#46

He does sound annoying tbf. Buy yeah I had pointless temp jobs with try hard middle aged blokes doing the same thing and now I realise they were just guys who had been through a hard time (redundancy or whatever) and were picking up the pieces.

#47

Worst is as a chef in a bougie independent bar/restaurant. The worst type of bar/restaurant.

#48

yeah i definitely didn’t understand that or have any empathy for the situation at the time, which might have made me think differently, but fuck using a defenceless 19 year old as fodder for your career progression, no matter what the circumstances*.

*well maybe not no matter what

#49

I had a remarkably similar experience in a call centre in Manchester taking booking for driving theory tests in Ireland. No training or any software (pre google maps) to help tell people where their nearest test centre was. There were only like 9 centres or something, so if they asked and I’d never heard of the place they were from I’d just say Dublin.

#50

oh yeah he sounds terrible. No sympathy there. I was just thinking back about a few guys I worked with and now understand better what they must have been going through.

1 Like
#51

I remember you telling this story on old DiS. Classic stuff.

1 Like
#52

I’ve posted a story about this job before, about how the first week was a 5 day training and induction course with like 15 people on it, all hired to do this same job. It was ridiculously indepth and wide ranging, despite the actual job being so basic you could have learnt it in 20 minutes. Over the five days there’d be fewer and fewer people there each day as more people saw sense and didn’t come back, and I was the only one there on the first day of week 2, ie when we actually started the job, and the volume of work to do was entirely manageable. So I can now only imagine that the induction was deliberately designed to weed out the 14 people most likely to have an issue with doing a horrible and boring job and find the dream candidate willing to sit through hours and hours of humiliating and degrading phone calls without kicking up a fuss or asking too many questions. That guy? Yep, it was me.

#53
2 Likes
#54

Loads more examples flooding my brain at the moment but the predominance of my posts in this thread is depressing me quite a lot

#55

:sweat_smile:
I hope “the brits” in this example is the call centre and not me. :frowning:

#56

Quite like boring jobs, just recite films in my head

1 Like
#57

oh and there’s this

#58

I been pretty lucky in that although I’ve been bored at work and had to do unpleasant things, on the whole I think I’ve enjoyed all of the places I’ve worked. When it’s been bad there’s always been something to learn, and when it’s been mind-numbing, I’ve always been able to chat to co-workers.

The least pleasant was probably when working for a large pharma company one summer and I had to spend a lot of my time in rooms set at particular temperatures for stability testing of drugs, to help them determine the shelf life of products.

Loading up crates of inhalers in 40/85 rooms (40 degrees/80% humidy) in breathing apparatus wasn’t nice.

#59

Worked on the car parks at a few festivals in the summer while I was a student. You got free entry to the festival, but it was a paid job with long hours rather than a do a few hours litter picking volunteering thing.

Was actually alright while cars were arriving cos you had something to do and people to interact with. But fuck, if you were doing a night shift and/or a shift after all the cars had arrived it took boredom to new levels. The supervisors would drive round checking you hadn’t fallen asleep, so you couldn’t do that. Ended up buying baccy and smoking for the times I did it just to have something to do.

19:00-07:00 shifts for a week at Glastonbury and an 18 hour shift at Big Chill were particularly low points.

#60

Worst: picking the yellow chunks off a conveyor in a meat factory. Luckily just a summer job, the other people were all nice, radio on, did 6-2 so was home early.

Most boring and worst: university admin drone. Part time but the actual work took me maybe an hour a week so then had the fill the other 20odd. Told off for using my phone, going on the internet, wearing headphones etc
In the end would just go and wander the campus for ages, make tea every half hour etc. Only lasted 9 months.

#61

Haha, yeah I’d hate to be one of those guys!

(If they didn’t let me wear headphones I’d have lost my damn mind by now)

3 Likes
#62

Does this poll count each temp assignment as a separate job?

#63

depends

#64

I made bum cream for Germans.

summer job in a factory, one week I got put on a conveyor line with loads of tubes of haemorrhoid cream labelled in German coming at me, and I had to put them in boxes and sometimes move the box to another pile of boxes.

#65

door to door double glazing sales, lasted a week

when i mentioned this on old DiS someone put my face on images of generic salespersons, can’t find them now tho