Be Excellent To Each Other

At some point everyone's done a shit job, I'm sure. Whether it's to pick up some beer money when you were younger, or to make ends meet after a job loss or similar. So what's the one, really really shit job you've ended up doing?

For me it was a week working in a plastics factory over Christmas when I was 17. Twelve hour shifts sitting next to a conveyor belt at the arse end of a thermosetting plastics machine, which made baby wipe bottle lids. My job, for 12 hours at a stretch, was to take the (hot as unholy fuck) lids off the conveyor, close the lid, and pop them in a bucket. I think I got paid the princely sum of 2.75 an hour.

Your turn!

Fucking hell, I just had a serious case of deja vu. Have we not done this before?

Sweeping and cleaning vessels prior to coating during a number of school holidays (summer holidays being the worst) for the paltry sum of 2 pounds an hour. Close second was picking / cutting lettuces under glass at a friends Dad's market garden but at least there I got to drive a tractor.

I guess I've been lucky as I've never had a really terrible job, I don't think. I've had workplaces with nasty colleagues and horrible bosses, but nothing like that. My first job was 13 hours a week at the local convenience store. £2.37 an hour.

Sort of. We've had a "what jobs have you done" thread.

viewtopic.php?style=19&f=3&t=7819&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Might have done. Let's party like it's 2012.

Here we go. viewtopic.php?style=19&p=601866#p601866

Good, thought I was going mad.

I worked at a factory that made fibreglass ladders. I was responsible for cutting and inserting the rungs.

It was all a bit shady and it was my mates father in laws unit. They didn't seem concerned that I wasn't wearing a face mask but I was slightly concerned when my snot was luminous green for weeks after.

I can't remember how much I got paid but it probably all went on games anyway.

I also worked for a local newspaper but anyone who followed me on Twitter a year or so ago will know all about it.

I got a job with a company I can't remember the name of, who used to make rubber door seals for cars. My job was to measure the door seals against a bit of wood, making sure they fell within two marks. I stood there from 8pm to 8am, measuring one every five seconds, at a guess. In the two months I worked there, I had three seals that were the wrong length

Being a glorified washer-upper at an understaffed restaurant while waiting on at the same time. So in addition to serving orders and clearing plates, the interim was spent frantically washing plates and kitchenware as fast as possible to keep up with the demand. Once everyone had fucked off I had to finish washing everything up, strip the tables, and set them for breakfast the next morning, and then sweep/mop the kitchen. Solid 5-6 hour shifts with no break for £2/hour.

Edit: Oh and I forgot to mention that the landlady was an alcoholic and the head chef who was her husband used to smack her about a lot after he'd had a couple himself. Fun times.

I once sold Karate Lessons door-to-door.

For 4 hours. Fuck that noise.

Did you find it easy to get hi-ya'd for that?

Yeah, but they soon gave me the chop

I guess they saw sense, eh?

You could try explaining this joke to a Scottish person but they may not understand, so you'd check by asking 'Sure you ken?'

One of my very first jobs, in 'fresh claims' in an unemployment benefit office was pretty crap. Angry people queuing up to be seen and precious little help when it was really busy.

But the one that would have given me a breakdown if I hadn't got out, was on the Ministerial Business Unit in the regional government office. High pressure and often a total waste of time. We'd work our bollocks off to prepare for a ministerial visit for weeks, only for it to be cancelled on the day. Also, minister's private office people going ballistic if an answer to a parliamentary question went back with a full stop missing. And which they the rewrote, or didn't use at all.

It's the only time I asked for a move before it made me ill.

I wrote a whole load of promotional material and web copy for a company specialising in fracking, based out of Oklahoma. It wasn't especially difficult work (the brief was basically "you know Halliburton? Make us sound like that" and I was essentially just rewriting technical documents about slurry) and it paid extremely well, but I felt like I'd broken a hefty piece of my soul off after the whole thing was done and I received my cheque.

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"They specialise in what?!"

I was given a job by my uncle when I was 12, to be the Saturday boy in one of his Butchers shops. My first job on arriving at 6am was to sort out two bin bags of offal and remove the hearts and livers from the lights. I was then given the task to mince the lights to make pet food with. I had that job for five years and I don't look back on it fondly. Being the bosses nephew I was given every shit job the staff didn't want to do.

I then worked in a clothes shop with a short arsed nazi for an assistant manager. That was simply tedious.

After that, I moved to London aged 19 and got my first full time photographic assistant job with a neurotic nasty piece of work. That lasted 9 months. I've been self employed since then.

David Bailey?

What did you think the DB stood for?

Usually, David Brown, but it normally has a number after it, rather than 'snappa.'

I joined the police.

When I was in my mid 20s I used to ride BMX a lot. Street mainly (gaps were my specialty)

Due to my Bipolar and Autism I had been out of work for quite a while. So my family were putting pressure on me etc. I decided to ask a local bike shop if they were hiring, turns out he was.

What I didn't know, however, was that the owner was a dodgy cunt who used to buy lots of stolen bikes from people with obviously badly faked IDs.

Any way, I had a street bike (I was sponsored by a SOCAL company called JAD) but due to my age (about 28) I was winding things down a little. I decided I wanted to build a race/trials bike that I could use for work and general transportation. I didn't need a car in London everything was within a few miles so I would just ride my BMX. Reason being, race/trails bikes are usually longer and thus better for riding any distance.

I was quite strapped for cash as the job didn't pay much (min wage) so I asked my grandfather if he would give me a loan so I could build this bike. He said that was fine...

So I built the bike and had it for a few months. I was just about to pay off my grandfather when he suddenly died of a stroke, meaning this bike was my last gift from him (as my Nana said).

Well my boss decided one day he was going to buy a stolen bike from this guy from Brixton. Obviously faked ID (you could tell it was a doctored photocopy). Any way, whilst he was there he saw my bike at the back of the shop and asked me all about it, what model, what year etc. I decided to keep it short.

That night as I was locking up my side of the shop (boss had already gone home) I leaned my bike against the door and was pulling down the shutters when I was thumped in the back of the head with a pipe. I don't remember much else, just looking around and seeing this cunt riding off into the distance on my bike.

The police came, took a statement etc. Any way, turns out that this photocopied ID was actually real and they caught the fucker. I was kinda hopeful.. Then they tell me that he's a crack head and thus, I was getting fuck all.

I was most angry at my boss for attracting bad flies around shit. Had he not dealt with that sort of shit cunt I would still have my bike.

I've never forgotten it nor will I. I just hope the cunt gets bummed in prison.

What me? Or the person I worked for? Neither in this instance, though I did come quite close to working for Bailey at one point in my early 20s. Glad I didn't in retrospect.

The latter.

I never really had what I think off as a shit job as I mostly didn't mind any of them.

I worked in shop fitting for most of the 90's, it would go quiet from November as nobody wanted builders messing their shops up in the run to Christmas

So we would get shoved onto local building jobs to keep us busy until January when it all kicked off again.

One of the more memorably ones was night shift in the local crematorium, we were doing offices and areas surrounding the burners, they used to make a fucking noise as they cooled down from the days working. Which was creepy on nights

Also the manager was a Star Trek fan and had a big model enterprise in his office which he accused us of fucking with and call the office, remember trying not to laugh when been questioned about it

Working as a young woman in IT was a bit shit (nothing like sexism and sexual harrassment to make your days fly by) but in the grand scheme of things was nothing. I've been quite lucky really.

There was also that time I had to dress up as a pig for an Oxford University dinner. That evening could have gone better.

I checked the other thread, and thought for sure I would have mentioned this before, but at university I worked as a sex text operator.

Those ads for local girls in your area where you can text for a good time?

Me.

It's actually a bank of people and your screen has notes on who you are and what you like, who they are and what they like, and stuff you've talked about. Each operator keeps it updated for the next person. You might not even be getting replies from the same person you think you're texting.

Anyway, there were a few rules to follow such as terms of endearment you couldn't use, but also whenever they texted STOP you were allowed one text to persuade them to rejoin, and you had to be really creative to keep them texting.

It wasn't for me, and I did two 2 hour shifts and then stopped logging on.

I got a cheque for ~£20 in the post a few weeks later.

Working at a pub at uni, where the owner would send me outside in a sheer shift top in the freezing cold in December because it's amuse him to point my nipples out to the drinkers in the bar, who he regarded as mates.

He had a fight with one of these mates once and threw a heavy wooden chair across the bar, which missed me by inches (actually it caught my arm, but should have hit me in the head if I hadn't moved quickly) and shattered all the optics behind me, covering me in glass and alcohol.

I walked out there and then. He threatened me over the phone if I didn't come back and serve a notice period. I was too scared and decided that I'd just forego the two weeks wages he owed me, but a massive rugby player I knew went there and collected them in cash and stopped him phoning me a few days later

OH MY

OH, OH MY

Ah, so you'd already met?

Hahaha!

If it wasn't for the pig thing, this would be the best thing to happen all week.

o/

POTW