I'm afraid I'll have to go against the tone of the question...
And say that my work experience as a kid was fantastic!

1. I had to sign some version of the Official Secrets Act beforehand because it was all MoD technology they were working on. That's usually an indication of potential boredom through sod's law but most of the week all the great stuff was prefixed with "well, we shouldn't really be showing you this but..." followed usually by the chance to play in a tank.

2. People kept passing me on and it would always be just before their fag break, which seemed to be spent looking very grey and depressed and pasty while smoking. My presence there seemed to alter the proceedings by depressing them about how many of them actually did work experience at the same company as a teenager...

3. I got to play with solder! I had to solder together a cable from the diagram I'd tidied up myself and transferred from ancient MacDraw to the server's FileMaker Pro database. This cable then went from the air conditioning unit in a tank to the testing box. I'm still waiting for the day in the news where some people have died because my shoddily soldered cable malfunctioned and they died in some desert...

When I told my father about my work experience he immediately suggested that I get a job at the local supermarket part time to "get a taste of the real world". I dutily did so, and discovered ignorance, apathy, downright stupidity and intentional malice. I frequently wanted to throw a brick onto people's heads. I then explained this to my father, who said "ah, you're cured."

Wise man :-)
(mmmm curry doesn't really understand this sig lark, Thu 10 May 2007, 11:46, Reply)