jobs you wouldn't imagine exsisted...
12-hour night shifts in summer in a salad factory, standing (too cold in factory to legally be allowed to sit) by a conveyor belt squeezing plastic bags of salad to check the seal.
And theen, 12 hour nightshifts in a soft drink factory in Yorkshire, next to the machine that cooks the paint on the cans. My job was to play 'go fish' with a small crowbar to make sure the cans went in upright. Also involved chemically cleaning a printing machine. No experience necessary! Left because the yorkshire chavman-filled factory was a frightening place for an 20yo blonde to be at night.
Also worked in a paper-printing factory, pushing cutouts from the spare paper. Bloody hands resulted. Gloves (reluctantly) given to us on the 3rd day, to cover our bloody stumps. Wouldn't want to get body fluids on the latest mortgage offer for NatWest now would we...
Sheet-folding for the local hospital. Favourite game? (scuse crossover post, know this has bindun) Guess the stain! (blood, more blood, shit, dunno, looks like a stomach-pumping session, blood etc.) The dirty laundry section was worse, colostomy bags and syringes wrapped in sheets. Am now immune to electric shocks.
Then, tailor, putting zips in trousers belonging to old men. Usually with inbuilt stains. And the stuff tha comes out when you pull a zip out...you don't want to even guess. Severe 'Filth'-style excema can be the only explination.
Bestest one...
At a make-up factory, in dire need of new machinery. We put the eyeliner bottle together by hand, first you fill it with a tiny little vacuum filler, then bash on the plug, screw on the lid, apply barcode (a finer art than you could ever imagine) and stick it through the daycoder. Do you not get the impression that a little more care on the sterility front would have been taken? Shit no. Oh, and if you were lucky you got to play on the big machines on the brushers (guess what they do...that's right...they put the brushes on!) which was great because no-one could hear you over the Metropolis-style machine and you were on a high chair. So all shift you could play captn startrek, complete with soundtrack and mechanical crises. "What seems to be the problem, Dave the Engineer?" "Ah no captn, she willnae brush no more, we gotta brush stuck in the anus of the machine, the dilithium crystals are shot to shit!!" etc. etc. This caught on as soon as people realised I was harmless and not convinced of my status as captain, (they wanted a go) so everyone on the machine got to play. Huzzah! Another favourite, "Death of Brian" (shopping list style, you have to remember all the alphabetical deaths before your letter), the factory idiot. Potential causer of many a lawsuit, but had been there since 1841 so firing him was more trouble than just letting him retire, but making sure there was always a fire-extinguisher handy.
In every job that must be done there is an element of fun...except mine.
Glad you liked the q btw ;)
(spida, Sat 2 Oct 2004, 23:38, Reply)