244 answers answered between 1999 and 2026 one of 25 in The Q&A
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
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Public figures who have answered a question like this elsewhere. Quoted from the source shown, not written for FLAPSS.
When I was 19, I washed up in the basement of a Paris restaurant that stank of rotted food. I did it for six months, until I was promoted to vegetable boy.
Unpacking scenery from a pantechnicon for the Carl Rosa Opera Company.
Reading the news. It’s a dull job.
Being a salesgirl in a baby shop where the others said things like, “He’s Jewish, but she’s American.” Also, after college, being a waitress in London, and trying to make change in the old money of shillings and pence.
I worked in a petrol station on the A1 one summer. I enjoyed it except when I was on latrine duty.
That would have to be a film called Pickup On 101. It was a very interesting story, about a wandering musician and an old guy on his way back to his home town to spend his last days, but they made it into a pile of dishonest trash.
Secretary to a lawyer. I was sacked after a week.
Hop-picking in Kent when I was 13. The smell was dreadful, and put me off beer for life.
A cabaret act with Agnetha, Frida and Benny. It was in a nightclub in Gothenburg and one night we had seven in the audience. It was before we found out that we were a pop group.
Scrabbling about under dusty floorboards as an electrician in my early 20s.
Working as the assistant to an agony aunt on a women’s magazine. When we didn’t get enough heartbreaking letters, we made them up.
I just hate to work, so I can’t choose one.
Doing an episode of Doctors was a bit of a nadir.
I worked in a Helms Bakery assembly line that separated egg whites from the yolks and from time to time a box of rotten eggs would come through. Need I say more?
When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by.
When Rufus first came out, it was all white guys and myself, but then the band changed and Tony Maiden, Bobby Watson and Andre Fischer came in. This guy booked us for a gig in Illinois, based on our original album cover, and when we got there he said that there were too many black people in the band. He actually put some white guys on the stage with us.
Treating a flock of sheep for foot rot when I was a farm labourer.
Standing outside a pub in Acton on a freezing February day in a threadbare overcoat doing market research.
I left the army and got a job with Unilever in Northern Ireland. They were very strict and you had to have a hat, and when you went into a shop you had to raise your hat to the shopkeeper and then sell your wares. I was selling margarine.
Giving barium enemas. I used to be a radiographer in Coventry.
Nobody has answered this one yet.