What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? What made it bad and how long did you last?
Just to be an awkward git, one of the best but also the worst jobs I’ve had was working for BT as the emergency operator - you know, the goon that answers with “Emergency, which service?” when you dial 999 or 112.
Genuinely loved that job, but it paid an absolute pittance. It was both fast paced ad fulfilling, but some of the shit that you hear still rattles my cage even today. Most of the calls were a blur while the job was getting done well, but some of them made you feel pure helpless slow-motion despair while you tried every trick in the book to fast track a particularly horrible call to the appropriate service.
I’m glad I did it but I absolutely wasn’t ready for the emotional devastation that it caused, and still caus es.
10/10 would do again A+++++
It’s been a while, but there’s some clear time wasters - a guy phoning in demanding the police because he had bees in his attic, a dude wanting to phone the police because he didn’t like the circus he went to, all sorts of menial bollocks borne out of people unable to manage their own lives. Most of the time, the standing instruction was to pass the call to the requested agency - at the end of the day, we were only listening to a snapshot of what’s happening, so we weren’t in a position to make a judgement of whether they really needed an ambulance or police attendance or water fairy or not.
The EISEC system used to pick up landline addresses (and sometimes mobile addresses if the mobile operator signed up to the scheme), but also automatically provided public phone box details. There was one phone box serial number that used to strike dread into you, because by the time your eyes set on the number and your neurons were firing thinking “oh no, I recognise that phone box number…”, this prolific caller had already started ranting about the new world order, how we’re all being led down a path of damnation and that we should repent, all this bollocks. That was one of the few times we could drop calls actually, where they quite clearly weren’t listening to us and weren’t in any immediate audible need of help or danger.
Some of them were real headscratchers - someone phoning from a landline wanting the coastguard because something had capsized… in Birmingham.
Unfortunately, most of the nonsense calls were a result of an already creaking social care system - people phoning in experiencing severe mental health issues, hallucinating and all sorts; some because they felt like they had nowhere else to turn; and some were just lonely and wanted to speak to someone. I did Operator Assistance calls too (where you dial 100 from a BT landline) and a good chunk of those were old men and women who just wanted someone to speak to. If I was killing time, I’d quite happily chat shit to them for five minutes, on the understanding that as soon as the dot matrix board showed a 999 call queued, they were yeeted and the emergency call was taken.
I learned a lot about the world, myself, and how to speak to folk to get what you want in the world without being a complete penispump to someone on the other end of the phone.
Sorry about the long post.
I’ve only really had four jobs. All retail and warehouse. So, it’s kinda hard to decide which was the worst so I’m gonna go with the one I lasted one day on before walking out.
It was at a large garden centre. I spent the entire day standing behind the till. Standing. Assistants weren’t allowed to sit down because they’d occasionally have to help a customer or move a large plant onto the checkout, which apparently the customer couldn’t do?
Anyway I walked in the following morning and said it wasn’t for me. I could have ghosted them, but I thought I owed them that much…Sods didn’t pay me; fuck 'em.
I had a summer job working in a fish factory shelling scallops.
It involved sitting in what was effectively a huge fridge surrounded by other people doing the same thing. The sound of the knives on the shells was so loud that you couldn’t really talk to the person sitting next to you. We had gloves, but the combination of the knives and the shells meant the gloves would have holes in them after a couple of hours so your hands would be wet all day. The smell got into your hair and clothes. And you’d start at 04:30 or 05:30 depending on when the boats came in.
i remember that smell. i worked the “slime line” in a fish processing plant in Seldovia AK for a summer. basically scooping fish stuff out with a metal spoon connected to a hose for 12-14 hours. fish scales everywhere.
What is an AK? I’m guessing not something to do with guns in this context.
Two spring to mind. I could rant forever about them but I’ll try to keep it short.
First was an apprenticeship at a furniture logistics company. I was essentially an extremely overworked and underpaid spreadsheet monkey (I got paid £4 an hour). I received no training and gained no valuable experience or qualifications. In hindsight it’s clear to me the company just wanted cheap labour from vulnerable teenagers.
After this I took a job handing out leaflets for a store which buys/sells goods. The job was in fact not to hand out leaflets like I thought but to harass people I saw walking towards CEX (to try and convince them to sell their games/consoles to us instead of CEX). Obviously this was seedy as hell and embarrassing. I’d get told off at the end of the day every day for not bringing in multiple PS4s or whatever.
I had a job in a local Co-op where I was bullied by the managers. That wasn’t great.
I also had a job in quality assurance where to give you an example one of the tasks was to look at like 10k gloves front and back to check they were intact. We were not allowed to have the radio on or listen to music etc you can imagine the sort of people who were in that job long term, the conversation was not thrilling. I only did that job for a few months and I’d have been suicidal if I had to do it for much longer.