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?