I think I was 14and I was setting myself up for life by deciding that a paper-round required getting up early so I'd got a job in a shop.
A butcher's shop.
For £20 a week I worked for two hours everyday after school. For a bonus fiver I could work all Saturday.
My jobs were fun things like cleaning the U-bend of the sink after it had got clogged with rotting meat that had been washed down there over the previous year.
Another top job was washing blood from the walls of the walk-in freezer. With bleach. And no hand protection. At below zero degrees(obviously). Occasionally the butchers would lock me in there. Oh how we laughed as I began to lose feeling in my fingertips and my skin turned white.
But you try to make the best of things, for example I could pass the time by having staring competitions with pig's heads (just their heads, nothing else).
I can also claim to have touched pig's brains, which are apparently something like 98% genetically identical to human brains. Looking back on it, that was actually really rather odd...
Still, I've grown up completely un-warped by the experience. Oh yeah.
(A butcher's shop.
For £20 a week I worked for two hours everyday after school. For a bonus fiver I could work all Saturday.
My jobs were fun things like cleaning the U-bend of the sink after it had got clogged with rotting meat that had been washed down there over the previous year.
Another top job was washing blood from the walls of the walk-in freezer. With bleach. And no hand protection. At below zero degrees(obviously). Occasionally the butchers would lock me in there. Oh how we laughed as I began to lose feeling in my fingertips and my skin turned white.
But you try to make the best of things, for example I could pass the time by having staring competitions with pig's heads (just their heads, nothing else).
I can also claim to have touched pig's brains, which are apparently something like 98% genetically identical to human brains. Looking back on it, that was actually really rather odd...
Still, I've grown up completely un-warped by the experience. Oh yeah.
Matazone has new icons, but is keeping this one,
Mon 10 Nov 2003, 15:08,
archived)
Another oneI did a temp job for a while that was typing in details of cancer patients.
Now, I know that those details are then taken onwards to help provide better care for future patients but still...
The forms I had to type in were about twenty pages long and would take about half an hour to input. I would find out during this time I would find out about the patient's family, what treatment s/he had undergone, if any kids were around, their age... A lot of personal information.
The last question was the one that even now makes me shudder.
'Tick the boxes that apply:
The patient survived 6 months after treatment
The patient survived 12 months after treatment
The patient survived 18 months after treatment
The patient survived 24 months after treatment'
I was pretty emotionally involved with these people by this point and to find out that most of them were dead within 6 month was crushing.
I bet that perky little story doesn't get on the show.
(Now, I know that those details are then taken onwards to help provide better care for future patients but still...
The forms I had to type in were about twenty pages long and would take about half an hour to input. I would find out during this time I would find out about the patient's family, what treatment s/he had undergone, if any kids were around, their age... A lot of personal information.
The last question was the one that even now makes me shudder.
'Tick the boxes that apply:
The patient survived 6 months after treatment
The patient survived 12 months after treatment
The patient survived 18 months after treatment
The patient survived 24 months after treatment'
I was pretty emotionally involved with these people by this point and to find out that most of them were dead within 6 month was crushing.
I bet that perky little story doesn't get on the show.
Matazone has new icons, but is keeping this one,
Mon 10 Nov 2003, 15:17,
archived)
And another oneTemping really does put you in some terrible jobs sometimes.
This is the only temp job that I got out of before my contract finished.
I sent out to a nearby office and found out that my task was to phone up businesses and to try to offer them the services of the company that had hired me.
The company provided support for CEOs. Essentially their theory was that it's lonely at the top and there's no-one to tell you what to do and how to cope with it. Bloody hell... To summarise, they run support groups for CEOs and charge an absolute fortune for this.
Of course, such services would go under expenses of the companies in question, not the CEO themselves.
The real problem I had with it was that among the list of companies were several public service ones, many of which were claiming that they had no money to give to their workers or to spend on small details like safty standards.
I was doing this job just after a major rail crash and top of the list was Railtrack's new executive. There they were, telling the world they had no money to repair all the tracks as fast as they would like and this company was trying to get me to get this person as a client.
It was very morally bankrupt and so I stopped that after one day.
(This is the only temp job that I got out of before my contract finished.
I sent out to a nearby office and found out that my task was to phone up businesses and to try to offer them the services of the company that had hired me.
The company provided support for CEOs. Essentially their theory was that it's lonely at the top and there's no-one to tell you what to do and how to cope with it. Bloody hell... To summarise, they run support groups for CEOs and charge an absolute fortune for this.
Of course, such services would go under expenses of the companies in question, not the CEO themselves.
The real problem I had with it was that among the list of companies were several public service ones, many of which were claiming that they had no money to give to their workers or to spend on small details like safty standards.
I was doing this job just after a major rail crash and top of the list was Railtrack's new executive. There they were, telling the world they had no money to repair all the tracks as fast as they would like and this company was trying to get me to get this person as a client.
It was very morally bankrupt and so I stopped that after one day.
Matazone has new icons, but is keeping this one,
Mon 10 Nov 2003, 15:27,
archived)
Last oneand another temp job.
The major clothing chain Pilot were changing over their till system. So you'd think that they'd work out someway to emigrate the data? Nooooo. That would be sensible.
Every item in their shop had a set of information to be input into a form, 12 of 19 fields were to be left empty. Every single item, in every single size had a different barcode. You'd think that they'd get a barcode scanner. Nooooo...
So I sat in a small room for three months, typing eight and a half hours solid every day(I needed the money so worked through my lunchbreaks) and I input about two-thirds of Pilot's new till system.
It didn't involve blood. So that was good.
It didn't involve cancer, again, this was progress.
It wasn't morally bankrupt, so I could sleep at night (albeit dreaming of inputting codes).
So what was so bad about this job? Surely it was just boring, not hellish? Noooo...
They piped Radio bloody One into every room of the building every single day and you couldn't turn it off.
That, ladies and gentlemen, was hell.
(The major clothing chain Pilot were changing over their till system. So you'd think that they'd work out someway to emigrate the data? Nooooo. That would be sensible.
Every item in their shop had a set of information to be input into a form, 12 of 19 fields were to be left empty. Every single item, in every single size had a different barcode. You'd think that they'd get a barcode scanner. Nooooo...
So I sat in a small room for three months, typing eight and a half hours solid every day(I needed the money so worked through my lunchbreaks) and I input about two-thirds of Pilot's new till system.
It didn't involve blood. So that was good.
It didn't involve cancer, again, this was progress.
It wasn't morally bankrupt, so I could sleep at night (albeit dreaming of inputting codes).
So what was so bad about this job? Surely it was just boring, not hellish? Noooo...
They piped Radio bloody One into every room of the building every single day and you couldn't turn it off.
That, ladies and gentlemen, was hell.
Matazone has new icons, but is keeping this one,
Mon 10 Nov 2003, 15:36,
archived)