What's the most difficult job you've ever done?

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Mine is care work for sure. I did it for almost 3 years until recently, I work in an office now and I'm not saying that all office jobs are the same, but mine feels like a piece of cake in comparison to being a carer.
Being a carer was:
Endless pressure to do overtime- my office job has overtime available if people want it, but zero obligation/pressure. Care work was feeling pressured into it every week. I said no once and got sighed at.
Poor pay- 50p an hour above minimum wage.
0 hours contracts both in a home and in domiciliary (I know some homes do offer contracted hours now)
Brutal hours: certainly no 11 hour rest breaks between shifts.
All bank holidays worked, no holidays allowed whatsoever across December and January.
Back-breaking work- there are hoists but you still have to push the hoists, and despite all the moving and handling training it just seems inevitable to strain your body in some way.
Poor pension, only SMP/no maternity pay.
Some companies have things like Wagestream to allow you to access wages early.
I've worked in really nice homes with adequate staff ratios and nice facilities but many homes have about 2-3 staff for 35 residents..
My company had a lot of staff on sponsorship from abroad and the sad thing was they felt like royalty in this job compared to how it was in their home countries..
Obviously it isn't all bad, the key thing was looking after the lovely residents/clients, emotionally it was very tough though to see people deteriorating physically and mentally/losing residents. They were fantastic and deserved a lot better than a lot of them were getting.
It can be very tough as you're open to a lot of abuse, I was physically, sexually and verbally assaulted. The residents often lack capacity due to their dementia/other cognitive impairment and of course it isn't their fault, they aren't doing these things deliberately (we did have one or two though who had full capacity but were just sexist and inappropriate!)
I doubt it will change anytime soon though as it's seen as low skill women's work.. at least the living wage is going up in April.
Interested to hear any other jobs people have had that they've considered their hardest for whichever reason.

I have done care work - I did it through an agency so add in the horror of them sending me all over but without any time to get there so I was always late. and I agree it was hard Work, but my subsequent job as a teacher, and then middle leader in school, which I did for 10+ years was much harder, for different reasons.
Constant constant pressure and never feeling off duty
Difficult kids who often had huge home issues and didn’t want to learn
Spending a lot of my own money on resources for the school and classroom
Abusive parents
Much better paid, though.

Care work is very very hard and lack of recognition and financial reward is absolutely appalling… I admire you hugely.
My hardest job was the first year after I qualified as a doctor… I spent the whole time in such a state of high anxiety, was sure I would kill someone and the hours where punishing…I was so utterly exhausted and stressed.

The most difficult job was working in a police control room. Answering emergency and non emergency calls and working on the radios dealing with incidents and supporting / directing officers.
I did 8 years and loved it. But by God it was difficult. Usually five 12 hour shifts and those days / nights felt so long. Some of the emergency calls I took were utterly harrowing and have stayed with me til this day.
During my era, you weren’t encouraged to talk about something that had effected you (no matter how horrific) - you were expected to just get on with it and deal with the next call / incident.
Working on the radios was always manic, having to remember where all the police crews were, trying to pre-empt what they might need, and also hearing harrowing / distressing things as incidents unfolded (or witnessing it on CCTV cameras).
I loved it but when I left and took a different role within the police I realised how stressful, tiring, and emotionally draining that role was.

I'm so sorry to hear OP.

Tbh reading from first few posts, my jobs have been good.

My son is a nurse in NHS, but has since left as it was just too hard.....and it also seems to have a bullying culture (in area he worked in anyway)

Worst job I had was in a call centre as recruitment consultant. I had to make a whole team redundant not long before Christmas. It was horrendous, they cried, I cried and then I was made redundant just after!

I think it was working at Little Chef whilst doing my A levels. One shift was ok the other horrible with vile management and cruel co-workers. Really nasty and spiteful. The job was relentless. Constantly run off my feet. I was given the crap jobs. Waiting on tables, cleaning tables, trying to manage the queue. Having to clear the tables, find tables for customers, take their orders and answer all manner of endless questions. I’ve also worked in very fancy hotels and restaurants and that was much easier. It was a motorway service restaurant and some customers acted as if they were at The Ritz. Does this English breakfast contain gluten? Do you have a vegetarian option ( yes read the menu). Well I want something which isn’t on the menu can you do that? What extra dishes can you cook for me. I don’t like anything on the menu. I don’t remember ever getting a break. If you asked for a drink ( which we were all entitled to) you would get tutted and sighed at. The nasty staff would stand around glaring whilst I never got a break. They asked me to stay on and I said not a chance.

Child protection.

My current role is a head of a software team. Pay is great, but I work many more than my contracted hours, constantly think about work, never switch off. Impacts sleep as well.
My team are great, but my stakeholders are nasty, always trying to throw you under the bus, escalate everything to my boss. Often feel undermined because of that. Then the extra layer of emotion is being a woman in a male dominated corporate company and dealing with the covert sexism & discrimination because we’ve managed to remove the overt part luckily. Parts of the role are rewarding though, delivering projects, investing & progressing people.

Lab tech in a conflict zone. I did that job in many conflict zones at different times. But this one tour was very difficult. Oddly, it wasn't one of the 2 times we were heavily shelled and in personal danger. It was the one when the work load was huge - 3 of us round the clock, barely eating or sleeping - and the manager was a nutter. At one point I worked well over 24 hours and got 3 hours sleep before being shook to get back into work for what became another 40 odd hour shift. I was hallucinating through sleep deprivation.

I was also being stalked (I don't use that word lightly) by an American SNCO. I was kidnapped by him at one point.

On return home I slept for 4 days.

From a purely physical perspective, it was when I worked in a wool factory when I was 19. Lugging around 80-90kg bales of wool (mixed with sheep shit), for 9 hours a day, in an aluminium warehouse for 5 months. This was before rules on heat in the workplace came in, and it'd regularly hit 40C in there.

From an exhaustion perspective...desktop tech during Y2k. I had maybe six weekends off in the whole year running up to it (this was a building with around 17000 machines), roughly 10-11hrs/day. Overtime was fabulous, but looking back there's no way I'd sacrifice a whole year to it now.

When I was a student I lasted one day working in a factory. It was mind numbingly boring, my back, shoulders and feet were killing me at the end and it paid an absolute pittance. I couldn’t believe there were people there who’d been doing it for ten plus years, no thanks. I’m a Project Manager now working on multi million pound contracts and it’s a breeze in comparison 😆

Current job

Men's cat B prison

Retail at Christmas. Just so tedious, a truly eye watering level of boredom. Ten hours a day on your feet in a department store with no windows, listening to the same 20 Christmas songs endlessly repeat, tidying up endless mounds of jumpers that people had pulled apart and hanging up thousands of coats.

Not to mention how relentlessly bloody rude and unpleasant the general public were!

I take my hat off to retail workers even now, nearly 20 years later, because I know how hard and miserable it can be.

I’m now a lawyer and it’s so much easier 😂

Midwife.
Was horrific. Used to cry driving to my shift.
Now work in civil service for more pay and so much less stress.

As a nearly qualified student midwife doing nights on labour ward:
night 1- tmfr baby
night 2- 22week twins born early because mum had an amniotic fluid infection, they lived for about 20 mins.
night 3- cord prolapse with emergency C section and very flat baby. He lived but I'm sure will have had last impairment.
night 4- admitted amum, full term, normal labour, no heartbeat. We wept together as she laboured.

That woman taught me so much, I was privileged to be at each of these moments but it really brought home that birth is a moment where we hang between life and death, midwifery is so much more than nursing (my previous profession).

I learned I'm not as resilient as I thought, and witnessed how to bear grief and horror with dignity.

I'm not a midwife any more.........

I'm a bit embarrassed that ive never done a difficult job! I did find first aid at a school tough though. Obviously not the scratched knees but I had 2 broken collar bones, a childs first epilipetic fit and a diabetes cock up, epi pen used and a few proper head splits. I hated calling parents to say an ambulence had been called too.

Call centre customer complaints taking back to back calls from abusive callers. Getting threats of death and rape and being sworn at and patronised for hours on end. It was relentless, psychologically difficult and an overwhelming sensory nightmare (a room full of agents trying to talk over each other all day long and customers coughing and shouting down the headsets constantly has left me moderately deaf in one ear).

The working conditions were quite abusive too. Monitored toilet breaks, micromanaging, high staff turnover (and a widespread drug problem amongst staff) and a HR department that gave no shits (disciplinarians for more than 4 days per year of illness, shouting at me for having to go to hospital appointments when pregnant, arbitrary dress codes). Not to mention the corrupt practices we were forced to participate in (breaking election rules, data mining, taking calls on behalf of several companies at once, despite contractually being ‘dedicated’ to one campaign at a time).

I stayed there for 7 years as it was my first job after university and I thought that’s just what work was like 😬 Luckily they made me redundant during my maternity leave and I joined the civil service, where the unions ensure that people are treated like actual humans.

I’m also pleased to say that the company are no longer operational within Britain - the implementation of GDPR pretty much put an end to their business!

Working at a chicken packing plant. 10h shift in freezing temperatures (well, it was +5 but felt like -20 after the first hour). I lasted a month.
I did OK with caring jobs. The clients were lovely, it’s the office that was causing trouble. I always said no to overtime. They can sigh as much as they like but they can’t actually make me work if I don’t want to. After hearing no for a couple of weeks, they stopped asking. The pay was rubbish. It never actually amounted to minimum wage because they only paid for contact hours and not travel time.
Managing hairdressing salons and dealing with both unreasonable customers AND unreasonable stylists. This was by far the highest pressure job I’ve ever had. Working 11.5h shifts on my feet, late nights and every weekend for 10 years. I blame this job for being single all through my 20s.
The best jobs were working in reprographic shop for a local uni and my current job in the NHS.

I am a Support Worker currently and have worked in various roles within the industry over the last 16 years. Started out when I was only 20! The job has broken me more than once, can’t believe I still have the strength to do it! We get treated so appallingly by the organisations we work for. So sad 😞

I spent about a year working as a 1:1 TA for a child with high needs mon to fri and doing care shifts on Saturdays because TA pay is so low. It was absolutely shit, I have never been so tired. The TA part was really interesting though which saved it.

Why are all these difficult jobs the lowest paid?

I just don't understand...

I worked on a kids oncology ward for a year or two. Whilst there were some amazing recovery stories, there were also some incredibly sad times.

I often think back to that job when Im having a bad day in my job now, gives you a sense of perspective very easily.

Working in local government (council), in a quite niche role. The role itself wasn't difficult but the team were on the whole utterly vile which made it the hardest job I've ever done just to survive it! Bunch of lazy bullying cunts who left me with lasting mental health problems because of how badly and unfairly I was treated.

Am in a similar line of work. God it is mentally relentless. Overworked, underpaid, disliked by the public. Knowing something horrific can happen and you're are supposed to be able to preent it. I stay in the job as the buzz you get when you get a good result is something else.

I was just discussing this with teen dd recently. I don't know the answer though. Is it simply to do with opportunities and qualifications gained?
The higher the qualification plus experience, the higher the pay and less emotional & physical exertion?