My worst job has got to be working in a mental health care centre last summer. I only managed two shifts. For a start, the house was in Hounslow, a place kind of like one of the outer rings of Saturn in terms of distant from Central London. Hounslow sucks.
Anyway, the job itself: I was shit at it.
My first chore was to take a young woman for a walk in her wheelchair. “You’ll have to chat and reassure her that you’re there,” they told me. She couldn’t talk at all and I’m not much good at banter - nevertheless I wheeled her along and managed to come up with some crap to mumble. I don’t think she liked me that much because have way through the journey she started to squeak a bit, and then began to cry. “Shit,” I thought, hastily backtracking and wheeling the chair around, back in the direction of the home. Unfortunately a wheel hit the curb, I hadn’t tied her in properly, and she flew quite dramatically through the air, landing in a bundle on the concrete in front of me.
The second mishap came when I had to get someone into bed. It shouldn’t have been difficult, I only had his face to wipe and a pair of pyjamas to put on. I only realised that I hadn’t put some of those protective plastic gloves on when he pissed all over my hands.
The second shift was the one that did it. I thought I was settling in on the second one, I really did. The girl in the wheelchair smiled at me, the catastrophe forgotten; the boy who had pissed all over my hands now held one of them as we settled down on the sofa and watched Eastenders on TV and another boy - I don’t know what his name was, Roger or whatever - was obviously quite taken with me. “What’s your name?” he asked me. “El - lo -ise,” he kept repeating, over and over, when I told him.
“El-lo-ise!”
“El-lo-ise!”
“El-lo-ise!”
I’m not quite sure how long it went on for. I was taken up with something else - trying to talk to one of the other residents, I suppose - but he kept going on and on, chanting my name in an ascending crescendo. Eventually, thinking he might actually want something, I looked around.
And there he was - or rather it was - a fully visible dick being wanked off very close to my face as he sang my name.
I didn’t know where to look.
Anyway, after that I decided that the job wasn’t really for me. A bit too much excitement - more than I could cope with.
To top it all the agency lost my shift timesheets, I couldn’t be arsed to go all the way down to Hounslow and get another one filled out, so I never even got paid.
Eloise Millar
Somewhere between an office and a factory, the call centre occupies a strange area between blue and white collar work. In Bristol, it is often said that when the slave trade ended, they just built call centres instead. Soon there will be so many that they will run out of land and start building them on ships. The sole purpose of call centres is to take shit for someone else. I spent four hellish months working for a certain adverstising company taking abuse from the general public.
Crazy people, rude people, bomb threats, deranged perverts, the arrogant and the idiotic. It seemed like no-one normal ever rang this national freephone advert/information line. To add to this the company seemed to hate all its staff. Toilet breaks were timed. Coffee breaks, timed to the second. How the hell I lasted four months in that pit of despair, I’ll never know. Never again. Ever.
Many many years ago I set off to Australia as a young fresh faced gap-year student.
My parents had ‘kindly’ arranged for me to spend a couple of months working on a farm. It turned out that the main business of the farm was not sheep as I had not unreasonably supposed but chickens. Chicken farming is a very fordist business. It has very little in common with the sweet, rustic and rural image many of us have of farming. The ‘farm’ consisted of several large sheds filled with cages that maybe had 20/30 chickens in an area a little over a metre square. There were maybe 500+ such cages on the site.
Amongst several contenders - my grimest job was patrolling and inspecting the chickens. If a chicken became lame, its cage-mates would start pecking it and if not stopped would peck err, its erstwhile colleague to death. My job was to remove the lame bird from the cage and ring its neck. This was never an easy task - frequently I over wrung the wretched beasts’ neck in a vain effort to reduce post-death spasms. All this left me with was a still spasming headless body in one hand, and a small and quite pissed-off looking chickens head in the other.
Perhaps inevitably I started to do my rounds less than diligently - letting canibalisation take its course seemed somehow preferable to my incompetent and gruesome methods.
David
During a summer break from University about 5 years ago I worked a ten-week stint at a Jigsaw factory deflating plastic wrapped jigsaw boxes.
I had just broken up very messily with my girlfriend of the time and was penniless to boot. After enduring the scorn and derision of jobsworth temping agency staff in my home town for weeks on end, I jumped on the first job that came my way at a Jigsaw factory in Watford.
My job was to lean on and thus deflate the plastic wrapped boxes of jigsaws as they rolled out of a Heath-Robinson plastic wrapping machine. I worked 11-hour shifts with two 15 minute breaks for the heady sum of �3 an hour.
I was the youngest person on the factory floor by about 30 years and my colleagues insisted that the radio was stuck on Capital Gold all day long. If you’ve never listened to Capital Gold before, it’s program consists of a moronic middle-aged DJ with 4 records taking requests from oppressed factory workers who could only think of those 4 records that the DJ had been playing at them for the past 10 years.
My fellow workers had long ago been zombified by the sheer monotony of their work, which like my task was more repetitive than what the machines had to do.
One old dear, you know the type - hysterically cackling and cranking out meaningless clich�s and platitudes with a manic intensity, would repeat every 10 minutes, like clockwork “It’s not that bad here, after a while you just switch off”.
The jigsaws themselves were the same ones they were producing 30 years earlier and the pictures on them were shockingly cheesy. They were made from a single piece of card that was cut and broken up by a machine with a flail before being dropped into a bag that goes inside the box. Every week this machine would seize up and when they opened it up, thousands and thousands of jigsaw pieces would fall out, virtually every single jigsaw that came out of that pokey, grubby factory was missing at least one piece.
After a couple of weeks of this I lost the power of speech, and even today I can’t stand to look at a vaseline-lensed picture of kittens without starting to drool.
James Prendergast
james.prendergast@cmc.co.uk
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.
The average working day was spent in 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 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.
Rog.
I used to have this summer job as a student in a factory that made bandages and cotton wool products. It was an old rambling victorian mill which was now half empty and was boiling hot and humid, with steam sprayers, as the cotton wool had to be kept damp.
It was also hugely dusty - you would come out at the end of each shift with white hair and of course, nobody wore a mask. So there I was, employed as a bandage folder.
Now, large surgical bandages were folded by hand in this place. You got a large piece of lint fabric, cut to size and had to fold it so the edges were turned in and it was exactly square. You had to stand up and lean over a table to do this and had to make 30 an hour - one every 2 minutes. Then they would go off to be machined. For this back-breaking nit-picking work you got paid £3.11 ph. and I was shite at it, all my bandages got rejected and I had to refold them. I was so bad that I eventually got stuck on the string-cutting machine. This involved getting a huge roll of string, sticking the end into the machine, setting the ancient machine to cut a certain length of string (or sometimes just for a bit of excitement you’d get to cut elastic instead) and then putting a box underneath to catch the pieces of string as the came out of the machine. You’d have to change the roll of string/elastic about once an hour and the box would fill up about every half an hour, but that was it. You could happily sit behind this machine and sleep and read without anybody noticing you. I managed a whole 6 weeks of this and even got a bonus as I had managed to produce more string than the expected rate!
The next year I came back and spent 6 weeks sticking stickers for special offers on bags of cotton wool. I was so good at it that I got promoted to supervisor, which meant that I could decide which radio staion we listened to and didn’t have to make the tea anymore. The only perk of working in this place was unlimited free cotton wool and cheap plasters.
Fiona White
.. was how the fruit and veg shop was known after Southport rioters had picked the appropriate letters off the shop front. In university breaks (when I wasn’t laid up in bed on unpaid sick leave for a bad back sustained moving cardboard boxes of rotten cabbage from one side of the shop floor to another) one of my key duties was to maintain The Trolley.
The shop was too small for regular trolleys, rendering single Trolley as the high altar of ASS. Here Mr ASS would attempt to recoup precious pennies by selling pawfuls of rotting fruit for 10p or less. It was my sole duty to top-up Trolley throughout the day, selecting only the foulest fruits for the happy shoppers of ASS to purchase at a knockdown price.
Standing by Trolley, scooping up putrefied handfuls of gunk in my stained turquoise tabard, I’d wait as one “mate” after another took their turn to come in and laugh at me bag up the treasures for human consumption. This was the only light relief from the tragic pensioners who would regularly fight me and each other for the choicest items, while doggedly claiming the fruits were “for the birds”.
Helen Monks
helenm@centaur.co.uk
Yeovil might well have been a fairly nice town at some point - but I’m only basing this on the fact that its got a church. The rest has been decimated by a red brick shopping centre and various out-of-town superstores.
James Garland
Yatton is near Bristol, off the A370 on the way to Weston-Super-Mare (which is itself bound to feature on the crapmap sooner or later).
In Yatton, the bones of children do not grow properly. A typical teenager will appear to have rickets and something odd about the skull. Often the dome of the head will appear to be missing completely, and the jaw is extended toward the ground. I am no scientist, but there must be something lacking in their diets - perhaps food.
In Yatton, the elderly are like dirty, damaged vultures. They converge at awful jumble sales. They rummage and fight for socks and underpants that have been torn from the stiff corpses of their previous ancient occupiers.
The newly-clad wizeners parade, in purple Sta-Prest flares and grimy beige duffel coats, worn with ancient carpet slippers, toothless to Somerfield to buy Tizer and Superkings. If they speak to each other, nobody knows what they say.
In Yatton, I have seen a woman die in the doctor’s surgery.
In Yatton it is always cold and dark.
Ben Woodcock
YATTON’S HAIRDRESSERS ATTACKED!
‘Manukenkun’ writes:
I used to have my hair cut there as a child. They refused to dye it black as they said it wasn’t natural, this is from people who willing dye old ladies hair blue…
Highlight: The Flighty Cod chip shop
Lowlight: Waiting to get served in the Black Bull and then tasting the beer afterwards.
Yarm is the worst sort of town: a whited sepulchre.
Superficially, it appears an attractive market town in the industrial wasteland of Teesside. However, spending any amount of time there one will discover that no resident has any taste or cultural discernment, the pubs attract a crowd similar to that found in the Costa del Sol, complete with fake tans and skimpy clothes.
Weekends and Tuesdays (singles night) are even worse with fighting yobs and divorcees on the hunt from out of town to pull the perceived better class, and hence (they assume) richer, resident of Yarm. . After 11 the only place to go is upstairs above a pub for a disco where the once-tasted, never-forgotten Tetley Imperial is served. Taxis will then charge a minimum of �5 to take you half a mile out of the place.
Nowhere is the famed northern friendliness on show.
Alumni: Tim Vincent, Half of Mansun.
Amenities: Football club, pound shops.
Wrexham is the proud owner of a football club, and nothing else whatsoever, since the brewery closed- it produced Wrexham Lager, “The ONLY Welsh lager”, which, unsurprisingly, was not popular in the country of Cery’s Matthew’s birth because it was only about 3% ABV.
The people there generally have children by the age of 18. It is at this age that they usually get a job in the Numark Pharmacy packing plant or one of the many sports shops (which are there to satisfy the demand for Kappa tracksuits), and by the age of 50 they’ve often grown as wide as they are tall, and waddle about the town centre looking for cheap clothes they can actually squeeze into.
Elisa Parish
The most attractive thing about Wolverhampton was the multi-story car park on School Street, the roof level of which used to offer attractive rural vistas of Staffordshire, Shropshire and the Wrekin. However, the council knocked it down in the 90s. Now its most attractive feature is an orbital dual carriageway so impossibly difficult to negotiate (unless you’re a local) that it actually performs a service to the community by keeping curious outsiders away from this gutter belch of the West Midlands.
Wolverhampton was made a city in 2001, and as the nation shrugged, TV pictures were beamed into every home by way of the 6 o’clock news, showing Wolverhampton’s town crier (who reasoned that a testimony to 60s concrete renewal required a town crier?) announcing this momentous event to at least 6 interested residents gathered on Dudley Street in the pissing rain.
According to some, the night life in Wolverhampton has improved in the last few years. Yeah, it’s great if you’re a suede-headed moron who diligently phones each of your mates in turn before a night out to make sure you aren’t all going to be wearing the same colour YSL shirt, before heading down to Yates’s to pull a 40 year-old mother-of-5 and punch someone in the face for having a different skin tone to yourself.
Unemployment in Wolverhampton is, of course staggeringly high and the city is so divided along class and racial lines that it is hardly a city at all but a collection of tribal groupings. Some of its outlying suburbs (such as Heathtown) are terrifying concrete wastelands too terrible to describe (Heathtown is where the people of Wolverhampton go to die).
The town has given birth to such talent as Slade and Eric Idle. It’s local politicos, whisky-supping sham socialists to the core, have the ruddy faced corpulence of the undeniably corrupt about them.
In the evenings, the smell of hops from Banks’s Brewery permeates the town like the stench of a trapped animal slowly decaying in a drain pipe.
Michael Thompson
Famous residents: Shakin’ Stevens
Everybody says: “I ain’t being funny or nuffin’”
Amenities: A pond
Entertainment: An old man with Alien Hand Syndrome
The first thing you will notice when you leave Woking train station is a sign which reads - ‘Welcome to Woking, Home to All-Weather Shopping’.
You will then confronted by an underground thoroughfare which you must go thorugh to get into the town proper. This being part of the main route for a legion of WKD swilling, acned, YSL-shirted young Herberts, the passage is permeated by the stench of piss, puke and rotting kebabs.
Thus you will be initiated into Woking culture with a game played by all of its inhabitants - trying to hold your breath long enough to make it out onto the steps at the other side.
On these steps on the other side there is usually a paralytic tramp, peeting three litres of White Lightening, contentedly pissing himself and creating a quite beautiful stepped waterfall effect, the like of which you might see in say the Brecon Beacons for example.
So perhaps it is that - the noxious cocktail, the Eau de Gutter, that causes the synapses in your brain to click and shudder or perhaps more simply the other end of the tunnel really does open out upon some whole new dimension. A new dimension where morality and intelligent thought become redundant (or are “fucked off out the window” in Woking-speak). Whatever it is, when in Woking you are subject to some terrible evil force.
So you are alone, alone to shop, whatever the weather. Unless there’s a very heavy downpour, in which case the public conveniences tend to flood. You wander around the Peacock Centre aimlessly, you find yourself being hypnotized by pan-piped Roxette. Your eyes glaze.
Before you know it you’ll be “sporting and cavorting”, attending stripper’s nights and dry-humping oiled-up Tom Selleck lookalikes with the best of them. There wi’ll be no stopping you.
A month or so later and you’re out of control. You’ve taken one alcoholic Irn Brew too far and you may have forgotten that there is indeed a world beyond the Peacock Centre, which you will now refer to affectionately as ‘Peacocks’ . To slowly reintegrate yourself into society, you start going away for the odd weekend, to Calais, to Brugges or Charing Cross police station where you manage to land yourself after a particularly tremendous day at Notting Hill carnival.
When you return to Woking, everyone will of been extremely worried about you because they “don’t venture out much and it’s dangerous up in that thar smoke” and they say they heard about a girl who got gang-raped by ten men and you say, some girls get all the luck but you don’t mean it.
So the rain beats down rhythmically on the Peacocks roof and the toilets slowly overflow and Roxette is ‘Dressed for Success’, in some kind of Bolivian poncho by the sounds of it, and you know, you may never leave again.
Sarah Janes
Witney is supposedly famous for its manufacture of blankets, which may still go on, and Douglas Hurd was and may still be the local MP. You can imagine for yourself how exciting it is to spend time there.
I fucking hate the place.
Tim Wild
It started off as a spar town in the turn of the century, but the demolition of the railway service has left it a shabby deprived shell.
If you have seventeen screaming kids, tattoos on your face and neck, a slot machine addiction and love crap food, come to Withernsea, you’ll love it!
Lisa
THEY SELL CRAP TO PEOPLE FROM HULL
Withernsea’s primary industry seems to be selling seaside touristy crap to daytrippers from Hull. The sea wall is made up of cement blocks that look like somthing built to protect a WWII battlefield from a tank invasion - which maybe is the only thing that would make Withernsea more pleasant. When I was there a crowd had gathered peering into the depths of these blocks, so we wandered over to see what the attraction was. They were watching a group of rats, frolicking around in the litter.
Richard Taylor
Sure it’s pretty and historic, but it’s hardly the bastion of civility many would have you believe.
Any character disappeared from the town centre when the high street received the chain store make-over, house-prices are exorbitant and cater exclusively for well-heeled London-employed family-builders seeking old England, and the countryside has been hewn by Maggie’s M3 legacy. And that isn’t the half of it. It’s the middle-class complacency, nay arrogance that defines the place.
This reactionary character is personfied by the town’s most odious insititution, Winchester College, and its inmates. Young public school boys stride the historic streets, comfortable and sublimely superior in the knowledge that daddy’s considerable land-ownership and board-room interests will see them through to their positions as Tory MPs
and beyond.
John Mitchell
It’s a great place if you have a penchant for baby’s head and peas (meat pudding and peas), barm cakes (bread rolls) and rugby league (similar to football but not as good).
The nightlife is great; both cabaret AND bingo all on the same night, but only in the classier social clubs.
Russ
There is nothing in Wick except sullen faced youths hanging around chip shops and denim clad drunken tinkers who talk to cider bottles.
There is nothing to do except drive cars for no reason other than to make their tyres squeak with handbrake turns.
Everybody in the entire town has snot hanging from their noses.
It has a river full of shopping trolleys.
The best thing about Wick is the lighthouse built by Robert Louis Stevenson’s uncle. Aged 17, RLS was in Wick and hated it. He ended up living in Western Samoa because geographically it was the furthest point from Wick on any atlas.
They have an amusement park in Wick. It is called a field. Their only export is Caithness Glass - most of which the factory buys from Accident and Emergency on a Friday night.
Highlight: Bagdale Hall Hotel & Bottle of 1989 Ch�teau Lafit Rothschild I drank there. Dracula.
Lowlight: Watching some local yobs kick a dog to death.
One of the settings for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this small town appears quaint on first laying eyes on it. After driving down through the beautiful North Yorkshire Moors and through the village of Sleights one could initially be forgiven for thinking that we’d arrived in a pleasant Spanish fishing town; the small of the sea and the beautiful architecture are a treat for the senses.
It is only on leaving one’s hotel, or for that matter, the car, that you actually realise where you are. No longer do the views of the Abbey matter, or the cry of the gulls in this rustic Algarve, what matters is that you’ve landed in the middle of commoner land and are surrounded by people whom you wouldn’t let lick the crap of your shoes.
Wednesday and Saturdays see the local ‘club’ and pubs heaving at the seams with slappers and slags who have nothing else better to do than get pregnant, being let into pubs after giving the doorman/fisherman a blow job. The place is also apparently famous for being THE place to buy dirty heroin, on the outskirts of the town you can see all of the council and Barrett houses which are the homes of the local smack heads, I advise not staying around and to leave to Robin Hood’s Bay (Seven miles south and full of upper middle class whom I can tolerate quite happily).
Anon
Is this ironic?
I defy you to find one person smiling, or even anyone who isn’t thinking “Why am I here? Why am I here? Why am I here? Please someone kill me,” over and over again, then holding their breath until they pass out.
That really is it.
It sucks the daylight out of the day and the happiness out of anyone who goes near it.
Jon Humphreys
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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."