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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.