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 worked in care, and loved it. I think I was probably very lucky with the company I worked for. I also worked part time which makes a big difference. I can't think of anything I would rather do. I prefer delivering care in people's homes to residential care though.

In answer to the questions, sorry, my worst job was waitressing as a teenager when I was in 6th form.

Starting a new role and within a month I was asked to announce a redundancy plan, the morning before we went out for Christmas lunch. That was joyful.

Another Christmas one - joined the penultimate day before the Christmas handover, half a day with outgoing FD who'd been asked to leave. The Chief Exec was asked to leave a couple of weeks into January.
I was left to sort out some dodgy accounting and work out what they'd done with the money 🙄

So all my jobs have been interesting but challenging at times. Working in health and social care during the pandemic has been without doubt the toughest however. Utterly brutal. And as a senior manager we are still seeing the fall out with our staff. There has been no let up for four years... first the emergency and now trying to rebuild. I have never known anything like it.

Some of these are truly awful. Mine was just going back to work full time as a financial controller, after two months maternity leave. DD slept all day and was awake all night (or so it seemed), her father had left me and I was overseas so totally alone. I sleep walked through the first year.

I've done lots of different stuff, including care work, but the worst one was a lovely job with a horrible boss. I was a naïve and shy and she bullied the fuck out of me. I used to literally get cramps and diarrhoea because I was so scared of her and it's had a big lasting effect even though it's been 20 years. And she's now a celeb with a radio show and tv slots when she should be in prison (that's maybe a tad extreme!).

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