

 

[El Jefe]

I would wager that you never eat coleslaw. I knew several people who have done this job and they will grab coleslaw out of your mouth in your best interests of course.

i wouldn;'t eat it anyway - hate most salad vegetables - but yeh, that'd put you right off it

 

[KeyboardJockey]

Oooh yes. Just remembered a health and safety nightmare job I once worked in. Among numerous incidents one I remember is that one of my tasks in this photographic lab was to take Glacial Acetic Acid and dilute it 1:50 by climbing up a broken ladder to a huge 100litre tank up on a shelf whilst carrying an open overflowing jug of concentrated acid.

 

[TopCat]

I worked for a courier company who stole half of my first weeks dockets and told me to fuck off when I complained. They were meant to be a bit gangster like and that was meant to scare me off from demanding my money. I was very cross, they are no longer in business.

I got sacked as a waiter from a winebar after three days, i throttled a customer who called me boy....

 

[Maurice Picarda]

Selling inutile electric potato peelers door to door on a commission-only basis. Each day started with a two hour motivational session which involved chanting implausible acronymns and listening respectfully to colleagues "insights" about sales success, and ended with an hour-long motivational warm-down and rounds of applause for everyone who had met their target. My manager was a bug-eyed loon who had been with the company a fortnight and explained with convert's zeal that it had changed his life. He rang me each evening for a chat to check that I was still motivated.

 

[KeyboardJockey]

Selling inutile electric potato peelers door to door on a commission-only basis. Each day started with a two hour motivational session which involved chanting implausible acronymns and listening respectfully to colleagues "insights" about sales success, and ended with an hour-long motivational warm-down and rounds of applause for everyone who had met their target. My manager was a bug-eyed loon who had been with the company a fortnight and explained with convert's zeal that it had changed his life. He rang me each evening for a chat to check that I was still motivated.

Oh fuck I went to an interview for a job in sales and found out it was selling vacuum cleaners door to door and the whole interview and presentations were just like that sort of swivel eyed bonkersness.

Never has a motivational presentation made me feel less motivated.

 

[Maurice Picarda]

Oh fuck I went to an interview for a job in sales and found out it was selling vacuum cleaners door to door and the whole interview and presentations were just like that sort of swivel eyed bonkersness.

Never has a motivational presentation made me feel less motivated.

Staff were encouraged to draw their goals on a chart and stick this up for all the office to see. Most people chopped pictures of cars and laydeez out of colour supplements and inexpertly prittsticked them next to the upline position they craved.

 

[KeyboardJockey]

Staff were encouraged to draw their goals on a chart and stick this up for all the office to see. Most people chopped pictures of cars and laydeez out of colour supplements and inexpertly prittsticked them next to the upline position they craved.

Oh fuck. Sounds like the only people who would enjoy that job are dickheads.

 

[Maurice Picarda]

Oh fuck. Sounds like the only people who would enjoy that job are dickheads.

I retired after thirty happy years there.

 

[JTG]

I sold Lottery tickets on the street in Melbourne for three days in 2004

I cleaned refurbished tellies for two weeks in 1997

Both were torture

 

[Epico]

I put ice-cream cones in a box for 9 hours a day, for six months (2 x university summers) - the job itself wasn't too bad, as El Jefe said, you can switch off - and I knew it was only temporary. Biggest nark was the thought of all my friends having holidays, and fun, and me spending my summers in a factory.

Worst job was working in a bowling alley, was just a depressing place frequented by morons - I quit there because I wanted to meet urbanites for the 1s time! Big mistake that.

 

[tar1984]

debt recovery admin assistant for the local council. they employed me and one other person on a 1 year temp contract because there was such a huge backlog of unpaid debts owed to the council.

you were handed a list of names, phone numbers & "amount owed", then had to call them up and tell them that they owed the council money and had a certain amount of time to pay before we passed the issue to the legal team.

the problem was some of these bills were from like years ago. it was like "em...you know how the council came and removed that wasp nest from your garden 5 years ago. well...you never paid us for that." if they argued and said they had paid, then they had to produce bank statements to prove it or they were still liable.

the worst past was if there was a dispute they had to come in for a face to face interview to discuss it. some of them understandably pissed off. i was 18 years old at the time and well out of my depth.

fucking hated that job. left after about 6 months.

the only good thing that came of it is that it improved my customer service skills. i became very confident talking to customers on the phone - perfect for my current employment in the high flying call centre industry

 

[mrsfran]

I worked at Burger King for 6 weeks and was bullied for having a posh accent. I was made to do the worst jobs, clean the loos every hour, was told I couldn't work on the tills because I wasn't pretty enough.

 

[Errol's son]

Working in a shoe shop where a high percentasge of the customers seemed to have very smelly feet... can't remember name of shop.

Selling gas and electricity packages door to door post openibng up of the market.

Selling pizza promotions door to door.

Working in a yoghurt factory.

 

[nick301171]

Worked in a pop factory over the summer when I was a student.

10 hour shifts, and all I would do is grab filled bottles of pop off a production line and put them into cardboard container. When the container was full I would shove it into a shrink wrap machine. And repeat.

Princely sum of £2.50 an hour for that; it was 1994 mind.

 

[scumbalina]

Agency job in a metal factory. I'd said cleaning but only offices etc, nothing industrial. It was a huge factory where they were...I dunno, doing stuff with metal and as they cut/filed it, there were piles and piles of corkscrew shavings, razor sharp. I had to go round with a wheelbarrow and pick them up, no gloves etc (I was too young and stoopid to think to ask ) just my bare hands (someone did give me gloves right at the end), then take the wheelbarrow and empty it into a skip, except I'm so ickle I couldn't really get it up the ramp and tip it. Then I had to clean all the (mens) toliets, huge ones with wall to wall urinal which they were all pissing in whilst I was cleaning them. I got finished early and someone told me to slip out quietly rather than hang around as the foreman etc had gone home for the day - but some cunting bastard grassed me up. I phoned the agency and told them I wasn't going back (it was meant to be for 2 weeks)....I never got paid a single penny. Did the whole fucking day for free and went home covered in scratches and cuts all over me poor arms.

 

[TopCat]

Swarf is a killer.