Your worst job

[PinkyB]

Sadly, men in uniform has never done it for me. I prefer the "dragged through a hedge backwards" look.

[brum]

You should see me after a long night shift!

[PinkyB]

As a fireman, or on stage with Jase in stockings and suspenders?

[Santerme]

Blimey, my brothers in the LFB, or whatever it is called these days!!

[brum]

I couldn't possibly comment.

BBW - when did you see my hose? I normally keep it coiled up out of harms way...

[PinkyB]

What do you do when there's a hosepipe ban?

[brum]

LFB it is Santerme and it definitely isn't my worst job so we've gone off topic here - apologies for the diversion!

[brum]

PinkyB Wrote:

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> What do you do when there's a hosepipe ban?

We have special dispensation.

[PinkyB]

Thank god for that!

[KalamityKel]

bigbadwolf Wrote:

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> Well now you're just teasing us Kel. What was your

> WORST job?

I dont have one that i can mention :p

[Michael Palaeologus]

1 - Butchers Boy, "smoking" the bacon by pouring flavouring chemical all over a bacon joint

2 - Battery chicken farm - removing old birds from the cage by their feet and transferring them into a smaller plastic box for onward transfer to a pie factory

3 - Factory bakery - it was so hot that the experienced workers would casually hold up the production line to allow double amounts of dough to go into half a dozen consecutive tins. Two hours later they would have risen to monstrous proportions and would gum up the oven, so giving us all a break as the engineers sorted things out

[bigbadwolf]

Rigging explosives is an incredibly tedious task. Setting them off is another matter. Yes, I'm showing off.

[PinkyB]

I worked for a summer in H Samuel, the shit high street jeweller's, at the time they were owned by dodgy businessman Gerald Ratner (remember him?)

I don't know why they employed me, really, because I was completely unsuitable for shop floor work, being congenitally unable to scrub up nicely. They realised this soon enough, mind you, because they stuck me in the dead zone that was the gift counter, selling velvet-covered musical jewellery boxes with dancing ballerinas that would break the second you got them home, twee china cottages, and those dreadful pewter dragons with red eyes that some people inexplicably collect. Trying to talk up such unmitigated shit ("It's suitable for kids of all ages, from 8 to 80!") nearly killed me.

Amusingly, though, while I was there, they employed a very smooth guy from Manchester in a shiny suit who had all the gold counter girls a flutter, and who several weeks later turned out to be an international jewel thief wanted by Interpol. Of course, they only found that out when they came in one morning to find all the diamonds had been nicked in the night. I laughed and laughed and laughed...

[bigbadwolf]

This just goes to prove there's one born everyday. what's next......blowing the safe at poundstretcher.

[PinkyB]

Well, we know where to come for the explosives now, obviously...

[Dougal]

Having to clean the haggis boiling vat in a butchers on a Saturday then stinking of boiled haggis for three days and subsequently being shunned by everyone in a wee free Kirk and having to sit all by myself on the bus to and from school for two days. I used to have leprosy but now I am cured. At least the midges stayed away for a while.

[pitflaps]

mine was with Jayne Mansfield....

[jaybee82]

I did work experience when I was 16 working for a pest exterminator. He used to go about in his van removing anything from birds' nests to full-on rat infestations. It felt good beforehand as I was the only kid in the school who had to have injections before doing his work experience, but realised the full extent of the task about 2 days in when I came home with about 9 bee stings on my face and arm from trying to move a bees' nest from a tree...also had to remove a birds nest from someone's chimney which resulted in getting peppered with birdy poo. The boss found the whole thing a lot funnier than I did...

[KidKruger]

Barman in the Paul Raymond Revue Bar in mid-80's.

ner ner, ner ner ner.

[Windom]

would have to be the popcorn and softdrink pusher at a themepark in Australia, Didnt think it sounded too bad but spending 12hrs a day during a freakishly hot summer slinging warm coke at legions of snot nosed kids began to pale. Then there was the uniform: candystripe shirt, beige trousers, red braces, bow tie and panama hat, very popular with the ladies it wasnt.

[steveo]

This is a long one but nicely revolting (I had already written it)

As a schoolboy in the late 60s I worked on a couple of farms in Essex - next to each other and owned by the same family. One kept chickens, the other pigs.

The chicken farm was basically two innocent looking aircraft hanger-sized sheds. Inside were tiers of chicken cages stretching off into the distance. The hens were jammed in tight, standing on mesh bars, with just enough space for them to stick their heads out for food and water. The eggs dropped through and were routed into collection trays, the shit would fall onto a flat metal floor surface which would be scraped off. The chickens lost all their neck feathers through rubbing against the bars when feeding and they would die in their hundeds as a result of suffocation, exhaustion, disease or fighting.

Twice every chicken day we would enter these stifling hell holes (by controlling the shed lights the farmer fooled the hens into thinking there were two days to our one day, driving them to lay twice). The squawking was deafening, the smell utterly repellant, so the objective was to get in and out as fast as possible - feed them, water them, collect the eggs, pull out the carcasses that were being trodden into the bars of the cages, turn on the scrapers, hose down the shit tray and scarper.

But my weekend job didn't last long, I couldn't stand that smell - far worse than pigs, cows or even humans. It was the smell of fear. I had to leave and went to work for the farmer next door.

This was a highly industrialised pig farm, with a mixture of swill pigs and meal fed pigs. The farmer had a contract to pick up waste food from local institutions - schools, hospitals, offices, as well as restaurants, cafes and a Butlins holiday camp. Every day his fleet of swill lorries would arrive and tip brimming bins of waste food onto a conveyer belt ? vile brews of blancmange, milk bottle tops, rotting pork chops, broken glass, rancid milk, plastic bags and anything else that might be casually chucked into an open swill bin by a kitchen hand - was emptied off into two vast steam heated cookers. We had to rifle through this food with our bare hands as, the farmer insisted, it was the only effective way of finding the cutlery and large bones that might be concealed in it and which might damage the cookers.

The swill was boiled and pumped down into a pit over which we had to walk to get to our rest room. Here we'd sit on grease covered armchairs and eat our sandwiches just feet from thousands of gallons of steaming swill, great clouds of it wafting in through the door like noxious burps. Swill smells revolting, it gets in your hair, clothes, ears and eyes but somehow you get used to it - although my mother never did and used to make me get undressed at the bottom of the garden and hose me down before letting me in.

One day a lorry arrived and tipped at the top of the driveway. Us boys were sent to cover the load with a tarpaulin 'in case the health people drop by'. The pink mess had come from a well known chicken processing factory and consisted of rotting chicken giblets and other chicken body parts. The smell made me gag and we had to use handkerchief masks before we could get near it. Then we heard the cheeping sounds. One of the farm lads waded into the filthy matter and frantically started pulling out live chicks, scores of them. Some he couldn't find and the pathetic cheeping didn't stop for a couple of days.

Each day a certain amount of the pink filth was forked into the cookers and mixed with the waste food. They didn't want to use too much of it in case it harmed the pigs.

Often a pig would die - at least one or two a week. The carcasses would be butchered and tossed into the cookers. Whatever had killed the pigs was fed back to them.

One of the other farm lads and myself were told to clean out the cookers one day. They were cylindrical tanks with circular hatches on the top like a submarine, where the waste food was put in and where the hot grease was scooped out (not for health reasons but because when the fat cooled it would congeal inside the swill pipes and block them). The farmhands drained the tanks, opened the hatches and, wearing only our underpants we were lowered inside. The only light was from the hatches and there was a foot of hot swill washing around our feet. There were long shafts running the length of the tanks with paddles attached for stirring the swill. We sat on the shafts, our legs dangling in the brown liquid in the steam filled tanks and bent double to feel for cutlery, broken crockery, bones and all the other stuff that gets thrown into waste food bins. Another important task was to cut and pull out any string or entrails that had wound around the paddles. Within seconds we were wringing with sweat and gasping for air.

I can often win 'what's the worst job you've ever done?' competitions with this story.

Generally the swill pigs got sicker than the meal pigs. They used to urinate and defecate in their own beds, they would lose all their teeth through lack of use and seemed to have constant diarrhoea. Their pee seemed highly acidic as well and a pair of wellingtons would rot away in a couple of months. In contrast the meal pigs were cleaner and happier. The problem for the farmer was that the meal pigs grew at half the rate of the swill pigs - that would go from piglet to fifteen stone porker in about six weeks. The economics were obvious.

The farmer got away with it. The pigs didn't contract any significant disease, neither did they cause a dangerous epidemic. They were taken on a double decked articulated lorry to the Walls factory as normal (usually five or six would die in transit - of suffocation usually. Some would arrive with broken legs). We'd watch the pigs being fed in the door of the processing plant and as we walked alongside it to get to the staff shop, our pigs were killed, rendered and their waste body parts were slopping down chutes into skips positioned along the length of the factory wall. We unsentimentally bought sausages and pies for our families at discount rates and headed off home.

We were blithely complacent about the health risks involved and one hopes that things must have improved in the thirty odd years since but even then we all knew that we shouldn't be feeding this muck to the pigs, that it was deeply wrong.

The farmer knew as well and had been concerned about being caught doing it but it was cheap food and he had a red E type Jaguar, house improvements, a swimming pool and a predilection for fine cigars to support.

The farmer has now, fortunately for us all, abandoned farming and gone on to build a huge waste disposal business ? something, obviously, for which he was highly qualified, although I worry about what he dumps where.

[GSJ57]

*Puts pork chop back in fridge ...gets out veggie burger*

[bigbadwolf]

The treatment of the workforce sounds like something from a Dickens novel.

[Eliza.D]

I was once a holiday rep in Greece for a very short while.

Among my list of disasters was the airport transfer. The coach driver got lost on the various pick ups. On the way to the airport (once we had found everyone) the hold door opened and all the suitecases fell out down a steep embankment.

Everyone was panicking that they would miss their flights. I reassured them that they would get their flights. We arrived at the airport 3 hrs later than we should have and most on my coach did infact miss their flight.

The company was called SunMed. They were based in Forest Hill. Shortly after i left the company went bust.