As I reached 17, my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to start to learn to ‘pay my way’. I applied for a vacancy advertised in the Kent Messenger classifieds for holiday work at a popular tourist attraction, you’ll know it, a castle sharing it’s name with a Yorkshire city.
I was interviewed by the head chef - the job: to be a sort of trainee commis chef. In the kitchen pecking order, I was to be one up from the ’special’ kitchen porters - I use that word advisedly, as ‘needs’ must.
I must stress that, unlike many of your crap jobs, it wasn’t my colleagues that were a problem. The boss was great and the other chefs, apart from a particularly fascist sous chef, were great fun to work with. In this instance, it really was the job that was crap. How apt, as I was to be the crepe chef.
I was to make crepes using two hot plates, some dodgy batter mix and an implement that resembled a wooden window squidgy. You may have seen this set-up in Britain, but you are more likely to come across it on the continent. Those continental experts pour just the right amount of mixture onto a sizzling round hob, swirl the squidgy so that the crepe forms an exquisitely thin, circular, no mixture over the edges, crepe, then prepare another on the adjacent hob and then turn them, fill with fillings and fold. Simple.
However, being a crepe chef combines the perhaps contradictory activities of cooking - a private, personal experience with occasional mishaps - and spectator sport. I had to cook with an audience. First time out.
If you’ve seen crepe making made to look easy, a trip to Leeds Castle crepe van in the Easter of 1993 would have rapidly disabused you of that notion.
For three harrowing days I slaved in that van, my 6′4″, spotty, skinny, 17 year old frame, bent over two sizzling hobs for eight hours a day. Always with an audience. Always with some smart alec kid pointing out the tears (and occasionally tears) in my oval, batter balls that I tried to cover with cheese and ham or chocolate sauce and banana. Attempting to master the correct pressure on the squidgy to make the crepe thin, but not too thin, to swirl at the right speed so batter mix didn’t spray the front row (although I admit, a few particularly irksome customers were treated to my fulsome apology: “I am terribly sorry, it’s only my first/second/third day…”).
And then, mid-way through my fourth day of living hell, I could do it. I swirled my wooden squidgy with aplomb, I started to show-off, seeing how quickly I could make them, delighting the crowd, stealing the odd line from TV magicians (”If you want a crepe? Say ‘Yes, Paul’”), doing two simultaneously, one with each hand, I’d got ‘it’, the knack, the trick. I could work in France and still impress the punters.
Did it make up for my three days of hell? Did it fuck. I was still hot, uncomfortable, poorly-paid and on my feet for eight hours non-stop (there was no room for a stool - the summer holiday seemed endless.) But I think the taunts and jeers, the mob cynically casting a wary eye over my inedible produce changed me. It gave me a lot of confidence in front of an audience. So perhaps I shouldn’t look back, with such shit-tinted spectacles. But be thankful for my crepe job.
Ben Roome
If you’ve ever sent off for free stuff, you will know that you leave your details on an answerphone, and then, magically, the product appears on your doorstep. Well, actually, it’s not magic. Somewhere along the line is a shaven monkey with a headset strapped to their head, deciphering unintelligible recordings and typing addresses into an computer for despatch. I was one of those monkeys, helping teenagers and bored single mothers get their grubby hands on free jelly beans.
Work would kick off at 0900, when I sat at a large circular desk. There were partitions radiating from the table, spreading out far enough so that you couldn’t even see the unfortunate person next to you. Not that I would have wanted to see them anyway: the place was staffed by enormously fat, legging- clad middle-aged women who would occasionally honk and snort at each other, but thankfully never at me.
Set up in my own private hell, I would listen to endless answerphone recordings, and blindly tap them into a computer. Monotony was broken by people who left abusive messages on the phones, and on one occasion someone had played their flute at the telephone. The headset had a microphone, but it was never used; I went for up to 4 hours - literally - without making a sound. My one-hour lunch break was spent on my own in the local Wimpy so I wouldn’t have to communicate with the braying fatballs that were my co-workers.
A highlight of the job was the mildly smug feeling when a person refused to give their phone number, but we already had it on file from some handout-grabbing session they or their contemptible families had called in for previously. That, and sending torrents of jelly beans to my friends.
I quit after 10 days to become an ‘office assistant’.
Marc Hockfield
Well, I was bumming around the med in the late summer of 1985 and against all odds landed a dream job as a crew member on a yacht heading to Florida.
Having assured the aggressive Chinese-Irish skipper that I had vast experience of sailing around the Outer Hebrides, and a crossing of the Atlantic was a mere piss in the sea for me. In reality I’d once got the ferry to Barra from Oban.
After we sailed past Gibraltar a period of six weeks constant heaving began. Everything that I ate forced its way out of my thrapple, if I kept my gob shut my sphincter would open obligingly.My main job in between barfing and shitting was cleaning the decks, chopping up rotten fish and vegetables and maintaining the toilets.
After persuading them not to throw me off in Tenerife we finally berthed in Miami where the skipper threw my fragile and wrecked skeletal body off. Immigration grudgingly allowed me in on a limited visa. I was footloose in Miami beach, no where to stay, no money, didn’t know anyone and no fun. I ended up spending three nights sleeping on a pool sunlounger at some dodgy hotel.
The local transvestite hookers took their clients down the lane towards the beach that backed on to my sunlounger, all night long I lay awake trying vainly to drown out the plethora of slurping noises emanating from Deelite, Knosha and Brucetta. I met Knosha on the beach one day and she arranged for me to get a job in Fort Lauderdale at a 24 hour Sex shop cum Strip joint ran by Cuban gangsters.
I’d naively assumed that I’d be operating a till selling sex aids and magazines, however the manageress Debby (58) whose family came from an island off the coast of England called Wales, handed me a mop and pointed me in the direction of the coin operated porn cabins.
Three weeks of mopping jizz of video screens was enough. The sight of an eighty year old Jewish New Yorker whacking his flaccid prick over an all American boy gang bang video was the end as he trailed his spunk from the cabin to the front door and out into the hot bright Florida afternoon. One week later I was back in Glasgow tanned distraught and working in a poseur wine bar in the West End.
Mark McLachlan
I was once employed to cover 11 years of Northamptonshire’s rubbish in bin liners.
I turned up to this Biffa waste disposal site in the lovely fields surrounding the M1. You couldn’t see the waste disposal site from the motorway as they had put a big hill in front of it.
My instructions were that I was to meet a guy called Dave and he’d tell me what to do. He first laughed for quite a long time about my apparel (t-shirt, shorts and trainers - come to think of it, he might have been laughing at my legs … anyway). Then he pointed me towards a haystack sized roll of black bin liners on a metal cart, sent me out of the hut and told me to go round the corner and “up the hill”.
I turned the corner and stopped dead in my tracks - as far as my eye (fast filling with water) could see was a mountain of black gunge. It stretched out as far as I could see to the left and to the right and straight ahead. I now know what it is to look at a desert when you need a pint.
I walked up to the foot of the mountain and pressed my foot against it. It gave way and then sprang back to its original shape. Which was the shape of nothing. The shape of your bed in a pitch black room. The shape of things to come.
It smelt of burning turds.
I splonched over The Gunge (which I learned was the last 11 years of domestic waste produced by the good people of the county (nappies, baked bean cans, rubber bands, lawnmowers, Arab straps) decomposed to the extent that each bit of crap looked and felt exactly like every other bit of crap, a forerunner of chart music in the nineties), wheeling my trolley past plastic tubes expelling trapped methane, conveniently placed at head height, to find a group of men, all in white boiler suits and gas masks like you see on films dealing with aliens/small nuclear mishaps, pointing at me.
The men probably saw the fear and nausea in my face as they didn’t laugh at my clearly inadequate clothing, and only pointed at the ground and indicated that I was to start laying the bin bags over The Gunge. The idea was that when I had finished they could lay turf over it and bunnies could live there.
I quickly estimated that this would only take me about the rest of my life to achieve, factored in the remuneration (�3.15 per hour worked, no paid lunch break), dropped my cart handle on the floor and fucked off home for a smoke.
Although I now work, it is with a smile on my face and no gas mask.
Pete McG
My first job after leaving University was to a temp for large Insurance company activating direct debits.
Hundreds of little grey slips came to my desk every single day, and it was the mental equivalent of a conveyor belt at a factory. The same repetitive task over and over again. But the ancient computer system was slower than you could (theoretically) work, expectations low and quality control lower. So to cope I basically stopped working - there were enough other people doing the same thing to easily cover my
idleness.
Paid per hour I came in late and went straight for a mid-morning nap on the (empty) top floor. After a two hour lunch at the pub or smoking joints in the park it was time for mid afternoon football in the empty canteen with another temp. Then it was time to go home. Each week my timesheet was
signed by someone who worked at a different office so I could easily submit that I had worked 40 hours. One afternoon I came back from lunch so drunk on vodka I passed out at my desk for 3 hours. No-one noticed; after all, I was only a temp. In the end I lasted 9 months and if they looked in my drawer afterwards they would’ve found 5,000 inactivated direct debit slips.
Tuppence.
I got paid 18 pence an hour extra to work with dirties at the hospital laundrette. It wasn’t worth it. The laundrette was a hot, loud cathedral-sized warehouse filled with gigantic tumble driers, massive washing machines, and very strange people all dedicated to cleaning the bedding, surgical gowns, nappies and towels of the entire hospital. Masses of dirty laundry would come down these big shoots. They would be covered in shit, piss, blood, and once, with what looked like someone’s kidneys. As the new employee, you were on dirties. This meant you had to stand under these shoots, catch the laundry, and transfer it into a washing machine. You spent most of the day with your face in, or near, piss. After finishing work, your nostrils were impregnated. Everything smelt of urine: your body, your food, your girlfriend, and your mother. It took three weeks after quitting before I could smell again.
It was literally the craps. But there was an upside: the pleasure in someone else having to do it once you’d moved on. I was shifted, promoted if you will, to machine operator, after I had persuaded a similarly down-on-his-luck friend to join the laundrette, who as the new employee was now on dirties. My new job was to press a button when my machine made a funny noise. It was a great job, made even idler by sitting on the floor and using a broom handle to press the button. Such initiative didn’t go unnoticed, and I was moved on to bigger machines with more buttons, some of which flashed.
The denizens of the laundrette were insane. The great joke was to switch on one of the room-sized tumble driers while someone was inside cleaning it. My friend did this to the laundrette’s psychopath. It really was very funny watching the psychopath -now sporting a cartoon Afro and wielding a steel bar - chase my pal the length of the building to the outside world. The departure of my friend left a vacuum on dirties that needed filling. After tasting the sweet nectar of being a machine operator, one of the elite, I was fucked if I would go back to tasting piss, so walked out too, into a clich�d sunny day.
Ralph El Turk
Straight after finishing a Graphic Design degree four years ago I moved to London where I promptly decided I had enough of being creative, for the time being at least. Having specialised in illustration I realised that 20% of my degree (a miserly 2:2 at that) had been gained through a written dissertation, the other 80% of my grade having been gained through imaginative use of ink, paintbrushes and crayons. I decided, quite rightly, that I was appallingly under skilled for a 23 year old and joined various high street temping agencies who didn’t seem to mind that I had no idea how to work a computer and had never been near an office in my life.
They promptly got me jobs stuffing envelopes and making coffee, perfect employment for an idle git like me, but soon enough I hit paydirt. MAFF (Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food) were looking for a general office monkey, or “data inputter” for the Fisheries Department for at least half a year, and they were prepared to pay me the jaw dropping sum of �5 per hour. I snatched up the job and almost instantly wish I hadn’t. You could argue that manual labour of any kind is worse than a job in a warm office in Whitehall, but I disagree. If you ever get lucky enough to go inside MAFF you will notice that it is peopled by Papa Lazerou’s circus freaks from The League of Gentlemen. I think they must have some sort of government quota (very PC you know) on how many simpletons, social cripples, malignant dwarves and general accidents of nature they must employ at any one time. In my office we had an army-mad deaf lad with a hare lip and lisp who dreamed of climbing the ladder of MAFF, and opposite me sat Bill, a fat, sweaty, balding middle aged wreck of a man who had clearly left school back in the 60’s and come straight to MAFF and had never plucked up courage to leave. Every day he would come in half an hour after me, and flop into his chair with a soul destroying sigh of such sadness that no matter how much I prepared myself, would drop me into a pit of depression. He clearly hated his job, but got some kind of perverted gratification from sighing and tutting and carrying the weight of the world on his rounded and flabby shoulders.
All I did was file, as you can imagine everything was copied in triplicate, stamped and then put into a paper file, usually covered in dust and stored in rows and rows, there must have been thousands of them. I suppose government ministries should keep records, but they kept everything, no matter how trivial or unimportant, what’s more, my dull colleagues clearly thrived on filing, they loved it! People often complain about bureaucratic people and ‘red tape’, well I’ve met the people who make this red tape, and I can assure you they get a big kick out of it. As for me, it was the most boring, mind numbing and demeaning thing I have ever done in my life, and I have had a plethora of bad jobs.
After 3 months I could barely take any more, I was waking up every morning close to tears, it was destroying me, sucking the life from me. I started looking for an excuse to leave. Then one day I was asked to file a whole month’s worth of correspondence on the import of Fish Gametes into the UK. Fair enough. So I filed them, it took all day. Like so many times before I had no idea what I was working on and didn’t really care much, but for some reason I decided to ask what a Gamete was. “Sperm” was the simple reply, from my simple colleague. I digested this, and began to wonder why on earth we were importing tons of the stuff each day, and then started to worry about how the fish muck was ‘harvested’ in the first place (now that really is a crap job!). So I asked why we wanted so much fish semen. “To put in fish paste” was the reply. I left the next day.
Also, I haven’t eaten fish paste since, I suggest you follow my example.
Finlay Coutts-Britton
I was took unpaid work experience in the constituency office of my local MP. He used a 20 year old photograph on all his mailshots and propaganda, his ex wife was one of his secretaries and the other… well, there was some sort of tension there. She was fond of telling me how she was the highest paid secretary in the county.
Lydia Wysocki
I am still haunted by the memory of my day filling plastic Koala bears with honey. .
Warily I cast my mind back to Australia, 1987. Stuck in Perth with no money and a broken down van, I had no alternative. “Job in a honey factory, you say?” Ok, it didn’t sound as appealing as a day down the beach lying next to a board and pretending to be a surfer, but with nice thoughts of sweet smells, bee hives and flowers evoked I took the job.
The factory was a small wooden hut, and we stood there for hours, screwing on lids, sticking on labels and packing boxes. And we did it slowly. Really bored, slowly. But in our own ways we were happy, at least we were until it was our turn to work the honey machine. .
The honey, you see, had to be heated up to make it runny. Then it was pumped from a big vat out the back into a giant silver funnel. You sat below the funnel, using a foot pump to release bursts of honey into the plastic Koalas. Simple, except that the honey was pumped into the funnel quicker than it could physically be released into the bears. There was a mirror above you so you could keep an eye on your honey level, and as soon as it got near the top you had to run round the back and switch off the pump. Except that you kept forgetting.
Just as you were finding a subconscious rhythm on the machine, allowing your mind to wander away from honey bear land, the sweet stuff would hit you from above. Cascading from the honey heavens, the goo was merciless. You’d be buried in a sea of stickiness in seconds. Then it would keep on pumping all over you, all over the floor, under the doors and out onto the street, until someone got to the pump. It was horrible, and it was all over your head, in your eyes, up your nose, down your trousers, everywhere. .
It took about an hour to clean up a dreaded honey overflow, and we lost several hours of production that day. In all I think I earned about �10, Several days later I cut short my trip and returned home, still traumatised and slightly sticky in places.
Jim Drewett
Having left University with no idea where to start on life’s great decline into the cold world of work, I signed on for a recruitment day being given by one of those Employment Firms that are wacky, new age, forward thinking etc.
The group leader, Sam, whilst not dazzling us with his executive teeth and oily suntan, explained how we were going to brainstorm, teamwork and ‘think outside the box’ for the next eight hours while potential employers watched. Realising with horror that I was whoring myself, I began to demonstrate ‘teamwork’ by letting the other group members come up with a ‘framework’ on how the hypothetical Fox might cross a river with a Chicken and bag of Grain. (This actually happened.) Anyway, despite my lethargy and horror at joining the corporate world of brainstorming, I was actually chosen by an employer and offered a miserly salary to go and phone people and try and sell bits of computers.
My immediate line manager was a thin rake of a man, a poisonous gossip and a raging alcoholic whose team talks at the daily sales meeting involved swearing, swatting imaginary flies and trying not to fall over. We then hit the phones with gusto - until the 5th person told us to Fuck Off because he wasn’t a computer shop, that he was the local chemist and didn’t need a new mouse with an easy scroll button. As our call output was monitored, I soon devised cunning methods to beat the system. This involved phoning the speaking clock and various fax machines. Even the ear splitting scream of those machines was preferable to explaining the difference between a laptop and a printer to some odious gimp who was minding his Dad’s computer shop and had no intention of buying anything because he was 13.
The final straw came as the MD, who had had taken to making presidential style walkabouts of the sales floor, encouraging the top sales guys, haranguing the new guys like me for having no balls, imparting his home-spun sales philosophy on us all - “The world is an Oyster, Ben my son, an Oyster”- and surreptitiously playing ‘Tit Cricket’ with the girls in the office as they squeezed past him in an attempt to place another �1.26 profit on the sales board.
I think my resignation letter contained the words, ‘You wouldn’t know what motivation was if it came along and punched you in your face, you horrible, cock-sucking little Hitler,’ and it neatly summed up my shame and displeasure of ever having worked in the dank little hell hole.
Ben Atherton
When I was 17, I got a job working for a summer camp in rural Pennsylvania. It turned out to essentially be a camp for the rich, privileged and spoiled from Long Island, if you’ve heard of the Hamptons, you’ll know what I mean.
My bunk was full of 15 year old girls who would not listen to me, given that I looked younger than they did, and that they were much too busy changing outfits eight times a day and putting on eyeliner while listening to “Copacabana” repeatedly. And this was supposed to be a place where people were roughing it.
The camp was run by an exceptionally tanned middle-aged man called Maury, who actually recruited counselors for their athletic skills and then bet on them during games with other camps. He also wore a chin-length silvery wig, and lots of gold chains.
We got four days off the entire summer of 8 weeks, and I think I made $200.00 for my hard work and resulting mental problems.
Alana DiGiacomo
alana_digiacomo@hotmail.com
The worst job I ever had was that of a fruit machine engineer.
The job consisted of me driving from pub to pub in Coventry repairing amusement machines, pay phones and pool tables.
This must sound pretty good, spending all day in pubs, betting shops and amusement arcades, but it was not, it was hell. The average working day was spent in some of the most despicable dives, horrible urine scented community pubs situated in the middle of desperate council estates, populated by whores, alcoholics and mouth breathing, tattooed knuckle-draggers who used me to supplement their dole money by making false claims against the fruit machines so they could perpetuate their useless existences.
Aside from finding used condoms and syringe needles in pool tables, cleaning vomit off payphones and the constant threat of having a pool cue wrapped around the back of your head for the sake of a handful of loose change, one of the worst aspects of the job was going into bingo clubs to repair their machines.
Bingo clubs contain some of the worst examples of humanity you would never hope to meet, bitter and twisted purple-haired harridans who believe they have a licence to treat you like shit because they were stupid enough to lose a weeks pension or their children’s inheritance in a fruit machine. They would scream, shout and sometimes physically abuse you before going back to feverishly feeding pound coins to the machines with their withered, nicotine stained fingers.
The slack jawed no-hopers who staffed these places could never be relied upon to help you as they were always told to side with the customer, however ludicrous they were. Needless to say, I formed a very low opinion of the human race while working in that job, one that has stayed with me to this day.
Roger Eastaff
I went to a temp agency who got me a job ‘with computers’ at the local (i.e. a 30 minute bicycle ride) Granada TV rental building. It turned out the job was in a call centre where people called to say there was something wrong with their TVs or satellite systems.
We would get in, grab a paper cup of lukewarm water and hit the phones. We had those headset things which make your ears sweat and your head ache. A customer would phone, we then looked up their account on the creaking green-screen system, and arranged for an engineer to visit and fix it. We couldn�t promise that the engineer would get there at a certain time, we could only say �morning� or �afternoon�. Of course, the bastards would usually not turn up at all, causing the poor sod of a customer to call back and complain to us.
We were also the call centre for all sort of rental crap like pub coin phones, stereos etc etc. All these needed a different button to be pushed so we needed training to spot what sort of customer it was. It was non-stop phone, with no let-up in the calls.
Rigidly-timed breaks and lunch were spent sitting in silence with our colleagues, contemplating suicide.
All this was grim for an optimistic graduate with his whole life ahead. I finally got the sack when, after putting the phone down on one customer, I shouted �Fuck Off� loud enough for a customer on another line to hear me. I didn�t even get the pleasure of being sacked there and then. I got home to find a message waiting, �don�t bother coming back�
In my desperation, I then got a job in Peterborough � see Crap Towns.
Matthew Petty
I once left a perfectly good college course (where I could booze it up all day and look at lovely young girls) 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 these 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
psybernaut@disinfo.net
Moving down to London straight after University, me-and-my-friends soon discovered the streets were paved with syringes, empty spooky brew cans and chicken bones. Setting ourselves up in a hole in Lewisham we lived a simple life, passing the time by scouring the Monday Guardian Jobs section, crying ourselves to sleep and avoiding pitched Yardie gang battles.
Me-and-the-lads raised our self-esteem by taking temping jobs and becoming �Kelly Girls�. We all had our highpoints from recording data about the bits left over after medical operations, to dressing up in a huge inflatable mobile phone to hand out leaflets.
My own personally tailored stygian creek was a strip lit dungeon in Westminster. There I would take phone calls from the hierarchically obsessed government staff, �my number five has asked me to point out that there is a plant that needs watering next to the sink on the fifth floor� or more intriguingly �my number two says that the toilets are out of paper in the second floor Mens.� I would then have to phone either the janitor or the odd job man to see if they could be arsed doing the job.
The thing I came to realise is that it’s actually a rather clever ruse for cutting down employment figures � the government employ the unemployable. One fine example of care in the workplace could not be burnt out of my memory even after years of counselling � Fearsome George. Fearsome George would wander around the building handing out post. However he believed that one of the perks of his job was wander about without his trousers or pants on, and rush into the toilets to watch you while you were trying to urinate.
Still I did get to learn of the Senior Tory MP who was a little too regular in his morning routine. Everyday he would reside the same toilet cubicle at the same hour. The fire service had to be called as it appears that someone had accidentally left some superglue on the toilet seat. The file reported that three men had to yank him off, leaving remnants of �hair and skin�.
Danny Bobbeck
For obvious reasons I wish to remain anonymous. Here are the worst bits of being on the nighshift:
1: Inadequate heating overnight during the winter months. Staff often have to work wearing coats. Central heating system switches off at about 8pm and switches on 6am.
2: Hot food is NOT supplied overnight. Staff have to supply their own food for the microwave. A small box of pastries IS supplied or you can buy ice cold sandwiches from a vending machine (if any remain). If you forget to supply your own food you starve! Tea and coffee is free of charge.
3: Staff are frequently bawled out and humiliated by management in the open plan office for everyone to hear.
4: Most staff are not permitted to book a single day’s leave. They are forced to book a minimum of 5 days.
5: Antiquated 40 hour week. If busy, staff are expected to work overtime without pay. Some people are able to start later the next day, although this is not possible for most.
6: Overnight, most staff work a 12 - 14 hour shift without a proper break away from their workstation. If someone does disappear for an hour, they are usually reprimanded.
7: A strong “Someone must be to blame” culture. Management appear to have a problem accepting that things will go wrong during a daily live 3 1/2 hour show.
8: Staff at home on sick leave frequently get phone calls from management wanting to know “how much longer they will be off”.
9: Dayshift staff are given time off to go to the company Christmas and Summer parties. Nightshift workers are not!
Miserable
Anon
I held down a number of crap jobs as a student (call centres and the like), but none could quite compare to the horror of working as a night cleaner at the offices of a big telecommunications company.
This job, as advertised, should have involved pushing hoovers around a 24-hour logistics centre between 10pm and 6am for around �4 an hour. That would have been bad enough, but the people I had to share the work with made it hell.
Firstly, there was my boss, a crazed old blue-rinse bat aged about eighty who spent the time chain smoking L&B in the foyer, moaning about the police “victimising” her family and friends and finding ways to avoid signing off my payslips. Then there was my ’supervisor’, her seventeen-year-old daughter who alternated between chaining L&B, poking at her belly-button piercing which had gone very septic and finding the worst jobs possible in the building and giving them to me. Making up the rank-and-file (emphasis on ‘rank’) was the boss’s fourteen-year-old son, who smoked and played on a gameboy all night, but got paid more than me.
This left all the actual work to be done by a two-man team of myself and a big guy called Kevin. Kevin was tatood all over and had several teeth missing (he cheerily explained that he’d lost them in a fight after he hit someone with a pool cue in a nearby pub) and even the management seemed slightly scared of him. He also had some strange ideas about how best to lighten the workload - rather than use the hoover, he explained, he found it easier to scurry about on all fours, picking up the bits of fluff and crap by hand. I suggested that I’d use the hoover. He looked down at me. I spent two weeks scurrying for carpet lint.
Finally, as well as having to spend eight hours a night with a bunch of losers lording it over me with the infinite power contained in their ’supervisor’ name-tags and one semi deranged gorilla, I had the added fun of contending with the sleep-deprived, underpaid and justifiably craky nocturnal employees of the office, who liked to moan about the shitty standard of cleaning we were providing at every chance whilst they lay about waiting for a telecommunications crisis to justify their existence.
On my last night a guy who looked like he’d swallowed a KFC outlet whole, and who was attempting to smoke through the air-conditioning vent at the time, complained that my halfhearted 4am dusting was giving him asthma, and that I ought to get some GCSEs and a proper job
I became a seething ball of pent-up rage and had left within the half hour.
This story also has a postscript of sorts. Two years later, and doing another crap job as a freelance researcher for a magazine I was conducting interviews on New Street station in Birmingham when I ran into a couple who looked remarkably like my vindictive ex-supervisor and her brother outside near the taxi rank. I think they were sleeping rough there. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, but the vindictive bastard in me couldn’t help but think it might be all that bad karma. Anyhow, at least I haven’t run into that Kevin guy since.
Tom Royal
Everyone knows that Call Centres are crap - the sweatshops of the 20th Century/modern slave trade etc - but my Call Centre job was really, really crap.
After losing a perfectly reasonable office job I found myself lacking funds for an upcoming holiday and so decided that the best thing to do was to get a quick easy job that I would have no trouble working extra hours for more money and which I could leave without any problems. So I walked into my nearest Temp agency and, a few days later, I found myself sitting at a “pod” (a cluster of four or five desks arranged in a circle), a pair of
headphones on my face, staring at a cheap computer screen which froze consistently and taking calls for a cheap phone-call Card company.
Basically, people would buy cheap phone cards that would enable them to call relatives in far-off lands for half the price that BT offered. There was only one main problem: the company and the service was complete and utter
crap.
The lines wouldn’t work, the cards would break easily, the numbers on the cards were inaccurate - the list goes on. This meant that the service only worked reasonably well for a few hours on a Friday afternoon.
For the rest of the entire week I took abusive nasty endless calls from people who couldn’t speak English. Often they would put relative’s on to translate and I would find myself speaking to a 12 year old girl about the complexities of Telephone Line maintenance. Old women from India would begin to cry; men from Bangladesh would threaten me as they had 19/20 year-old
grandsons living in London and they were going to come to the office etc. In the end the calls became so abusive, so endlessly bleak and nasty and difficult to resolve, that one day I walked in and decided not to answer a single call.
You see I had worked out a little trick - when a call came through you simply answered it, put the abusive bastard/bitch immediately on hold/pause and left them there. They would think they were still in a queue (and would continue to hold and not hang up; thus according to the computer and my Line Manager (an aggressive little man-hating Lesbian, if ever there was on) I had answered and was dealing with a call. I would pretend to speak to a silent line and then, loudly and politely, resolve the problem. My trick soon spread around my “pod” and then the rest of the open-plan office - in the end I doubt a single call was being taken.
One day I was called in the Managers office along with my Line Manager (the above-mentioned lesbian) and told that my attitude was wrong and that if I didn’t “pull my socks up” (his actual words) I would be fired. I couldn’t believe that they weren’t reprimanding me for what I had actually done and so I calmly stood up and said, “This circus is over. So thank you and fuck you.” I then simply walked out.
I heard that 2 days later the “trick” was discovered and about 70% of the office were thrown out.
Gary Cole
To earn some extra money while studying I worked in an old people’s hospital as an Aid. Basically, I was assigned to a ward where it was my duty to clean everything from the kitchen to the toilets, as well as serve hospital food to the toothless old gummers.
Of the five wards, mine held the most terminal cases, unfortuneately, as well as the most mad. One old chap, unable to grasp the concept of the modern toilet - having been on the streets for 25 years - insisted on curling one off on the floor of the matron’s office every night. When I got to know her, I began to suspect that he may not be as mad as I’d thought.
Then the day came when I was asked to cover for a porter. This normally involved wheeling the dead to the morgue. When someone died the curtains were pulled round the bed and the body wrapped in a shroud by the nurses. This has to happen fairly promptly otherwise the shock of loss can trigger a little epedemic of clog-popping as the other ward residents get themselves in a tiz.
It was up to me to manhandle the body off the bed onto a wheeled trolley. The trolley was covered by a coffin-shaped tent of material with a velcro flap on one side to slide the body in through. The body I had to deal with that day was that of a little old lady about the size of Yoda. Even then, in death, she was suprisingly heavy. So much so that I stumbled while manhandling her from her bed to the trolley. The trolley scooted away from me, shot through the curtain, and I stumbled after it with the corpse in my arms. This immediately set off a whirlwind of panic as the other patients began screaming and fainting, while nurses rushed around trying to ensure that no one died.
THEN, when I finally got the body onto the trolley and to the morgue, rigor mortis had begun to set in. The tightening of the muscles meant that it slowly began to sit up on its stainless steel bench. In order to slide the bench into the freezer I had to put my knee on the legs and lie across the body to push the upper torso back onto the bench. At this point my supervisor turned up to see how I was doing. Having heard reports that I’d been ‘dancing round the ward with a corpse’ and now finding my sprawled across it in the morgue, I was immediately asked to leave. I have never been so glad to be sacked.
Frazer Payne
When I was 18 I worked at a nursing home. Most of the ‘residents’ were ga ga, all wore adult diapers and the only bloke in there died the first weekend I started.
I was responsible (!) for feeding, toileting cleaning them; feeding meant timing the cycle of grunts and yells, figuring out when the mouth was at its widest and tongue at the lowest point in the mouth, then shoving a load of pulverised food on a spoon up into the roof of the mouth and withdrawing it so that the food remained behind the gum. Usually most of it would come out as the new cycle of groaning commenced. Toileting and cleaning were normally done together. Whilst the old dear evacuated herself on the commode you were distracted from the death-metal odour by having to clean faces, armpits and ancient tits. Some of the tits were pert and young looking. I was terrified.
After the commode pan was removed and its delicious contents disposed of I would ‘get to work’ on the nether regions. I was in denial at this stage and questioned the authority of the person that employed me, surely this was illegal. On more than one occasion your granny hadn’t fully finished doing her business when I was down there cleaning her bits with warm, soapy water. Not only have I had my shoes shat on, but also I have physically cradled turds that have suddenly dropped into my hands. It was only on the second day that I realised you were supposed to wear gloves.
I am emotionally scarred forever and believe all old people are inherently evil.
Jamie Dwelly
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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."