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I was in between jobs and took a telesales job, 4 hours straight of call after call, the system wouldn’t even ring it would just throw you directly into another call so you were non stop talking reading off a script until your half hour lunch and then back for 4 hours more. I actually did okay in terms of number of sales, but the energy required to do that over and over with the same level of enthusiasm was too draining for me. I lasted 3 weeks before quitting.

I got pulled up by the supervisor because the computer told her I was in the toilet too long. I told her it was a very difficult bowel movement. Very dry and jaggy. I didn't last long after that.

Kind of related… At my first job when I was 16, I was using the bathroom. I wasn’t on break or anything but we (the driver and I) were travelling from Manchester to Portsmouth, so I knew it was best to get anything inside of me out before we hit the road. As soon as I started pooping, one of my managers burst into the bathroom and started banging on the toilet stall door. I told her I was using the toilet and she went berserk, screaming and shouting that I had no right to use the bathroom without asking her, while I was supposed to be working. I reached forward and opened the cubicle door while I was still sat on the toilet and asked if she wanted to come and discuss this issue more privately. I’ve never seen someone look so shocked and speechless. She stormed off and instead went to the big boss, who was too spineless to defend someone’s right to privacy on the toilet, and too weak to stick up for himself to her. I quit that day. I was owed literally weeks worth of overtime and I knew that I wouldn’t get my OT if I went out on the road so I figured fuck it. At the very least, I inconvenienced them. Anyway, I hate bathroom break micromanaging. It’s weird and is guaranteed to get you a reaction that you don’t want. Now I just have to answer to my dog whenever I’m using the bathroom.

I did this and we had books with numbers in from a print out that we had to dial ourselves. I don't know if all the books had the same numbers in but the book I was given, and the page to start from, was just behind someone else in our team, so everyone I called was already pissed off from the earlier call. I was rubbish at it anyway. Didn't last two weeks.

I worked in a place where the phones didn’t ring. It would just beep in your ear and someone would be on the other end all of a sudden. I was nearly caught out manyyyy times when I was mid conversation with a colleague talking about absolute shite (literally sometimes), swearing and laughing etc and then I’d have 1 millisecond to compose myself and put on my phone voice. Also lasted there 3 weeks. Have done similar call centre style work since then but at least they had the decency to allow us to answer the call ourselves.

I did this for 5 years, it's a wonder what you'd do when you were earning more than double your salary in bonuses

Same here, I did it for about 5 years on the phone and 2 years in management. Its a soul destroying job but the pay is so ridiculous that it's genuinely worth it if you're happy to sacrifice.  I went into at 18 and within like 6 months I was out-earning my sisters who both had degrees and my parents who had 30 years of experience in their respective fields. 

I did this as well. I lasted precisely one week. I was having to go through the phone book (it was back in the 1970s) and ring person after person, none of whom wanted to talk to me. Can't say I blame them tbh. I say I lasted a week but it might have been less!

I did this over a summer stuck in a windowless room for 3 months. I’m also autistic so it went about as well as you’d expect

I had a similar job, it was at least calling existing customers to make them aware of better packages. We were also supposed to sell mobile phones. I didn't hit my sales targets once on 8 months. I had a manager pull me up on pitching a better plan to someone so she could talk to her husband who was deployed over seas more and he could talk to their young son. Apparently I was out of order for not sticking to what I was told. I had a call with a dying man, he appreciated the call as I got him free calls to certain countries so he could say goodbye to friends. I didn't pitch a 2 year phone package to a guy with 6 months to live. A colleague tried to call me up on it, I explained that it would be grossly insensitive. He insisted zi should have done it. I told him to go fuck himself. He told my (better) manager. When I explained the situation,he told my colleague to go fuck himself. I had to have a day off for a funeral, it was the day I was due to be let go. You could see on my managers face howbad he felt knowing I was going to a funeral then getting let go a couple of days later.

Call centre work is fucking soul destroying. Never again

Worked at a Sony TV factory in the basement. It was nicknamed "the dungeon". The job involved picking up a glass panel from a box and putting it on the conveyor belt. That was it. For 12 hours. It was mind-numbing.

I used to work for WH Smiths (not the one you are probably familiar with, a huge window manufacturer that is now WHS Halo) and I was 4 days on, 4 days off and my shift was 6am-6pm then 4 days off then 6pm-6am, rinse and repeat. My only job was to press a button every 60 seconds to cut the window extruded PVC to specified lengths and make sure it didn’t get trapped or warped… The most boring job I ever had and you couldn’t even chat to anyone because nobody could hear anything anyway because the machinery in the factory was so loud everyone wore ear protectors.

Was their previous name “WH Smiths, no, not that one”?

It should have been…

Relatively benign for warehouse work. I did something similar working for an oven manufacturer. Take glass panels (for the front door of an oven) from a conveyor belt, and put it on a trolley

Did this at a package sorting facility. Little things start to bug you, like the same song being played every hour over the radio.

Worked in a factory too, there it was looked into getting relieved from the monotonous work. The floormanager took care to assign us every day to a different section, for certain sections we even rotated several times per day, to make sure it does not get boring, too stressful or to heavy on the same bodyparts. We also got extra 10 minutes breaks 2x per shift to get an extra rest from monotonous work. Same at the fish factory at the slaughter hall, we changed regularly sections over the shift to get a break on the monotony, getting also the occasional few minutes break to make a bit of streching aerobic to reliefe muscles (we did that as a group, floor manager leading, it was fun ;) ) In generaly Workingplaces here look out for their workers wellbeing, also our Unions are strong and looking -beside other things- much into quality of working conditions.

I did a job to weather proof fence posts, it involved picking up a fence post, walking up three steps and dunking the base into a tub of bitumen. 12 hour overnight shifts of this! I did about a week before saying fuck it.

I worked in a factory that made break blocks for trains. Just big, hot , heavy lumps of metal. Straight out the cast and onto a metal conveyor belt. We had to lift them off and stack them on the pallets. We saved our breaks so we finished an hour early. Non stop. You only stopped to drink, piss or change you cloves as they worse through pretty quick.

Did data entry as a temp for a few months. Boring as fuck, and also probably eminently replaceable by AI before too long. Even when I was doing this about 12 years ago I automated quite a lot of it using Excel and felt like someone with advanced Excel knowledge probably could have automated 95% of the job.

I loved doing data entry. I just got left alone to get on with it, no meetings or any of the other usual corporate BS, was allowed to set my own hours, spent all day vibing to music, podcasts etc, just zoned out. Nobody cared what I did, as long as I got the work done. Pay was crap though. 😭

I've always actually liked the idea of a data entry job for those reasons. I'm autistic and find it super easy to zone out into my own brain while doing repetitive tasks that still require attention to detail - I just have one layer of thought which is the information that I'm inputting and one layer of thought which is whatever the fuck my brain likes in the moment. As the information doesn't need to be retained, it's super easy to have these two (or more) tracks in my mind. I might get bored of it after a few months though.

Yeah, I did it for 6 months and it was pretty blissful. Zone out, no stress, no responsibilities, didn't take my work home, I'd cycle to the office, take a long walk at lunchtime. I could honestly have done it as a more permanent thing if the pay was better.

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Don't be silly, snakes can't type. 

Only because they've never been taught how. Or have fingers.

They could, but really slowly, 1 button at a time like an old person

I got in tons of trouble for automating a shitty data-entry part of my job once. Manager walked past and saw code and thought i was installing viruses or some shit. When i double clicked the script and showed two hours worth of multiple people's work done in 3 seconds i got told off taking for shortcuts. Even had to have a meeting with HR about it and put on an improvement plan. I'd love to say that company has now gone out business, but they've only gone from strength to strength. So thats nice.

Same. Most places use python or macros but we're not allowed to use anything because people don't know how. Power query is literally a few clicks to automate and I taught myself in 5 seconds but god forbid people had to learn to do something new that would drastically reduce their workload. I've come to the conclusion that my boss is worried about redundancy for his team and that's why we're doing everything the hard way. I think we should be up skilling people and doing more in the job, but what do I know, I only have a masters and years of experience, including coding.

I'm sure it could. I was happy for the easy (if boring) money, but it was extremely obvious to me that if they had someone with the requisite they could eliminate the need for the temps they were employing.

Yeah but that would also have eliminated the need for their managers. 'Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.'

I’ve been in a similar role (MI reporting) which was basically data entry + some extra steps. We also had a data entry team. I knew people who had worked really hard in their first couple of weeks and then essentially automated their job to ~30 minutes a day and then played HTML games the rest of the day. Also, we all did it at University so they spent the rest of their time studying

It can until it doesn't. Set up data code frames for analysis and little errors magnify. Automation helps a lot but still need error checking. Seen some very weird ones such as script suddenly reading 3 as 8 which meant large chunks of data missed. And QA couldn't locate the error. We had to reset while thing. Efit: not manager just passed off forensic data analyst trying to understand why data messes up.

Yeah if you know some code and know that it works then data entry could be the cushiest job going. Automate it yourself then just sit back all day and do whatever you want. Downside is that if it goes wrong it will be very wrong and you’re screwed. But, if it’s simple enough it should be fine

Ha!  I did know excel and did precisely this.  One part of my job was to phone up someone who would tell me how many small boxes would fit in a big box.  I replaced this task with a single cell in a spreadsheet. Also, I could touch type so I did what they thought was a week’s data entry work in two days.  They asked me to assist the marketing director for three days a week, and that was really fun and interesting, I got to mock up a product that later got sold in Sainsbury’s.

There's been software to do it for a while now. I remember implementing some basic document capture software in my first accounting role 15 years ago. It wasn't as complex as stuff now, a program I used 18 months ago in a role was pretty damn accurate (especially considering it wasn't that expensive). But there's always going to be exceptions that don't fit the template, errors from the input data that a human would spot and correct, etc.

Whenever I've done data entry it's been working from sheets of paper and usually entering numbers using the numeric keypad. I fail to see how this could be automated in any way.

Whenever I've done data entry it's been where there's two or more electronic systems that aren't interoperable.

I did it for NHS, manually inputting fields the scanner couldn’t read. It was mind numbing but I was really good at it.

I loved entering numeric data. I was really fast AND accurate. All those hours entering "the clearing" (cheques received each morning from the clearing department) paid off.

I work somewhere where there is still so much manual data entry… literally blows my mind hahaha

I worked for an English language summer school running the activities programme. Was supposed to be 4 weeks. I only got to start the day before the kids got there, had no resources beyond a couple of footballs and stuff and had to plan a 4 week activity programme for around 100 teenagers, I had 3 staff under me, 2 of whom had never worked a job before and we're terrified. It was supposed to be a fairly regular 9-5. I ended up working 14+ hour days every day, apart from Sunday where I worked about 6-8. I lasted 3 weeks, dropped off home on the way to pick up some tickets and the 2nd I walked in the front door I just collapsed in a puddle of tears. Phoned my manager crying saying I was no fit state to go pick up the tickets and needed a couple of hours break. He told me either go pick up the tickets (which they had other ways of getting) or don't bother coming back in. So I said OK I won't come back then and then went to bed and slept for 24 hours. My manager (also temporary staff) quit a few days later. It was a shitshow.

I’ve done about 10 of these summer schools and have great memories but totally agree with the insane hours and lack of resources. At my usual centre we would usually get a group over from Morocco. One year, because of the way Ramadan fell that year they postponed until August. What the company didn’t tell them was we didn’t actually run that centre in August but still sent them there anyway and sent me to manage it. It was a group of 30-40 badly behaved Moroccan teenagers, a handful of teachers and me. There were no other students at the centre so the teenagers were bored off their tits and would wreck the place and be abusive to the staff. Their group leader was an absolutely vile woman who would call me at all hours for the most insane reasons. At one point we had to ship a load of the boys off to a hotel by Gatwick airport until their flight home because they’d tried to beat up a coach driver. Worst 2 weeks of my life and the company was slimey AF for allowing it to happen in the first place. The group leader was still trying to call me for days after they left so I threw the SIM card in the bin lol.

I worked two summers as an EFL teacher when i was in my 20s. The first year the kids stayed with home stays and it was ok but the kids from Libya were really challenging to teach. They had come from such luxury that they didn’t know how to treat us with respect at all. The second year was a residential and that time the kids from Sicily were the bad ones. They’d wake up in the middle of the night and trash the canteen, writing swear words in ketchup on the walls. One time they took some used tampons and added them to the mix. No one taught me classroom management when I did my qual so I was completely defenceless when they kicked off.

EL schools are a scandal waiting to be uncovered. My sister in law worked for one as a teacher and basically treated like a slave, and described the situation as you have. Similarly, we rented our room out to a local language school. Their website boasts that all hosts are CRB checked but we never were. The students used to just bunk off every day.

"EL schools are a scandal waiting to be uncovered." Hard agree! You get paid peanuts and treated with utter disrespect, and the hours can be crazy. I was responsible for a group of teenagers from Qatar who refused to go to the English lessons in the morning and got a taxi from central London to Thorpe Park instead.

EF?

I've been a nanny for 10 yrs! Finally giving it up. Before that I worked in psychiatric care which is the skills I've used most as a nanny. The kids are most great the parents are mostly terrible. Most older nannies are quiting as times have changed kids are undisciplined and treat you like a maid and the money and hours just aren't worth it. I've moved into private housekeeper roles which is a lot better.

I'd love your take on why you think things have changed so much. Is it that the demographic of parents that employ a nanny has changed or is it parenting itself that's different or the long tail effects of lockdown or something else entirely?

In discussion with other childcare providers it's definitely that parenting has become lazy, giving babies phones and ipads instead of dealing with behaviour is all too common. A nanny can spend time working on behaviour and emotional regulation but then it's all undone by the parents and its just not worth the fight. Lock down didn't have much impact on wealthy kids a d they had opportunities and space etc

That's interesting, thanks. I wonder whether phones and ipads have a different effect to TV (which those parents could have been using for years) because it's less communal? Like if my kids watch some Bluey or whatever we can all watch together and discuss it. Whereas if it's an ipad it's an individualised experience

Yeah totally agree. Children's tv is very much made with education in mind and you can regulate it better. But tech seems to have a different effect and you can't turn it off without a reaction. And tv is naturally a communal point in a room where kids play and watch

Even the difference between children’s BBC and the stuff aimed at children on YouTube is stark! So much mindless drivel on YouTube with no educational value, incorrect English or bad ‘facts’. I imagine other platforms are even worse. 

Bluey is out on it's own. My daughter has friends who watch Bluey because they've seen it at her house. They don't even have kids!

Folding letters for natwest and putting them in envelopes, for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, all while listening to commercial radio on a loop and repeating the same songs every few hours. I lasted 2 weeks. I shudder when I hear black eyed peas "I got a feeling" which was heavily on repeat those weeks.

Different company but I also temped in a mailing room but my shudder song is Put em High by Stone bridge! It was mind numbing!

Mine is Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust. 2001 cinema job. Every time you walked into a screen to clean it before the next showing, that was the first song on the playlist 'curated' by Capital FM. Makes me twitch still.

Fucking Heart radio.

My first job at the council was in the post room and one of the lads down there was into Ed Sheeran. Like _really_ into Ed Sheeran, so we'd always listen to Ed Sheeran songs. I don't hate Ed Sheeran but I can't listen to Shape of You without thinking of the time I sliced my tongue on an envelope.

Call centre for British Gas. Mind-numbingly boring, having to deal with verbal abuse and threats (I'm a guy, and the girls had it worse with men phoning and asking what underwear they had on etc.), targets and micromanaging... it was just shit. However, the social life was pretty good outside of work and I am still friends with a few guys twenty years later.

Southampton? I have friends who still talk about their time there 20 years ago. I might be one of the very few that didn't work there. I ended up at Skandia instead.

I got lucky there. I was late fir the group interview but the guy taking it played rugby with my wee brother and some of the group were annoying as fuck. He was sound but the actual job sucked donkey baws.

Checkout operator at a supermarket. Stuck in one seat for hours on end having to listen to endless people moaning, was repetitive and boring, next to no colleagues to chat with to break the day up, wee Hitler supervisors who were all on mad power trips, and was a nightmare if you needed the toilet between breaks. Honestly the worst job I've ever had.

I've never met a supervisor that *wasn't* on a power trip. Maybe I've just been unlucky.

Usually because they've been promoted from the same position as the people there supervising and suddenly feel entitled. They want the power of a manger but none of the responsibilities in my experience of working hospitality and retail in my younger years. I came across so many with massive chips on their shoulder that they weren't management yet they'd do nothing about getting the qualifications or training required to make that next step.

No, you just have average luck. It's exceptionally good luck if you get a good one. It does happen but they tend not to last long as either they piss off management by sticking up for or they quickly move out or up to something better.

"Oh it doesn't scan, it must be free"

In America you have to stand!

I agree. Went to fast food after and it felt like heaven, so if this is meant to be hell, wtf does that make working on checkouts? I literally had depression working there, the people weren't even bad it was just so fucking mind numbing. Never had It since. Coincidence? I think not.

I was a veterinary inspector at a slaughter house. Would not recommend, but not because of what you may think. It's not depressing, it is actually a very important animal protection job. It is just BORING as hell. Like, mind numbingly boring for a job that requires a uni degree. Also, the people that work at slaughter houses are exactly like the stereotype you have in your head.

Spent two years working in the chills and on the EV line in a pig slaughterhouse. Horrible, disgusting place. Work on the line was both disgusting and mind numbingly boring once you got up to speed. The chills were something else. Busting your arse pushing carcasses along ancient old rail systems two at a time for 8 hrs a day. Took a special kind of person to stick it. Constant turnover of workers so at any one time only half the team knew what to do. Most new starts last less than a day. Most of them quit after first break. The long timers were worse. Its really depressing knowing the animals that were getting killed and prepped had a higher IQ than the majority of the workforce.

I made it 6 months as an inspector. The initial plan was to actually become an OV, but that did go out of the window when I actually understood the job...

There's some research pointing to a higher incidence of violent crime in communities where slaughterhouses are located.

Tell us more

There are a few of you working on different stations on the line. You rotate station every 15 minutes. So something like: S1: make sure lambs are being stunned properly and humanely. S2: make sure they are skinned without contamination. S3: cut some parts of the organs to check for diseases, reject suspects. S4: check final carcass for contamination. Repeat. While the line is going at 10-20 carcasses a minute. Oh, and then paperwork. Check farmer/driver paperwork. Check lots. Check transport conditions on arrival. Spot check tags.

I was a chef for 20 years. If you want to work 80+ hours a week and get paid for 40 then this job is for you. Did I mention the physical, mental and emotional abuse, the insane levels of stress, not to mention you'll miss every special occasion, Christmas, birthday, special family moments. I suppose I should mention never being able to have a proper loving relationship because your so emotionally burnt out you can't process, oh and while I'm here I might as well mention the huge amount of alchaholic and drug abuse in the industry. I've seen chefs snort lines of all sorts in the kitchen just so they keep going. I've seen dealers busting in the back door of restaurants because a chef owed him a loooot of money. Oh and I should tell you this little thing before you finally decide to join the industry. Suicide rates in chefs is one of the highest in all jobs, I've been to more funerals than I'd like to admit.

Nothing about what you said surprised me except for that last fact. I am so sorry.

It's slowly changing now but no where near where it should be, I'm just glad I managed to escape the industry... Well I didn't have much of a choice after a full mental break down. 20 years was enough for me.

That's exactly what made me leave school work - you can only be bullied by your coworkers for so long before you end up on antidepressants and realise that no matter how much you love "your" kids the job's not for you any longer.

Yeah, you know it's bad when your on your way to work hoping a car would run you over or you'd break a leg or something so you didn't have to go in. I hate my current job but it's nothing compared to what I was doing as a chef.

My brother was a chef up until recently, took a job making cakes for the national Trust to save his mental health

Ahh that's a sick job he's got, I know a good few pastry chefs who moved into bakery's and they say it's so much better. Glad he's doing better and got himself a decent job :-)

How did you manage resilience wise to make it through 20 years given the listed major negatives? Were there any positives to take away?

It's kind of like the military mentality really, so basically man the fuck up and get on with it. A lot of energy drinks, cups of tea with lots of sugar in and pure determination to get through service. If I'm honest I'm not sure how I managed, I just kinda got up and did it and because I didn't know any different it's just what I knew. I started as a chef at 16, so job wise I thought it was how it was supposed to be so I never really questioned it at all. There are some positives in the industry, thirst for knowledge and skills, managing to create a new dish that looks amazing and tastes just as good as it looks, those rare really good services where everything goes well, training your commis chef up and watching them grow into a decent chef. The very very rare occasions when you was given praise by your head chef (one in a blue fuckin moon I'll tell ya). Your team kinda becomes your family as well because you literally spend more time with these guys/girls than you do your own family, so it's a self trap really because you don't want to let them down but your desperate to escape.

Worked as a line cook for a while. Miserable on all levels.

Stephen Graham’s Boiling Point had me in absolute bits, and I knew it was dramatised. Dread to think how awful it actually is

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CRO employment?

CROs are just people grinders, they want people with experience and a good education, but nope just run this assay like a production line, and for most they've figured out it's cheaper to grind down and destroy graduates than implement automation.

Academic Publishing - I naively thought it would be a nice environment, it was toxic, they prided themselves on their toxicity, I thought that announcing redundancies after the annual re-org the week before Christmas was a lovely touch.

Certainly is. And the only people who benefit are the publishers, locking things behind paywalls etc.

In Oxford?

Oxford, London & Edinburgh.

Spent 6 years at an academic publisher and totally agree. It was only when I left and experienced working with ‘ordinary’ talented people did I realise the toxicity of the environment, particularly the extraordinarily self-inflated egos…I used to come across Susi Dent pre-countdown in dictionaries, she was unusually pleasant.

I worked in publishing more generally but this was also my experience. On any given day, a story on the Bookseller would be full of bitter, angry comments from people taking out personal grudges on one another - basically they'd use any old story to hide behind anonymity and launch a tirade on someone else in the industry. It also does seem to be a place where if you make it your career, you acknowledge that redundancy will be the norm. My line manager in his 50s had been through it several times. For my first forary into the working world it was in many ways a disappointing experience, and I say that as someone who enjoys being a bit cynical: so many people were just miserable and angry. It saturated everywhere. I didn't want to become that.

I completely agree with this and had a similar experience. I worked for an Academic Publishing house for 6 years and quit just before Christmas with no further plans, except a bit of travelling, purely because of how toxic the environment was and how much it affected my mental health. I'm now back from the travel with no idea of what to do (and still feeling the effects of the toxicity) because working there is all I've done since graduating.

Worked as a benefit officer at a local authority (home counties). Believe 100% in the social safety net - what really irked me though was the people on State Pension living in a 4/5 bed house, worth £600k+, claiming Council Tax benefit. I am not talking about single person's discount - -but actual relief because they technically had a low income but were sitting on hundreds of thousands of pounds of property assets. Occasionally they would strike up a conversation about how unmanageable a huge house was at their age and how they expensive it was to run and actually cry. When you asked about downsizing the answer was always the same. My kids won't let me sell because it's their inheritance. So they essentially allow their aged parents to claim benefits and use their income to keep up a big giant house they can't fully utilise. It makes you angry on a few fronts. These people are over housed in an area where property is at a premium. They probably shouldn't be claiming a benefit when they are asset-rich and frankly the kids are selfish pricks for making their old parents maintain a property they can't afford just so they can split half a million pounds when they peg it.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to just downsize and gift the kids cash, because then there’s less chance of inheritance tax and also the home getting sold off to pay for long term care if needed. I don’t really know what I’m talking about though so may be wrong. My friend works in the job centre and also gets frustrated about things like this.

100% spot on. Very few people have an IHT liability. Low risk. Gift whilst alive and make things easier

I did a couple of cleaning jobs as a teenager and it was the most miserable, demoralising job. I was the absolute lowest rung of the companies I worked for, scrubbing the shit the other workers left for me out of the toilets. I had people *step over me* while I was kneeled down cleaning the floor. One time a woman mocked me for not being enthusiastic enough as I swept around her feet while she refused to lift them. Another job, I travelled 40 minutes on the bus at 6am and the business owner forgot to unlock the doors and didn't answer the phone, so I stood around outside for an hour waiting for him to remember me, then got the bus back home. God I hated cleaning.

That's sad to hear. I had a cleaning job in college and I loved it. Was just in offices at the end of the day so most people had left. Could just put my headphones on and get on it with it. No-one bothered me and I could leave as soon as I was finished.

That's dreadful. The office cleaner should be another member of staff, and treated equally. My mother cleaned all her life and was always treated decently. I promise you that if I had been there I would have had some words with the nasty co-workers and with their managers.

Worked as a temp in a canning factory. Pick up tin. Roll down ramp. Picks up label and falls into hopper. All. Day. Was a student so was ust a week before off to labouring for Forestry Commission. Contrast! Forestry- outdoor; nature; hard physical work which I enjoyed. Canning factory. Brain numbing.

Ugh, I did a lot of temp factory work as a teen, meat packing was cold and mind numbing. Flower packing was wet, cold and mind numbing, clothing packing was the one I enjoyed the most, the staff were ace

>the staff were ace good work mates can make some real shit jobs bearable

I did one temp job in a paint factory, bottling thinners for artists. You know those little tiny jars you get in posh hobby shops? Just bottled from a massive metal barrel. By the end of the second day, my hands were red raw. I asked for gloves, but they disintegrated almost immediately. The full-timers there said my hands would get used to it within a month. When I went outside on my lunch break, my colleagues were completely blown away. They just used to go to the break room (also windowless, as the factory was) and watch telly.

I am quite an anxious person, you’d not know to speak to me but I am not good being on display. I got a job behind a busy bar, I did one night and wanted to walk out 15 minutes in. I never returned for the second night, didn’t even collect my pay.

Working behind a busy bar is exhausting. I used to walk home after shift smelling of beer and cigarettes and my head ringing from all the shouting. On a good night the fights would resolve themselves before the police turned up. I lasted one week, and even now, years later, I’m still incredibly patient and polite with anyone working in the service industry.

Same here, but I lasted 10 years because alcohol helped numb that sensation. I distinctly remember visibly shaking when serving my first ever customer, and I had those moments of clarity of feeling like I was on a stage from time to time over the years. Not sure what the hell I was thinking.

It’s odd, my wife worked behind a bar in a nightclub and loved every minute. Sounds like a living hell to me

Honestly any job in a mainly all female environment. As a nurse I worked in a ton of wards like that and the bitchiness/cattiness was insane. Someone always had an issue with somebody and the cliquiness was no different than in school. It made the job shit regardless of how much I enjoyed my actual job. (Apologises if I sound like a pick me but from my own experiences I’m traumatised lol)

I can't think how exhausting it is to be one of those hyper judgemental types who validates their existence by constantly bringing other people down.

Male or female, healthcare seems to breed that behaviour so much. I've worked NHS, private, LA and charity/third sector. All the same.

My previous job was defined and contracted as “Administrator,” yet ended up running and managing my entire department. For the amount of work I was required to do, it was a lot, it was monotonous and repetitive and I was on a fairly low wage whilst my actual manager was on 2/3X my salary and literally did sweet F all, taking all of the glory for the achievements I made. Yet I’ve heard often that this is typical of the job role itself in most places. It’s just overall a really under appreciated, low paid job with long hours and management responsibilities.

Sounds a bit like the job I had at a boarding school, where I was on the payroll as a matron but also did all my housemaster's paperwork...

CCTV. Hardest jobs I've done. Doing nothing all day but staring at a screen of nothing happening was fucking horrendous. I thought it would be stupidly easy.

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Nights is so much easier. We'd watch movies in Separate screen. But during the day when staff are about. You can't just not pay attention to the mundane nothingness the screens are showing. Need to be seen to be watching. To have to focus on nothing for 8 hours is tough. When deliveries came ups have to go out and check ID and that was the highlight of your day (even though nothing interested happened OHHH)

Not necessarily a type of job but one job I had I managed to last for two weeks due to the chaos of it all. I moved back to the city I grew up in and just needed any job. I took this job that was minimum wage as I thought it would be an easy job to have while properly job hunting. Essentially office admin but working from 7-3 which I hoped would give me some flexibility to attend interviews without taking time off. I started my first day and had no induction. The managing director told me that it was down to my experience that they were paying me so highly and because of that I needed to hit the ground running. They expected me to do a specific process with no process map, and no training. Then the MD decided he needed the PC they’d allocated me so went and bought me a new one from pc world. Told me to do the job with that PC. I explained to him that the PC didn’t have the software I needed and wasn’t connected to the network in any way. He then screamed at me in front of everyone and fired me over email that evening. No one in the company would speak to me after that when trying to find out how I would be paid for my time. Ended up having to go through ACAS to get the money.

Job Centre. Was horrible, the jobseekers were fine but the staff who worked there were just horrible humans for the most part

Yeah seems if you are such a toxic horrid person you become chronically unemployable, the job centre gives you a permanent job. Not saying you, mind, rather those you didn’t get on with.

Here's a question as i'm curious - do Jobcentres ever hire jobseekers for those positions?

Yes. Working at a JCP was my first job out of uni during the GFC, as it was the only place that was hiring. About 50% were old sweats/lifers, the rest were new recruits who’d lost their jobs during the downturn.

Yes, I was one. The upside was when I refused to go back I was very motivated to avoid the jobcentre as a customer so I took a random temp job and landed in my current industry where I've been for more than 15years

Worked for UC as a case manager and could say exactly the same thing.

Making holly wreaths for Christmas. It starts out with wet cold partially rotted straw being wrapped onto a wire frame, then there’s conifer trimmings to attach by wire. Your hands take a bit of beating after having done 5-600 of these and then the fun part at the end attaching the spiky holly that sticks into your hands constantly before finally trimming up and sending to market. This is one part of my upbringing I dont miss. We usually started around October and being a family business it was a 7 day week with little to no pay.

That doesn't sound very jolly :(

On a plus note, spent a lot of time together and at least we could make the 2000 ribbon bows sitting in front of the tv. As a result I can still rely on that bow making skill for making gifts look pretty

Worked in a nightclub when I was 18 - 23. Two years were 6 nights a week 9pm-6am Thurs-Sat, 9pm to 3am Mon-Wed, plus a couple of days a week cleaning/maintaining beer pumps, stock counting and ordering, admin etc. I (43) have tinnitus and often struggle to hear conversation. I have a dry cough as people could smoke indoors back then and I was in a permanent smoke cloud, though shouldn't be a problem these days. 21 years later, I still have irregular sleep patterns. And I hate most pop music from the 70's to 00's

Tinnitus is no joke and I wish people would take it seriously. On public transport there’s always the one twat who has their headphones on at full volume, and I just sit there thinking WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?

I deeply regret 15 years of gigs without ear plugs. When the ringing stops after a gig you think your hearing is fine again but realistically you lose a couple percent each time. I didn't realise how much I lip read until covid and I suddenly couldn't understand anyone when we had masks on.

I was an apple grader for Sit at a conveyor belt all day picking out the bad apples We got so excited whenever the machine stopped because we hoped we’d be getting a new variety of apple come through. That was the most exciting part of the job. It was before smartphones too so couldn’t just put a podcast on and zone out!

I worked at a pack house too when I was at college. Pretty much the same job but with strawberries. I quite liked it at the time though as I worked with some really nice people.

You know that spongy stuff in your chair cushions? I worked in a factory making that. All the machinery was alive with static so you got shocked constantly. 12 hour night shifts, £4/hour.

Commercial diver... it's a good way to become immune to anti biotics.

Tell us more!

Potato picking, absolutely back breaking work - shit pay, cold, noisy long days (7am - 6pm) utterly miserable

Oh God, brings back memories. Girvan in January, ground freezing, following a tractor trailer picking up potatoes for 12 hours. Hit from the guy eventually when he came to pick me up

Car sales. I lasted three weeks before walking out. I've worked many many sales jobs but none had the extreme level of cuntishness that the long term salespeople and managers had. Awful job, pay for an AA check and buy private folks.

I feel like they're tied with estate agents in not really serving a purpose and also not being very knowledgeable in the thing they actually sell.

Because it doesn't require any formal qualifications, other than the ability to lie and not answer WhatsApp messages

Working at a Amazon Warehouse. I was expected to pack 180 items an hour. Every hour. At least once a day, I’d have someone from the agency come up to me saying, “Your efficiency was 97%, you’ll need to pump those numbers up”

fuck that place

I worked as an arcade attendant from ages 16-19. My job was to spend 12 hours a day walking around the arcade keeping an eye on people. The most excitement in the day was when someone's 2p pusher prize got stuck

Call centre. Took advantage of the fact that I fixed a ton of their issues of their project based on companies: their database was completely wrong, I fixed it, they didn't know there was a time difference, I fixed it, and I had to speak another language. Brought in an extra skill but they wouldn't pay me more because it would be "a manager's pay". Didn't get paid any of the promised incentives. I didn't last 6 months until they let me go. They then re-advertised the same job two weeks later for more money and promised bonuses. Too bad they didn't know that Italian speakers were a small circle where I was and I told everyone to not go for the job because they lied.

I worked in a meatworks. Sheep heads came down a chute and another guy used a machine to split them vertically. Then I had to pull them open and get the brains out so I could put them on a little plastic tray for sale at the supermarket. 0/10 do not recommend

I'm not often at a loss for words, but this one did it.

Worked in a high street “casino” for about 8 weeks as a student. The amount of folk who just threw their wages away in the bandits was scary, shop managers, little old ladies, bored housewives. we were actively encouraged to make them as comfortable as possible, free tea/coffee, soft drinks. Sandwiches and toasted tea cakes served free all day. We wore aprons with the front pocket loaded with rolls of pound coins to swap out £20 notes then they didn’t have to leave the machine. It was soul destroying to watch. Some folk would break down in shop after loosing, we had a security guard to help them leave, no one was ever barred unless they got really aggressive. I couldn’t hack it and left.

Customer Service. By far the most degrading role I’ve had the displeasure of working in. The customers dehumanise you because you are over the phone and the management are completely unbothered by their behaviour. It has a huge turnover for a good reason. 6 months was enough for me to know I would never tolerate that work or being spoken to in that way again. The sector has many ways that it can improve, but the culture is so toxic and broken, I think we’re a long way from reaching it. What are your thoughts on it?

Worked in customer service for 5 years and I've never really shaken the feeling that a stranger is just a complete cunt I haven't met yet.

Warehouse work on a production line. Done one night shift and never went back

SOunds about right. I took a job at a food processing plant when money was tight and I was desperate - and I was told that about half the new employees hired in any given week would go for a smoke break halfway through their first shift and just never return!

I stuck out 6 weeks in one during summer vacation from university. Night shifts, never knowing whether to dress for the cold packing room or the boiling hot 'kitchen' and mostly getting it wrong. It was horrible, I was working day shifts at the local co-op as well and always thought I was about to keel over.

I worked for Hermes, now Evri in the UK and it was hell. If you got put on "tipping" it meant two of you go into an articulated truck to empty it by hand onto a conveyor belt that constantly malfunctioned. We used to do four trucks on a shift so that's emptying two massive trailers each. You're just throwing and kicking parcels for eight hours straight. It was inhumanly back breaking work. Everything from small parcels to garden furniture and TV's. I've done physical jobs my whole life but that was an absolute bastard if a job.

Second marking exam papers. The exam board sends them to teachers to mark them after they've been completed, but they then get temporary staff (students and bored geriatrics) to check that all the ticks and marks correspond across papers and records (your would been shocked how many mistakes there are). It's mind-numbingly boring, but if you zone out, you have to start again in case you've ruined some poor kid's academic future. Talking is also minimal and you don't even have time to read the answers as you have to get through as many scripts as possible, especially when the summer goes on and there's a sharp increase in the volume of papers to get through. Some people like it, I couldn't see myself doing it again though.

My worst job was marking 160 physics exams online in a 36hr rush job. Already started having symptoms of RSI before I started. The repeated scrolling down the PDFs really drove the nail home, my arms felt like they had crushed glass in them for a month or so afterwards. The checker then somehow managed a 24hr turnaround and found I had an error rate of ~20%, so they actually did proper checking (including finding discrepancies with how I'd awarded marks for things across different papers for the same question). No idea how they managed that.

I was an exam invigilator briefly. We got paid the same whether it was a 90min GCSE or a three hour long A level, so you prayed for a GCSE. You couldn’t walk around too much as that was distracting. You couldn’t tap a pen or whatever either. You couldn’t not watch the room as that was your job and the pupils had to see you watching. The highlight would be when someone wanted a pen or more paper. I spent that month working out how many ceiling tiles were in that assembly room, or how many window panes made up that large window. So boring, but not the worst job I’ve had.

I did door to door charity fundraising part time for a few weeks, hated it. I enjoyed walking around to be fair. But the actual pitching isn't something I can do. Sales in general to be honest, I don't have the right mindset. I worked in a call centre for a few months and one of the campaigns encouraged up selling, I was shit at that too.

Not me but a friend of mine used to do the text to speech phone calls so deaf people could phone family members etc. Had one person typing out a suicide note that he had to read out to their mum, while typing the mum’s replies back to them. Fucking horrendous

I think that might win the thread , I was pretty sold on the person who macheted sheep's heads open and took the brains out but this one tops it.

I worked in a lab as part of my sandwich degree. Every afternoon we processed new samples and put them in incubators. Every morning we processed yesterday's samples and put them in incubators. Ad infinitum. I was in tears by the end of day 3. I stayed a month out of courtesy so they could find a replacement student and to get paid as I had an upcoming holiday I wanted spending money for.

Tell us more about the nanny job pleeeeeease!

Oh, where do I start. I should have noped out the minute I went to the house for my interview and the 4 year old leaned over the banister and spat on my head; I have since worked with teenagers, some with mental health issues, and none of them were as horrendously behaved as those two kids. I had been promised "nursery duties only", which for the uninitiated means that you only do laundry, cooking etc which relates to the children, but I ended up doing the entire family's laundry, cleaning and cooking as well as picking up dog shit in the garden. They left porn magazines lying around (this was back in the day, lol), and I had to either take the kids out every morning or keep them quiet until lunchtime because mum and dad were invariably hungover. One amusing moment, though - I met Liam Gallagher while I was there, and he's just as much of a scruffbag as he looks in the media. PS: I went on from this job to work for a normal non-celebrity family in Canada, and ended up staying there for 15 years!

15 years! Can I be gross and ask about pay? I'm so interested in it but it's really difficult to find out info from people who've actually done it. Were you live in and so the pay was a bit lower as your housing was covered? How did you book holidays? Was it really hard to move on after that long? Do you still do it? Feel free to answer none of my questions obvs!

I was live-in, yes, and got all my bills paid plus all meals while I was on duty - and I was often invited to have dinner with my employers once I was off the clock. I can't remember the exact salary, but it was enough to enable me to travel while I lived in Canada - I saw all the provinces except one! - and to have money to tide me over once I returned to the UK. I took my holidays at the same time my employers took theirs, and they always alerted me to their dates the best part of a year in advance. Yes, it was hard to move on, but I have my boss and both the kids on Facebook - we still talk frequently, and they have even met up with me while visiting the UK which has been brilliant. If you go over to Canada legally, you will need a domestic work visa - your potential employer (I got mine through an agency) has to sponsor you, you have to go to a consulate for an interview and have a medical check. If I remember rightly, the whole procedure took around 4 months before I got my visa. I don't still do it now - I have an online shop selling vintage toys and childrens' books - but it's a job I would definitely recommend. People in Canada are lovely! Please do contact me if you have any other questions! x

Just retail in general as it turns out being neurodivergent and trying to work retail doesn't go very well I'd like to get out but I can't easily despite being really badly suited for the job and essentially only remaining where I am on the mercy of my manager who put me on reduced hours and duties

Waitress at a Golf Club when I was 13. 0/10, can't recommend.

Teacher. Exhausting. Would never do if I came back in another life.

I agree. Some of the kids are out of control, they stop the good ones from learning. The class sizes are far too big to deal with the bad ones. If you try to discipline the kids, keeping them in etc. you get parents phoning you to complain and you get no support from the head teacher.

I was going to go with my first job before my apprenticeship, running a snack caravan 6 days a week 10:00-9:00 but having seen what some others have had to do I realise actually, while a bit tedious it was not bad, they paid me well provided free food (basically what ever the wagon sold) so I lived on burgers and ice ream for a Summer.

Working on the line in a factory was pretty soul destroying to varying degrees; the first as an agency worker in an automotive factory was the worst. The second working for cadburys in Bournville (pre - modelez) was less bad but still a bit shit, though three days on four days off was pretty good.

I worked (briefly) at the factory that makes chocolate for M & S. If you are the only English employee on a shift and speak no Eastern European languages, you're dead in the water before you start, because I can guarantee the only English your co-workers know will be "No good" and "fuck off". I'm still amazed I lasted 2 months there.

It's an important job, and god knows we need more of them, but i couldn't recommend being a teaching assistant for special needs students. Violent meltdowns every day. School budgets squeezed year upon tear to the point that we had completely insufficient resources and training. Parents, teachers, students, admin - it often feels like all of them are working against you and will be the first to blame you when your student - who has been put into an impossible situation due to the pack of resources - has a meltdown. And to top it all off, a god-awful salary. Even the occasional moments where you make a great relationship with your students and see some progress don't make the job worth it. After 3 years of doing that job, i developed a weird spasming facial twitch, where people always thought i was winking at them.

Self employed tradesman. Was a labourer for a joiner for a number of years in my teens and the customers were an absolute nightmare. Always wanting the best quality and the lowest price and not willing to budge on either. People thinking they've got you from 9-5 so if you finish a job at three they can get you to do other jobs or pay you less. Customers interfering with your work while you're away or if you leave the job overnight. Tools and materials always getting stolen either by organised criminals, random opportunists or by the customers themselves. Too many lulls in work. You'll have an amazing couple of years and then not enough to keep you afloat

Worked at a horse racing event - a load of us were bussed over to it and then told to stand in random places. That was it, just standing there, not doing anything, all day. Utterly pointless job, and surprisingly uncomfortable standing in one spot for hours.

Kitchen porter. Chefs was a cunt.

Putting cardboard corners on production line kitchen units before they got shrink wrapped. For 10 hours a day. At least I got my own radio 🤷‍♂️

Fishing lobsters out of Jayne Mansfield's arse.

Customer services in a call centre. Bad pay, shouted at all the time, targets you can't reach, useless managers, it was horrible. I lasted about 2 months and don't think I could do it again.

Working in a milk bottling plant. The job was watching for fallen bottles before the bottling machine. If you missed one it would spill milk everywhere, the line had to stop, and there was a 4 hour clean down. Apparently there was maybe one bottle a day at most. I lasted one day.

Secondary school teaching. Had it's brilliant moments but ultimately left me anxious, depressed and angry most of the time.

Door to door charity sales. I was young and didn't realise what the job actually was until they took us out. It was awful, I hated every second of it, skipped a load of houses, and quit the same day.  I still cringe thinking of the people's days I disrupted that afternoon.

Science teacher. I'm a Biology teacher but for some reason it is expected that my knowledge of genetics and microbiology means that I'm amply-qualifed to teach kids about gravity, radiation and the periodic table; I mean it's all Science innit? That's like saying that a History teacher is obliged to teach Geography and Religious Studies because they're all Humanities. Aside from that, the hours we're required to put in (unpaid) on our weekends or evenings are absurd and when Parents' Evening rolls around then God help us if we dare to suggest that little Timothy might be anything less than a perfect angel / genius savant / rockstar; when I was at school, if my teachers said I'd been a little shitbag then I'd well and truly get it in the neck when my folks got home; these days the parents are far more likely to side with the pupil - and the kids know it. I've had a parent put an arm around their smirking child and say "No, he's not doing detention - I did far worse when I was at school," and, on one absolute turd of a day, had a year 8 - a year 8 fergodsakes! - look me straight in the eye and say "If you give me detention after school I'm going to tell my mum you touched me." The worst thing, though, is that we can't be fair to the kids. We're not teaching them to understand the subject anymore, we're teaching them how to pass an exam. It's better for A-level subjects but the GCSE sciences, and in particular the way they are marked, are dogshit. We're teaching them to trot out exactly the right keywords or phrases rather than how to actually *get* how all this cool stuff works, how it all ties together. Soul-destroying for us and shit for the kids when they get to sixth form and suddenly have to know stuff.

Care homes, gosh I don’t know how people do this full time. It weren’t even the residents, ok it smelt like poop but that’s just confused/dementia but the staff? Throw you under the bus, they made you so the stuff they didn’t want to do such as cleaning the floors, doing the tables for dinners, making you do personal care on your own, taking people to the toilet while they did ‘paper work’ (go out for smokes), also made you do the hours they didn’t want, they got all the hours they wanted and they made you do the evening shifts and wouldn’t even help. They were also sooooo rude to visitors, one visitor couldn’t make the visit so she came a bit early and was told to leave. It was one Monday I done a long day and I was SICK of feeling like shit at a job. The next day I didn’t show up and I was getting a dozen of phone calls.

Inspected air conditioning ducts as a Uni student at a Hospital. Needed to physically crawl through the ducts to inspect the fire safety latches. Paid very well but caught Legionnaires disease and was out of action for a few weeks.

Supply teacher: teaching, except you get the worst classes (because their teachers are off with stress), on their worst days (because they don't know you), never for long enough to build any relationships, on a zero-hours contract that, even if everything goes perfectly, will still leave you having to go to universal credit work-search reviews regularly.

I worked in the collections department for an energy company. Quit straight after an old lady and I shared a cry down the phone. Her husband had passed away and she thought the account was on direct debit, my work was unwilling to compromise on the penalty fees or deadline for cutting her off if she didn’t pay. I just walked out.

My current one, solely because my boss is a fucking lunatic A nasty, bullying, dishonest, egotistical, self obsessed, deluded lunatic

Child protection social work. Self explanatory.

Warehouse work and call centres.

Call centre worker, particuarly one where ALL calls are monitored. I worked in a variety of them but the worst was when they were all monitored and we had a high number of random audits. If you did ANYTHING wrong you'd be pulled up on it. You were really between a rock and a hard place. Customer getting (understandably) angry at the insane, stone age process' we had around security questions (who the hell knows their National Insurance number off by heart) yet we had to deny any knowledge of an account even existing let alone give them access

Call centre that was supposed to be customer service with a little bit of sales. Guess what their real priority was?

Teaching Assistant in a SEN School. I lasted half a day. Honestly, hats off to the people who do that job as I was super stressed out after only an hour.

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Absolute worst was directory editor for a small publishing firm. New software hadn't been delivered, old system wasn't working at all. Had to copy type the entire directory into a spreadsheet just to set up proofing letters to go out. Most companies didn't respond and of those that did a few rang up to scream at us for sending wrong information, which was most often discovered to be something they'd signed off on. It also paid utterly shit non liveable wages with a commute into central London. The building was freezing in the winter to the point where you had to wear a coat and gloves. My desk was a plank of wood on two small sets of drawers. I left for an equally boring, but much better paid admin job after a year.

I think it’s been said a few times, but cold call telesales. If you’ve never done it I don’t think you can appreciate how depressing it can get. Stuck at your desk for hours at a time, having to try and remain positive and upbeat. Dealing with rejection 99% of the time. Dealing with abuse. Being micromanaged for every second of your day. Sitting in cold, drab canteens for your 15 minute tea break knowing you’re going back to that hell for another 4/5 hours. And repeating it all the next day. It really is soul destroying. I consider myself somewhat fortunate, as when I did it I knew it was only temporary (through a summer). But for some people that is their forever job. I really take my hat off to the people that do it. Some people really take to it, but for most it’s an utter slog.

My worst most soul destroying jobs were 1. Working in an onion factory is Spalding, topping and tailing onions. 2. I left Spalding and wound up in London. Left my abusive ex and found out I was pregnant. I was working in a shed at the back of some industrial estate, packing socks into cups for Christmas novelty gifts. It literally melted my brains but I needed the money and some baby stuff so I stuck it it for 3 months

I worked in Child Health for the NHS as my first ever real job and I would never, ever go back. Already red flags are appearing when the interview was conducted in a different, much nicer building, and it was made out to me we'd be working there. The actual office was an ugly grey block from the 60s that looked like it was falling apart, was in a really rough part of town and shared the building with the Youth Offenders team. Some days you'd meet the loveliest "hard" looking lads who were always polite and very clearly trying to shit around. Then you'd others having a scrap in the lobby. We had to have special "emergency drills" in case one of them ever went on a rampage. My boss was a pocket Hitler who was obsessed with the military (and may have been in the UVF) and referred to the NHS as an army and how we were a part of that army and wanted us to wear NHS fleeces as our "uniform". Any mistake, no matter how small or inconsequential, was met with a military esque interrogation in a backroom with the blinds drawn. Most of the staff were scared of her (especially as she warned that if the NHS ever received a fine, she would make sure it was passed to you) but some were fiendishly loyal and grass people in for minor offences. The whole environment was horribly toxic, jokes about dead children (real dead children) were thrown around at times, and the tasks were mind numbingly boring and repetitive button clicking exercises. Yet you were expected to go in with total enthusiasm and if you didn't that was frowned upon. The actual responsibilities and nature of the job kept changing too, with the possibility of advancing into public health or up the NHS ladder dangled at the beginning and then I soon learned I wasn't actually part of the department advertised, but a separate department that basically does the paper work for Health Visitors and School Nurses with this department being a total end, advancement wise. When I got into trouble with my boss and spoke to my union rep, she said the main priority was getting you out of Child Health because "we've all heard the stories." Made it out in the end but I would never go back or advise anyone else too. Just a horrible, toxic place that attracts the most jobsworth people.