Authors & Their Day Jobs

[Paul Whybrow]

This infographic shows some famous authors who once had unconventional jobs:

Authors and Their Day Jobs: INFOGRAPHIC | GalleyCat

I think it's intended to be inspirational, in a "well, if they can do it, so can I" way. I've certainly had some horrible jobs in my 62 years, including a few that were when I was on a career ladder as a librarian and teacher—rather than just doing a humdrum job to pay the bills.

The worst, and this isn't going to have Agent Pete abandoning vegetarianism, was working in a food factory that manufactured bacon, pork pies and quiches. This was a long time ago, in the mid-70s, and I'm sure hygiene standards have improved since then—the factory was closed for contravening them. Everything happened on site, from slaughtering the pigs to making the product, packing it and sending it out to supermarkets.

One of my first jobs was sweeping up pigs ears and putting them in a dustbin to be used by a pork scratching maker. They do say that no part of a pig is wasted, and this was proven by my promotion to a new task. A supervisor took me into a steamy room and gave me a chain mail glove to wear on my left hand. My right hand wielded an electric knife with a rotary blade. Three black dustbins were placed in front of me. One contained 1,000 pig testicles, the others were for holding the gristly middle that I'd cut out and the meaty flesh. The gristle went to a lard manufacturer, the meat was used to make pet food.

I did this onerous task for eight hours a day. Holding onto the slippery testicles turned my hand into a claw—I could barely open it at the end of the day. It certainly made me look at my own manly body differently as I soaped myself clean in the shower!

It's not the sort of thing that will appear on my author biography when I'm rich and famous, but I'm sure it contributed to my strength of character.

What's the worst job you've done?

 

[Robinne Weiss]

Mine pales by comparison, but growing up, most of my dad's side of the family worked at a women's lingerie factory, and working there was sort of a rite of passage for all the teens in the family. My dad was the pattern-maker. One of my uncles, and a male cousin were cutters, and I had a number of female relatives who were sewers. I was employed in the lace department, laying out layers of fabric to prepare them for cutting. It was a big factory floor, and everyone could see everyone else. My dad's office was off the main floor. In addition to the ribbing my male relatives gave me about everything else (as male relatives do...), I had the horror of being my dad's model when he was working on a new garment. I'd have to put it on in the toilet, then walk the entire length of the floor wearing some piece of lingerie to get to my dad's office so he could check the fit (as he said, the mannequin couldn't tell him if something bound in the crotch). Mortifying, and only gave those male relatives more to harass me about...

 

[Marc Joan]

Again, nothing like as bad as either of yours, but part of my duties during one of my research posts involved collecting umbilical cords from the maternity ward, and then removing endothelial cells from said cords back in the lab. Apart from the basic yukkiness of the whole operation, the nurses in the maternity ward would all stare at me like I was some kind of perverted vulture. My own walk of shame, but at least it wasn't in lingerie...

 

[Carol Rose]

Nothing too bad, depending on your definition of it. I've worked in restaurants, offices, and retail. In nursing I worked in critical care, including neonatal ICU, cardiac ICU, medical ICU, and surgical ICU. Saw some fairly graphic things in nursing - that's for sure. Now I work at a large US-based insurance company, so my days are boring as heck.

 

[Brian Clegg]

As a holiday job while at university I worked in a goods inwards lab at a chemical firm. As the youngest in the lab I was given the task of being 'lumper bumper' (source unknown). The company mostly processed oils to provide organic compounds for domestic products, and this job meant every time a tanker of raw materials came in you had (in all weathers, and this was Rochdale) to go out, climb the ladder onto the top of the tanker, open it and take samples from three different levels using a sampling device on a chain.

You then went back to the lab and tested the material, which was the fun bit, as you could turn them away if the quality wasn't good enough. But what makes this 'worst job' was some of those materials. The best was coconut oil, which smelled wonderful and was light and clear. But some of the tankers carried tallow - rendered animal fat. To keep it liquid it had to be kept hot. And this job was pretty well impossible to do without spilling it onto your overalls, so you stank of hot animal fat. Oh and it got everywhere on the tanker, so the ladder was greasy and slippery. It was lovely.

 

[Bluma Bezbroda]

That's an awesome thread Since I had to provide for myself from quite early on I did a whole caleidoscope of odd jobs- cashier, cantine waitress, I worked in a butique and for 3 years I was a seasonal worker in a large company offering gardening services (managed to drive a tractor, did a lot of jumping trees with a saw too ). In my mid-twenties, thanks to getting some education, I could move into temp lab technician and part-time teaching jobs, then finally a PhD position.

As most of us here I really can't top Paul's story, but I do have an anecdote in the same spirit. When I was sixteen I had my first 2 jobs- I was modelling for sketches/paintings in the Art Academy once a week, and sometimes I would work afternoons at my friend's mother's pet shop. Paul already explained that some leftovers from the slaughterhouses make their way to such estabilishments. We had curiously looking long sticks which my friend pointed out and said "You know what those are? Dried bull dongs". Being a teenager, I was like "Lol, d*cks", we had our share of fun over it and moved on. But then, one day, I am standing behind the counter, alone in the shop and a customer comes in. He goes straight to the dongs, takes one and starts sniffing it. Obviously not satisfied, he takes another one and gives it a nice, long snuffle. All the time I'm standing there, thinking which nail-crammed, killer-dog collar woud make the best weapon when the perv will decide to jump on me with vile intentions. Then, he suddenly noticed me and said, in a quite apologetic tone "Oh, I beg you, dont mind me. I have a dog, you see, and the bitch wont eat them if they are not stinky enough!"

 

[Sea-shore]

To pay my way through Uni I worked as a cashier (various places), waitress (busy Chinese restaurant where I worked a frantically for 6 hours straight), petrol station attendant (5am starts and crazy Sunday queues with only me at the tills: fun times), but the worst? Research worker where I was trapped in a basement laboratory with noisy accelerators, and the only other people I saw was the technician and my supervisor (occasionally). I think it was the lack of daylight that did it for me. I did a sharp change of careers after that.

 

[KG Christopher]

I have had a good few jobs before my career took off. The worst job had to be helping on my uncle's farm in Ireland when I was recently married and out of work. He had me doing all the slopping out of the cow sheds, bringing the sheep down and a particularly nasty job of pairing the hooves of the sheep. It would be wet, and you had to bring them off the field for dry keeping in covered pens, but we had to cut their hooves with a hook knife, scrape out the mud, shit and maggots that accumulated there, about 200 sheep, your arm would be covered in 'crap' maggots in your hair, or up and down your body, biting you aggressively. The rams would but you and the sheep could be aggressive, didn't like it. One day I thought I would smoke some marijuana to make the job more bearable, but I ended up getting violently sick over a sheep's back.

 

[Chase Gamwell]

I've had a few "crap" jobs, but honestly I don't think they were all THAT bad at the end of the day. During college, I worked in a deli for three years, cutting meat and frying chicken. It was dirty and the customers (mostly) sucked, but I made some really good friends from working there (and know how to fry chicken like a boss). My other "crap" job was working at a call center for a major cable provider. I answered the phones and helped customers with their general billing and account needs. I worked the night shift, so most of the time I was off the phone, but all kinds of characters typically called in late at night. Some to order special programs. Helping THOSE customers was...awkward...

 

[echo.]

Nothing like scooping the gristle out of pig bollocks, fortunately, but my brief stint in the army was... ill-advised, to say the least. Whoever thought to give me a command position deserves to be court-martialled. On one exercise on Salisbury plain I'd had so little sleep I started to hallucinate on sentry duty. There were supposed to be two of us but my 2IC had got lost on his adventure to find more boiled sweets, and the solitude took its toll. The bush ahead of me morphed into a zombie soldier and started crawling towards me like something out of The Grudge. There was screaming, I roused the whole platoon like the Taliban were upon us, and then I tried to shoot it. Never mind I was only carrying blanks.

 

[KG Christopher]

+

Nothing like scooping the gristle out of pig bollocks, fortunately, but my brief stint in the army was... ill-advised, to say the least. Whoever thought to give me a command position deserves to be court-martialled. On one exercise on Salisbury plain I'd had so little sleep I started to hallucinate on sentry duty. There were supposed to be two of us but my 2IC had got lost on his adventure to find more boiled sweets, and the solitude took its toll. The bush ahead of me morphed into a zombie soldier and started crawling towards me like something out of The Grudge. There was screaming, I roused the whole platoon like the Taliban were upon us, and then I tried to shoot it. Never mind I was only carrying blanks.

Man them strawberry sherberts have the same effect on me.

 

[Robinne Weiss]

The thing about bad jobs is that they provide so much material for stories!
One of my other lousy jobs was at an egg factory (I won't honour it with the name farm, it was a factory). It had the standard crap-job illegal working conditions and a vile foreman. When the foreman finally got sick of me needing help lifting 100-pound crates of eggs over my head, he put me on candling, where I worked alongside a woman who was a longtime friend of my grandmother. I learned all sorts of shocking things about my family from that woman! (all of which were true--she wasn't just trying to be mean, just reminiscing about the past...)

And @KG Christopher --I hear you about hoof care! I actually just wrote a blog post about hoof care from hell earlier this week. Though I only have four to do, not 200. For me, the worst is when the parings fly into your mouth--I've had to learn not to swear at the animals while I trim.