The only job I quit was, aged about 23, subediting a “men’s” magazine. My job was typing out readers’ pornographic fantasies. I started wishing people would reproduce by splitting down the middle.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 October 2023 source ↗
The question
What is the worst job you have ever had?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
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Others on this question
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Roger Allam
English actor
Picking tiny bits of glass out of long grass for Haringey council, 45 years ago.
I’ve never really had a horrible job – I liked working at restaurants and being a nanny when I wasn’t acting.
Andy Serkis
English actor
Putting ball bearings into Mum roll-on deodorant bottles in a factory, one summer when I was 17.
Jane Asher
English actress and author
Doing an episode of Doctors was a bit of a nadir.
More from Neil Gaiman
View profile →Mostly the pain. I don’t want to be trapped in a body that hurts.
Imaginative, dull, amiable.
I’ve never read Proust.
I like the idea of being atoms that other people can breathe in, and fabulous worm food.
As someone who left the world slightly more interesting than he found it.
And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
Recorded
134th Commencement, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, University of the Arts (uarts.edu), via the Internet Archive, 17 May 2012
source ↗
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