The Sponge Room
When I was starting up my own business a few years back, I did a few temp jobs to help keep me a float. One of these involved doing some shifts at a factory which specialised in a myriad of delights made from milk and cream: yoghurts, deserts, cottage cheese etc..

As with most factory jobs the work was monotonous and soul-crushingly boring. But there was one particular department I dreaded, nay feared, the most. The Sponge Room.

When fruit trifles are made, it involves the bowls making their way down a production line where a circular sponge disc is manually inserted into the bowl before fruit and cream can be oozed seductively from the steel teets of the production line. Only, when the sponge discs come into the factory they do so stacked in cardboard boxes. Previous experience has taught that the sponge discs can't be seperated from each other and placed in bowls fast enough before the next row shunts forward.

Thus, in the factory boardroom the ingenious concept of The Sponge Room was conceived. This involved a number of people in a room, seperating stacks of sponge discs and re-stacking them in another cardboard box ready to be taken to the production line.

An entire room filled with a crack team of about a dozen sponge seperaters were devoted to this for 12 hours a day, every day. And for a full, depressing, tearful week I was one of them.

Yet they still were baffled as to why they were losing £6 million a year.
(BeardyMat, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 21:04, 3 replies)

Student Ambassador
When I was at university I got the prestigious role of promoting my university. This involved hob-nobbing with potential students, telling them how wonderful our university was. These events usually involved sitting around waiting for people to arrive, then eating buffet, nice chocolate cake, quiche, nibbles and drinking lots of wine. We even managed to sneak a few friends in as 'potential students' and used the night as pre-lash. As poor students the event was also a chance to gather some much needed supplies. Always heading to the buffet with large handbags, you could get a few days fill of sandwiches. However, eating buffet pretzels for breakfast is pretty low. For this job we got paid £7 an hour, and usually got paid over time because of clerical errors with the hours rota.

One time no students turned up, for a days campus tours ect, due to swine flu. Unfortunately not only did we end up with their lunch vouchers but we also got paid for the full days work.
(Morgana De Faeye, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 20:44, 2 replies)

Easiest Job
Taco Bender
(Devilbabytales, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 20:35, 2 replies)

On the hoof
I was hired by a university laboratory to drive a swanky hire car every week to an abattoir to pick up cows' feet and tails for gruesome and sinister (I presume) experiments.

I'd drive for three hours, hang around the abattoir for a while as they got their wares ready (an experience in itself), throw the goods in the boot and drive three leisurely hours back while listening to ACDC.

All stopped when the uni got a speeding ticket on my behalf, but it was well worth it.
(moosefish, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 18:53, 2 replies)

Friend of mine...
...once worked as circulation manager for a Japanese newspaper that sold bugger all anywhere apart from Japan. His job entailed making sure that subscribers in various European capitals were getting their paper on time. So he would fly hither and thither, taking clients and printers out to top restaurants on a limitless expense account, all for seventeen copies of whatever unpronounceable (and unreadable) paper this was. He claimed to work like a dog when in London, but always managed to finish both the Times and Guardian crosswords every day (apart from one clue on each, which I used to provide the answer to when I saw him in the pub most nights).

When they finally made him redundant, he dragged the battle out as long as possible, since he'd found out they ran some kind of scam on bringing employees into this country under false pretences. Paid off his mortgage, anyway.

He's now a fairly high-ranking civil servant, so I'm glad to report his workload probably hasn't increased.
(zebideedoodah likes florence but prefers venice, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 18:07, Reply)

Chief Fuel Analyst
It was a two week assignment to cover the very important role of Chief Fuel Analyst in a power station.

A grandious job title and at the age of 18 and seemingly hired purely on the basis of my recently acquired A Level in Chemistry, how could I say no, it would just look so awesome on my CV.

However, this was no ordinary powerstation - the fuel to be analysed was poultry litter, or to use the technical phrase, chicken and turkey shit. Fifteen or so 25t loads of it a day, had to dig down, get a sample, do IR moisture test, to physical loss method mouture test, ash content. My Lab, which was in the same shed as the 1000t of fuel upfront of the incinerator, had a certain odour that made you both high and nausious at the same time.

But the work was easy, and the other lads let me play (PLAY!) with the forklift truck, even allowing me to join their FLT Racing League, as well as dick around with the cherry picker!
(Phooey I COOK MUD, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 17:43, 3 replies)

Playing evening music/ background music
I'm in a wind quintet which plays evening music for your standard events- dinner parties, functions etc. We've been booked twice to play for the local yacht club's garden parties- for which we charge our flat rate for two half hour slots. The reason this was easier than any other gig, ever:

1. We were there for the whole party, as the hosts required us to "mingle" and discuss music with the guests. We had one rule: no alcohol, which was self imposed as playing while drunk= jazz. This meant that we spent most of our evening eating caviar, salmon sandwiches, tiramasu and little aperitifs that were more of an artwork than anything else in the mansion we were at.

2. Although we played through our program for a whole hour each half rather than 30 minutes, we had a nice break between each piece where one of the many guests would discuss loudly with his dinner partner everything he knew about music, looking to us to nod and congratulate his cultural expertise. Bach, Tchaikovski- easy to get confused, right? ;)

3. At the end of the evening one of the guests had the idea of passing around a cup for "tips" while we were still playing. We didn't know about it until we were presented with it- it more than doubled our fee for the evening.

To anticipate one of the answers that always appears when the words "easiest job" appear on QOTW, playing is much, MUCH easier than conducting. Seriously.
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 16:19, Reply)

I have the best and the worst job. Six months of one; six months of the other. Regular like clockwork.
My job is certainly “interesting.”

For half of the year, I can do pretty much whatever I want. I have no management-defined goals, and am completely autonomous. During this time, however, I “choose” to work 70+ hours per week because it is the things done during this period that make me more employable and get me (eventually) promotions.

For the other half of the year, near-enough every waking hour is spent working. I will be up at 4am to get into the office for 6am. I will not be able to leave the office until 7pm, sometimes later. I’ll get home around 8 to 8:30 and then it’s pretty much a case of eating something, maybe watching the tiniest amount of TV and getting to bed around 9 – 9:30pm so I can get up the next day. This is on weekdays. On weekends, I’ll get up later and there’s no travelling, but I’ll still need to put in 30ish hours to get through the work. So that’s a 95 hour week right there. 2.7 times what management ever say the work should take if you bring this matter up with them (and before anyone says it, this is normal – I’m not taking 2.7 times longer than anyone else).

Other features of my job: no fixed working times – just “hours as necessary.” Those without career aspirations abuse this during the first six month period by doing sweet FA. You can literally spend months without seeing colleagues and no one knows where they are or what they are doing. For the other half of the year, management royally take the piss by layering the work on, as described above. This is endemic through the organisation. Those in administration functions have responded by ceasing to provide their core service for large parts of the day – their equivalent of what I have to spend 6am to 9am doing every workday, because I don’t have this option.

I also *have* to be in the office in the "busy" six month period. If I don't turn through illness or weather, pretty bad things happen. I have to run two cars just in case one won't start in the morning.

You might think I’m raking it in with all these hours: nope. Fixed salary. Higher than the national average but not massively so. No overtime.

And the worse thing about this? I really want a cat. I mean *really* want one. But I’m never at home, so it would be unfair on the poor wee thing.

Anyone want to guess what I do?
(dxg, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 16:09, 19 replies)

Dismantling a tank factory
A couple of years back my mate asked me to help him out with removing a massive laser cutter from a tank factory, someone had bought it for a song at an auction but part of the deal was that they had to move it off the site. Enter me and Clive, we turned up with a selection of spanners, hammers and crow bars, took in to bits and then I spent the next two days drinking coffee and watching a gang of blokes put the bits on a lorry. £2k in notes for 3 days "work". Win.
(ElBastardo, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 15:03, 3 replies)

Due to a series of internal staff movements and reshuffles
for the last 3 years i have not had a manager at work. I am the only person who knows what my job entails. The guy i am ultimately responsible to doesn't like to get his hands dirty with the little people, as a result, no one really knows what i do, but they understand it is vital for the successful running of the business. I have perfected the art of looking busy, while actually doing very little but play on my phone. Over the last year since i discovered how to stream video to my iphone, i have watched some cracking tv, the whole of the Wire, Deadwood, Breaking bad etc. Sounds like the perfect job, but alas the money is shite (but not bad for doing nowt) and i am starting a better paid job, which entails actually doing some work. Since i handed my notice in my colleagues have been panicking about getting someone trained up to do my job before i leave in a couple of weeks.. I sit back and laugh, as productivity is likely to increase once i leave!
(trickyric, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 14:50, Reply)

watch the simpsons
my husband has a job so easy that it makes me cry. early on in his stint as an audio visual technician in a massive city firm, his boss told him, as there wasn't much to do, that he could go home early that evening though not before he'd seen the end of the episode of the simpsons he was watching on a massive plasma screen.
(mrsrowe mrsrowe, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 14:38, 2 replies)

Here's a job I want.
I've noticed that an awful lot of big artists like to have lots of people on stage with them. Frequently one of them will be a guy playing that cigar...thing that you rub with a pencil. You know, the thing they gave to the class spacker in music lessons just so he could join in.
So essentially you get to put "Professional musician" on your CV, travel the world and have sex with groupies. All right, the groupies the road crew don't want but it still counts. And all without having to have more musical ability than a 10 year old who's been kicked in the head by a donkey.

My easiest job: Civil Servant in a department the bigwigs had mucked about with. The things I'd been trained to do were no longer being done by that department. The things that were now being done by that department, nobody ever got round to training me to do. Even when I asked nicely. I could do the bulk of my workload in about an hour. Twumb twiddling skills therefore honed to Shaolin Monk levels.
Couple of times I got as far as the entrance lobby then thought "Sod it", used my mobile to ask for a day off and went home.
Sorry.
(Big D, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 13:05, 1 reply)

id have to say robbing my house
after my housemate thought it would be a good idea to leave the door unlocked

fhailrbsrhbgds kfb sd
(ladyintheradiator, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 12:42, Reply)

I am a professional hole digger
I get paid well to dig holes. I get paid well to watch other people dig holes. I went to uni for 4 years to learn about professional hole digging. Sometimes I get invited to lecture about hole digging and get free food, drinks and the people's ovation and fame forever. Hole digging is not always easy, but it sure pays well (current rates are about $150 per hour).

For an unrelated, non-professional hole digging, I was congratulated for my digging prowess by the top army general/major whatever he was in Australia. That was a good day.

I am that person you sometimes see on the roadside leaning against my shovel, looking good in fluro and being smug. I would make an excellent plumber, but sometimes I can't remember that shit doesn't run uphill and paydays are Thursday.
(boozehound is drinking your bar dry, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 10:29, 6 replies)

Text Slut
Many years ago I was fortunate enough to get a job with a company who ran adult SMS services. You know the kind you see in the back of lads mags that say "Text "SEX" to 8**** to chat to horny women". Well I was the woman at the other end. They're all fake, even the ones that say they will connect you with someone local. We just used to use google maps to find out info about their area and then say we were from a nearby town. The job was actually pretty hard at times, we had to deal with loads of different punters at once and keep track of the conversations, plus come up with new and exciting naughty roleplays to keep them texting back. They would pay up to £1.50 for each reply we sent. I think some of the pervs racked up £1000 bills thanks to me and my team (I was a supervisor for a while). We could even send them naughty pictures of the girls they thought they were chatting to. Over the years in that job I pretended to be:

A chick with a dick
A gay man
Several kinds of dominatrix
A slave
An insect
Two girls at once on the threesome line

There's plenty more that I can't remember now. At times the job was absolutely hillarious, and at other times it was disturbing and a bit sad too. Some guys were genuinely nice and just a bit lonely and I felt bad about them being charged so much, just to chat to someone. The complete psycho freaks always made me see the charges as some kind of pervert/stupidy tax though. If you'd like to read a few anonymous transcripts then check out diamondflamer.livejournal.com/ - it's ancient, but there's loads of stuff in the archives to give you a giggle. It's NSFW! There's more in my OkCupid.com journal too. Go here www.okcupid.com/profile/diamondflamer and click journal and go back to page 13 and start from there. Sorry I am rubbish at html stuff so can't work out how to link directly to my journal.
(diamondflamer, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 10:27, 11 replies)

I used to make porn sites for a living
It wasn't the easiest job I've ever had, but it easily the best.

Two weeks in, they wanted to test my mettle, so they organised a shoot in the office. Trying to work when you've got Michelle B and Lolly Badcock going hammer and tongs on each other with dildos isn't easy, but entertaining nonetheless.

I fucking loved that job. Unfortunately, the heiresses of the company sold it, and nearly everyone lost their jobs.
( HoratioFellatio Taking the the out of psychotherapist, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 9:47, 2 replies)

Cisco phone support
Punter: hello, my thing is broke
me: Hello, do you have a contract?
Punter: yes I have contract
me: have you switched it off and on again?
punter: yes
me: is it still broke?
punter: yes
me: I have to escalate this to level two support, good bye
( VampireMonkeyOnSpeed a super sexy sexual sex terrorist sex, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 9:33, 4 replies)

Baggage Handler
I was a flight attendent on Flight 93`s return leg from San Fran on 11th September. Easy day that!
(K85 Mmmm Regal funsize, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 9:31, Reply)

Heath Ledger's pharmacist
I fucked that one up too! Fuck!
(CactusZack Shaved his coin purse on, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 4:31, 3 replies)

Maddy's babysitter
...Wait, I fucked that job up.
(CactusZack Shaved his coin purse on, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 4:27, Reply)

Packing hemp seed
The edible stuff sold in health food shops not the more interesting stuff.
A cash in hand job, £5 an hour, 10 years ago.
Picked up from Brighton, driven out into the Sussex countryside and dropped off at a barn in the middle of nowhere.
A huge open silo full of seed and numerous 5 foot high blue plastic barrels to be filled, by hand , with a small hand shovel.
Before the driver left me there I asked what they expected.
Previous packer did an average of 6-8 barrels a day, with an hour break at lunchtime, as long as I maintained that, all would be well.
Someone would come back at 1pm to take me to a local farm shop for lunch.
By 11pm I'd filled 6 barrels and realised I'd probably shot myself in the foot so hid 3 of them behind the silo.
When the boss turned up instead of the driver, i was sitting on a hay bale having a cig, he didnt look impressed but when seeing the 3 filled barrels he relaxed and drove me off for lunch.
I got back, and then wandered off into the coutryside and spent the remainder of the day chilling out, I chanced upon some guys shooting pheasants and managed to blag myself a brace with sweet talk and smiles ( and delicious they were :) )
Got back to the barn, filled another couple of barrels out of boredom, got picked up for home, got cash in hand for 8 hrs work when I'd actually only done about 4, plus I went home with 2 pheasants and a thank you for being a good worker, sweet.
(insomniac-surfer oh go on then, just this once, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 3:03, 4 replies)

8 inch commute saves shit stripper from life of prostitution
So I've done years in call centres, harrasing gullible old ladies of an evening to buy first aid kits and extensions on their catalogue repayments.
I've worked for four years in McDonalds and only achieved two stars.
I've grafted in the local radio industry for ten years, writing inane adverts, annoying jingles, and getting managerial bollockings every two days for my 'exuberant personality.'
I've worked hard and always earned SHIT MONEY.

So when I got made redundant from my radio job due to the credit crunch, I thought it was the end of the world. I applied for many unsuitable jobs, and even did a highly unsuccessful stint as a stripper (trust me, I'm not half bad to look at with top legs and even topper titties, but strangely, getting a dance is more about what you SAY to the guy, not how pert your teats are. Seems the gents don't like to be outwitted by smart ladies - I earned FECK all. In fact, I was about to go and work in one of the less respectable clubs where 'touchy feely time' is allowed before I got rescued from an unlikely source)

I spent a fairly pleasant ten months out of work, writing my book and attempting to show my nudie bits to unwilling men, and then...my redundancy pay ran out. FUCK.

On the day this happened, I got THE FEAR. Don't send me back to the dark place! I'm an office retard, I can't brew up and I say offensive things to my colleagues that I think are piss funny.

And then it came and saved me. BINGO! A mate of my brother's needed some SEO articles writing for his bingo site - they paid well and I could sit on my arse at home, no phonecalls off clients, no irritating colleagues, no shit for me to put my foot in with management.

And here's the easy bit. After just 8 months, I now have a £32k per year client list, and all I have to do is get up in the morning, commute EIGHT INCHES to my desk and dictate 10 - 15 inane little articles in to a bluetooth headset which speeds up my writing by 300 - 500%.

I can now churn out about one every 5-10 mins - and work is plentiful and easy to find.

I feel so guilty that others have to actually commute, work/live down mines for four months at a time/milk turkeys - and the best thing about it? I can work anywhere in the world as long as it has wifi and BEER.

Love from Vicky, currently travelling the US of A with a laptop on her knee.
(Radio Vicky Anyone cool Brits live in Ibiza?, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 3:01, 9 replies)

the crap hustle
Being quite into smoking at uni I spent most of the time stony broke, making and consuming my own egg fried rice and showering in own brand lemon scented washing up liquid.

Something needed to give so managed to get a job in the cloakroom at the local dive nightclub taking £1 for every (raffle style) ticket sold during the night. Wasn't long before I realised I could recycle the tickets and resell to the next pissed up redneck, being up north meant there was no shortage of cloaks to room. I didn't take the piss, the books looked good and I got off with enough cash to keep me in dope, kebabs and munch.
(Cepheus, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 2:20, Reply)

I had an "easy" job in quality control
They said it was easy, at M&M Mars, making sure the m&m's were ok before being bagged.




Fuckers fired me for pulling out the 3's, E's, and W's. They said I was being ridiculous, I thought it was a job well done.

Edited for my English tutor.
(CactusZack Shaved his coin purse on, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 1:57, Reply)

Two of the easiest jobs I've done
1) The first involved working in a warehouse as a temp. As I was an unskilled (read: Couldn't legally drive the forklift trucks) lanky streak of piss, my job consisted of being partnered with a forklift truck driver and following his instructions for the day. However, this being in Swindon, half of them spoke only Polish and a quarter of them a mix of Polish and highly broken English, which made the job interesting as I spent half the time trying to guess what they were saying. The ones I could understand were awesome though, as they actively encouraged me to doss around, in exchange for a limitless supply of tea on the breaks.

I think I got paid £90 for about half an hours worth of actual work over the course of two days. The rest of the time, I spent nattering away to the few that could understand me, and occasionally dodging falling pallets from high above. Good times.

2) The other easy job I've had was acting as a virtual PR consultant/general dogsbody for a very small (read: two people) maternity clothing company (part of my uni degree, I had to go get a job for a month and a half in an industry that the uni arranged for me), which is amusing when you consider that I was 21 years old and male at the time (still am male, for that matter).

My boss was early to mid-thirties, female, fit as fuck I believe the term is, and as this was the height of summer, spent most of her time in short shorts, showing off her amazing legs. I spent 75% of my time surfing Twitter, Blogspot and Facebook, managing them. The other 25% of the time was spent writing articles for the website and local newspaper about how awesome we were, making tea, posting parcels, and perving on my boss. As we were an online business, the dress code was ridiculously relaxed, and the days I wasn't required in the office, I spent lazing in bed on my laptop, often stark naked, just for shits and giggles and for the ability to say that yes, I was at work naked.

I could do whatever I liked as long as the FaceyB, blog and Twitter pages were updated with the daily stuff, and didn't fuck up. Which was almost never, and if any of them did go down, it was usually the rest of the site going down too, like if the FaceyB group fucked up, the rest of FaceyB would be fucked up. So it was a case of wait for it all to come back up again, which usually meant getting another cuppa for me and the boss and the other worker, and watch YouTube videos until it came back up.

I managed to win an award for the company at the Prima Baby Fashion Awards for my efforts, despite not actually wearing pants a full quarter of the time that I was working there. I'm pretty sure that's fucked up somehow, but it was awesome.

Apologies for length, the boss said I was good.
(Ghost Atreides enjoying incontestable health benefits on, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 1:46, 2 replies)

Study hard or you'll end up digging holes in the road
I'm that guy in the fluorescent jacket that stands with my hands in my pockets, watching the other two guys in fluorescent jackets digging a hole in road, while you're sitting in your car, barely moving, on the other side of the cones on every A road or motorway with roadworks during rush hour.

Actually, I'm not really. But I would like that job.
(Big Smurf Brush me daddy-O, Sat 11 Sep 2010, 0:18, 3 replies)

Easiest job Ever
Bouncing an 18th Birthday Party, until it kicked it off...
(puremadmental, Fri 10 Sep 2010, 23:15, Reply)

used to work at an airport....
and was paid 4x normal pay plus travel to turn up on Xmas day, see one plane land, watch it moved to the refit zone and go home.

Still got paid for 8 hrs though.(i.e. 32 hrs pay)

Pity the job was complete shit for the other 364 days of the year.
( NooShmoo It's a fantazmagorical pile of ultra bollocks, Fri 10 Sep 2010, 22:56, Reply)

Work experience in year 10
Not really a job, but as I had to be there, and it wasn't school, I'm counting it. But I was at a bike shop in town for two weeks. It involved me going to the bakery about 3 times a day for bacon rolls and coke, counting how many police cars drove past in a day, and listening about the assistant's time in prison for speeding.

Every so often the boss came in with a van of broken bikes, and the two of them put stickers over the scratches and put new tyres on them. While I sat in the corner staying out the way.

Although once I learned how to disconnect the brakes easily, so I guess I learned something in that fortnight. And got some moneys.
(Stu in the hat is frothing at the gash, Fri 10 Sep 2010, 21:38, Reply)