h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I recently finished "A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember". Funny stuff from a guy with a $40,000 degree in English, working at "McJobs" to pay the rent. It did remind me of some pretty bad jobs I've had. Maybe the worst were during summers between late high school and early college years. I worked for a temp agency that had two sides, "office" and "labor". When there were no "office" jobs, I took "labor", like unloading a box car full of heavy bags of powdered plastic, which had to be dragged to the door and dumped in a chute. Summers are hot in Oklahoma, especially inside a box car ... The only good part was the two of us had no supervision, so we took our time - apparently they didn't want to have to try to find somebody else ...

Any other recollections of McJobs?

Steam cleaning giant plantpots. 12 hour shifts starting at 4 in the morning or 4 in the afternoon, rotating bi-weekly. Horrible. I nearly went completely insane until I started counting them in the style of The Count from sesame street. Whilst doing that job I overheard something I think it will stay with me for the term of my natural life.

"Keep ya theivin' muslim 'ands off'f me scotch egg!"

I also unloaded aerosols from a shrink wrapping machine (big oven) and stacked them in overly complicated patterns. It was, as I saw it, a cross between 3D tetris and bomb disposal.

I worked in a meat factory once which had an abbatoire at one end and us at the other packing mince in boxes for the supermarkets.

The whole place was at 5 degrees permanently - except for the COLD rooms which were giant freezers.

I spent about 4 hours a day constructing cardboard boxes from flatpacks

I spent the rest packing freshly killed meat whilst getting bullied and sexually harrassed** by the generally ignorant permanent workers there. Lovely

I lasted 4 weeks before I *ran* from the place. I thank bod that I have a brain enough to not have to work in a place like that permanently.


** Yes women can sexually harrass men - it's true. I was 19 they were in their 20s-30s and pig ignorant. But they outnumbered us poor students.

Assembling and packing doorbells in a factory during a summer while at uni.

In fairness, you could go with a splitting hangover and still get the job done well enough but...it was certainly the most mind numbing thing I've ever done. As students (and there were about 30 of us) we were given a weekly wage based on hours worked, the permanent staff on the other hand worked piece-work and it was soul destroying for them when they were called for a 'repack'. It could have been worse though, I suppose, some of the other students were asked to count the faulty door pushes or put a certain number of screws in little plastic bags at least I had variety. The very worst part, though, was that we were *supposed* to have work for twelve weeks but were laid-off after six, along with with several permanent staff. I can't help thinking that if we hadn't been there the regulars may not have been made redundant...

Organising home carers... at the start of every week you had a list of all the "duties" needed to be covered the following week and which had to be sorted out by that Thursday...you also had a list of the carers available. List 1 was always a LOT longer than list 2, so you spent the whole of the week cajoling carers who didn't want to do extra hours into working - using anything from bribery to emotional blackmail. (Well, if you didn't get someone to cover, then poor old Edna/Gladys or whoever wouldn't get showered/put to bed/fed etc)

Alongside this you were dealing with new referrals, covering the duties for this week which had become uncovered due to sickness etc and getting shouted at by little old ladies who's carer was running late (because you or someone else had shoehorned another client in)and they'd missed the transport to the Day Centre..

Oh and one day a week and one weekend a month...providing 24 hour emergency phone cover.

Still makes me go cold now.

Waiter during Christmasses at Margate Winter Gardens. People can be such ignorant tossers.

And after that you STILL joined the Civil Service??!!

Flexi time and pension...

Tell me about it....I miss the flexi time and the holidays....still got me pension though (or will have!)

I've had loads of crap jobs, but I think the worst was the four months I spend at iVillage. Soooooo boooooring. I was glad when I was made redundant, and grinned all the way home in the car on my last day.

My worst paid job was £2.50 an hour delivering pizzas, but we made up for it with delivery money and tips. Didn't mind the actual job.

Jobs I was actually worst at was working in a record shop - couldn't work the tills to save my life, and kept forgetting to put the CDs in their cases when people bought them. Oops. The other was waitressing - couldn't remember the shorthand to save my life. Both I didn't last more than a few weeks at.

But still, the iVillage job tops the lot, even though it was such a short period of time out of a 21 year working life.

Working on the 'goop tube' on a quiche production line.

Bottom line: Never eat quiche. I mean it.

Telephone researcher - asking people what newspapers they read. It was mind numbingly dull.

I lasted 3 weeks, when I'd achieved enough to pay the rent in time.

I not going to be able see a quiche without thinking of the queen alien now.

I sucked, repeat sucked, at driving a fork-lift. I have a tendency to drift off and think about sex. I also found out my panic response was to whack my foot down on the accelerator and simultaneously raise the forks. Disastrous combo. I nearly back wheelied the thing down a ramp once. Nearly maimed a girl called Kirsty. Picked up the back of some hairy guy's transit van. All the workers from Pakistan would try to time their break so they could come out and watch how much of a menace I was.

>>I not going to be able see a quiche without thinking of the queen alien now.<<

A wise and insightful metaphor...

I am not unfamiliar with goop tubes.

My worst job ever was a receptionist position at a doctor's office, right out of college. It wasn't a bad office, and the doctor was decent enough. The job was just awful, though, because I've never liked to talk on the phone. During that time I avoided answering calls at home, because I'd had to talk on the blasted thing all day at work.

>Telephone researcher< Evadne, I worked in telephone market research for about five years (was is called NRS?). We used to regularly do farming surveys 'turning now to piglets'...always made me laugh

"I sucked, repeat sucked, at driving a fork-lift."

I worked in a warehouse one summer, driving an electric "walkie", which held two pallets just off the ground. My job was to drive around pulling orders from the stores, cases of whatever.

We had fork lift drivers who were maniacs. One guy set a pallet of ammonia cleaner on top of a pallet of Kool-Aid. The bottles all fell off and broke, requiring an evacuation. Another guy was driving his forklift backwards too fast, lost control and could not let go of the steering wheel or take his foot off the accelerator, for fear of falling off. Swerving back & forth he held on for dear life, and ran up on a bunch of cases of giveway dishes ...

I think I was happier driving my walkie ...

While I was at school I worked in a photography shop for about 1.25 an hour (pounds). That was the worst paid job. The most I have earned in an hour was 200 pounds (working in the middle of the night in a recording studio).

I also manually filled peanut butter into glass jars on a conveyor belt - but only managed it for one day! Pheewww!!

I had a really s*it job driving in London ... after I had made enough to go to Greece I was ready. Then the next day, my boss asked me to wash his car ... he complained about the smeary windows after washing it and I told him what he could do with his job and walked out! He came round later and offered me more money ... too late, I told him. Greece was great!!

Sandblasting and chipping hardened gunk from the inside of a huge precipitation tank at a pulp mill

I can still smell the bob-awful chemical stench..