I was a vegetable sat on a box

Hello all

My bizarre recent titles must be confusing some of you but there is a reason why I have named this blog in that sense, and you'll realise what it is as I'm going along.

Anyway, due to spending three years of being a temp, I worked some truly terrible jobs in that time, and some of the most mind-numbing roles you can possibly imagine. So I'm going to get you through a few of those.

Note that I legally can't name the companies as it will possibly result in legal action.

This guy obviously likes packing boxes....but give him
ten minutes packing boxes of crisps and that smile
will be well and truly gone

1) Crisp box packer

There's a factory in Lincoln that produces a certain brand of crisps and back in 2007, just after I had left British Telecom, I got a job working there. The job was literally grabbing the packets of crisps as they came off of the conveyor belt, placing them into a box and then putting a completed box on another conveyor belt.

That was for 8 hours a day with very small breaks and the worst part about it was that the conveyor belt was quite low down. To reach the packets I would have to bend my back slightly and after 8 hours my back was absolutely hurting like fuck, I even had to leave one shift early because my back was hurting that much.

I lasted four shifts at that place before leaving.


2) Security Guard (but as you would expect)

This is where the vegetable sat on a box comes in.

I was asked to work security at a local engineering firm for a day......but it's not as you'd expect. I was told to leave my bag in the security office and then there was a ten minute walk to where I would be doing "security" and what security actually was was sitting on a box in the middle of a road to stop people going down that road and re-directing them over a bridge.

This started at 7am but because I was asked to leave my bag in the security office, I had no music to listen to, nothing to read whilst I was redirecting the small number of cars that actually came along, nothing to eat, nothing to drink and all in 30 degrees of heat. This was also in the days when phones were not like what they're like now, it was a basic phone, no internet, no music, no games. I had to wait 6 hours for a 30 minute break and on my way back I tried to take my MP3 player with me back up to the box.....DENIED.

I was finally allowed to go home at 6pm. I swear that was one of the longest days of my life. I like having time to think but this just took the piss, it really did.

3) Mail sorter

One of my last temp jobs was working for a mail sorting company in Mansfield and much like the crisp packing job, the platform was really low, so I'm stuck with back pains for 8 hour shifts.

The job itself was literally grouping letters together by town and then after grouping them, grouping them by the beginning of their postcode, and so on. No music was allowed, the person I was stuck with didn't speak English and during the 8 hour shift, I was only allowed a 10 minute lunch break. The only time I was allowed to have more than 10 minutes was when I ended up doing a 15 hour shift....they gave one 30 minute lunch.

I was in this job for three weeks and to be fair, the money wasn't actually that bad and I was done by 2pm each day, but it was just mind numblingly dul that 8 hours seemed to last forever.

and finally.....

4) Market Researcher

She looks far too happy for someone who has
actually worked in a call centre, especially market research

The last time I was ill was just before Christmas 2008 and during that time I was given a temporary placement at a market research company that was literally two minutes walk from where I lived, which was awesome. I could go home on my lunch if I wanted and have a good time before returning.

The market research I was specifically doing was television research. The system would automatically dial a random phone number and I would have to sit there and listen to people's excuses for not wanting to do the survey. To be honest I didn't blame them, I wouldn't have wanted to fill in the survey either.

This job was so incredibly dull because the survey lasted an hour, but the amount of people who took the survey was so small that inbetween surveys, 20 minutes felt like two hours. And that's not to forget those that didn't do it did nothing other than abuse you all shift long.