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.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Picking up RAF pilots’ parachute packs and gear they dropped off in a pile.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 20 June 2026 source ↗
I have worked in McDonald’s.
Cleaning around the feet of John Malkovich with industrial carpet cleaner while he was trying to learn lines in the foyer of a theatre.
After Emmerdale, babysitting. I freaked out – I couldn’t believe people put me in charge of their children.
Leader of the opposition. I worked with the police service in Northern Ireland and then ran the Crown Prosecution Service. In each of those jobs, if something needed fixing, I could fix it. As leader of the opposition, you are not in power and it’s the most frustrating job I’ve ever had, and a job I hope I don’t have for much longer.
Recently, as people began to understand what I am trying to do in my painting.
A fellow artist called me a flaneur!
Needing order always.
Trying to exercise authority over one.
In the 1950s I went to the Chelsea Arts Club’s New Year’s Eve ball at the Royal Albert Hall dressed as a Christmas pudding, with swimming trunks under my costume and holly in my hair.
My work. What shape will it take?
Adrian Edmondson, Cressida Cowell, Louis Theroux, Rosanna Arquette, Robert Carlyle, Tim Rice
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