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.

Lambing, when the lambs are dead and rotted inside and you ahve to pull them out bit by bit. Shitty enough for you?

female resident not patient and threw not through.

I've packed knickers, board games and chickens, cleaned loos and hotel bedrooms, Waitressed, put up with some more than I should have done...

They definitely helped with the student loans though...

The shittier, though better paid - grad- jobs have given me far worse grief... As you know they're not just for the summer... Far more soul destroying...

Will be giving my kids frank lessons in dealing with pricks at work, taking no shit and just generally not taking it all so seriously!

i did one night working as a glass collector in a night club. got covered in drink, my bum grabbed about a hundred times by old pervs, heard the same song im not kidding 15 times, and was given a pair of latex gloves to unblock a toilet, no plunger or anything like that just a plastic bag and small gloves. I was told it was 16 hours per week but the manager had me in for 30 hours in the first 4 days. i told him i could not do the monday as i had placement and he said fuck your placement, i said fuck your job. i hated that place, no amount of money was worth it. I have the utmost respect for people who do that job.

(was actually kind of glad when the place went bust, the manager was a wanker)

I endured 18 months of utter misery in an alleged 'promotion' in a professional role. I was offered the job and promised all sorts of additional responsibilities. None of them materialised and I was given nothing to do. I complained and complained, going right to the top and it never improved. I used to cry when I got home at night because I thought it was the end of my career and I was so frustrated and bored.

I've done my fair share of shitty jobs as a student as well, but at least they had an end in sight. I worked at Sainsbury's for years. Nothing, nothing compared to the misery of this though.

I decided to cut my losses and start our family and while I was off on maternity I applied for and got a brilliant new job which I love love love.

Working at the local 'family' pub serving meals and clearing tables one summer. I even got the privilege of making the children's ice cream sundaes from the machine in the kitchen, so my hands were permanently sticky from Mr Whippy mix and leftover ketchup from the plates.

There was one of those Noddy rides for the kids, too. That played the fucking Noddy theme. All fucking shift. Over and over again.

Haha some of these jobs are just so grim

My worst job has to be in a call centre for a huge telecommunications company. Just soul destroying. Sat for hours like a battery hen. Although there were many ways to bugger the computer system up so we didn't receive any calls...I lasted 6 years. I look back and don't know how I did it. It put me through uni though, so served it's purpose.

door to door fundraising for a supposed environmental non-profit. Under the guise of civic virtue, it was a complete scam both upon the exploited young people going door to door (who were paid based upon the amount of money solicited), and upon the gentle, generous hearted who gave money in response to the (bait) noble cause. It took a week, which was the training week, for me cop to the scam and quit.

It still shocks me in retrospect. The 'trainers' were paid a cut of the 'knockers' takes. It was like Fagin. The trainers ran teams of knockers and pressured us (naive youth recruits) heavily to elicit donations rather than obtain the signatures on petitions (the petitions were also bait). The trainers would drive the knockers to some faraway area and drop us there for 8 or 10 hours, during which we were supposed to achieve or surpass some target amount. They trained us in heavy pressure sales tactics to extract the highest donations possible.

Surely whatever money made it past the hands of the trainers ended up in some other corrupt pocket.

If someone comes to your door for a noble cause you have never heard of and hands you a clipboard (a purposeful move that makes it difficult for you to close the door again as they won't accept it back), think three times before you donate.

Cleaning lots of false teeth in a psycho-geriatric ward. I am still freaked out.

I got a carpeting because I put them all in a sink with bleach then scrubbed. They all got mixed up and we had to try to find out which teeth belonged to which mouth.

Sandwich factory, weighing out 25g portions of frozen prawns for twelve hours with a half hour lunch break (and free prawn sandwich)

4 words.

Assistant. Manager. In. Starbucks.

shivers

PetitPiaf that sounds quite nice! Swanning around, playing with those fancy coffee machines, drinking unlimited caramel frapuccinos... .

The one that made me have to stop and be physicaly sick on the hard shoulder of the M25 lloks back now in amaxement that I put up with so much bullying shit

I hate that you can't edit here

Waitressing in a two storey restaurant with no dumb waiter and an upstairs kitchen, with a passive aggressive boss and floor manager who would constantly give contradicting instructions and shifts that always overran.
Every week I am thankful to have left.

Your story gives me hope, Miss MarjoriBanks, I've been stuck in a role like the one you describe for the past 2 years where it was supposed to be a promotion and a chance to work on an exciting new strategy but instead has left me isolated in the organisation and completely depressed about my career prospects... It's so soul-destroying when you just want to work hard and contribute but are left sitting there with your skills gathering dust. The boss called me in for a 'chat' recently threatening me with redundancy but not being professional enough to follow any of the legal procedures or even the guidelines within our own organisation to do so! I had to lodge a grievance with him against HR before he took it any further and we ended up in tribunal territory... what an idiot. As I'm pregnant, this is not the kind of stress I need right now but I'm trying to focus on the positive. It might be my chance to escape this particular worst job experience - maybe something better will be around the corner for me too after maternity leave

As for worst jobs ever, I think call centre work has to be the worst for me. When I was a student I got a job doing market research over the phone on behalf of a software company, which was fine, but then we completed the work too soon and had 2 days left on our contract to fill so they got us to do cold-calling telesales instead. Those 2 days seemed to last a month... I had a phone phobia for ages afterwards!

My worst job was when i was 16 when worked in an army kitchin. I had to get up at four in the morning to get a mini bus to the middle of nowhere and start work at five. I had to wash up, peel veg...just the normal sorts of kitchin work. How ever they often expected me to work until 1am and then come into work again at 5am! I would only get about 2 hours sleep a night and only had two 15mins breaks and half an hour for lunch! It was highly illegal.
Wasn't helped by the fact that my then boyfriend also worked with me and my 'manager' was obsessed with him, if i even said one word to him she would scream at me and then follow him to another part of the kitchin and talk to him for the best part of an hour.
There was also a mother and daughter that worked there. They would come into work and tell all of the other staff what sexual exploits they had been up to on thier days off, most of these involved horifficly inapropriate desciptions and just used to make me wonder why would you go out on the pull with your own mother? Very odd but amusing.
Stuck with it for about 2 months and that was only because my nieghbour was one of the head chefs and i felt guilty about leaving. Even now if i see the pink spray we had to use to clean it makes me heave. Truly awful and i would never work in a kitchin again.

TooManyBlossoms Actually, it does seem like a walk in the park compared with the poster who was extracting lumps of lamb from the minges of sheep!! boke

Strangely spending 18 months working on a customer complaints desk getting shouted at by angry engineers all day doesn't go down as the worst one. (Even though it did take another 12 months for me to stop swearing every time I heard a phone ring.)

The worst was putting flyers in envelopes for a theatre mail shot. Not so bad, except the 4 people I worked with were really, really, dull, boring people.
It was also in the days after Diana died, so the music on the radio was really depressing. We took some CD's in but everyone hated each other's taste in music so much that the radio was the best compromise

The only good bit was that the job was meant to be for 2 days but half the leaflets hadn't arrived. We spent 1 day and 2 mornings sat around doing nothing except try to make conversation. We then did all the work on the 4th day and got 3 days pay.
Although I'm not sure that made up for having to spend extra time sat in that room with those people.

Nikki1978 (way back on this thread)
I also picked watermelons in a Kibbutz in Israel. We had the same conveyer belt system but threw them down the row almost like a ball game. We worked 6am till 12pm and i got an amazing tan and came home the healthiest I've ever been in my life.
My worst job was working as a topless waitress in Amsterdam, though at the time it was good money and the friends I made and the laughs we had (at the expense of our clients) made up for it. I don't have a daughter but if I ever imagined her making a choice like that she would be locked in a room for the rest of her life.

Winding electrical coils in batches of several hundred. Sometimes it was exciting if the wire had to go round three times instead of two. Working in a hospital laundry. I once folded a batch of clean but not quite dry nurses uniforms, which went mouldy. Worked in a hospital kitchen - birds would manage to get in and poo on the baking trays. My first teaching job on leaving university - I would get stomach ache on Sunday evenings. Sorting files in an office while hearing young guys boasting about their sexual exploits. Have a great job now though!

Working as PA to a guy who sold vintage racing cars.

I worked in a premium brand chocolate shop on a very busy shopping street in a capital city. It sold ice-creams, and I spent hours scooping for hordes of tourists. I got really bad RSI, had to wear a bandage and they sacked me for being unable to scoop, despite it being a work-related injury. Bastard Thorntons shop, I should've sued them for every truffle penny they had.

Oh dear OP I think your worst job sounds about the worst job ever...I have had quite a few mind numbing temp jobs doing admin, customer services on the end of the phone for Guinness

Loads of shitty ones ....

Chambermaid - Had to strip off the sticky, crusty pube ridden sheets and remove used condoms and porn mags from the beds.

Stuffed envelopes all day at a warehouse for a direct mailing company. Had it's good points but hated working with smokers all day. It was back in the day when you could smoke at work. Talk about H&S hazard, fags and paper, not a good combination. I wonder if their insurance company know?!

Worked behind a bar where I later found out the local mobsters hung out. They would order a round of drinks then just walk off. If we didn't serve them quick enough they would launch glasses at us. Needless to say, I didn't stay there long.

So many more ......I could write a book!