What is the worst job you have had?

[FoodLover36]

I would say sales assistant at a supermarket , too repetitive for me.

Working in a supermarket. Dull, dull, dull. Also, so many cuts from cardboard. They're surprisingly filthy as well. The team I worked with were horrible as well.

Plus, there is one waitrose in v wealthy part of London... Wow.. I've never seen so much plastic surgery! Fur coats... Bulging lips... I almost wanted to work there to people watch

Taking staples out of paper for microfilming. Two weeks, mind numbing. However, I am conscientious and I made the neatest pile of staples out of everyone, which was commented on!

@EmmaGrundyForPM

In a factory which made filchie clips for female sterilisation. It was a holiday job when I was a student and was horrendous because the clips had a rubber insole which was moulded but when they came out of the oven-thingy I had to scrape off any extra rubber with a scalpel. Mind numbingly boring and really hard on your hand in terms of RSI. So glad it was only a summer job.

I font know why but reading this stressed me out. Sounds awful!

Filing Clerk in an architects office. I loved the filing and folding the huge drawings in a particular way as I'm an incredibly organised person but the office staff treated me as the lowest of the low. Barely speaking to me if I said good morning, the receptionist could barely disguise what she thought of me but she didn't even know me! I left after a month and said exactly why I was going!

I worked in a chip shop when I was 16/17. I hated it. It was only for the Christmas but they wanted me to stay on and I said no. I really have no idea why they wanted me to stay on as I was awful. Like really awful, I struggled with adding things up in my head quickly enough and I could wrap the chips. I was useless.

I unintentionally ended up on a trial day with door to door 'chuggers' trying to get people to sign up to direct debits for charity. Legit charity (would change depend on who was being promoted) but grim work.

I shadowed a guy going round doors a d getting told about the job. This was in 2001 and he would get £28 for each person he signed up to a monthly direct debit which could be as small as £3.

I spent 8 hours with him and he got 2 sign ups so money didn't seem awful but you'd have to have zero morals to succeed. We spent ages in one house with an elderly lady who seemed happy just to have someone to talk to. It was so uncomfortable.

The job was advertised as a marketing, sales and promotion position and they had a swanky city centre address - like a great opportunity!

I did about 5 years of temping.
I soon realised the quality of the company and how they treated you very much came down from the top people.
If they said hello, introduced themselves... Were polite then you knew it would be OK and it was.

Snotty people with no time to talk to the lower ranks or patronising people, forget it.

Some places were just so awful, life is too short! Small things and being kind make all the difference.

So many

Working in a little chef... I now have a life long aversion to baked beans

Cleaning the chicken roasting ovens in a supermarket

Being a famous character in a tourist attraction. Spent hours waving and having my photo taken. So boring and the weight of the 'head' was a HSE issue and we were only supposed to wear it for 20 mins at a time.

Labelling individual Christmas baubles with teeny tiny labels.

Stuffing free newspapers with leaflets.

Working in a coffee shop where I had to carry trays of steaming hot coffee up and down several flights of rickety uneven stairs.

Worst of all though is my current public sector job which requires lots of post graduate qualifications. Maximum stress for very little pay. I'd rather clean burnt chicken drippings for £4 less an hour tbh.

I tried door to door sales, quit on the second day. Awful job. Most people weren't in or didn't answer and the ones that did weren't interested.

@Pet8

A frozen sausage factory. Came on shift and had to find any old dirty wellies, overall and hat that fitted or was nearest your size. Mainly Male line managers who loved the power over us. (Workforce mainly made up of middle aged, older or very young women.) Absolutely hated it. Had an lonely, all uphill, walk home every night and used to sob most nights. Packed it in for my own sanity in the end and enrolled at college.

I know how you feel... I did 6 weeks in a frozen food factory when I was a teenager. They did seafood to sell in pubs. One of my jobs was checking if packets of prawns were off by sniffing them. After a couple of hours I had no sense of smell left.

Caretaker at a dogs home in Portugal. I was 17 and did it with a school friend as our first job leaving school. No pay but accommodation and use of truck. Every day we would pick up plastic bins from hotels with all scrap food, it would be fermenting in the heat. The contents was poured into a bath and sifted by hand to check no glass or bottle tops, then mixed with dry food to feed the dogs. The vet would visit once a month and euthanase certain dogs, we had to wrap the bodies and put them in a roadside dumpster. Not to mention all the poo cleaning from cages. It was fucking grim!

Winkle picker. Dangerous(climbing over slippery rocks with the risk of being caught by the incoming tide), cold, wet and at night when I closed my eyes all I could see was bloody winkles!

Care assistant in home for the elderly. The lady who ran it was completely heartless. I became fond of Harold, a lovely man in his late 80s. One morning I came in and his bed was stripped and all his photos missing. I asked where he was and she barked 'Harold's dead! Get making that bed up the next ones due in in two hours!'

As well as the owner being horrible the staff were equally vile, nasty and bullying.

I lasted only 3 weeks at that job, I couldn't take it.

First job out of Uni in an office. The job wasn’t that bad, but I shared an office with a woman who didn’t speak to me at all. She was really chatty and lovely with everyone else but just totally ignored me. I was 22 I didn’t know what was going on.

Waiter in a wedding venue, though mainly because the rest of the staff were all arseholes, every single one of them

KFC on Friday and Saturday evenings as a student. I actually volunteered to wash the greasy trays at the end of each shift so I wouldn’t have to face the post-pub clientele. Nice colleagues though and I didn’t get a bollocking from the manageress when I dropped a tray of ribs in the floor (she just got me to pick them up, put them back on the tray then stuck them in the oven)!

Typist in an MOD typing pool. Deathly dull. Bollocked by the managers when the officers talked to me. Ugh.

I've got a count down .

3. Telephone fundraising for my old school. It was a summer job for a fortnight and by the end of it the sound of a dial tone made me feel physically sick. I was 20 and I was so bad at it. They swapped me to doing outreach calls establishing links with more recent leavers!

4. Department manager at a huge high street fashion chain. I liked the job and the company but the boss was a bullying nightmare- not just to me, to everyone. I lasted a month- my parents begged me to leave because they'd never seen me so unhappy. Mental health took a steep nosedive and I looked like a different person within a couple of weeks. Rest of the colleagues (mostly) were great. We still go out drinking 3 years later!

5. Assistant Manager for an outdoor retail chain under the JD Sports umbrella. Liked my colleagues and the HR side was actually pretty good but I found the working practices and culture the brand entails very unpleasant. I'd worked for a much cosier, very MN approved brand before and the hours, attitude towards staff and general JD way really distasteful. I was stuck on permanent evenings at one point and felt so isolated. It was incredibly pressurised, I couldn't switch off from the job- really aggressive whatsapp group and the area manager was a total creep who went bananas when I gave my notice and went out of his way to make my last 2 weeks awful. Luckily my doll of a manager really protected me.

Packing potted meat in a factory. The meat was cooked in huge pressure cookers at one end of the factory, then minced and the "special seasoning " added. The huge bowls of steaming grey sludge then had to be packed by hand into 1 lb bowls.
The place stank and was filthy- there wasn't even any hot water for hand washing. Never eaten the stuff since 🤮

PaperMonster - I worked for the MoD in a professional role at a really weird military base. None of the other ranks would speak to me as I was an officer’s wife and my own line manager was a junior military officer and an utter dick, my husband outranked him and he didn’t like it!

MoD is an utterly bizarre place to work on these bases. I don’t think they have typing clerks these days but I can imagine them being treated like crap.

Care assistant I absolutely adored every single one of my patients and treated them all the way I would my own family, but sometimes we would be made to fit 4-5 1 hour long home visits In 1 hour or they would be ringing me up saying "where are you? You need to get to mrs A or Mr B... I would do about 12 patients in a single morning and I always felt deflated at the end of the day because I wanted to sit with them for their allocated time and talk or help them out but most of the time it was just impossible with the amount of work I had to do... they deserved much better!

Yeah telesales for me too! A friend got me into it. Cold calling people from a torn page of the phone directory, trying to get a lead. Double glazing I was about 16. Totally awful. I lasted about 2 and 1/2 evening. Had to leave because o felt so guilty. Grim

It's a toss up between a call centre - technical helpline for Motorola mobile phones - or a holiday job in the supermarket at the local caravan park. The call centre was just vile, everybody was so rude on the phone, everything was personally my fault, there was a limit to what I could actually offer - nobody wanted a repair on their phone meaning they'd be without it for days, they wanted a replacement (which is understandable but it was out of my hands if the phone was out of the warranty or if they'd invalidated the warranty because they'd dropped it in a sink full of water then put it in the microwave to dry it out - true story!) Then there were all the rules we had to follow, targets to meet, toilet breaks being monitored etc.

Oh god and delivering thousands of freebie local paper. Used to throw them away in the end. Got about £2.17 a week. 😑