Crap jobs

[COYBL25]

Heard similar stories some of the lads worked on a site next to a chicken factory. Sounded utterly grim apparently the smell was awful.

Ammonia.

It made your eyes water and cling to your hair / clothes.

 

[Gwlacticos]

Lettuce Picking.
Age fifteen, had a week off school. My mate lasted a day, so I called another mate and he only managed a day as well.

Picked up in a van filled with chain smoking land girls. Back breaking work, one cutting, the other holding the bags open.

Twelve pound a day. Was happy with my sixty quid in brown envelope on the Friday.

 

[JimmyJeffers]

Half the jobs here sound ace

 

[JimmyJeffers]

Brother in law is the head chef at a medium size hotel.

The pressure for the money he gets is insane.

He doesn’t use his all of his leave, as the agency usually chefs balls things up and the restaurant goes to pot, leading to bad reviews and less custom.

The hours he works are insane for the money and he’s constantly fighting with the hotel owner, over how to run the kitchen and the suppliers.

He works split shifts, frequently goess in on his days off early for no pay, to sort stuff out.

He looks after his staff though and they all drink together - they don’t half drink though !

Just about every chef I’ve known works like this. Functioning alcoholics

 

[milky]

Cleaner for University Halls.

My colleagues were brilliant but some of the stuff you'd see...

Go on

 

[Jebus_lives]

I've had a fair few with various temp agencies while funding Uni, but perhaps the stand out for me was computerising doctors notes. My job was to go through warehouse after warehouse, and pull out hand written doctors notes from 1900 (like the type that used to be put at the end of a patients bed in hospital), and scan them all.

Massive dusty folders that you had to unpick staples/paperclips etc, and flatten and try an scan. It was a scanner that pulled through pieces of paper like a printer and half the time it would clog. Monotonous, and the amount of obscure stains you hoped at best was blood was a nightmare for a germophobe.

Other crap jobs I had was the insolvency service - my job was to destroy case notes. That's it. Data entry too for podiatry department. Spending the days typing up handwritten notes about feet.

I did something very similar, but without the scanning part.

The company would drop me into a vacant office or closed down library and I'd spend weeks, sat on my own, organising items and cataloguing things into a computer.

Most of the time, stuff would be in damp basements, attic spaces or leaky garages. Genuinely surprised I never got really sick or went mad.

But, the pay was decent and I'd spend all day listening to music. I think I'd have gone mad otherwise.

Come to think of it, it may have been about the time I started visiting online Everton forums.

 

[COYBL25]

Just about every chef I’ve known works like this. Functioning alcoholics

Or massive coke heads / both.

 

[Brightonblue]

Worked part time as a teenager on a farm that had battery hen sheds, sweeping the floors.

Never ate chicken again after that and eventually went full veggie a few years later.

Every time I went in, I`d be rescuing chickens that had fallen through the bars of their cages onto the floor below and would`ve died from lack of food/water and all the faecal matter that was raining down on them.

The owner didn`t give a flying one and would`ve happily just left them there to die.

Only lasted a couple of weeks, as it was affecting my mental health so badly.

Yep same here Had to get the f out of it ! Did my head in but ironically made me a lot healthier.

 

[heatmeiser]

Weirdest one was collecting all the unbroken clays after the clay pigeon shoot on the moors

Think it was a tenner a morning. Never actually saw the people shooting but my mate got to do the pulling or whatever it's called and said they were all rough bellends, not the tweed poshos I expected.

 

[Kurt.]

Once worked for a mechanical engineering maintenance firm, great bunch of lads and the boss was fantastic. We were working on an aluminium smelting plant and it was horrendous. We worked in the potlines, about 400 huge baths full of liquid aluminum each about 1200 degrees. We got to do the jobs the companies own maintenance crews wouldn’t do basically, one of the best/worst was laying a wooden board across a live pot and shuffling along the board on your back in full PPE and a load of burning gear to burn off the old crushbreaker teeth to replace them. We all had an agreement that if one of us fell in a pot the others were to stand on him and not try to save him as you’d be so badly burnt

 

[Cake]

Heard similar stories some of the lads worked on a site next to a chicken factory. Sounded utterly grim apparently the smell was awful.

There was a 'chicken factory' as it was called (processing plant) on Bridle Road, Bootle. Almost everyone who worked there lived in 'Dodge City' (the Netherton estate) The girls from the chicken factory used to come in the pub Friday lunchtime in their white chicken juice stained coats ('uniforms'), regulation ankle-wellies with bits of raw chicken hanging off them and they stunk - (people pay good money for that these days)! They took over the pool table, dartboard and anything else they had their eye on. Rough as a bear's arse and not to be messed with (in fear of disease or injury)!

 

[Rita_Poon]

It's strange, looking back there's usually a few things about crap jobs that were ok, have known chicken processors, and their stories are all loathsome. Went onto a pig farm to repair and upgrade a load of stalls and railings and some stairs that were an actual deathtrap, the stuff the staff did to the pigs was horrendous, this wasn't a slaughter house, it was the breeding and fattening up beforehand place ("bovine university") and the violence was out of hand. 'kin sadists!
A long time ago got dragged out to help hay bailing, it was weather dependent, and we had to get a shift on, fields and fields of straw bails needed collecting then stacking. It was like every muscle in my body had been hit with hammers for a few hours. The sleep was amazing but stiff as a board waking up. Glad it was only three weeks or so, and the pittance for it wasn't worth it. Very hard graft. Hard life looking after live stock, so much prep and planning.
Yeah it's the loonies that stick out in the memory. Chef's, crackers. Newsagents, nuts. Licensees, the biggest liars on the planet. Farmers, surly. Railway workers, surprisingly level headed. HGV drivers, what a cross section these are. Funny.

 

[BainesontoastNEW]

Been fortunate enough to like my resume, but my oldest sister spent a year in palliative care at Christies, Manchester. Seeing people have no hope of recovery broke her spirit tenfold.

 

[Prevenger17]

Working in an elderly care home has to be up there, i've not done it myself but when i was visiting my grandmother regularly, the turnover rate of employees there was insane, people qutting a week into the job etc.

The people who do it deserve so much respect because from what I've seen, it can be an incredibly depressing environment to work in.

I worked in an advanced dementia care residential unit in a hospital for many years. I'm not sure how I would feel about it now, but it was an eye opener for me back then, as I was young and really had no idea what could happen to the human mind and body. As grim as it was, I met a lot of amazing nurses and families over the years there and remember that time very fondly

 

[Alanbileysfeathercut]

Worst was a chicken factory in Holland for two weeks! Really good money but it turned me veggie for 4 years afterwards !
Hardest was a fisherman in Scotland We were out for 5 to 7 days each time with the nets coming in every hour.
Gruelling it was and Chuffin dangerous too.
Lasted the winter and was loaded by the time I left though.

Grampian Country Chickens..
I passed that place everyday going to and from work,till it shut.
The smell was disgusting,even with car windows shut, and it was forever being washed down.
And folk that worked in the fish the smell lingered and little bits of scalesyou couldn'tget rid off,and you could always tell a female who worked in the filleting...red line on the back of her legs from the wellies.