[Closed] The worst job you ever had or still have.....

Working for an alcoholic with mood swings and a completely unpredictable temper. That coupled with working away on the tightest expenses account I have ever seen. Glad when I got out.

Was this manager also an owner? In Leicester...?

For me it was working a meat packing factory, the shift was 4pm-11pm and involved packing crappy processed meat into 500g boxed. Oh yes, I smelled delightful.

A close second was nights at a shot blasting factory in Swindon. My car had no radio at the time and it was a 45 minute drive from Bristol. Coffee and an open window were my friend.

Working for any company owned by "venture capitalists".

Alternatively, making chocolate cones and profiteroles for a disgustingly poorly managed, popular chain of falsely titled "patisseries".

The one where I was told to steal from customers by my 'boss' 😐
(not giving them stuff they had paid for...services and goods)

Cleaning up Winston Churchill's bogies!

after working in IT for 5 years i went travelling in new zealand.

when the cash was low i walked into the nearest job agency and got signed up for any manual labour work.

i ended up working for P&O Cold storage, basically i would put on a freezer suit walk into huge climate controlled room. a forklift would appear and dump a 20 or 40ft shipping container about an inch from my face.

i would then open it and walk to the end, then another forklift would turn up with a cradle full of 25kg boxes of frozen lamb.

i then had to manually stack them 7 high until the container was full.

i lasted 3 months to be fair and to be honest it was the hardest job mentally and physically ive ever done but i met some of the most mental people in my life.

i still cringe when i see a shipping container..

It involved lobsters.....

8 hour days making plastic straps to hold knife handles onto their packaging with a hydraulic press. 30 or so at a time. I could feel my brain atrophying.

Working for a far east multi-national printing company with cancer causing chemical seeping into our office? The place was reeked with chemical. I legged it after 6 months once I came back from the trip to the Philippines representing the company. However, it was fun talking to strippers in the Philippines. They were stark naked. Not sure where to focus my eyes when talking to them ... 😯

repairing sanitary towel disposal units... macerators and incinerators

Injecting the jelly into pork pies

I used to work for CRC. I also worked in a slaughter house as a cleaner. I'm not quite sure how to answer this.

That Jane Mansfield.......

I've hated every job I've ever done except my current one - driving a black cab two days a week.

Working as a ladyboy stripper in the Phillipines, especially when the gun-toting zombie maggots came in !

Sweet, charming, shy, mysterious girl .....

My life has been full of shite jobs but being an Asda home shopping delivery driver has to top it for me. It was a stop gap after redundancy and NEVER again. The department was shocking with no management, the gaffer that took me on had a breakdown after a few months and they never replaced him. The hours were shite and the customers weren't much better either. A close second was driving for a communications company. Long hours normally getting out of bed at 0300 and not getting back home until at least 1800. Lots of lifting of kit and comms cable on site as well. TBH I don't know how I stuck it for as long as I was dead on my feet most days.

..... this was the scientific, er, term for it but, you know, in general terms it was known as 'Lobsterisimus -um- Bummakisimus'.

The worst actual job, was being a toilet attendant in a properly shit nightclub 😆 My job was to stop fighting, shagging, drug dealing and choking to death, by standing in a toilet all night. Every so often, I got released from my lavatorial duties to collect glasses, quite a treat. Paid alright though and you meet interesting people.

But that was nothing on the worst working environment, which was a decent job but saw me off work with stress after about 6 months. And it's not like i hadn't been in shit working environments before and laughed it off, I never thought I could be brought down like that til it happened... Some people are [i]really good[/i] at being ****s.

cheekyboy - Member

Working as a ladyboy stripper in the Phillipines, especially when the gun-toting zombie maggots came in !

The people we were meeting actually carried 9mm pistols, seriously, and we were actually told to get out quick if something unusual started to appear. 😮

Ahh ... you got the wrong city there. No ladyboy strippers in the Philippines that's Thailand. 🙄

I worked at RBS for a year. In that time I did no work, and I don't mean I did hardly any work, I mean I produced literally no work. My boss and the whole department knew, nobody cared. I used to surf the web and see how early I could leave without anyone saying anything, 2.45 was the record I think. I and think they hired me just to keep headcount up so when redundancies came around they'd have a better chance of hanging on.Seriously spirit crushing stuff.

@cfinnimore

would it prying to ask which ones (venture capitalists)? And what was so bad about it?

packing eggs at a battery farm for £1 an hour (it was 1986). 0500 start, chicken dung piled three foot high under each rack, you could smell the factory from 2 miles away. Scary ex-munitions factory. Cruelty was awful.
Had to put fresh clothing on each day as the stench turned my stomach.

Didn't last long.

Cleaning up Winston Churchill's bogies!

Oh yes!

I've only had 3 jobs in 43 years. 1st one was with the council as an apprentice plant/vehicle mechanic, then I was self employed for about 20 years.
Then I joined the prison service. I am now at the end of my tether & was watching some high speed trains the other day (& I wasn't thinking about being a train driver either)
I really, really need to be out of there. (I am actively looking/applying BTW)

working in various factory jobs (agency- everything from a cake factory to meat packing/cardboard box manufacturer/aerosol can factory).

the hardest job physically though had to be doing recycling boxes.the driving around in the lorry/guys i worked with,was great BUT! having to run with the boxes to try and keep up with them (i hadn't done any running since secondary school (whilst wearing steel toecap working boots) was bloody knackering.

2 days of that and i could barely get out of the cab at the end of the shift (was literally walking like john wayne for the next 3 days),and my achilles tendons looked like raw beef 😯

Not sure if it was selling double glazing at 16 for £1 an hour (and got imprisoned briefly in the house of a very angry man who wouldn't let me go) or working in a hospital kitchen - 8 hours of non-stop fast work in horrendous heat where talking to anyone was instant dismissal! Fun. Not.

I've only had 3 jobs in 43 years. 1st one was with the council as an apprentice plant/vehicle mechanic, then I was self employed for

I was an apprentice diesel/plant fitter, loved it that much I joined the RN, represented the UK on the Royal Navy drinking team, I was on the bitter squad, oh the joy of serving your country 😀

Paper sales. Selling sheets or bfo rolls of paper. Lasted just under a year. Soul destroying, worked with people who genuinely got excited over a sheet of paper.
I don't think I actually ever sold anything, I used to do anything I could to get out of the office, well apart from standing in the wharehouse watching the huge machine convert rolls of paper in to sheets. I had to work on this when I first started there, an hour in I was ready to throw myself in to the machine

Worst was the previous.

Boss seemed to hate his own job.

Forgot about this jem... Pot washing when I was 16 at a local pub. My mate was a barman and got me the job as I needed cash. The head chef was a tit and I walked out after 5 hours because I was told I don't get breaks.

Astronaut. They lied about aliens, the sandwich man never came by and there's no incidental music in space. They eventually sacked me for flicking pencils out the window aimed at earth, I would pretend they were missiles, there being bog all else to do other than post lies on internet forums.

alcoholic with mood swings and a completely unpredictable temper.

Remember my last pharmaceutical job and, when we met a sales target, how they flew 840 staff out to Dublin for four days fully-expensed celebration.

They made us fly bloody economy!! Oh the humanity!

Rachel

When I was 12 I got a job of rowing a boat into the middle of a bloody big lake, going to the fish farm nets and killing any Cormorants trapped whilst attempting to eat the fish.
I got 5 pounds a week so one pound a day.
I had to do this before school.

Dag treader. That's treading the shitty end of sheep fleeces in a bailer. Day after day after day after day.......

Ice cream stacker. Stacking boxes of ice cream on to pallets in a freezer warehouse. Day after day after day after day .......

I've had lots of shit jobs - the hardest was 'fruit picking' in Bunderberg - it was a scam really you had to stay in a certain hostel to get work - even though it was basic as hell and dirty it cost more a night than the s****y ones in Sydney - they'd wake you at 5am feed you a bit of cereal and send you off with a crappy little packed lunch - you'd work 12 hours chasing a tractor around a field picking 'Zucchinis' they grow on the ground so it's literally back breaking - you'd earn enough to cover the hostel fees and just about feed yourself - I walked from the lot after a few days - but some of the other back packers had arrived broke on the promise of good money and were stuck for weeks saving enough to get out!

The worst was call centre work though, it was psychological torture - I bought all thier bullshit about career progression and stuck at it for nearly two years - I once asked my manager how he got on when he was 'on the phones' and he sort of flippantly said "oh I never did, I came in on the graduate scheme" and desperately tried to back pedal - turns out almost none of the management had worked their way up - so much for career progression - between that and the recurring nightmares and borderline drug / booze issues I walked - best thing I ever did.

I've been in some shit situations since, twice redundant, which is no way as horrible as living in fear of it - but for the most part I've enjoyed work - I get bored sitting idle.

12 hours a day shovelling pig shit out of a barn. £10 a day (25 years ago). That was a whole summer holiday.

3 months of sitting at a bench by myself, no radio or anyone to talk to, tying fig of 8 knots in bits of string. £3/hour, 12 hour days.

But of course I used to live in t'shoebox in t'middle of t'road and I'd have to get up half an hour before I went to bed and pay mill owner for t'privellege of going t'work. And I were grateful.

😉

Standing in a convenience store trying to sell access to the payg Internet terminal. This as probably 1998: so 90% of people had no idea what they could do with he Internet the others already had it!

To make it even worse is one of the store staff spent the whole day showing us magic tricks 😥

I did a day once unpacking bars of soap from a box, sticking a clear round penny-sized sticker over each end of the packaging and boxing them back up. It wasn't horrific or anything but still to this day don't know why.

Nights at a metal bashers, I was the only one working nights, so very quiet, with a stack of stuff to get pressed, folded and loaded for the guys working days. Inadequate PPE so lots of tiny cuts to my hands, and a boss who thought he could take the piddle with paying.

Grave digger

Pheasant plucker. Just like me dad. I didn't stick it long tho.

I was a slick sheet slitter for a while too.

Actually, I did work a quarter shift I a. Chicken processing factory in Aberdeen - quarter shift = walked out at tea break on the first morning. Disgusting place.

Radiator factory working for an agency for minimum wage. I had to lift the radiators off the last conveyor and put cardboard ends on before they got shrink wrapped. All the regular staff did absolutely nothing and the place ran on agency staff. It was the happiest day of my life at that point when the manager called a load of agency staff in and said he would have to let us go!

boriselbrus - Member

12 hours a day shovelling pig shit out of a barn. £10 a day (25 years ago). That was a whole summer holiday.

3 months of sitting at a bench by myself, no radio or anyone to talk to, tying fig of 8 knots in bits of string. £3/hour, 12 hour days.

But of course I used to live in t'shoebox in t'middle of t'road and I'd have to get up half an hour before I went to bed and pay mill owner for t'privellege of going t'work. And I were grateful.

Done that. Not so bad as I like the pig. Lovely animal. By the time they got to know me they were on their way to slaughter house. Rather sad at times to think about it. How many pigs did you look after? Mine was nearly 500 ( 12kg to 85/90kg size). Job started at 8am (started cycling at 6.30am) and finished at 6pm. Yes, first week I could taste shite at the back of my throat.

It is still a better job without stress ...

Giving change in an underground amusement arcade in 12 hour shifts with very few breaks. Not in the same league as some of the above, but it was dull, repetitive and seeing people with a gambling problem spending all day shuffling between machines was soul destroying as we were just reinforcing their habit. It also reinforced just how filthy money ( notes and coin) is.

My worst was hop picking. I worked in the shed. My job was to stand on a gantry looking down at the three machines, watching to see if a bit of vine got tangled on a roller. If it did (happened about every 10-15 mins or so) I had to poke it with a stick with a hook on the end. If that didn't work I pressed a button. There was a fan under the rollers so I was having hop pollen blown over me all the time so I reeked, and was actually sticky with it. 4-12pm. I almost walked out at the first break, then after the first day, then at the first weekend... then the first whole week.. then.. I realised I'd been there two months and I couldn't actually remember anything at all, so I actually felt the same as I did on that first day. Completely lost time - very bizarre. The bag I used to bring sandwiches in still stank of hops a decade later when it finally wore out.

The best agency job I had though was working in a vanilla and mint warehouse. The total opposite of the hop job 🙂

Topping and tailing swedes in a cold draughty warehouse in the evenings in winter..
Selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door.. Who in their right mind is gonna give you upwards of a grand for a hoover!?
Tarmacking with Irish gypsies wasn't as bad as it sounds, £15 per day and living cheek by jowl in a tiny caravan with your stinky mates was pretty gross though, as was the fear of a dodgy family pulling onto wherever we were parked up (we did a moonlit flit one night after sawn-off shotguns were brandished) the family we were working for were good fun though and they really cared quite deeply for us (despite the shit wage)
Labouring for a dry liner was pretty shit, mixing up muck by hand gave me blisters on my baby soft hands within the first hour on my first day..

It will surprise chewkw to know that I've spent most of my working life as a builders labourer 😉

Being a househusband has probably been the most challenging though.. untold sleep deprivation, isolation, the mundane act of housework, screaming children.. all thankless too by and large

It's all slowly paying off as the kids reach school age though and they are starting to be a good laugh

My other half reminded me to post this (VNSFW)

Worst IT job was probably doing sub graduate level adjustments to a stupid pointless app that could have been replaced in the time it took to download something better, created by an enthusiastic team of 6 hard working well meaning folk. They wrote (and maintained) their own webserver dedicated to this app. Stupid bastards. 6 months and nothing happened at all.

Made it hard applying for my next contract. "What did you do in your last job? Well.. **** all, really."

I worked at Heathrow airport for 6 months through security airside in a new cafe /restaurant. It was awful unrealistic targets and full of happy people going on holidays .I hated it i resigned when it settled down and staff were trained .Only plus side was it was T3 and most flights were long haul to asia so lots of lovely little brown women to look at . 😆 They looked at me like i was something they trod in whilst i ogled them through the hatch . 😥
I used to take Picnic hampers down to the girls on Check in when i was bored they loved the free scones and it once saved me paying 30kilo excess baggage on a kite surf trip .
Still it was the worst job i ever had - no i always try chat to the staff in airport cafes as i have walked a mile in their shoes .

Worked for Barclays for the worst 3 1/2 years of my life. The other staff were fine as people but the pressure to sell stuff of dubious morality was huge. Think PPI, credit cards, loans etc to people who couldn't afford it or claim for it. Yes, I was part of what caused the global recession 😥

The only time I've quit a job without having anything to go to.

Drop forge in Walsall as a summer job when I was at uni.
My job was to rake the scrap from around the 6 drop hammers into skips and then tell the bloke with the fork lift when they were full so he could change them. Also had to push the stock into the furnace mouth to make sure the hammer operator always had enough ready to be forged into gate hinges.
12 hour shift, so loud and hot that you couldn't hold a conversation apart from in the hourly 10 min smoke break.
There were guys who'd been there for 10 plus years, I just couldn't beleive anyone having to do that sort of thing for that long, I lasted less than a week...

At 17 I went to work for a friend of the family. He produced veg for supermarkets in those big plastic boxes. I had to wash them. 15000 of them a day. 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Made a LOT of money for a 17 year old but it really made me understand what a shit job was.

A furniture making company loading a cnc lathe.
Massive stacks of timber, load one into lathe, press button, sand, repeat.
Hours... Headphones and dust mask on all day, very loud, could only hear machinery and the occasional snippet of Heart FM or whatever shitty soul crushing local radio station factory workers seem to thrive on.
Helped me make the decision to change things and study more...

Close second, night shift over summer while at uni sorting and packing newspapers and magazines at a warehouse in high Wycombe, which were then distributed to newsagents. The only interest was the odd flick through the jazz mags...

Putting the handles onto big 5l water bottles involved slamming the handle down onto the top of neck of the bottles as they came past on a conveyor belt. They came past at 40-60 per minute depending on how many people were manning the line and if you missed more than a certain number a minute an alarm went off and the whole line shut down. By about half an hour in your hands were covered in little cuts from sharp plastic on the rings, after an hour your palm was bruised in a perfect circle where it hit the lip of the bottle, after 6 hours your hands wouldn't open properly and after 13 hours with a half hour break your entire upper body screamed at you.

I managed three 13 hour night shifts and then walked out an hour early and told them to stick it. I was somewhat undermined in my flounce by the fact that I was 16 and had to wait an hour for my dad to come and pick me up.

It took weeks for my hands to work properly again.

plastic bottle stacker lasted about a week. It was clean not to noisy pretty much stress free but so so so tediously boring.

Not so much a "job" as some things I'd have to do when I'd visit my relatives' farms in the midlands of Ireland every Summer...I used to go for nearly the whole school holidays.

1. Picking ****ing stones.
A load of us following a slow moving tractor and trailer throwing all the big stones into the back of it - AFAIR, this was after ploughing and harrowing. As a kid, I couldn't understand how there'd be a load of new stones every year in the same field if we'd picked them the year before. 😆

2. Turning ****ing turf.
Imagine rocking up to a field with endless rows of turf like this...every single piece had to be turned over after it had dried out for a while. The fields I remember weren't nice and dry like this one...they were wet, muddy, cold. It was bloody horrible. 😡
[img] [/img]

How could the turf dry if the fields were wet and muddy?

2. Turning **** turf.
Imagine rocking up to a field with endless rows of turf like this...every single piece had to be turned over after it had dried out for a while. The fields I remember weren't nice and dry like this one...they were wet, muddy, cold. It was bloody horrible.

You can't have done it more than more than a few times I'm guessing? You're lucky it was wet, otherwise the midges would have probably eaten you alive. Footing turf is a bit sore on the back, other than that it's fine, bloody midges on the other hand make it hell.

So, you lot are trying to tell me I should stop loafing around in my dressing gown and write my thesis then?

Good call.

How could the turf dry if the fields were wet and muddy?

It air dried on each side...and then see the little stacks the fellow is making? That's called footing, but you'd need the turf to be a bit dry-ish other wise the footed turf would fall down. Tbh, I don't really remember footing it...maybe that was done later in the summer.

You can't have done it more than more than a few times I'm guessing? You're lucky it was wet, otherwise the midges would have probably eaten you alive.

🙂

True, I only remember doing it a few times...thankfully. I assume whereas we managed a few yards as kids, the grown-ups were probably flying up and down the bog at it, but obviously, I remember it as miles and miles and miles and miles of turf. 😆

Last role.

employed to be Operations Manager of a firm run by two idiots. One was just a bully, knew he was a bully, thrived on the fact that he knew some of the staff were physically scared of him, and really couldn't give a shit. the company 'employed' his wife to do about 1/2 hour of actually work a day, and she spent the rest of the time internet shopping, when I restricted her internet access for breaching policy...well, you can imagine, I'm sure.

The other idiot was potentially worse, thinking back I think he had some sort of megalomaniac messiah complex. He loved being the bloke "on the white horse" He even said that to me, that he saw himself "charging to the rescue" Trouble was HE would set up the other idiot to fall into these ridiculous made up traumas and situations so that he could "sort it out" he did it over an over again. He was one of the blokes who sees things in black and white only, I was either with him or against him, an when he realised that I was neither, I became useless in his action plan to wrest the company away from his bullying co-owner. Staff turnover was as you can imagine, very high. I found out not long after I joined in August that I was 10th recruitment that year (place had about 15-18 workers) I was 9th to have handed in resignation. Lasted about 10 weeks of stress and shite.

Proper pair of mental cases that were destroying the lives of their workers, with their struggle over the company.

deadlydarcy
True, I only remember doing it a few times...thankfully

It's a task that's generally done in good weather if possible, and whilst we do have shit weather in Ireland, there's usually one or two good days in late spring to get it done. But as I said, those bog midges are like piranhas so a bit of rain is a god send.

As boyhood chores go I didn't really mind it. Potato picking, drystone walling, processing firewood and fishing were all much harder.

Whereabouts did you do all that then jimjam?

tattie picking, mind you £5/day wasn't bad (at the time).
Back breaking work, frozen (October, often frosted / frozen ground) but good camaraderie (if you didn't get chucked in the Spey at lunch break, which I did 🙁 )

Oddest job in some ways was traffic encase, stand at junction, count cars, lorries, cycles etc. Just boring, expect having to fend off folk asking what I was doing. My colleague watched Wimbledon instead, an ace was a lorry, shot against serve was a motorcycle, etc. eventually our boss clocked ion to what he was doing ("unusual traffic patterns yesterday Iain"..)

deadlydarcy

Whereabouts did you do all that then jimjam?

Donegal where I grew up. Back breaking child labour remembered with fondness 🙂 .

Ah right, my uncles' and aunts' farms were in Offaly. I was "evacuated" up there from the burbs every summer...for a kid from the town, it was awesome being in the countryside, though my cousins did get lots of mileage from my urban naivety. 😉

Working for a high street chemists, no, no that one, the other one.

It was in my last year of college, doing a couple of shifts per week in the evenings. It was boring, and the manager was an arse.

I ended up either quitting or being fired, not sure what it is. My birthday that year (18th) was on a Wednesday, which was a day that I usually worked. So, a few weeks ahead of it I asked for the day off and said I could work another day if necessary instead of taking it as holiday. Manager said "okay, what about the Friday of that week?". Knowing that I would be out getting hammered (legally!) I said no and put in a leave request. It was signed off by the manager.

We get to the Thursday after my birthday...
-Store manager: "You know that you're working tomorrow don't you?"
-Me:"No I'm not, I took yesterday as leave"
-SM:"But you said you'd work another day, I asked you to work friday and you said yes".
-Me:"No, I said no. And you approved my leave."
-SM:"Well, you still said you'd come in tomorrow so if you don't then don't bother coming back at all"
-Me:(Turning to include the area manager who happened to be there)"But the leave request was signed off. Were you going to take my leave off me but also make me come in to work?"
AM stays silent...
-SM:"Like I said, if you don't come in tomorrow then don't bother coming back at all"
Me:"But I've taken it as leave and I've got stuff planned, I can't come in tomorrow so there's no point threatening me"
SM:"I've already said, if you don't come in tomorrow then don't come back at all"
Me: Directly to the area manager "Is this right"
AM:"..."
Me:"fine. I won't be here tomorrow."
SM:"Well you'd better be because if you don't then you shouldn't come back at all"

I finished my shift, went out on Friday and never went back. I turned up on time every day, worked hard for £3.something an hour, never gave them any trouble and yet he still acted like that so he could pretend to be king of his little retail kingdom. I got my last weeks pay and never heard off them. I didn't really care as I was off to uni a few weeks later but it was the principle of the thing!

My eternal problem with workplaces is that I am too trusting. But I've never done an actual shite job, like some up there ^^, just ended up in some shitty situations with the usual psychopaths and bully's. The stress of being the only breadwinner etc was the worst, not having the security of being able to just walk away.

I always hate the "martyrs" you know the ones who think the only way to success is through begin first in and last out - pissing competitions rather than applying your intelligence.

Smudger666 - Member
Pheasant plucker. Just like me dad. I didn't stick it long tho.

Pheasent plucker. Tongue twister

Milk man when i was 12-13 ish. Our neighbour who was the milkman had a stroke and his wife was struggling to cope with the round. My parents volunteered my assistance.

To makes things worse, she didn't like being in the house on her own so I had to stay in her house in the spare room on a night and for 8 weeks worked from 3:30 until 6 and got no money. This was in winter. I realised being a milkman was not the life for me.

[img] [/img]

Not quite what you had in mind, eh sandwhicheater?

I lasted three and a half days in a call centre in Reading cold calling people to make appointments for salesmen to go and sell servers. I had absolutely no idea what I was helping to sell and no aptitude for it either. By the lunchtime in the Thursday i walkinged I to the managers office and told him I couldn't stand it. He said he knew I'd be the first out and thanked me for telling him and not just walking out. He paid me the whole week and I started another temp job the following Monday. Pretty easy compared to some of the above.

LOL @ gofasterstripes. It's funny but I've watched that episode loads of times and it's one of the best. After jogging my memory from my above post, the milkman chap who had the stroke was very very close to the character and Irish. Mick the milkman.

Maybe if I'd not gone around with his wife driving the float I would of had a very different experience.

Worst conditions were down the mine-80 degrees temperature and 80% humidity,Dusty and in wellies due to 10"sludge at times.Wore wellies ,shorts,belt,battery and cap lamp for a few years.
Worst place was a chocolate factory(not Cadburys)within a year of the pit shutting.Women and young kids,psycho manager and works engineer at war,in fact a complete culture shock.
Best and easiest job was in a car factory on weekend dayshift as maintenance.