To ask what is the worst job you ever had?

[Joey1471]

I would say the worst job I ever I ever had was selling door to door , 90% of them refused to even consider buying anything , plus it was raining too.

When I was doing my a levels I was working in a sausage factory to fund a girls holiday after the exams had finished.

I am now a vegetarian

I have been lucky on the whole but one that stands out was the first project I worked on after graduating.

It was actually a defence project and for some reason the test data they had got hold of was in hard copy form - a great big ring binder full of figures. However, they needed all this data to be entered in to a database before they could use it. Yup - my job!. Me and the other "graddy" had to spend weeks and weeks entering this data. We took it in turns to either read the data out or type it in.

It was quite technical and meant absolutely nothing to either of us but it was actually classifed to "Secret UK, US Eyes Only" and had to be kept in a special safe when we were not using it. There was a bit of an issue over the fact that we were only supposed to have it open in a locked room and the only lockable room was the one where the printer lived, which meant people wanting to come in and out all the time. The boss solved this by supplying us with a big black piece of material. When someone wanted to come in to the room we had to stop what we were doing, drape the big black cloth over the terminal and the folder and only then unlock the door and wait until whoever it was had left before we could carry on. Of course everyone thought this was hilarious and seemed to make as many trips as possible to the printer to see the hapless new grads pratting about like a magician with this big black cloth.

Ups call centre

Years ago I worked for Burger King.

It was horrible. When it was quiet, I was sent downstairs, not able to go home in case it was busy, but not being paid.

It was fucking horrible. I had to wear a stupid cap with my ears sticking out the side and scrub the table bases with a nail brush in front of customers.

Handed my uniform in after a week.

Supermarket job. Local small business. Treated the youngsters like shite and the full timers like royalty. In reality the youngsters did all the heavy work on the weekend and evenings whilst the old folk did bigger all.
I once got told off for cleaning windows to the cigarette kiosk because they would expect the full timers to do it in the week!

I worked in house keeping for a posh independent hotel for a few months, that was grim. The state that the rooms were left in was horrible, and the amount of work we had to do in the allocated time was back breaking.
As a student I had a couple of jobs that I hated - planting in a greenhouse for 8 hours a day in the height of summer and washing up in a fish restaurant were 2 of the worst.

Working in Woolworths as a student.
The work itself wasn’t bad, as retail goes, but they kept “forgetting” to pay me. In the end I had to threaten small claims court and then got handed several hundred pounds of cash from the tills. I suspect the manager had some sort of fiddle going on, and that I never officially worked there!

Several weeks as a turkey plucker, 20 years ago.

Freezing cold; standing still for hours in a howling gale. I plucked until my fingers bled.

I had two little kids to feed and a dick of an exH. He left me with thousands of pounds of debt, yet thought it was beneath him to pay maintenance.

Benefits had been held up for weeks because they kept losing my paperwork.

We were living on pasta with a squirt of tomato sauce - for every meal. I had 23p in my purse - and that was all.

It was the only time I seriously considered going on the game to get money to feed the kids.

I had never felt so low.

Many years ago I had an agency job working in a factory making cardboard boxes. Worst. Job. Ever. It was cold, boring, unfriendly and I would lose a fair amount of blood in paper cuts every day. The manager regarding H&S as a luxury we didn't need and would tell us off for dripping blood on the boxes as they had to be thrown away. Couldn't wait for the summer to end so I could go back to university!

yep door to door sales awful I was 16

Dealing with complaints. One irate customer (holiday hotel in Majorca )sent dried shitty toilet paper in with his letter (this was the 90's). He claims he found it under his bed (so saved it to bring home). We also had cockroaches and 'pink' chicken sent in the post.

I was threatened, swore at (because the bacon was 'different' and one couple travelled from Corby to Kent to personally 'pay us a visit' on their return with their complaint. They also insisted we pay their train fare and camped out in the reception of our head office building for three hours.

When I was a holiday rep (many, many moons ago), one particular gentleman threw a punch at me because I refused to carry his suitcases to his room.

Working in a ‘popular’ bar in Weymouth one summer as a student dealing with all the fuckwit hen and stag bashes which generally involved being threatened with violence or groping.

Lucky :) hope things have since turned round. Call centre work was a special kind of hell

Working in an accounts department stuffing envelopes. In silence. Miserable!!! Needless to say I didn’t stay long.

A nanny job I had for only a week before I realised I would not be happy with the family. The children were lovely - 4yo girl and 8mo baby - but the mother and I were never going to gel. The final straw was being reprimanded for not having dinner on the table for her perfectly able bodied husband, having spent the whole day cuddling baby who had a miserable d&v bug. I left that day, contacted a local agency during the evening and was in place with a new family within a week.

Debt collection. It was for car accidents and you had to phone people (you had a full court case to read so at least the car accidents were real) and tell them they owed a horrific amount of money because their car insurance wouldn’t pay out. It was advertised as a legal trainee position, definitely just debt collection. It was absolutely soul destroying.

Working for a diplomat based in the UK. It was meant to be a nannying job with "some" housekeeping. Fair enough. That housekeeping grew arms and legs though. Hell it grew heads and tails. I would always ask for speficic instructions ie. likes/dislikes for methods, systems etc and all I would get was, "Whatever you see fit." She lived like a pig and asked me to organise her extensive closet which consisted of mountains of designer clothes and underwear in mountains all over the floor of her huge bedroom. I blitzed that place and did a phenomenal job, leaving her a diagram of where everything had been stored. I categorised, colour-coordinated, the whole shebang. I came to work the next day to furious scribbles all over my diagram (and a red wine ring around said diagram) with comments about what a shit job I'd done. I locked up, text her to say we were on very different wavelengths and returned the keys the next morning.

I did a series of awful temping jobs to find my University social life. The worst was the two days I spent single handed manning the phones at a well known Japanese company's UK HQ. Sadly for me I have (and did not pretend to) no Japanese language skills at all.

Fielding calls from Japan wanting to be put through to people when I couldn't understand what the caller was saying, what the name of the person was that they were asking for and even when I had finally got an idea of what it was, the list of names and extension numbers I had been given had all the Japanese names in character format. It was humiliating and exhausting.

Timing how long it would take for foam to dispurse from a cup of coffee from drink machines.

I want someone to come on to say they were Naomi Campbell's assistant or Mariah Carey's nanny

Some temp/agency jobs I had when I was a student were pretty grim. One was cleaning out some freezers with a whole load of gone off prawns and that had me literally heaving. Envelope stuffing for company mailshots (thank God for the invention of email!) cold calling/telecanvassing very boring and grim especially when payed for leads.

Pudding factory, sprinkling the tops on m&s puddings and putting trifle fruit in little pots for 12 hours straight. Soul destroying, you weren’t even allowed to chat, it was a real eye opener as some poor sods had been working there about 40 years. The only benefit was you got to buy the squashed puds at a very reduced price.

Chambermaid for a family owned and run 3 star local hotel. Incredibly hard work (not that I minded that part of it) for £2.92/hour (this was just before NMW, in about 1996). Lowest point as cleaning the en suite bathroom after a guy on a business trip, who was staying for a few nights (he was leaving in 2 days time), had pooed all over the loo and the area around it. He left me a 50 pence tip when he left. I have never felt so worthless.

I just also remembered a Nanny/Housekeeper job I also had, it involved doing all the laundry (fine, no problem) BUT, this meant before I could put a load in the washer, I had to peel the used towels/liners off my employers knickers EVERY SINGLE TIME (so not the odd one left on in error iyswim).

Cleaning job at a school in the evenings. The pay was pitiful, and the work was back breaking. The school was FILTHY. It very clearly had been surface cleaned at best for years as there was inches of dust and crap on the floors, it was grim to say the least. I remember standing there in horror as the cleaning company supervisor told me that they were always short staffed so the school was "dirtier than normal". Understatement of the century. I lasted one week with a team who mostly couldn't give a shit and left the majority of work to me while they wandered about and chatted. Had reached my limit by Friday and just never went back -I did email and let them know exactly why. AND they never paid me!!!