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This Little Piggie Stayed at Home
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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Take control of your life and reclaim your right to be idle.
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The Idler is a bi-annual, book-shaped magazine that campaigns against the work ethic. It was founded in 1993 by Tom Hodgkinson and his friend Gavin Pretor-Pinney. The intention of the magazine is to return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject. As well as providing a radical and thought-provoking read, the Idler is also very funny. MORE …
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