That summer job from hell
On one hand, there was the pleasant liberation won by earning money for the first time. I was 14, with a bum-fluff moustache, and had a summer job washing dishes in a local hotel. On the other hand, I also recall my mother trying to hose me down in the back garden with the words, “Wait there while I get a hose. You’re not coming in the house like that.” The best therapists in the country haven’t managed to dislodge that memory.
Washing dishes in a busy hotel was the most disgusting job I’ve ever done. I used to come home covered in grease and congealed food. After a while I stopped noticing the smell, unlike my mother, who made me undress in the back garden with a hose aimed at my head. I suppose it could have been worse. It might have been the front garden.
I worked flat-out for eight hours with a 15 minute break for lunch (which was served in a putrid canteen by an old bint wreathed in flies and Rothman’s smoke). I never knew that I had a partner in wash-up. He used to clock in and go home, leaving me to scrape the crap off hundreds of plates and feed them into an equally overworked washing machine. The water was nearly always cold which meant the plates came out as dirty as they went in.
The worst part was filling in for the kitchen porter. This meant washing pots by hand and emptying bins full of unsold chickens and half-chewed leftovers. They weighed a ton and I had to haul them on a trolley up a hill to the hotel’s skip. This had its own eco-system where mutant cats with multiple tails and heads waited for their delivery of slops. After a while I got quite strong and would swing the bins up on my shoulder like an old fashioned bin-man. As a result, I frequently got scrambled eggs and gravy in my hair.
Eventually, I had earned enough to buy a guitar so I quit. The supervisor actually begged me to stay. Not out of respect, but because he knew I was an idiot who could easily be exploited.
Then there was the six months I spent working as a lounge boy. I was so bad at it that I never got tips. Half the time I didn’t get my fiver’s wages either, as I kept giving people too much change out of my float. The manager was a sour git. He wore polyester underpants and kept giving himself electric shocks while pulling pints and scratching his crotch at the same time. He was such a tightwad that he wouldn’t buy a hoover and I had to sweep the carpets at the end of the night with a brush.
The worst job I’ve ever had, however, was doing a gig in McDonald’s on Valentine’s night in 1985. I played guitar and sang love songs to love-struck halfwits wooing each other over quarter-pounders and fries. My wages were a tenner and as much as I could eat. It was hard to keep the food down watching punters snogging all around me.
Last week, as the annual scramble for summer work began, I did a quick vox pop of well-known faces to find the Worst Summer Jobs Ever. Some of the responses were surprising. For instance, a well-known former foreign correspondent once cleaned toilets in Copenhagen. RTE producer — and former Off The Rails Presenter — Pat O’Mahony worked in an abbatoir.
Broadcaster, Flor McCarthy’s first summer job was (unbeknownst to her parents) collecting glasses outside a pub on Sherkin Island. She was 11 and the owner refused to pay her in money. “Instead, I got paid in Curly Wurlys and red lemonade.”
A male accountant friend spent a summer in a newsagents selling tin foil to heroin addicts. He once saw a dead body at the bus stop. Another spent four weeks scraping surplus lead off the inside of a disused lead melting machine in a German cable factory.
Naoise Nunn, the producer of political cabaret “Leviathan”, can’t eat coleslaw any more. He got a job mixing it by hand in a plastic bath in Waterford in the late ‘80s.
“The mayonnaise was like toxic waste. I had onion powder caked in my nose for weeks.”
There was also the female babysitter who had to mind an out-of-control three-year-old who somehow managed to put a leaf up his willy.
Here are a few more, equally painful, summer jobs…
“My first ever part-time job was in the media. I was 10 years old. Okay, it was a paper round, but it was my first foot on the ladder (kind of). It wasn’t the worst summer job I’ve ever had. That honour goes to my stint as a ‘plumber’. I was 16 and totally clueless. ‘Ball-cock’ was a word you sniggered about with your teenage mates. ‘U bend’ was something you accused them of.
“I quickly learned that plumbing was, literally, full of crap jobs. I started my ‘career’ unblocking sewers and drains in the summer of 1980. The blistering sunshine made it a spectacularly smelly job but, being a teenager (and not knowing any better), I got used to it. I actually excelled at it. So much so, that I got promoted and was given an indoors job insulating attics at a secondary school.
“The Leaving Certificate exams were finishing up and the school was empty except for some sixth years. The first day started well. I leapt from joist to joist with the grace of a teenage mountain goat. Lagging attics was easy, I thought. By mid-day my opinion had changed dramatically as the attic slowly turned into a sauna. The lagging-sheets were made of fibre glass, which meant I had to wear a mask. It was stifling hot work.
“The glass dust went everywhere: up your T-shirt, down your jeans. I was sweating, scratching and cursing like a lunatic while trying to maintain my balance — it was a nightmare. I bent down to scratch my ankle and heard a ripping sound, followed by a crash. My feet had gone through the plasterboard and I was falling through the ceiling. It all happened in slow-mo. I remember the look of horror on the plumber’s face as he turned around to see me wedged up to my armpits between the joists.
“There was the sound of high-pitched teenage shrieking below me. I looked down and saw a room full of freaked-out girls covered in plaster. I was stuck in the ceiling of the exam hall. In their already stressed-out state, they thought I was a masked madman coming through the roof to get them.
“What I did next surprised even me: I waved. I don’t know why. It just seemed the right thing to do. I may have been in shock. I may even have been just trying to reassure them that I wasn’t a madman. It didn’t work. I think someone screamed ‘He’s got an axe!’ I can’t be sure. I do know that my legs were flailing about a lot as I tried to climb back into the attic. A teacher later told me I looked like I was trying to ride an invisible bike across the ceiling, which only made me look like more of a mentaller.
“I quit just as the words “you’re fired” were coming out of the plumber’s mouth.”
“I got my first taste of the market economy when I was nine-years-old. I spent the summer picking strawberries near where I lived and sold them for seven or eight pence per punnet. That was quite a mark-up back then. It meant I could buy more 10p bags in the sweetshop. That’s what it was all about: earning money for ‘real’ sweets.
“I also did all the classic jobs: working in restaurants, doing pub lounge boy, with the float and the dodgy shirt and ill-fitting trousers.
“One summer I got a job working in a shop. I was chatting to my mate at the counter during a quiet moment, when two lads came in. They were about 18. The next thing I knew, I was being held up at knifepoint. I literally felt the cold, hard steel of a blade against my neck. I thought ‘this isn’t good’. They were shouting ‘give us the money. Empty the till’, which we promptly did.
“We were told to get down behind the counter and not get up. Two minutes later we looked out the door and saw them cycling away like in that scene in ET, with one of them sitting on the crossbar. They escaped on bicycles. That really added insult to injury.
“I wasn’t remotely brave, I wasn’t remotely heroic, but it gave me a story to tell. Okay, it’s not exactly a war story, but …”
“While I was in college I used to work part-time in a launderette. I actually liked it there, but there were one or two horrible moments — like the time I was held up.
“Two guys came in and put what I thought was a pen to my neck. I laughed, thinking they were messing. Then one of them showed me that it was a syringe. That was pretty terrifying. They did a good cop/bad cop routine. One was very handsome and kept saying ‘it’s nothing personal’ while the other was shouting his head off. Then, when they were leaving, the ‘bad cop’ turned around and said “Look, I’m sorry, right”.
“On another occasion a businessman read me the riot act because his shirts weren’t done and he was on his way to Holland. He was really nasty. A week later he came back in to apologise for taking his bad mood out on me. He had bought me a ‘present’. It was a huge lump of hash. Why he thought I looked like a hash smoker I don’t know. I threw it in the Liffey.
“There were stomach-turning moments too. I used to have to empty the laundry bags and load the machines by hand. Once, I opened a bag that had been handed in by a football team. It was full of sweaty gear that had been fermenting for a week. It was indescribable. It actually put me off men for a month.
“There was one customer I liked whose clothes were always clean-smelling and fresh and he was very, very cool. That was Tom Dunne of Something Happens.
“He’s one of the country’s most popular broadcasters now and whenever I’m in studio with him, I keep thinking: ‘I used to wash Tom Dunne’s underwear’. How weird is that?”
“I started in my first band when I was 11 years of age. It was great craic — and very cool for a young lad — but I also had to make some money, so I did a few part-time jobs. The worst one I can remember was in an old folks home in Dalkey. That was back in 1985.
“You can imagine how gloomy it was there, especially for someone like me who likes bright lights and a stage. The lowest point came on the day of Live Aid. While all my bandmates were watching it, I was working in the kitchen of the old folks home. U2 were on stage doing their thing and I was peeling spuds! I never got to see any of it.
“Since then, I’ve played in front of 100s of thousands of people and have worked with many of the acts that were on stage that night, including U2.
“Even now when I meet up with Bono I think of potatoes.”
“I went to Trinity in the early 1980s and one summer I found myself in London working in the Martini factory on the Great Western Road. I was put in charge of the labelling machine. The glue they used to stick the labels on was disgusting. It came in big tubs and was gunky and looked like vomit. Sometimes if the labels went on wrong you had to peel them off by hand and ended up with glue all over you.
“I didn’t ask what the glue was made of, but it smelled horrible. [Didn’t they used to boil old horses for glue?] The whole place stank of spilled Martini and glue. I suppose I was, effectively, a glue-sniffer!
“The worst bit was on Saturday mornings when I had to come in and clean all the old, stinky, gunky glue out of the machine. I used to get nosebleeds every evening as I went home on the train. I think it must have been something to do with noise levels at the factory: all the bottles clanking together.
“The up-side was that I got a free bottle of Martini every week. The down-side is that, even after all these years, I still can’t look at a bottle of the stuff.
“I began doing part-time work quite young. When I was 14, I worked in a local chipper handing out fish and chips. I loved it as it was a great way to meet fellahs.
“Before that, ‘_____’ and I used to go around people’s back gardens in Glenageary and rip up their flowers. We would then go around the front and knock on the door — and sell the flowers back to them.
“I also did a summer job in a famous Dun Laoghaire nightclub. To have a club licence back then you had to serve food. In Peekers, we used to serve chicken ‘curry’. The dining area was up a spiral staircase on the edge of the dancefloor. Drunken dancers would come up and I’d plonk a plate of curry and rice in front of them. They wolfed it down. (It was so dark they could have been eating anything).
“I really liked working there because of the music: they used to play loads of disco records, like Sister Sledge and Boney M. It was very cool.
“Probably the funniest part-time job I did was when I was 17. I worked for a Kissogram company called Hot Lips and used to dress as a French Maid or a Naughty Nun, with a backless habit and French knickers. The guy that ran it used to dress as Tarzan and had a car with a big pair of lips on it.
“One day, I wanted to visit my mother’s grave in between appearances and we drove into Shanganagh cemetery looking for it. Me in a Naughty Nun’s outfit driving around a graveyard with Tarzan in a Hot Lips car. It must have been some sight.”
“The worst job I ever had was when I was on holidays from the School of Journalism in Rathmines. It was in Clery’s rooftop coffee shop. They made us wear a canary-yellow hat and dress with a frilly apron. It was awful.
“Customers used to come up from the country on shopping outings. They would order tea and then produce their own sandwiches and eat them at the table. My job was to clear the plates away but I had been promised that, one day, I would rise in the ranks to use the till or serve the fish and chips.
“There was a mad woman who worked in the kitchen washing dishes. Whenever I came in, she would scream and start smashing plates on the floor. It was like she was guarding her territory.
“The worst part of the job was that you had to listen to Chicago’s Greatest Hits playing on a loop all the time. ‘If you leave me now (you’ll take away the biggest part of me)’ played over and over again. I still can’t listen to that song.
“Like the song said, I did leave and I did take something away with me too. Two weeks into the job my sister came in to see me. She was horrified and kidnapped me on my lunch break. I never gave the uniform back, but then I never got paid.
“I never got to serve the fish and chips either.”
“I spent the summer of 1976 working in the coolest shop on Earth, No Romance, in Dublin. For 50p an hour I stacked shelves with bondage trousers, safety pin earrings, badges and some unusual underwear.
“The worst thing about this job was that The Boomtown Rats would frequently stop by to say “hello”. Every time this happened the shop would fill to capacity with prepubescent punkettes. The shoplifters would use this as an opportunity to thieve as much merchandise as they could stuff down their trousers.
“I was also pestered daily by bands asking if we would sell their badges. One annoying little person in particular had me driven up the wall trying to get me to sell his. I always refused on the basis that the design was awful and they were a rubbish band.
“One day I went for lunch and came back to find the boss had bought them all and was now busy placing U2 — it could happen to you badges all over the display counter.”
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