flipreverse! what is the shortest period of employment you've ever had?
i'm not sure if agency gotten jobs count. if so mine is a day working at synseal. was offered a better job whilst on my first shift so just left it at that.
if real jobs, then Honest Freddies when I was 16. worked there for a month before they laid off half the staff.
maybe tell us why you left/got sacked/whatever. i'm expecting good contributions from llb and forza especially.
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call centre
45 minutes
go on..
just shit isn't it
I just walked oot
car park attendant: 2.5 months
that was a great job
Lenders Foods, Astley.
Aged 17.
Offered a permanent job in a food factory whilst still at college.
After an hour of shovelling carrots into a machine above head height i could barely feel my arms so just went to the pub.
Never to be seen again...
Selling ad space
Did 1 week training and 3 days work then quit - though technically I was employed for 4 weeks
40 mins of telesales
An old lady answered the phone and told me in excruciating detail just how much of an upheaval it was for her to answer her phone given her physical state and that after all that it was some kid trying to sell her windows. Just walked straight out after apologising to her.
3/4 days in telesales
couple of days training then onto the phones, i left half way through my first day making calls.
Half a shift in WHSmith
Some prick tried making me wear a Shrek hat as some sort of initiation.
Complained I was feeling ill halfway through and walked out, never to return.
WHSmith had me dress up as darth vader on my first week.
I actually looked pretty badass. I had a lightsaber...
About 2 1/2 hrs in a telesales job when I was 17.
Left half through my first training shift. Just went up to the manager and said 'Not for me'. Something in his dead eyes told me it was something that he'd heard many many times before.
Felt sort of bad afterward as my cousin had sorted out the gig.
loads of little freelancing jobs
half days and whatever.
walked out of a job after 6 hours though and then they only paid me for 4. bit weird.
2 weeks
In some weird office complex doing something I still don't quite understand. Something to do with shares, I basically had to either count return forms people had filled out or scan batches of 100 forms. Usually it would scan 98 or 99 so I had to count to make sure it was right. Another "team" went through screens all showing the same number scanned in, you had to confirm they were all 2s or 7s. Oddly not all that dull as they moved you around a lot.
My first real job after uni, just 2 weeks temping before going on holiday. £6 per hour, I remember looking at my watch and every time 10 minutes went by I though how wonderful it was that I was a pound richer. It should have been 3 weeks but I called in sick in the 2nd week as a house move took too long. They told me not to bother with the last day as the thing they were doing was completed.
A lot of people leaving call centres
I don't blame you, especially outbound ones. I worked for BT tech support on the phones, loads of people did the 2 weeks training, all paid, loads of breaks, fun and bants, 2 hour lunches, then left before or after the first day on the phones. It is truly shit, being told to get in available, loads of targets, constantly talking to arseholes or being the arsehole someone is talking to.
I had little choice really, but luckily they realised I was too techy to talk old ladies through how to reboot a router and had me on second line.
Yeah, the contrast between fun dossy training and then the actual work
in tech support call centres is huge. I've managed to last a year in mine so far though.
just under 3 months.
worked for eight weeks in a V Shop
I only really got the job because I had just finished being a Christmas stockroom temp at a Virgin Megastore so was already trained in how the stock system worked, and to be fair I was terrible at shop floor sales work and spent most of my day making unrecoverable errors with the till.
but then again the manager was a horrible little troll man (with a mad boner for Led Zep) who would constantly criticise me for not giving 110% to a minimum wage shop job that mostly consisted of selling terrible UK Garage cassette singles to wankers who would ALWAYS pay the 99p price with a credit card.
the chain got either shut down or sold to Sanity (remember them LOL) about six months later so w/e
I think I know that Led Zep bloke...
was that in Bedford (or possibly Milton Keynes)?
yep
i heard he went to MK after the Bedford shop closed.
oddly I saw him walking down a street in London a couple of years ago and it struck utter fear into me the way only an old boss can
1 week.
It was an ongoing placement earlier on in the year where I had to scan in complaint letters for people travelling on South Eastern Railways.
movie extra
one day
door to door double glazing salesman
2 days. Amazed I lasted that long to be honest.
10 weeks, I think.
Worked a couple of summers at a large pharma company after A-levels and first year at uni. Was offered a permanent job each time at the end.
I quite enjoyed working in the labs and stuff, plus it paid for my super swanky computer (400MHz, 128K RAM, Pentium II machine) that saw me through university.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSHKO03uykc
Removal man helper guy.
They didn't ask me back after the trial day.
1 day. Spent hoovering rats up. Didn't fancy a second day at it.
Were you not allowed a Henry?
Nope.
Which was obviously a major issue from the off.
Pizza Express - 1 week
Well, it'll just need to all right, won't it.
Baws...forgot about quotes on here...
I can't be arsed retyping this fantastic tale.
It ended with me calling the manager to quit from a party.
I meekly told them I wouldn't be in that day, or probably any other - would that be okay?
I then realised it didn't matter as I was quitting and told them it'd just need to be okay becaus their job was lousy and I wasn't coming back.
4 weeks
Worked at game and the manager killed himself, then the assistant tried to. Wasnt for me.
Ok that was probably my all-time worst guilty lol.
Insurance Company
Three days. On the final day I read the whole of the Unabomber's Manifesto, had an existential crisis, covered my desk in sellotape and printed pages and pages of paper with "Hail to the King, Baby" written on it in large bold font anonymously to the other end of the office. Didn't come in the next day.
Although I admire your story telling skills
We all know you lasted 2 days in a custard factory but got sacked because you were having trouble concealing your ever present ragin' semi
Mystery Shopper!
Just a week temp placement while I was waiting for something else to start.
Had to call up garages to find prices for fleets of vans, wasn't helped by my complete lack of knowledge of vehicles nor by my southern counties accent. Tried putting on a matey-garage-mate accent to 'blend', sometimes it worked, sometimes it was like this:
Me: 'ello mate, lookin' fer a price fer a fleet of yer Ford vans, need a dozen of 'em, yeah?
Dealer: Mystery shopper are we?
Me: No...
Dealer: *LAUGHS*
if agency jobs count then 1 day
i registered with an agency on a thursday and had another job starting with another agency on the monday that i didn't want to go to. while i was there the new agency said they'd find me something for monday but could i do this 1 day placement the next day?
about 1 minute before i arrived at the office to start this placement the next day, the agency rang me and said they'd get me something for monday but they'd told this place i was going to that i'd be there 3 days so could i tell them i would? i had to go all day pretending i'd be back on monday while they kept anxiously asking me how i was finding the work (there was no work).
it used to be really easy to get jobs didn't it?
yeah!
i walked into an agency the day after my last colleague exam at 1pm. started a night shift at 11pm that same day.
those were the days.
the job I ended up doing for seven and a half years
went to agency Thursday, had interview Friday, started Monday
Same for my latest job
I've been in it for over 4 years now. I was in the haze of a warm summer of unemployment, it really took me by surprise. My money was pretty much out though so it was a good thing.
a few hours
it was at a u2 gid bar staff. they let us break for lunch so me and a friend just fucked it off right there.
we got to watch the gig for free (i know it was u2 but still) and i got paid for doing the full night afterwards. can only assumed someone signed a name that looked ike mine with the registration at the end.
surely people here must have similar stories?
2 days doing door-to-door sales (charity subscriptions).
Fucking dreadful. Packed it in.
Link here: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=1261101
Basically a company like that, read that link, I'm sure a few of us have come across companies under the DS-MAX umbrella with the same sort of business model.
Hot Dog salesman at Wembly
1 day (0 days)
was at Coventry University, got a free bus to London with this agency, then told at the gates of wembly, that my trousers weren't black enough. went into town, had an awesome day, got the free bus back and also got paid for a full days work.
if agency jobs count, 1 day
if not, 4 shifts at an Italian restaurant when I was 18. Got paid less than minimum wage, the manager justified it by saying that the rest of his staff got minimum wage and I was less experienced than them.
worked in a cinema for like 2 months
while i paid a credit card off. then i just phoned in to say i wasn't coming back. boss was like "you have to work one weeks notice". ha, right
shoulda stayed
working in a cinema was both fun and easy
oh yeah definitely.
most fun job i've ever had. basically just flirting with girls all the time. i only did it as a second job though to pay off my card. didn't want to carry on doing two jobs.
My first job when I moved to London
Was at a gig promoters. I had moved to London especially for the job. On the first day, I was sent home after 3 hours because they realised they hadn't ordered a computer for me. I went back 2 days later when they had a computer, and spent the morning setting it and the office wifi network up.
I then booked 20 acts for gigs in a day and a half, updated all their databases and streamlined their online promoters. I started on the Monday, but on the Friday lunchtime they took me for lunch, and when dessert arrived with my 4th pint, they said they had to let me go as buying the computer had ruined their cashflow and they couldn't afford to keep me on.
GOOD ONE UP ALL NIGHT PROMOTIONS!
:D
they were just scared of your raw potential
One day - self employed at consulting firm whose initials were AA and whose parent gained enormous public infamy for nefarious activitied involving a large US oil company
I didn't turn up the following day due to my objections to the desception involving the job, and the deceipt in the description of the job, wherin both myself and their client were being fleeced, I did not bill them
1 day in a pub when I was 18
head chef (who had been there for 10+ years) told me he got a free pint at the end of each shift in the kitchen so I gave it to him and the manager promptly fired me for stealing stock and said he was considering getting police involved