Employment oddities
March Hare
Shipmate Posts: 20
in Heaven
Threads discussing Christmas and touching on postal services 'then and now' reminded me that working on 'the Christmas post' was a regular source of a little extra income for generations of British students. I'm sure many shipmates have memories doing just that. But that got me thinking about temporary jobs in general - the sort one did during college vacations or while waiting for a 'proper' job to come along. Mine were fairly routine: driving, office dogsbody, working in a wine warehouse and making up route-cards for holiday motorists for the RAC (something else that's vanished into history). When we compared notes, it was generally agreed that the top prize for weirdest temporary job went to one of our set who got a job washing bodies in a mortuary.
There must surely be some tales to be told?
There must surely be some tales to be told?
Comments
One summer job I did was loading piles of magazines on to a conveyor belt. Mostly comics, but at one point it was pornographic magazines. My parents somehow found out , though not from me, and told me not to go back, but I was due to finish at the end of the week. The conveyor belt moved too fast for any reading anyway.
One colleague tried to irritate the latter, at which point one of the oversized felines decided to spray him to show displeasure.
I met a wide range of very interesting people and was the leanest and fittest I’ve ever been, as I was cycling between jobs and some of the work was quite physical anyway. I learnt the Dewey decimal system, Fens dialect words, basic wheelchair maintenance and a lot about the practical implications of long term physical disability, learning disability and mental health issues.
Then there was a steelworks in Sweden, a locomotive works also in Sweden, and a tractor engine factory in Finland. Looking back over a great many years, they were some of the best of times. A bit later as a real engineer I worked on a weird thing popularly known as The Flying Peanut - you can look it up.
One of the others I helped check exam marking at an exam board and keyed in data at a wholesaler to their NEW stock register (1988). I understood better how it worked than the people who sold it to them by the end of the time.
I did this from a corner of the offices which contained the off-catalogue book cases. The council had two collections of books, both, I believe, bequests, which were not listed in the main catalogue. No-one could find their existence by browsing the catalogue, you had to know they were there before you could order them. One was a library of Masonic books, whose existence was known by the local Lodges, and books were occasionally requested.
The other was the collection of pornography. I have no idea who left their extensive collection of pornographic books to the City Council. I can't imagine having to draw up a Will which included such a bequest. No requests to borrow those books ever troubled the council library admin.
And that is how I became a nurse.
places where I'd left the leaflets and told them it was all lies!
In my first university summer vacation I sold umbrellas in Harrods and learned to roll them precisely. Also parasols in assorted colours, including six to one lady who couldn't make up her mind which to choose, and wantd them delivered to a Mayfair address, but not before 11 am. Afterwards, my supervisor said "You know what she is, don't you?", but I didn't (at that time).
The next year I worked as an 'au pair' in the household of the Regius Professor of Divinity in Oxford, in the house in Tom Quad where Alice Liddell lived when she was immortalised as 'Alice in Wonderland'.
That does sound good. I have bumbled from one engineering job to another - there are issues with the (industrial) museum volunteering I do, but I think it's closest to what I really enjoy in that line. I'm also lucky to have a PT technician job with a team I like. I feel lucky I no longer am under much pressure (though I say that with fingers crossed, as if things change I could be right back in it up to my neck). One never really knows.
I loved hearing about your library experience @cgichard, that resonated so much with my first post school job. One that sticks in my mind 30 years later was the man who only wanted Larry and Stretch stories.
I used to love selecting items for those readers on our homebound library service, particularly those who could still read regular print as the available choices were wider. I used to pity my friend who had one woman who wanted 20-30 large print books per fortnight and couldn't grasp that we didn't have funds to buy materials to keep up with her reading capacity. Our budget only permitted 20-30 books per month and had to cover all reading interests, not just her own. Oh the fun and games!
In between redundancy and working freelance I did door to door market research which could be awful but on a good day quite interesting. I think @Gracious Rebel did that for a while.
The job I jacked in the quickest was cold-calling door knocking for a well known internet provider whereby people were invited to install a monitor to record their online activities. The idea was they'd get vouchers in return and the provider would get data to help them target ads effectively. I thought there were algorithms for that.
There were no takers.
I've also done some cold-calling telephone stuff. That's hard work.
But I've never had to shovel shit or anything like that.
It was said that if you worked further up the line you could help yourself to as many broken biscuits as you could eat, but perhaps sensibly, they didn't allow me near that section!
Shovelling shit is quite therapeutic!
Mind you, being buried up to your neck in it would probably be more enjoyable than jobhunting right now.
The same summer (2002 or 2003, I think) I helped remove by hand the head-height weeds that had grown up alongside a new housing estate after the contractor forgot to apply weedkiller and/or put grass down. I then did a few shifts in a White Arrow warehouse, washed up in the kitchens of the old N&N hospital, and did 2-3 night shifts at Anglian Windows where I couldn't hear what people were saying over the radio and made a right mess of things.
In one of them, when I would only have been about 18, I became conscious that a rather attractive Italian girl in the class who would have been about the same age as me, was gazing at me with a degree of attention that was a bit disconcerting. I realised that I had not been imagining it. When I leant over her to correct her written exercise I became immediately conscious that she was pointedly leaning into my shoulder and nudging.
Design for production - who'd ha' thunk it!