What was your worst ever job?

[RinkeyDinkey]

And did you leave with a bang?

When I was 17, in 1986, and saving for university, I worked as a cleaner in a kebab shop for about 6 weeks. I got £50 a week, which wasn't bad, and free burgers as perks. No way would I touch a kebab after what I saw in that shop.

But I had to wash the previous night's greasy shite that had been left to steep in cold water, with the grease solidified on the top. It was so grim.

My dad didn't think I'd last more than a week.

I also worked in a pub where the batshit landlady would go from best mate to utter twat in the blink of an eye. She saw no problem with allowing male customers to assault me and would let her mental dogs out in the cellars and then send me down to get ice because it was a 'laugh'. She is one of the worst human beings I have ever known and still runs a pub in Morpeth.

Ready meal factory was pretty grim. The smell was awful and permanent staff treated temps like crap.

Another random packing factory was pretty bad. No food but the nastiest group of women I've ever met.

A Saturday job at a hairdressers. He was horrible, bossy, rude and letchy. I left after two weeks.

Different hairdressers, wasn't bad until they wanted me to hold down a screaming baby so they could pierce her ears. I refused and was sacked.

Saturday Job in Index the Catalogue Shop where you either had to work the till wearing a peach blouse, royal blue A-line skirt and necktie OR go and work in the stockroom.

The stockroom was both better and worse. Better because you could open all the merchandise up and look at it & test the perfumes etc or just hide on the shelves, worse because you got bullied by the girl with the blond permed hair and twenty five thousand gold hoops in each ear. If you were really lucky she would put you in the lift (no bigger than a dumb waiter) which was meant for the orders to be sent down to the shop floor. Happy days.

Jigsaw clothes shop. Most bitchy, nasty bunch of women I've ever had the misfortune to work with! Nasty company & they expected you to be there 45 minutes before your shift started to clean the shop & have a meeting.. unpaid.

A chicken packing factory - lasted a whole hour!

A 'care' home for people with dementia and Alzheimer's and with some of the most cruel and uncaring people I've ever met, I ate my lunch with the residents because they were much better company than the horrible witches.

The worse though was for a car parts company as a data input clerk. I was expected to manually type all these lines of text in, many of which were just repeats with the colour changed. I'm not an IT whiz but I'm good at excel, so I improved it and made the whole process 100X quicker. My boss, this fickle, nasty bitch, hated me for it. She'd give me what would have previously been a days work and I'd do it in two hours 😂 then I'd have nothing to do, so I started taking other work from other people, and improving their systems (not even like hard stuff - I was 18, but this place was a joke!!) she had me fired eventually for 'gross misconduct' as I apparently took a personal call. I told her that wasn't gross misconduct, but that telling her to go fuck herself would be, then went to get my stuff, told her to go fuck herself and walked out I then cried from anger and embarrassment on the bus on my way home

Saturday job in a shoe shop.

The manager was a horror, I called her The Beast of Birkenhead although not to her face cos I didn't want to get eviscerated.

As well as being a general nasty cow, she would deliberately gaslight staff by giving us wrong information and then humiliating whomever had "got it wrong" in front of customers and staff, telling everybody how useless so and so was and how nobody could do the job like her.

She would completely (and for no good reason), randomly rearrange the stock rooms every month. Well I say "she would", she would get the assistant manager to rearrange the stock rooms at her behest which meant you could never learn where everything was. All the boxes were numerically coded (men's would be say 01... and then formal men's would be say 30, so it would be 0130 and then the number of the particular style, so 0130123 and then casual would be 01 and then 31 and then the style number, so 0131123 etc) but instead of putting all the men's in one section and then in numerical order so it was logical to find them, the fucker would dot them about. All different sections mixed together so you would have to play hunt the fucking code and then she would bollock you in front of everybody for taking too long.

The last straw was that we worked at a very basic wage but were supposed to get commision on our sales, except she wouldn't let any of us on the till and I caught her putting peoples sales through on her code. She knew I'd clocked her and I heard her on the phone telling her line manager that I was useless and she was going to sack me so I immediately quit to prevent her from the pleasure. Bitch.

Like a pp, selling door to door. Knackering work mostly involving being told to fuck off and on the few times people did talk to you, you basically lied to them. After a couple of weeks I worked out that the supervisor was nicking all leads generated by us new starts and quit. In a different job, massive organisation, a year later I was in the postroom one day and saw a letter that was going out to them. I wrote 'BASTARDS' on the back of the envelope.

Luggsays, another one nicking leads. I bet that's really common with commission based jobs.

Meat factory, hearing pigs, chickens etc come through the production line and being presented with cuts of meat that would be differently packaged depending on the run, and yes Waitrose/Asda et al did used to come through the same production line.

The lines may have changed recently, but it was nothing more than capitalism a few years ago.

Working at a "trendy" sales job. Started ok, small male led team, lot of banter that I could overlook (I'm married to a dockie). Did well, got on some incentives but the tasks and targets got harder and then when I discovered I was pg, my new line manager kept insinuating I'd get sacked before I went on maternity leave, my baby "may still die", or tried me to get on my hands an knees at 6 months to unplug and move my desk/computer etc.

Signed off sick and never went back. There was a LOT more to it and I wish I had taken them to tribunal now but I was SO glad to see the back of them.

Chalet hostess. They gave me a stained t-shirt as my new new uniform to wear : fuck this, I thought and walked.

I also worked in a nationwide chemist and made some super minor error and the manager said she wanted to speak to me at 5pm. It was around 10am in the morning. I said to her I'm not waiting till 5pm so you can fire me, she said I take it that's your resignation, yes I said.

Luckily when I got home I had another job offer in the mail!

HaroldssocalledBlueTits - undoubtedly. As my Grandad the notorious kleptomaniac used to say "Where there's money, there's a thief".

My first job out of uni.

I was hired by a charity I'd been volunteering with and made redundant six months later at the end of the contract

The whole six months was a dreadful experience.

Years later I finally realised that the only reason they had EVER hired me is because they wanted me to fail and thereby renegotiate the contract terms with the external funder.

When it became apparent I was good at it and received a lot of external praise the environment just became more and more hostile. The original contract had been failing because my predecessor was a lazy fucking arsehole hated by his contact book.

They offered me no support, sabotaged me and blamed me for being unable to fulfil a practical aspect of the job role that I declared at both application and interview I was unable to fulfill.

Any small criticism became blown into a huge failing, and my supervisions were always one long "you're shit" no praise my manager made me cry twice and was jealous of positive attention I received

With my full support the contract was renegotiated as I had identified that the need was misplaced, the funder agreed and wanted me to stay in post under the new contract.

The charity refused and said I would have to reapply for my job, I knew immediately that if I were to reapply I wouldn't get the job, and I wasn't prepared to be humiliated and refused to apply and told the funder exactly why. They were willing to move the contract to keep me but the charity had the monopoly on a certain provision in the local area and so they couldn't get permission.

The bittersweet element was that with in a year of me being fired under the guise of being made redundant (and they sent a letter to my clients that read like I'd been fired) ; two separate people who knew two separate former colleagues approached me socially and said they'd resigned and that both had cited the way I was treated there the entire duration of my employment in their resignation letters as things that had prompted them to leave.

Absolute bunch of bastards with the exception of the two who resigned.

When I was a student I worked for a catering company who provided staff for football stadiums.

I did a lot of shifts in Club A doing silver service and waitressing for the VIPs.
Good job, nice tips. All good.

Then I signed up for a shift at Club B. Turned up on a Sat afternoon expecting to go to the VIP lounge. Was given a paper hat and directed to a booth. Spent 4 hours serving pies to pissed up, abusive football fans. I was fucking terrified. My accent didn't help ( think accent belonging to the rival club). Hideous.

Sales advisor in a large department store. It was the most mind numbingly boring job I've ever had. During the recession so the store was always dead, but you couldn't ever be seen doing nothing so we would spend our time folding and refolding everything. Absolutely dire.

Taking staples out of pieces of paper. ALL DAY. That was IT. It wasn't what the agency had said I would be doing either, so I left on the first day and never went back. Hate being lied to.

Frozen veg factory, picking dead mice and frogs out of freshly harvested peas, never eaten another pea since!

This was in the early 90s. I worked for a shop owned by a husband and wife. After about 2 weeks, the husband informed me that if I didn't have sex with him, I could lose my job. I promptly told him to go fuck himself and walked out the door.

Sorting out potatoes on a conveyor belt. Tapping trifles so the custard couldn't be seen. Working in a hotel booking firm for business people. At my exit interview I was asked what I thought of the company "principles". I replied that I wasn't aware that the company had any

I worked in a restaurant when I was 16, the interview included having to turn around so the manager could get a look at my arse, which probably should have been a red flag.

Door to door working for N Power to switch people over from their current provider of gas and electric. The whole company was a farce. For starters we had to travel to Newcastle eveey morning for the pep talk... then get into cars and be sent out to different districts around the northeast. We had sheets with all tbe comparitive rates and were meant to get people to invite us in so we could show them on their own bills how to save money switching.

Two main issues. The only people who would ever invite you in were the elderly, who we were not supposed to sign up. Most people did, but it was tbe one vaguely moral rule and you could potentially be fired for it. Two, we were not the cheapest option for most potential customers.

I did this job for 2 miserable weeks. Entire days spent trawling around the same 40 houses all day because god forbid we stray into other neighbourhoods. I helped a bunch of people, mostly elderly, to understand that a) never sign anything on tbe doorstep and b) switch to powergen as they were the cheapest at that time.

On the last day of the two weeks I foubd myself at a housing estate right by Marsden Rock. I decided sod it, I am going down to the beach to think about my life choices. I met a man with a boy down there who had a fire going. They were so welcoming, and the man said he worked with troubled kids in homes and foster cares, takong them out for the day and trying to help them. His job seemed to bring him so much joy and seemed so worthwhile. I realised I could never go back to that office or keep doing the job anymore, so they helped me burn all the paperwork.

I left the beach with more self worth and a promise to myself never to do a job I didn't believe in.

Oh, and my pay for those 2 weeks? $0. I signed at least 5 people over, but the company refused to pay me for any of them, claiming they all must have changed their minds. I knew for a fact they were lying as several of my 'sales' were family members.

N power suck. Door to door jobs suck. People conning the elderly suck.

I worked in a nursery and it's not uncommon to be treated badly but this was just horrendous. You couldn't call in sick, the policy was if you were sick you still had to go to work and the director would decide if you could go home (it was always no). Forced overtime, pay was withheld if you did something wrong, no one stayed long.

My last job. Started working for a friend in the skilled job I do, I then saw a very different, nasty and bullying side to her which completely ended our friendship and I just had to leave.

It's true what they say, never work for friends.