JS
Father Christmas at a department store. The plaintive sadness of the children’s unrealistic requests was almost unbearable.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 9 May 2020 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.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 230 →
Craig Charles
English actor
Filming a TV show in a field in the snow in February in the Dublin hills for 14 hours; the director said, “We’re not going to get that shot today.”
Gulliver’s Travels at Adelaide Fringe.
I worked on a kibbutz in Israel and had to clean out the chicken run. It was like an oven. Inside were rows and rows of chickens that had been shitting for months – the whole floor was six inches deep in chicken shit.
Greg James
British author, broadcaster, comedian, and presenter
When I was at school, I had a summer job where I had to buff blocks of plastic for a display unit. The factory only remembered to give us masks on day three.
More from Julian Sands
View profile →As an interesting, amusing father by my children.
David Hare – he’s always fascinating and funny.
In the early 90s, in the Andes, caught in an atrocious storm above 20,000ft with three others. We were all in a very bad way. Some guys close to us perished; we were lucky.
Rufus Wainwright’s Get Happy.
A case of Chateau Margaux 59.
Being exquisitely alive.
More on craft & work
- What accomplishment matters most to you? 192 answers
- How do you tell when a piece of work is done? 67 answers
- What do you do when you feel creatively stuck? 63 answers
- How does a new piece of work usually begin for you? 60 answers
- How much rewriting or revision do you typically do? 46 answers
- What part of your job would surprise outsiders because it takes up so much of your time? 41 answers
Also answered this
John Simm, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Gemma Chan, Cybill Shepherd, Archie Panjabi, Steve Pemberton
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