Jack Davenport: What is the worst job you have ever had?

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.

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here

Bicycle courier: it was literally dicing with death on a minute-to-minute basis for 12 hours a day. It was terrifying and exhausting.

The Q&A, The Guardian, 2 March 2024 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 230 →

Charlotte Church Welsh singer-songwriter and actress

It was a double-edged sword, but being a major-label artist, I felt like a commodity, a thing to be sold.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 16 July 2022 source ↗

Malcolm Gladwell Staff writer at The New Yorker; author of The Tipping Point and Outliers

I was a reporter for many years at the Washington Post. Although I loved every minute, I don’t think I was a very good reporter.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 17 April 2021 source ↗

Helen George English actress

Waitressing. I was so bad. I smashed things. I once mistakenly ordered a very expensive bottle of wine for a table. They thought they were ordering a very average bottle of wine, and I ordered them an £800 bottle and they drank it. I got the sack a few weeks later.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 28 January 2023 source ↗

Cressida Cowell British writer

I was a terrible secretary in a publishing company (clumsy, disorganised, hid letters behind the filing cabinet because I was supposed to have done something with them and I wasn’t sure what).

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 September 2020 source ↗