Ask UK

Just to be an awkward git, one of the best but also the worst jobs I've had was working for BT as the emergency operator - you know, the goon that answers with "Emergency, which service?" when you dial 999 or 112.

Genuinely loved that job, but it paid an absolute pittance. It was both fast paced ad fulfilling, but some of the shit that you hear still rattles my cage even today. Most of the calls were a blur while the job was getting done well, but some of them made you feel pure helpless slow-motion despair while you tried every trick in the book to fast track a particularly horrible call to the appropriate service.

I'm glad I did it but I absolutely wasn't ready for the emotional devastation that it caused, and still caus es.

10/10 would do again A+++++

I've only really had four jobs. All retail and warehouse. So, it's kinda hard to decide which was the worst so I'm gonna go with the one I lasted one day on before walking out.

It was at a large garden centre. I spent the entire day standing behind the till. Standing. Assistants weren't allowed to sit down because they'd occasionally have to help a customer or move a large plant onto the checkout, which apparently the customer couldn't do?

Anyway I walked in the following morning and said it wasn't for me. I could have ghosted them, but I thought I owed them that much....Sods didn't pay me; fuck 'em.

I had a summer job working in a fish factory shelling scallops.

It involved sitting in what was effectively a huge fridge surrounded by other people doing the same thing. The sound of the knives on the shells was so loud that you couldn't really talk to the person sitting next to you. We had gloves, but the combination of the knives and the shells meant the gloves would have holes in them after a couple of hours so your hands would be wet all day. The smell got into your hair and clothes. And you'd start at 04:30 or 05:30 depending on when the boats came in.

Two spring to mind. I could rant forever about them but I'll try to keep it short.

First was an apprenticeship at a furniture logistics company. I was essentially an extremely overworked and underpaid spreadsheet monkey (I got paid £4 an hour). I received no training and gained no valuable experience or qualifications. In hindsight it's clear to me the company just wanted cheap labour from vulnerable teenagers.

After this I took a job handing out leaflets for a store which buys/sells goods. The job was in fact not to hand out leaflets like I thought but to harass people I saw walking towards CEX (to try and convince them to sell their games/consoles to us instead of CEX). Obviously this was seedy as hell and embarrassing. I'd get told off at the end of the day every day for not bringing in multiple PS4s or whatever.

I had a job in a local Co-op where I was bullied by the managers. That wasn't great.

I also had a job in quality assurance where to give you an example one of the tasks was to look at like 10k gloves front and back to check they were intact. We were not allowed to have the radio on or listen to music etc you can imagine the sort of people who were in that job long term, the conversation was not thrilling. I only did that job for a few months and I'd have been suicidal if I had to do it for much longer.

I once worked for a department store chain that no longer exists. I did 2 days of training in a classroom, then spent 2 days on the floor before I no call no showed and just never went back. It was just so freaking boring. I think I spent one day sorting a rack by size and color out of sheer boredom. Wound up getting a job at Denny's (shitty 24 hour chain diner) shortly after, and while that also sucked, at least it wasn't boring, and tips meant the overall pay was also better.

I had a security job for 2 weeks.

Jobs were scarce and this ghetto startup had openings, so I took something to perpetuate that eating thing.

I regretted it. I wasn't a mall cop, thank god, but I was there to pit-lamp hobos at one construction site and the next week moved up to patrol a pulp mill after-hours.

In those two weeks of skulking about I saw a lot of nature - mink and eagles and such - but I couldn't take the mediocrity and shady management; so when another opportunity came up I bolted.

It's funny but that's my worst.

Cold calling telemarketing ("Do you have time to answer some questions about x?"). Felt grotty with every call (got yelled at a lot too, be nice to people who call they likely don't want to call you any more than you want to receive the call), lasted 2-weeks.

Swapped out to data entry of paper responses into a spreadsheet, was so much better but only lasted 2 days before I went back to the phones. Am verg grateful I don't have to do that any more.

Telemarketing job.

They're usually shit jobs but I found out in the course of training that we were calling people who had cancelled their Wall Street Journal subscriptions in the days after people were canceling in large numbers due to the Rupert Murdoch takeover.

Like fuck you, this job is hard enough without hassling the very people who have already made up their damn minds.

All that and the sales quota prize had been stolen from the manager's office.

I quit when training was done.

Slaughter House cleanup

Tech support. I was with a broadband company that beams microwave internet to rural customers. Their only other options were dial-up (in 2019~) or much more expensive satellite. The company was inflating its network stats by buying up small regional ISPs and claiming their users/infrastructure as its own. This resulted in patchwork hardware across the entire country. Some towers I could access with our normal software. Some required downloading proprietary software, others were from the 1990s and could only take command line interactions. With any hardware that wasn't ours, it was usually cheaper to disconnect the area than to service it.

So meemaw calls in because she hasn't been able to read her far-right facebook conspiracies for the day. She hasn't spoken to her children in decades so I'm the first human contact she's had in a while. I pull up her system and it's from 2001. Nothing works with my interface and I can't tell if the tower is malfunctioning or if its radio transmitter or her radio receiver is or if there's a tree somewhere in the 15km~ distance between the two. The last maintenance entry was five years ago and there are under a dozen people connected to it so the company won't invest further. My call centre's QA team is listening in on the conversation for up to ten minutes. I'd have to string the boomer along for those ten minutes, listening to all the insane shit they have to say about minorities, while pretending there is any hope of their service returning. Then after I knew QA wasn't listening I'd quickly explain the situation, urge them to go with any other option, and end the call before my time metrics were fucked up by trying to help them.

All the while I'd be looking at their internet speeds and fixating on the broadband gap. It took them days to download what I can in ten minutes. Our service was the best they could get and the company existed to deprive them of access to data.

I took a position at a low tier (chain) hotel because we had just moved back to the US and i figured it would tide us over until something better came up.

I went one day to check it out, and ....it was bad. The GM showed me around and said I would start the week of Thanksgiving, I went one day and saw what was what and started prepping for the week. When I asked where the staff was the answer was not encouraging (they were non existant).

I actually got up on turkeyday, showered, dressed, kissed the family goodbye and made it about 2 miles before i came to my senses and turned around.

Family was extremely happy, the GM wasn't...It was going to be a shitshow anyway.

Went shopping, called up a couple friends and had a big ol' Thanksgiving meal at home.

Worst job I ever had was keeping the lobsters out of Jayne Mansfield’s arsehole

Dealing with the public

Assistant camp cook at a Boy Scout Camp. The assistant cook does almost all of the prep work for the head cook, and does all the kitchen cleanup. The dishawasher handled only dishes from the dining hall, not any of things used for cooking. M-F I had to be in the kitchen by 5:45am, got about an hour off after lunch--if I managed to complete everything quickly--and then got out of the kitchen at around 9pm. I also had meal breaks, as long as they didn't interfere with getting the job done. Sunday I had to be in the kitchen at 3:30p (we only did dinner for the arriving troops), and Saturday I got to leave at noon or so since we only did breakfast before they all left. I had room and board--which was a milsurp wall tent with a milsurp cot--I had to supply my own bedding--and whatever I wanted to eat once the campers were done and my work was done. My wages were the princely sum of something like $175/week. In the early 90s. It worked out to something like $2.50/hr (which would be about $5.15 now).

And to top it off, the camp director got fired, a new one came in, and he fired all the kitchen staff so that he could bring his own people in. I was told at the time that I would have been the only one he kept, but he didn't want to change his team. So I got moved to another camp about 90 minutes away.

Head cook was cool though; he'd been a cook in the Navy for decades, starting in Korea.

Telecoms engineer. The management. Forty-three years, two months and nineteen days. 😀