What’s the worst job you have ever had?

[Floopyfloop]

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

Working in a paper factory but in their office. It was awful. I was excited to work there and I was literally thrown in the deep end, no proper training, depressing windowless office and screaming at me if I made a mistake (what would they expect if they hadn’t trained me properly? I brought it up several times!) whereas my other colleague was treated as royalty and she could do no wrong! I decided to quit when I thought it was easier to die than endure Sunday blues feeling every week!

I lasted two months and found a much better job, better pay and wfh. Been there for many years now and I love my job.

I was a shy very timid 15 years old girl and I got my first job in a bed and breakfast mainly used by commercial travellers. the family who ran it were a nightmare. most locals would not work there and hated the family as they were so vile not to mention filthy. The wife was horrible would start shouting at me as soon as I came through the door; I had to cycle 5 miles to get there on main roads and started at 7 in the morning. nothing I did was right and after a while my duties included going to their factory a mile away and cleaning up the offices and men's staff room which was stinking.
I then went to another job working in a freezer centre which I thought was better but wrong it was worse. The manageress was a total bitch who did all she could to make my life a misery. At breaks I used to sit in the stinking cold outside toilet and cry my heart out.
Another job I had was working in a greengrocers which was ok but I started on a YTS which was basically slave labour for a pittance then after a certain time the company would either take you on or boot you out and take another person under the same circumstances. The government paid the pittance so no loss to them. This place was unbelievable. It appeared to be a woman who was married to someone and a man who was married to someone else hope that makes sense. anyway this was a front the shop I mean they were actually having a fling and upstairs they had a bedroom which was very sordid. I was 17 and left to run the shop while they did what they wanted. Also there was another shop nearby and at weekends sex parties were organised including these two owners on Mondays I would have to listen about all the goings on at these parties! believe me it was the sort of thing that would make anyone blush never mind poor innocent me.
Finally at one time desperate for a place to live I had an old caravan which a pub let me park on their ground if I did Sunday lunchtimes waitressing. sounds ok but two problems. one I seemed to have to serve every idiot going got fed up all the groping the stupid jokes etc. but the main problem was the owner; he had recently hooked up with a very young girl think barely scraping 16 and he knew he was on to a good thing. many a time before opening i would walk into the bar with them having sex on tables floor toilets you name it always finding them doing something. By this time I was not so innocent and just used to carry on with what I was meant to be doing and ignore them. odd really always thought that he was well dodgy he cleared off with the girl and a very large amount of money one night. dont think he was ever caught either

I worked for a woman for two years who was a slightly watered down version of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada. After six months, I would regularly get people coming up to me saying 'how are you still here?'

Apparently she had been through five of me in the previous year. She sacked my replacement after three months. Twice.

I still dream about her twenty years after leaving. I wonder if my two years was an all time record?

Sadly she has not fallen into a sinkhole and is doing very, very well for herself.

Googling your ex boss to see if she's dead every year is perfectly normal, right?

Another one would be working in a factory that made McCain products. Working on the waffle line was soul destroying hours upon hours and putting waffles in their packaging

Event Mananger.

Soul destroying, surrounded by colleagues with huge egos.

Best job was working in a supermarket, had such a laugh with customers and colleagues, shifts flew by.

Do they even sell pot pourri nowadays? Haven't seen any in ages and it's not something I'd usually buy anyway.

Museum attendant in a very well known city centre castle.
Sounds great but was desperately, soul-crushingly boring. I was either polishing glass cabinets or standing by said glass cabinets. Lasted six weeks.

Riveting window handles onto double glazing units. I was in a production line, each riveter would add another piece onto the unit, I was so slow, I held every else up, they'd all be there staring at me waiting for their next work piece. I got so stressed I'd rivet the piece I was adding wrongly, which would piss them off more.

I had to take staples out of thick paper bundles for them to be scanned onto a computer system.

My job was to remove the staples, nothing else.

When I was a lot younger I did regular office temping work. One of which was an ongoing audio typing job for a now defunct department store headquarters. After several months they put someone else in the role who needed an internal transfer quickly but said there was something else for me to do. This all happened on the day, with no notice.

the something else turned out to be spending a day on my own in a massive dusty basement sorting out old files. Some of the files dated back to 1939, this was in 1990. I don’t think they’d been touched since then either.

My hands were rotten, my hair felt full of dust, I was lifting loads of cardboard files in (fairly smart) office wear and my clothes were full of old thick dust. No one came down to check on me during the day.

I went home and rang the agency to say I’m not going back. They backed me and said I was hired with the company as an audio typist, not a filing clerk.

then the women from the company rang me at home to say that I could come back and said ‘ we won’t make you do any filing’ while laughing. I said ‘ I know you won’t! and rang off.

There were loads of other temp jobs available in 1990!

Small telesales company.Boss looked like Grotbags and was an evil bitch from hell.
She made us stand up for however long it took to sell something

A ramper on aircrafts. Crawling into tiny, filthy spaces of the aircraft hold to load it with the cargo. It was finger numbing freezing in the winter. I used to get home filthy, cut, bruised with bumps on my head and numb fingers.
Everything has to be put in perfectly for balance and weight, not to mention being securely fastened.
Has everything from holiday luggage to live animals and dead bodies.
Fortunately a vacancy came up in the office, which I applied for and got a few months later.

Double glazing telesales. Bothering people while they were eating their tea, and for a really dodgy, aggressive company.

Also working at a William Morris concession when I was at school, I absolutely hated it.

Short stint in retail. Hell.

Warren James the jewellers. Manager had us cleaning the windows with a toothbrush. Bat shit isn't even the word.

15 years later and I'm a manager in a professional role and I'm so grateful for my horrendous ex boss who taught me everything I needed to know about how
NOT to manage

A Merchant bank in the 90's. The MD and his vile little sidekick arse licking junior Secretary made my life a misery every day for 2 years. I still have bad dreams about it 😢

Handing out leaflets for Mayfest on Buchanan Street in Glasgow - I was supposed to do it for 2 hours - I stuck it out for 1 hour then gave up - dumped the rest of the leaflets and didn't request payment. I felt so invisible, so worthless. No other job was as bad.

PA to the CEO of an organisation. Just hellish. I thought it sounded exciting and that the work would be interesting. And at times it was - when I wasn't getting yelled at or crying into my lunch...

Worked in a spice factory, the smell was unbelievable and attached itself to your hair and clothes, I went in a shop after work once and the women in front of me at the checkout were discussing how they could smell curry

I worked for a very well known (and not as yet cancelled) comedian as my first job out of uni. I was young and naive, but also in retrospect very resilient to the amount of utter shit I had to deal with. I quit after 14 months.
Almost as bad as retail.

Outbound sales. Literally cold calling people. I desperately needed a job so I had no choice, it was that or be on benefits. Had to work there for a year until I found a new job. I actually wasn't terrible at it but did not enjoy it.

@Beargrumps22 I'm so sorry you had to put up with such unreasonable, weird, and insanely inappropriate people at such a young age. The things our younger selves put up with, that we'd call out immediately now.

The biggest p!stake wasn't actually meant to be a job at all. My parents sent me on a pony trekking holiday when I was about 12. Idea usually is you have bed, board, meals with groups of other people and ride all day. This place was me and another girl also on "holiday", at a run down stables, sharing a filthy room with an older guy who was employed on minimum wage as a stable hand. Every day the owner would have us all in her house, cleaning her trophies, washing up, hoovering, dusting, mucking out the horses, cleaning the tack, with the odd ride thrown in. So she got people to pay to stay at her stables "on holiday" to do the minimum wage jobs she needed doing for free.

Other than that an egg factory, where dropping the eggs periodically, was the only way to break the boredom.