The only job I quit was, aged about 23, subediting a “men’s” magazine. My job was typing out readers’ pornographic fantasies. I started wishing people would reproduce by splitting down the middle.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 October 2023 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.
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Others on this question
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Mo Farah
British track and field athlete
I have worked in McDonald’s.
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).
I had to clean up the sump pump [toilet system] in my house because my sister and I flushed things we shouldn’t have.
Children’s underwear department at Marks & Spencer, Oxford Circus. I was 16 years old, earning money in my summer holidays.
More from Neil Gaiman
View profile →Mostly the pain. I don’t want to be trapped in a body that hurts.
My soon-to-be ex-wife, Amanda. I wish I’d been able to do whatever would have been necessary all the way back to keep us as a unit. Probably the worst thing I did was not tell her how miserable I was, certain that I could turn this around somehow.
I’ve never read Proust.
The idiocy of going to Skye from New Zealand in April 2020. All of a sudden, I’m turning on the news and hearing myself as an item. I have never been more mortified.
I like the idea of being atoms that other people can breathe in, and fabulous worm food.
My kids, and getting some of the stories I had in my head on to paper in a way that wasn’t too far removed from the thing I dreamed about writing.
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