Soul destroying jobs

[zedr]

one of my first jobs was working weekends in a sausage shop. mostly okay and we got free//cheap fancy sausages which was a bonus. however cleaning the cold room where the sausages were left to hang once made was grim. mopping sausage juice and then hoovering it up into the gnarliest henry the hoover you've ever met with all the stink of sausage meet clinging to your skin. id end up reeking of sausage meat at school which was not ideal.

 

[kebabking]

Several kind of stand out - summer holiday after finishing GCSE's:

Traipsing around industrial estates in Hartcliffe trying to sell crap like Filofaxes and lighting up pens out of a holdall. Commission only. Lasted a morning. Dumped the bag in a skip & simply walked into town and got a bus home. They never asked about the bag - no commission, obvs...

Traipsing around Kingswood trying to get appointments for hard sell double glazing creeps. Lasted 3 days.

Working for a charity (I think it was a charity ...) doing telesales calls looking for donations. Lasted about two weeks.

Not sure the next one was soul destroying, but it was certainly illusions destroying. Working in an abbotoir: my job was taking a bath on wheels full of a bright red slop to be made into sausages.

It was some time before I ate sausages again....

My first regimental posting after joining the Army was equally awful - Germany in the 90's. Training budget of about £9.60 a year, we fired the guns once a year for a NATO qualification shoot, and apart from that it was painting rocks. Everyone hated everyone else, and most people were borderline alcholics, and everyone over the age of 35 was divorced. On the positive side, working weekend was 11am on Monday to 4pm on Thursday with Wednesday off. I used spend most weekends in the Alps...

 

[Fruitloop]

Why did the army need so many painted rocks?

 

[kebabking]

Why did the army need so many painted rocks?

No idea...

 

[Puddy_Tat]

we fired the guns once a year for a NATO qualification shoot

did you have to shout 'bang' the rest of the time?

Why did the army need so many painted rocks?

if the british army hadn't painted the rocks, the russians might have come and painted them

 

[kebabking]

did you have to shout 'bang' the rest of the time?

Yes.

When we practiced moving stuff around by helicopter there weren't any helicopters available, so we used adminstrative helicopters, or as everyone else calls them, lorries.

We would all charge about loading said lorries while shouting 'Wokka Wokka Wokka' at each other.

Great times.

 

[Magnus McGinty]

and apart from that it was painting rocks.

I remember early on in my apprenticeship there was a recession and so there wasn’t really a site we could go to so had to go the the HQ instead. There was fuck all to do but they simply couldn’t have us sitting about so it was “right. Move that pile of scaffolding from here, over to there.”
And when that was completed it was “right. Now move it all back again.”

 

[StoneRoad]

Cleaning strowger selector contacts ( Google it) with a thing like a glorified electric toothbrush but with a shoe lace in place of the bristles at a NW London telephone exchange that we will call Northwood because that was it’s fucking name.

When me and another apprentice turned up for (I think) a three month posting the lazy fuckers were three years behind with their cleaning schedule. When we left they were two years ahead. We spent alternating days actually learning stuff and cleaning the fucking mechanisms.

Now of course the whole exchange probably fits in a box the size of a small fridge. I bet the fuckers never cleaned it again.

Hey, A380 - I've got a 50 line strowger exchange that needs cleaning [& setting up] ...
fancy a go ? for old times sake ?

 

[Magnus McGinty]

Why did the army need so many painted rocks?

Wax on, wax off, Daniel son.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Why did the army need so many painted rocks?

Idle hands are the devil's workshop, etc....

(And, if they can get you used to following stupid orders, you'll follow stupid orders when they need you to).

 

[StoneRoad]

Been very lucky [?] in that most of my "real" jobs have been, at least, fairly interesting.

Back when I was a student, and quite in need of additional funds - stop sniggering, the books on my course were f'ing expensive, even second hand, and one tutor kept specifying the "new edition" [written by his best mate, natch].

I ended up stuffing envelopes for mail shots and some door-to-door freesheet deliveries.
For the first job, on the second day our "supervisor" buggered off for a meeting or something after handing out a bollocking for not reaching the target te day before. As soon as he'd gone, we had a think and totally re-arranged our work stream into a production line. We ran out of materials mid-afternoon, just as he came back & started to explode that we'd interfered with the process ... his boss came in and made him leave the room. We didn't see him for the rest of the week. But we got the best part of a fortnights work done in four days - and a hefty bonus as a result. Next short vacation, and we were on the job again, and made a similar killing.
I lasted about half-way around the route for the freesheet, after a contretemps with a nasty bloke and his rancid dogs ...

 

[davesgcr]

Forgotten about the sheer hell of agriculture student work

(a) Strawberry picking in the Cotswolds - crawling along picking berries - a pittance for a box and often rejected as "fit only for jam" , squalid camping with a trench to do your business. They were short of pickers so we organised a walk out striketo treat the fuckers a lesson , just as they could have made some good money from good berries. (PS - never , ever buy Co-op Jam after the way we saw those berries treated)

(b) Broad been picking near Evesham -better as you could stand up working , even better that you filled the net bags with good beans on the outside and tore up whole plants and stuck them in the middle , topped up with good beans top and bottom. I think it was 20p a bag - scandal really - so the feedback from grocers via the wholesalers would have put them in the not great suppliers category.

Working doing traffic census , security work and bar staff was much , much better.

 

[Casaubon]

Gold Beating - hammering gold between sheets of animal stomach membrane to produce gold leaf.

‘……77-year-old Joe Woodward has been doing it for 63 years….using the same hammer…..’

 

[not-bono-ever]

all jobs are soul destroyIng

 

[not-bono-ever]

unloading ships and containers of indian rice. paid by the container. hefting 50kg hesssian sacks from defunmigated rice from containers, bear hugging it above a hopper and slashing the bottom of the bag with a stanley knife so it could desposit its contents. Yes there were accidents on a frequest basis. and there were rats and bad insects in the rice, as well as the odd human shit. living the fucking dream and never able to make more than 30 quid a 10 hour day. My GF dumped me as it didnt fit into what someone with degrees should be doing.( she married a millionare banker i later found out )

The plus side- I was the fittest and healthiest I have ever been in my life. I was fucking ripped.as hard as it may appear now. I was scaffolder fit. but lonely and miserable

 

[friendofdorothy]

Dog and cat food factory. It was smelly, dirty and difficult to get to. There was no one in the factory voluntary. They got their entire workforce by people being referred from the dole office or else have their dole cut. Morale = 0 Workers were horrible to each other. Pay was low.

On the plus side us young ems got to chat to each other. I got really fit loading trays of 12 or 24 cans onto a pallet. Occasional light comic relief when a can of under-cooked cat food exploded all over the forklift driver.

Thankfully only for a few weeks before going to Poly. I was very glad to leave.