What’s the worst job you have ever had?

[Floopyfloop]

What has been the most soul destroying job you have ever done ?

Did a lot of dirty & 'hard work' jobs as a 6th former & while at uni (mostly through agencies) - pot washer or auto-dishwash minder in pubs/ canteens was always hot & dirty. Factory work was often boring as hell (watching the bakewell tarts go past on a conveyor at 3 a second, and attempting to knock off the malformed ones), but the worst was a cleaning job I had with my cousin.

We started at 6am, cleaning a men's working club, which always stank of stale beer, fags and urine (not the best odours that early in the morning), and the toilets were always vile. We were supposed to be supervised by an older woman, but she spent the entire time feeding the fruit machines and moaning at us to work faster.

My cousin had a worse one though - she was a vegan, but still got sent to the chicken dismembering and packing factory. She lasted about 10minutes.

Sausage, pork pie and pie factory, grim and boring.
Butchers dept in sainsbury's, buckets of blood.
Badly run childrens care home - kids rioted.
Summer job serving/ clearing meal trays in a hospital ..false teeth and yuck came down on the trays.

Packing creme eggs in a chocolate factory!

Bra factory...

Mind numbing and so bloody hot
We were always dripping in sweat as we packed bras and got shouted at to work faster...

Gutting fish.

So so SO cold (because it was literally a bloody big fridge). Im not squeamish, but when you can tell its your own blood rather than fish blood because yours is a nicer temperature.... no.

Watching

I worked at a Pizza Hut when I was 16 and the manager would take a pizza straight out the oven then shout "Catch!" and throw the pan at me. My instincts told me to catch, not thinking the pan is dangerously hot. Then he got mad because I instantly dropped it. Found out later he was dating a friend of mine (probly 30 year age difference) and abused her badly. I wish I'd smacked him in the face with that hot pan now!

Years later I managed a seaside ice cream shop which was really fun, but the owner rigged the inside of the building with cameras and microphones. He'd listen in on convos between his wife and I, then come strolling in making passive aggressive remarks in response to what we'd been saying. He literally sat outside in his car watching me via cameras from an app on his phone all day. He and his wife would get into raging fights at the store, and try to get me involved. I literally said "This is why I'm not married! Leave me in peace." As soon as he started preaching at me about a woman's place and Trump and all that I walked out and never looked back.

Another restaurant management job- the manager above me had a meth habit and was stealing from the safe to pay for it. Every time he was confronted by the owner he pinned it on an employee, which involved calling the police and theft charges. He also conned female employees into giving him favors in the storage shed and in return they didn't have to work. When he was coming down off the drugs he would scream and throw pans at people's heads.

At my very first job at 15 the owner of the place groped me as soon as I walked in. He had a daughter my age.

Once I got a job delivering newspapers on a rural route and when I was training alone with the manager, he took me out to a very isolated place and told me it was the perfect place to dump my lifeless body. When I reported him to HR she asked me "if this kind of thing happens to me a lot." I said "Men being creepy? Yes!" and she didn't believe me.

All of my bad experiences (I have more!) are because of badly behaved and overpaid men.

Working for a well known supermarket in their petrol station. Awful and clicky

Being a underpaid overworked carer during covid lock downs and seeing 12 residents die due to covid and seeing the funeral home turn up. I have ptsd now and can't get some images out of my head despite therapy

A well known charity. The CEO was a ruthless b@stard who discriminated against women. Bullied my boss badly. Got the senior women to do the work and let the men on the team take the credit for it.
The 'freedom to speak up' lead was anything but, just there to feather his own nest.
I often think about people donating and wonder if they realise their money is being spent on settling employment disputes by egomaniacs.

A Saturday job at Hypervalue (remember those anyone?!) when I was 16.

They stuck me straight on the till... I had literally 5 minutes training on the till operation and a quick whip round of the store then I was off.

There was no scanner at the tills...every product price had to be manually typed in. And the products had NO PRICE TICKETS on. Instead, there was a large laminated booklet at the till with a huge a-z list of every product and the price.

The other Saturday staff had been there donkeys years and knew every price from heart so didn't need the book. I obviously did and I painfully had to check every single product manually. The queue would build up, I'd get flustered, then mean boss lady would stalk over and say 'move' and clear the queue in 5 minutes. Then I was back on and over the next half hour the same would happen again. This happened on repeat for the whole 8 hour shift.

I learned quickly never to ask for help if I couldn't find a product price because they'd talk to me like shit and tell me I should 'really know the job and all the prices by now' (after a month, so effectively just four shifts!). And they started being meaner and meaner every time the till queue built.

So...I'd make the prices up. Go with my best guesstimate. They were all mainly £5 and under items ending in .99 or .49 so I'd just pick a price and use that. And I'd go low, so there was minimal chance of customers complaining. I'm pretty sure a lot of people got some massive bargains from me when they had a conveyer belt full!

The store manager turned a blind eye. As long as I stayed on the till all day and didn't bother her she didn't care. So I kept making my own price structure up, for 6 whole months. And there were other newer staff midweek who I later learned had to do the same.

I wasn't surprised at all when the whole chain went bust a few years later. It was the most horrendously run store and must have been haemorrhaging money, if they were all like that it's a wonder they lasted as long as they did!

When I was 15 and desperate for cash (DM was a single parent and we were on the breadline) I took a job at a local newsagent.

The owner and his son talked down to me like I was an idiot, ran me ragged while they did nothing themselves and after working four evenings a week plus 11 hours on a Saturday, I walked away with £20 a week. I lasted six weeks before deciding I wasn't that desperate after all and a year later he was busted for exploiting minors.

Worked for an IT company as an account manager, had one customer in the uk who was part of a global account, well known telecom company, the uk part of the deal was run at a loss so we were unable to hit any of our targets and it was cheaper to pay them the service credits each month.

The guy I dealt with from the customer side was a vile bully, took pleasure in demeaning me in front of people, he'd shout and swear in meetings and my boss would just shrug and say we pay the credits. My director shoved me under a bus at 10pm before I went on holiday to save his own arse. I lasted 3 weeks and then left (handed my notice in whilst on holiday), I was on an insane amount of money but I can see why. The guy who they took on to replace me contacted me on LinkedIn to complain about the job - he lasted a few months more than me.

McDonald's at an airport. People can be miserable arses when they are going on holiday. Plus you get a meal on shift, I felt yuk.

Worked in a factory when I was a student. My part of the factory was responsible for packaging liquid medical products so my job was to sit at a machine and put each packet under a pressure tester to make sure it didn't leak. These days I imagine this process is automated but it wasn't then.

The factory was full of horrible bullies and misogyny ran wild. I did night shifts and as I walked across a darkened car park to the canteen, one group of men would 'jokingly' jump out from behind big steel containers and offer to 'give me one'. They'd play pranks when there was no boss on the factory floor and in one case, stripped another student (male) down to his underwear, shrink wrapped him to a trolley and left him in a hallway for people to laugh at.

I reported this to the boss and got a 'they're just having a laugh with the boys' sort of response. I was earning really good money (no wonder as staff turnover was really high) and really wanted to stick it out so that I would have fun/drinking money for my next term at uni, but I started to feel like I might be targeted next. One of the men discovered I'd reported them for the shrink wrapping episode and the entire corner of the factory stopped speaking to me. Even if I asked a work question, they'd pretend they couldn't see or hear me.

They not long after I called in sick and then I quit. I was working for an agency so they withheld my final week's pay for not giving them notice but I was just glad to be free and feel safe again!

F1 (first year qualified) junior doctor, particularly in general medicine - I had some other specialty rotations that were a bit better. Ridiculously busy, treated like shit by everyone, nurses would find ways to torment you, managers chasing you for paperwork when you're just trying to fight fires on the wards. Never left less than two hours late. I counted down the days. Oh, and my boyfriend (now DH) was diagnosed with cancer in the middle of it, so that was fun.

Fortunately I found a specialty that I love and am now a consultant and life is much better.

I actually begged for this job. I was at an industry function with an ex. Drunk😳and the VP of what was apparently the "best of the best" company to complete your training in the area I was working in was at our table.

We got chatting and I begged him for a chance to interview and work there. Did and got the job. Drove 40 miles each way to get there and took a small reduction in salary as it was meant to be such a great place to be able to say you'd worked for.

It was hideous. I knew the first day when the structure was totally American. I had 7 managers *in office, and I was manager to 8 people and I was fairly low on the pole at this stage - so you could do nothing without authorisation and pointless meetings.
The was NO work to do just mounda and mounds of busy crap that produced nothing that we had to go for more meetings to discuss.

I'd left a fast pased environment where I was learning everyday - to work in a pretend office.

And even worse everyone seemed to be from the same town and looked on outsiders like Tubbs from The League of Gentlemen "This is a local job for local people, we don't have strangers here"

So I also had to sit with no office chat whilst pretending to work, in between meetings and horrendous full office chants like you see on American TV.

I've worked in factories, cleaning, rotisserie chickens, tills, retail, starting as the most junior trainee but this was the absolute worst job ever.

I stuck it for a year for the sake of my CV and ran away as fast as I could.

Years later my BFF applied there and I said Nooooo but the money was great and she took the job, in a different area. End of the first day she phoned saying shite I have made a huge mistake. Again she was out asap.

Worked for Thames Water for 1.5 days before walking out.
Was put in a dept that worked out how much water was lost due to a reported leak and how much water was actually used by the resident / business and what to charge accordingly. Given about two hours training before given a desk in the corner of an office and expected to work out the invoices .
Went for lunch on the 2nd day and never returned.

Nothing quite as bad as some of these but I hated working at John Lewis. The micromanagement from head office was off the scale. Our department manager seemed to think it was the staff on £5 an hour responsibility to come up with ideas of improving the profitability of the department (and then said no to every single suggestion because head office dictate we must do it this way).

We also had to be on the shop floor 10 mins before the store opened and stay 10 minutes later to tidy but we weren't paid for those 20 minutes. There was a 6 week rota, every 6 weeks we would have to work 6 days in a row. For some reason some twat thought that would be a good week to work the late night shopping so mid way through that week you'd have to work 8.50am to 8.10pm unless it was December then you'd need to work until 9.10pm. HATED IT THERE

On the pot wash in a restaurant.
Ridiculously quick and ridiculously hot.

In an all night bar as a student. The shifts were things like 10pm-6am and you’d be on your feet all night, serving extremely drunk customers while they perved on you. It was before the smoking ban, so I’d come home stinking of smoke and have to shower before I could fall in to bed and I got a sore throat every weekend without fail. The really late night customers were horrible and the worst night I worked was Christmas Eve when it was full of miserable people with no plans for the next day. Oh and a full fight broke out just before midnight and one of the guys got knocked out on the dance floor.

A deli in Hull, when I was a teenager. It was run by a mother and daughter, and a third woman who seemed to be close to them. She had a temper problem, would shout at the top of her voice and slam things when angry. No one ever pulled her up on it, everyone acted like her behaviour was totally normal.

They were all very cliquey, I was the newbie and also brand new to the area. I sometimes struggled to understand regional words (they called bread rolls "bread cakes", for example). The main clientele appeared to be truckers and tradesmen with very strong local accents, I really struggled to catch everything they were saying, especially if they phoned in to order.
I'd have to ask them to repeat themselves before giving up and handing the phone to one of the other women. I was mortified.
I was genuinely trying my best but the other women must've decided I was either thick or taking the mick, so they spoke to me like I was stupid, mocked me, picked me up on the smallest mistakes and had me do all the dirty jobs no one else wanted.
One time, after being berated for the nth time that day (I was apparently buttering the bread wrong), I sighed and said something like "I'm sick of this".
So the manager pulled me into the side room and told me, very po faced, that she was having to let me go because of my "attitude" (but shouty woman's attitude was apparently fine). I just said "right", went home and cried. I wish I'd thrown the bloody "bread cake" in her face on my way out.

Worst jobs I have ever had have all been with small businesses. They take the pressure they are under out on staff

I don't really understand the concept of plastering as a single job. I mean, it's so so repetitive you must get RSI. How come people who are plasterers don't vary it a bit and do other bits of trades too?

Giz a clue!