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Good thread, BBW! I've been pretty lucky with my jobs, mainly because I tend to stay in the good ones for ever and ever, but in my younger days I did do some very shit temp jobs.


Top Three:


1. Sock-turning at a factory in Leicester. This involved putting inside out socks on a special machine with a tube attachment that would then suck them the right way again. You were supposed to do several thousand of these an hour. My abiding memory of that job, though, was of the poor woman who sat in the front row of the many rows of sock-turning machines, so was practically on display to everyone who walked in, and who had an unfortunate and stomach-churning enormous growth on her forehead. Even now I feel unwell at the thought of it.



2. Moving boxes of shoes from one set of shelves to a different set of shelves and then counting them. I lasted one shift, mainly due to the supervisor who checked my work, took me aside, and said in a very low, patronising voice, "Have you always had trouble with your maths, dear?" The shame!



3. The Saturday job in a shit clothes shop I had aged 15 where the lecherous boss used to get a kick from making the girls tell him all about their sex lives in great detail, even encouraging you to make it up for his vicarious pleasure when, like me, you were too young to have anything to tell him. When I left I carefully deposited a nicely-sucked orange Tic-Tac in the pocket of every single garment on the shop floor.

Salmon Smokery in Scotland. Dip hands into neat detergent which produces rash, slice frozen smoked salmon to go into the packs you see in supermarkets. Frozen so a thinner slice can be produced which meant chilblains at the end of day.


One perk however, those rich southerners wouldn't countenance dark meat in their packs so we took the trimmings home to make pate.

Jesus Christ, I look into a thread named 'your worst job' and I find a lot of talk about honey, mushrooms, smoked bastard salmon, sock and shoe moving and fast food.

You massive bunch of sissy Marys. You enormous shower of Josephines.


I worked for a SW11 based building firm. One job involved a cellar with a back up rising from the sewer.

It was about, it seemed 12-14 inches deep. Anyway I was equipped with wellies and given the task of opening the far door which was fairly well sealed in order to let the effluent run away to the outside drains.

Wade through I did and get the door open I also did. What I also did was get a two bootful of sewage as it flowed filthily passed me.

Walking round with a pint and a half of other people's discharge in each boot? Now that's a bad job.

Now come on you enormous fairies.

O.k Hona, I'll see your sewage and raise. At college I took some summer work on the underground and had to go along the tunnels checking that light bulbs were still working and I and the two others that accompanied me always had the very clear felling we were being watched by someone/something.
I worked in a freerange egg farm over the summers of uni. Collecting and packing the eggs from under 6000 savage hens? arses. Probably the worst job was either washing the shite from the eggs or if the shed clean down corresponded with my holidays catching the now bald hens and sending them off to slaughter.

In the long hot summer of 1976, I worked with my uncle in my school holidays.


We had a job renewing the rubber flooring in a laundry room of an estate, where I cannot recall.


It was already roasting, but it took me three days to take up the old floor by using a blowlamp to curl up the tile edges then get a shovel under to prise them free.


So a confined, airless room, with smell of burning rubber and enhanced 90 degree temperatures.


I politely declined further work with him and went on to gain employment for the rest of the summer on the council play schemes for younger kids in Brixton....I would not say that was a bad job, but they should have paid danger money.

At 15 I worked for a bloke who bought old Gas Board vans and re-sold them as caravanettes. It was my job to literally hammer and chip away to break up the 2" thick layer of solid tar that often covered the floors of these vans, in the hottest summer of the 70's. All for 40p per hour.


I love the image of PinkyB sneaking around the shop, sucking on tic-tacs whilst slipping them carefully into all the pockets. Well, they do say that revenge is 'sweet'...!

PinkyB Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> I always rather hoped I'd see something about it

> in the local paper.

>

> "LOCAL BUSINESSMAN ARRESTED FOR SICK SWEET STUNT"

>

> "I felt crushed and devalued" said one horrified

> customer.

>

>

>

> I was immensely pleased to later discover that

> he'd gone bankrupt, the filthy old bastard.



This reminds me of when my elder sister got a Saturday job in 'Chelsea Girl'. They put her and some other girls into cages and hoisted them up above the shoppers to 'look for shoplifters'! When she told my dad, who was a fireman (I know, father's footsteps...) he was fuming! He stopped them straight away because my sister would be fried alive if the shop caught fire.

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