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.
I was a floor model briefly at Bloomingdale’s in New York in 1979. I hated it. When no one was watching, I would lock myself in the toilet and read.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 August 2017 source ↗
Working in a furniture factory in Warrington when I was 17. It was a summer job, and I had to cover the studs in the back of Chesterfield sofas with leather.
I’ve never had a terrible job. I’ve been a cook, waitress, bookseller, teacher, freelance writer. I know what the bad jobs are and I haven’t done them.
Acting, when you don’t want to do it or you disagree with everything, is almost like having sex with someone you don’t like. I had one experience like that on stage, in a terrible version of The Cherry Orchard. I put on a wig, dark-coloured contacts and just hoped no one would recognise me.
At King’s College hospital when I was 16; the job was putting hundreds of pieces of A4 paper into A4 transparent envelopes. I lasted one day.
The man who asked me directions on the subway seven years ago: I am so sorry for sending you to Queens rather than to the Bronx.
I would have articulated aloud the comments I too often suppressed out of deference to arrogant, condescending, sexist bores.
The Blazing World.
I have a penchant for happiness. I have experienced euphoria before a migraine, which may not count, but I have also felt immense happiness leaning back in a chair in sunlight, puttering in my garden, reading, dancing, immediately after giving birth and when writing.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Jo Nesbø, Sara Pascoe, Ann Patchett, Paterson Joseph, Jack Whitehall
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