The Book Tower

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? Hmmm, something about Winston Churchill springs to mind whenever this question crops up. I’m not thinking about careers here (not that assisting Mr Churchill in this manner is an enviable career). It’s too depressing for people to suddenly pause and think “I’ve worked in this bank for 20 years. Yes, it is the worst job I’ve ever had.” This is more about temporary jobs, or jobs you left after two weeks when you realised the enormity of your bad decision.

The worst job I have ever had:

Working in Our Price records. You would think this would be a good job, but the manager I worked for was particularly horrible. She gave me a dressing down for not putting out empty cassette boxes for ‘The Joshua Tree’. “We’ve lost sales!” she barked. I’ve always thought I’d done them a favour (I’ve never been a U2 fan).

This was just before CDs came on the scene, so I was always signing for deliveries of huge boxes of vinyl, struggling with them up the stairs and then spending ages on the phone to suppliers trying to order more huge boxes of vinyl.

‘Star Trekkin’‘ by The Firm was number one for the two weeks that I kept the job. We were required to play it every day. I used to slip The Smiths on whenever I could, but we were also required to honour the requests of our customers. A very strange character would come in most days and ask me to play “I Want to Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston. I was obliged to stop playing ‘Star Trekkin’‘, or The Smiths, and put it on. I wondered at the time why he didn’t buy the record, but looking back I realise he didn’t need to. He had his own free personal DJ.

Lunchtimes would be my only escape from this terrible music. Strangely, I always used to see Kenneth Branagh walking around at lunchtime too. I later worked out that he was appearing at a nearby theatre.

Other contenders:

Shifting. I had a job for a day carrying furniture from one building, across a busy road to the top of another very high building. For anyone familiar with South West London, it was the horrible black office block opposite Colliers Wood tube station. The bloke I was working with had been engaged in this type of work before and kept saying “I’m used to a bit of shifting”.

Working in a timber yard. This lasted for half a day. It was hot and heavy work. One particular character would drive up and down in a mini fork lift, barechested and shouting “out the way son!”

Counting cars at traffic lights. With several other poor souls I was armed with a personal ‘clicker’, recording the numbers of cars, vans and motorcycles as they passed through a busy junction. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for our supervisor, who bored us with endless tales about his favourite ‘counts’.

Making tea for Jeffery Archer, Cecil Parkinson and other Conservative MPs. Actually, this was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. But that’s another story. And it brings us back to Winston Churchill. Sort of.

Clive: I understood that Winston used to hoard his bogies.

Derek: Right, he was a great bogie hoarder. I used to find a spare bucket in his wardrobe on the weekends when I used to clear up and sometimes after a party the whole room would be full of bogies. . . I mean, the whole floor, and I used to go in there with a face flannel and, you know, mop them up.

Ahem.