Whats the most stupid job you've ever had?

[Random Orbital Bob]

Various for me incl putting the heads on dolls in the Ideal Toy factory.
Extra in the making of Rambo 3 (backpacking in Israel at the time)
Raking bunkers on a golf course
taking photos of tourists on a "pirate galleon". Sacked after day 1 for having no film in the camera...doh!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

All of them.

 

[Harbo]

Working for Schweppes as a holiday job.
Literally "tied" to a conveyor belt loading crates of empty bottles onto it for 8hrs a day!!
10 minute break in the morning and afternoon and 45min lunch break. Machine started whether you were there or not!
Glad it was only for a few weeks.

Rod

 

[smoggy49]

Id have to agree with Phil "all of them", I suppose in the golden days of employment the late sixties and seventies, you could be in a job you didn't like. So on Thursday when the jobs where in the local paper you could ring up, have an interview over the phone and start the following Monday. In those days there was a massive variety of jobs my friend had a job as a "banana ripen-er"which was mega boring. Still with the responsibilities of a family I returned to engineering and for the last 25 years sewage has been my bread and butter I know I know but it pays the bills so not to be sniffed at!

Chas

 

[Benchwayze]

Selling 'Jubbly's' and potatoes from a Commer 15cwt van.
Inspection of 'England's' shoes for quality.

Been a great programme on Beeb 2 about sewage workers. But it has put me off drinking tap-water, and explained why the water tastes of chlorine. Wonder what they are doing these days, they didn't do before or not doing what they did?

:? :? :?

John

 

[ColeyS1]

Flight of stairs for a cat

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk

 

[doctor Bob]

working in a yogurt factory, tipping crates of rotten strawberries on to a conveyor belt 12hr shifts, ever wondered what happens to brown hairy strawberries ........................ I don't eat much cheap variety yogurt

 

[Random Orbital Bob]

LOL.....I forgot one of mine and yours and the Harbo slave factory job reminded me.

Spent a summer in the Waitrose fruit and veg warehouse in Bracknell. I had various jobs, the worst of which was making up the metal carts (which ultimately you see inside the supermarkets). It was a rail system and the bases came down the track. You were on a platform not unlike a station but smaller of course. You had 100's of cage sides stacked behind you and as each base came down the rail you had to make up the sides. If you didn't keep up with the line the charge hand used to come down a and bollock you. Of course the charge hand already hated you because you were a student whereas he had left school at 12, the bollocking was just a job perk to him!

15 minute tea break am and pm and 1 hour for lunch and they operated 24 hours and the best pay was 10pm til 6am. That was my shift. The tea break room was about 5 minutes walk from the cart bay, 10 min round trip. If you were late back to station by 1 minute your pay was docked by 15 minutes. So tea break was actually 5 minutes.

Only good thing? Subsidised canteen that made the best full English I've ever tasted Cost 50p if I recall correctly.

 

[Steve Maskery]

My first job was putting the pins in the back of electric kettles at the Russel Hobbs factory. 800 kettles per day, 40p/hour.
Another summer I inspected flatware at the Wedgwood factory. We had to wipe dirty water round the edges of biscuitware. If there were any hairline fractures the dirt would find them. After a couple of days the foreman asked me to go "over there". "Where?", says I. "Over there, by the clock." "What clock?". I explained I didn't have very good eyesight and he asked what on earth I was doing inspecting stuff if I couldn't see properly....

Another year I worked in a psychiatric hospital. Mainly geriatric, so it was mostly teeth and bums, but I did spend a week on the "subnormal" ward. I'm sure it would be called something else today. Full of very strange people. If you have ever seen the 1930's film Freaks then it will give you some idea. People with pointy heads. On guy in his 40s who looked like a teenager, he never aged. Two guys in their 30s and 40s who had the head of a man but the body of a baby. That sort of thing. I was terrified the morning I started but didn't want to leave by the end of the week.

Probably the best holiday job was van delivery. Every day was different. Some days I was out on the road with a driver, others I was sweeping up, or taking a van to a garage or unloading a truck or... It was good.

But the worst, the very worst, the most unbelievably awful job I ever had was teaching physics and chemistry to brats in an inner city school in Nottingham. I did it for 4 years and had nightmares about it for years afterwards.

 

[Vic Perrin]

I once worked in a factory that made bespoke wooden rocking horses. My job was to sort out the timber with good Knot holes in them and pass them onto the craftsmen who made them into rocking horse arrrse holes.

Vic

 

[Phil Pascoe]

... and I bet they were rarer than rocking horse shiiit. :lol:

 

[KevM]

I was always amused by my grandfather's accounts of painting coal piles white in various outposts of Empire.

 

[paul-c]

I once worked in a factory that made bespoke wooden rocking horses. My job was to sort out the timber with good Knot holes in them and pass them onto the craftsmen who made them into rocking horse arrrse holes.

=D> =D> =D> =D> =D> #-o

 

[doorframe]

Anyone remember Black Wednesday, back in the Nineties? I was a self employed TV/Video/Anything-You-Want-Repaired Engineer at the time. To say it was grim was a massive understatement. Nobody had any money, and if they did they certainly weren't giving it to me to have their ex-rental TV bodged up. Social weren't interested. They just said "That's life mate. You're self employed. Not our problem". I had a mortgage, a pregnant wife, next to no income, an older tv than most of my customers, and the tax man breathing down my neck. I sold everything of any value in the local free papers and prayed for the phone to ring with a paying job.

Some local long term unemployed (Shirley and Martin) living next door to my best mate Bob (who was also a tv eng in almost the same situation as me) were setting off every morning in their brand new Sierra, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to know they were doing some cash-in-hand. We found out where and got in on the act. It was the most brain-dead work imaginable, but it saved my mortgage and kept the roof over our heads. It consisted of...

Packing T-Shirts.... 10p each
Putting badges on whiskey labels... £2 per 100
Spinning the nylon cord onto helium balloon valves £2 per 100

....and all sorts of other unimaginable dross. No hard work, just mind numbingly boring toil.

One day a container of fake Greek (I think it was Greek) pottery arrived, and the 'boss' wanted it unloaded. Bob and I said we'd do it for a tenner each. Martin jumped straight in and offered to do it for a tenner on his own. Tosser. Needless to say, we all did it and split the tenner between us.

Life has never been as bad since.

 

[rafezetter]

Working for Schweppes as a holiday job.
Literally "tied" to a conveyor belt loading crates of empty bottles onto it for 8hrs a day!!
10 minute break in the morning and afternoon and 45min lunch break. Machine started whether you were there or not!
Glad it was only for a few weeks.

Rod

similar - filling plane travel sized bottles of cordial and small containers of "fruit juice" for plane flights - summer job after school.

 

[Dusty]

For me it had to be a temp job in an icecream factory , squirting the moose is to the cup on top of the sponge , after a few days I was premoted to injecting the sponge with a syringe that was a blue liquid .......The scary thing was the big bottle had a hazardous sign on it . Any way after three days they offered me a full tie job to which I struggled to not laugh out loud . It was brain numing . I already had a job lined up so was off .

Previous to that I was given three days work at a scaffold company , painting a blob of green paint on each clip to signify it being theirs . I did thousands and by fooooook I was bored !

This was all in the late 90's and for me in my area work was easy to walk out of a job and in to another .

 

[doorframe]

Spare a thought for the poor bloke working in the sweet factory, painting the little letters on M&Ms!!

 

[spinks]

He got sacked as he was dyslexic and kept putting "W's" on instead of "M's"

 

[MMUK]

A friend of mine went for an interview at a well know confectionary company in West Yorkshire. She went for an interview as a book keeper but was apparently over qualified. They did however offer her a job as a fudge packer. I don't know how she kept a straight face :lol:

 

[Random Orbital Bob]

Actually on a not getting a job note....spent a year in Australia in my early 20's and got refused a job at Mcdonalds because I had a degree! Over qualified they said. As if a job in Mcdonalds should only be held open for those applicants who are serious about a career there