rebness

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Hmm, this is a tough one. I'll list my worst jobs:

Factory Worker
What the hell. I think I ended up doing this one summer because I desperately needed some cash for university. I just took the first thing that came along, which was working in some factory in Liverpool, packing gluten-free bread. The job started at 6am, but there were no buses from my village at that time, so I had to walk six kilometres to Dovecot and then get a bus from there, then walk through some nondescript 'technology park' to work. I had to stand at the end of a conveyor belt and pack bread that was coming off the line. The plastic was still hot to the touch and I wasn't given gloves, so that hurt. We had to stand up for eight hours and I was told off for 'leaning' against something for support. Plus, the girl opposite me was one of the stupidest people I have ever met, so conversation was tedious. (This isn't to say factory workers are stupid; there were lots of clever people there and, depressingly, one had a first-class history degree).

I recall glancing over to the clock and nearly weeping when time seemed to stand still. The work was so tedious and physically tiring that on the second day, I staggered up my garden path, greeted my parents who were lazing in the sun and then collapsed onto the grass. I never went back.

To This Day I Don't Know What My Job Was
I applied for a job in Glasgow as some sort of secretary. My training consisted of 'Action these files and use this system. Lunch is at 1'. The firm was some... insurance broker place, I think, and was rapidly going under. There had been a smarmy young man in a senior position whom all the secretaries loved, but who just didn't do any work. We had furious, screaming clients ringing us at all hours of the day demanding answers and it was so unpleasant fobbing them off that I and the three other secretaries took it in hour-long shifts to answer the phones.

Also, the main boss was in the process of being demoted by Head Office in Liverpool, whose reps insisted was 'fat and stupid' on the phone. That's a bit harsh, but he was a bit nuts, shouting, screaming and stomping about every time some other fault of Smarmy's surfaced.

Plus, there was some crazy legal system I just couldn't understand, documents that had to be typed in a certain way and filed and cross-referenced but nobody knew where the references were and after asking and asking and asking and being fobbed off like those customers, I took to playing Solitaire all day. Thankfully, another job came up two weeks into this confusing hell.

ASDA Checkout girl
First year of uni, I had no money at Christmas, so I took on a Christmas position at this supermarket. It was okay. The money wasn't bad, but the midnight closings (with someone always having to run in as I was shutting down the till and keep me waiting for half an hour off the clock while they grabbed 'essentials') and the general tedium grated. But the worst thing was the beeps. Imagine the constant beeps of the scanner as you go through shopping trolley after shopping trolley after shopping trolley. Now imagine you're on a line of thirty or so tills, so each second of each and every day, there are several beeps.

Okay, it's just work, right? Except that each night, I would lie in bed and as I drifted off to sleep, my head would be filled with echoes of beep, beep, beep...