Worst jobs that you have done

[Andy Hamilton]

I had to write a bit of a potted history of myself the other day and I thought I would share with you some of the worst jobs I have had. Anyone else with similar experiences?

Cleaning out one of the furnaces at British Steel in corby. I and a punk had to climb inside into an area about the size of a mini and got covered from head to toe in soot which took 3 days and about 7 baths to get out of my skin. Due to a cock up I did not even get paid for 2 days doing that.

Worked in food factories and had to do wonderful jobs such as 'smoothing out' - moving a knife over a lasagne to smooth out the sauce, pouring chemicals into hoppers to make crisp ingredients, buttering
bread for 8 hours a day, walking into a huge fridge to get mincemeat to pour into a hopper the fridge had gone off blood on the floor and I had to hold my breath to get the meat or throw up.

I made holes in a factory for a while too. This involved sticking a bit of metal into a machine pressing a pedal and making a hole. Great fun.

[albert onglebod]

trying to get interviews for double galzing salesmen over the phone.
I only did this for 2 days.We were told that only people interested in home improvement were on the list .
The lady sitting beside me was a past master and knew every weedling trick in the book but my concience just wouldn't allow me to BS anybody.

The other job which was very tedious although not terrible was painting out spots on giant black and white photographs all day. They looked great when you had finished but it didnt half make your legs ache standing up all the time.

[ina]

Can't even say that I've had really bad jobs... There were some people who were hell to work for, but on the whole I always knew I could walk out, so either I put up with it because I liked the work, or because it was short term...

Picking strawberries is quite hard work - bending over for hours at a time; disposing of not-so-fresh bodies (of sheep and other livestock!) can be very unpleasant; I have worked in factories, which wasn't exciting, but bearable; being a chambermaid is sometimes horrible (having to clean guests' sh** off the bathroom walls etc). My ultimate horror would be having to work in a call centre.

[The Chili Monster]

I could compile a list of all the employers not to work for (based on my own experiences) but I guess that would just prompt legal action.

Can't say which period of my checkered career path was the worst BUT activities just vying for entry into the crap job hall-of-fame include:
Labelling jars by hand, Cleaner at a depot, Checkout Operator (but that was the damned customers -another rant for another day) Making Burgers, Making Burgers, Making Burgers (MMM)(not lovin' it) and Car Park Attendant.

Back in the mid-eighties, my punishment for not finding my part-time supermarket job worthy of my full attention and for skiving in general was assignment to "the compactor". This noisey, dirty and smelly contraction swallowed rubbish and compessed cardboard and paper into neat, discrete sizes.
The first day of my sentence commenced. Dirty and smelly as it was, I loved it. It was a beautiful, hot summer's day. I set myself up with a chair, a supply of Lilt and fags and had a whale of a time. All in all, I probabaly only did a total of about two hours work. The best bit was the look on the Manager's face when he realised I wasn't hating it.

Anyway, homage to the masters: http://www.idler.co.uk/crap/

[Stonehead]

But how do you define worst job?

I could easily say all of the jobs I did before we bought this place. They had their moments and many paid well but at the end of the day none were me.

I could also point out the really, really bad stuff that comes with some jobs - like lying under a fire truck with a reflective blanket over me and two others while a bushfire tried to eat us alive. It bubbled the paint off the truck, but the wind changed direction just before we cooked. Or seeing a bloke get shot in the arm with a blank cartridge from an SLR. Or seeing death in its many gruesome forms because it's part of the job.

Then there were the jobs that were just unbelievably arduous - try spraying 2-4-5T with a galvanised metal backpack spray, while wearing rubber gauntlets, protective overalls and a respirator under the Australian sun. And to make it more challenging, do it up hill and down on land choked with blackberries that are over your head.

But, for me, the worst jobs are the ones with a stench that remains with you for years. I'm not going to detail most of them as they're just too horrific, but a couple that will make people chuckle include:

Going down the Putty Road (the NSW Aussies will know this one) to an accident site. The accident itself wasn't too bad, but what made it absolutely disgusting was that there had been another accident there the day before - a semi-trailer loaded with eggs had rolled. Allow 24 hours and 38C temperatures...

Pressure washing inside a rendering vat...

Helping clear the decomposing remains of a whale from a beach - after someone else's rather daft attempt to get rid of it with explosives...

Cleaning any sileage/septic/foul water/manure tank out, particularly on a hot day - and believe me, a respirator doesn't keep the smell out...

Cleaning a flat formerly occupied by the lads from hell - who pissed just about everywhere, spilled beer everywhere, didn't clean anywhere, left food everywhere, and appeared to never, ever have flushed the loo...

Sorry, but you did ask for worst jobs!

Stonehead

[Hillbilly]

I've not had a job I've hated but I guess for sheer boredom it had to be stacking pulp and pallet logs in the woods when I was just starting out. Shifting ton after ton of wood by hand, day after day, week after week, month after month in fair weather or foul - it gets pretty grim. Woodcutting wasn't so bad - even in a blizzard you hardly noticed it. Then there were the accidents with the saws or harvesters, which I won't go into on here as they were just horrific and very sobering. The last job involved scaling the side of an oil tanker in some really rough seas from a pilot launch and that was pretty disturbing but still, not as bad as some of you guy's expereinces. I've been pretty lucky really job wise. Mostly doing stuff I love. Trees and ships.

[shiney]

1. Working in a turkey burger factory. This prompted me to become a vegetarian for 20 years. I now eat as much organic meaty stuff as I can get my hands on as I lapsed badly over a bacon sandwich one day. My body told me I NEEDED it and it was right. It was delicious.

Burgers that are bought are a big no no now! Homemade everytime.

2.Making contact lenses and etching numbers on each lens. God, that gave me the biggest headache and eyestrain. I lasted a week there!

The dullest job I had was working in an archictects office. Yawnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!

[Andy Hamilton]

Just thought of some more bad jobs I have had....

Sticking junk mail into envelopes and having the supervisor belittle me as I could not work out what order they were suposed to go in with her leaning over my shoulder. I put it to her that no-one reads it anyway and that they certainly were not going to bother about what order it came in. Did not go down too well!

I have also done door to door double glazing selling when I was 17, was pretty good at it too. I got disillusioned after a while and ended up spending my time telling people that they should go for wooden window frames as they are more reliable.

Changing the dates on frozen meat was another good one. It was for the pepparami that goes on pizza. Took it out of the freezer then changed the best before date for a year later. Some of us were saying to each other 'is this legal?' - then we got the sack for being 3 mins late back from our lunch break.

[hedgewizard]

Nothing that can compare with any of those, but my own job dealing with ill people can be pretty tough if you're ill yourself. Because of a lack of cover I usually have to drag myself in even when I should be in bed, green in the face trying not to breathe on anyone with staff avoiding you. Then some old git comes in with a bit of a cough he's had for, oh, nearly 20 mins now and insists on demonstrating it... right in your face. Etc.

[Luath]

Being a Moderator..................

[Stonehead]

Nothing that can compare with any of those, but my own job dealing with ill people can be pretty tough if you're ill yourself. Because of a lack of cover I usually have to drag myself in even when I should be in bed, green in the face trying not to breathe on anyone with staff avoiding you. Then some old git comes in with a bit of a cough he's had for, oh, nearly 20 mins now and insists on demonstrating it... right in your face. Etc.

Trying running a self-sufficient croft - no holidays, no sick leave, no time off and always a huge workload to get through. But, on the positive side it's possible to avoid other human beings (well, OH and boys aside) for days at a time!

And the only old git here is me...

[Chickpea]

I worked in a chip shop once. You don't get off until after midnight (serving drunks for an hour or more after chucking out time, then cleaning up), and you have to have a thorough shower because your hair and skin stinks. You have to wash your clothes as well because they stink. It's a rubbish job.

I worked for a company that developed sonar systems for military submarines. You know when you wake up in the morning and ask yourself "What difference would it make, cosmically speaking, if I just rolled over and went back to sleep and didn't go into work today?" and the answer comes back "Well, it'd be that little bit harder to blow people up." I decided I would never again do a job that didn't have a good answer to that question.

It was the best-paying job I ever had and i quit it. I havn't so much had a career ladder - more a career snake. But I've always had job satisfaction after that.

[wulf]

I was unemployed for a few months after dropping out of a teacher training course. For about a week I worked with a friend of mine who had landed a contract to drive around in a dustcart picking up cardboard for recycling (so, kind of green, although you have to wonder if that really offset the cost of the truck rumbling about the countryside!).

It was too poorly paid to keep up (more keeping friend company for a week) and was generally okay (especially dropping the cardboard off and getting to browse through all the discarded magazines that were littered about for recycling). However, I remember one afternoon that was the pits - picking up cardboard from a meat packing factory on a hot afternoon - bloody and crawing with maggots. Ugh!

Wulf

[Dave]

My job experiences are similar to Andy's worked in meat processing plant with him - I told the agency I was a vegetarian but you know what ba***ds they can be.
It was miles from anywhere so you couldn't just walk out - They wanted me to act as a guard on a machine turning sides of beef into mincemeat. I somehow got out of doing that and ended up stacking ready made lasgne in a room on my own. The lasagne would come down from a conveyor belt in the ceiling and I'd have to stack them into crates. At one point I was too slow for the machine and it backed up sending all the little tin-foil cartons raining into the room.
As Andy described earlier there was blood all over the floor everywhere - I had some safety wellies with a hole in and my socks were sodden with animal blood by the time I left for the day.
I was a very depressed teenager at the time and the whole experience was a living hell. I've never done a job worse since. I think we were paid something like £2.40 an hour for it. I'd dropped out of my A levels and my parents wanted to know I was doing something so after a couple of days in that hell hole I used to leave the house in the morning pretending to go to work until I found something else.

Another sh*t job I've had was in a lab testing the sticks diabetics use to test their blood sugar. I'd pipette a drop of glucose onto twelve strips and a computer would anylise it. I'd then take the 12 strips out of the machine and start all over again for 12 hours! There was no natural light or air and I worked with a bunch of bloody morons who just wanted to talk about last nights episode of "Wife Swap". I'm not a person who recoils at bad language or crude jokes at all but the depths of deprivity that came out of some of their mouths would make Jim Davison blush.

[Stonehead]

Not one of mine, but a job held by an ex-girlfriend. She worked in the perfume department of a major department store and absolutely hated it. It was a "promotion" from Lingerie and involved burying herself under loads of slap, working in a miasma of scent and putting up with all manner of appalling people (particularly the other staff).

Even worse for her, she was not a make-up sort of woman - preferred no make-up, jeans and bike leathers, and tinkering with and racing old motorbikes! After two weeks in Perfumery, she came down with skin rashes and severe hay fever.

Whenever I watch the Fast Show's Arabella Weir doing the "No Offence" sketch, I'm instantly transported back in time and fall about in fits of laughter as it's so, so true!

Another ex was a podiatrist - imagine dealing with the feet of mainly over-70s, in ill-health, incontinent, with sores, corns, bunions and infections, and who are unable to wash their feet. Ugh! She was good at foot massages after a stressful day, however.