What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? What made it bad and how long did you last?
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Just to be an awkward git, one of the best but also the worst jobs I’ve had was working for BT as the emergency operator - you know, the goon that answers with “Emergency, which service?” when you dial 999 or 112.
Genuinely loved that job, but it paid an absolute pittance. It was both fast paced ad fulfilling, but some of the shit that you hear still rattles my cage even today. Most of the calls were a blur while the job was getting done well, but some of them made you feel pure helpless slow-motion despair while you tried every trick in the book to fast track a particularly horrible call to the appropriate service.
I’m glad I did it but I absolutely wasn’t ready for the emotional devastation that it caused, and still caus es.
10/10 would do again A+++++
Can you share some funny calls if you ever received them?
It’s been a while, but there’s some clear time wasters - a guy phoning in demanding the police because he had bees in his attic, a dude wanting to phone the police because he didn’t like the circus he went to, all sorts of menial bollocks borne out of people unable to manage their own lives. Most of the time, the standing instruction was to pass the call to the requested agency - at the end of the day, we were only listening to a snapshot of what’s happening, so we weren’t in a position to make a judgement of whether they really needed an ambulance or police attendance or water fairy or not.
The EISEC system used to pick up landline addresses (and sometimes mobile addresses if the mobile operator signed up to the scheme), but also automatically provided public phone box details. There was one phone box serial number that used to strike dread into you, because by the time your eyes set on the number and your neurons were firing thinking “oh no, I recognise that phone box number…”, this prolific caller had already started ranting about the new world order, how we’re all being led down a path of damnation and that we should repent, all this bollocks. That was one of the few times we could drop calls actually, where they quite clearly weren’t listening to us and weren’t in any immediate audible need of help or danger.
Some of them were real headscratchers - someone phoning from a landline wanting the coastguard because something had capsized… in Birmingham.
Unfortunately, most of the nonsense calls were a result of an already creaking social care system - people phoning in experiencing severe mental health issues, hallucinating and all sorts; some because they felt like they had nowhere else to turn; and some were just lonely and wanted to speak to someone. I did Operator Assistance calls too (where you dial 100 from a BT landline) and a good chunk of those were old men and women who just wanted someone to speak to. If I was killing time, I’d quite happily chat shit to them for five minutes, on the understanding that as soon as the dot matrix board showed a 999 call queued, they were yeeted and the emergency call was taken.
I learned a lot about the world, myself, and how to speak to folk to get what you want in the world without being a complete penispump to someone on the other end of the phone.
Sorry about the long post.
Remember the Cant. ✊🏽
I’ve only really had four jobs. All retail and warehouse. So, it’s kinda hard to decide which was the worst so I’m gonna go with the one I lasted one day on before walking out.
It was at a large garden centre. I spent the entire day standing behind the till. Standing. Assistants weren’t allowed to sit down because they’d occasionally have to help a customer or move a large plant onto the checkout, which apparently the customer couldn’t do?
Anyway I walked in the following morning and said it wasn’t for me. I could have ghosted them, but I thought I owed them that much…Sods didn’t pay me; fuck 'em.
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I had a summer job working in a fish factory shelling scallops.
It involved sitting in what was effectively a huge fridge surrounded by other people doing the same thing. The sound of the knives on the shells was so loud that you couldn’t really talk to the person sitting next to you. We had gloves, but the combination of the knives and the shells meant the gloves would have holes in them after a couple of hours so your hands would be wet all day. The smell got into your hair and clothes. And you’d start at 04:30 or 05:30 depending on when the boats came in.
i remember that smell. i worked the “slime line” in a fish processing plant in Seldovia AK for a summer. basically scooping fish stuff out with a metal spoon connected to a hose for 12-14 hours. fish scales everywhere.
What is an AK? I’m guessing not something to do with guns in this context.
Alaska.
Two spring to mind. I could rant forever about them but I’ll try to keep it short.
First was an apprenticeship at a furniture logistics company. I was essentially an extremely overworked and underpaid spreadsheet monkey (I got paid £4 an hour). I received no training and gained no valuable experience or qualifications. In hindsight it’s clear to me the company just wanted cheap labour from vulnerable teenagers.
After this I took a job handing out leaflets for a store which buys/sells goods. The job was in fact not to hand out leaflets like I thought but to harass people I saw walking towards CEX (to try and convince them to sell their games/consoles to us instead of CEX). Obviously this was seedy as hell and embarrassing. I’d get told off at the end of the day every day for not bringing in multiple PS4s or whatever.
I had a job in a local Co-op where I was bullied by the managers. That wasn’t great.
I also had a job in quality assurance where to give you an example one of the tasks was to look at like 10k gloves front and back to check they were intact. We were not allowed to have the radio on or listen to music etc you can imagine the sort of people who were in that job long term, the conversation was not thrilling. I only did that job for a few months and I’d have been suicidal if I had to do it for much longer.
I once worked for a department store chain that no longer exists. I did 2 days of training in a classroom, then spent 2 days on the floor before I no call no showed and just never went back. It was just so freaking boring. I think I spent one day sorting a rack by size and color out of sheer boredom. Wound up getting a job at Denny’s (shitty 24 hour chain diner) shortly after, and while that also sucked, at least it wasn’t boring, and tips meant the overall pay was also better.
I had a security job for 2 weeks.
Jobs were scarce and this ghetto startup had openings, so I took something to perpetuate that eating thing.
I regretted it. I wasn’t a mall cop, thank god, but I was there to pit-lamp hobos at one construction site and the next week moved up to patrol a pulp mill after-hours.
In those two weeks of skulking about I saw a lot of nature - mink and eagles and such - but I couldn’t take the mediocrity and shady management; so when another opportunity came up I bolted.
It’s funny but that’s my worst.
Cold calling telemarketing (“Do you have time to answer some questions about x?”). Felt grotty with every call (got yelled at a lot too, be nice to people who call they likely don’t want to call you any more than you want to receive the call), lasted 2-weeks.
Swapped out to data entry of paper responses into a spreadsheet, was so much better but only lasted 2 days before I went back to the phones. Am verg grateful I don’t have to do that any more.
What’s the correct way of handling those calls. I’ll usually just let them say their bit and then say I’m not interested, which I think is fair but I wonder if it’s not easier for everyone involved to just cut them up and say you’re not interested immediately.
My partner’s mum gets right on my goat because she insists on being an absolute arse on the phone. I get it, it’s annoying but I don’t understand the need to be a total see you next Tuesday to the person on the phone. Hang up and move on.
I mean, I was good with people hanging up during the spiel. Saying “sorry I’m not interested” is more than fine and likely to put you on the upper end of calls that’s day. Swearing or getting upset isn’t acceptable and fails to recognise that neither of you want to be on that call.
However telemarketing has a better response rate than paper based surveys, and the data is used to drive decision making. A lot of people complain when things don’t work out for you - like local council decisions on new amenities, but if you don’t submit your opinion you can’t be heard. It’s not perfect but it is used to define a surprising number of things.
Wrt to you MIL, yeah, it’s not nice to be on the recieving end of hostility, I get it can be annoying but as I implied above nobody chooses the job, I personally had to take whatever I could get and I was too young/not out of work long enough for JSA (plus JSA is a pain to get anyway, but that’s a whole different story).
I usually ask them who they’re calling to speak to, since if they’re not a cold-caller they would know my name. This usually makes them hang up. With your inside experience, is this a good way of handling it?
This is an excellent way of screening. The company I worked for was an opt-in service. So all people being called had at some point agreed to it (though most forget ticking the box on a form or whatever, which is totally understandable), and we therefore had their names, so it wouldn’t have worked for what we were doing. But yes if a cold-caller doesn’t know who they’re calling then it’s a good indication you don’t need what they’re offering.
I heard a podcast with Scott Hanselman (a technologist in the US) and he had a phone system where you had to say the name of the person you wanted to an automated gate-keeper, which sounded like a really cool system, and similar to the sort of screening you’re doing.
“Please take my number off your list.” and hang up. Any company that follows the OFCOM rules is obliged to honour verbal requests for removal, so that’s the correct thing to do.
Admittedly, a cold calling company that follows the rules is an oxymoron so I tend to just cut them off with a “for fuck sake”, hang up, Google the number out of sheer curiosity, and then add it to the block list. Every now and then I see a number in the call history that’s been auto-blocked, so that at least provides a little satisfaction.
Or there’s the Google call screening thing, though legitimate callers find it confusing and often hang up before you get chance to take over the call, or assume it’s voicemail and try to leave a message.
got yelled at a lot too, be nice to people who call they likely don’t want to call you any more than you want to receive the call
- comma splice
- I hate being mean or obtuse to callers using my phone to sell me things or defraud me too. I’ll bet the humanity on the other end eventually caused you to change jobs too – because the seediness was a known quantity at the start but being in the line of return fire was definitely the catalyst. This is the goal.
In respect to 1) you’re absolutely correct, that should be two sentences and not the horrible run-on that I created.
In response to 2), yes I can understand being wary of spam callers, there weren’t nearly as many 15 years ago when I was doing the job. It was targeted research, so people who’d opted in to being contacted for marketing purposes (“how is your new toaster working out for you”) or local authority requests for comment (“are you happy with the new park that opened”).
I’ve had some real howlers the other way though (with actual scammers) so I understand the frustration, one woman who was obviously a spam PPE caller yelled at me “don’t you like money!” after I had politely declined,and there’s no dealing with that. In the end the easiest thing to do and a definite improvement on being nasty, is just hang up, in my opinion.
Lord, I remember back when the worst thing calling was either a telemarketer, or a collection agency.
Some of them were unpleasant, but not nearly as unpleasant as the people who are trying to straight up steal your shit these days.
Barring a known number, that phone can keep on ringing.
I have a contact in my phone called Spam (with a picture of Spam), and I add any number that doesn’t pass the sniff test within 30s (particularly Robo-spammers, urgh!), it can very helpful to get a repeat call and the picture of a can of spam tells me not to bother picking up.
I’ve had some real howlers the other way though (with actual scammers) so I understand the frustration, one woman who was obviously a spam PPE caller yelled at me “don’t you like money!” after I had politely declined,and there’s no dealing with that.
If I can, I keep them on the phone until they hung up on me frustrated. More often than not I can, I used to wfh and be able, in between meetings, to keep them going for a while, while doing my actual work. “Can you spell that url again? No it says page not found” or “of course I want a refund for that iPhone, what do I need to do”. All while typing my work emails, chatting with colleagues or working on a slide deck. Nowadays I’m looking after young babies full time. So even easier to apologise for the background noise and ask them to repeat their whole spiel for a fourth time.
That’s fair. It seems there’s a good scene in recording Scam Baiting antics and putting it on You Tube too.
Hyphen or semicolon or full-stop here, not comma.
If your sign for a job that you know irritates every single person that comes into contact with, then that is on you.
If every person had the respect for others to refused those jobs, then those calls wouldn’t exist.
I think you may misunderstand what I did. It was reaching out to people who had opted in to be part of market research. If they said “don’t contact me again” or if they were hostile then they got on the “no-call” list and were never contacted again. The only way that we could have got their phone number is if they submitted it during some sort of sign-up process somewhere. So I think you might be equating the work I did with something else.
The “cold” part of the “cold-calling” I mentioned above was because they weren’t explicitly expecting the call, but they had somewhere signed up and agreed to be contacted.
Refusing to take work is a rather privileged position, not everyone has that luxury, and I didn’t at the time. That being said I was out of there as quick as I could find something else (I only did 2 weeks).
got yelled at a lot too, be nice to people who call they likely don’t want to call you any more than you want to receive the call
Yeah but you’re the one getting paid for it and they’re not! Sorry, but you shouldn’t have worked there. Don’t blame the people you’re intentionally irritating for getting mad at you for your own poor choice.
Disclaimer that I never yell at these people but I will often hang up on them after the first “sorry not interest” gets ignored. If other people want to yell at them to get the message that they don’t want to be bothered, more power to them. Fuck telemarketers.
“sorry, I’m not interested” and hanging up is fine, cursing my family and telling me what a PoS I am, not so much. I think it’s clear you’ve never had to work in the service industry if you think that working a job like this dehumanizes you and justifies rudeness of this scale.
Calling you names and insulting family is not the same as simple yelling. Now you’re changing your narrative to straw man me into defending behavior like that.
You deserved to get yelled at if you are calling people to waste their time to market a product to them. It should be illegal, but at best it’s unethical, and you contributed to the problem.
That said, nobody deserves to be called names, slurs, or death threats, or whatever other new things you decide to include in your narrative.
You ended your post with “fuck telemarketers”, on a post where I was highlighting that I hated having to do that job, so yeah, you demonstrate a distinct lack of empathy, if there’s a wider context on that comment please let me know, as I’m not trying to strawman you, when you explicitly stated I deserved to be treated like that.
The fact you think telemarketing is about selling a product and not market research (about all sorts of things including political opinions, or NGOs etc) shows that you don’t know what you’re talking about and seem like an angry person. I’m going to disengage now, but I hope you can find peace :)
Telemarketing could be selling items or could mean market research.
Since you’re now bringing up the market research aspect (which most people don’t associate with telemarketing), ok, let’s tackle that new narrative:
Good market research practices involve paying people for their time and energy spent providing feedback about a product or behavior. Telemarketers do no such thing. They just bother people to solicit from them. You are suggesting that just cuz it’s for research that makes it better?
Don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about - It doesn’t matter what it’s for - calling people with solicitations of any kind is wrong.
I never yell at these people but I will often hang up on them after the first “sorry not interest” gets ignored.
Nah. Here’s the rules:
- don’t yell so they have an excuse to hang up
- ask them to repeat things, and parts of things, and more things, as some sweatshops have rules that say the customer must understand the pitch before they can be hooked legally.
- never say yes
- never hang up; let them
- question everything
- remember not to give out ANY personal information - not even confirming they have the number they think they dialed - until they can concretely prove whom they are. (This is a bailout for legit organizations that call you and accidentally sound like scam calls. They should immediately ask you to look up their 800 number and call a given extension within that publicly-advertised phone tree to somewhat confirm their identity)
- now the game is on. Your goal is to rack up the minutes they spend on you. With enough players, it finally becomes a losing proposition to run a phone sales/scam organization; but it’s gotta be a lot of people.
My record is 75 minutes with a ‘Bell Atlantic’ rep who was fluid with details and gave me an edge to contrast the data-points, and who finally hung up claiming she wanted to validate my information, Mr Thomas, to which I replied “Thomas, who the hell is that?” before the line went dead. I loved rocking out phrases like “well are you lying now or were you lying then?” I sometimes hope she took a different job the next day and hope she’s seen success. My name isn’t Thomas.
Telemarketing job.
They’re usually shit jobs but I found out in the course of training that we were calling people who had cancelled their Wall Street Journal subscriptions in the days after people were canceling in large numbers due to the Rupert Murdoch takeover.
Like fuck you, this job is hard enough without hassling the very people who have already made up their damn minds.
All that and the sales quota prize had been stolen from the manager’s office.
I quit when training was done.
Slaughter House cleanup
My brother (a student and vegetarian at the time) lived in a house backing on to a slaughterhouse which also owned the place, so they had to pay the rent in the main office - it was grim going but at least they got to head straight back out again.
A friend once had a summer job as a chicken de-boner and I wondered what could be worse. Apparently, cleaning up after.
Love a bit of Derek and Clive,hilarious.
Came here for this. And some references to Winston Churchill’s bogeys.
I took a position at a low tier (chain) hotel because we had just moved back to the US and i figured it would tide us over until something better came up.
I went one day to check it out, and …it was bad. The GM showed me around and said I would start the week of Thanksgiving, I went one day and saw what was what and started prepping for the week. When I asked where the staff was the answer was not encouraging (they were non existant).
I actually got up on turkeyday, showered, dressed, kissed the family goodbye and made it about 2 miles before i came to my senses and turned around.
Family was extremely happy, the GM wasn’t…It was going to be a shitshow anyway.
Went shopping, called up a couple friends and had a big ol’ Thanksgiving meal at home.
Tech support. I was with a broadband company that beams microwave internet to rural customers. Their only other options were dial-up (in 2019~) or much more expensive satellite. The company was inflating its network stats by buying up small regional ISPs and claiming their users/infrastructure as its own. This resulted in patchwork hardware across the entire country. Some towers I could access with our normal software. Some required downloading proprietary software, others were from the 1990s and could only take command line interactions. With any hardware that wasn’t ours, it was usually cheaper to disconnect the area than to service it.
So meemaw calls in because she hasn’t been able to read her far-right facebook conspiracies for the day. She hasn’t spoken to her children in decades so I’m the first human contact she’s had in a while. I pull up her system and it’s from 2001. Nothing works with my interface and I can’t tell if the tower is malfunctioning or if its radio transmitter or her radio receiver is or if there’s a tree somewhere in the 15km~ distance between the two. The last maintenance entry was five years ago and there are under a dozen people connected to it so the company won’t invest further. My call centre’s QA team is listening in on the conversation for up to ten minutes. I’d have to string the boomer along for those ten minutes, listening to all the insane shit they have to say about minorities, while pretending there is any hope of their service returning. Then after I knew QA wasn’t listening I’d quickly explain the situation, urge them to go with any other option, and end the call before my time metrics were fucked up by trying to help them.
All the while I’d be looking at their internet speeds and fixating on the broadband gap. It took them days to download what I can in ten minutes. Our service was the best they could get and the company existed to deprive them of access to data.
Dealing with the public
Assistant camp cook at a Boy Scout Camp. The assistant cook does almost all of the prep work for the head cook, and does all the kitchen cleanup. The dishawasher handled only dishes from the dining hall, not any of things used for cooking. M-F I had to be in the kitchen by 5:45am, got about an hour off after lunch–if I managed to complete everything quickly–and then got out of the kitchen at around 9pm. I also had meal breaks, as long as they didn’t interfere with getting the job done. Sunday I had to be in the kitchen at 3:30p (we only did dinner for the arriving troops), and Saturday I got to leave at noon or so since we only did breakfast before they all left. I had room and board–which was a milsurp wall tent with a milsurp cot–I had to supply my own bedding–and whatever I wanted to eat once the campers were done and my work was done. My wages were the princely sum of something like $175/week. In the early 90s. It worked out to something like $2.50/hr (which would be about $5.15 now).
And to top it off, the camp director got fired, a new one came in, and he fired all the kitchen staff so that he could bring his own people in. I was told at the time that I would have been the only one he kept, but he didn’t want to change his team. So I got moved to another camp about 90 minutes away.
Head cook was cool though; he’d been a cook in the Navy for decades, starting in Korea.
