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Got to thinking of the jobs I had when i was younger... Had a job where i worked as a bike guide for some rather portly lads with lots of money but no sense of direction or basic fitness.
What seemed like a nice relaxing job bimbling around the countryside invariably turned into trips of horror with people getting lost, constantly having mechanicals, medical emergencies and so on.
Any of you guys have any stories from jobs that sounded cool on paper, but turned out to be pure torture?
Saturday milk round as a hormonally challenged teenager.
4am starts and a distinct lack of bored housewives.....
Fireman, I reckon.
It must get pretty rubbish after a while drinking tea and napping all day.
Cycle courier in Glasgow.
Sitting about in the cold waiting for jobs that never came.
It paid so little I had to chose between fixing my bike or paying rent. I got a dull indoor desk job sharpish.
Computer games tester - 1998(?), London, mostly WWI & WW2 flight sims.
The most boring shit ever, as the games were really buggy, and we just had to play the same level over and over and over to replicate crashes and bugs, then pass the info over to the programmers, who would fail to fix it, pass it back to us, and so on ad infinitum.
Also the office was full of nerds, so come lunchtime I'd suggest a pint at the pub next door, and all they wanted to do was frag each other in Quake Arena.
Fireman, I reckon.
🎣
PlayStation 2 launch and tech support supervisor ! Was as fun as it sounded I did get a ps2 to test in the office 4 months before release though !!!
I was once the 'Database Coordinator' for a Mercedes Benz franchise.
That was as boring as it sounds. Actually more boring. Much more.
I did a lot of mail merges.
Tester for Amstrad email phones. Freeform give a load of idiots kit and let them play with it.
Managed to find a way to brick them by sending a voice message to myself, a feature that I think made it into production.
They did so little that endless days of 'testing' got very dull.
Computer games tester – 1998(?), London, mostly WWI & WW2 flight sims.
Could have been worse, could have been 1988.
Fireman, I reckon.
It must get pretty rubbish after a while drinking tea and napping all day.
You say that but with two young children the rest is often appreciated. I tend to drink tea/coffee in the morning but water in the afternoon as I prefer exercising in the gym later in the day. Fitting smoke detectors and school visits get pretty samey though.
Had 14 weeks at home due to shielding my son and can’t wait to get back on Wednesday. Fist job is my blue light refresher, NEE, NOOOOOR! 🙂
It must get pretty rubbish after a while drinking tea and napping all day
nah, there's cars to be washed, snooker to be played don't forget the part time work to arrange.
Motorbike courier in London, in winter. Cold, wet, made barely any money and utterly destroyed my CBR600. Which was on HP.....
Some of you think being outdoor instructor is cool.
Wait for your fourth high ropes session of the week, followed by your fourth archery session of the week. Same routine. Same fake risk. Same minutiae of safety routines. Same timescale. Freezing cold. Raining. You're being paid a pittance.
And the knowledge that it all happens again at the weekend.
After you've cleaned pee-filled wetsuits, brushed out someone else's minibus and assisted the house team with discovering the "holy trinity" of pee, puke and blood in the rooms...
don’t forget the part time work to arrange.
Are you my neighbour? Apparently he's a good joiner...
Motorbike courier in London, in winter. Cold, wet, made barely any money and utterly destroyed my CBR600. That was on HP…..
2 years as a motorbike courier in Bristol. On an MZ 251.
nah, there’s cars to be washed, snooker to be played don’t forget the part time work to arrange.
We’ve lost the snooker but after 3 months off my wife’s car is minging.
Working for Evans Cycles. Getting paid minimum wage with no commission to hard sell bike's is a piss take. Went back to selling BMW's.
Strawberry picking. Working outside in the summer, camping with a diverse gang of mainly young Europeans should have been ace.
Backbreaking work, paid piecework and because the weather was shite very little crop. Drunk all our wages and got punched in a pub. 😁
Saturday milk round as a hormonally challenged teenager.
4am starts and a distinct lack of bored housewives…..
Aaaaah yes - I remember it well!
It was the winter of 1981 in the South West Midlands and I was working for/with "Trevor" our local Milkman and Housewife-chatter-upper extraordinaire!
He thought he was so 'smoooooooth' hahahahahahaha never got him anywhere!
Getting lobsters out of Jayne Mansfi....
...oh wait, wasn't supposed to tell anyone.
“It’s all about driving fast and getting in fights”
It’s not.
According to many people, being a postie in the middle of a heatwave.
They have no idea how horrid it is, pushing a 50-125Kg trolley around a delivery round for up to ~5 hours, while having to go way beyond a gentle stroll pace to get finished on time. Even more fun during lockdown, as you need extra fluid, but all your usual emergency loo stops at pubs and alike are all shut!
Worked in Post Office Research helping engineers analyse letter sorting machine data.
Basically I sat next to a bloke with massive BO and typed printouts into Supercalc for two months.
I saw quite a few mechanics come and go in the bike trade. Usually teenagers who'd been decent riders as Juniors, had loads of cash splashed on them by parents and basically thought all bikes had XTR. They fondly imagined that bike mechanics was all shiny trinkets and top end kit, maybe a quick chat with a star rider or a visit to the big RockShox truck at an event.
Then they'd see the reality - knackered rusty old heaps of shit, hub gears, chains covered in oil and dirt, customers that didn't care about race results or groupset hierarchy, they just wanted the bloody bike fixing so they could ride to the office.
Manchester's smallest bouncer.
On an MZ 251.
I like MZ's. 🙂
Being Prime Minister, it all looked so much fun on Yes Minister, and Theresa and Dave were in the press alot and got to mingle with other world leaders... having taken on the role, it turns out having a basic grasp of a dead language isn't much of a qualification and that people are starting to turn on my habit of blustering and bluffing and actually expect me to have an idea of what is happening outside of my fabulous little bubble. I'm supposed to care apparently.
Anyway I've just spouted more bullshit to appease the masses, hopefully that horrible well qualified loser will give me an easier time of it tomorrow lunchtime, I can't wait until summer recess so I can stop having to pretend I care and can just hide and let Dom sort it out.
Boris
LOL @ Boris.
That programming clip is spot on too.
When I left school in 1990 a classmate got a job with Vauxhall as a development test driver. He thought he was going to be ragging Lotus Carltons and Astra GTE's round race tracks all day.
He actually spent all day driving base spec Nova's round the Millbrook oval at low speed to test fuel consumption figures. He wasn't even allowed to have the radio on. He lasted a month of 8 hour days having never gone faster than 55mph.
IT Security.
People think it is going to be a cross between CSI and the bloke that replaced Q in the last of the Bond films, all huge screens and nerve centers as you skillfully jam a hacker from the other side of the world.
In reality, it is days of effort trying to convince developers to stop using shitty old code libraries or fix bugs that are in old code that no one wants to touch because it was written in a hackathon five years ago, the bloke that did it has left the company and people want to write cool new stuff, not fix old boring stuff.
Unless you are in Incident Response, in which case it is countless phishing e-mails and helping people reset passwords after they have fallen for them.
IT Security.
I like it when it's boring; I did some IR work for clients when they had 'significant' breaches - it could get quite emotional. I didn't like all the crying and swearing. Nobody goes to work for that, I've got teenaged girls in the house so I get enough of that at home.
IT Security.
People think it is going to be a cross between CSI and the bloke that replaced Q in the last of the Bond films
I'm not sure they do, you know.
When I left school in 1990 a classmate got a job with Vauxhall as a development test driver. He thought he was going to be ragging Lotus Carltons and Astra GTE’s round race tracks all day.
He actually spent all day driving base spec Nova’s round the Millbrook oval at low speed to test fuel consumption figures. He wasn’t even allowed to have the radio on. He lasted a month of 8 hour days having never gone faster than 55mph.
Best one so far.
Getting lobsters out of Jayne Mansfi….
I only clicked the thread to check this had been covered😀
I had a job fitting mirrors once, it was always something I could see myself doing.
jimilindley
I had a job fitting mirrors once, it was always something I could see myself doing.
Thank you sir, you have made my day.
CSI. Made to sound cool by tv but lots of scraping up of bodily fluids.
RIB/speedboat security team at our work, about 2% of the time razzing round the dock in the sunshine, 98% of the time freezing your bollocks off being shat on by seagulls.
Working outside with trees and chainsaws in the summer sunshine. Give me a frosty morning any day.
tthew
Strawberry picking. Working outside in the summer, camping with a diverse gang of mainly young Europeans should have been ace.
I did a couple of months banana picking in Crete ... stuck in polytunnels with 100% humidity bloody aweful
Went from that to "protection/security" on a pedalo concession* and letting appartments.
*Weirdest job... who'd have thought pedalo's rental was gang warfare in an otherwise sleepy village?
Gave up my poorly paid job in a bike shop to go back to working for the NHS, 4 weeks before C19 lockdown 🤦♂️
Thought it would be cool but turned out to be the worst job I've had. Didn't last long and didn't end well.....
....selling bicycles and spares / accessories for one of the countries largest manufacturers (importers of BSOs in the main)
Gave up my poorly paid job in a bike shop to go back to working for the NHS, 4 weeks before C19 lockdown
At least you won't be put on furlough!
Cycle rickshaw rider.
Hours of sitting around, often in crap weather, touting for customers. Busiest time is Friday/Saturday night, so you're dealing with drunks coming out of the pubs. And then they want to go halfway across town and pay **** all for it.
Plus unfriendly taxi drivers...
At least you won’t be put on furlough!
I know, missing out on all that beach time.
Prison officer. Your'e a mentor, father/mother, social worker, listener, manager, samaritan, career advisor, detective, all in one in a uniform.
Used to be a cool job for life.
Not nowadays.
Late '90's, running the Guinness hospitality truck doing the county shows and Eisteddfod's round the country. Should have been good but away for nine months of the year, drunken farmers down from the hills and getting chased out of Welsh pubs because of my southern accent. Still can't stand Guinness to this day 😁
IT Security.
People think it is going to be a cross between CSI and the bloke that replaced Q in the last of the Bond films, all huge screens and nerve centers as you skillfully jam a hacker from the other side of the world.
It can be interesting if you're good at reading contracts
Oh, Pedalos - I read that wrong then.
I think that was from the golden age of being able to get away with stuff. These days, anything like that would get you arrested, shot or quickly hung out to dry by your employer. I think that would also only work in some very, VERY specific countries. UK or here (Sweden) and you would have Polis TFU down on you like a sack of shit in a lift, then swiftly in prison.
These days it is ISO 27k1 in one hand, NIST SP800-23 and SP800-61 in the other, and a good grasp of office politics.
Trimix
Oh, Pedalos – I read that wrong then.
Yeah, bizarre... the great pedalo wars.
No idea really how it escalated but it must have started with one trying to steal customers who were waiting or something. Then by the time I arrived they were burning the competitors and intimidating customers.
Toughest part of the job was the mosquito's sleeping in a beach hut guarding pedalo's.
Hi Integra I used to work the county shows, 10 years before you, did pay well and I had no costs as lived in the van and employer paid all expenses. Really hard work and got stuck on loads of show grounds when it rained. Van was like a sauna too, got the worst hay fever I ever had too.
Saying that, I really enjoyed it. Earned enough in 1 summer to pay a post grad 1 year course in London.
Also, after 3 weeks I did not know where I was in uk as the same people follow all the shows, sometimes a customer spoke in say a Cornish accent, I d think omg I am in Cornwall.
Home office , meetings with ministers and spies. All idiots who excel at greasy pole climbing.
I used to do lots of work putting up county shows well the tents stages etc 25 years ago. Great job, earned loads then went on holiday for 4/5 months every winter.
In a past life I used to build soft play units. Pipe frame akin to scaffolding, then plastic bases, slides, tunnels, ball pools and the like. We built one in the Merry Hill Centre in Birmingham that at the time was the biggest soft play unit in Europe and the biggest Discovery Zone outside of North America.
In on of itself the construction side of it was fun. But the boss was of the mindset that the longer it took to build, the more it'd cost him in hotel bills. (As an aside here we had DZ consultants sent over from the US who were living it large in the Copthorne Hotel down the road presumably as DZ USA's expense, whereas my mate Dave and I were sharing a twin room in some armpit of a B&B owned by a psychopath.) So when we were on site we were working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week for several weeks on end until the job was finished. It was largely back-breaking manual labour, a lot of it was lifting and shifting literal lorry-loads of kit (IIRC Merry Hill DZ came on three HGVs) which as a 10-stone-wet-through 20-something almost finished me off.
We had a contract with McDonald's, which meant free lunches - great for me as a vegetarian obviously, living off coffee and fries for a fortnight - but we were also odd-job skivvies for them doing stuff like installing bollards and painting doors. Working outdoors sounds great but let me tell you, swinging a pickaxe about in December is officially Not Fun.
One time on a job in London I fell from the third story of an installation, so maybe 11' up in the air, landed in a sitting position and pulled a load of muscles in my back. I'd stepped back to get a better swing with a hammer and stepped off the base into thin air. Dave said later that all he could think of as I went down was Hans Gruber, the bastard. All the boss was concerned about was when I could return to work.
When I came back I was instructed to pick up a box of foam from the office. This is like thick pipe lagging, it protects the pipe frame from being damaged by impact from small children's skulls. The box was maybe half a metre cross-section and 2m long. I'd to transport this to site from the office in Preston via train to London and then across London via Tube, along with my regular luggage packed for several weeks away from home of course, with what I suspect now with the benefit of hindsight was a broken wrist.
All this came to a head finally after finishing a remote job (it might even have been the London job above, not that it matters). We'd worked late to get the job completed, because of course we did rather than him paying for another night in a hotel, and on the way home the van tyre exploded (which was fun in itself, we went from lane 2 to lane 3 to lane 1 of the M6 in less than the time it takes to go "oh fu...", it's a good job the road was quiet) which then meant a late-night AA call-out to hacksaw off the steel radial that'd wrapped itself the wheel hub.
Our supervisor's parting shot as we left the van at the office and collected our cars was "don't worry about tomorrow lads, I'll clear it with the boss." I got home at gone 4am.
At 8:31 that same morning the phone rang. It's the boss, "Where are you?"
"In bed," I replied.
"Why aren't you at work?"
"Well, Andy said... " and I didn't get any further than that because he promptly exploded.
"I DON'T CARE WHAT ANDY SAID!!" he screamed, "HE'S NOT YOUR BOSS, I AM, AND I TOLD YOU TO BE IN WORK TODAY!"
"But..." I offered.
"Anyway," he continued, "you've been warned about your time-keeping before [it was a ~45 minute commute via unpredictable A-roads and I was occasionally late by a couple of minutes] so I've decided to terminate your temporary [first I've heard of that] contract."
To which I went, "fine," and hung up on him then went back to sleep the sleep of the terminally relieved. That was the last time we ever spoke. I actually have two termination letters from that place: the real one sacking me, and a second one thanking me for the completion of my contract which was secretly drafted by his PA who thought he was bang out of order.
Again with the benefit of hindsight, the boss was Dave's brother-in-law and his approach to not being guilty of favouritism was to overcompensate and treat him like shit. Well, y'know, more than he did everyone else. He'd sacked Dave several times over during his perhaps unsurprisingly commonplace tantrums and expected him to be in work as normal the day after, maybe he thought I'd do the same but he was one off.
“It’s all about driving fast and getting in fights”
It’s not.
Stock Broker?
Stock Broker?
Nah, it’s Parcelforce driver
More likely Yodel, they drive so fast that to the untrained eye you'd swear they'd never been there at all.
Home office , meetings with ministers and spies.
Spies at the Home Office? Something to do with Border Force?
Spies at the Home Office? Something to do with Border Force?
500 is run by the Home Secretary (in theory).
The old spies like to get everywhere, amazing how people trained in deception, working in secret and writing their own press are all so good 😉
500 is run by the Home Secretary (in theory).The old spies like to get everywhere, amazing how people trained in deception, working in secret and writing their own press are all so good 😉
Ha. I used to work with the Home Office not infrequently, but all we ever talked about was visa tiers 💤
Spent 2 days collecting contaminated water samples in 35 degree heat in the old Kowloon bus depot, lowering bottles into drains whilst dodging buses. Minging.
Not as minging as running bench-scale tests on abattoir effluent in the same heat from a little portacabin on site. The smell was awful, as was the sound of screaming pigs.
Citizenship and worries from the States about the amount being granted to people from certain places. It all came to a head when someone about 5 pay grades higher than me asked seriously if Switzerland was in Europe. I called them a complete idiot and told them never to speak to me again. To be fair they didn't. I left soon after to go on a 9 month climbing trip thanks to £300 overtime a day as 'targets' needed to be met..
Not as minging as running bench-scale tests on abattoir effluent in the same heat from a little portacabin on site. The smell was awful, as was the sound of screaming pigs.
Wow, and I thought that job would have been soooo cool.
😉
*Weirdest job… who’d have thought pedalo’s rental was gang warfare in an otherwise sleepy village?
At one point in the late 80s I was working on developing a watersports/diving/shooting/outdoor centre package to be based in Elounda (Crete). It was aimed more at the corporate jollies thing rather than the usual holiday packages but would also cater to walk-ins if there was space.
Our Greek partner who we needed to run the business was very helpful and things got sorted rapidly.
Turned out he was part of one the the 5 families who basically run that end of the island.
There were other windsurfing operations in the area but the hotels were they were based were told to get rid of them or they would have no laundry services or maintenance available to them.
The final realisation about what was happening cane when a Greek Air force Colonel offered to sink a couple of old planes in the bay for our clients to dive on. In return he wanted us to organise a floating brothel (think of those boozey day trips up and down the coast in the Canaries. But with added STDs). We vaguely asked why and were told they wanted to try to launder some money.
How dirty is money when running it through a brothel cleans it up.
Project cancelled and I came back to England.
I would need a lot of persuading to get involved with a business in Greece these days.
A few years ago I was earning most of my income writing showbiz news for a high-profile, reasonably cool media brand.
It was just churnalism, picking up stories elsewhere and giving them an entertaining spin. I don't have much interest in celebs or the kind of pop stars I was covering but I was quite good at it.
Most people weren't that interested to be honest, but I did have many conversations where I had to explain that "no, I don't interview stars" (did more of that on a local rag), "no, I don't go to fancy parties", "no, I don't watch The Only Way Is Essex", "yes, I am the only straight, male showbiz writer I've ever met".
And no, it wasn't exactly horrible (it was easy and paid quite well), but it was faintly depressing and wasn't really enhancing my career prospects.
Not as minging as running bench-scale tests on abattoir effluent in the same heat from a little portacabin on site. The smell was awful, as was the sound of screaming pigs.
Wow, and I thought that job would have been soooo cool.
😉
It's a fair point. But I was young and naively thought it would be cool to be a scientist.