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The worst job I ever had was at Hemingway’s Pork Butchers in Leeds. Not the shop in the Arndale, mind – my eldest sister had that cushy number – my pitch was the factory in Garforth. Saturdays I’d set out at 6am, which was no particular biggie given I’d just retired from a five-year stint as a morning paper boy, and me and my faithful Raleigh Stratos (ten speed, one horn and one added flip-down bike stand – which I’d sawed off too short, so the bike just slowly keeled over like a drug-darted deer – and drop handlebars turned backwards and upwards as was the modern way in 1983) could be seen licking down the mad mile and up by the Old George and onwards to far Garforth and its industrial parks, where the company’s two vans were already loading up with hot beige pleasures. Generally no biggie, but just occasionally the crawl out of bed, jittery at the drilling of my glow-handed Baby Ben, would be coloured by a trainee hangover from a last night’s Skol or a Trophy Electric, skulked in corners in Headingley pubs. But mostly I was fresh and bouncy as my copy of Smash Hits.
My remit at Hemingway’s was threefold. Washing the vans on their return from the shops was one – the easy one.
The second, scraping the bits off the cooking trays and feeding them into the washing drum – a carousel of scalding jets and murderous wire brushes, with flimsy clanging walls that buckled and sucked as I leaned in to free a mangled tray. And at my back by the factory doors crazed starlings dashed at the trays stacked waiting to be hosed – each one a platter of scorched delicious treats; yeah, delicious, they were.
The third – and this one my “tell us a fact about yourself” intro piece ever since (well, I toggle it with being peed on by a tiger) – putting jelly in the pork pies.
Putting jelly in pork pies.
I’d be rigged up with a cylindrical tank on my back, a tube coming off it and a gun on its end. The pork pies were laid down before me, and I would prod one hole in a top crust and then into a second hole I’d pump my hot animal glue (yes, that’s what I said) until it bubbled out the first hole and shot up my sleeve; and then I’d stop and move onto the next pie.
I got 5 quid for these Saturday stints; 6.30am to 1pm. Showers weren’t particularly a la mode in Leeds back then, so after cycling home and a lunch of cold sausage rolls, I’d leg it down to Woolworth’s, blow my entire wages on singles and spend the rest of the day listening to them. The Cure’s The Walk, Siouxsie’s Dear Prudence, Rock Steady Crew and Song To The Siren… all these the spoils of my Pork Life.
I left that job by giving it to someone else. I actually just sorted out a replacement and then they started turning up when I didn’t. That’s a neat economic model, no? Mr Hemingway never noticed. Perhaps the starlings thought of me occasionally, nicking their scran.
As a university part-time job I had to clean the bathrooms and toilets of a dermatology ward in the Royal Berks Hospital. Scraping-wise, that was pretty similar to the butcher’s factory. And I’ll never forget encountering the unemptied bath and its plug with no chain… and my rubber gloves just too short.
Thanks Steve. You should have been the fifth Yorkshireman in the sketch.
Brilliant piece of storytelling. My bakery story well and truly trumped by your butcher experiences.
(Going back on Twitter this morning to see if we can complete the set with a candlestick maker anecdote).
A colleague of mine at the first agency I worked at in London was turned vegetarian by a visit to the Bovril factory. He didn’t go into the detail of what he’d seen but it was obviously pretty gruesome. These close encounters of the herd kind (groan!) obviously affect people pretty deeply.
Hi Phil! I love ‘worst job’ stories.
My worst job, like yours, was a university holiday job. It was in a call centre for an investment company (who will remain nameless but they are a big Edinburgh employer and famous iconic brand with a really weird hexagonal headquarters).
The thing I hated about it was the lack of control I had.
In the mornings we took calls from customers. You couldn’t answer the phone, you had a headset that beeped at you when a call was coming in and after 3 seconds you were on the call. The people who phoned in the morning were generally complaining that something hadn’t been done right, or they were changing their contact details. It was very boring.
In the afternoons we had to phone customers to tell them they were not going to get a windfall in the recent change the company had made from being a mutual to a bank.
So, for hours every day I had to tell people something they didn’t want to hear. I guess it was good customer service to phone with bad news, rather than just write a letter, but it was hellish for me because everyone was annoyed because the press had said there was going to be big money to be made.
At the end of each day my ears were ringing. My brain would be tired and hyped and I had trouble getting to sleep at night.
You were talking all day but you couldn’t have a drink on your desk, you had to go to the water cooler and drink from a tiny paper cone.
We were timed for everything. Lunch, cigarette, toilet breaks. If you wanted to leave your desk you had to ask permission, they had to turn the phone off. The team leaders were always going on at people for wasting time, when what they were trying to do was calm down.
I lasted about 6 weeks. Then I decided that I’d rather work in Pizza Hut.
So sorry, not candlestick making but life-informing all the same.