My first job was in a garden center over a Christmas period, don't remember anything particularly exciting about it though. Lot's of snobby birds with their brat children is about the long and short of it. Though we did have a bit of verbal biffo with the florist across the road, she wanted cheap flowers and we told her to go shove it.

Let's see. Now that this subject has been brought up. I might as well reveal my work history. About 5 years ago, I worked in a shop called Mail Boxes Etc., where we helped mail stuff. I worked there during the Christmas season, while I was going to school. Then after I left THERE, I started work at my first fast food joint, Carl's Jr. I worked there for two months before I walked out. It doesn't help matters when your co-workers can't speak a word of English, and your manager is a total ****. After that, I stopped working for about a year, then I was stupid enough to join the United States Army Reserve when I was seventeen. Talk about a parttime job, one weekend a month, two weeks a year. I actually managed to make to the end of Basic Training, then I broke my ankle. Didn't graduate BT, floated for about 6 more months, then I left. All in all, a year and a half in the military. After that I didn't get a job until December of 2001. I worked "full-time" at a telemarketing place, for about 35 hours a week. Don't ask, I live in Utah where 35 hours a week qualifies as "full-time." Lasted there for about 4 months. I got fired at 12:00 on March 29,2002. They day after I got a call from one of my dad's friends about a job opening in North Salt Lake City, Utah. I got hired that day. It was at a printing company. I helped put together pamphlets by hand and stapled them so they could get cut and mailed off to other companies. It was supposed to be a temporary job that lasted three weeks. But I worked my ass off. It was about six months later, that I got laid off. I got laid off on my birthday. How messed up is that? After that I was unemployed until August of last year, where I applied at Wendy's. That's where I am now. *Takes a deep breath* Whew. Well, that's what I've been doing for the past 5 and half years.
I think it's time for me to go to bed.

"Violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived."

I have bloody loads but the worst was working at a transport depot loading wagons. it wasn't the work itself, it was the total lack of organisation.

..sweetness, sweetness, I was only joking when I said by rights you should be bludgeoned in your bed..

I started as a paperboy at 13, quit and moved over to another shop with better pay, then after a year I got promoted as a shop assistant. I worked there every morning, coming in at 6am everyday, for 4 years. I learnt some valuable life experiences in dealing with arsehole customers, catching pikeys stealing things and insulting the morons who believe a shopworker needs to be patronised every day. On top of that I've done several rounds of work experience (read: "slave labour", I was aiming to become a vet so I've worked in two different types of veterinary practice, on a dairy farm and in an abattoir. After that, I decided that it probably wasn't quite the thing for me. Still, I can proudly claim I know how to suture, the correct safe handling of aggressive dogs, how to milk a cow, drive a tractor and I've got a pretty good idea of how to slaughter animals.
Not bad for someone who's only 18, huh?

Worked at Greenbros. nursey selling plants, fertilizer, ect. A lot of fun with 10 hours on sat and on sundays. But it gave me extra spending money.

Edited by - Finalday on 6/7/2004 5:07:52 AM

I too have had shed-loads of crappy jobs over the years....part and parcel to funding your own education. The worst one however has to be when I worked in a bakery doing night shift....

Firstly it was a 13 hour night shift...6pm to 7am. My main job was as a "loader"...basically the bakery was an enormous combined set of warehouses, one of which had all of the delivery vans parked in it, waiting to get their quota to take to their respective small bakerys and supermarkets. I had to stand on the back of the lorry whilst some other geezer hoisted up a 9 foot stack of trays to me with a forklift - and then my job would be to get from the front, to the back of the lorry and position it perfectly. Sounds easy right? Let me put this into perspective - each stack weighed approximately twice my body weight and the only way to move them was to carefully rock and wiggle it from side to side whilst bending at 45 degrees to use my own body weight to counterlever it. Each lorry had approximately 30 stacks in it - and there were 50+ lorries. I got 2, 20 minute breaks in 13 hours.

Needless to say, in the 12 weeks I worked there I managed to drop from a 14 stone flabby git to 11 stone of solid muscle. The fittest I've ever been by far - and I wish I could say I kept the physique, but ya know I can't

But that wasn't the worst part of the bakery job. The worst was a job called the "crows nest". It was so bad they couldn't employ anyone to do it....so the rest of us had to work on a rota to do it.....I only had to do it for 1 night every 3 weeks, so in the time I was there I only did it 4 times...but it almost drove me insane. I challenge ANY of you to do it once....

This Bakery was a nation wide supplier so you can imagine the amount of bread etc that they were churning out over night. To churn that amount of bread out they need some serious ovens. They had one oven, the momma, that was approximately the size of 4 large, 3 storey detached houses put together. Its a monster. Running up the side of the oven was a small ladder, just big enough for one person to climb. The ladder was made of metal (intelligent) so it was smoulderingly hot, I had to wear metal coated boots and industrial gloves to climb the fecker. If you touch the side of the oven or the ladder itself with any part of your body other than your protected feet and hands, you're looking at first degree burns.

At the very top of the oven there is a conveyer belt and a platform that is approximately 1m by 1m. Think about the size of that quite seriously. It ain't big. This is the crows nest. My job was to stand for 13 hours straight and watch bread leave the oven and enter the cooler on the conveyer belt. If a loaf came out wonky I had to straighten it before it enters the cooler. Thats it. Nothing else. To give you an idea of how often this happened, on average a loaf would come out wonky about once every 3 hours. Now to add to this mind numbing experience are a couple of other factors. Firstly, its so hot, that you have to wear paper clothes and by the end of the night they are virtually melted to your skin or burnt away. Secondly the noise is so immense that its completely quiet. After 10 minutes up there you are deaf until you come down and rest for a few hours. Thirdly, you are standing on a red hot platform surrounded by barriers that is one metre squared - you cannot touch the barriers at any point for risk of burning. Try to stand for 10 minutes in a metre squared and you'll understand how hard that is. You can't sit, you can't lean, you can't hear, you can't breathe with the heat, the clothes you are wearing might as well be none existent, your skin feelings like its peeling off with the heat and to top it all off - you have to do this for 13 hours straight, with only 2 short breaks, WITHOUT a watch or a clock in sight.

I've seen grown men cry, and I was one of them, after half a night up there. That by far, was the worst job of my life.

Tell ya what though - I appreciate bread more than ever before nowadays!!

I worked in a pie factory for 2 summers so I know where you'tre coming from on that, grom. funnily i dont eat many pies any more.

..sweetness, sweetness, I was only joking when I said by rights you should be bludgeoned in your bed..

Yup I don't think anyone is going to be topping that one Grom, I thought me brothers abbattoir stories were bad.

@taw - I went off the smell of freshly baked bread for almost 5 years. Shame, cos I used to love it until I worked there. So what did you do in the pie factory?

@mustang - abatoire wins hands down. I couldn't work in one of those, no matter how much was being offered. I was broken by the bakery, but I think I would be scarred for life if I worked at an abatoire. I can't even stand the thought of it.

For two summers I worked on a farm operating the Neutron Probe. It's a probe designed to detect how much moisture is in the soil, so you can irrigate the field more or less and keep the moisture at optimum. I got to ride around the farm all day on a 4-wheeler, it was a Honda 300 4WD. It was pretty fun.
At the start of the summer you had to set up 3 or 4 probe sites in every field, about 60 feet from the edge of the field. You drilled a 3 inch wide hole about 4 feet deep and then shoved a piece of PVC pipe into it to keep the dirt out. Once you had all the sites installed you cruised around all day taking readings. You'd drive the ATV up to the site and drop the neutron probe detector down the pipe. Then you had to write down the number it gave back. I had about a hundred fields to take readings on. About 2/3 were corn and I only had to probe them once a week, the other third were potato fields and I probed them twice a week. Some of the worst things about the job were the corn pollen, and the puddles in the potato fields that were full of rotting potato plants that you had to run through to get to the probe sites, and some of the fields got really deep pivot tracks, and you had to jump them with the bike and sometimes you fell in and had to call someone on the radio to get them to help you drag your bike out of the track(some of the other guys on the farm had 2WD ATVs and they got stuck a lot more). Some of the best things about the job was getting paid to ride a ATV all day, and being outside is fun.


Let's get those missiles ready to destroy the universe!!

I put the pies in the huge conveyor oven on 3ft x 4t trays, in straight lines. the most exciting thing in the job was pulling the trays out in a apanic when they went skew-wiff, with this big long tray pulling hook. Nights too. total crap.

in case you wanna know, it was Holland's Pies (Northern Foods) in Baxenden nr. Accrington.

i worked in an abattoir too for a few weeks, apart from the stink I didn't mind that so much.

but ANC was the worst.

wtf? is a Neutron Probe exactly when its at home?

..sweetness, sweetness, I was only joking when I said, by rights you should be bludgeoned in your bed..

Edited by - Tawakalna on 6/7/2004 9:41:47 AM

Hollands Pies...little bit too much grit for my likin Sounds like a thoroughly fascinating job taw, reminds me of so many manual jobs I've had to do in the past. Thing that always amused me though, and I'm sure you've found this being an educated man....?....maybe its just me but I've found that if you do anything more than grunt in a place like that they automatically put you down as being either a) posh (education=wealthy of course ), b) a "nonce" or c) all of the above....until of course you prove you can do their job better than them. Then they tend to fear you (job threat) so they treat ya with a little more respect. I actually got so tired of this "class" routine in manual jobs, the last warehouse I worked in, I waited until some idiot started the whole "ey lads, check owt this ponce - looks lark he ain't done a 'ard days graft in 'is larf", then I walked straight up to him and lamped him one across the chin....something I'm not very good at being a stoned hippy so it was a bit of a lame punch, and something that could have easily backfired I'd like to add....but after a couple of seconds of hushed silence, the rest of the crew just wet themselves laughing at the guy holding his chin...and I fit right in. Never will understand the mentality, but I've grown accustomed to dealing with it.

I suppose some people here might find it a bit wierd hearing me say that, but I've spent a lot of time in manual jobs over the years because I'm not a fan of sitting on the dole. They're usually really sh***y jobs, but when you finally fit in with the rest of the workers, they can have just as many merits as any other job.

The last two part-time jobs I had before I got a permanent job were both office related jobs so I guess I am not eligible for any campaign badges like the others here.

I learned quite a bit about what goes on inside offices, the gold bricking, the bickering and the politics. Part-time workers are NOT supposed to have any intelligence and certainly are NOT supposed to exercise any initiative... at least not in the minds of those at the office who are made responsible for the part-time labor.

Typically, these "supervisors" are rather dim and have no imagination. They fear change, they fear failure and they fear being made to look bad more than they want to succeed.

So if you are doing a part time stint at an office and all you want is a steady pay check until something better comes along, just do the job the way you've been instructed (non-sense, inefficiency and all) and do your best to make it as short a tour of duty as possible.

IF, on the other hand, it is an entry point to a business that you'd like to work for full time, try to make friends with your supervisor and show him/her how things may work better if some things are changed and make doubly sure that your supervisor gets the credit for the success.

Then, work to get yourself hired full time.

THEN, transfer out of that department as soon as you can because that supervisor is going to expect you to keep his/her career ascendancy as a priority thereafter and you'll be stifled.

lol. thats so true its scary