It can be for any reason, rate of pay, people you worked with, people you worked for, things you had to do, etc...

I don't know why I was thinking about this tonight but mine is definitely working for The Carphone Warehouse. Although it did increase my confidence a hell of a lot and I don't think I'd be the same person now if I hadn't worked there. I think I was on the Venn Diagram edge between geek and nerd...


The thing that makes it the worst for me though (apart from a couple of managers (always female ones) who were complete arse holes) was working with/for the public. The number of names I was called whilst trying to help people with their problems...

I got to the point with one guy where I just stopped and told him to leave the store and I continued serving the next customer. It was only at this point that he started being a reasonable person and I managed to sort his problem. Then there was the guy up in Harrogate who almost tried to hit me. The only time I ever pressed the emergency police button.

I don't know if it was me or them (or more than likely a volatile combination of both) but there were people who used to come back to me regularly for upgrades, etc... because of my good service so I dunno.

It has put me off working in a public facing job ever since though.

So what are your's?

I worked for 4 weeks in Presto loading butter and margarine into a freezers. It was cold, horrid hell.

I also worked at the DHSS, which comes a close second, though it was at least tolerable because of the people I worked with. Dealing with piss smelling winos wasn’t fun, especially when they talked to you in the street. I think for some, I was their only friend.

Frying chips in Cornwall just outside of Newquay. One customer was so grateful after I'd helped her with the pushchair and heated her baby's bottle that she left the sh*ty nappy for me to clear up.

Checkout bod in a supermarket. Dull work, dull colleagues and dull "targets". And crap money!

Mind numbing stuff. Half a dozen things you have to ask EVERY customer, and then they moan at you for not being "original" and "genuine" with each one. WTF?

Do you really need to ask someone with 2 items if they need a bag? Do you really need to ask someone who doesn't have a qualifying balance if they have a loyalty card?

There was no capacity for discretion, no allowance made for how you interacted with customers (it all had to be in a particular order, with specific things asked). Oh, and you were told to ask customers about what they were buying and why - which always struck me as intrusive and downright rude.

A crappy data input job for a couple of months.

I ended up with very little cash and RSI.

Needs must I guess.

I used to work as a checkout person in Sainsbury's.

It was VERY dull. I'd pass the time (whilst working) by trying to add up the total bill in my head whilst putting it through. I'd also try to remember as many of the input codes for groceries and stuff by remembering the pattern they made on the number pad, etc...

I also had a good game which involved drawing continuous lines along the conveyor belt

Back to your point about asking about the stuff people are buying. I was in Tesco the other day and bought a copy of Wired Magazine. The checkout guy asked me about the magazine as it may have been related to his study (which was ok) but then he picked up the magazine and started thumbing through it to try and find the article! I kind of felt like telling him to buy his own.

During my student days, I got a summer job at a huge bakery. The first shift was 7pm to 7am and it was shatteringly tiring work with only a couple of breaks. The people were mostly awful....very much the foul-mouthed type who'd be out spending all their pay on a Friday night and drunkenly brawling in the streets. Not all were like that but most were. Before this job I loved the smell of freshly baked bread but not so much anymore!

Hmm, several bad ones...

Working in the freezers (literally) in Sainsburys.

Selling tickets for the Isle of Wight ferry on the pier at the end of Portsmouth Harbour Station - 90% of travellers already had tickets. I actually went to work during the hurricane of 1987! Stuck on the end of a pier in a portacabin, with waves lashing against the edge!

The trains were cancelled - trees on the line - so I got a lift to work with the mail van. Perhaps that wasn't such a good idea, a high sided Sherpa van, with 110 knot sidewinds! We had to rescue a car ferry, which was ramming a hole in its side against a barge in the middle of the estuary!

Probably the worst was doing the dishes at the Berni Inn in East Grinstead. Did that for a whole summer, 6 days a week, an average of about 14 hours a day!

First proper bar job. I was broke and failing to regain employment in the retail world after a string of dismissals and got "lucky" with a bar needing work on a Friday night.

So I showed up - got handed a t-shirt and placed behind the bar. I knew my way around a bar and had worked in retail for some 3 years up until that part so could handle the customers - but I was no way ready for the 400+ person flood that poured through the doors at 10pm when the bar downstairs opened up the "club" area that I was manning on my own. It turned out the private function was a regular thing and the killer of many an ambitous new employee - most of whom were never invited back because the bosses were filling vacancies left by other staff members who would quit or get fired ahead of these evenings.

I decided after about two hours that I really enjoyed bar work, but wasn't going to carry the whole night without a shred of help from anyone else - so I threw a good few drinks down my neck, texted a few friends and we pillaged the bar. I never went back in or called for another shift. Oh and slurred the name of the bar for the remainder of my days.

Oh yes "A Bar 2 Far" (Kingston Upon Thames) you suck(ed).

Shelf stacker in Kwik Save.

Mark

Working nights in a factory making triangle pack sandwiches.

I've been doing more or less the same sort of work for a quarter century or so. In the time before, I would just knuckle down and do my best, as most of the jobs had a little interest and variety.

Now, I'm bored doing what I'm supposedly good at. The spark has gone from my creative side, extinguished by the relentless tide of sh!t you get from customers who don't know what they want and don't want to pay for a quality job when they get it.

I did have one studio manager job that drove me mental. My first freelance position, over in Tunbridge Wells. It was a nightmare to get to, and the boss was an utter control freak. I was used to a degree of self-reliance, and had been expected to just get on with the tasks at hand. This job was completely different: we'd be given a brief, the boss would go out, we'd do what he asked and then wait for four hours for him to return so he could micromanage the brief all over again. "Can you move that rule half a point up? No, two points down? One-and-a-half back up? That's it. Perfect." (You think I'm joking?)

I felt like I was simply not trusted to do the job, and it's about the only one where I've got up in the morning and collapsed in floods of tears because I simply couldn't face going into work. I lasted three months before it was so obvious to the boss something wasn't working properly. We parted reasonably amicably, and I did do a couple of days covering for sickness, but I've not been back there since.

Now, I'm drifting again, not sure what I want to do with the next half of my life...

Working on a chicken freezing line.

They call it replenishing these days.

Working for GNER/NXEC/East Coast/Whatever they're going to be next.

The customers for the most part are pretty awful. Especially in first class. You get the odd lovely person which brightens the day up, but there are always people who think it's their god-given right to treat you like some sort of slave because they've upgraded to first class for £20.

Also management are useless and uncontactable (phoned 26 times tues/wed, left 4 voicemails for different people and nothing).