Public Address | Cafe | Stories: Employment Lore

Jeremy Andrew

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 22:08:25 +1200

thesis involved interviewing workers at strip bars and massage parlours

In my time looking after University student computer labs, I found it amazing how many of them were 'researching' for a paper on internet porn.
Even more amazing were the ones who used the lab colour printer to run off…

Stephen Judd

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 18:40:55 +1200

Which reminds me of a lecturer from the School of Education at Waikato who started out researching how prostitutes educate one another, did indeed become a receptionist (purely for research) and is now a professional dominatrix in Sydney, which I think that is probably more fun than teaching ungrateful undergraduates,

Hadyn Green

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:33:45 +1200

A friend of mine did his PhD in Sociology in the States. His thesis involved interviewing workers at strip bars and massage parlours. He said that, with no exception, if your girlfriend said she was only the receptionist at one of those places she was definitely more than that.

He…

Robyn Gallagher

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 21:36:42 +1200

NEVER take a Receptionist job at a Massage Parlour/Escort Service.

Or "The receptionist job's gone, love, but we have another job you might be interested in, and it pays more. Here, have a seat and Krystelle will give you a tour..."

InternationalObserver

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:01:46 +1200

PA readers are probably smart enough not to need this warning, but just in case there's some nerdy sheltered types out there looking for extra cash:

NEVER take a Receptionist job at a Massage Parlour/Escort Service. They may assure you that that's all you're required for, and you may believe…

Robyn Gallagher

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:37:58 +1200

There were four of us working on the call centre of the ISP's accounts department. We were understaffed at the worst of times, and this was one of those times.

That afternoon, I was at my scheduled lunchbreak (12.00 to 12.30, and you'd better be back at your desk by…

Stef Alderson

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 11:59:04 +1200

Probably the worst job i had was as a "carrot grader" for a market farm one student summer.
You had to stand at a conveyor belt and pick out the deformed carrots as they came rattling past before bagging them.
T-e-d-i-o-u-s. First day on the job, came home and yes,…

Rob Hosking

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 08:47:35 +1200

Moswt fun job was as a clown in Auckland's Queen St one December when I was at uiniversity.

It was for a gift shop called 'Box-It' based in CML Mall. I was dressed in a clown face, red tights, a box around the middle, and with a box lid as…

Lea Barker

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 19:58:00 +1200

I once had a childhood wish fulfilled when I got paid to sit up all night and watch television.

Unfortunately, the decade in which the wish was fulfilled was the one in which BBC World covered every smoky, bloody detail of the war in Kosovo and the genocide in Rwanda.…

Gavin Stowers

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:33:36 +1200

Best job I ever had was as a musician based out of Auckland. We went to pubs and clubs – and got paid to have fun.

At one point we were sponsored by a Canadian brewery, so got to drink all our beer for free – AND got paid to…

Andrew Stevenson

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:47:03 +1200

My first full time job out of Uni was contracting for an NZ organisation, where the contract was rolled over week by week. You knew you were not a valued employee, but a resource to be used.
After some time I started to apply for other jobs and was duly…

Jackie Clark

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 21:17:27 +1200

jobs,I've had a few.......isn't that how the old song goes? No? Oh well, it's true nonetheless. Loving all these stories. My worst jobs were definitively the ones I had as a barmaid in England. For three years, I seemed to take the jobs with the shittest landlords in all the…

Hadyn Green

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:23:27 +1200

At the Interview:
My best ever interview was for my first "real" job. Of the two guys interviewing my one had trimmed his moustache really badly and it was really uneven. The other guy had...something about him, which escapes me know but was equally attention grabbing. So I spent the…

Jeremy Andrew

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 08:50:25 +1200

We're all persons here ;-)

Chockasunday

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:15:15 +1200

I took a working holiday and went to work as a waiter in Austria. It wasn't for the money, just the chance to practise some German and live at a ski resort for the winter.

I told them I'd never worked as a waiter before I started the job.
I…

Emma Hart

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:17:13 +1200

For most of my adult life, I've worked for online companies in virtual offices. Turns out this seems to bring out the absolute worst of office politics – you don't even have to TRY to look someone in the face while you stab them in the back.

I work for…

andrew llewellyn

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:48:40 +1200

There was little difference between a large government department & a large multinational company. Except you get unreasonable directives from Head Office, instead of the Minister's Office.

I presume it hasn't changed in 15 years.

Jeremy Andrew

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:41:05 +1200

I've found the larger the company/organisation, the larger the bureaucracy, the more people who aren't directly connected to the customer/money source, the more it all starts to resemble a Dilbert cartoon.

andrew llewellyn

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:38:36 +1200

I got beaten by the man at work – the faceless bureaucrats anyway. I worked for a multinational, fortune 500 company whose CEO was a member of the Business Round Table.

For reasons too complex to go into, I had the chance to visit one of our branches in Australia.…

Jason Dykes

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:09:44 +1200

Any joyous work stories out there? Or do the rotten jobs always make the best stories?

I once worked for a large company that required its business units to create strategic plans once a year. We were allowed a couple of work days and a small budget to go offsite…

Jeremy Andrew

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:08:56 +1200

I would not be surprised if washing your hands, arms & even faces in a mix of turpentine, nail polish remover & sundry other solvents each day for years, was harmful to your health.

Speaking as someone who used to work handling hazardous waste for the local council, in my no-longer-professional opinion:…

andrew llewellyn

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:16:36 +1200

nail polish remover

Gah – acetone! It's all coming back to me now....

andrew llewellyn

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:11:48 +1200

I remember seeing more than a few guys there who seemed pretty well permanently toasted after many years in the solvent room.

Everyone was happier by afternoon.

What got me, having worked there in the holidays for 3 years (? if not more :) was how many long servers had…

Richard Llewellyn

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:51:19 +1200

Dulux paints, circa 1980, my job was to clean out the vats that paint was made in. I had a high pressure hose, and every solvent known to humankind on tap.

Heh – yeah, I remember seeing more than a few guys there who seemed pretty well permanently toasted after…

Jason Dykes

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:44:00 +1200

The amount of alcohol that could be consumed during lunchtime at the pub was a feature of a couple of other jobs.
As a kid I had various reasons to visit Press House in Wellington in the late 70s/ealy 80s and observed the same behaviour there. The evening subs would…

andrew llewellyn

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:19:04 +1200

Dulux paints, circa 1980, my job was to clean out the vats that paint was made in. I had a high pressure hose, and every solvent known to humankind on tap.

The factory workforce at the time included a major portion of golf mad pacific islanders, many spend their lunchtimes…

Richard Llewellyn

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 08:25:09 +1200

Then there was the gauntlet of the office Christmas party.

Gawd, I had a similar experience, working for a family owned trading business in Leicester Square in the late 1980's.

Christmas party was held in a tacky Covent Garden pub in a wood panelled function room, and the CFO of…

Don Christie

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:12:06 +1200

Yes, and the crappier the job the more ridiculous the interview...

Leanard Rossiter had a good response to the "do you drink?" question.

His Reggie Perrin response was:

Only to excess.

He got the job at the sewerage works.

Russell Brown

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:12:25 +1200

After ten weeks I couldn't bear to pretend to have no work to do any more and I decided to leave.

I had some work with some of the same components, at a music magazine publisher, where I somehow got wotk as a temp sub-editor. Every now and then I'd…

Jason Dykes

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:44:02 +1200

November 1988. After 14 months of cleaning operating theatres in Christchurch, I had enough cash to fund a working holiday in London. On the day of my last history exam I boarded a plane and arrived with enough money to last me ten days. I figured that would be plenty…

Scott Common

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 09:34:34 +1200

I'm going to keep this short...

Most confused job I've ever had – cleaning out septic waste tanks with a mate in the height of summer in the Wairarapa...

The hours were crap (pun intended), it was hot and sweaty in our plastic suits, we got great treatment from our…

Russell Brown

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 21:51:21 +1200

In 1988, the year that acid house happened, I was working for a company called MRIB in London. There were two sets of music sales chart in the UK: the BBC-Gallup ones, and the somewhat less robust charts compiled by MRIB.

One of the treats of the job used to…

David Hamilton

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:24:38 +1200

A mate and I were hired to do odd jobs for a company that makes high precision machinery. One of the tasks involved organising and repacking for storage the owners entire collection of National Geographic magazines, some of which dated back to the 30's. Pro tip – load them into…

InternationalObserver

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:21:53 +1200

I've always found the job interviews more amusing

Yes, and the crappier the job the more ridiculous the interview...

Why do you want this job?
Because I need a job, I have bills to pay.

What makes you the best candidate for this job?
I haven't seen all the other candidates…

Che Tibby

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 14:52:04 +1200

1996, auckland. i had a job washing dishes and making sandwiches at a cafe called 'picasso' in an art school in grafton.

being an ancient building in a seedy(ish) part of town the place had a chronic rodent infestation. i was working every day there, and my first job each…

Shaz

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 10:35:34 +1200

I've always found the job interviews more amusing, perhaps because I tend not to get the job...
Being asked by someone in the seafood industry how I felt about 'bottom trawling', que smirking, girly nervous giggling and answering, 'umm.. personal choice? I mean, it's none of my business really'
Being…

Ben Austin

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 08:59:22 +1200

Worst job – dairy worker – horrible hours, horrible pay, being crapped/urinated on by cows etc

It had it's upsides though – when not in the shed I was outside in the sun.

Felix Marwick

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 19:32:27 +1200

Worst job – push hoeing tobacco for $3.50 an hour. Basically it involved walking up and down rows of tobacco plants 8 hours a day removing the weeds. It was mind numbingly dull.

Picking the stuff was even worse. Sitting in a small hard plastic seat at the bottom of…

Andre Dromgool

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:04:31 +1200

When I was 16 I worked at a chicken slaughterhouse in the weekends, soaked in blood and smelling of death it was one of the coldest jobs on the planet. The production line gave you a range of tasks to enjoy: dragging the bird into an inverted cone and cutting…

Michael Savidge

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 16:59:52 +1200

I was once paid too much money to lie on my back in a field for two days and count the number and type of birds flying through an imaginary grid...

However it was sunny and I often fell asleep.

Jason Dykes

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 16:17:37 +1200

For 14 months I had an evening job cleaning operating theatres at Christchurch Hospital. In many ways it was ideal for a student. The work was bloody, but the pay was good. I got free sandwiches for dinner. The location also made it easy to do stuff in town afterwards.…

merc

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:11:53 +1200

It's true, when Herbs were seen in a KFC ad by a KFC exec (in the US), the exec said, "Is that a fu*ng ni**r in mah ad?"
I kid you not, the campaign was changed after that despite NZ having the highest per capita consumption in the world at…

Simon Grigg

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 15:02:02 +1200

I worked part-time at McD's for a few years as a teen.

Did KFC as a teen, in Panmure, saving money for my first car. Colonel Sanders (yes the real one) came to visit us. All the brown people were sent home..our staff was was 90% Maori and Polynesian...but the…

Jeremy Andrew

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 14:41:41 +1200

I worked part-time at McD's for a few years as a teen. The stories I have to tell are much less gross than onemight expect. The standard of hygiene (contrary to popular urban myth) is distinctly higher than one would otherwise expect from a bunch of 17-year-olds on minimum wage…

Richard Llewellyn

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:46:41 +1200

Cleaning out the chocolate vats at Griffins biscuit factory in Lower Hutt, during their annual spring clean.

Involved donning full protective suit and climbing down into these enormous vats with a pressure hose.

The amount of thick, congealed fat/goo was ebough to put me off my mallowpuffs for weeks.

Anne M

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:44:04 +1200

This requires a lot of boring preamble (sorry).

When I was a student one of the main research interests of my lab was Mycoplasma They cause various pneumonias and arthritis, we cared about sheep pneumonia. They're touchy little buggers to grow and one of the constituents of their media is…

Russell Brown

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:10:55 +1200

I'll let the music do the talking

Oh no, that's never going to do. What's the point of posting under a pseudonym if you can't spill?

InternationalObserver

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:02:17 +1200

I'll let the music do the talking

Russell Brown

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 10:55:08 +1200

This month, it's jobs: the first, the worst, the best,the weirdest, the simply memorable. You may change names to protect the guilty, but don't hold back on the anecdotes. Personal grievances will have to be filed separately.