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  2. Worst job I ever had? Basically, Jayne Mansfield suffered from, er, what was known in-, in the medical trade as ‘lobsters-up-the-arsehole’. And it was my job every evening to go round to Jayne, who was a sweet girl, sweet, charming, shy, mysterious girl… and get these fucking lobsters out of her arsehole.

  4. I don’t think I’ve ever had a better job than when I used to fill shelves in the local supermarket after school and my section was next to the creme eggs display.

    *nostalgically runs tongue over fillings*

  5. In my teens I had a factory job making plastic plates. It was in summer in Melbourne (read fucking hot) standing in front of an extremely hot metal stamper. Dusty too – so even better for an asthmatic.

    Even now I can remember the sequence > get plastic tablet, blow excess dust off tablet, place tablet in centre of hot metal stamper, press stamp to create plate, add some sort of design sheet, place over plate and stamp again, remove plate to cool, knock of excess plastic, stack to be taken away for the women in another section to buff up.

    • I worked shifts in a glass factory in St. Helens one summer (not hot at all). It was a similar process making Pepsi bottles for Saudi Arabia. Those women, though. I’ve never met such a group of filthy minded perverts in all my life. There were two of us ‘blokes’ and me a teenager. We were endlessly tormented by them. Made the time fly by, I can tell you.

      • I spent a summer soldering big capacitors into power amplifier boards in a factory staffed by army wives from the base next door. I was 16, and they were filthy.

        I spent most of the summer blushing, and avoiding eye contact with their husbands when we went to the pub on Friday lunchtimes – I know what treats they’d received on their return from active duty.

      • When I was made redundant in ’91 I did various temp jobs, all of which made me grateful for when I got back on my feet. Coca Cola can factory in Milton Keynes, wrapping huge towers of empty cans onto pallets so the forklift could move them. Horrible trying to keep up and lots of tiny cuts to the hands. Same place on top of the line, pulling out damaged cans with a hook.
        Sandwich factory, at the end of a conveyor belt putting one ingredient on the bread as it came past. The whole place was refrigerated to keep the food fresh. One shift, there were three of us doing egg mayonnaise: 1st bloke had a bucket of goo, using an ice cream scoop to dollop it onto the bread after which I spread it out and bloke 3 dropped a handful of cress on. At tea break, I suggested changing jobs, only to be told that using the scoop was top job and I hadn’t been there long enough.
        Best temp job was driver’s mate on the green “dumpy bins” behind shops. Being driven around, listening to the radio, then jumping out for a couple of minutes to empty the bins. They all had scams where they emptied a cafe’s bins on the side in return for breakfast once a week.

    • Back in the 60s when we had full employment it was possible to start a job in the morning, quit at lunchtime and find another the next day.

      The only real job I’ve ever had (outside music) came when I moved back home to Sheffield for a few months in 1969. Sheffield, as everyone knows, is the city of steel, where the world’s knives and forks were made before China took everyone’s jobs.

      Well, China is welcome to them as far as I’m concerned. I got a job making wooden handles for knives in a cutlery factory. I had to sit at machine and using a jig (not doing one), shape little wooden blanks into one half of a knife handle, which I then threw into a container next to the machine.

      The required amount was 400 handles a day (or 400 halves). By lunchtime on the first day I’d barely managed 100 and was seeing double. My immediate thought was “fuck this for a game of soldiers” and never went back after lunch.

      That was my first and last glimpse of real graft and factory life that millions of people do every day. I take my hat off to them.

  6. Worst for me was a temp Christmas job working in the local post office, night shift in the sorting office. I was a student, the money was welcome but the staff there were horrible. It was just me and an unemployed builder. We got on great, but the regular staff made it obvious they resented us being there and just behaved in a way that I thought was wrong. I kept quiet, was only there for 2-3 weeks but my builder mate just came out with it during tea break – “I hate those bastards”. He needed the work & money, I didn’t (I was a full grant student) so could understand how he felt about workers boasting about the little scams they were on.

  7. I had lots of temp jobs in my younger days. The worst were working in factories. As Johnny recounts above they were unbearably boring, required no thought at all yet it was hard to fulfill the required quota. And I was largely resented by the people I worked with, partly because as a student I could claim my tax back (and
    I had the potential for a more interesting future). I remember my first night in a bread factory (the night shift 6pm-6am paid fantastically well) i was waiting to be given instructions. The supevisor approached me and I expected to be told what to do, but instead was told “take your hands out of your pockets, you’re not in school now ya cunt”. Nice. Funnily enough, the only job where the permanent colleagues were nice to me was when I worked for the Postal Service. I concluded they were happier people cos they got out in the fresh air and weren’t cooped up in a noisy factory away from sunlight. I enjoyed being a temporary postman.

    • Interesting you say hard to meet the quota because, for another job, in a warehouse, I was chastised by one of the permanents for working too fast. “Steady on mate, there’s no hurry”

  8. Around the time of the Derek & Clive LP release the National Union of Students newspaper ran a competition to find a witty response to “what’s the worst job in the world?”

    The winner gave the answer… “a blow job from a cannibal.”

  9. I certainly enjoyed a role where I was part of a committee that had to see unreleased films in a private cinema in Soho, then discuss the psychological implications of it over a posh lunch. Occasionally i would be given a DVD of recent “art movies” for the more “broad-minded” cineste, and had to advise on how sinister they were – and paid for it. VERY repetitive.

  10. Working at the Thwaites brewery in Blackburn and being invited to tasting sessions of different lagers. I then had to say which I preferred. Sheer hell it was. Hic!

  11. My neighbour’s sister was briefly engaged to a fellow who’d done special effects work on various movies. One time he casually mentioned that among other things for Batman Returns he had to make full body casts of Michelle Pfeiffer, so that her Catwoman costumes could be made.

    “That must have been tough” I ventured.

    “It was hell” he replied with a smile.

  12. At the height of the building trade slump of the early ’90s I was sent on an agency job to a big hotel near Sloane Square. They were dismantling a rooftop swimming pool and replacing it with either more accommodation or a new restaurant, I forget which.
    As part of the pool dismantlement, myself and a few other electricians were crawling about in an adjacent loft space, in near-total darkness, removing all the old wiring so that the roof could be demolished. Nobody knew what was live or dead wiring as all the schematics had been lost long before. Pretty much all of us received electric shocks at some point or other during the work and the space we were working in was cramped and thick with many years accumulation of black dust.
    Meanwhile, a gang of about a dozen guys were working nearby with jackhammers breaking up the old pool. The noise was deafening.
    I stuck it out for a few weeks, because there wasn’t any other work about. Finally I got a call from another agency for a better job and I gladly took it.

  13. Worst job I had was working in the “stores” for the local council as a summer job. I was 18 and my mother just got me the job and said you start on Monday (she worked for the council). First thing I had to learn to do was supply all the council vehicles with petrol, diesel etc. This all had to be logged with the vehicle’s mileage to make sure the they were only used for work purposes. The sheet where this was logged was very important, I was told this with some vigour. About halfway through first morning the wind blew the sheet away, and it fell into a huge hole near the pumps. I thought briefly about running away, but managed to later climb down into the hole and retrieve it at great personal risk.

    I then spend most of the summer clearing out the “stores” and tearing up computer print outs, I know not why. A rough guy who worked “on the bins” used to come in to skive, and he would help out. He also decided to bully me throughout the summer inventing games which involved him throwing things at me. I was paid 55 quid a week, 43 after tax. But for some reason in the last week of the summer I got more than 100 quid cash in my pay packet, I didn’t complain.

  15. Greenhouse.

    Sweaty and dirty – but I still didn’t like it, largely because of the bloody radio. You can hear the same ads a hell of a lot of times on a 9 hour shift.

    If I ever meet Rick Witter I’ll stick his Link up his jacksie.

  17. Fried Chicken Factory, Aberdeen 1966. I had ‘long’ hair which must have almost touched my shirt collar. I was three weeks into being a vegetarian but the money was too good to resist. Watching people scoffing down fried chicken at 6am was shocking to this Grammar School boy and, as recounted elsewhere, I could not believe the sexual hassle meted out by the women – to go to the toilet meant walking through past two lines of white-coated wenches each one of whom apparently wanted to fuck my little arse off: I had simply had no idea how to handle any of this and took to sprinting past waving my arm in a nonchalant “I love you too” manner.
    In Week 2 for some reason they put me in charge of a huge tower-thing into which chicken carcasses were thrown. After I pressed a bewildering array of buttons and pulled an astonishing amount of levers there would be a few minutes silence before the tower started to shake, rattle and roll producing approximately 1000 gallons of foul-smelling chicken fat. All that week I was terrified I would get the buttons & lever sequence wrong (my training had consisted of “press here, here, here and here, pull this , this, this and that, press etc etc”) and the resultant explosion would kill everyone in the factory (“213 dead in Chicken Fat Inferno) but somehow I made it through to payday.
    At the start of Week 3 the Factory Foreman returned from his holidays. In the changing rooms he came marching up and barked into my face “Are you a fucking poof, you long-haired fairy?” To this day I have no idea why I replied ” No but you are”.
    Being held up against a wall, my shoes at least two feet off the floor, and strangled by a bald-headed physcopath whose eyes threatened to burst all over me was the scariest thing ever. I may well have wet myself.
    Mum was rather surprised to see me walk back in to the house an hour after I had left it. Me, I was just glad to be alive

    • At The Chicken Fat Machine* were you not tempted to start pull all the levers at random singing “Ever since I was a young man, I played the silver ball…”

      (*unreleased live album by The Fall)

  18. I’ve been quite lucky workwise. Multi drop van driver was probably the worst, especially the day a front wheel bearing shattered on my transit on the M4, scary as fuck but managed to get it off at Newbury I think. “Can’t you get it back to the yard?” (Colnbrook by the way) were the words that confirmed that it was not the job for me. On top of that we all drove vans that claimed Panther Express “This Pussy Does The Business”

  19. I had a few. Nights in a pea freezing plant was fun, with an 18 hour night shift in the change over back to days a particular highlight, though it was really good money and I bought my first good guitar with the proceeds. I still have it – an undesirable Ibanez Artist (and I could have had a late 60s Gibson Les Paul Custom for 500 quid…) but I went through too much to get it so we can never part. Making those foam sanding block things – breathing noxious fumes all day from the foam making, and one day one bloke cut his finger off on the machine which sliced the big foam blocks into strips which were glued and covered in the abrasive. My job was to make sure they went through the coating machine smoothly – one slip and you’d have a traffic jam of gluey foam strips on the floor. This hell was made bearable by the foreman who instinctively knew something about management – he gave decent breaks, brought a few beers in on Friday lunchtime, generally kept spirits up. Contrast to the printing place I worked – I’ve never had so many paper cuts. I was in the packing department, and spent all day picking up piles of printed card and moving it from one place to another. One day it was quiet and I reorganised the tables so that rather than have to pick the piles up you could just slide from one to another. The weasley little shitbag of a foreman came back and asked what I was doing. I demonstrated the new process and said “I thought….” “YOU’RE NOT PAID TO THINK YOU’RE PAID TO DO AS YOU’RE FUCKING TOLD” he yelled at me, and made me put it back as it was. Twat. Early lesson in middle management incompetence. Oh, and working nights in the chicken house on a kibbutz was fun….loading chickens to go off to slaughter. The timing was such that you had to pick two up with each hand, by their feet. They’d peck you, shit on you and scream the place down as they knew what was coming. It was so awful everyone only had to do one night a week – the rest was spent in a bakery watching the state of the art conveyor belt system which carried the bread and making sure it didn’t grind to a halt – the genius who designed it decided that making it bread crumb proof was an unnecessary complication when you can sit a backpacking layabout from the UK there to continually brush the crumbs out for 8 hours.

  20. My first job, in between school and uni, was working as a slaughterhouse assistant. I’ll never forget my first day. We were simply taken to the slaughterhouse and given some rudimentary instructions. It was a vision of hell. Squealing pigs having their throats cut and the blood drained into metal churns to make black puddings. Clanking machinery dragging the carcasses round the production line. A huge fireball thing that singed the hairs off. The stench of blood and shit.

    My own task was to strip the fat from the abdominal cavity, cut out the kidneys and gigots. and cut off the balls from any male pigs (contrary to popular belief, these were chucked away for rendering, rather than straight into the pies.)

    It was phenomenally unpleasant. And I never ate a sausage again until, oh, the Wednesday.

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