Ahh, the student jobs..
There was the one where I woked for the city council in the gardening dept. I was out all day, with my pale celtic skin, in the burning NZ sun weeding traffic islands while dodging maniac drivers and fending off sexist comments.
There was the year I worked for the Inland Revenue who were changing thier filing system. I spent and entire summer taking out files one by one, removing the split pin that held all the douments together in the top right hand side, arranging them in the centre, hole punching and putting two plit pins int the holes.
How about the one in the knitting wool factory where I spent 8 hour shifts plus overtime putting 10 balls of knitting wool into celophane bags and putting a sticker on the bag? For fun, occasionally I got to work on the spinning machines when the other operators had cut their hands too much to keep the wool clean that day, in between having to stop work because the factory routinely got hotter than the legally allowed maximum. The girl who stood next to me on the packing table had proudly bought herself a tape player. She posessed one tape which was on constant rotation. I still can't listen to Bruce Springstean's Born in the USA without breaking out into a cold sweat.
Or the few weeks I spent putting CDs into CD cases. All the girls did the tedius jobs while the boys got to walk around the factory floor pushing the stacks of CDs and stacking the boxes.
I think the worst one, however, was the trainee software writer job where the boss left on planned sick leave (he had an operation he had been waiting for for 6 months) after I'd been there 4 days and none of the others in the team gave me any work to do. They'd hog all the easier or less complex jobs i.e. the ones the trainee should be doing, leaving only the hideously complex ones that I had no way of doing without f*ing up some serious financial transactions. Routinely the big boss would bark at me about how little I was doing but do nothing about directing any suitable work, much less training, my way. The worst bit though was the conversation. All the "boys" (there were no other women) talked about was what they had bought/downloaded/streamed. For variety every month they would launch into a tedius and predictable moan about how much tax they had to pay and how it was a complete liberty...blah blah. I lasted to the end of my probationary period and left. Two months later the business was sold and has, I understand, been restructed almost out of existence. My heart bleeds.