The question
What is the worst job you have done?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.
When I was about 18, I worked on the chicken counter in a large supermarket, and every morning I had to pierce 64 birds on to industrial skewers to load up the rotisserie. That was very grim.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 22 April 2023 source ↗
When I was doing A-levels, I worked in a factory that made homework diaries, which was fine until they banned talking and the radio.
Working in a warehouse, packing frozen meat. It was a nightmare: I hate the cold and it was very tough.
Laying down slabs for the council.
Either shredding duck in a Chinese restaurant, or Oblivion.
My mother and my brother would still be alive. So much of my life has been coping with the grief of losing them.
My creative freedom. I was the creative director of a large fashion brand when I packed it all in to pursue my writing.
People who can’t hear other points of view. Absolute certainty always scares me a little.
At a fashion show after-party in New York in 2004, my friend dared me to push her into the pool. I did, and you’ve never heard laughter die so quickly.
The summer of 1997. My husband, who is an American, gave up everything to come and live with me in Edinburgh when we were students, and we were so skint but we had so much fun.
To my younger self. I was incredibly self-loathing and self-doubting, and I’m still undoing that damage 30 years later.
Jensen Huang, Angela Hartnett, Terence Conran, Katharine Hamnett, Julien Macdonald, Bobbi Brown
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