What's the worst job you've ever had?

[moogster1a]

following on from the slave labour post, what's the worst job / lowest pay you've ever had.
I once had a job which involved collecting pig brains straight from the abbatoir ( they often introduced me to the lucky pigs before they went throught "the system") i then had to dunk them in liquid nitrogen and drive them back to the lab.
I always used to wonder what would happen if I had a car accident and the police would find a dozen or so brains scattered over the road.
Anyway, I digress, shittiest jobs, please.

My worst job was my first Saturday job, aged 15, putting jam in doughnut in a bakery for £1 per hour! I did actually enjoy my time working there, and the other staff were lovely, I'm still in contact with many of them 20 years later. However task-wise it's a pretty crap job to do.....

working in a very prestigious public school

kids were lovely, teachers were lovely but the other office staff were absolute bitches

i was only 17 and used to go home and cry at their spitefulness. I only stayed about six months then took a pay cut and went elsewhere

Ah two student jobs.

The first summer I made sandwhiches at Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight. Not so bad but the management were incredibly tight. You had to clock in and clock out even for breaks. If you were even one minute late they deducted 15 minutes of pay. You might work OVER at the end of the day by thirty minutes if need be but they wouldn't pay that. Hell no. One day I sliced my finger on the bacon slicer. I knew as soon as I did it I would have to go to hospital. The Manager wanted to put a plaster on it. Fortunately eventually they took me to hospital and I had eight stitches. They then took me back to work to finish my shift and I had to ride my motorcycle home one handed. No mean feat.

Another summer I worked in a fish and chip shop in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight again. The owners were even tighter than the above. They didn't feed us but if there was anything at the end of the shift going to waste we could buy it. We would make a pot of tea for customers and just keep topping it up for hours. Everything was so cheap, rubbish quality - ketchup, pickles, marge, bread etc etc. Northerners would come in and complain about the portion sizes which I didnt understand till I moved to the Midlands and saw their portion sizes and I understood just how mean the chip shop owner was! I was told off cos my vintage motorcycle leaked oil on the drive out the back. At the end of the season only one favoured worker received a bonus - everyone else was pretty much told to f off. But mostly I hated it because I STANK of fish ALL the time. UGH ugh ugh.

Student vac job, working in a box factory, assembling talc boxes. 7.30am start, 4.30 finish and we weren't allowed to sit down. But it helped keep me out of the red, so can't grumble.

M&L

I also worked for Morrisons Cafe in Stoke on Trent. Vile place run by a dour jobsworth and several insane supervisors. if battered fish dropped on the manky floor they used to tell you to plate it up and put a bit of lemon over the join. Came in one morning and there was a pigeon in the deep fat fryer. Manager scooped it out and turned it on. [boak]

peanut factory.
had to remove any bad peanuts from the conveyor belt.
the woman opposite me used to eat them with her mouth open
the smell made me feel sick
couldn't eat nuts for years
oh and once I said I was at university, nobody spoke to me

Pot washing at the Michellin factory in stoke. Full of hard ladies that'd been there for 50 years. Had to get up at 4 to get there for 5. No one spoke to me either once I said I was at uni. Scrubbing bacon trays at 5 in the morning was [boak].

Making sandwiches in a twee little covered market sandwich shop. Basically outdoors in winter - froze me poor hands off, (and a tight-arse owner).
Working in a twee little Alice in Wonderland souvenir shop - miserable grumpy owner who resenting me getting good A level grades (he'd gone to the same school - had issues) and said 'yeah but you failed your driving test though.'

Work experience from school aged 15. I couldn't decide what to do and then the only placements left were shite ones.

I was sent to a very upmarket hair salon for 3 weeks ( I had bad hair, spotty skin and was painfully shy).

The owner/manager was a complete snooty bitch bag and had me doing the sandwich run, using me as an example to her trainees of how not be dress/look/be. She sent me to do all her personal errands, wouldnt let me have a lunch break or go home before 6pm ( started at 8am). It was awful.

On day 5 , she suggested I should scrub the steps leading to her apartment ( above the salon) because I looked like a good 'scrubber'. I started the job and throughout the next hour she teased and made fun of me in front of all the staff and customers. Finally I could take no more and I lost it , picked up the dirty water and threw it all over her on my out of the door.
I can still hear her shrieks and screams 24 years later.

Loading soap onto the conveyor at the Body Shop Factory

Supermarket cafes are not nice to work in.

A lady once found a dirty fork in the clean forks tray, I apologised (without too much feeling, just "sorry, here's a clean one") and she asked me if I was ashamed or some such rubbish. I think she expected a bit more of a show of "oh how terrible". I told her if I went around feeling personally responsible for every little thing I would have walked out long ago.

Worked in a knicker factory. I had to spend all day sewing those little bows on to the front of knickers. Even now I hate those little bows on knickers and rip them off.

The factory was awful, one huge shed with conveyor belts with boxes of knickers on, and the sound of 200 sewing machines. Cotton dust in the air. Radio 2 on full blast (god damn you to hell) and lots of yabbering women.

The women were the worst - really horrible scum of the earth types. They would make Janice battersby look like Nigella Lawson. They didn't speak to me as I was from a different town and considered me lowest of the low. They scared me. My mother came one day to meet me for lunch, and she looked shocked when we all streamed out the door. She said 'christ, you work at prisoner Cell block H'

I was pregnant and had to heft boxes around likr no tomorrow.

Couple of years after I left the place closed down and outsourced all its operations to India. So now there is some poor soul sewing knicker bows on for about 50p a day.

I NEVER buy M&S knickers (the company I worked for made them exclusively for them)

Night shift in an onion factory. We were picked up in an unmarked van and driven into deepest, darkest Norfolk.
We had to take the skins off onions all night. Weren't allowed to wear gloves so we could "be at one with the onion". I lasted one night. I never got paid actually....b&%%!

julesgee- good on ya!

Also spent a summer (1989) working in a vegetable processing factory (look...job opportunities in Norfolk weren't great for students!).

Started off doing carrots, then progressed onto swede or parsnips which used a knife to tail them, then if you were really good you got to do stew pack which involved different sorts of vegetable and therefore higher thought processes that not every employee there had. The BEST job was lettuces which involved wrapping in film and using this little heated pad to stick the film together before putting the label on. The worst job was bloody spring sodding onions. Standing all day at a cold water tank washing mud off them. Oh, same for beetroot (I'd forgotten about them until now...must have blocked it from my memory). As a special birthday treat you got thrown in the spring onion tank.

Because I am tall I got banished to the back of the shed to spend the day stacking crates on pallets and moving them around on a fork lift trolley thing.

The worst day was when me and my two friends were desperately trying to bag carrots as quick as we could and one friend got a call over the tannoy. Turned out her Mum had got her a job in an office. Cow! She's actually my best friend so I'm allowed to say that.

Working in factory assembly lines. One was packing toys into boxes. You had to stand at the assembly line the whole time. I used to come out at the end of the day hobbling like an old woman - I was 17 at the time!

DH & I got a jobs one summer in a fish factory. I had to arrange slices of smoked salmon on little gold trays and DH was in the gutting department where he had to clean out the bins full of fish guts.

Our hands were permanently cold and wet and we stank of fish. We lasted 2 weeks and had to burn all our clothes after it.

God I appreciate our lifestyle now!

The worst job is the only job I've ever walked out of. Waitressing/bar tending in a seaside pub... something I thought would be fine given that at the time I had four years' experience in catering. It was massively hard work (popular, expensive pub during a really, really hot Easter hols with high-than-average bunch of rude clients: "Daddy says I have to get a job so I'll be working here in a few days... but I've told him to tell Sally [owner] that I simply can't work in the kitchen, it's disgusting, menial and I won't wash up, so he's making her put me behind the bar." As I served them food.) with no breaks but the worst bit was another woman who I was meant to serve breakfast with and then get ready/clean for lunch, do the laundry and more cleaning with, before serving lunch and then cleaning again.

My first shift she was away and I spent the whole afternoon in dishwash. The next day another woman praised me sky-high to her because of how well I'd worked... she hated it. Spent the next four days constantly telling me that I was shit, actually slowed her down and stupid for not remembering the hundreds of different food/cleaning/laundry combinations for various tasks. She acted like she was a long-standing invaluable member of staff so I didn't dare complain. It was only after I handed in my notice - and I always regret not mentioning that she was the reason why - that another girl my age told me she'd only been there a month and no-one liked her. I decided writing a letter to the manager was too bitter and went back to my equally hard but much more satisfactory job as a wedding caterer... at least I knew when my boss shouted at me in that job she was just getting it in the neck from the bride and it was nothing personal.

Emptying out a birthing pool after the event whilst 8ish weeks pregnant.Gross.

pizaa 'restaurant'. caught the 'chef', havnig empited the bins, going to make food without washing his hands.

well known, orange, supermarket. Customers who thought they wre a cut above evryone else, were un-belieeeeevably rude. I got yelled at for 'processing shopping too fast' and, then 'too slow' Miserable cows.

Now I am an uber-professional

Also, ex-job (american multi-national, 24 billion dollar turnover) where manager was dead against women and mothers - organising meetings at 6pm when he knew I had a communte home and a 6 month old baby to pick up.

There are now 5 full time employees doing the job I did, I worked so hard there and got no thanks. I do not miss that place either!

I've had so many...

While working as a bar maid I took on the cleaning for some extra money. I have an all-too vivid memory of digging the men's urinals out with a teaspoon. You just don't want to know.

Getorfmoiland - Janice Battersby will never ever be as good as me. I am utterly perfect, have you not noticed how smug I am whilst eating in my dressing gown?

Sorted onions (yup that is a real job!)...OMG the stench and shock when you put your hand into a rotten onion....the smell would stay on your fingers for days :-(

However the banter was good!

Worst job was in a recruitment agency where they made me cry everyday I was only 16 and on a YTS..I got paid out of petty cash at the end of the week..only stayed 3 months before I got out to somewhere much nicer..

I should say it was scraping dead rabbits and hares off a runway and pulling bits of birds out of aircraft engines while I worked as a bird control operator on a busy airfield, but, that was actually a really good job. Out and about all day and was my own boss.

Worse job ever was in a call centre for a company that leases cars to businesses to use as company cars. Irate businessmen expecting the AA to be called out to change a tyre for them so they didn't get their hands dirty!