Work experience
In between GCSEs and these new-fangled AS-level things, I spent a week at a crappy local paper making tea and writing those tiny little articles that go in the thin columns down the side of the page - things like "Cat rescued from tall tree". Which the hippy editor would then rewrite totally, so when my parents bought copies of the paper to send to grandparents and so on, I'd see the finished article and say "I didn't write that!" So that put me off journalism.

The week after that I was filing the year's supply of yellow dossiers they'd obviously been saving up for work experience girls for a law firm. The only interesting points were making tea and going to court occasionally to hear about parking offences. Not to mention that the three of us doing work experience there (we were all about 15-16) were each chatted up by the "office sex beast", who looked and sounded exactly like Brian Blessed. And was about the same age as Brian Blessed.

A year or so later, thanks to a phenomenon known as the Welsh Mafia (my parents afe Welsh, the woman who ran the office was Welsh, ergo she had to give me a job), I was doing my community service (my school had had some insane idea that it was necessary to have some community service to put on your UCAS form). I was a computer monkey for Age Concern - they had a brand new spangly computer in both their offices and no one knew how to switch it on. I spent two weeks teaching grannies to use Word, making spreadsheets, flyers, typing up dinner menus for what I can only describe as Springfield Retirement Castle, and adding up totals of how many old people came in and had lunch and what they owed me, which had to go in a basket, and then into a tin, and if the tin was empty it had to go into another tin... and so on. The only interesting bits were when their printer spat out black ink all over me (which wasn't funny at the time as it ruined what I was wearing), and when the Office CD-ROM cracked in the CD drive and shattered into a million pieces inside the computer case, meaning I spent the afternoon hitting it with office equipment to get all the pieces out and making a mini-jigsaw on the office floor, then legging it at 5.00 so no one would know I'd done it. Happy times.
( Maladicta, Mon 20 Feb 2006, 20:27, Reply)