What has been the worst job you have ever done?

This ship, this line.

Despite being two years old, this tub's literally falling apart. Cooling jacket water pipes and valves for the main engine just burst for no reason, despite being used at below design pressure, exhaust valves quit life, compressors add water to the air reservoirs, the oil purifiers add it to the oil, and the exhaust gas and auxiliary boilers seem literally determined to either burn through their tubes of blow themselves up. Oh, and as this ship has a camshaft-less "intelligent" engine :rolleyes:, the control hydraulics that power the fuel injectors and exhaust valve actuators constantly play up as well.

It's been what I can only describe as a three month onslaught of stress, sleep deprivation and frankly, misery. Still, sign off next Thursday in Singapore, arrive home Friday, and have a phone interview on the following Monday with an oil major for an opening in their tanker fleet, so perhaps this ordeal will have equipped me with the experience and skills I need to move onward and upward from this.
 
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Selling hot dogs and washing dishes for a cafe while I was at college. Was grim but it payed for my driving lessons, nights out and I managed to save for a lads holiday.
 
LiamC said:
I also vote currys. I done the warehouse and it was absolutely awful. Lasted 2 weeks.
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I did 2 years and was a manager for 1.5 of that (student job turned full time when I graduated). Pay wasn't much better but the pressure was 100% higher. As though you can get minimum wage retards who know nothing about technology to sell products the customer neither wants nor needs. LOL!
 
i was susan boyle's gynaecologist.

edit: wrong thread. i thought this was for the best job you've ever had. :o
 
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General warehouse assistant aka do this do that and I won't have to.

boots decided to give loads of make-up to charity but only the out of date old stuff that had leaked etc....

so we had to search through bin bags full of loose make-up and try to salvage what we could and chuck 70% of it in the bin because it was either out of date or had separated.....

we had a whole summer worth of pallets full of bin bags full of make up.....

The next time a big company gives something to charity realise it probably was stuff that should have ended up on a rubbish skip anyway :rolleyes:

BTW everyone used to take perks of the job home lol.. (we seemed to be a depot that got deliveries and then shipped them directly to the other boots warehouses so we had a really fast turn around time for any stock we took in)

my manager said if I want anything don't steal it just let me know lol......

The security guard used to walk around after deliveries looking for tweenies stuff for his kids lol (this was the 90s)
 
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branddaly said:
Working in a chicken factory. It grew, killed, and packaged those chickens you buy on trays at supermarkets. I was vegetarian at the time. Worst thing was having to remove my ball closure rings from my ears and face before every shift. That required a pair of pliers. All because I wanted to spend my upcoming birthday in Manchester with friends.
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Surely even working in a chicken processing factory in the first place goes against the entire point of being a vegetarian, regardless of whether you're eating the product or not? :eek:
 
Kensington Freak. Small clothing retailer in Birmingham. Stupid management with stupid targets and crap pay. Needed the cash as was at uni. Getting a job at Currys after that was like the best thing to ever happen.

Working at Royal Mail. Supervisors were complete mammaries.

PCServicecall. Dixons/Currys customer support arm. Nuff said.
 
bazzabear said:
Pizza delivery around the Longbridge area of Birmingham just after Rover closed down. The mood was very dark, and the stuff that I experienced - looking back I'm amazed that I did it, but at the time it was that or quit University (which I did at the end of the year anyway because of the utterly crap year that I had, and which this job contributed to.)

Some examples:

Joyriders playing chicken with you.
Driving round a car on fire in the middle of the road.
Another car planted in a tree and abandoned.
Myriad hoax orders, or people clearly considering mugging me for a pizza.
Huge high rise flats with broken lifts and lights which I had to deliver to, and was always pleased to get out of in one piece.

One time the customer was a pregnant lady, and started telling me that I should be giving her a discount because of this. Then her two MASSIVE neighbours came out and joined in the demanding too. Eventually managed to convince them that I couldn't, and if I returned with less money than expected I'd get sacked for nicking it.
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Sounds lovely :D Really ropey area Longbridge...well anywhere in Birmingham is to be fair haha
 
TommyV said:
Surely even working in a chicken processing factory in the first place goes against the entire point of being a vegetarian, regardless of whether you're eating the product or not? :eek:
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Depends on the reason for being vegetarian. I had hippy parents who decided to bring me up vegetarian. I didn't get a choice as a kid, and I continued that lifestyle for several years as an young adult. Get pecked by enough chickens and you stop having any qualms about killing the little *******. Plus I was far from evangelical, if other people chose to eat meat they were going to have to get it from somewhere.
 
It'd be a toss up between two:

First: Driving to an abattoir every morning to collect a cooler full of pig brains (cleaved in half by the giant saws they use to cut the pigs down the middle), take them back to my lab, peel the membrane off the (iced) brains by hand (numb hands ahoy!), liquidise them and then do a load of centrifuging to get to the desired proteins. Needless to say, I wasn't exactly a babe magnet back then. It wasn't helped when my mate cooked us a spag bol involving two cloves of garlic. After we'd eaten it (after a few beers, of course) I discovered he didn't know the difference between a clove and a bulb! I reeked for days.

Second:
Making insulation jackets for industrial engines and tanks. That involved lots of cutting and stitching fibre glass fabrics. At the end of a shift I had to strip completely and scrub (and I mean scrub) to get rid of all the small fibers. My skin would be covered in little red spots from the constant irritation.
 
making model trees for miniature railways.

Had to sit there and trim bottle brushes into tree shape, then cover them in glue, spin the excess off and then sprinkle them with dyed green saw dust.

10's of thousands of them!!

for £2.50/hour! :O
 
I have fond memories of the 1st 2, although in reality they were not nice jobs
1 - Iron foundry
The boss whilst he could be reasonable most of the time wasn't. constantly shouting at you and telling you off for stuff that had gone wrong be it your fault or not. arrived to work at 07:30, did 30 minutes of flat out hard work as fast as you could then at 08:00 we would be "playing" around with 1400oC molten iron.
The brass section used only old taps, which contained water, whilst melting the taps down you had to keep the "pot" stocked up because if a wet tap touched the molten metal the pot "emptied" itself (all you could do when that happened was run away fast and hope that it missed you. luckily that only happened once.
Chicken factory -
I was 17 I lasted just shy of 6 months before my constant truism and lateness made them give me the boot. I actually didn't mind it that much because I was moved around from job to job so never ended up stuck in one place for too long (all jobs in that place were monotonous)

But the worst place I ever worked for was Sainsburys.
Original store manager was ok.
I just got fed up of the ridiculous managers, worked my nads off one day to be told I had messed around all day, then another day had a fairly easy day as it was quiet and didn't do much to be told I had worked really hard all day. and being 17 at the time no one really listens to you when you want to defend yourself. Refused to pay me overtime (never did any overtime after that) New store manager came along and was a little hitler and seemed to have me in his office all the time for basicly nothing.
A guy stuck a note up in the cold room that I worked out of saying something like "James fancies Tess" so I put one up in his cage saying "plonk is a knob" and I got told off for it. One of the guys who worked on produce with me was extremely lazy and somehow seemed to get away with it and whenever I worked with him I seemed to get the flack for it.
Was soooooo glad to leave there.
Then there was the pizza shop I worked in at various points in my life the owner was basicly mental (happens to be one of my closest friends now though lol) he was a slave driver to the extreme and would have no problem embaressing you in front of people because he didn't like something you had done. being young was not able to argue with him effectively either.
Then the manager that ended up working for him, initially started there as a normal staff member like me but ended up being manager, came from a rough area of Derby and had the upbringing that came with it, was thick as **** and very very arrogant at times, have had many an arguement with him, and 2 of his 3 brothers that worked in the shop sometimes.

I'll stop now before I end up depressed :p
 
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