Print Technician:
-Poorly paid (started on £10k/year)
-Non-standard hours (rotating early/late shifts, had to work every other Saturday morning)
-One of only two people in the job so the buck stopped with me if my co-worker wasn't around
-Very stressful at times due to the above e.g. when co-worker on holiday had to work extra hours and if there were any problems they used to pile up and you couldn't deal with them because you were too busy trying to keep head above water with the 'normal' work; the phone would ring and I'd dread what it could be and all the while talking to someone worrying about something else I was trying to do falling further behind
-High level of responsibility i.e. if I made a mistake then potentially hundreds or thousands of documents sent out could be wrong, placing POs for hundreds of pounds every week, needing to maintain stock levels and predict usage etc
-An absolute ****ton of information to remember e.g. we had at least 50 different paper stocks to print different documents on, plus literally dozens of manual workarounds for quirks of the system
-Quite complex at times e.g. making design changes to documents on old proprietary systems, requesting right files from mainframe systems etc
-General lack of respect from some departments treating us as slaves to bring them boxes of paper, change toners etc even when we were exceedingly busy
-Little in the way of transferable skills outside the organisation, which made it a very difficult job to move on from or be recognised for, despite arguably having more real world day-to-day responsibility/importance than any job I've had since
-Supervisor who you couldn't trust, she'd claim you didn't tell her about problems when you had, kinda weird situation as I didn't report directly to her but she would deputise for my boss when he wasn't around.
-In hindsight technically I probably suffered sexual harassment from said supervisor who would deliberately force me to squeeze past her behind rather than making room, lots of innuendo, asking personal questions about my sex life etc. In the end she got the boot after flashing one of the execs I think....
Looking back now it seems crazy that I did such a stressful job for so long for so little money, but because it was my first job, I just assumed it was normal and that most people hated going in to work.
After I'd finally moved into a different department they tried to get a temp in to cover the work and they quit after a week saying it was too stressful so it wasn't just me being soft. They then hired a specialist contractor on at least 4x what they'd be paying me and even after weeks in the job I still had to help them out on pretty much a daily basis because it was such a varied and complex (in a bad, clunky way) job.
