What's The Worst Job You Ever Had?

I spent an awful year working for Sainsbury. I was supposed to be an assistant manager, but the manager was embroiled in a constant war with the store manager and had no time to spare for me. Then she left and I was in charge with no idea how all the computer stuff worked or what I was supposed to do about stocktaking or ordering. We were very short staffed and HR made no attempt to source more people. As management I was working from 6.30 am till 10pm, usually with no break for lunch because there was just no one else. I told the store manager that I would stay if they found a new manager and I would just be a normal assistant. It didn't do much good as when there was an overtime ban the manager told me not to worry because it wouldn't apply to me and I could carry on working my 15 hour days!

Primrose53

I did a summer season in a very posh hotel as a chambermaid which would now be called a housekeeper I guess.

My friend and I started together and wore blue nylon tops.
We started work at 6.30 through till 2.30 then had to go back at 6.30 to turn the beds down. Most guests were in the restaurant then so we used to literally run along the corridors and into all the rooms as we could finish as soon as we were done.

The Head Housekeeper double checked all our work and was very particular. One time a guest must have had diarrhoea and there were pools of it all over the thick, gold carpet. I was like 🤮🤮🤮 and had to get my friend to clean it up.

We had dirty old men chatting us up, porno photos left laying around, dogs nearly attacking us in bedrooms, disgustingly filthy toilets, slimy face cloths, rude people and cigarettes stubbed out on leftover breakfast trays.

Ew! The good old days eh?

During my nurse training I had a placement in a chest hospital. Long before the days of disposable items. The sputum cups were metal and it was my job to clean them. 🤮

Hulling strawberries for huge summer events. Sat on the floor, bent over for hours, preparing thousands of pounds of strawberries.

I could barely look at a strawberry for years afterwards.

My first and probably worst job was as a papergirl! Out at the crack of dawn in all weathers. My father made me a trolley as the bag was so heavy, especially on a Sunday with all the extra supplements. I was paid 10 shillings a week.

When I was between jobs in my teens I did temp work. One awful job stands out - I worked for two very overweight elderly bachelor brothers. Let’s call them Mr Tweedle and Mr Dee. They spent all day dictating letters to each other which I then typed up. I stood it for a week and then told the agency I wasn’t going back.

My grandmother used to say I could "sell ice to the eskimos". (You have to call them inuits now). She was probably correct.

My first job at 14 (would not be allowed now) was in a chip shop a few minutes from my parents house. It was a bit hot and steamy and I went home each night with grease all down the front of my wrap around apron I had to wear. I got twice as much as my friends who worked in shops.

The drunks who came in on a friday and saturday night were a bit of a challengs but I learned to humour them. And it was easy to persuade them to buy more things. Nowadays they call it upselling.

I kept that job on and off for several years and it came in useful when I was studying for my library exams and only working half time. I was paid cash in hand - no payslip or deductions. Plus no travelling time and a fish and chip supper after every shift.

The worst job I ever had was as a telephone debt collector while I was a mature undergraduate. We had a lot of pressure from the manager to make people pay. This was in the 1980s before any of the more recent financial crises. As you can imagine there was a lot of abuse and stress. I felt worthless in myself doing the job although I was good at it. However it taught me a lot about the debt industry and how little power debt collectors have. I left after 6 months and did more phone work as a market researh interviewer and later on inbound sales. They were easy peasy in comparison.

I also worked on a phone chatline as a dominatrix which was actually quite a lot of fun. Except that I was the only one in the office who did not smoke. You can be sure that I learned to deal with bossy men and which buttons to press to bring them down. I did that job for my 3rd year anthropology dissertation and got a 1st for it.

Done lots of other part time jobs - door to door sales, film extra, night club singer.

Like Primrose53 I was - very briefly - a hotel chambermaid.
It was a slightly seedy and run-down hotel in Earls Court whose clientele was almost exclusively Saudi Arabian men. Perhaps this accounted for the grossly overheated rooms. I can still smell the fug of cigarette smoke, BO and worse that would explode out of the rooms as we opened the doors. Ugh.
On the first morning, the girl I was working with warned me about the bathrooms. Turds on the floor, turds in the bath, towels used instead of loo paper and the indescribable stink that made your eyes water.
Some of the guests, if they returned to their rooms while we were working, seemed to assume we were some kind of complimentary "extra" provided by management and were quite resentful when we objected to having our boobs and backsides groped.
The one and only upside was that most of them seemed to have no notion about the value of English money and while some would tip you a threepenny bit, others would happily hand us a £5 note each.
I only lasted a week but I took home more than a month's pay in tips and, ever since, I've taken great care to leave the bathroom decent when staying in hotels.

we were some kind of complementary extra

I’m so sorry Scribbles, but that really made me laugh 😂

Some very interesting and entertaining jobs on here. Mine are not so entertaining I’m afraid.
I had several jobs as a teenager and student, but two were particularly horrible. The first when I was fourteen, I worked a job share with my friend. She did the morning and I did the afternoon, on Saturdays, in a restaurant. Our job was to wash the dishes by hand, no dishwashers then. The huge sink, was full of the most disgusting, greasy, brown water which we had to wash up in. It made me never want to eat in such a place. It was silver service too.
The second was a summer holiday job in a Co-op food factory. It was mind numbingly boring. We did different jobs, filling boxes with eight jars of jam, scrubbing the labels off jam jars that had been wrongly labelled, ripping jellies out of jelly moulds, nearly ripping our hands into pieces in the process. Awful, just awful. I lasted the six weeks I planned to last, but hated it.

When I was 17 I had left hairdressing apprentice job because I applied for a typing course. I was hell bent on an office job but needed a job until my training started. I got a job in a then famous bakery which had shops on every high street. It was an eye opener that’s putting it mildly it was mid 70s.

In the late 80s I was a full time mum but the mortgage rate went from 4% to 15% in just a few weeks I had to get a job to help with the bills. I got a job in a school as an extra covering in the kitchen and cleaning I hated it but it helped with the finances. Let’s just say at the time school dinners were disgusting and cleaning toilets was worse. The staff toilets were worse than the pupils absolutely disgraceful.

Aww Sago that's horrendous.
I've had 2 jobs in my life that I could class as worse jobs - Checkout at one of the big supermarkets. Horrible customers and we were all watched to make sure we talked to all of them. The other was a chalet maid at a local holiday camp. Walking round with all your equipment and sheets especially in the pouring rain and chalets like bombsites.

Although my official title was Personal Assistant to the Sales Manager, my day to day work mainly involved filing and plonking out dictated letters and reports.

The biggest waste of time was typing out written reports from the regional reps. Apparently my boss couldn't read hand written reports.

My boss insisted that I typed exactly what he said including his grammatical mistakes and that I typed heigth, width and depth when describing the dimensions of a refuse bin. After a while it ceased to grate and I became used to being just an extension of the typewriter.

I stuck it for over two years as I had a mortgage to pay.

Scribbles, Sago, yuck and yuck!
Nothing I have had to do compares.

My most boring job was in a hairdressers sweeping hair all morning.
Most annoying was in Woolworths for a Summer with a control freak for a boss who hated to see me not looking busy.

Strawberry picking in Norfolk where I was so incompetent my piecework wages didn't cover the rent I had to pay my friend's mum. I ate a lot of strawbs.

A geriatric psychiatric ward packing bedsores and the stench of urine put me off nursing as a career.

A children's hospital with some very sad cases and lonely children needing cuddles.
I was an au pair one summer in Paris avoiding lecherous men but not as bad as some of your experiences.

Years ago, I’m 68 now, when I was mid 20s. I had had a few mental health appointments which I now window was PTSD due to being made homeless as a teenager. My then manager gave me a lecture about my absences for appointments, didn’t give me a rise and one person stopped talking to me. My DH came along and dragged me out, the only problem was that I could not get a reference and could not find a job! We had a mortgage too. Being penalised for hospital appointments would be illegal now. The company was positively Dickensian.

Now know not window!

Post-retirement I got a P/T job as a seasonal worker in a local large and quite well known supermarket. I was put on 'counters' which basically meant serving on deli, cooked foods and wet fish alternately. The rest of the team had been there some years and wasted no time in taking liberties...........it didn't matter which section I was working on, all the crap jobs at closing time were mine whilst they all stood around gossiping.........I put up with it for a fortnight before telling the store manager just what I thought of him, his staff and the store in general.

A holiday job at Selfridges. I spent all day in the sub-basement writing the price on the back of Christmas cards and clipping the envelope and the card together with a paper clip.

Some times for variety we had a machine which you set to print a price and clip the card and envelope together automatically. You just sat there; cards one side envelopes the other, putting them in the machine and pressing a leaver.

Do I need to say how mind bendingly boring this was? There were three of us and because we were in a sub basement we could not get any radio transmission, so did not even have any music to lighten the boredom of our task.

After a while w began drifting into work a few minutes late, strteching out our coffee and lunch breaks.....

I was there for 6 weeks, but liberation came in the 6th week. It was the first week in Septemeber and Selfridges started selling Christmas cards, we had a priced a seasons supply of cards and we were sent onto the shop floor to load the cards into the cabinets set up and sell them to customers.

Six weeks of standing at a conveyor belt packing cartons of cream or yogurt, utterly soul destroying and some of the ladies had been there for 45 years!
It was during the summer holidays before I went nursing, very good pay for the early 70’s but so boring.
In the afternoons we emptied returns, cartons of mouldy cream etc, the smell put me off cream for years.

Picking tomatoes in greenhouses, a summer job at 15, it was so hot, I got filthy, the bath water every day was lime green, the smell was lovely though.

Pea picking when I was about 15.

My worse job ever was working in a nursing home in the kitchen I was on my feet from 8am - 7pm my legs were so sore the kitchen floor was made of stone I used to cry at night saying to my husband I can’t go back there it’s awful

Grammaretto I picked strawbs in Norfolk too. We had to provide our own tents and camp round the edge of a large strawberry field. As long as we picked all day long it was rent free. We could smell the strawbs at night as we were so close to the field.

The field was close to a beach so we could bathe in the sea at the end of a long, sweaty day. One night there were high winds and storms and our (no doubt badly pitched) tent took off like a large bat and flapped away over the field. We shared a tent with some kind, Welsh girls until morning then went home.

I worked with an outright bully as my manager. She gave me one day off for my daughter’s wedding hundreds of miles away,
demanded that hospital appointments and operations took place in the holidays, docked my pay when I had to take another daughter to hospital during a miscarriage, complained about my weight and what I wore etc etc. She treated me and another assistant as servants and described us ‘cretins’ to a colleague.

A couple of holiday jobs. One hop-picking in Kent for several weeks. My boyfriend was out in the fresh air all day driving a tractor while I was with all the other women and girls in a huge, metal barn picking out stalks and stones from a conveyor belt. The constant booming noise and stench of hops and diesel made us all ill with headaches and nausea and we used to jam the belt deliberately just to get a few minutes off for a gulp of fresh air.

The Christmas post where I was allocated two normal rounds under the beady eyes of a postmaster who checked that my bags were empty at the end of the day. It was snowy, icy and hilly and I’d to hang on to drainpipes as I skated down some steep streets. I was only paid (very little, being female and just 17) till about 2 o’clock but would push whatever was left through the last few letterboxes just before 5 before racing to the post office before it closed. There were complaints.

The most mind-numbingly boring was an agency job in the office of a university Pharmacology department which was closed for Summer. I had nothing at all to do apart from water two plants. When I told the agency I wanted to leave they persuaded me to stay for a third week as the person in charge “needed” someone to be there to answer the phone. I took just one call - a query about entrance requirements that I couldn’t answer - and got the agency to assign someone else for the rest of the holiday. I was then moved to the busy complaints section of Empire Stores catalogue company - it was just me, I was the complaints section, and it could have been awful, but it was utter bliss after the university! I had some lovely chats and don’t remember any abuse - people must have been less angry in those days.

When I was 8 or 9 I lasted one long back-breaking day potato picking for a local farmer. I did it for some extra pocket money and because I thought it would be fun(!), some of my classmates had to do it for days on end to add to the family income.

Summer holiday job, washing up in a department store restaurant kitchen. It was during my first uni summer vac and my folks had recently moved 100 miles from our former home. I knew nobody - it was the most miserable summer of my entire life. 🙁
And recently met dh - who’d promised to come and visit me - never did. Fortunately he’s made up for it since!

What with email and mobile phones now, I don’t suppose anybody would have to feel so horribly lonely and isolated, though I dare say some poor souls still do.