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What is the worst job you have done?

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.

One of 24 questions in The Q&A here.

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Public figures who have answered a question like this elsewhere. Quoted from the source shown, not written for FLAPSS.

Read by field Everyone Arts and letters 55 Politics and public life 4 Business and finance 1
Read by age Any age In their thirties 14 In their forties 8 In their fifties 14 In their sixties 14 Seventy and beyond 9
PP Arnold
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?

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 7 October 2023 source ↗

Esther Rantzen
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.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 17 February 2024 source ↗

Stephanie Beacham
I was 15 working in Boots on Barnet High Street and it was terrifying. At coffee break you had to know whose cup was whose, and taking the wrong cup was a crime. I’ve met bitches, but I tell you they started out in Boots in Barnet.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 31 May 2025 source ↗

Arlene Phillips
In a Dagenham factory at 6am, picking soldiers’ greatcoats from wars around the world to sell at the market in Chelsea. I smelled like mothballs, and no one would come near me.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 28 June 2025 source ↗

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