Reply With QuoteNot as entertaining as your post above, but my pal used to monitor emissions from crematorium!
He had some ‘interesting’ tales to tell.
Not as entertaining as your post above, but my pal used to monitor emissions from crematorium!
He had some ‘interesting’ tales to tell.
Is there a German Jeremy Kyle?!
I was going to post the Derek and Clive sketch of the same name but thought better of it in the G and D.
Cheers..
Jase
Now he tells me!
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Winston Churchill and Jayne Mansfield duties, no doubt ???Originally Posted by JasonM
Yep!
Cheers..
Jase
Yes, yes, I believe every word of that. Looks like a “Sun” journalist wrote and designed the page too!
( Part of my duties was to prepare bodies on the ward to go to the mortuary. Including packing things..)
I have a keen interest in internet fakes, so just spent a few minutes on Google around this story.
The original of the story is from the July 1978 (!!) edition of Jet magazine. You can find a link to the archived copy of the magazine here. Interestingly, the "newspaper snippet" in your link quotes the original text word for word. Here is a writeup about the articles form 2011, making some interesting observations.
I am sure nobody here thought that the story was real, so please excuse me for the distraction.
My worst job ever? When I was 17, I thought school was un-cool and worked for one summer in a chemical factory. The level of exposure to chemicals was insane; and after a few months I dutifully returned to school.
Someone who lies about the little things will lie about the big things too.
Working as a milkman in the 70s on a rural round, up at the crack of sparrers any break for food etc added to your day.
It has to be preparing Turkeys for the Festive Season Dinner at a local farm.
.......I still nightmares about the whole experience some 25+ years later.
Working down a coal mine in Germany in the 1970s.
Summer jobs as a student - slaughterhouse; mortuary assistant; sticking the sticks in lolly ices at a local ice cream factory.
Good money though at the time mostly night shifts.
B
Cleaning bathrooms the morning after the night before in a Crete night club was the grimmest, working on an organic farm in the Arava desert in Israel the hottest. Working in a brewery as a teenager the most moreish.
Scraping lard of baking trays at a pork pie factory - hideous...
Putting stickers on boxes for colostomy bags - tedious
Cleaning graffiti of Leicester City buses - Noxious
Vacuum moulding Estée Lauder make up trays - a combo of all three above plus very loud (and my bike got nicked)
I once produced Earth, Wind and Fire.
Me too.....I think it was the curry from the night before.
I've done that for a week after a bad kebab in Egypt.
Edit. I need to learn to type faster
yum pork pies.
I worked in a place that made all the chicken nuggets (and most other processed chicken products) for most of Europe. I was 17 and doing a summer job. Apparently they processed 1m chickens a week. It was the most sole sucking place I have ever worked, generations of families work there until they retired/died. It was like working with the cast of the walking dead!
Add into that some of the unsavoury things that went into making processed chicken foods in the 80’s (Nuggets most certainly weren’t all breast meat in those days, definitely 100% chicken though!). Most odd/interesting/scary place I ever worked!
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A meat factory in more ways than one.
I had to clean hospital sewers at Rotherham General Hospital when it was being rebuilt in 1973//4 working for Ackroyd & Abbott aged 15
Then my last job Health & Safety Advisor @ PSA Peugeot Citroen
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I once caddied for Jimmy Tarbuck.
Only slightly better than this, was doing a stock take of Frozen Turkeys in a supermarket freezer. Boring, very cold and painful.
Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When I was doing my RIBA part I, I had to snag all the new seats in the Kop at Anfield. Check the seat number, ensure it was securely fixed, fold down and make sure it folded back correctly. Rinse and repeat 12,000 times.
I also had to count the total number of seats at Old Trafford. Three of us did it three times each and not one number was the same
Loved the job but not those particular tasks.
As a 12 year-old in the late 1950s in Iowa (USA), I was a morning paperboy with a long, suburban, hilly route of 85 subscriber homes. I would get up at 4:30 a.m., sometimes in blizzard conditions and temperatures as low as -30c, and trudge through snow drifts up to my hips for hours. It could be quite miserable!
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Some of you may remember Courts furniture superstore. My job was to take customer calls and lie to them about when their furniture was due to be delivered. On occasion, I would tell the truth that their furniture had actually arrived in the warehouse 2 weeks ago. As you can imagine they wanted to be put through to the manager immediately. I quit after a month and never looked back.
Kapish
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In my mispent younger years I used to live in a boozy and cannabis induced haze in Amsterdam. Any one day I saw a sign outside an agency saying "fish packers wanted, good rates of pay". So I duly went in an registered and was told to return at 4-30 am the next morning.
Being young and naive I slept as late as I could and rushed to the rendezvous point for 4-30. A mini bus picked us up then took roughly an hour to drive us out to the docks which was god knows where.
When we got off the bus at the port we were herded down to a fair sized freighter, by this time I was feeling a little thirsty and peckish, but when I asked where the nearest coffee shop was it just raised a laugh. Now the other thing that concerned me was that all of the Dutch guys waiting to work were built like Arnold Schwarzenegger. So we get ordered down into the bowels of the freighter. If memory serves me correctly it was 3 stories down and it was bloody freezing.
So what happens is a crane drops a pallet that is stacked with boxes that are packed with fish and ice to keep them frozen. Now each box probably weighs about 10kg. As soon as the pallet hits the floor everyone swarms over it and take the boxes and start stacking them around the edges of the hold. Now 10 kg doesn't seem that bad but I am only a small guy and once the stack gets to about 6 foot i am struggling to get the boxes up that high. This went on all day until all 3 levels of the hold was filled. Bearing in mind it was probably about minus 10 degrees in the hold and I had no gloves my hands were in bits, let alone not having anything to eat or drink for the whole day. I actually thought I was going to die. One of the Dutch guys gave me a cup of coffee from his flask and that was the high point of the day. I finally got back to Amsterdam at about 5-30 pm and have never been so knackered in my life. I dont think I've gone so long without food or drink before or since.I didn't turn up the next day as my hands and limbs hurt so much. And to cap it all they tried to knock me for the days pay because i didn't turn up for the second day.
So yeah definately the worst job I've ever had!
Normally gave up my holidays and weekends at one of my dads car sales places until I went to Uni. I thought I’d be independent the first summer there and got a few temporarys jobs...
Definitely the worst was a labouring job, digging out the old sewerage system for a cattery and kennels. 2 weeks with a weak gag reflex gave me a six pack.
It taught me a valuable lesson though: Study harder.
Picking fag ends out of McDonald’s car park as a 16 year-old. Had dared to question what qualifications were necessary to work there and got my just reward! Didn’t go back for the second shift.
Spent a week applying baby oil to the rubber kickbars in the massive ASDA where I worked as a Sixth-former. Manager had seen me out in the local pub after I phoned in sick to watch Kuka Shaker at Leeds Uni Student Union. I hadn’t learned from the experience above.
Stock taking in the freezers at Sainsbury’s during my first degree.
Working in the DWP call centre during my second one.
But the most painful, draining experience was my first year working as a newly qualified doctor. 12 days straight in a row with 12 hour shifts. Nights spent being nominally responsible for 100s of patients despite not being able to take the advanced life support course until the end of the year due to ‘rota pressures’. Felt totally out of my depth but learnt a lot - wouldn’t want to do it again. Is there a more lowly position in the hospital hierarchy than House Officer???
Night shift assembling c.d cases when at uni.
Well apart from the odd office job - slicing bread.
It's just a matter of time...
Too many to count!
First job was Staybrite Windows, knocking on doors in Salford trying to sell double glazing. Three days that lasted, with three days of training beforehand (may I tell you about our new patented "hard lipped" beading?")
The very worst was about ten years ago. The kitchen factory I worked at went belly up so I signed on with a few employment agencies to tide me over. The local scrapyard had opened up a recycling depot so they sent me there. Basically half a dozen of us stood on a conveyer belt separating waste into plastic, glass, paper etc (before we had individual bins to do that).
Second or third day one of the supervisors came back from lunch with two dead kittens he'd found in the rubbish sticking out of his top pockets. Big laugh all round and I thought "this probably ain't the job for me".
YTS placement in 90s. They figured out it was cheaper to have me to format hundreds of floppy disks than pay the additional 3p per disk. Took weeks each time, dreaded seeing the boxes arrive.
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I did a day for an agency in some hotel somewhere, it cost me more in fuel to get there than I was paid and when I arrived I discovered I was going to be a chambermaid, making beds and cleaning rooms in a golf resort (why don't people use toilet brushes when they know someone else will do it for them?). The same agency put me in a place where we were supposed to sell some kind of accountancy books. I still don't know what they were since no one actually gave me any training the whole week I was there. I resigned on the Friday morning, the manager said he was about to sack me anyway. Twat. Cleaning a bakery on Saturdays when I was 16 was sheer misery, as was filling cars in a petrol station (with a tiny unheated hut to sit in). I've done all manner of underpaid and generally miserable jobs in my time, it's why I'm always polite to people who do that sort of thing.
"A man of little significance"
Worst job... night shift at the only 24hr petrol station in Wrexham. Had to deal with drunks, drive offs (which were deducted from my wages) and general scum.
The taxi drivers were Ok, and I did sell petrol to Bernard Manning one night and got 2 tickets to the embassy club (never did use em)
The last straw came when I had 2 drive off on a Saturday night.
I shut off the pumps, locked the doors and went home.
Months later I and a few other staff took the owner to court and recovered our lost wages....
What he was doing was illegal, and it made the local papers..
Last edited by Enoch; 17th July 2018 at 11:49.
Nothing too bad; night shifts at a petrol station cum off license on a council estate; putting cakes in boxes for 5 hours straight in a refrigerated factory - pretty grim.
There's a swingers hotel just down the A5 from me near the Magna Park warehouses called Liberty Elite. I always thought that cleaning the rooms there must be pretty miserable
Cleaning sports club changing rooms and toilets was OK. Cleaning up Wembley after matches was OK mostly.
Working at the photo processing plant formally known as Grunwicks definitely not OK. This was after the industrial dispute that older members will remember. Compulsory last minute over time so 12 hour days with 30 mins for lunch, enforced silence at all times, monitored and regulated toilet breaks, regular insults and jibes from the supervisors and the punishment for transgressions was a spell on the ‘TTS’ machine, which was ergonomically designed to give you excruciating back pain after 20 minutes. No wonder fights used to start at break times. All for £15 a day in the early 80’s. Certainly encouraged me to complete my studies. All that to get your holiday snaps developed and posted off.
Must have seen some interesting snaps?
Probably the few days I spent cold calling prospects for a mate setting up a new software firm.
God, that was depressing work, no idea how people do it for a living!
I worked in a garden centre whilst at sixth form and college and had a paper round, but I liked them (paper round could be a bit grim when it was really cold).
Otherwise, I've always worked in IT and it's never been 'bad' (I have heard some horror stories) - When a 'job' has been bad, it's been because of the people I worked for and that's easily fixed by moving
M
Last edited by snowman; 17th July 2018 at 14:42.
Once worked 3 days in a parcel warehouse, from 8 o'clock in the morning till 5 o'clock in the afternoon. Hot, sweaty, boring work with supervisors who treated you like crap. I left halfway through my shitf one morning and never went back. The pay was rubbish too.
a summer spent on a chicken farm age 15, it was the deep litter system where day old chicks are put in sheds over a layer of wood shavings and taken out weeks later when fully grown, they end up standing on about a foot of shit and feathers which has to be cleaned out, i had to feed them but the auger system for the second floor was broken so had to fill and carry sacks up to the second floor to put in the hopper, the drinking systems used to leak and the wet guano would give off ammonia, my mum made me take off my clothes outside as my clothes reeked, and due to breathing in this ammonia you would be burping chicken shit/ammonia burps all night. the sheds were cleared out by hand with shovels, imagine doing that in this weather?
the chickens were moved at night (so they couldn’t see you) which meant crouching down in the dark and grabbing their legs and walking out with 2 chickens in each hand to be stuffed into crates, thousands of chickens to be moved and this is after you have done a days work, the tendons in your hands and arms were buggered the next day and you could hardly open/close your hands.
i would have taken most of the jobs posted over this at a drop of a hat.
all that for £2/hr (around 1990)
somebody is flying me to Singapore business class next week and paying me to make their product look nice, i think that summer job made me realise i needed to get out of the small town/village stuck for life mentality.
I was a mastic asphalt spreader by trade, mainly water proofing roofs. Sometimes we would lay floors, sometimes we would asphalt tanks. These were usually underground or underneath something that if it split would damage the building.
The job we had was ...reasphalting a tank under a 1,000 gallons of Nitrite acid at Bradwell Power station. The tank sat on piers 3 foot high. The tank could not be drained probably due to cost. We were given the stop cock key so it could not be accidentally turned on. We used special acid resisting asphalt that contained Sulfur. The fumes from the asphalt made you heave. We wore no protective clothing because it was so hot. Drips of acid occasionally burned your skin. Laying on your side asphalt was lowered down in a bucket, and you spread the hot asphalt up the piers with wooden floats. I was 22 at the time, the thought of that job makes me wince even now. This was 1980, I was paid £65 a day for the week the job lasted, I vowed then never to work with Acid resisting Asphalt again ...I never did!
Never had any really bad jobs, a summer spent in crawling on RSJ's removing rust prior to painting of a metal plateing factory that had, had a fire was the worst of the bunch I'm not a small person but the spaces were.
Spent two days in that hell hole of a place called sport direct or whatever they call it this week.
You had to buy your uniform which amounted to almost my two days pay. Day one was okay, it started well selling football boots to a then professional player but the second day was spent folding umbro polo shirts then we had someone steal an umbrella from the front of the store so we gave chase then got a rollicking for leaving the shop. When ordered to be at work for 6am on day three to unload a lorry by hand I said okay and didn't go back.
Less than you would think. The likes of us were generally dealing with trays of packs of QC’d pictures. Quality Control was a highly skilled and sought after job. You got to sit down and scroll through big drums of pictures, with different stickers to mark up any anomolies - over exposed, out of focus, dodgy etc. Every now and then a few of them would gather round one machine, but I would have probably been stabbed if I’d gone to look. There were rumours of a stash in the managers office.
I did spend a week in the post room, where about 30 women opened all the envelopes with the undeveloped films in and I went round emptying bins and bringing in more envelopes. 30 women with broad imaginations and a robust sense of humour can be very cruel to a young lad...
Would have made a good Charles Dickens. Title suggestions welcome.
That is bad.
Driving an artic delivering for Lidl. Needless to say I don’t shop there after what I saw in the distribution centre. From what I gather it hasn’t changed either in the last 2 years. I managed 4 days before I said bye.
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I hope you washed your hands between finishing the second job and starting the third...
pales into insignificance compared to some of the jobs listed but my worst was probably installing pc's for HMRC in Felixstowe and Ipswich.
this involved me getting up at 3.30 driving an LWB sprinter to Milton Keynes to pick up my helper from his boarding house, then drive across MK to the warehouse to load up the new pc's, then drive to felixtowe (or ipswitch), spend 4 hours installing software on 20/30 pc's , spend another 2 or 3 hours moving these pc's to peoples desks, setting them up and carrying their old pc's back to the van. Pack the van then drive back to MK, got back to MK for about 7.30pm if i was lucky, then wait for a spare bay before unpacking and paletting up the old pc's. Drive helper back to boarding house then drive home. Usually got home about 9.30 / 10pm although if there was traffic it could be gone midnight. Sleep, rinse, repeat for 4 months.
The saving grace was that this was a contracted job so pay wasn't terrible and the company messed up the numbers when they included the 200 pc's in Ipswitch's 'secure undercover department' which we weren't allowed to do (as they needed to be archived and disposed of securely). So basically I got paid to sit on my backside for 2 weeks at the end of the job, easiest 3 grand I ever earned. Doubly sweet as it, indirectly, came from Her Majesty's Robbing C***s.
I got taken on for some summer work while I was 16 or so. The job was to insulate the roof of this building site. Not a pleasant job and the best of times but it was a particularly hot summer and several days were 30c outside. Inside that loft must have been well over 50c. We ended up switching our hours so we could start at 3am. I later found out me and this other kid had only been brought in because none of the other labourers were stupid enough to do the job.
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