Damn.. qualifications! Knew I'd forgotten something along the way...

I forgot one!

I spent 8 miserable hours attempting to sell Karate club membership door to door in Stockon-on-Tees.

We were instructed to lay down the hard sell on everyone that opened their door. Even frail old grannies, FFS.

GKR, you can kiss my arse, you scamming fucks

Punch the grannies in the face when the open the door. Instant sale.

You did it for goodness sake. A company is the people working for it - you were part of the problem, davpaz. *shakes head sadly*

Oh, you know the cafes at railway stations, the ones that sell tea/coffee/cakes? I used to work at one. Had to go in at 0530 and get it all ready (sort out the papers, bake cakes, make sandwiches, etc) for opening at 0615. Then work through until 13.30. Or come in at 1300 and work until close, then tidy up. During that time, I suffered verbal abuse from disgruntled train passengers over the state of the nation's railways, got robbed, got to know the taxi drivers and get free lifts in town, turned off a fruit machine after someone below the age of 18 had just stuck £30 quid in it, got £15 in smith's vouchers for being awesome, worked with a really odd bloke ("I'd have more chance of going out with Buffy than you as I know Tae Kwon Do"), several mad girls and older women and the boss hit on me during her leaving do. It was quite good as I got to go surfing in the morning or afternoon and it was only really busy once an hour.

I was a gardener for the council, and I drove the main road. This was in the summer break one year while I was at university, 20 years old. they gave me my own battered Datsun truck, and I drove around the scenic spots and landmarks of highland perthshire, strimming the verges of carparks and so on. Week-about, I'd mow the lawns of council houses in Aberfeldy. Hard work, little pay and often lonely, but I was happy back then, I think. And fit from all the exercise.

Feex

You know if I wasn't in this job I'd love to work as a gardener.

If only!

I like the idea of it but I reckon it would be a bit miserable sometimes. I was watching something the other day which had a tree surgeon on it and he was saying that everyone he ever talks to who works in an office says that they'd love his job. He thought they were all idiots.

Well yeah, it's like that with most jobs though I suppose.

It's just from enjoying doing things in my own garden really.

Ooh - I missed out three agency jobs.

I worked 12-hour shifts on a production line in a plastics factory that made baby wipes bottles. My job was taking the lids out of the machine (with gloves, because they were fucking hot) and closing them before putting them in the next machine. Job satisfaction a-go-go!

I did night shifts at a newspaper distributor, piling stacks of newspapers into a machine which bound them with that plastic tape stuff. Saw a guy lose 3 fingers doing that, nasty.

I did night shifts at the Royal Mail sorting office before Christmas. My job was to take all the stupid-shaped Christmas cards that the autosorting machine couldn't handle, and sort them by hand.

Oh, I did that one, too. My job was to stand still for ten hours, hunched over a standing desk, and sort piles of letters into first, second and business class.

I've never experienced back ache like that before or since. Terrible work, but decent pay.

I worked the Christmas Post once. Loved it. Did fuck all, got paid.

...

I suppose it'd be a bit of a crap job here though, since there'd only be about 5 months work every year.

All-righty. I'm sort of interested to see this myself (and to see how much I'll forget). It's going to be a long'un. These are sort of in order, although often jobs overlap each other.

So, my first job was working on a farm, shovelling grain into a Archimedes screw type thing.
Various other farm jobs followed, involving normal farm-type stuff, and one escape from certain death. If you want to see me go white when telling a story, ask me about it.
Me and a friend did some gardening around the village we lived in - we earned £1 an hour each. Whoo yeah!
I helped my old man look after a rich chap's racing cars sometimes, which involved going to race tracks and stuff, often in other parts of Western Europe. They were the only times I left the UK.
I've beaten for bird shoots a few times.
I worked as a trapper (person that presses the buttons when someone says "pull") at a clay pigeon shooting site, eventually becoming a CPSA referee.
I've worked till at Sainsbury's and Tesco, and had jobs at KFC, McDonalds and Burger King.
I buy a flashing light and dig the sub speakers out of my car to be a DJ for a night. I keep it up for a long time.
I worked as a cashier for a local petrol station. I used to play on my Playstation on a black and white TV under the counter.
I left school, which I was shit at.
I went to work for Spalding (the sports people) picking goods in their warehouses. I got fired for crashing a forklift into one of the shelving units and knocking a load of stuff down. That same weekend I got fired from the petrol station because the boss thought I was stealing cigarettes. Not a great weekend.
Then I got a job with a company I can't remember the name of, who used to make rubber door seals for cars. My job was to measure the door seals against a bit of wood, making sure they fell within two marks. I stood there from 8pm to 8am, measuring one every five seconds, at a guess. In the two months I worked there, I had three seals that were the wrong length
I remember wanting to stay at that company, because when you'd been there for a year they would send you to Germany for two weeks on an exchange program. I get really weird emotions when I think now about how excited that made me - mostly fear and guilt, like I'm betraying myself somehow. Fuck knows. The job was turning me into a fucking zombie though, so I quit.
I get a job with a builder friend of the guy running the clay pigeon site helping him out building a garage when he was low on staff. I tell him I can drive a JCB backhoe loader, which I'd done once about six years ago, but it turned out I was fairly handy at it. He kept me on after the garage job, and loaned me some money so I could get the proper license for driving vehicles on building sites and let me pay it back out of my wages each week. I remember crying when he offered it to me, because it was the first time anyone had done anything like that for me. Builders have trouble knowing what to do in those situations
I get work in a night club at the weekends. I start in the bar, but after one night I'm moved to 'indoor security'. As I didn't have a certificate, I wasn't allowed to be an official bouncer, but that's what I was. I DJed at the club a few times, too. At that time I was working for the builder all week, bouncing on Friday and Saturday nights, doing my JCB course on Saturdays and still working for the clay pigeon site on Sunday. I was perfectly happy and would still be doing it now, but a girl broke my heart and everything went to shit.
Four weeks later I have no jobs at all, and don't leave the house except to put the bins out. I'd saved a thousand pounds or so up over the years, so I could probably have stayed that way for a few months. At the time I didn't think much about it, but it's pretty clear that I was depressed. It fucking sucks. That whole time, and a lot of stuff from my relationship with said girl has simply vanished from my head. It sounds like a cliché but I really have to try hard to remember things about it, and often I can't at all.
A guy called Jake saved my life, and got me the fucked up "job" of living in a woman's house. She worked for Shell, and spend 95% of her time in Dubai. I looked after her house.
I took what was left of my money to pay the builder back (it was about £700). He told me he'd forget about it if I came back to work for him and finished the course. I agreed, but there was no crying this time - I was (and am) a very different person to the guy he used to employ.
I prove this three weeks later by resigning the second I had completed the course to work for Her Majesties Highways, building the Bedford bypass. He was understandably angry about it, and asked for the his money back. My last words to him were "show me a fucking contract and it's yours". One day I'll call him up and apologise.
I discover that working on roads is exactly what everyone thinks it is - basically a fuckload of waiting. I learned how to work all kinds of machinery, it was awesome. When the road was nearly finished, I got into an argument with the foreman about wearing my hard hat when I was inside the tractor. He called my bad things. I laughed in his face. He pushed me, I pushed him. He went to hit me and I took him out. Unsurprisingly, that was the end of that job.
Jake had moved into the woman's house with me by then, and he lived in a somewhat different world - he was a computer programmer and earned loads of money, and he was bisexual, a thing that hadn't existed in my life up until then. He was an attractive guy and never had any trouble hooking up with either sex. I would always be his wingman, but because I was out of work I couldn't afford drinks once he'd pulled, so I started introducing myself to women by telling them they should buy me a drink. Thus was born the "aggressive romantic style" that led to It also found its way into the rest of my life, and now it's hard to imagine a not hyper-arrogant me.
Anyhow, Jake had got me interested in computers, and I got a job working in a warehouse 'refurbishing' laser printers and keyboards, which basically meant I'd test them, replace any broken parts from the big "pile of bits" if I could, and clean them. If they were properly past it, I'd strip them for the pile. Unfortunately the company ran out of money, and had to let me go.
Next door to where my dad worked a new branch for a nationwide "IT warrantee" company move in, and I got a job with them. They gave me a Rover 600si and I had to drive around the country swapping faulty hardware out, or repairing it on site if I could. I loved the job, but I hated the boss, and he hated me. Eventually he used the fact that I was putting petrol in my car on a Friday night and a Monday morning to fire me, although everyone else did it too. Cunt. I grab a "beyond repair" PC on my way out, and fix it when I get home. It's the first one I'd ever owned.
Hooking up with a temp company I work for Fujifilm telling lorries what printers (big, photo-processing printers) to take where. I work for Eastern Energy, helping renew contracts for big companies during their end of year rush. I do various other things too, that I don't really remember. My first software job is for something to do with the parole office - I made them an Access database thing that let them store all their employee details. There were printed-off help files everywhere All the time I'm still earning money from the woman who wants me to live in her house. Years of having no money at all had made me put letters from the bank into the bin as soon as they arrived, but when Jake realised I was doing that he told me off and dug one back out, and I had over £10,000. That was one Hell of a night.
Off I went to work for a company called Tenser, that invented smart cards (credit cards with remote-read chips in, like Oyster cards) as a software tester. I write a "fault database" in PHP. I can't begin to imagine how terrible my code was. I stay at Tenser for a fair while.
Miss Grim... (she wasn't Mrs Grim... back then) suddenly decides to do an MA in London, and invites me to come with her. I leave my job at Tenser, and move to Bermondsey. I blag my way to a couple of Guest DJ spots at The End, and get paid more for fours hours work there than I used to get for a week digging up roads. I get an interview for a role of Junior Web Developer, and lie through my teeth. Bullshit needle pushed to critical, I get the job, which pays twice what I earned at Tenser. I've stayed there ever since, and HERE ENDS THE SURPRISINGLY PERSONAL BALLAD OF THE WORKING LIFE OF GRIM....

TLDR: I've done a lot of different jobs.

Bloody Hell.

You've not sobered up yet, then.

Heh - you guys out last night?

Presumably you wouldn't have got fired from the garage if you hadn't unplugged their CCTV to plug your Playstation in?

No, they didn't mind the TV. It's probably all the cigarettes I stole.

I know a guy who did a school project on farm safety ( Geography A-Level, I think ) and he once showed me a file of coroners reports from farm accidents he had compiled. Blooming 'eck, I was having open-grain-screw and unguarded-drive-shaft related nightmares for a while. I can well imagine your escape from certain death.

By my estimates, Grim... is about 4768 years old.

I'm glad you said

That's a lot of interesting stuff... and without it all, we'd probably all be paying £2 a month to chat.

A good friend is an HSE accident inspector with responsibility for farm accidents. She's seen some things, mind.

Bull shit.

I know, right? There's this big old list of stuff and then "then I left school"

Like said, a lot of the jobs overlapped, and I did some on some days of the week and some on others.

I've remembered two more - working in a dairy for a temp agency hauling big trollies of milk around (which involved a fight with a French guy called "Ox", which is a fairly interesting story) but when they found out I was fairly smart and could speak English they bumped me up to "robot technician", which basically meant when the robots got stuck I would smack the stuck bit with with a steel rod until they worked again. If this didn't help I would use my rod to bend the mischievous bit out of the way.
Another job involved doing HTML web work for a small one-man company, which I got because I was fucking his daughter at the time. I stopped fucking his daughter, and the job ended soon after that. Thus began my oath that I would never get into a relationship with anyone who was something to do with my job.

I'd just like to say Working Stiffs?

See people, that's the way to do it. The rest of you with your one line lists should be ashamed.

PFFT! - mine weren't no list!

Malc

I've just realised the depression bit in the middle is clearly my origin story. Awesome

It would be your crappy song scene in "Grim...s Christmas Carol"

Readers with a keen memory may remember Jake as the guy who got the mystery ticket to France, and the fucking epic events that followed after.

He's still in Mexico, by the way, determined to find her.

I used to work in the forest machine industry. Heard a few nasty tales there, probably told this one before.
This is the big tree harvester machines, which have a harvester head with hydraulic rollers, delimbing knives and chainsaw on the end of like a digger boom. Common problem was wires and pipes getting knocked off by stray branches or careless operation. The machines costed something like £250k so they tended to double shift them, working all night, just the operator by himself.
If anything broke, they'd try to fix it, illuminated by the powerful floodlights on the machine. You'd leave the engine on else the batteries would go flat in minutes. Sometimes it was an electrical problem, so they'd leave the computer switched on too, to try to diagnose it. Man got crushed when he cut the wrong wire, blew a fuse and the head closed up on him, knives, rollers and all. The next operator found him in the morning. Engine still running and radio playing in the nice warm cab a few metres away. Bad way to go.

Oof. I know a guy, an experienced farmer, who put his hand into a baler to unjam it and simply forgot to disengage the PTO from the tractor first. Luckily, he didn't fit into the baler itself (it was a smaller, square-bale one rather than a round one) so it couldn't suck him right in, but the fucker tore his arm off

Woah....Thanks for sharing Grim..., that's an interesting story!

Does Craster still love cock this morning?

I like Grim...'s life story too!

Awesome tale...

Mine is another of the really short list ones

'gap' year at uni as a programmer for a very small software company
IT support (hardware/software) at a college
IT support job which turned into more of a helpdesk support role at a call centre for Sky
Telephone support role at a software company
Team leader within the support role at the same place
Support manager at the same place

The gap year role was a year , I spent around 2 years at the college which was great fun because i worked with a small group of other techies and we looked out for each other but as soon as the first one left the team fell apart and everyone else left shortly afterwards , the IT role at sky was not suppose to be phone stuff but they hired me and almost immediatly contracted out the face to face support stuff so i ended up doing mainly phone support - very draining and when something big went down you'd spend all day taking hundreds of very short calls "yes its down and its being worked on" - it lasted about 18 months and I got out of that because i met my girlfriend who happend to be living and working around 450 miles away and in a job she couldnt change - so i moved in with her and i've been with my current employer for the last 11 years.

Oh, I was a wine steward for a while at uni. Suit and bow tie, and working in relatively posh joints. Served Gary Neville at an awards event once.

christ, that took long enough!

This is why I love interweb forums, it is the best mix of people from diverse background and views all in one place. Here is 3 of mine...

The strangest job I've ever done was working night shifts (11pm till 7am) on one of them high numbered Sky channels where people send in text messages, I'd filter them for the screen, and then write some bullshit afterwards. The service was supposed to be geared towards single people looking for love, so I'd spend my shift talking about cakes and how much I couldn't stand Heart radio being pumped in the office, while at the same time consoling a lot of very distressed people who turned to the channel for a bit of company. What was even more crazy was the fact the same company ran chat sex lines and so you would hear loud moaning every few minutes from somewhere in the building. Just crazy.

Second strangest? Working for Danish tv but based in West Drayton. Never watched so much US tv tat than in them days... Days of Outr Lives? Check, Ricki Lake? Check, Simpsons? Check.

Possibly the dullest job I ever did was data entry of albums for the likes of Amazon. Imagine, typing up 6-cd box sets of Duke Ellington. Soul destroying

I did an afternoon's trial of something similar. It was vetting comments that came in to some news channel's live text-in service for people to comment on the news or some such rubbish. Initially, I thought 'Great.. getting paid for sitting around online for a few hours at a time', but in reality, you're tied to that view of the screen for the duration and it was incredibly dull. Hence the trial only being an afternoon - didn't take long to decide it wasn't for me.

I did too.

Served Gary Neville, that is. Him and his brother Phil and his Dad Neville had a table at some function.

No thanks, I'll stick to the chicken.

Express & Star?

Very much so. I was only on a temporary contract, but I'm glad I left in the end. I shortened my lunch hour from one hour to half an hour voluntarily, so that I could leave half an hour early and thus get home at a reasonable time (train and bus scheduling meant that if I left at 5.30 I wouldn't get home until 8pm some nights) and the bosses kept having a go at me because I was leaving early.

And I'm out!