The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Everyone's had a shit job or two at some point in their lives but I reckon I've had more than my fair share. Here are all the shit jobs I've done.

Volunteer librarian

Salary: Unpaid

Duration: 1 week

My first taste of the bitter world of work came at the tender age of fifteen. My school forced us all to do two weeks' work experience at local businesses.

While my friends went to work in their dad's businesses, like car showrooms and money-printing factories, I went to work in the local library.

It was okay, actually. It was as stress-free as you can imagine. The tasks were easy things like reshelving books and helping old people to the toilets before they pissed themselves. And the people who worked there - all middle-aged women - were nice, albeit boring.

But on my first day, when 5 pm came, I merrily skipped to the door when a voice said, "Where do you think you're going?"

I turned and there was the manager. "You can't leave until I tell you to leave," she said in a surly tone.

I had to go back into the library and help them close up, despite the fact that I wasn't getting paid to work there.

Still though, out of all the jobs I've done since then, working in the library was the best.

Which means it was all downhill from here on.

Teaching assistant

Salary: Unpaid

Duration: 1 week

After my volunteer stint in the library, I also did a week's work experience at my dad's school. My dad works as a teacher in a primary school and he said I could come help. At one point I had to supervise a bunch of kids in the computer room, and they were supposed to use the internet to find images of pirates and treasure and then use these images to make a collage, but instead, every kid bar one started googling gangsters and pop stars, and I was powerless to stop them. The teacher wasn't happy with the finished collages - pictures of Jay-Z and Beyonce pasted into Microsoft Word - and gave all the kids a bollocking.

During that week, I discovered I had no aptitude for teaching whatsoever and had no ability to control children. This put me off teaching as a career. So in that sense, the work experience was a complete success, because otherwise, I might have become a teacher.

Plate collector

Salary: Minimum wage

Duration: 2 months

The absolute most stressful job I've ever done was working as a plate collector in a Chinese buffet restaurant. Every shift was the very epitome of stress. The place was always crammed. I would be carrying ten or twenty plates at a time, praying I wouldn't drop any, trying to manoeuvre my way around fat slobs, as I said, "Excuse me," trying to get squeeze past their giant arse cheeks. I functioned on adrenaline for my entire shift just to get the work done.

I dropped drinks a few times. The worst was when I dropped a tray of drinks all over this poor woman who I think was out on a hen night. I ruined her dress. Thankfully, she and her friends were too drunk to care and they just laughed it off.

Another task I had was to take people's drinks orders. This involved writing the order on a piece of paper and then taking it to the bar. Simple, right? Well, apparently not. Because after I'd done a few orders, my manager pulled me to one side and said, "Your handwriting is so messy that the bartender can't read it." To my humiliation, he told me to ask other waiters to write orders for me.

Oh, and another thing. The tips. Sometimes diners would leave tips, but of course, only the full-time staff got to keep them. Our tips went to the full-time staff. Part-time staff like me didn't get anything.

It wasn't all bad though. At the end of my shift, when the restaurant was finally closing, I could eat whatever I wanted from the buffet. So I'd help myself to a giant plate of sweet and sour chicken with fried rice and broccoli, and I'd sit next to the only other non-Asian man working there (a white 30-year-old chav who was a nice guy).

The free food almost made up for it. Almost, but not quite.

Laboratory assistant

Salary: £6.50 an hour

Duration: 7 weeks

For my gap year, instead of going to Burma like everyone else, I worked as a laboratory assistant at a chicken factory.

I never actually went into the factory, mind you, where they killed the chickens. I worked in a building next-door, cutting packets of chicken open and checking them for salmonella and other diseases.

My job was to basically open packets of chicken, cut off a piece and put the piece into a bag of nutrients to see if bacteria would grow. They never did. I think there was more to the job than that but this is the only task I remember. I wasn't trusted to do much else.

Every morning, truckloads of squawking chickens would go into the factory, and every evening, truckloads of packaged chicken would go out. Logically, somewhere between those two events, workers were killing and skinning the chickens, but I never got to see that. Maybe that's for the best.

Though this one time, a man took me out to a chicken farm, and there were these large, artificially lit sheds full of chickens. The floor was nothing but chickens. Each shed contained hundreds and hundreds of chickens. They had barely any room to move.

I reckon the sight of that would be enough to turn most people vegetarian, or at least make them switch to free-range chicken. Not me though. I still happily eat large quantities of battery chicken to this day.

After just seven weeks, they fired me for not caring enough about the work, which was fair enough, to be honest. I hadn't made any effort to learn anything and I obviously had no passion for cutting up packets of chicken.

I was pleased they fired me though because they gave me a month's redundancy pay (£1,000), which is essentially getting paid for doing nothing.

I got out of that town as fast as I could.

When I got back home, I lied to my friends. I told them I had quit my placement because it was boring, instead of telling them the truth, which was that I had been fired for putting no effort into learning the job.

Here's the word-for-word explanation I sent to one friend over Facebook:

the placement was boring. I was cutting up chickens for most of the time... thought I might as well finish my final year so I could get a better job, like working in asda or something

Ironically my next employer wasn't too different from Asda.

Interlude - Graduation

Just before I graduated, I remember a huge banner hanging from the top of the university that said, "95% OF OUR STUDENTS GET GRADUATE JOBS". Ninety five percent? I thought. A graduate job's practically guaranteed! I imagined myself in a cushy office, my feet up and my arms behind my head, laughing about all the poor plebs with minimum-wage shit jobs. What exactly I'd be doing there in that office, I didn't know. All I knew is it would be high-paid, easy, and respectable.

I wish I'd taken a photo of that banner. Because it lied to me.

Maybe it was bad luck. I finished my degree in 2008, the same year that a global recession destroyed jobs like a wildfire burning dead forest wood. Any job was hard to come by, let alone a cushy graduate job. My degree was useless and my only work experience had ended in me getting fired both times.

Shelf-stacker at Sainsbury's

Salary: £5.92 an hour (minimum wage)

Duration: 1 month

After university, the only job I could find was working as a shelf-stacker at Sainsbury's. And it only lasted a month because it was a temporary Christmas job. Though that's probably for the best because I kept dropping bottles of alcohol, causing them to smash all over the floor. My mom came to see me at work one day and I was picking up shards of broken glass with my bare hands. True story.

Postman

Salary: £8 an hour

Duration: 2 years

After that came the longest job I've ever held: at Royal Mail as a postman.

I thought I'd like being a postman. In fact, I wanted to be a postman as a kid because I thought delivering letters in the rain and snow would somehow be fun.

I was mistaken. Five days a week, I had to ride a heavy, mail-laden bike up and down hills - and that was just to get to my starting point. Then I'd walk and cycle around for three to five hours delivering letters. Finally, once I'd delivered all of the letters, it was time to cycle back up and down the same hills to return to the delivery office.

The first time I did this, I almost fainted. No joke. I was very pale by the end of the first shift. My body had used up all my blood from pedalling the bike or something.

I should have probably quit there and then, but I didn't, which was a mistake.

Being a postman can fuck up your body. For example, there was a postman called Bob who was always complaining about his knee. "Oh Christ, my knee is killing me," he would say. "I hate this job. My knee hurts so much." Why didn't he just quit? I don't know.

As for me, I injured my side while riding my bike up a hill. I think I tore some tissue or a muscle or something because that area of my body felt very uncomfortable. But instead of taking time off to let it heal, as any normal person would do, I kept working, day in and day out, and only made it worse. I didn't even tell my manager about it, which was pretty stupid of me, come to think of it.

And the injury hasn't fully healed, by the way. I still have discomfort in my side today. Sometimes I can feel it there all. The. Time. That's why I'll never be a postman again.

Mentally, the work was very easy. A trained chimp could have done it. All you had to do was read the addresses on letters and deliver them to the right door. That didn't stop me from misdelivering the occasional letter or two though.

Some other memories of being a postman:

• One day we went out in the snow and I forgot to bring gloves. It was okay at first but soon my exposed hands were freezing. My colleague lent me some gloves but this turned out to be a mistake. The freezing cold rain soaked the gloves through and made my hands even colder than before, though I don't know how that was possible. Luckily my colleague decided we should call it day. I'm glad he did because otherwise, I would probably have gotten frostbite and lost all my fingers.
• A cat attacking my leg and leaving bloody claw marks
• A dog that wanted to attack me so badly that it tried to jump through a window. The window was made of tempered glass and cracked instead of shattering. The man who lived in that house had to get his whole window replaced.
• There were no toilets on my round so when I needed a piss, I went to this abandoned house and pissed up the wall. I did this every day for a year.
• A cleaner who stole money from birthday cards
• A man telling me to "get a grip" after I accidentally posted his mail into his neighbour's house for the third time
• Eating nothing but a large bag of cashew nuts for breakfast and feeling sick
• Dropping letters in puddles during torrential rainstorms

Leaflet distributor

Salary: Roughly £3 an hour

Duration: 2 weeks

A housemate suggested that I do leaflet distributing. I thought I'd give it a go because it sounded similar to being a postman. I was paid around £20 to deliver 1,000 leaflets to houses in Bournemouth. These were flyers for pizza restaurants, adverts for dentists, that sort of thing. Junk mail. I was given a set route and told to do in the next week.

In some ways, it was better than my postman job, because you could do it in your own time and you didn't need to ride a bike. I also didn't have to interact with anyone, which was great as I hate people.

However, there was one very bad thing about it: the salary. This fact was made clear to me when an abusive child shouted at me, "Three pounds an hour!" I did some mental calculations and discovered with that somehow he was completely right: I was earning three pounds an hour. I quit the next day.

But my ordeal wasn't over after I quit. The company kept calling me because they wanted their bag back. This wasn't some expensive designer Gucci bag - it just a stupid carrier bag with their logo on it. They were threatening to fine me £20 (!) even though I was no longer an employee and I had already given it back to them. Eventually, I moved away from the area and changed my number but for all I know, they are still calling my old number to this day.

Mystery shopper

Salary: Roughly £2 an hour, plus a free meal

Duration: 1 year

To supplement my low income as a postman, I worked as a mystery shopper for a company called RetailEyes. I had to go into Subway and Wetherspoons, buy food, and then fill out a report afterwards about my experience. The pay was between £3 and £7, which was terrible, because when you factored in the time spent applying for the job, reading the instructions, travelling to the restaurant, and filling out the report, it didn't even pay minimum wage.

Leather factory worker

Salary: CAD$9.90 (£5.64) per hour (minimum wage)

Duration: 2 weeks

I moved to Canada because I naively assumed there were no crap jobs there, only good ones. I was wrong.

My next crap job was at a leather factory in Montreal. Only five people worked there. There was Reuben the Jewish owner, Marco the Italian immigrant, Madhav the old Indian man who would wander around doing nothing all day and occasionally flash me a menacing smile, and two women who worked tirelessly on the sewing machines without ever saying a word.

The first day, the owner set me to work with Marco. Marco's job was to feed sheets of leather into a cutting machine. The machine had twenty circular blades that spun around fast, like a torture device from the Saw films. As Marco fed the leather in, my job was to quickly bundle together all the newly-cut leather strips that came out the other end.

"Watch your fingers," said Marco. "The blades are sharp."

Marco wasn't kidding when he said the blades were sharp. In my first hour, I cut one of my fingers on the blades. Marco saw my bleeding finger and said, "You cut yourself?"

"Yeah," I said.

He sighed and shook his head. "I told you to watch your fingers." He went and got a wipe and a plaster from the first-aid box, which presumably was used often.

Another day, the factory's owner, Reuben, entrusted me to stamp silver squares onto a cushion. I had to stamp a hundred silver squares onto the cushion in ten rows of ten.

"Straight lines," he said. "Remember, keep the squares in straight lines." Then he went off to check the business's finances. Checking the business's finances is what he did most of the time. I believe this was because the factory was in constant danger of going out of business.

Reuben came back half an hour later. "No, no, no!" he cried. "What's the matter with you?! Didn't you listen?! I said STRAIGHT LINES!"

I'd not only stamped the squares in wonky lines, but I'd also made rips in the fabric while doing this. Reuban tried to salvage his precious cushion by getting one of the women to sew patches on the back to hide the rips.

The Indian man, Madhav, later told me with barely concealed glee that each silver square cost Reuban fifty cents, so the entire cost of my mess-up was fifty dollars.

At the end of my shift, Reuben said, "I won't need you next week."

He never contacted me again.

Barista

Salary: $9.90 (£5.64) per hour (minimum wage) + tips

Duration: 2 weeks

Still in Canada, I got a job as a barista at a coffee chain.

The worst part was having to wake up at 5 am, in winter, to ride my bike through snow to get to the coffee shop in time for the start of my shift, at 5:30 am. This was a Canadian winter, with temperatures as low as -20°C.

Oh, and I had to do hours of training at home, on my computer, all of which was unpaid, which I think was illegal.

One evening, I was about to leave when the manager said, "Where do you think you're going?"

"It's 5:30 pm," I said. "It's the end of my shift."

"No, you can't leave," she scowled. "You can't leave until you've helped tidied up and put everything away". It was just like the library.

I quit two weeks later. Not because the work was bad, but because I was worried that the gluten in the air was making me autistic. You heard me right: I was worried that the gluten in the air was making me autistic.

And if you think I'm bad for quitting after just two weeks, then get this: my Irish friend Declan only lasted three days. When he got home after the third day, he virtually had a nervous breakdown because he didn't want to go back the next day. He never even went back to collect his meagre paycheck for his three days of work.

Here's his experience in his own words:

Working as a barista was the second-worst job of my life.

Once I started the job, I realised my French comprehension wasn't so good. In a downtown coffee shop in a bilingual city, that was a problem. I felt my stress levels rising each time a customer ordered in French. I looked at them like a rabbit in the headlights as my brain tried to decipher what they said. I asked some to repeat themselves and I was met by either sympathy or incredulity.

What didn't help was a colleague who scolded me for falling behind on tasks such as refilling the coffee beans.

I quit after my third day.

Video games proofreader

Salary: CAD$10-13 an hour

Duration: 4 months

Babel

Next I got a job there as a video games 'localiser' which means I was checking the text in video games. My main project was a game called Scribblenauts Unmasked: A DC Comics Adventure. It had been released in the US and now we were translating it into other languages. My job was to check the translation to British English.

But in the end, THE GAME WASN'T EVEN RELEASED IN BRITISH ENGLISH so my entire two month's work was for NOTHING. An entire two months' work resulted in fuck-all. All I had to show for it was my meagre wages.

Bugtracker

I got a another video games testing job, this time at a company called Bugtracker. For a month, I sat in a room without windows with seven other people, and we tested a game called One Piece: Romance Dawn. I didn't actually play the game. All I did was watch cutscenes and try to find mistakes in the text. Even 'cutscene' isn't the right word though because it was actually just a static screen with two textboxes for characters talking. So for hours and hours, from 7 am to 3 pm, I'd be reading textboxes, my mind focused on finding any grammar or spelling mistakes. And I only ever came across one or two mistakes a day so even the value of me being there was questionable.

Clothes shop assistant

Salary: Minimum wage (£6.31 an hour)

Duration: 6 weeks

In 2013, I got a job as a Christmas temp at River Island. It was a very boring shift on a mostly empty men's department.

You had to arrive to your shift five minutes early for a 'briefing'. The briefings were invariably pointless. The manager would tell you what your daily targets were, which were things like "Make £500 in sales" or "Upsell 15 products" and other similar shite. I don't think anyone met their targets. They were never mentioned outside the briefings anyway.

I got in trouble at work one day. It all started when I accidentally shortchanged a woman by £5. Normally when this happens, it's no big deal. You just call a manager to come open the till. It happens to everyone who works on cash registers. But I, being a genius, thought of a faster way to give this woman her change: I took out my wallet and gave her £5 of my own money. Yes, I gave her some of my own money. This way, I wouldn't have to call a manager to open the till. (The till wouldn't open unless there was a sale, you see.) But this wasn't out of generosity: my plan was to then take £5 out the till and put it in my wallet, making everything even again. It all would have been fine. But unfortunately, I never got that far, because the woman went to my manager and told her about my "suspicious activity". The manager called me into her office and asked me for an explanation. It didn't look good for me. What could I say? That I had been planning on taking money out the till and putting it in my wallet? I couldn't say that because it sounded a lot like stealing. My manager kept pushing me for an explanation. She couldn't understand why I handed a customer 5 pounds of my own money. So I lied and said I had been making a lot of mistakes on the till and I'd tried to cover up this latest mistake too. So she took my till privileges away. I wasn't able to serve customers on the till anymore. Though at least I could get pleasure from watching long lines of impatient people form at the tills and knowing I could do nothing to help.

From then on my tasks were simply to walk around tidying clothes and to greet every single customer with "Let me know if you need any help", to which the reply was almost invariably a polite "Will do, thank you." Also, often customers would come in to collect things they had ordered online and I'd have to go in the backroom to find them, which was another bastard task I hated.

Oh, and there was a 16-year-old girl working there being paid the shockingly low sum of £3.72 an hour. The shop could get away with this because the minimum wage is less for children than it is for adults.

The manager promised us that if we worked hard, we might become a full-time worker like herself. Though I still don't know if that was supposed to motivate us or scare us.

English tutor

Salary: CAD$10-20 an hour (£6-12 an hour)

Duration: 3 years

I was desperate for money at this point (probably because I was poor) so I decided to advertise myself online as a private English tutor, despite having no training or experience in English teaching.

I started out charging just CAD$10 (£6) an hour, a crippling low wage. It was even less than minimum wage. And I used to cycle to lessons because I couldn't afford public transport. And this was Canada, mind you, known for its extreme winters. I remember riding my bike up snow-filled streets and down ice-covered hills just to do a $10 lesson. That was one of the lowest points in my life. I could have fallen from my bike and broken my neck, just for $10, though maybe that would have been a good thing as it would have put me out of my misery.

A Chinese dad hired me to come to his house and teach English to his two Chinese kids: an eight-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy. The problem was the boy didn't want to do the lessons, and I can't blame him. He'd been in school all day. Why should he listen to me for two hours? In the end, I did just two lessons and never went back. I never showed up to the third lesson. I actually ghosted the dad by not answering his calls.

Next I was hired by a Chinese-owned language school to teach for two hours a week. It was only two hours a week but those hours were the longest hours of my week. The kids didn't want to learn either. The problem with children in general is that they don't want to learn anything. They'd rather stay dumb and play Nintendo and I can't say I blame them.

I remember at one point, two kids with Nintendo DS's were wrestling each other at the front of the classroom and I bleakly tried to carry on teaching.

Then there was a man who needed to pass an English test to get a promotion for his job. I had to get up at 7:30 AM to give him a two-hour lesson from 8 AM to 10 AM. That doesn't sound too bad, but unbeknownst to me, I had hypothyroidism, which was undiagnosed and untreated, and every lesson felt like I was dying. It's hard to explain what it felt like, but it felt horrible. I was thirsty mainly, and for some reason, I didn't want to drink water because I was afraid he would think I was weird for drinking lots of water?

By the way, the man's English test? After twenty or so lessons with me, he took the English test he needed to pass for his promotion, and he failed. My lessons with him were wasted.

My final student was an Italian woman who wanted an intensive English course. Three hours a day for five days. I said I could do it. Not because I could do it, but because I needed the money.

I brought no materials with me to our lessons. I didn't even bring any textbooks. I never bought any, to save money. All I brought was a shitty Samsung tablet that I'd loaded some worksheets onto.

On the third day of lessons, I asked her if we could shorten the lesson because I had something else to do that day, and she got angry at me. "I have come here for an intensive English course! Not to be messed around." She stormed out the cafe and I never saw her again. I was like a slap in the face, but a good one: it made me realise that English teaching, like so many other things, is not for me.

Freelance ghost essay writer

Salary: £6-20 an hour

Duration: 5 years

One day, someone saw my online advert for English teaching and asked if I could write essays instead. He was offering $50 if I could write an essay about Macbeth. I couldn't turn down the money so I agreed. The essay was easy to write, fun even. The guy was happy with the essay and handed over the $50.

I realised this was something I could do as a job. So I started advertising myself as an essay writer.

I hate people, so what I liked about it was the lack of human interaction. I just sat at my computer and typed away.

But the job had its downsides. People would call with tight deadlines. "Paul," my Saudi Arabian client Abdullah would say, over Skype, with his two kids screaming in the background, "there is no rush with this one. I just need it by tomorrow." This was in spite of the fact I had three other essays to finish for other people. But I would accept his deadlines just because I wanted the cash. In fact, it didn't matter what the level was - college, Bachelor's, Master's - I took the work because I wanted the money.

Sometimes I would stay up to 2 am to finish an essay for someone, and once, I actually left the apartment at 2.30 am to exchange an essay for cash with a student. My girlfriend called me, begging me to come home, worried I was going to get mugged and left in a ditch.

Even though I was never beaten up and/or raped, my body still showed signs of damage. My wrists were shiny and red due to resting them on the laptop for so long. And my right index finger twitched every few seconds as if simulating a mouse click.

I started having nightmares. Not nightmares about monsters but about essays. I would dream that I was back at university, sitting in the library, and I would realise I had missed the deadline for an important assignment. I would wake up with my heart pounding. But then I'd remember I'd graduated university ten years ago and feel intense relief.

And to this day I still write essays for people.