#22

Exactly - why didn’t I realise that at the time :woman_shrugging:

1 Like
#23

Most boring was just temp jobs where nobody knew or was willing to tell you what you were meant to do but office set up meant you couldn’t just sit and read a book or whatever. Had a few of those.

Worst was a weird one that’s difficult to explain but was basically running an in-house photocopy service. Was in a tiny room and I was on my own so literally didn’t get time to get a drink of water or go to the bathroom all day. Was essentially like working in a sauna and there were 4 or 5 regular clients who were utter bastards. On the plus side I lost a shedload of weight.

#24

The exact best phrase for it

1 Like
#25

You ever tried reading a patent m8? Fucking hell.

#26

This is just a taster, I’ve had so many ridiculously bad jobs I couldn’t possibly sit here trying to remember them all and decide on a worst one.

I worked for a catering agency that used to provide staff to Old Trafford football ground for match days and other events, and as a result of that got a job working for Man Utd directly as a bar person. This involved remarkably little actual bar tendering. Me and a couple of other people were employed almost full time to just do back room duties, stock takes etc. There was very little of this to do, so it mainly just involved wondering the corridors of the stadium and sneaking into corporate boxes overlooking the pitch with a pot of tea. So much walking around with no work to do, or if there was work to do it was easy just to not do it. It was kinda exciting having free reign of place for the first couple of days, then it was just soul destroying after that. Saw Fergie once.

1 Like
#27

I’ve been pretty lucky with jobs, but here are the lowlights

Working on a research farm, harvesting and handling rapeseed. It was over a summer and paid £3 per hour, £4.50/hour once you’d done 40 hours that week, so we all worked like 60hours. Mostly it was ace, outdoors, messing about in huge silos of tiny seed, but some of the crop was in the greenhouses which was diabolical. Everything was covered with powdery mildew so we had to wear full breathing gear and environmental suits and even then the stuff got through and caused mega mega hayfever reactions. Never want to smell greenhouse grown oilseed plants and powdery mildew again. EVER.

In the kitchens at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge. Stood by the gaping maw of an industrial dishwasher taking out plates and cutlery that felt hotter than the surface of the sun whilst it hissed and spat at me.

Most of the repetitive jobs (like stuffing envelopes) I’ve had I’ve not found boring cause I can just wonder off in my head or chat with co-workers.

#28

a few temp jobs at an exam board that were so boring i’ve actually forgotten what they consisted of. basically unpacking bundles of exams, counting something and then repacking them.

1 Like
#29

Oh god, 12 hour nightshifts in a soho basement doing really menial technical tasks. Going weird drinking too much coffee and twitching because you could hear mice and rats in the walls.

#30

worst job i’ve ever had was probably at WHSmith as a christmas temp years back. got barely any training on how anything worked so kept messing the till up, manager was a total dickhead, music was the same four or five songs on a loop, colleagues were twats and the pay was rubbish, especially when they decided that after paying for my rubbish training, they wouldn’t and docked it from my pay so i got like £10 for the previous day’s work. didn’t go in again after that.

#31

At least that one i could kind of see a need for it. I’ve no idea what happened to those documents after i counted the bits of paper but it makes some sense to check everything’s actually there. I had another temp job where i had to write down details of every fax that arrived, then take the fax to its recipient somewhere in the building and get someone to sign for it. While that job was less boring, why why why why the fuck why do you need to pay someone to do that?

#32

in that job the company insisted that only one shoe was on display at a time (presumably to stop the local bams from shoplifting), quite often we’d be unable to match up a shoe a customer wanted with the other one in the back stockroom, this led to us regularly then launching the odd shoe over the back of the staff room (which had a weird indoor flat roof lower than the ceiling of the building)

a few years after me and my mates had quit the fire brigade were called out as there was smoke coming from the back of the building, they found 100’s of odd shoes that had been thrown up there which had apparently been blocking one of the ventilation fans and nearly set the whole place on fire

7 Likes
#33

never heard it called menial technical tasks before

1 Like
#34

Glorious scenes

1 Like
#35

Genuine nightmare sitch for me, these

The anxiety makes it orrifying

1 Like
#36

before I got the Old Trafford gig, when I was still working for the catering agency, another job they sent me on was washing pots in the kitchen at Newmarket racecourse for a three day race meeting. It was cheaper to bus us from Manchester to Newmarket (near Cambridge) and back each day than to put us in some kind of digs, so a day’s work was getting up at 3:30am to go into town for the bus, then work from 8am to 6pm washing filthy pots and pans with no hot water, and then bus back to get to bed about midnight. Repeat. Ghastly.

#37

Did nightshifts in a warehouse for a while. It was fine really but people just aren’t made for nightshifts - you end up in such a weird state and with a few exceptions (generally the blokes with multiple children so really needed the higher salary) the workers were just very strange.

#38

I had a few jobs working in retail in the pre-smartphone era. I was probably close to tears with boredom during more shifts than I wasn’t. :sleepy:

#40

I did temping pre minimum wage in the North and Midlands. It was insane how little you’d earn and the agency would actually get more than you did.

1 Like
#41

Did this really really terrible temp job where you’d have to call all these business that were on a database just to check we had the right details for them on the system. It was me and another guy who was probably in his 40s and taking it really seriously, in retrospect I guess he was trying to make an impression so as to get a permanent job, fair enough. But he would always listen to me on the phone and loudly offer me advice on how to improve my telephone manner, trying to demonstrate to the other peolpe in office how amazing he was. Hated that guy so much.

#42

this was during a time I was so poor that I used to take a tupperware of boiled rice with salt and pepper on it as my lunch every day, and eat it in the park no matter what the weather as I was too ashamed to eat it in the office kitchen.