This week in the Careers talk forums we had lots of posts about people's worst jobs. These included tales of making sandwiches all night for a supermarket, telesales for a fertilizer company and an audio typist who spent their time in an enclosed office with chain-smoking secretaries.
My worst job was definitely the days I spent gutting fish in Buckinghamshire. It was the end of my first year at university and my mother had kindly organised me a summer job on a trout farm. I had visions of sitting on a river bank in the sun watching the fish swimming; I had no idea of the horror that was waiting for me.
What I actually had to do was stand in wellies, an all-in-one white overall (why did they think white was a good idea?) and a hairnet in front of a machine where the suffocated trout were garrotted and gutted with alarming speed - the guts and blood spurting everywhere - before I was presented with a fillet which I had to then tidy up with a knife and tweezers before passing it on to be packaged.
The smell knocked your head back first thing in the morning before you finally got used to it, but I was never able to get over the scene of the massacre. I lasted six days.
What is your worst job and what made it so? Was it what you had to do that made it so unbearable, or was it the people you worked with?
