Without a doubt, the worst job I ever had was working on the night shift at a big industrial cleaning contractors in Bradford. I was around 19 at the time and waiting to get employed at Field Printers, a company that paid well, was fully unionized and known as a good employer.

I had been to the job centre and seen an advert for a general labourer on the night shift at a place called Allied. I thought I'd give it a go. No interview, no background checks, nothing; just turn up at 9pm and get stuck in. I had no idea I was about to enter the lowest rung of hell.

The job was basically pulling industrial rags out of massive electric dryers very quickly, putting them in cages and starting all over again. Within 10 minutes, I was sweating like a pig, my hands were burning and I was gasping for air.  I looked across at the other workers and they were basically in the same state as me, but they looked like zombies and didn't seem to realize that they were trapped in a kind of Dante's inferno. I truly felt like I was in a waking nightmare.

I stuck it for four hours and eventually threw the rag in and walked out. The Supervisor asked me what the fuck I was doing. I told him I'd had enough and he smirked knowingly and just sighed. I'd imagine that the turnover of employees at that place was staggering. I remember walking home and thinking how fucked up and downright evil capitalism was.

© Words - Dean Cavanagh

I worked for Sounds for the best part of seven years – can you imagine the strain of a job like that? Having to tour the world with the likes of Debbie Harry and The Clash, interviewing boyhood heroes like Phil Lynott and Noddy Holder, getting paid to go on all-expenses-covered trips to Japan, India, the USA, Scandinavia...it was hell. Granted I did have to cope with Ozzy Osbourne shaving off my eye-brows, and epic quantities of sex, drugs and alcohol, but who’s complaining...I was living every music fan’s dream existence.

I’ve been lucky, I suppose, because I’ve never had a job I didn’t like. The most banal was when I worked in the post room at the Shell building on the Embankment. But even that was an eye-opener because I worked with an ex East End docker called Ron who wore a permanent neck collar after getting crushed between a ship and a jetty. His stories were captivating and his opinions of politicians, bosses and union officials chimed with mine, which strengthened my resolve to get involved in radical left-wing politics.

I also worked briefly in the press department at the London Fire Brigade HQ at Lambeth. Easy you might think, but part of my job was to sort and file pictures from various incidents the men – and they were all men back then – had to deal with. You’d get photos of charred corpses or kids who had lost hands in accidents. My Dad was a fireman and the job made me understand why he and his mates had such a black sense of humour. They needed it to cope with the things they experienced on a regular basis. They had a proper job. They were heroes.

© Words- Garry Bushell


The worst job I ever had was more to do with the people I worked with rather than the job itself. Psychological female bullying is an odd thing. I’d be innocently munching on a Twix at 10.30 in the morning, when my line manager would pop by my desk and say “Ooooh, dangerous,” before walking off. At lunchtime, I’d buy myself a tomato soup and when I’d return it would be, “Naughty, so many calories”. We’d go out for lunch and I’d order something that I couldn’t finish, then she’d grab my food to eat it and while tucking in would tell me “God Katy, you eat so much”, and I’d be thinking… no I don’t. Then would come the comments about my personality. “It’s said that people who write with a green pen are mad,” she’d say out loud within earshot, when for weeks I’d been writing with a green pen. “You’re crazy,” she’d sometimes say behind a laugh. Then she’d get passive aggressive. She’d get me to do some work, and when I handed it back, rather than telling me what mistake I’d made, I’d hear her whispering behind a door about me – not quite loud enough for me to hear what she was saying, but loud enough for me to know it wasn’t good.

These things go under the radar to a passer by. They are so subtle, it’s difficult to recognize them, and in the end you question if you are just going a bit insane. It’s not something I could have put into a formal complaint, because I’d look like an idiot — “Dear General Manager, she said there are loads of calories in a tomato soup!” — but that’s what made this type of bullying so powerful. I couldn’t pin it down, or specify a specific problem. I just felt on edge, and uncomfortable, all the time. It built up and it built up until I hated the job, and dreaded coming in, not knowing what kind of wisecrack comment I was going to get next, about my size, my eating habits, my hair, my personality, the fact that my shoes made a funny noise, anything. But it wasn’t just me it was happening to. I’d overhear the same things happening in other rooms — other women getting slagged off, getting the piss taken out of them and bullied behind their backs. I couldn’t get through a day without feeling sick to the stomach and desperate to leave, it was horrible.

© Words- Katy Georgiou

My worst job wasn’t so much the physical working conditions, but the mental conditions of a small company selling software training imposed by a small, rounded and bespectacled man called David Fish with a fondness for alcoholic and cooperate values.

Anyway, on the way to work I was knocked off my pushbike by a car, which was greeted with amusement by the company. I carried on working regardless, but I awoke the following morning with a pounding headache. I called in and I said I was going to the hospital, which I did, and the GP said there were no head wounds but that I needed to relax for five days, so he wrote me off from work, much to my delight.

Now, did I get any ‘get well soon’ cards? No. Instead, I was besieged for five days asking me to return to work. When I did go back, I was sacked and re-instated in a day when they realised I had a strong case for unfair dismissal.

In my naivety, I returned to work, yet Fish told me that I was an underachiever. This went on for about three months, when he finally found an excuse to sack me, which was relief for both parties.

We never spoke again. I eventually found out that many people left the firm as he had been discovered for downloading child porn and he died penniless. This was due to being knocked for a lot of money by a company that bought his one out. I found this all quite ironic, as he always tried to force his righteous values down your throat, and always tried to avoid paying people, including me. I was invited to the funeral, but I thought, ‘best not’. 

© Words- Oscar De Paul

I have had quite a few bad jobs and my first three were not exactly desirable, of which they were a butcher, baker and a curry maker (I kid you not).

Early 1980s Manchester, the Thatcher years were not the most productive in gaining any sort of employment, never mind anything that you would want to call a career. I have had a long list of jobs none of which filled me with any long fulfilled desire, from selling handbags door-to-door for an American stack-them-high kind of distributor to working in a warehouse specialising in bedding to working as a labourer in gas/water/electric and all the utilities that you still see these days and wonder how/why people would want to do that job.

But, by far the worst would have to be the time I spent as a tunnel digger in the late 1980s. I understood that this job was well paid in comparison to others, but by god, you had to have the stomach of a rhino to cope with the rats, water and a host of other sewage on a day-to-day basis. Not unlike a miner at the coalface, I can still sense the fear in my eyes as I took to going below the ground with my daily tool of choice – the kango hammer to hit at a wall of rock where I would have to fill a bucket that was lifted out by the crane above me at street level.  
 
I know there are hundreds of Irishmen that did this job for decades, and I salute every one of them, but it wasn’t for me.

One month and I was gone.

© Words- Paul Gallagher



The worst job I've ever done was as an evening telephonist at an hotel with 200 rooms, where most of the occupants were business people.  It was before automatic metering and mobile phones and I had to monitor the duration of national and international calls made by guests.  

At the end of my shift, I had to calculate the telephone charges which were to be added to their bill. When the switchboard was very busy, accuracy was difficult and I was told that there was often a dispute about a charge the following morning.  

The hotel manager was a bully and always blamed me. Although my shift finished at 10 pm. I rarely got away before 11 pm. I stuck it out for three months and then left.  That hotel still owes me for a week's wages.

© Words - Patricia Rochester

I’m a teenager down the Job Centre. A clearing house to my future with each card representing a new path – a different destiny. And it made grim reading: washer-upper, bin-man, kitchen cleaner. None of them appealed until I saw, “Want to make SERIOUS money? Do you want that FAST car? Live in that BIG House?” And that’s how I got into selling carpet cleaning door-to-door.  

They give you a couple of hours training, then this seedy looking geezer in a crumpled suit takes you in his car out in the middle of the sticks – they won't tell you where. I felt like I was in the mob about to do a hit.

Some people were quite nice and smiled back, but a lot slammed the door in my face. At lunchtime, the supervisor picked me up and took me to some boozer. He was one of those types that doesn’t seem able to talk about anything else other than himself.  So my lunchtime was spent listening to his relentless me-monologue. Turns out he’s into his dogs. I joke, “Aren't we all after a few drinks?” He was telling me, “My dog can have any dog in Hounslow.”  I couldn’t help laughing, and he scowled, “I can’t take a joke about anything – but nobody laughs at my dog.”

I made a sale on my second day. It was to an elderly couple who were just too nice to say no. I was supposed to be happy, but I felt dirty. I was thinking, is this my life? My future? Am I going to end up in a couple of years bragging to my sales team about my dog being hard? I packed it in on my third day.

©  Words - Paolo Sedazzari