MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
So, what have you done? You know, the sort of job you did at school/uni to make ends meet, get enough beer tokens to buy stuff you wanted/needed.
Some of mine;
Built tennis courts - back breaking, but I got a great tan!
Made office screen partitions - Soul destroying
Stuffed [s]junkmail[/s] important information in to envelopes - Duller than beige
So, what else have y'all done?
Recruitment Consultant for one year. I hated every single soul destroying second of it.
car wash was pretty shit - supervisors took all the tips, face got covered in road muck etc
working in a sweet factory REALLY isn't as good as it sounds either.
plastic bottle stacker, lasted about 6 days
Supermarket - trolley boy then shelf stacker p/t in 6th year, loved it!
Otherwise kitchen wash-up, lbs monkey, assembled portable x-ray generators (for leffeboy on here!), updated the Scotsman website of an evening for a bit.
I spent a few months temping while between jobs.
Some of them were quite fun, others not so!
2 weeks in a mustard factory was pretty crap
a few days as a hospital car park attendant was remarkably OK!
sorting mail for a day was fine
assembling electrical equipment was quite fun, although I'm sure there should have been more training and testing!
Cheers, Rich
[url=
lobsters from Jayne Mansfields bum[/url]
Not the safest link for work
I've worked in a few factories some of which were quite good fun, but the worst was a badly lit, hot depressing place cleaning up the moulds of video recorder fronts. On the second hour I asked for a break and didn't get it, on the third hour I asked for a break and didn't get it, on the fourth, the fifth, the sixth and the seventh until at nearly eight hours into a twelve hour shift I got a 10min break.
Less than a full shift I lasted and I'm sure the quality of my workmanship wasn't very high. Twunts!
As I said, I've worked in various factories and some of them have been a joy, so I know it doesn't have to be crappy. Crappy is what the management make it, and they do reap what they sow.
Dog kennel cleaning at 14, the waste pit in the height of summer was something I never want to have to experience again, made Glastonbury toilets seem positivly pleasant.
Straight out of Uni fo 6 months, looked after the scooters for all the Pizza hut stores in S.W and S.E London, having to fix knackered vehicles in the middle of winter in alleyways stinking of bins and fox p'@@, good money crap hours and stressful, offered out by a couple of managers who couldn't get their head round why I wouldn't fix the dangerous scooters.
potwash in a massive hospital, I was the only one working on the dishes, halfway through clearing breakfast lunch turned up, halfway through clearing lunch dinner turned up.....
I think I walked out halfway through clearing dinner!
Recruitment Consultant for one year. I hated every single soul destroying second of it.
Try 23 years. 😐
Counted small change for a bus company. In a locked room with no windows.
Egg grader (includes cleaning blood & crap from eggs)
Dipping & dagging (sheep).
Drilling the holes in the sides of flat pack furniture.
1st two involved the most actual sh1t.
I used to operate the machine that sucked the crap out of canal boats - a weeks worth of muck and boy does it buzz. balancing down the side of a boat trying to get the pipe in the right place often ended up in the canal wet and stinking. Money was good though 😀
plus used to be able to take the barges up and down the canal to turn them around to face the right way for the next punters always tried the make the cleaners inside seasick 😆
spent a summer digging an 8ft deep trench under a lime tree by hand with a pick axe and spade looking for water near an old pumping station in the middle of bumble**** .....
rich man with a 7 acre garden didnt want a digger brought over his garden so paid me 300 quid a week to dig for 8 hours a day for 4 weeks
i found it - his man made lake (a dirty cesspit with about 3 inches of water previous was 3 foot deep after i found the well !
also delivered leaflets - that was a shit job ... 1000 leaflets for 50 quid ... never again !
i enjoyed delivering papers though !
drifting pipes a pretty shit job but unfortunantly its an incredibly small part of my job
spent a week working in an inspection department measuring shit - that was a shit job !
You know when you're driving and it's sunny so you pull down the visor at the top of the windscreen? I worked in a factory that made the hinges they pivot on.
Don't need to open the link TJ, already laughing 😆
I used to build aeroplane toilets for 3 years. Not as bad as it sounds as I worked along side a guy that refurbished returned ones. yuk.
injected dead chickens with water
hung dead chickens up in a big freezer
printed plastic yogurt cartons
to my shame, horse hair rubberizer for cluster bomb liners 😳
was sacked for thumping someone
Making the puff part of powder puffs. Mind numbingly boring, extremely hot and not overly safe. The girl on the machine next to me lost the end of her finger in a stamping machine.
Sticking labels on packs of toilet rolls in a factory as they went past on a conveyor, welding exhausts in a factory that supplied KwikSh!t, about 90 per hour. Worked in a tea bag factory tearing open boxes of seconds and emptying the the contents out, 12 hour shifts for 2 weeks.
iDave, that wasn't at Gotts was it?
Quality control for the little pots of milk with foil lids. 12hr shift in a fridge hand squeezing each one. about every 3/4hr one would explode in your face. soul destroying but paid for a very good trip!
On the bins for a summer, horrible horrible job, 10hrs of running and throwing bags, dripping in all kinds of filth. Met some fantastic characters who despite their corse exterior were sound good people. My binmen get something nice for xmas every year!
Worked in a lottery ticket kiosk for a summer. It mostly involved explaining to the scum of the earth why their four numbers were only worth £11.59 that week.
The only job I had that was more depressing was working in a sweetie warehouse. Sounds a lot less shit than it actually was.
Refurbishing cooling towers, was dirty and dangerous.
Working in a CD packing factory, usually just putting the CD's and booklets into the cases by hand because it was cheaper to use students than invest in machinery.
But they were both student jobs, its working in IT for the past 10 years, no security, no training, minimal rewards and seeing my own obsolescence at some point in the future that's destroying my soul far more.
Granulating plastic offcuts and extrusions in an injection mould factory, 40 degree+ heat, in a tiny pod feeding plastic off cuts that would slice through the protective gloves into a granulator that would deafen you through ear plugs, with ear defenders on top.
It was OK though as you got regular breaks, when you started to pass out with the heat, and then you could cough up the plastic dust, that would shred your throat and give you chronic nosebleeds.
Still not the worst job I've heard of, a mate worked at a battery chicken farm rotating the chickens between the shed/cages. I believe he set the record for longest person to stick with the job as well, at 10 days. Apparently the smell, and state of the animals ****ed with your head, like nothing else.
By far the worst was working in a call centre during uni hols. I didn't even last until lunch. My friends from uni who went into IT, accountancy and law seem to be just as miserable now, albeit better paid.
Driving instructor. Totally shite job.
Data entry of the experience forms that people fill out on their flight back from the costas, was pretty fun, especially when you got a plane load of 18-30s customers to input.
Assistant to a QS on the M25 contract, paid well, and taught me a lot about how business actually works, as I ended up helping out with adjudication of contract disputes.
Head counter in a college, easy money and lots of hot college students.
Checking passports for the home office, in an office with no windows that would regularly get to over 40C at the desks, which were surrounded by UV lamps/scanners/PCs/Laser printers, was happy to get out of there to my first proper graduate job after 9 months.
Worked on a building site as a labourer for six months during winter when I was eighteen. The site was right on the edge of the duddon estuary in Cumbria. To say that it was cold would be an understatement. One of the worst memories was one day when there was rain, sleet and hailstones. All the brickies ( who were treated like gods) had gone home having been rained off. I ( stupidly) thought i might be able to do the same."right lads i've got a nice little job for you to do". We then had to dig out a trench using only a pick and shovel that took me and another led all day to do when there was a jcb that could of done it in half an hour. When I asked about using the jcb the gaffer told us:" oh no, can't do that, that would mean you'd have nothing else to do for the rest of the day". The pay? £2 an hour (in 1992). Didn't last much longer after that.
Clearing soil from briar root stock for rose buds to be grafted on to them. I got a good tan, on my back. Wrists looked like I was self harming. The radio on my belt loop with Test Match Special kept me sane, when there was a Test. Insane the rest of the time listening to R1.
Cleaning the toilets at Delhi airport whilst saving enough for a a flight home.
Fast food - Jesus, I hated it. Could never get the smell of burgers out of my skin and hair. And serving pissed up people on a Friday and Saturday night was horrible.
i had a 'literally' shit job two years ago where i had to go to a sewage treatment works in glasgow everyday and take samples. my boots actually went mouldy and started rotting. i had to drive around glasgow taking air samples at the same time, and i broke the clutch cable AND the throttle cable in a week on my car. but despite that, it was kind of enjoyable...
Used to be a window cleaner on the tall buildings in Melbourne. That was equally rubbish and good.
Good due to being paid for abseiling all day, rubbish due to zero mind stimulus.
Working in a cold store was surprisingly alright although having to unload pallets containing the frozen ingredients for pet food was an eye opener.
Worst has to be working in the factory making supermarket sandwiches. Being a student I wasn't suitable to do anything apart from sorting through trays of sliced tomatoes picking out the end bits.
Worst ever was working a supermarket at age 15. Actually no, perhaps deliverying papers when I was 14. I had to do 314 papers for 2p each, it took me two entire evenings - come home from school, eat, then work until 9.30pm, for just over six quid. Ridiculous. Didn't do it for long mind.
Also, working a hop picking plant was pretty bad - I had to stand on a gantry and watch hops going underneath me and press a button if it got tangled up. On nights too.
Worked in retail when I was at uni. Tesco was fairly bad (decent pay but the management was a bit disorganised and would fail to cover shifts and breaks, meaning people ended up working extra time with no pay), Game was horrendous (expected staff to come in and hour early and leave an hour late and not take breaks, also got headbutted by a fellow member of staff) and WH Smith which was actually quite nice.
Worst job was when I was at college, working in a bottle packing factory in Burton for £3.21 an hour, 6am - 2.30pm. At the time the minimum wage was being debated, and I vividly remember a Tory MP saying that it was pointless and unnecessary because hardly anyone earned less than £5 an hour anyway. They weren't keen on people taking breaks either, and health and safety was a bit terrifying there...
Paper merchants selling paper. Yep it was as boring as that
worst one was as a student on 12 hour shifts in a factory packing the lids you get on the tops of your drinks at MacDonalds and Burger King. The only way to get through it was to wear a radio walkman and think that 2 days work = 1.5 weeks of rent. After that had to sit on a line that printed the labels on plastic M&S pots. Have done the envelope stuffing, insurance document filing although not sure how many of them they found after my weeks stint 🙄
Data Entry of the 1901 UK Census. Got paid less than £50 a week for roughly 25 hours work. It was piece work too, average wage was about £15 a week so I had to type like the wind to get £40+ each week.
Bonus of the job was free accomodation and 3 meals a day. 😉
Temp student job working at the car importers on the docks. Basically putting the Suzuki car manuals together for the glove box. Beyond mind numbing and having to tolerate the most racist bastard of a boss you'd ever seen verbally abusing the small collective of non-white workers to a truly shocking level.
Everyday I prayed for one of them to turn round and lamp him...
Potato picking.
Hard, bent over, backbreaking work. 8am to 6pm. Earned cash in hand. A nice crisp £10 from the farmer at the end of the day. In the days before the minimum wage. I was underage and wanting extra money during the summer holidays. Rioting wasn't an option in those days.
I recall that nearly every day one of the gang would turn up late. I was naive not to realise that they were signing on - and then coming to do cash in hand work. They also took turns to drive the tractor with the potato trailer behind it. I was too young and so wasn't trusted, so no breaks for me. Bitter, after all these years? Nah 😉
Did do paper rounds though. It was a gold mine at my local newsagents. Started out on the crap, heavy, long rounds (Telegraph / Times), but over time took on the quick light rounds (Sun / Mirror) and made them my own. They all paid the same so the light rounds were best. Then I got the 'spare' role - which meant I had to take on extra rounds if someone didn't turn up. I got paid the bonus regardless of whether I had to work or not, and I got the money for the extra rounds too. Made me late for school every now and then 🙂 Did the same on Sunday's too. That was easy money.
Tried to get into the 'deliver 500 papers to local houses for £5' business, but that was hard work in the evenings. Binned it after a month or so.
Cleaning Tar tankers, big artic lorry tankers with stainless steel clad tanks on the back. When they were being filled there would be spillages and at the end of the week we'd have to clean them and generally make them look presentable. We had to put a solvent on to disolve the tar, then steam clean, soap and water, steam clean, rinse and repeat. The tar factory stank and there were various lagoons of sulphur rich effluent everywhere and you were invariably wet through for most of the day it was pretty crappy but was probably the best paid Saturday job in S****horpe at the time. We also worked year round Saturdays and sundays in all weathers. My mate and I were only 17 at the time and just passed our driving tests.
We used to have to rely on fitters bringing down tankers from the workshops to the wash bay to keep us in work because they were the only other people working weekends, but invariably the lazy sods wouldn't answer the phone when we'd ring to say that we were ready for another lorry. This would mean a half mile trudge through the plant to go and tell them.
I decided in my infinite wisdom and thinking on my feet attitude decided "how difficult can it be to drive a lorry" and proceeded to drive a 40ft tanker through the plant, past silos full of all sorts of flamable, toxic and explosive liquids, back to the workshops. The fitters didn't make owt of it however I was filmed on CCTV and after one of them must have told the management,I was promptly dismissed.
What made it worse was that about six months later, I started dating a lovely girl and all was going swimmingly until couple of weeks in, it came to meet the parents time, and I was greeted at the door by the plant manager who'd sacked me! The relationship faltered not long after that.
i turned ron hill track suits the right way out in a mill in Macclesfield for about 2-3 months - boring, but learnt how to live life around radio 1 in the morning and radio 4 in the afternoon....that was all that was allowed on't radio in't mill 😀
Then I got the 'spare' role - which meant I had to take on extra rounds if someone didn't turn up. I got paid the bonus regardless of whether I had to work or not, and I got the money for the extra rounds too. Made me late for school every now and then Did the same on Sunday's too. That was easy money.
i loved that one basically after about 6 months i was the longest serving employee so got moved up - got paid by the hour for it ! was the only reason i kept doing it till i was 16 ....
Putting the cherry on Rum Babas.
That was it.
The girl next to me closed the box.
After 6 hours, we swapped for the giddy joy of a new taks, and were almost instantly bollo**ed as if we hadn't time to learn the subtleties of each position.
After 8 hours we were both giggling in a slightly deranged manner.
I lasted 1 shift.
Rogueing. Meciless, slave labour like work in the hottest summer for years.
Sticking the labels on the DR DOS 6 update disks to fix the issues introduced by changes DriveSpace compression (or was it Double Space...??)
Not been keen on MS since then 🙂
After 6 hours, we swapped for the giddy joy of a new taks, and were almost instantly bollo**ed as if we hadn't time to learn the subtleties of each position.After 8 hours we were both giggling in a slightly deranged manner.
I lasted 1 shift.
I was honestly expecting you to reveal that she is now your wife or something... missed opportunity?
I worked on a horse raddish jar-filling production line, my job was to ensure the jars didnt get stuck. Huuuge responsibility for a 17 year old temp!
Temp work for the council. Soulless, joyless, all creative thought and ambition had been stamped out of everyone in there. I lasted 3 days.
I think the breaking point was when some poor bloke phoned up to say that the trees (on council property) where dropping their leaves into the alleyway next to his council flat, which would block the drains, then cause his front room to flood. As this happens every year, he wanted to phone in advance to make sure the leaves got picked up as. He was nice as pie, and was just trying to be proactive and save himself the hassle. Took his details and told him I would phone back.
I explained the situation to the supervisor, who's response was 'Well, are they wet leaves or dry leaves?'
After asking what difference that made, since the chap is worried that his home is going to be flooded again, the response was 'Wet leaves and dry leaves [i]are different departments[/i]'.
I am not sure how I managed to remain civil.
Love to see that on a CV!i turned ron hill track suits the right way out in a mill in Macclesfield
cutting up chickens and large chunks of garlic butter for chicken Kievs
in chunky chicks factory lasted 3 hours ...the smell of the garlic butter lingered on my skin for another week though
the thought of chicken Kiev still gives me the boak
Sticking the labels on the DR DOS 6 update disks to fix the issues introduced by changes DriveSpace compression (or was it Double Space...??)Not been keen on MS since then
SuperStor, if it was DR DOS. DoubleSpace / Drivespace was MS-DOS (it's the main difference between MS-DOS 6.2, 6.21 and 6.22 - MS got threatened with legal action after ripping off DoubleSpace from someone else, so removed it (6.21) and then reintroduced it suitably changed and renamed (6.22). </geek> )
Pawnbroker- soul destroying seeing people get rid of their most prized possesions just so they can feed their children.
Worlds smallest doorman/bouncer (Five feet six!). Funnily enough the idiots always went for my bigger colleagues first. When questioned later they all said they assumed I must have been properly hard to do the job so went for the easier option?!? Young, drunk girls were the most vicious by far.
Insurance death claims was pretty horrible sometimes.
Currently a care worker. Love the work but the way we are treated by some employers is utterly disgraceful.
Servicing sanitary towel macerators and incinerators.....
Simply the worst job I've ever done...... You'd find a machine overloaded and festering and have to bag up and burn the contents.....
V good incentive to study hard and go on to uni.
Good days would be fixing sewage macerators......
i can beat you all 😉
i was a drayman (beer delivery) throughout school holidays and when i was in uni, ball breaking work with some of the maddest nutters ive ever met. you would not believe how dirty some pubs cellars were, im taking trays of sarnies put on top of kegs ready for a party later that day BUT the floor was a foot deep in manky water and dog sh*T!
worst job ever was in new zealand on a year trip, ended up working for P&O cold storage in christchurch, all day every day from 6am till 5pm we had to wear freezer suits and load 40ft containers with 25kg boxes of lamb!! ive never felt so knackered in my entire life, built me up though!
Thankfully, not for any length of time, but as a kid, on my dad's brother's farm, the odd day picking stones from a harrowed field. That and turning turf - two of the most soul destroying jobs that would make me long for the boredom of the suburbs 🙂
police officer, overloaded with relentless low level shite. utter shite.
Stripping excess card from between christmas cards (they were bulk printed on very large sheets that had been partly perforated). Luckily I only needed to do it for two weeks to top my holiday spending money up.
Twas very dull, it knackered your hands & back and the pay was bobbins.
