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I'm sure we've all had some pretty grim jobs when younger. Some maybe still do. The worst I've had... I used to work on a salt works when I was about 19, basically cleaning up the (huge) spillages. I still, to this day, NEVER add salt to my food as I can't bloody stand the stuff. Its all I tasted for 6 months. My feet literally rotted too, due to being constantly soaked.
But I spotted this job advert the other day and concluded that this would be like a living, waking hellscape. Can you imagine 5 nights of serving vastly-overpriced, lukewarm Carling in wobbly plastic glasses to tens of thousands of coked up Oasis fans who've been drinking since breakfast? In a muddy field in Prestwich? For minimum wage.
Not if it was the last job on earth!
Lets have your hellish jobs then? Anything worse than this?
That's worse than retrieving lobsters from Jayne Mansfield's bum.
My worst job was Abbey National deed Safe in Milton Keynes.
It was basically bonded labour. Most were women earning a tiny amount of money. But they had Abbey National mortgages with a 5% reduction in their mortgage rate. This basically halved their mortgage payments so they couldn’t afford to leave.
The work from 9-3 was picking up a packet and typing in an 8 digit number, then repeat. We weren’t allowed to talk. After 3 we opened post and were allowed to talk. Oh the joy
Part of one of my previous jobs was classifying the level of abuse (A,B or C) in Child Sexual Exploitation & Abuse videos and pictures. I ended that role traumatised a few years later after a period of nightmares and dabbling with self-harm
Might as well close this thread now, we have, for want of a better term, a winner.
There was a Custard Copper on Barryboys who did the same thing. @kilo, you don't have a geology degree by any chance?
I did festival bar work like that in the OP and it was brilliant. Standing around in the sun with a bunch of other youngsters, sneaking pints, and getting paid.
I did festival bar work like that in the OP and it was brilliant. Standing around in the sun with a bunch of other youngsters, sneaking pints, and getting paid.
Yeah, but there's festival work (which I've done, and it can be great fun), and serving warm lager to pissed/coked up fans of a shite 90s band.
I was solo security guard in a small housing development in Toxteth in the mid 1990's. I was given 50p to run the phone box if it 'really kicked off'.... And told being 6'1" I would likely scare a good few folk off anyway.
Yeah, I didn't turn up for shift 2.
I do think the people who wrangle portaloos must have a pretty shit time...
I reckon the poor sod that has to change Diaper Don must have it bad.
I do think the people who wrangle portaloos must have a pretty shit time...
Are you taking the piss?
retrieving lobsters from Jayne Mansfield's bum.
Even without goggling that, my first thought was Derek & Clive. I was correct 😆
I did festival bar work like that in the OP and it was brilliant
I’ve worked behind enough bars when I was a student, including the Hacienda (I’ve seen things that can never be unseen, but it was brilliant!). I just can’t think of anything worse than working behind that particular bar
I reckon the poor sod that has to change Diaper Don must have it bad.
He's so intent on becoming King of America he's bringing back the Groom of the Stool.
Lets have your hellish jobs then? Anything worse than this?
Combining two aspects of the above discussion - the people who have to deal with the portaloos at the Oasis gig. I can imagine that will involve encountering most of the alcohol that's been served but umm... "post-processing"...
I went on a "train the trainer" course once with a bunch of trainers from different industries.
One of the subjects we learned to deal with was the question of disruptive delegates. Think "I don't wanna be here" and the 'fiddles with phones' distracted type.
Anyway, one of the trainers worked for the YMCA in Liverpool, teaching druggies and street sleepers basic maths and English, etc. When we were chatting about what disruptive delegates we'd dealt with, he said "Yeah, I'm quite lucky that it's been a couple of months since anyone actually shat themselves in the training room..."
Anyway, kilo wins. 😔
Can't top Kilo but...
Did a stint as a student on the dust carts, being a tidy/clean freak, it made me uncomfortable.
1 summer later I had a temp job on the DSS front counter, where you got regular death threads, you'd see said scrots in various pubs later. Was amusing.
But the worst was turning rolls over all night in a factory - lasted 2 hours and walked off. Felt like Ben Hur on the galley watching the other poor people.
Working in noisy dirty stinking plastics factories stood by a machine opening its door every 50seconds and pulling out a plastic bucket for eight hours a day. Oh no the sprue got stuck and I didn't notice. Whoopsie!
Can I offer measuring radioactivity in biological samples which have in the past included sheep urine and seal milk? It mostly starts with boiling anything up to 5 litres of sample with nitric acid.....
I particularly dislike seal milk. When cow's milk goes very sour it separates into a watery layer and a layer of fatty solids and is pretty horrid, but when seal milk goes sour it separates into three layers- a watery one, fatty solids, and a layer of what appears to be rancid fish oil.
And as for a human bioassay lab, when the faecal samples come in after the shift workers have had a weekend on the beer and curry, that's pretty stomach-turning
But that's life at the cutting edge of science for you!
Hope you have recovered somewhat Kilo. Sounds horrific
I lifted bunches of bananas onto a string for 10 hours a day.
It was fine to start off with, the bunches were knee high. When they got to waist high that was hard work. The trolleys were hosed down and the floor had metal rails. One slip and you could drop 1m backwards onto a concrete floor or metal rail.
All the time getting constantly heckled by the locals who were busy chopping bananas into what I had previously thought was a bunch of bananas.
It was the only job in Townsville. ABC, BBC, any letter and BC for banana company.
The waste was unbelievable. They had a dump truck of wasted bananas taken off site every day. Too straight, to curvy, to yellow to green.....
I wasn't sad leaving that job.
Portaloo guys have it fine. They're not cleaning them with a big brush, they're blasting them to **** with a pressure washer (and probably aerosolizing everything) from a decent distance away.
I always thought that Cornish tin miners had it bad BITD. 1000 feet of laddering down to get to the rockface they were mining. Arsenic rich environment that is wholly perfused with radon, so an early death was inevitable. Even earlier if the sea broke in or the roof collapsed. And at the end of the shift it was ladders back to the surface. Or if you were lucky enough to have a man engine, what if it broke?
But that's all physical stuff. @kilo, much respect. It's something that I could never do.
https://www.cornwallforever.co.uk/history/the-levant-mine-disaster
The OP's Oasis job sounds like working the squaddie bar on a base in Germany which I quite enjoyed. My worst job was sampling at the knackers yard the Summer the plant broke down and they had six-week-old heaps of ballooning/bursting dead animals oozing grim liquids. The stench impregnated everything and it took a couple of days after each visit to recover my sense of smell. The guys who worked there - that was a grim job.
I helped out with air cadets in Newcastle many years ago. The adult W/O was an ex-RAF driver, who'd been involved with the post-Lockerbie, erm, 'clean-up'.
He drove through endless fields in the borders over the Christmas period as body parts were placed into the back of his truck. He said it wasn't great.
But, he was quick to point out that someone had the job of finding them in the first place and popping little flags next to them. And the poor sods who actually had to pick them up and put them in his truck...
Not the worst, but perhaps the most mind numbing. I had a summer job in an Umbro warehouse in Heywood. My job was to take football shirts out of a cardboard box, attach the price tags, and put them in a different cardboard box. For eight hours a day. The only interest was the police raid on the gang stealing the shirts using fake invoices.
Portaloo guys have it fine.
I worked for a summer as a student for a bloke that had a swimming pool construction company and a portaloo company. my job was loading the portaloo onto the flatbed - then to be taken back to the yard and cleaned. To get them onto the flat bed, you had to rock them onto an edge...I'll leave it to your imagination about what can happen to a toilet that's been used all weekend, a bit of pressure and a crack in the tank.
Doesn't seem that bad to me. Sure, it's minimum wage, but if you couldn't get a ticket then there's a good chance you'd be able to slope off for a few minutes under the guise of a toilet break.
Though I'm not sure the organisers have thought this through because I'd turn up on day 1, waltz through security with my speshul badge, and then melt into the crowd.
Another job not as bad as kilos....
Worst job I had was Brussel sprout picker, obviously just before Christmas so it was baltic in the field, cold water collected in the plants just where you had to pick the sprouts and you were paid by weight you collected. Needless to say I will never eat a Brussel sprout these days
Just caught the end of a documentary where chap had to get into the firing line of a randy bull in order to get a sample.
That.
(kilos job accepted)
Looks like Edinburgh Cooncil and most of Reddit agrees with OP: https://www.reddit.com/r/Edinburgh/comments/1lc2418/oasis_fans_called_rowdy_and_middleaged_in/
Yeah, kilo FTW,
but Royal Mail and Blue Arrow must come close as the worst employers. I was employed for a while as an agency postie - all employment instructions were either email, or mainly SMS but you couldn’t actually reply to them and had to call during limited hours using your personal phone - great when you worked where there was lots of ‘not’ spots. Royal Mail management however for their sheer incompetence - they’d knowing send defective/unroadworthy vehicles for us to use, or sometimes none at all.
Up until Kilo ended the thread, I was going to say Abattoir. I trained in one for a year, and it's just not an environment conducive with happiness.
Grim jobs somebody needs to do.
seal milk?
Are going to just ignore the fact it's someones job to milk seals?
seal milk?
At infant school I got the job of milk monitor. It was my job to unseal the milk.
We get some grim jobs in Amberlanceland. But whenever we hoick someone in to A&E because they’ve not sh@t in weeks, I remember someone in there’s going to get the task of digitally evacuating our patient, while I go and sit in the cab to go on STW for a bit before the next job.
I worked in the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority for a year or so. Not as bad as Kilos but a caseload of maybe 30 criminal cases with all the evidence of rotten inhumanity laid out for you. Like being a juror on many cases at once. I can certainly remember some of the worse ones 20 years later.
I did a "buddy shift" with a guy who sold crap from a holdall to rando businesses. Amway International. Basically just walked into an industrial estate and just hit up anyone we saw trying to sell crap like emergency torches and pegs.
It was a lovely morning, lunch was great, then I went home. Sod that for a game of soldiers.
Vallon man always looked like it sucked balls.
"Yeah mate, just walk out the front completely exposed and find the IED for us. Fingers crossed the electronic countermeasures work".
Are going to just ignore the fact it's someones job to milk seals?
It was indeed. A custom made breast pump was involved
That would be a nature series that I'd actually watch - How To Milk Large Toothy Animals with Sir Dave.
Only a small part if the job but dealing with dead bodies that had been dead for a week or two was never fun. Usually in a house. Once in the banks of the Clyde we had to dig out a body half buried in sand. The exposed half was skeletal while the half in the sandbank had flesh on the bones. She had washed downriver from Bothwell apparently. Suicide.
One area I worked only had mortuary staff Mon-Fri 9-5. Out of hours after doing what was needed at the scene we also had to follow the van to the mortuary and strip and label the body before sliding it into the freezer.
Not as bad a Kilo. A colleague worked for two years in a dept investigating historical child abuse. While locking up the peeps was satisfying two years was her limit.
Only a small part if the job but dealing with dead bodies
Years ago, I went to the Bike Show in the NEC with a guy who was something to do with exhumations and dealt with the local crematoria. His stories about exploding pace makers and interesting exhumations kept us entertained for the three hour drive. But, obviously, we didn't have to experience the nasty stuff first hand.
But, obviously, we didn't have to experience the nasty stuff first hand.
A paramedic friend of mine told us about a suicide (at home) where they'd been called about 3 days after the guy had killed himself - one of those "I've not seen my neighbour for a while" concerned phone calls, police then ambulance.
The guy's cat had subsequently eaten most of his face.
She said she'd seen a few like that. People who'd been dead for long enough that things had started to eat them.
Circa 1981 or 2 me and a mate went to one of the first "Monster of Rock" festivals at Donington. Whilst we were pitching our tents, a fella wandered over and said "are you two squaddies"? The short hair in a sea of long greasy locks was obviously a bit of a giveaway. "Want some security work? You'll get backstage passes and free beer"! We said yes and were given hi viz and torches and made to wander around a bit of the campsite. It was shit and the whole backstage pass bit which had swung it for us was clearly bullshit.
Just as it was getting dark, a group of about 10 or 12 patched "one percenter" bikers, were getting pissed/stoned and lairy and were setting about some trees with large axes to get firewood for a fairly impressive bonfire. Matey who had recruited us, rocked up in his landrover, pointed at the bikers and said "go over there and get them to stop that". "No f***ing chance"! Was our reply and we ditched the hi viz and torches there and then. Then went on the lash having dodged a bullet (or axe)!
My Dad was on duty for the Fire Brigade in Dumfries on the night of the Lockerbie disaster. After the fires were extinguished, he was one of the people going round putting the little flags to mark the body parts mentioned above. Unsurprisingly he doesn't talk about it much.
That's worse than retrieving lobsters from Jayne Mansfield's bum.
Could be worse.
You could have spent money to go listen to that talentless gash.
I'm old enough to have had a Saturday job at a butcher's shop that had it's own mini abbatoir round the back. Cattle would arrive by lorry and be sent (forcibly, when the first few had gone through the rest would sense what was happening and panic) through the whole process. I lasted a day and have been veggie since