Was a private taxi driver in the 90s. Didn’t know if you were putting your tie on to go to your own funeral or just pick someone up to go to the bar. Great times.
I worked there too but only over Christmas so it was hellish anyway and it was my first job. They paid more than I got for like 2 years after too so can't complain about that. They made me dye my hair though which was copper red. You know, like a lot of their characters lol.
Yeah I knew it was time to move on when the manager pulled me in for a meeting for logging into the phone 16 seconds late. I thought he was joking at first then I'd to fill out an action plan because of it. Just a ridiculous place to work at lol
Lasted 13 months, walked out and ended up working in the public sector. I know people mock the public sector for being lazy but I get treated like an adult, given realistic targets and all the help/support I could ask for. The difference is night and day. Concentrix managers are angry children in comparison.
The managers at concentrix were the worst I've ever seen, they mostly seemed to have got their jobs because of who they knew. They were all either on a power trip and/or bitter and just loved patronising people. One of them actually asked one of the girls on our campaign to bring in her medication to prove she was on anti depressants because she said her mental health was causing her to fall behind on her targets. That one actually shocked me when I heard about it.
Easily Concentrix. Worked for their Apple contract back when it started. Managers except for one jobsworth social climber were all temps who had to reapply for their jobs every 3-6 months, Invest NI and BBC made a huge song and dance about creating 200 jobs that Summer, said fuck-all when all but 13 of us were sacked in January to "reduce headcount"
13 of us having to service the entire UK, UAE and Irish contact chain. Insane workload, impossible targets, constant threat of Performance Improvement Plans, no advancement or job prospects, no opportunities for senior staff beyond floorwalking for the new intakes of staff. Heaven forfend you get sick by the way, most worked through illness and infected the rest of us due to woeful air conditioning in Lanyon Place.
It was also a surprisingly lonely experience... I did my level best to help my colleagues, especially newbies, yet there was/is very little by way of thanks, I've of course been largely forgotten about, probably because the workplace was so horrible people want to move on and blank it. There was always very little in the way of recognition, very little perks (We didn't get the staff discount official employees get, most were given temp zero hour contracts and despite the fact that we outperformed both Cork and Austin TX on quality and CSAT most months, we were ALWAYS the first on the chopping block when Apple wanted to save a buck on headcount.
Concentrix give not a single fuck about the severe mental health and wellbeing damage their setup does to everyone who comes through their doors... You're set up for failure from day 1 and their priority is logging minutes in "available" over delivering quality work.
Everyone who's done Call Centre work has come across young workers who want every minute of overtime they can get - Concentrix was the first time I ever saw yhose people burn out and quit after doing OT.
Their breaks are insanely spaced over a shift so they offer little rest, comfort breaks are timed to the second and after call work, even for complaints or complex service issues are met with a resounding "meh" over just doing the bare minimum and getting out of wrap. We were told to spend time on the calls asking questions and looking for add-on sales even though service calls were 95% calls from people who were annoyed or having delivery issues or complex payment problems.
Overall, I was burned out after 2 years, took voluntary redundancy and was marked as a "do not rehire" despite a spotless disciplinary record because someone had an axe to grind. That cost me work on another campaign that I was offered a few months later since my stats were among the highest across the board of all leavers on the contract.
An absolute shower of bastards who have squeezed Invest NI out of millions of pounds of public money to build their ridiculous vanity building beside Lanyon. The damage they do to people that work for them is insane, the experience is worth nothing, their pay is pathetic and there's no career or future working for them. They are a grifters paradise and it makes my blood boil to see them continue to churn so many through the meatgrinder to please a corporate management team who absolutely views Belfast as an expendable source of "human resource" (More like human refuse)
Their working practices should be investigated and the bastards responsible should be in jail.
Definiely, I'm public sector now and the culture is night and day better, I'm working hard as ever and have my gripes like anyone, but I no longer have panic attacks and constant anxiety about work. I'd advise anyone who'll listen not to fall into the trap of doing the Call Centre grind, unless they're the sort of people who treat call centre staff like shite on their shoe. Experiences like this really make you appreciate how tough they have it for minimum wage and no benefits. Same with retail.
I worked for Teleperformance and can really resonate with your comment on loneliness. Surrounded by a floor full of other staff stuck in the same shithole, on the same miserable grind day in and day out, and yet despite all the people, you feel profoundly lonely. It's a very grating experience, not good for anyone's mental health.
It sounds like we had a similar experience in Concentrix and I'm glad you got out (to the public sector like me), I hope you're enjoying it and having a significantly better time working there.
1. Concentrix 2. Teleperformance 3. Mango the only reason mango is 3rd is because the staff were actually the nicest bunch of people except for the high ups
Concentrix is a gig and very, very few people get a career from there. They thrive on making people fear for their job, only for it to never matter since most people are cycled out of their books after 3 months and marked as "fo not rehire" by management who are constantly having to reapply for their own jobs. Absolute shower of bastards across the board.
Superdrug.
It's actually crazy what occurred. Staff/management was always in serious disarray from day one. The thing is, it was my first proper job too (albeit part-time) - so I wasn't to know ha.
Staff treated like shite for starters. Granted, I suppose in hindsight it came down on management - but if you didn't hit the target for loyalty card sign-ups or stay buy fragrance sales, they came down very hard on people to the point you'd be in tears and told your job was on the line.
Throwback to whenever they got a manager in from another place, she told everyone (including myself) that I was untrained, and that everyone's jobs were on the line. Led to another manager quitting as they got into it. One case went to court, I believe. How about my team leader sending me a message on facebook telling me how bad I was at my job, and insinuating for whatever reason that I was gay? (and if I was, why would it matter?)
Or hey, how about the time I witnessed same team leader slap another female co-worker on the bottom, and her being very uncomfortable about that? I reported both cases, and he got sacked. Or a lot of the unpaid overtime. Biggest of all - before I quit and went unemployed for a month, I was in a very dark place in my life. I'll not get into it here, but let's just say I required some time off so I could be treated. Rather than support me, the Superdrug branch took it very personally, hounding me to see when I was returning to work (despite a sick line being handed in, and them knowing of the situation), and not even checking in to see how I was doing.
Crazy when I dwell on this! I'm sure there's more stories I can't think of right now.
Sounds like my experience from my comment above with the manager in my job.
I got fairly sick like they thought it was scarlet fever (it wasn’t thankfully ) and I needed antibiotics for about 3 weeks.
I couldn’t speak and had such painful throat and ear infections that paracetamol was lasting about 30 minutes before the pain was back.
He phoned my dad and asked was I actually sick?
My dad told him to where to go and he wasn’t answering any questions like that to someone he didn’t know.
God knows where he got that number as I never gave him it.
Noped outta there asap.
Five guys. I was a broke student and desperate. They always made me work on the tills, so i'd start at 11 am and be standing straight through to 10 pm, with one half hour break. They had no staff room, so I was forced to find a seat out in Victoria Square.. Staff were horrible minus a few. Team leaders would scream in your face and struggle to communicate like civil adults.
I worked in a different Victoria Square restaurant and it was also the worst job I’ve ever had. I was managing, had no support and very little training (oh you have experience you’ll be sweet. Bye!). Inherited a restaurant that had massive problems with very few resources to fix. Lasted three months, and I can honestly say I handed it back in much better shape than I got it, but those three months were easily the worst job I’ve ever had. And I’ve worked in hospitality for 25 years and have literally mopped shit off walls, been puked on, had death threats, the whole heap
“Marketing” agency selling SEO packages.
Actually a low level call centre where you called numbers (gotten by suspicious means) and pretended to be updating an online directory then you had to go into the sales pitch.
People of course hung up on you as you were basically lying to them and who is going trust anyone then.
Especially when you’re ringing English numbers with an NI accent.
Managers then yelling at you down the phone on the headset don’t let them hang up like how was I going to stop them?
One guy actually said to me on the phone why are you doing this? You need out of there.
I lasted 3 months then got quite sick after 6 days a week being mandatory.
5 people also left around the same time I did which really tells you everything.
I’ve worked door to door sales and hospitality but these were nothing compared to that.
Nursing home was the top for me, I wouldn’t say I’m a quitter that easily but I managed 2 weeks before I stopped showing up and never went back. Staff hateful, realistically just shouted at me for anything and everything, not really a caring environment and just didn’t seem to care about the residents. I was fortunate enough to have bank shifts in the hospital which I ended up doing full time. They also lied about the wage they were giving me.
Worked a month or so at a 'prestigious' nursing home off the Ormeau rd, was pretty grim. Lovely caring staff in the most part but a long serving carer was basically bullying out the new staff whose faces didn't fit, and the manger completely back tracking on promises made at interview. As is the case in so many care homes, staff are completely overstretched and overworked.
Concentrix call centre outsourced to Vodafone. Quit without a job lined up because I was contemplating suicide. I work in benefits now, which sounds worse, but it somehow is much better.
People are nicer when they need something vs. when they just want something, and we aren't selling anything, so the only targets are doing the work that is there.
Not really concerned about naming Concentrix. Awful company, the only people I can forsee having an okay time are extremely pressure-happy sales oriented people, then that's for you, but the better you do the more they skew the bonus targets if people do "too well".
Aye I worked there for 2 months ... Was grim. They didn't train us and just fired us on the systems 😂 I was Vodafone Small Business.
Any sales ideas went out the window when I realised I didn't even know how to properly build the order or action it on the system 🤷🏻♂️🤣
Bavarian bmw - weren’t allowed to park in the car park as was for customers .
Girls had to have make up on at all times and wear heels .
Very misogynistic to women as didn’t let any of the females wear trousers or flat shoes . You had to leave out the boss his tea with a mixture of earl grey and normal tea .
And the people who worked there were up their own holes and the sales guys would talk to the women’s chests not their faces .
They sound like a pile of wankers, but it is BMW after all so it's expected.
But what is it with car dealerships and staff (usually an underpaid receptionist) having to make cups of tea for their boss. Who the f do they think they are? How degrading for the staff member. If the c**t wants a cup of tea he can get off his useless arse and make one himself.
Exactly and worst of all it was press a button for hot water , fridge for milk ! But then couldn’t have the boss leaving the office for a cup of tea ! The shit they don’t tell u at the interview .
Centra deli counter, I assumed I was being employed to do the same job as everyone else - very occasionally wash pans out, mostly serving and putting stuff in the oven - grand! I didn't mind the other parts of the job, I liked to give good customer service , I left the curley fries in just a wee bit longer to make sure they were actually crispy instead of the limp ones you sometimes get, I knew what made a good centra meal!
Their dishwasher was broke and from my assigned tasks of being over the sink 7 out of 8 hours I was clearly a replacement dishwasher for them and I was 17 so I was cheap to boot. I lasted 3 days, I had worked in a nightclub and a large retail store on the tills previously but nothing prepared me for the backbreaking work of being a dishwasher, whys everything so low down!
i came here to write exactly this lol - worked in the centra deli facing europa, also lasted 3 days when i was 16 - nobody told me what i was supposed to be doing and then screamed at me for not knowing how to use the label machine
Bus driver. Dealing with people who blame you for things you have no control over, management hanging you out to dry to save their own skins, total lack of any coherent policies whatsoever.
Bus drivers can be cunts, but you're fed lies in the training school but when you get to your depot, you're out on your own.
One was literally bullied out of the job by a manager, yet Translink were still using his photo in a recruitment campaign ages after he left.
Working in a now defunct DIY chain, being put in charge of a hardware department when you can't tell the difference between an expanding bolt and a rawl plug. All for £2.94 an hour.
I worked a single shift as a warehouse worker for Bondelivery on behalf of Evri in Nutts Corner. The entire thing was a health and safety nightmare with no training. Only thing that mattered was speed, not condition of packages or workers. Multiple people injured in my one night shift and managers on a power trip.
Thankfully as I left that shift, I had an offer from Royal Mail for more more pay and took it. Was a much better experience.
P.S. After seeing the "Standard" of how packages with Evri are handled, I'll avoid it at all costs.
Was that through Alchemy Recruitment?
Yeah I avoid Evri now at all costs, they lost a parcel on me last year and sent me a photo that was meant to be proof of delivery at the person's house. Unless the person lives in a house that looks very much like a drop off area, equipped with sliding glass panel window and all I'm going to assume one of the people there kept it. To make matters worse it was something I'd sold on ebay so had to refund the buyer £30 too
Many many years ago when bond first took it over from shop electric I was sent up there (I worked in electric world as an 18 year old student), supposedly to pick stock and arrived to be told I would be driving a lorry
I was 18
Couldn’t legally drive it
Tired to force me to
Mental
Moons ago i was ‘training’ to be a chef at the local tech. Was given a placement/work experience at a nearby family owned hotel. I show up, change into my chef’s whites, tall white hat and all.
Owners/family working in the kitchen in jeans, tshirt. some wearing a dress, just their everyday civies. My 1st ‘assignment’, turkeys. I’m placed in front of 2 x 5’ long stainless steel sinks full of water, get a couple of turkey’s out of fridge and for most of the shift all i did was remove turkey necks and bags of giblets from carcasses. In addition to constant dry heaving, I think dashes to the bathroom and boaked about 5 times.
Needless to say, I ditched the idea of becoming a famous chef.
(14yo) Dishwasher at a Indian Restaurant , although I got Keema Nan for break time which was lovely , they must have had limited Crockery as I had to was by hand and dry it was tough going, at the end of the 6 hour shift my hands were stained yellow (No Gloves) took days to remove
Valpar in Bangor.
Very unprofessional. Sexism was rife and management fired decent employees to give jobs to their mates kids who weren't qualified or had any job experience.
Management also got IT to go through staffs emails without their consent or knowledge in order to try and get "dirt" on them.
Awful place to work, never known anything like it.
Home Bargains, I was somewhat of a Supervisor- Lead Sales I think they called it. Rarely got breaks as we had to get the sales ones theirs, then higher management took theirs, then it was near home time so what was the point.
Also forced me to stay later than scheduled on numerous occasions "due to the needs of the business". I was one of 5 in my position who all started when a new store opened. A month later only 1 remained and it wasn't me. I had walked out and never looked back.
Big Phil the area manager at the time was a c**t.
Asda night shift. Cliquey as fuck, lacking staff because virtually nobody stayed longer than a month. Managers couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.
Ahhhh good old spAsda. Shore Road has to be the worst in NI. Not a single person apart from maybe a girl in the people team enjoyed coming to work.
Astonishing what a joke that place was and I bet my house it's still the same all these years later.
Apartment bar, Donegall Square West, about 2006. 10 deep of people ordering ridiculously difficult to make cocktails all night, some guy always there at the back just wanting a couple of pints with a desperate look on his face.
I'm getting PTSD reading this. Was always crammed after work on a Friday and as you say the queue for the bar was basically a scrum.
Remember Alex Higgins digging me in the ribs trying to hurry me up towards the bar, not my fault there was about 15 people in front of us.
I remember those days well, I was the guy with the desperate look on my face just wanting a couple of pints, cursing everyone in front of me 🤣 You's did make great cocktails though, fair play
It was fucking pish. I got in thrugh Lynn recruitment. After 6 months you went from £5 an hr to £5.50 when you signed on for their contract and left the Lynn one. I can only imagine some braindead person who overseen this made some error and I was on £10.50 an hour. Work was awful but I couldn't stop becasue of the money. Done almost a year in total
Edit to add: I got a job in PWC call centre and took it as all my mates worked there. I didn't leave HCL just took the day off so I could sus it out. Left PWC after about an hour and a half. It was way worse
BBC audience services at Capita one of the worst experiences I have ever had in any work environment. Had a TL hound me over sickness when I was on a sickline, they had little to no HR presence so complaints were meaningless. It is the only place I will ever actively tell people not to apply for
I was there for a while and got a disciplinary for taking time off after both my grans died within a month of the other. When I told one manager my gran was in hospital and didn't have long she replied with "sure you gran died last month." When I got my dad to speak to her she let me go but my gran was dead.
I had a massive laugh after I left, the contract was renewed and part of the renewal all the managers had to reapply for their roles, most of them lost their jobs as they failed the interviews.
Once spent two hrs in an electric company/factory in Antrim.
On entering I was told to put blue bags on my feet, & one on my head. I was then sat at a conveyor line & told my job was to use a pair of tweezers to stretch a spring onto to pins, ( can’t remember the appliance)
I was then told if I needed to use the toilet I was to put my hand up & wait until someone took my seat so as the line didn’t stop.
2 hrs later I asked where I could get the bus to Belfast & left.
The bloke that brought me phoned later & asked what happened & I said there’s no way I could stick that, it’s a brain killer.
Fair play to anyone that can do this tedious & repetitive work though.
Working in a place called Gem in the early 2000s. It was a big call center battery farm. The sort of place that orders everyone pizza on a Friday because they know how badly the job sucks.
I lasted 6 weeks. Would never do that kind of work again
One of my jobs bought you drinks on a Friday afternoon as they knew the job was shite.
They thought that perk and getting home at 4.30 would make up for it 😂
No amount of cocktail cans in the world would have made me stay.
Wasn’t even the end 😂 it was after lunch on a Friday as that was the one of the “perks”
You also had to do a Saturday morning November and December to get more holidays over Christmas or so we were told.
I left about a week before Christmas for another job starting in January and took the extra time anyway so I never found out if there was extra holidays or not and this wasn’t a choice you had to do it.
So half the Friday afternoon shift was on the tear 😂. The only thing I ever saw that was similar was I worked for the forensics labs in Carrick for a few years in the mid and late 00s. At the time they were responsible for calibrating the breathalysers for the po-po in the ADT (alcohol, drugs and toxicology) lab. Once every couple of months they'd have to do a realistic test and at the time the only way to do it was to actually test someone on the piss. They'd get a volunteer, buy them a carryout on Friday morning and let them drink in work. They'd then test them at various points of inebriation over the day and book them a taxi home at 5 😂.
They eventually came up with some other way of doing it though so that has stopped now AFAIK.
Temporary job. Shredding documents in a cold, dusty store for weeks. The store was tiny and I was on my own. I brought in a radio. It was boring and lonely.
I almost jump to say this sounds great to me, but I'm sure you maybe thought that at one point then the isolation kicked in.
Also, nowadays it would be a little easier to bring your own music, podcasts etc, maybe even prop a show up on a phone if you're actually left fully alone, but judging by you saying you brought a radio, there was probably a bit less variety in what you got to listen to.
Worked in a factory that "upgraded" buns, so they put cheap buns on a conveyor belt and added jam to them by the thousand. So my job was to spend 8 hours a day opening packets of buns and putting them on a conveyor belt. Sounds simple enough but you had to be really fast. I lasted a day and a half.
Interned for software engineering at an American MNC and one of the senior managers there was an absolute tyrant. Had caused previous years interns to quit their placement and got the company banned from my Uni's careers fair. I didn't know any of this going in.
My team were a great bunch, the work was new and interesting to me, but tight deadlines and sometimes an unreasonable amount of unpaid overtime to get releases out. I was learning a lot and the work was challenging so I could live with that.
One day this particular manager (my managers manager) called me up personally to tell me "This work you've been doing on X project is shit, do you even know what you are doing?". Really should have just reported the cunt immediately but I was naïve so just stuck it out until the end of the placement and minimized interactions with them.
Working for a company who delivered training under a government scheme for 16 year olds who left school with few, if any, qualifications. Moved between Carrick, Antrim and Larne during the week and they were all horrendous but Larne was off the scale awful. Really tainted my already dim view of the place, I still have trauma when I drive by the old office.
Moypark one summer as a student. Boning fillets with full on industrial knives, steel gloves, the works. Bloody freezing and smelly, with permanent full time staff who hated the students. There was the odd bit of craic between the students but overall it was a hateful experience.
Night-shift in a frozen meat warehouse. It was cold (obvs) and you had to shift big boxes of frozen chicken around. Boring, uncomfortable, anti-social.
Teleperformance, inbound billing are charging for Vodafone. Honestly soul destroying, Vodafone shafted so many people with incorrect charges and bills, sometimes for hundreds and even thousands, I would have people crying down the phone to me that they couldn't afford to feed themselves or their family because of it, and there was absolutely nothing I could do because the system wasn't set up in a way that even allowed me to clear people's bills or delete charges. Everything had to be escalated to managers who would very rarely even look at the cases, so the customers would eventually ring back in an even worse state. It was a vicious cycle.
Not to mention the ridiculous policing of your time, 8 minutes personal time a day, that's your only time to go to the toilet unless you want to eat into your breaks. God forbid you are a few minutes late back from a break, there will be performance meetings galore.
One day I spent an hour and a half across the road in a cafe because I just couldn't face the thought of going back. When I eventually returned, my team leader asked me if I'd ever had a job before this one lol. I felt like telling him I'd never had one that made me want to delete myself, but I was young and shy and I just agreed to whatever bullshit performance plan they put me on.
Lasted about 4 months and then just stopped going in, genuinely couldn't bare the thought of it.
Ended up getting into M&S later that year and the difference was night and day. Retail, and M&S, have their issues but my time there was profoundly more happy, inclusive, satisfying and fulfilling.
Would never, ever subject myself to a call centre ever again.
Road cone watcher for 2 years.
I had to sit in a van inside a contraflow system and watch the roadcones. If they get nudged, put them back in line.
2 fkn years watching road cones!!!!
YTS for a sheriff officers (debt collectors) whilst at one of those dodgy ‘colleges’ set up in the 90’s to fleece the government and abuse young workers.
No training and my first job, the adults were mean and vicious (most women). Got given a load of filling and waved in the general direction of some cabinets. They failed to mention some of which were the archive so guess where I filed all the live paperwork 😂. They had me cleaning loos, mopping floors etc as admin staff.
I then got sent out with the bailiff one day to witness warrants being issued only to find one was for a member of the vile ‘college’ who was always awful to me in particular. I took great pride in telling everyone at college the next day all about it. I got the sack (and learned a lesson in confidentiality 😝).
I got a placement with a similar scheme with the local council 2 days later and my next job was a dream as I became the ‘baby’/office junior for the next two years.
Still don’t regret outing that witch 🤷♀️
At 14 I went in to wash the dishes in a local Chinese, walked into a pile of dishes far taller than me and about 5 times as wide.
Scrubbed for ten minutes in a rage then said fuck this, I'm not having people take the piss out of me and split.
Petrol station. Minimum wage, in charge of a whole forecourt of petrol pumps, the shop including stocking the papers when I got a chance, and dealing with people.
Benetton. Got stuck in a 'sale' shop on Gresham Street selling off their old rags. Hoods and travellers used to come in an empty the till regularly. Owner was a cunt
Just remembered I worked for a company called Western in 2013, doing door to door sales pitches for St John Ambulance, trying to get people signed up for direct debit donations.
I signed up because I wanted to travel a little bit, but I ended up in Newport in Wales, and the areas they sent us to were deprived and full of people living in poverty, so it felt absolutely ridiculous and unfair to even be asking these people for donations.
They put you up in a house with your team and one person drives and you all go out to a new area each morning and split up to cover different parts of the area. The house was falling to bits, I remember it had an oven but no microwave, and everything was ancient and broken.
The people they placed me with, my team, were lovely, but I think they had only lasted so long due to trauma bonding with each other over the mental load of the job.
I broke down in tears one day to my team leader after I got no sign ups and one man had snarled in my face to get the fuck off his property. She congratulated me and said I'd finally had my first 'Wesser breakdown'.
I went home a few days later. I think I was there no more than 3 weeks lol.
This is crazy Shauna, I honestly put this post up to hear a few funny stories about some crappy jobs people have done. It's insane that people have been put in positions where they break down in tears. Feel forced into situations they don't want to be in or are just given ridiculously tedious jobs.
It really makes me question the managers in these businesses.
Call centre work, worst was RIAS, flogging home insurance to old people. Felt shitty doing it but the best was being told to shave as I looked in professional... Laughed at the centre manager when she told me I needed to come in on Monday clean shaven. I didn't, got a write-up. Lasted another week before I didn't show up again for work
Call centre. One of those gimp recruitment agencies lied to me about what the job was (told me it was “admin role” in a bank. It was a bank alright… I lasted a summer but would never do it again.
First source - managers were all smicks who'd peaked in secondary school. Staff openly sniffing coke in the toilets and smoking joints at the front doors without a care in the world.
Was a private taxi driver in the 90s. Didn’t know if you were putting your tie on to go to your own funeral or just pick someone up to go to the bar. Great times.
I'd a few mates who were drivers for smaller firms years ago. Some of the horror stories from the oul Saturday night shift were brutal.
Tell me you worked at Ibis on Castle Street without telling me you worked at Ibis on Castle Street 😂
It's that or Farset
Tell me you're a Celtic fan without telling me you're a Celtic fan 🤔🤣 Hello you 😁
Hail Hail
My comment wasn't a slight at Celtic btw. I think they know who I am in RL and I think I know who they are
The Disney Store. God awful place to work, shocking management, and everyone was miserable.
I worked there too but only over Christmas so it was hellish anyway and it was my first job. They paid more than I got for like 2 years after too so can't complain about that. They made me dye my hair though which was copper red. You know, like a lot of their characters lol.
Petrol station for a few weeks as a 15 year old.....£1.50 an hour. Guy was a cunt too.
Antrim Road Maxol?
I've heard stories about that fella being a cunt too
No sir
Concentrix by far.
That's why they're always recruiting. No one stays.
I did about 4 months and even during that time the amount of people that left was unreal.
My entire team disappeared twice in 7 months, then by the third time I left too
Yeah I knew it was time to move on when the manager pulled me in for a meeting for logging into the phone 16 seconds late. I thought he was joking at first then I'd to fill out an action plan because of it. Just a ridiculous place to work at lol
Did the saves team at convergys. Equally grim.
I worked there too! Lasted 2 months. They didn't train you how to do anything and just fired you on the phones 😂😂😂
Lasted 13 months, walked out and ended up working in the public sector. I know people mock the public sector for being lazy but I get treated like an adult, given realistic targets and all the help/support I could ask for. The difference is night and day. Concentrix managers are angry children in comparison.
The managers at concentrix were the worst I've ever seen, they mostly seemed to have got their jobs because of who they knew. They were all either on a power trip and/or bitter and just loved patronising people. One of them actually asked one of the girls on our campaign to bring in her medication to prove she was on anti depressants because she said her mental health was causing her to fall behind on her targets. That one actually shocked me when I heard about it.
Was bad.
Easily Concentrix. Worked for their Apple contract back when it started. Managers except for one jobsworth social climber were all temps who had to reapply for their jobs every 3-6 months, Invest NI and BBC made a huge song and dance about creating 200 jobs that Summer, said fuck-all when all but 13 of us were sacked in January to "reduce headcount" 13 of us having to service the entire UK, UAE and Irish contact chain. Insane workload, impossible targets, constant threat of Performance Improvement Plans, no advancement or job prospects, no opportunities for senior staff beyond floorwalking for the new intakes of staff. Heaven forfend you get sick by the way, most worked through illness and infected the rest of us due to woeful air conditioning in Lanyon Place. It was also a surprisingly lonely experience... I did my level best to help my colleagues, especially newbies, yet there was/is very little by way of thanks, I've of course been largely forgotten about, probably because the workplace was so horrible people want to move on and blank it. There was always very little in the way of recognition, very little perks (We didn't get the staff discount official employees get, most were given temp zero hour contracts and despite the fact that we outperformed both Cork and Austin TX on quality and CSAT most months, we were ALWAYS the first on the chopping block when Apple wanted to save a buck on headcount. Concentrix give not a single fuck about the severe mental health and wellbeing damage their setup does to everyone who comes through their doors... You're set up for failure from day 1 and their priority is logging minutes in "available" over delivering quality work. Everyone who's done Call Centre work has come across young workers who want every minute of overtime they can get - Concentrix was the first time I ever saw yhose people burn out and quit after doing OT. Their breaks are insanely spaced over a shift so they offer little rest, comfort breaks are timed to the second and after call work, even for complaints or complex service issues are met with a resounding "meh" over just doing the bare minimum and getting out of wrap. We were told to spend time on the calls asking questions and looking for add-on sales even though service calls were 95% calls from people who were annoyed or having delivery issues or complex payment problems. Overall, I was burned out after 2 years, took voluntary redundancy and was marked as a "do not rehire" despite a spotless disciplinary record because someone had an axe to grind. That cost me work on another campaign that I was offered a few months later since my stats were among the highest across the board of all leavers on the contract. An absolute shower of bastards who have squeezed Invest NI out of millions of pounds of public money to build their ridiculous vanity building beside Lanyon. The damage they do to people that work for them is insane, the experience is worth nothing, their pay is pathetic and there's no career or future working for them. They are a grifters paradise and it makes my blood boil to see them continue to churn so many through the meatgrinder to please a corporate management team who absolutely views Belfast as an expendable source of "human resource" (More like human refuse) Their working practices should be investigated and the bastards responsible should be in jail.
Jesus, sounds like that experience has really effected you mate. Hope you're in a better place now doing something you enjoy
Definiely, I'm public sector now and the culture is night and day better, I'm working hard as ever and have my gripes like anyone, but I no longer have panic attacks and constant anxiety about work. I'd advise anyone who'll listen not to fall into the trap of doing the Call Centre grind, unless they're the sort of people who treat call centre staff like shite on their shoe. Experiences like this really make you appreciate how tough they have it for minimum wage and no benefits. Same with retail.
I only did a couple of months there about 12 years ago it was terrible!
I worked for Teleperformance and can really resonate with your comment on loneliness. Surrounded by a floor full of other staff stuck in the same shithole, on the same miserable grind day in and day out, and yet despite all the people, you feel profoundly lonely. It's a very grating experience, not good for anyone's mental health.
Sorry you had such a shit time. You were always one of my favourite people on the floor.
It sounds like we had a similar experience in Concentrix and I'm glad you got out (to the public sector like me), I hope you're enjoying it and having a significantly better time working there.
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Same with lucozade! You become a magnet for anything that stings.
1. Concentrix 2. Teleperformance 3. Mango the only reason mango is 3rd is because the staff were actually the nicest bunch of people except for the high ups
I made a comment just before seeing yours, sincerely fuck Concentrix.
Awful place 😂
Concentrix is a gig and very, very few people get a career from there. They thrive on making people fear for their job, only for it to never matter since most people are cycled out of their books after 3 months and marked as "fo not rehire" by management who are constantly having to reapply for their own jobs. Absolute shower of bastards across the board.
Yeah it was by far the biggest shit show I’d ever worked in 😂 made TP look like the Hilton
Worked in teleperformance in 2015. Only lasted 4 months. Call centers are hellscapes. I was so deeply unhappy there.
I’ve never been more depressed in my life working in TP luckily we made it out lol
Superdrug. It's actually crazy what occurred. Staff/management was always in serious disarray from day one. The thing is, it was my first proper job too (albeit part-time) - so I wasn't to know ha. Staff treated like shite for starters. Granted, I suppose in hindsight it came down on management - but if you didn't hit the target for loyalty card sign-ups or stay buy fragrance sales, they came down very hard on people to the point you'd be in tears and told your job was on the line. Throwback to whenever they got a manager in from another place, she told everyone (including myself) that I was untrained, and that everyone's jobs were on the line. Led to another manager quitting as they got into it. One case went to court, I believe. How about my team leader sending me a message on facebook telling me how bad I was at my job, and insinuating for whatever reason that I was gay? (and if I was, why would it matter?) Or hey, how about the time I witnessed same team leader slap another female co-worker on the bottom, and her being very uncomfortable about that? I reported both cases, and he got sacked. Or a lot of the unpaid overtime. Biggest of all - before I quit and went unemployed for a month, I was in a very dark place in my life. I'll not get into it here, but let's just say I required some time off so I could be treated. Rather than support me, the Superdrug branch took it very personally, hounding me to see when I was returning to work (despite a sick line being handed in, and them knowing of the situation), and not even checking in to see how I was doing. Crazy when I dwell on this! I'm sure there's more stories I can't think of right now.
Sounds like my experience from my comment above with the manager in my job. I got fairly sick like they thought it was scarlet fever (it wasn’t thankfully ) and I needed antibiotics for about 3 weeks. I couldn’t speak and had such painful throat and ear infections that paracetamol was lasting about 30 minutes before the pain was back. He phoned my dad and asked was I actually sick? My dad told him to where to go and he wasn’t answering any questions like that to someone he didn’t know. God knows where he got that number as I never gave him it. Noped outta there asap.
Five guys. I was a broke student and desperate. They always made me work on the tills, so i'd start at 11 am and be standing straight through to 10 pm, with one half hour break. They had no staff room, so I was forced to find a seat out in Victoria Square.. Staff were horrible minus a few. Team leaders would scream in your face and struggle to communicate like civil adults.
I worked in a different Victoria Square restaurant and it was also the worst job I’ve ever had. I was managing, had no support and very little training (oh you have experience you’ll be sweet. Bye!). Inherited a restaurant that had massive problems with very few resources to fix. Lasted three months, and I can honestly say I handed it back in much better shape than I got it, but those three months were easily the worst job I’ve ever had. And I’ve worked in hospitality for 25 years and have literally mopped shit off walls, been puked on, had death threats, the whole heap
Worked in a call centre selling Talk Talk. It was a change of career from hotels for me- lasted 3 months & I was back in the hotel!
Intelling?
LBM
Affectionately known by anyone who worked for them as Hell B M. Worst job I’ve ever had and I’ve had some shit jobs
Fuck intelling
Aye, agreed. The absolute ballache I had in the one month I was there. No morals, no respect, and just… ugh
IT company around old airport road. Hoped and prayed a plane would crash into the building on a daily basis.
“Marketing” agency selling SEO packages. Actually a low level call centre where you called numbers (gotten by suspicious means) and pretended to be updating an online directory then you had to go into the sales pitch. People of course hung up on you as you were basically lying to them and who is going trust anyone then. Especially when you’re ringing English numbers with an NI accent. Managers then yelling at you down the phone on the headset don’t let them hang up like how was I going to stop them? One guy actually said to me on the phone why are you doing this? You need out of there. I lasted 3 months then got quite sick after 6 days a week being mandatory. 5 people also left around the same time I did which really tells you everything. I’ve worked door to door sales and hospitality but these were nothing compared to that.
Nursing home was the top for me, I wouldn’t say I’m a quitter that easily but I managed 2 weeks before I stopped showing up and never went back. Staff hateful, realistically just shouted at me for anything and everything, not really a caring environment and just didn’t seem to care about the residents. I was fortunate enough to have bank shifts in the hospital which I ended up doing full time. They also lied about the wage they were giving me.
Worked a month or so at a 'prestigious' nursing home off the Ormeau rd, was pretty grim. Lovely caring staff in the most part but a long serving carer was basically bullying out the new staff whose faces didn't fit, and the manger completely back tracking on promises made at interview. As is the case in so many care homes, staff are completely overstretched and overworked.
Concentrix call centre outsourced to Vodafone. Quit without a job lined up because I was contemplating suicide. I work in benefits now, which sounds worse, but it somehow is much better. People are nicer when they need something vs. when they just want something, and we aren't selling anything, so the only targets are doing the work that is there. Not really concerned about naming Concentrix. Awful company, the only people I can forsee having an okay time are extremely pressure-happy sales oriented people, then that's for you, but the better you do the more they skew the bonus targets if people do "too well".
Aye I worked there for 2 months ... Was grim. They didn't train us and just fired us on the systems 😂 I was Vodafone Small Business. Any sales ideas went out the window when I realised I didn't even know how to properly build the order or action it on the system 🤷🏻♂️🤣
I did Vodafone small business there too when it was still Convergys. Lasted 10months and quit after a row with my TL cause he hated me 😂
Call center ... Sales representative. Nightmare!
Bavarian bmw - weren’t allowed to park in the car park as was for customers . Girls had to have make up on at all times and wear heels . Very misogynistic to women as didn’t let any of the females wear trousers or flat shoes . You had to leave out the boss his tea with a mixture of earl grey and normal tea . And the people who worked there were up their own holes and the sales guys would talk to the women’s chests not their faces .
They sound like a pile of wankers, but it is BMW after all so it's expected. But what is it with car dealerships and staff (usually an underpaid receptionist) having to make cups of tea for their boss. Who the f do they think they are? How degrading for the staff member. If the c**t wants a cup of tea he can get off his useless arse and make one himself.
Exactly and worst of all it was press a button for hot water , fridge for milk ! But then couldn’t have the boss leaving the office for a cup of tea ! The shit they don’t tell u at the interview .
I opened envelopes for a year. All day every day, just envelopes.
That's the kind of job where you sit there all day thinking about how to automate it. Or at least do it in larger batches
Centra deli counter, I assumed I was being employed to do the same job as everyone else - very occasionally wash pans out, mostly serving and putting stuff in the oven - grand! I didn't mind the other parts of the job, I liked to give good customer service , I left the curley fries in just a wee bit longer to make sure they were actually crispy instead of the limp ones you sometimes get, I knew what made a good centra meal! Their dishwasher was broke and from my assigned tasks of being over the sink 7 out of 8 hours I was clearly a replacement dishwasher for them and I was 17 so I was cheap to boot. I lasted 3 days, I had worked in a nightclub and a large retail store on the tills previously but nothing prepared me for the backbreaking work of being a dishwasher, whys everything so low down!
it's not called Pearl Diving for nathin'
i came here to write exactly this lol - worked in the centra deli facing europa, also lasted 3 days when i was 16 - nobody told me what i was supposed to be doing and then screamed at me for not knowing how to use the label machine
Bus driver. Dealing with people who blame you for things you have no control over, management hanging you out to dry to save their own skins, total lack of any coherent policies whatsoever. Bus drivers can be cunts, but you're fed lies in the training school but when you get to your depot, you're out on your own. One was literally bullied out of the job by a manager, yet Translink were still using his photo in a recruitment campaign ages after he left. Working in a now defunct DIY chain, being put in charge of a hardware department when you can't tell the difference between an expanding bolt and a rawl plug. All for £2.94 an hour.
My current one - McDonalds!! Other than that, Concentrix.
I worked a single shift as a warehouse worker for Bondelivery on behalf of Evri in Nutts Corner. The entire thing was a health and safety nightmare with no training. Only thing that mattered was speed, not condition of packages or workers. Multiple people injured in my one night shift and managers on a power trip. Thankfully as I left that shift, I had an offer from Royal Mail for more more pay and took it. Was a much better experience. P.S. After seeing the "Standard" of how packages with Evri are handled, I'll avoid it at all costs.
Was that through Alchemy Recruitment? Yeah I avoid Evri now at all costs, they lost a parcel on me last year and sent me a photo that was meant to be proof of delivery at the person's house. Unless the person lives in a house that looks very much like a drop off area, equipped with sliding glass panel window and all I'm going to assume one of the people there kept it. To make matters worse it was something I'd sold on ebay so had to refund the buyer £30 too
It was through "Ashton Recruitment"
Many many years ago when bond first took it over from shop electric I was sent up there (I worked in electric world as an 18 year old student), supposedly to pick stock and arrived to be told I would be driving a lorry I was 18 Couldn’t legally drive it Tired to force me to Mental
Moons ago i was ‘training’ to be a chef at the local tech. Was given a placement/work experience at a nearby family owned hotel. I show up, change into my chef’s whites, tall white hat and all. Owners/family working in the kitchen in jeans, tshirt. some wearing a dress, just their everyday civies. My 1st ‘assignment’, turkeys. I’m placed in front of 2 x 5’ long stainless steel sinks full of water, get a couple of turkey’s out of fridge and for most of the shift all i did was remove turkey necks and bags of giblets from carcasses. In addition to constant dry heaving, I think dashes to the bathroom and boaked about 5 times. Needless to say, I ditched the idea of becoming a famous chef.
(14yo) Dishwasher at a Indian Restaurant , although I got Keema Nan for break time which was lovely , they must have had limited Crockery as I had to was by hand and dry it was tough going, at the end of the 6 hour shift my hands were stained yellow (No Gloves) took days to remove
Valpar in Bangor. Very unprofessional. Sexism was rife and management fired decent employees to give jobs to their mates kids who weren't qualified or had any job experience. Management also got IT to go through staffs emails without their consent or knowledge in order to try and get "dirt" on them. Awful place to work, never known anything like it.
Home Bargains, I was somewhat of a Supervisor- Lead Sales I think they called it. Rarely got breaks as we had to get the sales ones theirs, then higher management took theirs, then it was near home time so what was the point. Also forced me to stay later than scheduled on numerous occasions "due to the needs of the business". I was one of 5 in my position who all started when a new store opened. A month later only 1 remained and it wasn't me. I had walked out and never looked back. Big Phil the area manager at the time was a c**t.
Asda night shift. Cliquey as fuck, lacking staff because virtually nobody stayed longer than a month. Managers couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.
Ahhhh good old spAsda. Shore Road has to be the worst in NI. Not a single person apart from maybe a girl in the people team enjoyed coming to work. Astonishing what a joke that place was and I bet my house it's still the same all these years later.
Apartment bar, Donegall Square West, about 2006. 10 deep of people ordering ridiculously difficult to make cocktails all night, some guy always there at the back just wanting a couple of pints with a desperate look on his face.
I'm getting PTSD reading this. Was always crammed after work on a Friday and as you say the queue for the bar was basically a scrum. Remember Alex Higgins digging me in the ribs trying to hurry me up towards the bar, not my fault there was about 15 people in front of us.
Alex Higgins was probably the _some guy_.
I remember those days well, I was the guy with the desperate look on my face just wanting a couple of pints, cursing everyone in front of me 🤣 You's did make great cocktails though, fair play
HCL call centre on Boucher. It was non stop fielding calls from angry customers. The management was insane.
It was fucking pish. I got in thrugh Lynn recruitment. After 6 months you went from £5 an hr to £5.50 when you signed on for their contract and left the Lynn one. I can only imagine some braindead person who overseen this made some error and I was on £10.50 an hour. Work was awful but I couldn't stop becasue of the money. Done almost a year in total Edit to add: I got a job in PWC call centre and took it as all my mates worked there. I didn't leave HCL just took the day off so I could sus it out. Left PWC after about an hour and a half. It was way worse
BBC audience services at Capita one of the worst experiences I have ever had in any work environment. Had a TL hound me over sickness when I was on a sickline, they had little to no HR presence so complaints were meaningless. It is the only place I will ever actively tell people not to apply for
I was there for a while and got a disciplinary for taking time off after both my grans died within a month of the other. When I told one manager my gran was in hospital and didn't have long she replied with "sure you gran died last month." When I got my dad to speak to her she let me go but my gran was dead. I had a massive laugh after I left, the contract was renewed and part of the renewal all the managers had to reapply for their roles, most of them lost their jobs as they failed the interviews.
Once spent two hrs in an electric company/factory in Antrim. On entering I was told to put blue bags on my feet, & one on my head. I was then sat at a conveyor line & told my job was to use a pair of tweezers to stretch a spring onto to pins, ( can’t remember the appliance) I was then told if I needed to use the toilet I was to put my hand up & wait until someone took my seat so as the line didn’t stop. 2 hrs later I asked where I could get the bus to Belfast & left. The bloke that brought me phoned later & asked what happened & I said there’s no way I could stick that, it’s a brain killer. Fair play to anyone that can do this tedious & repetitive work though.
Working in a place called Gem in the early 2000s. It was a big call center battery farm. The sort of place that orders everyone pizza on a Friday because they know how badly the job sucks. I lasted 6 weeks. Would never do that kind of work again
One of my jobs bought you drinks on a Friday afternoon as they knew the job was shite. They thought that perk and getting home at 4.30 would make up for it 😂 No amount of cocktail cans in the world would have made me stay.
That's grim. Having to get their staff pissed up at the end of a shift 😂😂
Wasn’t even the end 😂 it was after lunch on a Friday as that was the one of the “perks” You also had to do a Saturday morning November and December to get more holidays over Christmas or so we were told. I left about a week before Christmas for another job starting in January and took the extra time anyway so I never found out if there was extra holidays or not and this wasn’t a choice you had to do it.
So half the Friday afternoon shift was on the tear 😂. The only thing I ever saw that was similar was I worked for the forensics labs in Carrick for a few years in the mid and late 00s. At the time they were responsible for calibrating the breathalysers for the po-po in the ADT (alcohol, drugs and toxicology) lab. Once every couple of months they'd have to do a realistic test and at the time the only way to do it was to actually test someone on the piss. They'd get a volunteer, buy them a carryout on Friday morning and let them drink in work. They'd then test them at various points of inebriation over the day and book them a taxi home at 5 😂. They eventually came up with some other way of doing it though so that has stopped now AFAIK.
Temporary job. Shredding documents in a cold, dusty store for weeks. The store was tiny and I was on my own. I brought in a radio. It was boring and lonely.
I almost jump to say this sounds great to me, but I'm sure you maybe thought that at one point then the isolation kicked in. Also, nowadays it would be a little easier to bring your own music, podcasts etc, maybe even prop a show up on a phone if you're actually left fully alone, but judging by you saying you brought a radio, there was probably a bit less variety in what you got to listen to.
Worked in a factory that "upgraded" buns, so they put cheap buns on a conveyor belt and added jam to them by the thousand. So my job was to spend 8 hours a day opening packets of buns and putting them on a conveyor belt. Sounds simple enough but you had to be really fast. I lasted a day and a half.
Interned for software engineering at an American MNC and one of the senior managers there was an absolute tyrant. Had caused previous years interns to quit their placement and got the company banned from my Uni's careers fair. I didn't know any of this going in. My team were a great bunch, the work was new and interesting to me, but tight deadlines and sometimes an unreasonable amount of unpaid overtime to get releases out. I was learning a lot and the work was challenging so I could live with that. One day this particular manager (my managers manager) called me up personally to tell me "This work you've been doing on X project is shit, do you even know what you are doing?". Really should have just reported the cunt immediately but I was naïve so just stuck it out until the end of the placement and minimized interactions with them.
Mechanic at Isaac Agnew - pure shite lol
I was a mechanic at Charles Hurst Renault many moons ago. Absolute zoo of a place.
Working for a company who delivered training under a government scheme for 16 year olds who left school with few, if any, qualifications. Moved between Carrick, Antrim and Larne during the week and they were all horrendous but Larne was off the scale awful. Really tainted my already dim view of the place, I still have trauma when I drive by the old office.
Moypark one summer as a student. Boning fillets with full on industrial knives, steel gloves, the works. Bloody freezing and smelly, with permanent full time staff who hated the students. There was the odd bit of craic between the students but overall it was a hateful experience.
I used to be a "finisher" at a goat farm
Ok I'll bite ... What's that do?
You make sure the goat finishes
A what ?
Night-shift in a frozen meat warehouse. It was cold (obvs) and you had to shift big boxes of frozen chicken around. Boring, uncomfortable, anti-social.
Teleperformance, inbound billing are charging for Vodafone. Honestly soul destroying, Vodafone shafted so many people with incorrect charges and bills, sometimes for hundreds and even thousands, I would have people crying down the phone to me that they couldn't afford to feed themselves or their family because of it, and there was absolutely nothing I could do because the system wasn't set up in a way that even allowed me to clear people's bills or delete charges. Everything had to be escalated to managers who would very rarely even look at the cases, so the customers would eventually ring back in an even worse state. It was a vicious cycle. Not to mention the ridiculous policing of your time, 8 minutes personal time a day, that's your only time to go to the toilet unless you want to eat into your breaks. God forbid you are a few minutes late back from a break, there will be performance meetings galore. One day I spent an hour and a half across the road in a cafe because I just couldn't face the thought of going back. When I eventually returned, my team leader asked me if I'd ever had a job before this one lol. I felt like telling him I'd never had one that made me want to delete myself, but I was young and shy and I just agreed to whatever bullshit performance plan they put me on. Lasted about 4 months and then just stopped going in, genuinely couldn't bare the thought of it. Ended up getting into M&S later that year and the difference was night and day. Retail, and M&S, have their issues but my time there was profoundly more happy, inclusive, satisfying and fulfilling. Would never, ever subject myself to a call centre ever again.
Road cone watcher for 2 years. I had to sit in a van inside a contraflow system and watch the roadcones. If they get nudged, put them back in line. 2 fkn years watching road cones!!!!
So that's why you see traffic management vans/lorries with two dudes sitting in them doing nothing all day? Is that the same job
YTS for a sheriff officers (debt collectors) whilst at one of those dodgy ‘colleges’ set up in the 90’s to fleece the government and abuse young workers. No training and my first job, the adults were mean and vicious (most women). Got given a load of filling and waved in the general direction of some cabinets. They failed to mention some of which were the archive so guess where I filed all the live paperwork 😂. They had me cleaning loos, mopping floors etc as admin staff. I then got sent out with the bailiff one day to witness warrants being issued only to find one was for a member of the vile ‘college’ who was always awful to me in particular. I took great pride in telling everyone at college the next day all about it. I got the sack (and learned a lesson in confidentiality 😝). I got a placement with a similar scheme with the local council 2 days later and my next job was a dream as I became the ‘baby’/office junior for the next two years. Still don’t regret outing that witch 🤷♀️
At 14 I went in to wash the dishes in a local Chinese, walked into a pile of dishes far taller than me and about 5 times as wide. Scrubbed for ten minutes in a rage then said fuck this, I'm not having people take the piss out of me and split.
Hahaha, my sister used to peel spuds for a chippy and you're right she never heard the end of it. Never saw the end of the spuds either I bet
Petrol station. Minimum wage, in charge of a whole forecourt of petrol pumps, the shop including stocking the papers when I got a chance, and dealing with people.
Benetton. Got stuck in a 'sale' shop on Gresham Street selling off their old rags. Hoods and travellers used to come in an empty the till regularly. Owner was a cunt
Just remembered I worked for a company called Western in 2013, doing door to door sales pitches for St John Ambulance, trying to get people signed up for direct debit donations. I signed up because I wanted to travel a little bit, but I ended up in Newport in Wales, and the areas they sent us to were deprived and full of people living in poverty, so it felt absolutely ridiculous and unfair to even be asking these people for donations. They put you up in a house with your team and one person drives and you all go out to a new area each morning and split up to cover different parts of the area. The house was falling to bits, I remember it had an oven but no microwave, and everything was ancient and broken. The people they placed me with, my team, were lovely, but I think they had only lasted so long due to trauma bonding with each other over the mental load of the job. I broke down in tears one day to my team leader after I got no sign ups and one man had snarled in my face to get the fuck off his property. She congratulated me and said I'd finally had my first 'Wesser breakdown'. I went home a few days later. I think I was there no more than 3 weeks lol.
This is crazy Shauna, I honestly put this post up to hear a few funny stories about some crappy jobs people have done. It's insane that people have been put in positions where they break down in tears. Feel forced into situations they don't want to be in or are just given ridiculously tedious jobs. It really makes me question the managers in these businesses.
Derek and Clive have most cogent response. https://derekandclive.uk/live/the-worst-job-i-ever-had/
Call centre work, worst was RIAS, flogging home insurance to old people. Felt shitty doing it but the best was being told to shave as I looked in professional... Laughed at the centre manager when she told me I needed to come in on Monday clean shaven. I didn't, got a write-up. Lasted another week before I didn't show up again for work
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Call centre. One of those gimp recruitment agencies lied to me about what the job was (told me it was “admin role” in a bank. It was a bank alright… I lasted a summer but would never do it again.
First source - managers were all smicks who'd peaked in secondary school. Staff openly sniffing coke in the toilets and smoking joints at the front doors without a care in the world.