Standing outside a pub in Acton on a freezing February day in a threadbare overcoat doing market research.
What is the worst job you have done?
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
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.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Cleaning the changing rooms at Kensington leisure centre from the age of 16.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 3 April 2021 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 232 →
John Waters
American filmmaker
I worked in a unisex clothes store for three days. Girls would say, 'Do I look fat in this?' I'd say, 'Yes.' I was fired.
Joan Jett
American singer, songwriter and guitarist
I had a cafeteria job, serving food, and some people were really nasty. There was a stack of nice, cool plates, and a stack of hotter plates that had just come out of the kitchen. So, if a person was an arsehole, I’d hand them a hot plate with a smile and watch them deal with it.
Kathy Lette
Australian-British author
Bedpan emptier in a hospital.
More from Noel Clarke
View profile →Like hugging your children first thing in the morning and kissing them goodnight.
I don’t really flash money about.
A car crash in the Utah mountains in 2005. We were driving from Arizona to Salt Lake City to go to a basketball game and the car slipped on black ice and we skidded off the motorway, flipped over and rolled down a ravine. The police officer said it was the worst accident he’d seen in 18 years when nobody died.
More on craft & work
- What do you consider your greatest achievement? 193 answers
- How does a new work begin for you? 70 answers
- How do you know when a piece of work is finished? 69 answers
- What do you do when you feel creatively blocked or stuck? 69 answers
- How much rewriting or revision do you do? 51 answers
- What is the part of your job that people would be surprised is most of your job? 47 answers
Also answered this
Julian Sands, Meera Syal, Stephen Graham, Helen George, Rita Wilson, Joanne Froggatt
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All craft & work questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject