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.

It mainly entailed being verbally and physically abused by members of the great British public! :o

The worst: Temporary warehouse work. I had to stand at the end of a conveyor belt opening empty plastic boxes all day. Mind numbing. What made it theworst was beying about 30ft from the nearest person, so there was no conversation at all. Just boxes.

The lowest Paid: I worked in a garage towards the end of school. I worked all day cleaning the cars until they were gleaming and moving heavy stuff around the place. They paid me £5.00 per 8 hour day.

I once worked in a nursing home for two months, my previous job had been in a gorgeous nursing home where the people were treated with respect and staff were nice, I only moved because it was closer and more money.

Anyway I had to work with a call called sam she was about 30 and still lived at home and called her parents mummy and daddy, she also cried because I said someone would have to pay me to go and see Evita at the cinema (it was her favourite film). She was horrible to the residents she slapped an old lady who had had a stroke on her bottom while we were turning her, I complained she denied and because she had been there since it opened I was told to forget it.
Then we had to go and bath an eldery lady who was very proper and private you could tell she didn't want a bath, but sam kept on and on and she eventually tearfully agreed as long as she could take her handbag with her to the bathroom, I couldn't see anything wrong with this but sam tried dragging her down a corridor while this lady was crying and holding onto my hand, I pressed the emergency buzzer and a nurse came and told me I was being petty and shouted at this old lady to get in the bath.
I also got told off for warming up shampoo before washing peoples hair by putting it in a jug of warm water as the bath ran .
Chatting too much to the residents,refusing to do dangerous lifts and saying no to putting al ady to bed at 6pm when she had requested that she wanted to stay up and watch tv for a couple of hours.
I walked out in the end and put in a huge complaint but never heard anything back,this was in 1997.

My other job was spending 8 hours a day alone with my mother on a layby in a burger van, I took a Stephen King book to pass the time on and left it on the counter and some bastard nicked it!

RogerMelly what is the Birmingham box though?

beamoaning that is so shocking , hope that girl got sacked and that care home got closed down

The managers loved the girl, it was all such a shock to me because I was only 19 and the last nursing home I had worked in was lovely I stupidly assumed all NH were like this.
I was very vocal about how shit it all was so they hated me, I doubt the girl got the sack though they didn't give a shit.
If I had been older and wiser I would have raised hell instead of just sending a complaint in.

working in a department store that no longer exists in uni summer holidays, very snotty indeed.
Clothes were terrible and I could not in good faith say 'oh you look lovely' in the way snooty manager wanted me to say to totally style-less frumpy women in linen that needed an iron.

Also its SO brutal to stand for 9 hours (I used to sneak off to 'tidy the changing rooms' to secretely sit down for a bit)

LOVED silver service waitressing though, great tips and lots of nice food

It's the area on the M6 around Birmingham! Maybe you have to be local to know that though:)

Worst-paid job: 80p an hour serving hot dogs and ice cream at the local park snack bar. (80p an hour on weekdays, a whole pound at weekends!) I was 14/15 and it was 1983.
Muckiest job: I worked in waste/recycling for about 6 years, so there were plenty of really mucky moments - worked on waste audits for Essex County Council and Stansted airport literally going through the contents of the bins for a few days at each...I actually loved it though!
Shittiest job: 1 day temping as a catering assistant in a big company canteen where one of the things I had to do was clean out the 'warming' trays (bloody hot!) after use - I wasn't even given any gloves and it was downright dangerous.
Saddest job: Working in a nursery 'school' which was basically a holding pen for children, where they either did nothing much or were forced to sit and do 'handwriting' from about age 3. I did whatever I could to enrich their experience, providing paper for drawing, homemade playdough, and introducing French games. I can't believe I stayed there 3 years, got paid about tuppence, but kept going back for the kids.

I am a Brummy! Lived here forever! i haven't heard, it called by that name, before.

the worst one i had was for a firm that made stuff for the building trade, the job was boring, my manager was a lech, the whole office was having an affair with someone, so there was much screeching like banshees as they discussed their sexual exploits, then they sacked me when i got pregnant. bastards the lot of em. i used to feel sick if i saw the logo.

closely followed by working at Specsavers, id done 8 years at an independent opticians and loved it, then moved to speccies, what a mistake that was. it was just a sales job - no skill involved and no one gave a shit, and the staff were absolute bitches. it was like an endurance test.

i had quite a few jobs to just see me though the kids being little - working on a garage forecourt, (crap money and crapper shifts), supermarket checkout operator, (didnt mind that actually!) temping, doctors receptionist - that was ok really except the gps really didnt give a toss how you were treated and the rest of the staff were raging racists.

all in the past thank god!

It is oftened commented as the birmigham box..oh well, maybe i just know loads of shit facts:o

Being a chambermaid for a local hotel (part of a global chain). I was 21 (so, 15 years ago), and I'd just graduated and was doing summer work before I went back to university to start my masters degree. I worked in the hotel as a chambermaid in the mornings and as a waitress/kitchen hand in a pub/restaurant in the evenings.

The hotel paid the princely sum of £2.92/hour, and for that I would service the rooms, which were all en-suite. One 'gentleman' who was staying for 4 nights must have had a very upset stomach one night and the toilet bowl was horrendously filthy when I went to clean the next morning. Of course, I cleaned it, boaking away. It was not so much having to do that as part of the job (the level of filth overstepped the boundaries of the job though I think), it was more that he left a 50p (yes, all of 50p) tip at the end of the stay. That was clealrly the price he put on me cleaning the mess. I felt really demeaned.

Came in one morning and there was a pigeon in the deep fat fryer. Manager scooped it out and turned it on.

thats just made me laugh out loud :)

I worked full time at a cafe when I was 15 after I dropped out of school, I had to deal with coach loads of people who didn't speak much English and was having to deal with much requests of 'cock' (coke) from them all.
I had lecherous old men who would pat my bum and stick notes in my pockets.
I worked with 2 old ladies who did NOTHING so at 15 I would open up the cafe at 6am, put the tables and chairs out, serve food, cook food, take orders, clean and restock until 6PM everyday. Luckily they couldn't so without me and they knew that I knew it was illegal for me to work thier so along with sleezy tips I got pain a ton, unfotunatley at 15 all I had to spend it on was food and drugs.

Telesales for a dodgy office paper firm in Romford. Everyone in the office chain smoked, the office manager cleaned the phones with spit and hanky, and you got sacked if you didn't make two sales a day. 45 hour week for £90 basic commission.

First job was as a domestic in a seedy hotel nightclub at sixteen all the other domestics would give me the mens toilets to clean everyday and they were rotten, used condoms on the floor and pints full of wee left next to the toilets , no one spoke to me except the men who at nine thirty in the morning were still pissed and used to shout obcenities at me whilst I was picking up condoms/fag ends etc needless to say I didn't last long.
Job after that was a domesic in a emi home , I had to clean poo off Walls and carpets whilst hungover (I was a party hard student at the time) and all sorts of really awful jobs , the carers were awful and let the residents walk around dripping urine and they would laugh at them when they talked to themselves or fell over , that was what made me become a carer to make a difference to people .

BeaMoaning, that actually brought tears to my eyes. Do these people not realise they will be old one day and would not want to be treated in such a degrading manner?

too @ your second job MRwhiskerson

Thanks God for people like both of you!

beamoaning I had almost exactly the same experiance working in care as you did , so similar In fact it is spooky .
I saw so
e terrible things in the homes I worked in and was bulled and ostracised for the crime of caring and refusing to force grown adults into bed at five pm so staff could have their breaks .

Mrs, sorry not MR!

My mum had the same experience as you two working in a home. She found it so distressing to have to fight with her collegues to actually be able to do her job in a caring manner that she stopped working in that setting all together and now looks after elderley people in their own house.

Cleaning up shit. At a primary school and later in another job at an old people's home. Now I do it for my children. It was excellent training.

As a very precocious student, I took on a telesales job, trying to flog double glazing via cold-calling unappreciative members of the public at home. It paid something like £1.40 per call that you didn't get the phone slammed down on you, with £2 for every "lead" we got.

I got through sixteen calls before standing up in the "office" and declaring that the job was tedious and "beneath me". I hung up my headset and flounced. They must have thought I was such a self-important prick.

Probably workng for a large city law firm after I returned to work from mat leave, was head hunted and changed jobs. In terms of stress and dreading going to work. Nearly had a nervous breakdown. Only lasted a few months and got out fortunately.

Other than that it was probably working in a crappy nightclub 3/4 nights a week at uni, just because of the hours, shit pay and customers grabbing your arse, stuff like that.