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?
What is the worst job you have done?
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Identity & self
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What would you like to leave your children?
Death & what remains
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.
Working in a bottle factory, which lasted one day, and the Radio 1 breakfast show.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 August 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 229 →Cold call market research at uni.
Terence Conran
British restaurateur and designer
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.
Bryn Terfel
Welsh bass-baritone singer
I cleaned the toilets at the local pub every Saturday morning.
More from Mark Radcliffe
View profile →Heights, something happening to my children and Manchester United getting good again (I’m a Man City fan).
This was said about me in a Radio 1 focus group: “I don’t pay my licence fee to hear scummy northerners.”
When I changed the toner cartridge in my printer all on my own – that was a day of pure euphoria.
Fairly decent bloke.
Throat and neck cancer in 2018. They told me six to eight months if it hadn’t been caught.
A sense of what’s right, a few quid and some nice paintings.
More on craft & work
- What do you consider your greatest achievement? 192 answers
- How do you know when a piece of work is finished? 67 answers
- What do you do when you feel creatively blocked or stuck? 66 answers
- How does a new work begin for you? 63 answers
- How much rewriting or revision do you do? 46 answers
- What is the part of your job that people would be surprised is most of your job? 41 answers
Also answered this
Helen George, Monty Don, Robert Glenister, Kevin Rowland, PP Arnold, Rosanna Arquette
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