Now I don’t know what the problem is, but over in Cairns (Australia) they seem to have nothing but praise for the “destination” of Fitzroy Island. The online brochure describes it as having “an ever-growing reputation for adventure, fun
and brilliant nightlife!” My friends and I were taken in by such promises, and so the four of us booked a day and a night on the island.
Big mistake.
As soon as we arrived, an apocalyptic rainstorm hit the island and our mysery was soon compounded on discovering that our room had not been prepared. So, we spent a couple of hours in a dank, dripping bar with not so much as an apology from the surly folk responsible for the rooms. We sat. We sat. We watched Dr Phil on a geriatric tv hanging in the corner. We sat some more. Finally, our room was ready, and we were all set to begin our couple of days of excitement and fun.
The room was small, damp, and the pillows were squares of synthetic sponge. There was also an impressive array of bugs and lizards jostling to annex our accommodation, a nice touch. We adjourned to the seating area and cracked open a couple of beers that we’d bought in Cairns before coming over. Bad idea, an employee helpfully informed us that we’d be thrown off the island should we continue to drink alcohol not bought on the premises. Then it was time to make tea in our ‘luxury kitchenette’…
The kitchen was like something out of a rotting fifties theme restaurant. Giant, rusty fridges housed ageing food, and, bizarrely, vending machines from years long past languished, coughing and empty in the corner. Yet more bugs and lizards lingered around for our delectation (including one calmly menacing spider). Would we like to use the kichen�s crockery and pans? The bellboy inquired. Then we would have to pay and rent them at a cheerfully extortionate rate. Fancy a glass of tap water? Err, not if it�s undrinkable, green, and full of nourishing ants. Perhaps we�d enjoy a swim in the sea? Not if it�s fucking raining and full of jellyfish at the height of stinger season. I complained to the manager. In a moment of startling honesty he replied, �Next time don�t believe the website, it�s all lies�
Edd Flower, Exeter
I worked in a sandwich factory for a miserable pittance in the summer after my GCSEs. The permanent staff we’re bitter and resentful towards me (after all, I was a 16 year old getting a bit of extra pocket money so that I could afford to go on holiday without my parents for the first time, while they had 47 children, depressed husbands and a Special Brew habit to feed), and manifested this by making me do all the crap elements of sandwich-making - yes, there is a hierarchy of pleasurable and not so pleasurable elements to making sandwiches, usually dictated by the different fillings we had to use.
I was always ‘in charge’ of the eggs, which, when stored, pre-boiled, in vats of fluorescent yellow vile-smelling liquid, are never nice to prepare i.e. rinse and shove through a giant mincing machine and then dowsed in several industrial-sized jars of cheap mayonnaise. This is especially unpleasant when it is stiflingly hot, and suffering with the full-effect of a never-before-experienced hangover. As an example of what is a ‘pleasant’ job in the sandwich factory, operating the buttering machine was much-coveted, being both easy (you simply tip the sliced loaf into a chute, and it pops out at the other end, ready buttered, or in the case of this factory, ready cheap-margarined, and you just stack) and fun (you could really challenge yourself by attempting to break any personal record you might have achieved in the buttered loaves/minute league, or you could go quite slowly and become transfixed by the gentle rhythm of the buttered slices popping out of the buttering machine). But these ‘pleasurable’ jobs were scant and heavily out-weighed by more mundane activities like scraping off great swathes of grated cheese (cheap, warm and rubbery of no fixed origin) from the preparation tables or mixing huge trays of stinky tuna mayonnaise.
There are two women who will forever be lodged in my memory from the sandwich factory; Betty Gums and Betty Lettuce. Obviously, with two Bettys, there needed to be clarification as to who you wanted to speak to. Betty Gums was called Betty Gums because all her teeth were false and she had peculiarly pale gums. She was a sweet, timid woman. And Betty Lettuce was called Betty Lettuce because it was always her job to wash the lettuce. I don’t know whether she chose to do this, or was forced into it at an early age. She was a fiery woman, old before her time, whose daughter once tried to kill her. The other employees who stand out were a gay man who denied being gay and said his live-in lover was a flat mate and he was celibate, a matricidal woman (see above), and a power-crazed chef who would stomp around on the floor above us, sporadically sending down pieces of cooked meat on the dumb waiter.
Happy days.
Jessie Sanders
jessie@zone.ltd.uk
The worst job I ever had was working on an animated feature in ‘91, a personal project of a critically acclaimed animator who had been a top Soho ad animator for decades. He had been making this thing since the 70’s and had finally got a little Hollywood backing and hired a small, underpaid crew to give birth to his baby. It was going to be like nothing that had gone before, the greatest animation feature of all time.
An Arabian fairy tale, visually based on Persian miniatures and with a basic remit to prove that he was the greatest animator who ever lived. The feature was ludicrously complicated in design and detail. This added a further rich layer of agony to what is already a bad business, for while animation is a wonderful thing to watch, making it is hellish laborious. At 24 frames a second, it takes a crew of hundreds many months to produce the drawings you see on screen. Each animator produces key drawings (the extremes of movement), their assistant draws the principal frames that lie between each key. This set of drawings is then passed to the in-betweener whose job it is to fill in all the remaining frames which when filmed will produce the illusion of fluid movement. At this level the work is unbelievably tedious. You have to turn yourself into a drawing machine. I spent 10 months as an in-betweener, drawing tiny incremental movements for upwards of 54 hours a week. We sat in a huge warren of wooden animator’s desks for up to 16 hours a day, the only sound the rasp of flicked paper and the tsk tsk tsk of personal stereos. The work was repetitive and minute. The lines we traced between were often so close, the width of a pencil tip would barely fit between them. Drawings could take anything up to an hour. When the first breakdown was achieved there were only another 20 breakdowns after that. When those breakdowns were done, there were the in-betweens either side of them. And then the in-betweens either side of them. Then you gave the folder to the production person and that was the last you saw of that. I never managed to identify anything I’d done when we watched the ‘dailies’ from the lab each morning. Boredom was a constant enemy.
We were like battery hens, and the management treated us accordingly. Colleagues chatting for even a few moments were interrupted by glaring production people and the offenders returned to their desks. Which would have been acceptable if they had been paying commercial rates. As it was, this was a low-budget, high-art production and most people were working 14 hours extra a week for free.
I hated the endless repetitive, spirit-crushing work, I hated the endless hours and I disliked the people. Before web design, animators were the geeks of the creative industries. Like train-spotters are said to be, some of my colleagues were strangely autistic - collectors of memorabilia from cartoons and TV science fiction shows, individuals with pictures on their desks not of their loved ones but of themselves, alone. Many were suffering from the symptoms of what we would now call RSI. Some of the older men had a drink problem. Very few were married.
A few months after I was laid off, I was mooching around Colombia trying to feel better about myself when I caught a ride with a rich vacationing Ecuadorian couple. We fell to chatting, as you do, and I explained about the film I had been working on and the laborious nature of animation feature production. The husband came up with the best description of the business, one that evokes the minuteness and accuracy and machine-like tedium, but also the grand collective effort. ‘That’s the work of ants,’ he said.
Steve Handley
steve.handley@hhc.co.uk
The worst job I’ve ever had was one summer after I had dropped out of University. I took a job as a weedsprayer. Every day I had to wear a green boiler suit, carry a 35 litre tank of toxic weedkiller on my back and a sprayer in my hand. The look was finished off with lime green marigolds and a face mask. My 12 hour shift consisted of scaling the banks that run along side motorways, spraying around the little trees in the height of summer to prevent the poor little things being overpowered by bramble and other violent plants. I get chronic hayfever which made an already hellish job much worse.
When the 3 months of this motorway hell had ended I went on to spray the streets of Slough, which, comparitively speaking, I was looking forward to, but it was much worse. At least on the motorway banks I was a faceless saddo, but now my pride was naked to the world. Imagine if you will the site of me in my green boiler suit, marigolds and face mask walking down your road spraying the pavements. Four year old children would run up shouting ‘Ghostbuster!’ Laughing in my face and calling me a twat, sad bastard etc. There was nothing I could say or do, no witty retort could hide the fact that they were right.
One day an incontinent bag lady came up to me, patted me on the arm and said, in a soothing voice, ‘My, I bet your parents are proud.’ She shuffled off giggling in her self-stained trousers.
I consider that to be the lowest point of my life.
Dan Kieran
Washing dishes would normally qualify as a pretty dreadful job, but you might expect the misery to be somewhat abated by the opportunity for scoffing leftovers at the end of the day. Unfortunately, my experience of said job was in a pretty hardline vegan/healthfood sort of thing. Didn’t stop the well-meaning proprietor from stuffing horrific lentil/nut/carrot/etc monstrosities down my throat at every opportunity. They tasted as bad as they looked and the effect on my insides - well I’ll go no further. Still, I’m a besuited mortgage-slave now, so maybe it wasn’t so bad after all…
Gary Romain
g.romain@asb.org.uk
During the summer of 1995 my friend and I obtained what seemed to be a dream summer job working for 300 bucks a week as “Re-agent Personnel” in a Californian warehouse production unit. However, initial portents weren’t good. On our first morning a call from reception in our motel awoke us from our drunken blackout informing us that our boss was here to pick us up. Five minutes later we were in his car trying to pass of the alcohol fumes as jet lag and picking bits of vegetation out of our smelly clothes.
We were immediately set to work stickering boxes, most of which my friend managed to put on upside down, a minor tragedy in this perfection drenched state. We were then moved onto bottling chemicals. This involved receiving an electric shock every single time we screwed on the cap of a bottle of chemical reagents through the static build-up.
Next up on the torture list was the glue gun. Now anyone with a clear head can handle the glue gum without causing much harm to oneself. However, with the daily hangover and the heat in the air-conditioning free warehouse rising to 100 degrees everyday then the tendency to inflict glue burns on one’s hands increases five hundredfold. After a day of this our hands were shot to pieces. Making boxes came as light relief afterwards - apart from the numerous cardboard cuts you’d invariably receive.
A tad unaware of what the company did, a few tentative enquiries were made as to the possibility of other tasks. We were sent to the “shaking blood” department by the still unimpressed vice president. Hours of “shaking plastic bottles of goat and alligator blood to get rid of the blood clots.” Unsurprisingly, the novelty wore off quickly and we were informed that the next task was “quantifying urea products”. We were set to work bottling piss. We didn’t ask what sort, as we weren’t sure whether it was preferable to be bottling human or animal waste water. Luckily it wasn’t still warm.
We were constantly kept on edge by the bitter supervisor having screaming tantrums every time something minor went wrong and the fact that our new found best friend (the local dealer) insisted we share a bowl of weed with him at every opportunity, especially at 6am in the morning before work. However, after an incident with a unpaid police fine stemming from an overloaded car, things went sour after one of my co-workers threatened to kill my friend. We realised we’d outstayed our welcome and took off to Los Angeles.
Nathan King
I started my career of crap jobs in a syringe needle factory. My task was in quality control, seated next to a conveyor belt carrying needles glued into plastic bases. Dangerously erect, they marched past at a rate of twenty five a second. I was a solitary addition to the conveyor belt with nothing but the grinding of the machinery to keep me company.
Armed with tweezers to extract the faulty syringes, I sat there for eight hours a day sourcing entertainment by deliberately causing pile-ups. I would knock a row of syringes over, and the ensuing row would plough into them sending malicious points in every direction. I consequently left every day covered with tiny punctures. Needless to say, I also spent a good amount of time asleep at my post, resulting in an early dismissal. (2 weeks after arrival.)
My next student holidays were spent working for the city council. They first offfered me a job on the bins. Being a dustman is the hardest thing I have ever done. I actually only lasted one day. After running around in the rain all day carrying rubbish on my shoulder with mushy peas running down my neck, I had done my lot.
Gareth Mealing
I once got suckered by a Temp Agency into going for a job as a kitchen porter in a hotel in Bournemouth.
I was still at University and pretty naive and had no idea at the time what a kitchen porter did. After a formal half an hour interview (why?), I was offered the job on the spot and told to start work straight away.
I was led into the kitchens and introduced to the other kitchen porter, who was a Scottish psychopath in his fifties who’d spent most of his adult life in prison for various violent crimes. He outlined the laborious tasks that were to befall me over the next couple of days - basically washing pots and pans.
This Scottish guy was a real pro kitchen porter. He’d apparently spent about twenty years in prison doing the job and consequently his hands were like leather. He’d fill up the sink with water that was near boiling point and just stick his hands in it for hours. As there were no rubber gloves I was expected to do the same. It was complete agony. If you winced at all he’d stare at you as if was about to slash your throat so I just persevered.
After two days my hands were completely blistered. I had one blister that was so painful that it brought tears to my eyes. When the Scottish bloke sloped off for a crap that afternoon, I plucked up the courage and asked the Head Chef, who was also the owner of the Hotel, if he had a plaster. He reluctantly gave me one but told me if I needed another one it would be taken from my wages.
At that point I walked out. The Temp Agency wouldn’t even pay me.
Not as bad though as my friend who used to work in a porn shop in Soho. He spent six months in a dingy room in the basement placing stickers over erections in European porno mags to meet British porno law restrictions. He also once had to clean out a customer’s vibrating vagina that had stopped working because the mechanics had been caked in cum.
Craig Lee
craig_lee@totalise.co.uk
I once left a perfectly good college course to work as an apprentice spray painter in a hell-hole of a town called Kelty in Fife.
The wage was poor, the fumes were appalling and I was forced to clean out the filthy spray painting filter machine on a weekly basis.
The panel beater had a tendency to enjoy heating up door handles with a welding torch, and the spray painter liked to send you out to wash vans during heavy rainfall and snow blizzards.
My fingers were practically worn to the bone rubbing down car panels with wet and dry paper, and no-one was ever remotely happy with the results. After being moaned at to “rub the thing down properly” I decided one day to rub the fucker down to the bare metal just out of anger. That wasn’t well received either and prompted them to put me through an alleged spray painter’s initiation ceremony, involving having my knob and balls painted with underseal.
The whole company was run by what can only be described as an idiot of an unsurpassing level - who on a daily basis, at every meal time, would eat stinking meat pies with his oily grubby hands, and get half of the awful meat over himself instead of in his mouth.
My emancipation came one morning when after being sent to a neighbouring garage for a long stand, I did so by spending it up the town until mid afternoon. The following day I point blankly refused to go for the spray painter’s breakfast and then refused to do anything for him at all. Two hours later I was out of that hell-hole and on my way home with the biggest grin I had had for 3 months.
Psybernaut
Determined to save money for an impending move to America back in 1986, I took a night job at some grotty little factory in Surbiton, Surrey. I had often passed the building sniggering at the unfortunates inside, a thought which kept coming back to me after I accepted 5 quid an hour under the table.
My job was to go into the factory at 6pm, negotiate a stretch of boxes and old work tools which blocked the only access route to my ‘corner’ of the factory, lay enormous 20ft sheets of rubbery vinyl on an enormous table (7 at a time) on top of each other, place a cutting mould at the left-hand side and bring down an enormous electric hammer to pound the shapes out. I would then shift the mould along an inch and repeat until every possible bit of material had been used, whence I would put out more material and do it all again. The manager, a despicable sweaty little fool with lizard eyes and a pot belly, babbled on about what a great challenge it would be to get 8 cuts out of each line. ‘Professional pride’ I think he said a couple of times, though I could be making that bit up. I would do this repeatedly, and without a break, until 10pm, when I would go into his large, dingy office and collect my cash from him as he sat under a light-bulb on string. I would have to suffer 5-10 minutes of shite chatter as he told me that his ‘woman’ (wife) always had his dinner ready when he got home and that if she didn’t he would ‘fucking well do something about it’ (go and get take-away with a whimper I imagine) and then I would stumble home, stupefied, worn down and bitter.
It lasted three months and the cash got me through the first two months of my journey stateside (which, incidentally, resulted in full-time residence). Funnily enough, I treat my soft-glasses case with care and respect these days.
Steffan Balzarak
I once did the door to door household goods thing, about 10 years ago, in London. It was actually a live-in job as the company owned a house in Uxbridge and recruited kids like myself from the Northern wastelands.
Basically, you worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week and were expected to do ‘Spazzing’. This involved pretending to be mentally handicapped to gain sympathy at the door.
You were dropped off and picked up each day by the boss who drove a minibus. Whoever made the least money each day would have to sit in the ‘Slap Seat’ and be beaten by the others on the way home. Woe betide anyone who failed to help administer this punishment. Some people had been living and working there so long that they began to behave as though they really were mentally handicapped.
The guy who ran the company was exposed a few years later by the Evening Standard, under the front page headline ‘THE NEW FAGIN!”. I only lasted 2 weeks and managed to avoid both ‘Spazzing’ and the ‘Slap Seat’. The various employment I gained after that was less frightening, although no more fulfilling.
I am retired now. At 29 years of age I feel my life is just beginning.
Dan
Every Summer whilst on holiday from University, my best friend and I used to put up Marquees (see another story in this list) until it became harvest time, where we would sign on as ‘Seed Processors’.
This job involved travelling around to farms in a transit van with a diesel generator in the back, following a lorry with a big machine on the back that processed grain, sorting out the more viable grains to be used as next years seed.
Doesn’t sound too bad does it? However, the job involved standing next to this vibrating machine as lorry after lorry of grain was passed through the machine, coating it in mercury based agrochemicals and emptying the result into 50kg bags through a hopper that would fill at an alarming rate - so it was a constant race against time. You kept going until the job was done, and the machine would not stop until it was all taken care of.
So, on a shitty windswept farm in Lincolnshire for example you would be deafened by noise, wearing a cheap paper mask as you put bag after bag on this hopper, stitched it and lifted it when full. By the end of the job you were covered in shit, chemicals and dust. 50kgs - 8 stone. Heavy. A typical 50-70 ton job would involve 20 bags per ton. 1000-1400 bags. Christ. We would work up to 20 hours per day and seven days a week (at �1 per ton!), then pack up and start driving to the next farm. You got used to sleeping in barns, vans, anywhere. By the end of the season you would have muscles in places you shouldn’t and be totally unable to talk to anyone at all.
The worst incident was bagging 70 tons in the driving rain and darkness under floodlights in Cumbria. A cow that was being passed through the stock yard collapsed and the farmer sent for the vet. He arrived, shot it in the head and then put a metal spike in the hole and wiggled it around to”stir it’s brains up”. There was a river of shit and silage run off passing through the yard at 20 miles per hour and six inches deep.
The Horror.
Tim Roser
I had to Sign the Official Secrets Act and everything, so lets keep this between us, okay?
I work for the police, in their vetting unit.
We run background checks on anyone who will have anykind of “Unsupervised access to children”. Doctors, nurses, teachers, dinner ladies, couples hoping to adopt or foster, etc.
We perform checks on them using ‘Intelligence Computer Systems’. Because we are dealing with peoples’ personal details, there can be absolutely no margin for error. Double checking all the forms that you’ve spent three hour’s inputting is soul destroying.
Plus, I’m finding out all the different ways people abuse rape and hurt each other five days a week.
For the most part, the people I work with are okay, except the line managers, who’re corrupt lazy bullies, and the head manager, who is a socially retarded old bat who keeps trying to be ‘Down with the Kids’. A good recent example;
“Oh yeah, Travis, they’re a great band they are, they’re really good, and Starsailor…”
It all got to much for me a few weeks back, in the canteen, when I realised I was sitting opposite the copper who used to give me and my mates shit about skateboarding when I was 15. Terrifying.
Raoul
A few years ago I worked as a runner (ie. dogsbody) for a TV company. The accounts department was in a narrow building on 4 floors plus an attic and a basement.
One day the management decided to renovate the building, so we runners had to shift all the furniture, files etc from floor to floor. Carrying a (full) filing cabinet or colossal oak desk up four flights of narrow stairs is by no means easy, but the worst was yet to come.
They decided we should move all the long-term files kept in the attic into the basement, so we crawled into this tiny, dusty space, picked up the boxes which invariably decomposed on contact and shifted twenty years’ worth of vat forms to the newly done-up basement.
After two weeks of this backbreaking work, everything was sorted. The building looked respectable, all the files were where they should have been and we were proud(ish) of a job well done.
Then disaster struck.
Two days later the sewer under the basement burst, clogged by the grease from the chip shop next door, and our brand-new archive was flooded with raw sewage. We donned wellies, masks and gloves and waded in to rescue the sodding files, fighting the constant urge to puke from the revolting smell. As well as grabbing all the paperwork, we had to use brooms to keep the six-inch-deep tide of shit away. None of us could stand to be in the room for more than five minutes, and it took us three days of this to get everything out.
However bad this seemed to us, though, it was surely nothing compared to what the poor sod from the council who had to fix the sewer went through - he was there for about two weeks.
Doug Brown
I worked one summer in a rehabilitation hospital, working in the administration section. The job was great, the hours were standard, and the opportunities for skiving off were something I have been unable to match since.
As part of my job, I had to visit the offices on the wards daily to update the in-patient’s charts with any new results of blood tests, x-rays etc. Most of the ward offices were located at the end of the ward, meaning that I would have to walk the length of the ward and past all the patients to get to the files. This was absolutely fine, except in the High Dependency Unit.
There was one patient who had been in a particularly nasty car crash, and was made to sit up in his bed for two hours every day. If I made it to the ward before the bed was titled, he would lie silently staring at the ceiling. However, if I was running late, I would get there while he was sitting, and I could always hear him muttering something over and over under his breath.
After a few days of this, my curiosity got the better of me, and I walked deliberately slowly past his bed. I still feel the horror I felt when I suddenly realised what he was saying, over and over, was “Kill me. Kill me. Kill me…”
Sharon
Back in the glory days of University my dad got me and my brother summer jobs at the semi-conductor plant where he worked. We were gophers, carrying boxes of semi-conductor wafers between the various processing plants in the buildings as they underwent all the different processes. My brother elected to take the night shifts, which meant that he got paid more and had very little to do (production was slower at night) and could sleep on the trolley we pushed the boxes around on when it was particularly quirt.
I however took days. 12 hour shifts carrying boxes weighing 2kg each around in supermarket shopping baskets (2 boxes per basket) or occasionally, blissfully, pushing them around on a flat bed trolley. Doesn’t sound too bad? Well, if you’ve ever worked in a semi-conductor plant you’ll know that the successful production of wafers relies entirely on cleanliness. Wafers are extremely fragile and when blank only cost around �20 each but when finsished can cost as much as �1,000 each. A speck of dust will render a wafer completely useless.
This meant that we all had to wear ‘clean suits’, a large plastic baby grow with nylon and rubber boots, rubber surgical gloves, a nylon elasticated hood and a surgical mask and large plastic goggles. Pushing your mask below your nose to breathe in the labs was a disciplinary offence. It was hot, it was August and there was no air conditioning, as that too carries dust. We had three breaks in 12 hours totalling one and a quarter hours. At the end of each day I would arrive home at 8pm with only enough time and energy to bathe (as I smelt of sweaty potatoes), eat and crawl into bed ready to be up at 5.30am for work at 7am. For weeks after I finished working there my hair was lank, my nails soft and my skin sallow.
We gophers used to try and relieve the pressure by skiving to the ‘dressing’ room or standing under the warm air jets in the ‘decontamination’ chamber but, if we did, work would simply build up on our trolleys back at our posts and we would have to shift boxes faster when we got back.
After a while my supervisor realised I wasn’t as much of a gimp as the other gophers and began training me on the lab machines. Soon I could run 70% of the lab equipment on my own (my dad was proud!). However this was to lead to the nightmare of me accidentally ruining a whole box of wafers (24 wafers worth about �800 each) when I put them through the wrong process because someone had stuck the wrong process label on the wrong box.
Other problems I experienced were not being able to recognise any of my co-workers when they were wearing their clean suits in the lab (you can only see peoples eyes) leading to some embarressing occasions of mistaken identity; the other women avoiding me because my Dad was ‘one of them’ .i.e. an engineer working in middle management; bemused co-workers of my dad coming up to me saying ‘but we thought you were 3 years old’ based on the photos on my dad’s desk and the way he talks about me.
The company was also later to become an enemy of my family when they almost poisoned my dad with a chemical that burns you from the inside out and then made him redundant, though he was their longest ever worker of 22 years and stripped him of all of his share options,through a legal loophole.
However the saddest thing was probably the realisation that the women who worked as machine operators without engineering qualifications for the same money as me were some of the brightest, most talented people I have ever met, but who did not have the courage or will-power to fulfill their potential.
Justine Marie
I once spent a particularly memorable week minimum wage-slaving as a kitchen porter in a hospital. Having finished university only a few weeks before, I was in dire need of a cash injection.
Despite having a good degree, the usual consultancies wouldn’t give me a look-in. The firm I eventually went to specialised in outsourcing unemployable ingrates to various factories which, despite the soul-grinding menial labour, were financially quite appealing.
Being the new boy though, I was given the lowest of the low to prove I was reliable - a week in the hospital kitchens. Despite being given instructions on how to operate an industrial potato
pealer (I never even knew such things existed) by a woman called Pauline who looked to me as if she had walked straight off the set of The League Of Gentlemen, I thought I would be able to hack it.
Loading up the behemoth (the dish washer) was consistently
entertaining. The dishes could not go straight in and you had to hose off the encrusted remains with a very powerful hose which at times was quite relaxing.
The highlight had to be Terry though, the resident chief porter.
He and Pauline had an oddly sadistic relationship which reminded me of that Dirk Bogarde film The Night Porter.
Although he seemed quite simple, Terry had a hidden intelligence and when Pauline was out the room he would reveal to me his burning hatred of her.
For her part, Pauline enjoyed regaling me with tales of her ongoing education programme for Terry and how the “poor soul hadn’t a clue.”
I’m sure they are both still there to this day, buttering the bread,
preparing salads for dying people and cleaning the potties of the weak-bladdered.
Aaron Bateman
I worked in a small cosmetics factory one holiday in Christchurch, New Zealand.
I was relegated the two jobs that absolutely no one else wanted to do. Initially this involved screwing ridged caps on tubes that were fired off a conveyer belt.
If you were too slow, and the things splatted all over the ground, you then had to clean up the mess and spend after hours catching up. Mind you, this turned out to be paradise, at least I had some human contact. Two weeks later I had huge blisters on my hands from screwing the lids on and couldn’t do it anymore. So they shifted me to the powder room, aka ‘The Isolation Chamber’ for the next six weeks.
It was just me and the powder funnel nine hours a day, day in day out. The funnel needed to be refilled every hour with powder which came in huge drums. I had to climb up into them to scoop the stuff out. Then I had to climb to the top of the funnel with a bucket to pour the powder in. Each refill took four trips. To make matters worse I was supposed to mix this with scenting stuff to give it a pleasant smell. Despite wearing a mask and being covered in overalls, powder still got everywhere. I was a walking powder puff for the next six weeks. Every breath I took, everything I saw, ate and drank, looked or tasted of powder. To make matters worse, I had my pay docked as they had consignments of peach scented powder returned because I had either filled it with lavender or forgot to put in scent.
The experience continues to haunt me to this day.
Anon
I was once employed to stand on a pipe for two days. A building agency sent me to work as a labourer for some pipe fitters two floors underground in the dingiest cellar known to mankind. My task was to counterweight the pipe while it was set level by standing on it.
Why the hell they couldn’t just have found a lump of stone to do my job (thus saving themselves �90) beats me. It is a sad state of affairs when you realise that a lump of stone could actually do your job better than you.
Before anyone had heard about web sites or e-business I used to work for a multimedia company.
This involved working seven days a week from 9:30 to midnight most days with unpaid overtime, even at weekends. I was fortunate enough to be one of only two girls which meant I didn’t have to share the work sofa bed with the guys and could go home for my showers/bed.
I and another guy worked out at some point that we were getting about $4.00 an hour. This went on for two years as there were no other multimedia companies around for me to work at yet.
The last straw came when I started a course on Saturday mornings and got blasted from the boss for turning up late! The shitty thing is that, when I go for interviews now, people think I’m lying about my years of experience because I worked at the first multimedia company (in my state) more than eight years ago.
Lee
P.S. I am not working right now as my head is sore from hitting the glass ceiling too many times.
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"I do nothing and then I do something. But it's taken years of investigating idleness in all its forms to be able to achieve this. My discipline is borne out of concerted study of idleness."