What's the worst job you've ever had? What made it bad and how long did you last?
Just to be an awkward git, one of the best but also the worst jobs I've had was working for BT as the emergency operator - you know, the goon that answers with "Emergency, which service?" when you dial 999 or 112.
Genuinely loved that job, but it paid an absolute pittance. It was both fast paced ad fulfilling, but some of the shit that you hear still rattles my cage even today. Most of the calls were a blur while the job was getting done well, but some of them made you feel pure helpless slow-motion despair while you tried every trick in the book to fast track a particularly horrible call to the appropriate service.
I'm glad I did it but I absolutely wasn't ready for the emotional devastation that it caused, and still caus es.
10/10 would do again A+++++
It's been a while, but there's some clear time wasters - a guy phoning in demanding the police because he had bees in his attic, a dude wanting to phone the police because he didn't like the circus he went to, all sorts of menial bollocks borne out of people unable to manage their own lives. Most of the time, the standing instruction was to pass the call to the requested agency - at the end of the day, we were only listening to a snapshot of what's happening, so we weren't in a position to make a judgement of whether they really needed an ambulance or police attendance or water fairy or not.
The EISEC system used to pick up landline addresses (and sometimes mobile addresses if the mobile operator signed up to the scheme), but also automatically provided public phone box details. There was one phone box serial number that used to strike dread into you, because by the time your eyes set on the number and your neurons were firing thinking "oh no, I recognise that phone box number...", this prolific caller had already started ranting about the new world order, how we're all being led down a path of damnation and that we should repent, all this bollocks. That was one of the few times we could drop calls actually, where they quite clearly weren't listening to us and weren't in any immediate audible need of help or danger.
Some of them were real headscratchers - someone phoning from a landline wanting the coastguard because something had capsized... in Birmingham.
Unfortunately, most of the nonsense calls were a result of an already creaking social care system - people phoning in experiencing severe mental health issues, hallucinating and all sorts; some because they felt like they had nowhere else to turn; and some were just lonely and wanted to speak to someone. I did Operator Assistance calls too (where you dial 100 from a BT landline) and a good chunk of those were old men and women who just wanted someone to speak to. If I was killing time, I'd quite happily chat shit to them for five minutes, on the understanding that as soon as the dot matrix board showed a 999 call queued, they were yeeted and the emergency call was taken.
I learned a lot about the world, myself, and how to speak to folk to get what you want in the world without being a complete penispump to someone on the other end of the phone.
Sorry about the long post.
I've only really had four jobs. All retail and warehouse. So, it's kinda hard to decide which was the worst so I'm gonna go with the one I lasted one day on before walking out.
It was at a large garden centre. I spent the entire day standing behind the till. Standing. Assistants weren't allowed to sit down because they'd occasionally have to help a customer or move a large plant onto the checkout, which apparently the customer couldn't do?
Anyway I walked in the following morning and said it wasn't for me. I could have ghosted them, but I thought I owed them that much....Sods didn't pay me; fuck 'em.
I had a summer job working in a fish factory shelling scallops.
It involved sitting in what was effectively a huge fridge surrounded by other people doing the same thing. The sound of the knives on the shells was so loud that you couldn't really talk to the person sitting next to you. We had gloves, but the combination of the knives and the shells meant the gloves would have holes in them after a couple of hours so your hands would be wet all day. The smell got into your hair and clothes. And you'd start at 04:30 or 05:30 depending on when the boats came in.
Cold calling telemarketing ("Do you have time to answer some questions about x?"). Felt grotty with every call (got yelled at a lot too, be nice to people who call they likely don't want to call you any more than you want to receive the call), lasted 2-weeks.
Swapped out to data entry of paper responses into a spreadsheet, was so much better but only lasted 2 days before I went back to the phones. Am verg grateful I don't have to do that any more.
What's the correct way of handling those calls. I'll usually just let them say their bit and then say I'm not interested, which I think is fair but I wonder if it's not easier for everyone involved to just cut them up and say you're not interested immediately.
My partner's mum gets right on my goat because she insists on being an absolute arse on the phone. I get it, it's annoying but I don't understand the need to be a total see you next Tuesday to the person on the phone. Hang up and move on.
I mean, I was good with people hanging up during the spiel. Saying "sorry I'm not interested" is more than fine and likely to put you on the upper end of calls that's day. Swearing or getting upset isn't acceptable and fails to recognise that neither of you want to be on that call.
However telemarketing has a better response rate than paper based surveys, and the data is used to drive decision making. A lot of people complain when things don't work out for you - like local council decisions on new amenities, but if you don't submit your opinion you can't be heard. It's not perfect but it is used to define a surprising number of things.
Wrt to you MIL, yeah, it's not nice to be on the recieving end of hostility, I get it can be annoying but as I implied above nobody chooses the job, I personally had to take whatever I could get and I was too young/not out of work long enough for JSA (plus JSA is a pain to get anyway, but that's a whole different story).
I usually ask them who they're calling to speak to, since if they're not a cold-caller they would know my name. This usually makes them hang up. With your inside experience, is this a good way of handling it?
This is an excellent way of screening. The company I worked for was an opt-in service. So all people being called had at some point agreed to it (though most forget ticking the box on a form or whatever, which is totally understandable), and we therefore had their names, so it wouldn't have worked for what we were doing. But yes if a cold-caller doesn't know who they're calling then it's a good indication you don't need what they're offering.
I heard a podcast with Scott Hanselman (a technologist in the US) and he had a phone system where you had to say the name of the person you wanted to an automated gate-keeper, which sounded like a really cool system, and similar to the sort of screening you're doing.
"Please take my number off your list." and hang up. Any company that follows the OFCOM rules is obliged to honour verbal requests for removal, so that's the correct thing to do.
Admittedly, a cold calling company that follows the rules is an oxymoron so I tend to just cut them off with a "for fuck sake", hang up, Google the number out of sheer curiosity, and then add it to the block list. Every now and then I see a number in the call history that's been auto-blocked, so that at least provides a little satisfaction.
Or there's the Google call screening thing, though legitimate callers find it confusing and often hang up before you get chance to take over the call, or assume it's voicemail and try to leave a message.
My brother (a student and vegetarian at the time) lived in a house backing on to a slaughterhouse which also owned the place, so they had to pay the rent in the main office - it was grim going but at least they got to head straight back out again.
A friend once had a summer job as a chicken de-boner and I wondered what could be worse. Apparently, cleaning up after.
I had a job in a local Co-op where I was bullied by the managers. That wasn't great.
I also had a job in quality assurance where to give you an example one of the tasks was to look at like 10k gloves front and back to check they were intact. We were not allowed to have the radio on or listen to music etc you can imagine the sort of people who were in that job long term, the conversation was not thrilling. I only did that job for a few months and I'd have been suicidal if I had to do it for much longer.
Two spring to mind. I could rant forever about them but I'll try to keep it short.
First was an apprenticeship at a furniture logistics company. I was essentially an extremely overworked and underpaid spreadsheet monkey (I got paid £4 an hour). I received no training and gained no valuable experience or qualifications. In hindsight it's clear to me the company just wanted cheap labour from vulnerable teenagers.
After this I took a job handing out leaflets for a store which buys/sells goods. The job was in fact not to hand out leaflets like I thought but to harass people I saw walking towards CEX (to try and convince them to sell their games/consoles to us instead of CEX). Obviously this was seedy as hell and embarrassing. I'd get told off at the end of the day every day for not bringing in multiple PS4s or whatever.
Tech support. I was with a broadband company that beams microwave internet to rural customers. Their only other options were dial-up (in 2019~) or much more expensive satellite. The company was inflating its network stats by buying up small regional ISPs and claiming their users/infrastructure as its own. This resulted in patchwork hardware across the entire country. Some towers I could access with our normal software. Some required downloading proprietary software, others were from the 1990s and could only take command line interactions. With any hardware that wasn't ours, it was usually cheaper to disconnect the area than to service it.
So meemaw calls in because she hasn't been able to read her far-right facebook conspiracies for the day. She hasn't spoken to her children in decades so I'm the first human contact she's had in a while. I pull up her system and it's from 2001. Nothing works with my interface and I can't tell if the tower is malfunctioning or if its radio transmitter or her radio receiver is or if there's a tree somewhere in the 15km~ distance between the two. The last maintenance entry was five years ago and there are under a dozen people connected to it so the company won't invest further. My call centre's QA team is listening in on the conversation for up to ten minutes. I'd have to string the boomer along for those ten minutes, listening to all the insane shit they have to say about minorities, while pretending there is any hope of their service returning. Then after I knew QA wasn't listening I'd quickly explain the situation, urge them to go with any other option, and end the call before my time metrics were fucked up by trying to help them.
All the while I'd be looking at their internet speeds and fixating on the broadband gap. It took them days to download what I can in ten minutes. Our service was the best they could get and the company existed to deprive them of access to data.
Telecoms engineer. The management. Forty-three years, two months and nineteen days. 😀
