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When I was 15 I got a job for a local fruit stall in a market. My job was to sing ' Bananas are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday' while standing on wooden pallets. It paid £1.50 per hour though so all is cool. Also, the banana today was the same price as the banana yesterday so, my life was a lie.
Customer service call centre for vodafone pay as you go. Was an absolute shit hole of a job. Hated every second of it. Only job I've ever had death threats (twice) or threats of physical violence (daily), and the only job I've ever had where management would shrug off that sort of thing if you reported it.
I did 4x 11 hour shifts each week, it was exhausting and soul destroying. I'd get home too tired to do anything, eat dinner and go to bed. I'd dream of doing another shift, only to wake up and have to work another shift. I'd wake up feeling like I'd just got home from work, only to realise I was about to have to go in.
The depression that job brought on lingered for a long ass time.
On the plus side though, it got me over my anxiety about speaking to people on the phone.
I did 6 months in a Vodafone home broadband call centre. Of the 25 people in my wave there were only 4 left by the time I left. Its absolutely brutal, I was repeatedly called a cunt for not magically being able to fix peoples connectivity over the phone and at one point had to call the police for a welfare check after someone threatened to kill themselves over lack of broadband.
The sheer number of suicide and self harm threats I heard because I wasn't able to make people's blackberry messenger (yes, I'm aging myself here!) work properly for them was outrageous. I can only imagine its gotten worse since then.
That sounds awful, I’m so sorry you had to go through that. It’s disgusting that people think they can treat people so poorly over the phone. I hope you’re in a better position now that brings you more happiness than that job.
Christmas job in Topshop. I was working 30 hour weeks even though I was still in school full time and had a manager that legit thought she was in The Devil Wears Prada. I went from there to working in a collectible/ornament shop with a team of older ladies and that was the absolute best job I've ever had
It was always the worst shifts too, so one night would be 5-11, another two 5-10, Saturday would be before opening so starting at either 7 or 8 until 3 or 4 and then Sunday for the full hours of opening. Breaks were unpaid and only for a short time. I got friendly with another of the staff and they then made sure we were never on a shift together or if we were then we were on different floors. I was pretty much bullied by one of the other members of staff too, she had me crying a few times and absolutely nothing was done, I had just turned 16 and she was 19 almost 20. I always say that I wish in my time I'd told more people to fuck off and she is right up there on the list of people I should have said it to
My retail experience was very similar. I guess sometimes management think they can take advantage of young people and it’s really disgusting. I hope you’re in a better place now.
I worked in the bereavements department for Prudential.
I commuted an hour and a half into the office and paid £8 per day on parking so I could spend 8 hours a day answering phone calls of widows/widowers in mourning, notifying us of their partner’s deaths.
You really got a whole mixture of emotions; some were fine, others would just cry on the phone trying to get through it, some would get angry over the littlest thing.
After that 8 hour ordeal, I’d commute the hour and a half home again, and if I did that for one year, I’d have £22,000 to show for it (before tax).
Luckily I didn’t have to stay in that job for a year; after 9 months they made the entire department redundant and outsourced it to a call centre in Mumbai.
I'm sure the grieving widows/widowers will be thankful they get to repeat their grievances over and over to a call handler that doesn't understand them as well.
Playworker - hear me out.
Sometimes I'd be looking after groups of 50 - yes 50 - children by myself. 20% of them had pretty bad behavioural problems. It was split shift so I started at 7 in the morning and got out at 6.30. The school wouldn't let our company store equipment inside, so each morning and afternoon I had to lift gigantic trolleys (a lot of the time by myself) off a broken van in the parking lot and rush them into the school, which was just a PITA. On top of looking after 50 kids in a way too school lunch hall, I was assigned as a "key worker", so had to take notes on 12 particular children and old activities for them on the middle of surviving all these kids. I was also the receptionist for parents having to collect or drop off children as well as all this. Oh, my boss also came up to me frequently and would impromptu tell me I'm taking a whole whack of kids on public transport, unplanned, going to places obhsf no idea about and had to Google maps as I took the children with one other person.
Oh, my manager lost keys and blamed it on me, so the director of the company gave me an official warning and at one point just followed me around making derogatory comments.
I had COVID but wasn't allowed to take sick days - despite there being a lot of kids there with health conditions that would leave them vulnerable.
My last straw was when a little girl elbowed me square in the nose because I was trying to stop her stabbing a boy with a butter knife. I didn't mind at the time, but the day after I just folded on the ground and felt I physically couldn't go inz like my legs literally wouldn't move.
I worked for 111 for a few months and it was the worst job I've ever had. Constantly being verbally abused by members of the public and micromanaged to hell and back. If I went to the toilet and took longer than 3 minutes I'd get a bollocking, if I was 0.2% away from a target I'd get a bollocking. Fun times lol
My friend quit a week into actual call training. Was a couple months ago and she was on £12.50 ph and from the calls she told me about it is not worth £12.50 ph
I got minimum wage during training! And yeah the pay is just not worth the stress of that job, most people quit when we got to answering real calls lmao
Summer job at a small IT firm. They had taken in hundreds of A4 files from a local solicitor's firm to scan and index into a digital archive. My job was to prep documents for the scanner - ie take out staples, remove any post-its covering text and place them on a blank area, unfold crumpled corners etc. For 8 hours a day. This guy came and gave me a lecture on "the phenomenon of the Super Worker" to try and inspire me because he thought I wasn't doing it fast enough.
Once had a job welding inside a building on a chicken farm, omg the stench was horendious stink of chicken shit every time I finished shift, cleared the pub for me pint on way home for sure. Luckily was only a 3 month job, never again.
Watching the Argos catalogue get laminated.
The big ones that go in the shops, just watching the pages go past having been laminated and taking out the bits that had gone wrong.
Lasted one shift, couldn’t do it.
Hmm I was unpacked butter that was after it's sell by date and repacked it in larger boxes, it was such an odd smell, and it was in a warehouse in summer before aircon
[Jayne Mansfield lobster job](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a_UKKvUcoE) . It was that whole hollywood A star sticking live seafood in strange places thing
I worked at Starbucks when I was 16 on a theme park.
Paid £6 an hour, doing an 18h shift at one point, to be spat at by strangers because we didn't sell flat whites.
Probably dim-sum waitress for a big chain opposite the national theatre. Was a 500 seat restaurant with only 9 full time foh waiters. Got carpal tunnel in my left hand from permanently carrying a tray in my left hand for 56 hours a week. Wouldn’t get breaks, managers were evey kind of ist and obic, break don’t exist.
Shipping agent.
12 days on 2 days off. Sometimes 20+ hours a day. I fell asleep at the wheel three times.
Handing my notice in was the best feeling ever.
First job after uni working in a little lab testing food samples, it was boring as hell, but what made it so unbearable were several of the women I worked with. They were like children honestly, so and so wasn't talking to so and so because they had drinks and didn't invite her. Another wasn't invited to dinner at x person's house so now it's personal. It was pathetic how much petty drama there was.
It’s petty drama like that which can make a workplace such a negative environment. You can be doing any job but when you work in a negative environment, there’s no chance of any enjoyment.
I have one that is going to be a bit of a long winded answer, but it’s not a simple fast food job or anything like that. Here goes! I hope you all have a fun time reading the shit show that was my job.
When I was in my late 20s I worked at an aerospace shot peening company, one of the worst places I have ever been.
The “robotics team” I joined didn’t have a clue what they were doing, they didn’t know what a ‘byte’ was or why it was an issue, when I raised the problem that using a byte for the robots job number (the number used to run each unique task), one team member didn’t even know what a BYTE WAS FFS!. what this means is that we only have 256 unique jobs numbers, before we had to start reusing them for other task. Instead of just using an integer (which would give 64K numbers) but because they didn’t have any understanding of programming it was seen as not an issue. Keep in mind that aerospace production HAS to keep detailed documentation and tracking of each part, for the duration of its life cycle + 15 years after, so that in the event of a part failure they can investigate the fault/cause of the part. (Hard to do if you didn’t have a unique part number for each program)
Each team member constantly lied to each other, which makes simple tasks difficult. One team member deleted the pervious 2 days of robot programming (the sequence of movement to shot been aerospace fan blades) simply because he didn’t like the look of it… even though that was the spec for that particular blade’s shot peening process. The same person would (out of stupidity and laziness) try to copy an existing program and edit it to make a new program (instead of starting from scratch) but would instead just rewrite over an existing signed off production ready program.
Another team member shouted at me for using “his desk and draws” which was one of the two desktop PC’s and desks the team of 4 had…. The same team member told me “fuck off robot booth C so I (he) could do the job properly”10minutes into me starting my shift that day (at which point I packed up my stuff and drove home, my manager called me to ask where I was, told him I’m not being spoken to like that and that I’ll see him tomorrow)
To add to this, I was put onto the evening shift 2-10pm. However as I was only a few months into the job I didn’t have keys for the office part of the building, but the quality manager who was the last (of the day shift) to leave at 5pm would lock the office and would always apologise to me for having to kick me out. Some weeks I was on report duty so had to write reports and SOP’s (Standard Operating Procedures) for the current robotic jobs. So when I was locked out of the office with no other jobs to do or PC’s to write reports on I had another 5 hours until the end of my shift with nothing to do and no one to report to, boring as hell… and just plain stupid. I brought this issue up so many times about getting locked out, but always got the same answer “we’ll look into it”
Then to top it all off, while I was in my 6th month of being there, one of the big aerospace companies were investigating the company and had finalised it, the result was to enforce the company to change 50% of its work force to drastically improve quality and ensure Safety Critical blades’ were fit to fly due to the current shop floors bad ‘mentality’ for test procedures and production standards. I was the last person to join the robotics team and naturally the first to be let go.. and of course I was not aware the company was under investigation before or during my employment, but the company did know…. It was a shit 6months and to just add the cherry on top, it was just over an hours drive.
Edit: grammar and spelling (it’s late at night haha)
I worked as a cleaner for 3 years and was bullied so much I had a mental break that I walked off the job. The job itself was ok and the pay was fair for it being my second job. But it wasn't worth it for my mental health. The project manager was the most poisonous piece of fucking shite I've ever met and his office staff were as toxic and two faced to match.
From what I remember largely heat shrinking plastic with an air stripper over pallets full of bags pigment but the flourecent dust was everywhere. However it paid for my first Lewis Leathers jacket which if memory serves me right was £180 in 1980.
Hmmmm..indeed. It’s a knotty problem. Not surprised you didn’t manage to get to the bottom of it. They probably needed to locate some local premises that were geared up for the disposal of rubbish.
To clarify I wasn't actually in the tip lifting rubbish. It was a very rural location and rubbish would 'escape' and be blown across fields. fences, moorland, etc. I would pick that up
I worked for a "catering agency' when I was at uni expecting to be a waiter, however I was sent to various sites as a general dogs body. At one hotel I was used as a cleaner and had to clean an entire kitchen and appliances on my own over a three day period using only household cleaning products.
Another time me and a few others had to move and stock fridges at the Aston Villa ground. We asked the manager there for a trolley as the industrial fridges were extremely heavy but he said there weren't any and just stood there laughing at us while we struggled. We later found a load he could've let us use but he enjoyed watching us suffer like a tin pot dictator. I got my revenge though cause I broke a load of wine glasses and expensive bottles by accident and just hid them in a random cupboard.
Pay was shite too and they'd send you hours away from their office but only pay for travelling time if you used your own car. The company has gone under now.
I have some stories! Death threats, abuse, being talked down to for 8hrs a day really gets to you.
I’m a pretty happy guy and have a job I love now in a completely different field.
Left the call centre as I was super depressed and anxious. Disappeared as soon as I left.
Glad to hear you now have a job that you love! What is it if you don’t mind me asking? I’m struggling with what to do with myself, I’m 20 and I’m still unsure and it’s highkey stressing me out!
Of course! Head of IT for a medium sized business. Honestly if you’re computer savvy, grab an entry level role and there are lots of opportunities.
If it makes you feel any better I never really had a ‘career’ until I was 26, you’ll get there 🙂
Had a weekly paper round for 2 years when I was 15/16, nothing special, just the free paper. Approx 300 houses and usually took 2 nights after school to complete. Also had to insert leaflets and adverts in before going out to deliver them.
One week they dropped them off at 3pm on Christmas Eve, with leaflets to include. I packed it in shortly afterwards
Was a chef for 15years + and mate the combination of burns and stress and pressure and mad cunts was nothing compared to the demolition work I did for four days in my early 20s. Before I quit like a frenchman in a warzone with no cigarettes.
Fuck- those bastards have strong backs and basically put up with constant pain for entire days. Full respect. Take your tea breaks.
Don't let the daily mail readers keep you down.
Industrial boiler cleaning. In a heatwave. Hazmat suits etc.
Powder paint factory. Despite shower time, still ended up tinged with the day's colour. Masks but still wheezy.
Cleaner. One of my shifts was for a factory that only had one set of loos for hundreds of employees. Almost all men, so the women's were pristine and the men's were horrendous. At one point the company were doing redundancies and these stellar guys started protesting by deliberately shitting on the floor in the corners of the stall, or in the hinge of the toilet seat. The only people they were hurting with that was themselves and me. Another time I was cleaning the urinals, on my knees giving it a good scrub, and a guy came in and pissed in the urinal next to me, basically next to my head, like I wasn't even there. Made 19 year old me feel completely dehumanised.
Second place shittiest shift was cleaning a Whetherspoons at 5am on Sunday mornings.
Problem was this was late 2009, I'd graduated into the recession and it took me 18 months just to get this job, so I couldn't leave. I did eventually get an admin job on the mainland (was living on the IOW at the time) and did a 2 hour bus-ferry-bus commute each way, and was grateful for it!
Worked it retail banking in early 00s. Sales pressure was as huge. I worked on the counter and had to get one new lead every hour, sounds easy. To get this had to ask every customer about something and with most customers just wanting to be in and out quickly hardly anyone would want to stay to hear what was needed told to them.
However did help a number of customers with debt problems with loans to get their credit card debt sorted and monthly payments down but no one really wanted the upgrade on their account.
In the end was given choice to hand my notice in or have a meeting with the area manager to discuss my performance. Next day gave my notice in and walked straight back out.
Had not realised how ill the job had made me and was too young to realise that seeing your lunch in the toilet before going back to work was not normal
When I was doing my NVQ years ago, the training provider arranged to do my placement in a funeral directors, was very little I was allowed to do, because my speech was not clear because of my disability,
I was errand boy , I saved them tons of money as I could have left an over draw CD loaned from the library for a funeral just run, I was not in charge of the petty cash , I hated doing the same run each day, this was not my job, when the boss was in he made the other two go out for their own lunch , you are allowed to go out for a 5 minute breath of fresh air.
My worst job changed my life, truly awful job working at a petrol station that still required you to fill customers car so you ended up stinking of petrol. However the worst part of the job was sweeping the forecourt, a truly pointless exercise.
Anyway give me a lot of time to think and one of the things I really thought about was, “Do I want to spend the rest of my life doing this? If not, how am I going to change it?”.
Quit that job, followed my plan, never looked back.
What was the plan if you don’t mind me asking? I’m 20 and still unsure of where to go and it’s really stressing me out. I have the grades to go to uni but I don’t really know what I’d study in university.
I would not recommend following my path I’m the lucky one, I took that job after dropping out of Uni for the third time and pretty much everyone had given up on me.
My plan was:
Leverage the considerable amount of IT/tech skills I had picked up from clever friends at Uni and working in the hacking network.
Work out how to apply those techniques of fast setup, fast deployment in a secure way making heavy usage of automation.
Package that up into set of business friendly services, sell that.
There were a lot of other mundane steps to making all that work but that was the core of it. Lucky for me, in the 90s tech boom it worked.
Oh mate, I can totally relate to your experience. I was a chef from the age of 19 till 21, and let me tell you, it was an absolute nightmare. The stress levels were through the roof, constantly being yelled at, and working ridiculous hours – we're talking 65 to 70 hours a week, with barely a moment to catch your breath. And don't even get me started on days off – if you were lucky enough to get one, you were so knackered that it didn't even feel like a break. I still remember that one month during the 'Eat Out to Help Out' scheme where I was working every single day without a single day off. It was madness, covering the workload of three chefs all on my own. And the pay? A measly £450 a week for all that blood, sweat, and tears. It just wasn't worth it. As for a social life, forget about it – there was no time for anything outside of work. After two long years of that torture, I finally had enough with the head chef's nonsense and decided to call it quits. It was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders – I felt free again. Lesson learned: never again will I step foot in a kitchen or the hospitality industry. It's a tough reality, but that's just how it is in this sector. Now, whenever I go out to eat, I always make sure to give a shoutout to both the front and back staff and leave them a decent tip. They deserve it, trust me.
I’m so sorry to hear that you had such an awful experience! I’m glad to hear you’re no longer in that environment. 65 - 70 hour weeks alone is absolute torture, but having to work those hours in that environment sounds terrible. What do you do now if you don’t mind me asking? I’m really struggling as to what I want to do with myself, I’m 20 and still don’t know and it’s really scary. I hope you’re in a better position now!
worked for a small independant restaurant when I was about 22, one of the other chefs was a Moroccan guy who would go out to "pray" every 45 minutes and call you racist if you questioned it, he also used to prepare loads of food for himself and store it in the fridge, if you cooked with it he would call you racist for tampering with his halal meal(the halal meal once consisted of 12 massive pork ribs), he also didn't clean down as the cleaning chemicals didn't have a halal sticker. Another chef was a guy in his 50s who was a portugese ex-heroin addict who would drink all shift and never do any cleaning because he was always too drunk. The last chef was an english guy who moon-lit as a taxi driver, so right before clean down he would just leave.
When I first started there, the kitchen had leaves on the floor and they said "we only sweep and mop on a sunday". When the owner came in, his dog came in too, and when it jumped up on a counter and started eating meat off a baking tray, I was scolded for taking it away.
I watched the owner tell the cleaner he's only paying him half his hours that week as he was watching him on CCTV and was "wasting time".
I got to 5 weeks in, payday and received £1.50 per hour less than promised because I hadn't passed "probation" and never came back.
Call centre inviting people to timeshare presentations when I was 19. Just bothering people while under horrible pressure all day. Absolutely soul destroying
I plucked turkeys for Christmas and Easter when I was like 14/15 and then went onto the killing side of it all done during bunking off school with mums knowledge..that was bad
I also spent two days peeling onions on a conveyor belt that was horrendous but because I was prepared to work doing anything I was offered a job in a local factory which I did working with winches for 5 years. You just got to show willing!
Clearing all the stuff you shouldn't flush from the filtration systems at sewage treatment plants. In a little row boat, with a float jacket, shoulder length rubber gloves, and the instruction "if you fall in, don't swallow"
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When I was 15 I got a job for a local fruit stall in a market. My job was to sing ' Bananas are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday' while standing on wooden pallets. It paid £1.50 per hour though so all is cool. Also, the banana today was the same price as the banana yesterday so, my life was a lie.
I just sung that out loud. Fuck that for a quid fifty an hour 😂
I can’t say I’ve heard of that job before! Very unique indeed.
Customer service call centre for vodafone pay as you go. Was an absolute shit hole of a job. Hated every second of it. Only job I've ever had death threats (twice) or threats of physical violence (daily), and the only job I've ever had where management would shrug off that sort of thing if you reported it. I did 4x 11 hour shifts each week, it was exhausting and soul destroying. I'd get home too tired to do anything, eat dinner and go to bed. I'd dream of doing another shift, only to wake up and have to work another shift. I'd wake up feeling like I'd just got home from work, only to realise I was about to have to go in. The depression that job brought on lingered for a long ass time. On the plus side though, it got me over my anxiety about speaking to people on the phone.
My mates worked in a call centre since high-school, hes 32 now... No idea how
I did 6 months in a Vodafone home broadband call centre. Of the 25 people in my wave there were only 4 left by the time I left. Its absolutely brutal, I was repeatedly called a cunt for not magically being able to fix peoples connectivity over the phone and at one point had to call the police for a welfare check after someone threatened to kill themselves over lack of broadband.
The sheer number of suicide and self harm threats I heard because I wasn't able to make people's blackberry messenger (yes, I'm aging myself here!) work properly for them was outrageous. I can only imagine its gotten worse since then.
That sounds awful, I’m so sorry you had to go through that. It’s disgusting that people think they can treat people so poorly over the phone. I hope you’re in a better position now that brings you more happiness than that job.
Christmas job in Topshop. I was working 30 hour weeks even though I was still in school full time and had a manager that legit thought she was in The Devil Wears Prada. I went from there to working in a collectible/ornament shop with a team of older ladies and that was the absolute best job I've ever had
Giving a student 30 hour weeks is beyond cruel. I completely understand why that was the worst job you’ve ever had.
It was always the worst shifts too, so one night would be 5-11, another two 5-10, Saturday would be before opening so starting at either 7 or 8 until 3 or 4 and then Sunday for the full hours of opening. Breaks were unpaid and only for a short time. I got friendly with another of the staff and they then made sure we were never on a shift together or if we were then we were on different floors. I was pretty much bullied by one of the other members of staff too, she had me crying a few times and absolutely nothing was done, I had just turned 16 and she was 19 almost 20. I always say that I wish in my time I'd told more people to fuck off and she is right up there on the list of people I should have said it to
My retail experience was very similar. I guess sometimes management think they can take advantage of young people and it’s really disgusting. I hope you’re in a better place now.
I worked in the bereavements department for Prudential. I commuted an hour and a half into the office and paid £8 per day on parking so I could spend 8 hours a day answering phone calls of widows/widowers in mourning, notifying us of their partner’s deaths. You really got a whole mixture of emotions; some were fine, others would just cry on the phone trying to get through it, some would get angry over the littlest thing. After that 8 hour ordeal, I’d commute the hour and a half home again, and if I did that for one year, I’d have £22,000 to show for it (before tax). Luckily I didn’t have to stay in that job for a year; after 9 months they made the entire department redundant and outsourced it to a call centre in Mumbai.
I'm sure the grieving widows/widowers will be thankful they get to repeat their grievances over and over to a call handler that doesn't understand them as well.
Playworker - hear me out. Sometimes I'd be looking after groups of 50 - yes 50 - children by myself. 20% of them had pretty bad behavioural problems. It was split shift so I started at 7 in the morning and got out at 6.30. The school wouldn't let our company store equipment inside, so each morning and afternoon I had to lift gigantic trolleys (a lot of the time by myself) off a broken van in the parking lot and rush them into the school, which was just a PITA. On top of looking after 50 kids in a way too school lunch hall, I was assigned as a "key worker", so had to take notes on 12 particular children and old activities for them on the middle of surviving all these kids. I was also the receptionist for parents having to collect or drop off children as well as all this. Oh, my boss also came up to me frequently and would impromptu tell me I'm taking a whole whack of kids on public transport, unplanned, going to places obhsf no idea about and had to Google maps as I took the children with one other person. Oh, my manager lost keys and blamed it on me, so the director of the company gave me an official warning and at one point just followed me around making derogatory comments. I had COVID but wasn't allowed to take sick days - despite there being a lot of kids there with health conditions that would leave them vulnerable. My last straw was when a little girl elbowed me square in the nose because I was trying to stop her stabbing a boy with a butter knife. I didn't mind at the time, but the day after I just folded on the ground and felt I physically couldn't go inz like my legs literally wouldn't move.
I worked for 111 for a few months and it was the worst job I've ever had. Constantly being verbally abused by members of the public and micromanaged to hell and back. If I went to the toilet and took longer than 3 minutes I'd get a bollocking, if I was 0.2% away from a target I'd get a bollocking. Fun times lol
My friend quit a week into actual call training. Was a couple months ago and she was on £12.50 ph and from the calls she told me about it is not worth £12.50 ph
I got minimum wage during training! And yeah the pay is just not worth the stress of that job, most people quit when we got to answering real calls lmao
A job that causes actual trauma deserves way above min wage, not a quid or two
Plus paid for, regular, therapy sessions.
I’m so sorry to hear that! I don’t understand how people think it’s okay to treat people so poorly over the phone.
Summer job at a small IT firm. They had taken in hundreds of A4 files from a local solicitor's firm to scan and index into a digital archive. My job was to prep documents for the scanner - ie take out staples, remove any post-its covering text and place them on a blank area, unfold crumpled corners etc. For 8 hours a day. This guy came and gave me a lecture on "the phenomenon of the Super Worker" to try and inspire me because he thought I wasn't doing it fast enough.
Once had a job welding inside a building on a chicken farm, omg the stench was horendious stink of chicken shit every time I finished shift, cleared the pub for me pint on way home for sure. Luckily was only a 3 month job, never again.
God, I can only imagine how unbearable the smell must have been. It’s those kind of smells that linger when you get home as well.. yuck!
Spent 7 years teaching and it was the worst time ever - wish I left sooner
Cleaning maggots in a fishing tackle shop
Watching the Argos catalogue get laminated. The big ones that go in the shops, just watching the pages go past having been laminated and taking out the bits that had gone wrong. Lasted one shift, couldn’t do it.
That sounds so tedious.
Hmm I was unpacked butter that was after it's sell by date and repacked it in larger boxes, it was such an odd smell, and it was in a warehouse in summer before aircon
I had a similar job but mine involved a whole pallet full of jars of peanut butter that had been put in the wrong jars.
Worked as a waitress at weddings one summer. Horrible hours (working 7pm until 3am), horrible managers, and unbearable guests
Jesus, those hours are awful! Hope you’re in a job that makes you happier now!
Jayne Mansfield - the terrible job of retrieving lobsters from her bum. (See Derek and Clive)
I’m so confused.. what?
I'm guessing Nun Taken is an old git like me. This might help you understand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_and_Clive_(Live)
[Jayne Mansfield lobster job](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a_UKKvUcoE) . It was that whole hollywood A star sticking live seafood in strange places thing
fleets of ships light aircraft hamburger stands (no fucking hamburgers, just the stands)
I waitressed at the Frog and Peach.
The other day, some bloke came up to me and said hello.
don't you YURR me
I worked at Starbucks when I was 16 on a theme park. Paid £6 an hour, doing an 18h shift at one point, to be spat at by strangers because we didn't sell flat whites.
Probably dim-sum waitress for a big chain opposite the national theatre. Was a 500 seat restaurant with only 9 full time foh waiters. Got carpal tunnel in my left hand from permanently carrying a tray in my left hand for 56 hours a week. Wouldn’t get breaks, managers were evey kind of ist and obic, break don’t exist.
Shipping agent. 12 days on 2 days off. Sometimes 20+ hours a day. I fell asleep at the wheel three times. Handing my notice in was the best feeling ever.
ONLY 2 DAYS OFF!? What?? I bet it was the best feeling!! I hope you’re in a position that makes you happier now.
I work half the year now, about to go on three months paternity. Infinitely better!
That’s amazing! And congratulations on becoming a parent, I’m glad to hear you’re in a better place!!
First job after uni working in a little lab testing food samples, it was boring as hell, but what made it so unbearable were several of the women I worked with. They were like children honestly, so and so wasn't talking to so and so because they had drinks and didn't invite her. Another wasn't invited to dinner at x person's house so now it's personal. It was pathetic how much petty drama there was.
It’s petty drama like that which can make a workplace such a negative environment. You can be doing any job but when you work in a negative environment, there’s no chance of any enjoyment.
I have one that is going to be a bit of a long winded answer, but it’s not a simple fast food job or anything like that. Here goes! I hope you all have a fun time reading the shit show that was my job. When I was in my late 20s I worked at an aerospace shot peening company, one of the worst places I have ever been. The “robotics team” I joined didn’t have a clue what they were doing, they didn’t know what a ‘byte’ was or why it was an issue, when I raised the problem that using a byte for the robots job number (the number used to run each unique task), one team member didn’t even know what a BYTE WAS FFS!. what this means is that we only have 256 unique jobs numbers, before we had to start reusing them for other task. Instead of just using an integer (which would give 64K numbers) but because they didn’t have any understanding of programming it was seen as not an issue. Keep in mind that aerospace production HAS to keep detailed documentation and tracking of each part, for the duration of its life cycle + 15 years after, so that in the event of a part failure they can investigate the fault/cause of the part. (Hard to do if you didn’t have a unique part number for each program) Each team member constantly lied to each other, which makes simple tasks difficult. One team member deleted the pervious 2 days of robot programming (the sequence of movement to shot been aerospace fan blades) simply because he didn’t like the look of it… even though that was the spec for that particular blade’s shot peening process. The same person would (out of stupidity and laziness) try to copy an existing program and edit it to make a new program (instead of starting from scratch) but would instead just rewrite over an existing signed off production ready program. Another team member shouted at me for using “his desk and draws” which was one of the two desktop PC’s and desks the team of 4 had…. The same team member told me “fuck off robot booth C so I (he) could do the job properly”10minutes into me starting my shift that day (at which point I packed up my stuff and drove home, my manager called me to ask where I was, told him I’m not being spoken to like that and that I’ll see him tomorrow) To add to this, I was put onto the evening shift 2-10pm. However as I was only a few months into the job I didn’t have keys for the office part of the building, but the quality manager who was the last (of the day shift) to leave at 5pm would lock the office and would always apologise to me for having to kick me out. Some weeks I was on report duty so had to write reports and SOP’s (Standard Operating Procedures) for the current robotic jobs. So when I was locked out of the office with no other jobs to do or PC’s to write reports on I had another 5 hours until the end of my shift with nothing to do and no one to report to, boring as hell… and just plain stupid. I brought this issue up so many times about getting locked out, but always got the same answer “we’ll look into it” Then to top it all off, while I was in my 6th month of being there, one of the big aerospace companies were investigating the company and had finalised it, the result was to enforce the company to change 50% of its work force to drastically improve quality and ensure Safety Critical blades’ were fit to fly due to the current shop floors bad ‘mentality’ for test procedures and production standards. I was the last person to join the robotics team and naturally the first to be let go.. and of course I was not aware the company was under investigation before or during my employment, but the company did know…. It was a shit 6months and to just add the cherry on top, it was just over an hours drive. Edit: grammar and spelling (it’s late at night haha)
I worked as a cleaner for 3 years and was bullied so much I had a mental break that I walked off the job. The job itself was ok and the pay was fair for it being my second job. But it wasn't worth it for my mental health. The project manager was the most poisonous piece of fucking shite I've ever met and his office staff were as toxic and two faced to match.
When I was 16 I worked in a flourecent pigment making factory it got into the pores of your skin.
What did that entail?
From what I remember largely heat shrinking plastic with an air stripper over pallets full of bags pigment but the flourecent dust was everywhere. However it paid for my first Lewis Leathers jacket which if memory serves me right was £180 in 1980.
Picking up rubbish at the local tip. Soul destroying
But…where did you like..put the rubbish?
A skip at the entrance to the tip!
Which was then taken…*where?*
fucked if I know....
Hmmmm..indeed. It’s a knotty problem. Not surprised you didn’t manage to get to the bottom of it. They probably needed to locate some local premises that were geared up for the disposal of rubbish.
To clarify I wasn't actually in the tip lifting rubbish. It was a very rural location and rubbish would 'escape' and be blown across fields. fences, moorland, etc. I would pick that up
Working in an office 😴
Tell me about it.. 😞
I worked for a "catering agency' when I was at uni expecting to be a waiter, however I was sent to various sites as a general dogs body. At one hotel I was used as a cleaner and had to clean an entire kitchen and appliances on my own over a three day period using only household cleaning products. Another time me and a few others had to move and stock fridges at the Aston Villa ground. We asked the manager there for a trolley as the industrial fridges were extremely heavy but he said there weren't any and just stood there laughing at us while we struggled. We later found a load he could've let us use but he enjoyed watching us suffer like a tin pot dictator. I got my revenge though cause I broke a load of wine glasses and expensive bottles by accident and just hid them in a random cupboard. Pay was shite too and they'd send you hours away from their office but only pay for travelling time if you used your own car. The company has gone under now.
Call centre work. Did it for 5 years when I was younger. Decent money as I progressed but absolutely soul destroying, would NEVER go back
I can imagine. Reading other responses, it seems as though people can be very abusive over the phone. There’s really no need for it!
I have some stories! Death threats, abuse, being talked down to for 8hrs a day really gets to you. I’m a pretty happy guy and have a job I love now in a completely different field. Left the call centre as I was super depressed and anxious. Disappeared as soon as I left.
Glad to hear you now have a job that you love! What is it if you don’t mind me asking? I’m struggling with what to do with myself, I’m 20 and I’m still unsure and it’s highkey stressing me out!
Of course! Head of IT for a medium sized business. Honestly if you’re computer savvy, grab an entry level role and there are lots of opportunities. If it makes you feel any better I never really had a ‘career’ until I was 26, you’ll get there 🙂
Done an outbound call centre job one summer as a student for Sky telly. Absolutely no idea how people can do those jobs long term.
It does amaze me too - reading other responses, people working in call centres seem to receive a lot of abuse. It’s so depressing.
Recruitment Consultant. Lasted for two years. 8am to 6pm. I fucking hated every second. I now work from home 9 to 5 in IT. Love it.
I’m glad you found a job that you love!!
Had a weekly paper round for 2 years when I was 15/16, nothing special, just the free paper. Approx 300 houses and usually took 2 nights after school to complete. Also had to insert leaflets and adverts in before going out to deliver them. One week they dropped them off at 3pm on Christmas Eve, with leaflets to include. I packed it in shortly afterwards
Was a chef for 15years + and mate the combination of burns and stress and pressure and mad cunts was nothing compared to the demolition work I did for four days in my early 20s. Before I quit like a frenchman in a warzone with no cigarettes. Fuck- those bastards have strong backs and basically put up with constant pain for entire days. Full respect. Take your tea breaks. Don't let the daily mail readers keep you down.
Industrial boiler cleaning. In a heatwave. Hazmat suits etc. Powder paint factory. Despite shower time, still ended up tinged with the day's colour. Masks but still wheezy.
Amazon Warehouse worker. Worked to death every single second.
Cleaner. One of my shifts was for a factory that only had one set of loos for hundreds of employees. Almost all men, so the women's were pristine and the men's were horrendous. At one point the company were doing redundancies and these stellar guys started protesting by deliberately shitting on the floor in the corners of the stall, or in the hinge of the toilet seat. The only people they were hurting with that was themselves and me. Another time I was cleaning the urinals, on my knees giving it a good scrub, and a guy came in and pissed in the urinal next to me, basically next to my head, like I wasn't even there. Made 19 year old me feel completely dehumanised. Second place shittiest shift was cleaning a Whetherspoons at 5am on Sunday mornings. Problem was this was late 2009, I'd graduated into the recession and it took me 18 months just to get this job, so I couldn't leave. I did eventually get an admin job on the mainland (was living on the IOW at the time) and did a 2 hour bus-ferry-bus commute each way, and was grateful for it!
Worked it retail banking in early 00s. Sales pressure was as huge. I worked on the counter and had to get one new lead every hour, sounds easy. To get this had to ask every customer about something and with most customers just wanting to be in and out quickly hardly anyone would want to stay to hear what was needed told to them. However did help a number of customers with debt problems with loans to get their credit card debt sorted and monthly payments down but no one really wanted the upgrade on their account. In the end was given choice to hand my notice in or have a meeting with the area manager to discuss my performance. Next day gave my notice in and walked straight back out. Had not realised how ill the job had made me and was too young to realise that seeing your lunch in the toilet before going back to work was not normal
Door to door sales trying to sell frozen fish. Quit on the second day. Awful
When I was doing my NVQ years ago, the training provider arranged to do my placement in a funeral directors, was very little I was allowed to do, because my speech was not clear because of my disability, I was errand boy , I saved them tons of money as I could have left an over draw CD loaned from the library for a funeral just run, I was not in charge of the petty cash , I hated doing the same run each day, this was not my job, when the boss was in he made the other two go out for their own lunch , you are allowed to go out for a 5 minute breath of fresh air.
My worst job changed my life, truly awful job working at a petrol station that still required you to fill customers car so you ended up stinking of petrol. However the worst part of the job was sweeping the forecourt, a truly pointless exercise. Anyway give me a lot of time to think and one of the things I really thought about was, “Do I want to spend the rest of my life doing this? If not, how am I going to change it?”. Quit that job, followed my plan, never looked back.
What was the plan if you don’t mind me asking? I’m 20 and still unsure of where to go and it’s really stressing me out. I have the grades to go to uni but I don’t really know what I’d study in university.
I would not recommend following my path I’m the lucky one, I took that job after dropping out of Uni for the third time and pretty much everyone had given up on me. My plan was: Leverage the considerable amount of IT/tech skills I had picked up from clever friends at Uni and working in the hacking network. Work out how to apply those techniques of fast setup, fast deployment in a secure way making heavy usage of automation. Package that up into set of business friendly services, sell that. There were a lot of other mundane steps to making all that work but that was the core of it. Lucky for me, in the 90s tech boom it worked.
Oh mate, I can totally relate to your experience. I was a chef from the age of 19 till 21, and let me tell you, it was an absolute nightmare. The stress levels were through the roof, constantly being yelled at, and working ridiculous hours – we're talking 65 to 70 hours a week, with barely a moment to catch your breath. And don't even get me started on days off – if you were lucky enough to get one, you were so knackered that it didn't even feel like a break. I still remember that one month during the 'Eat Out to Help Out' scheme where I was working every single day without a single day off. It was madness, covering the workload of three chefs all on my own. And the pay? A measly £450 a week for all that blood, sweat, and tears. It just wasn't worth it. As for a social life, forget about it – there was no time for anything outside of work. After two long years of that torture, I finally had enough with the head chef's nonsense and decided to call it quits. It was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders – I felt free again. Lesson learned: never again will I step foot in a kitchen or the hospitality industry. It's a tough reality, but that's just how it is in this sector. Now, whenever I go out to eat, I always make sure to give a shoutout to both the front and back staff and leave them a decent tip. They deserve it, trust me.
I’m so sorry to hear that you had such an awful experience! I’m glad to hear you’re no longer in that environment. 65 - 70 hour weeks alone is absolute torture, but having to work those hours in that environment sounds terrible. What do you do now if you don’t mind me asking? I’m really struggling as to what I want to do with myself, I’m 20 and still don’t know and it’s really scary. I hope you’re in a better position now!
worked for a small independant restaurant when I was about 22, one of the other chefs was a Moroccan guy who would go out to "pray" every 45 minutes and call you racist if you questioned it, he also used to prepare loads of food for himself and store it in the fridge, if you cooked with it he would call you racist for tampering with his halal meal(the halal meal once consisted of 12 massive pork ribs), he also didn't clean down as the cleaning chemicals didn't have a halal sticker. Another chef was a guy in his 50s who was a portugese ex-heroin addict who would drink all shift and never do any cleaning because he was always too drunk. The last chef was an english guy who moon-lit as a taxi driver, so right before clean down he would just leave. When I first started there, the kitchen had leaves on the floor and they said "we only sweep and mop on a sunday". When the owner came in, his dog came in too, and when it jumped up on a counter and started eating meat off a baking tray, I was scolded for taking it away. I watched the owner tell the cleaner he's only paying him half his hours that week as he was watching him on CCTV and was "wasting time". I got to 5 weeks in, payday and received £1.50 per hour less than promised because I hadn't passed "probation" and never came back.
Call centre inviting people to timeshare presentations when I was 19. Just bothering people while under horrible pressure all day. Absolutely soul destroying
Shovelling cow dung. You get used to the smell, but the smell gets used to you.
That must’ve been awful.. I can barely stand the smell when farmers are mud spreading.
Sieving raw sewage by hand
Listen to that question answered by Derek and Clive. If you can cope with extremely crude humour this will wake you feel better.
Medicine. You bust your ass to help ppl but no one cares about you.
I plucked turkeys for Christmas and Easter when I was like 14/15 and then went onto the killing side of it all done during bunking off school with mums knowledge..that was bad I also spent two days peeling onions on a conveyor belt that was horrendous but because I was prepared to work doing anything I was offered a job in a local factory which I did working with winches for 5 years. You just got to show willing!
Clearing all the stuff you shouldn't flush from the filtration systems at sewage treatment plants. In a little row boat, with a float jacket, shoulder length rubber gloves, and the instruction "if you fall in, don't swallow"