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I've never had a particularly awful job. The worst job I had though was working for Royal Mail in the UK. I answered the phone and gave out postcodes for addresses. This doesn't sound too terrible, and it wasn't, but there were mitigating factors. The computers we had to do the lookups on were horribly old and slow, and we were being judged on how many calls we could answer in a day, even though that was as much a factor of how fast our computer was as of how fast we were. At the start of the period of working there, we were not told that we were being monitored for speed. Then half way through we were told, at which point they told us they would publish the figures, but then they didn't, so I never found out how I was doing. Add to that that the workstations would have failed health and safety if anyone would have bothered to check such things. The screens were too high and didn't adjust, the chairs were awful, and it made for an uncomfortable day. Add to that the fact that the office didn't have any air conditioning either and this was in high summer, and it got pretty hot. We were required to wear a suit and tie too.
That might not have been the worst day. The worst day was when I was a removal man. We were moving a large three bedroom house from one side of Cambridge to the other. We started at 08:00 and were expected to be completely moved by the end of the day. We had three guys and one panel truck the size of a medium sized U-Haul. The host family had not packed at all. It was horrible. We didn't get done till 3:00am, and the guy had the nerve to tip us just 5GBP each. I woke up the next day stiff as a board, and didn't get up till 12:00.
Then there was the employer who deducted my child support from my pay check, but didn't send it in to the state, and I got hauled up in court for it.
I've never had a particularly awful job. The worst job I had though was working for Royal Mail in the UK. I answered the phone and gave out postcodes for addresses. This doesn't sound too terrible, and it wasn't, but there were mitigating factors. The computers we had to do the lookups on were horribly old and slow, and we were being judged on how many calls we could answer in a day, even though that was as much a factor of how fast our computer was as of how fast we were. At the start of the period of working there, we were not told that we were being monitored for speed. Then half way through we were told, at which point they told us they would publish the figures, but then they didn't, so I never found out how I was doing. Add to that that the workstations would have failed health and safety if anyone would have bothered to check such things. The screens were too high and didn't adjust, the chairs were awful, and it made for an uncomfortable day. Add to that the fact that the office didn't have any air conditioning either and this was in high summer, and it got pretty hot. We were required to wear a suit and tie too.
That might not have been the worst day. The worst day was when I was a removal man. We were moving a large three bedroom house from one side of Cambridge to the other. We started at 08:00 and were expected to be completely moved by the end of the day. We had three guys and one panel truck the size of a medium sized U-Haul. The host family had not packed at all. It was horrible. We didn't get done till 3:00am, and the guy had the nerve to tip us just 5GBP each. I woke up the next day stiff as a board, and didn't get up till 12:00.
Then there was the employer who deducted my child support from my pay check, but didn't send it in to the state, and I got hauled up in court for it.
