Posh YTS
As a child of 16 (well technically an adult at 16, but I can say for certain that I was still a kid as at 32 I still haven't grown up...) I got rail roaded into some crazy ass posh YTS scheme in 'electronics', which basically entailed me getting all the shit jobs, getting paid less than anyone else in the whole factory (including the mice and cockroaches), while supposedly getting some sort of vocational training.

My duties included:

Cropping off about 0.5 of a millimetre off the legs of some memory chips so a fucking machine could fit them properly. I shit you not, it was cheaper to pay me to take the chips out of their tubes, crop them and put them back in their tubes for the machine, than it was to fix the fucking machine... (an average run of chips took me 2 weeks to get thru).

Cutting reels of wire into strips of wire, then stripping the ends of the wire, twisting the wire and tinning them. I thought my supervisor was talking the piss when he asked me to do this, kinda like how you would ask the newbie to go to the stores and ask for a long wait etc etc. So I sat around aimlessly for 2 days before he came to check my progress... turns out he wasn't joking... 6 weeks of cutting, stripping etc etc.

Inserting pins into printed circuit boards because it was cheaper to get me to do it than program one of the machines to do it... 3 months of pushing pins into pcbs... I had fucking blisters on my hands!

and many many more...

All the while I was supposed to be filling in a 'log book' to show these training monkeys what I had been doing so they could certify my progress and give me my training certificate.

I started to think I was holding on to the shitty end of a stick when one of the people I had befriended asked me what I got paid... "£2 an hour" says I, "fuck me! I wouldn't even get out of bed for £2 an hour" says she... Still, I thought - these are reasonable people - I'll ask for a pay rise and guess what? I only fucking got one! I went from £2 and hour to £2 and 8 pence an hour.

Shortly after when the weather was nice I took 4 weeks off, I should really have told someone but I figured I deserved something for my trouble - I guess I was asking for it when I put in an appearance one lunch time sat in a friends, girl friends convertible, enjoying the sun, my freedom and the company of my friends girlfriend. The funny thing is they didn't say anything about it when I eventually went back to work, until I asked them to dismiss me on the grounds of unsuitability for employment (a loop hole to get paid job seekers without the 4 or 8 week wait during which point the government hope you become homeless and drop off the employment register because you don't have a permanent address) which they refused (bastards - it wouldn't have cost them anything) - I quit shortly after that, a more cynical and bitter person for the first 3 years of employed life.

I got my certificate after 3 years of hell and no one has ever asked to see it since!
( z0mb13e has a bee in his botnet, Tue 21 Feb 2006, 14:44, Reply)