Several spring to mind but I’ll save the very worst until last…
White Stuff - there six months straight out of uni while I looked for a grad role. Worked with a few women in their 40s and the rest were mainly around my age 21-24 or so. They all thought they were something terribly special and important and that they worked in ‘fashion’. I don’t know if it was a particularly frumpy season I worked there but it was a lot of lumpy knits in unflattering sludge tones and dresses with twee prints. Hideous stuff. One girl was senior to me and just so superior in tone and manner. I didn’t fit in at all (was asked when I was going to grow up as I was wearing trainers - I was 21) and was cast down alone to menswear in the quiet, windowless basement to work solo. Ghastly place.
Waitrose was another short-lived job when I was a student, actually for similar reasons. I was shocked how superior and full of themselves a lot of the floor staff were. I’d previously worked in another supermarket and loved it. Alarm bells rung in my head during my induction from a section manager when she asked if I had relevant experience and I said yes, checkouts, deli counter, replen etc. at Sainsbury’s. She said that didn’t count as it wasn’t a premium store, like this one. Silly cow. Stacking tins of beans is much the same whether you do it in Harrods Food Hall or Kwiksave. Jacked that job in fast as I really didn’t fit in - they judged anyone scruffy or frankly normal who came into shop there. I remember smugly noting when Waitrose started doing that complicated MyWaitrose card that the snobby section manager had told me ‘we don’t do gimmicks like loyalty cards or special offers because we don’t need to attract those kind of people.’ Idiot.
The worst job was some 15 years later though. By then I was well established in my public relations career and took a new role with a large multinational consumer brand. One you’ll all be familiar with and most of you will likely have consumed its products.
I was taken on to handle comms for an international division, multiple territories. It was a big step up in salary, but the actual job sounded right up my street. The interview process was odd - I had about seven interviews and then a lunch and I realised, later on reflection, I had asked most of the questions, I had mapped out job spec and responsibilities and I had discussed scope of the role.
It was largely remote, a standalone, newly-created role in a remote team entirely unrelated to what I did. With a boss who knew nothing whatsoever about what I do. Even though he’d interviewed me.
By the end of the first week I had concerns. By the end of the first month I was trying to get my old job back. By the end of the fourth month I’d quit, with nothing to go to.
I consider myself to be a very resilient person. While those two previous jobs I mentioned annoyed me a lot they were by no means the only awful ones I’d had - my first PR job agency-side as a Junior Account Exec was horrendous, as was cleaning hotel rooms and a bar job at a country house hotel working for a frankly unhinged woman who threw bottles of wine at people. I have put up with crap. But this job was so much worse than anything I’d ever imagined.
For starters my boss thought I was something in IT. I know nothing about IT, at all. I can barely use Excel, or add a new printer. He set me to building an API (had to Google what one was) to link an intranet to the company’s digital training platform. Literally had no idea what I was doing. He also wanted me to roll out conferencing software to the corporate population. Again, no idea at all. There was more but I can’t remember it. I’ve consciously purged most of it from my memory.
The few things I actually understood and were in my comms realm (building up internal comms procedures, drafting content for various platforms etc) changed in brief by the day. I’d do it and he’d change his mind how it should be done again and again and again. I was also responsible for running a huge international online meeting once a month for hundreds of colleagues and the IT infrastructure couldn’t cope. The sound would go or the videos wouldn’t work. I hated it so so so much. I don’t think my boss was an unkind guy but he exuded a tense anxiety and his corporate image was clearly an important part of his sense of self.
One day I was so unhappy I just quit. I decided that morning I’d be happier cleaning hotel rooms or taking a farm
hand job (easy to get local jobs) and if that was the case there was something seriously wrong. Best decision I ever made and should have done it day one. Got a relatively poorly paid temp job in PR for a small company and later a great perm job I’m still in (on more money than the awful one!)
It taught me it’s just not worth it and all the stuff my parents said about having to stick with a job at least two years is bollocks. No one even asked in interviews about that short stint!