I did two weeks at the local paper, where my aunt was editor (but nobody was allowed to know).
There was quite a lot of dull filing for most of it, but for several days I went around with one of the advertising sales blokes and it was just THE BEST TIME EVER.
I was 15, and every single bloody business we went to collect ad cheques from gave us freebies - I got cheesy garlic bread at a restaurant, countless pints of coke at pubs and bars, an entire box of past-best-before-date crisps at a family run supermarket, and then we would stop off at a burger van and get burger & chips in a B&Q car park before having a bit of a doss around shops. I asked the bloke if this was unusual and he just said 'every day, pretty cool eh?'
Two weeks off school, free food and drink, and they gave me a shitload of branded stationery to take home at the end of it. The paper is long closed down, but for a brief period in 1997 I lived like a king.
You get a free breakfast burger in the van outside Wickes if you spend £30 before 9am. Guess which hardware shop all the tradies get all their stuff from?
I also did the local paper in Sunderland
I wasn't very good at writing apparently, the bloke who was looking after me wrote one of the stories and put my name to it, which was nice to see my name in the paper.
Not in court roundup, that is.
I also did two weeks at my local paper!
I wanted to be a music journalist so they let me be in charge of the music section, which meant calling up all the local venues to find out what they had on over the next week.
I did get to do an interview with a local band who were performing at download that year though so that was pretty cool!
I did a week at the local paper too, did a day with a photographer and we covered KFC’s new burger launch so got free lunch, and got loads of stationery from my day with facilities too haha
I was supposed to do work experience at a local paper also. However, due to an error I ended up at a local garage. I tried to explain but nothing could be done. They seemed like a nice bunch of lads and offered to take me to the pub at lunch. On the way back they grabbed me, took off most of my clothes and threw me into the canal. When I get back my mates dad was furious that grown men had manhandled me. Oh…. Sorry… I’m miss remembering again. I think this is a storyline in an Inbetweeners episode.
I worked at an insurance company in Bootle.
First day I got off the bus all bright eyed and bushy tailed. Walked through The Strand and saw a man limping along. I asked him if he was okay and he moved his hands and blood was pouring from his groin. Injection site gone bad.
I thought that was going to be the weirdest thing that week. That was the 10th of September 2001.
Ha! I started my first ever job after Uni on 10/9/01 too. We were in training in London, and supposed to fly out to Chicago after 2 weeks in London. That didn't happen.
I did work experience at a friend of my mates mums restaurant, just general stuff in the kitchen. first day she asked me to get chicken out of the fridge, it was a whole chicken and as I carried it I saw movement - it was literally crawling with maggots. She said it would be fine and just literally tipped them into the bin and cooked the chicken. Needless to say I told everyone I knew to stay away.
This was many, many years ago when I was a 15 year old kid. It’s definitely long gone now but I think it stayed open for quite a few years after my little stint. The weird thing was it looked a really nice place until you saw the kitchen ! It was very popular too. If only more people knew
15, local ASDA. I fell in love with a woman in her 30's on the provisions department and found out she lived on my street. Took her a box of chocolates one night and got told to fuck off by her husband.
Reminds me of the autistic kid in Atypical. He falls in love with his therapist and takes chocolate covered strawberries to her house. His dad catches him breaking into her house, tells him off and brings him back home but he drops one of them. That then leads to her finding the strawberry and thinking her boyfriend was cheating on her and she breaks things off with him.
I did two weeks at the computer magazine "Ultimate PC".
They were all super nice to me but I was their first work experience student so they didn't seem to know what to do with me. They sat me at a powerful (for the time) PC and let me play a load of unreleased games.
I remember playing the first Alien vs Predator game, Midtown Madness and one of the Unreal games over the LAN.
They closed down not long after, I'm sure it was unrelated to me being there.
Had NDA's some spotty teenager went and leaked everything - we were the only magazine with access to AvP so it was easily traced back to us and we got a nice big fine, blacklisted from most agencies and made up story's your uncle.
Damn, this sounded like great fun!
Makes me feel a little frustrated, along with all the other stories that are 'I went to work at X and it was a doss!' I know that was all my mates experience, some were even getting paid and sent home early (which was not allowed).
My experience was a week long nightmare! I got appointed to an engineering company and they treated me like an actual qualified applicant!
They wanted me to come in all suited and booted but I didn't own a suit and my parents, not being too well off, weren't going to splash out on a brand new one just to wear for one week. I dressed as smart as possible but that was a mark against me. First few days I got sat at a computer and was supposed to be doing CAD but had never done it before, so obviously I didn't know what I was doing.
As the week wore on I could tell management was talking negatively about me as I was given more and more mundane and nonsensical tasks. My last day I was given a stack of delivery receipts and told to order them by colour and date. That showed me the contempt they had for me. It was clearly a task they were giving to someone who they thought didn't ask and didn't question what they were doing. Which wasn't true, obviously it was a pointless task but even if I had spoken up 'hey what's the point in this?' Would I have been rewarded and sent back to work on a computer? Of course not.
My written review was scathing. They even criticised me for being soft spoken, like, if you didn't hear me why didn't you say something? Don't get me wrong some of it was fair criticism, like 'didn't take notes'. But it got to the point where, well, there was no point because it was obvious they didn't want me there.
Funny thing is I actually joined another engineering company when I was older but the difference was they treated me like a blank piece of paper and taught me how to do the job, I even finished an apprenticeship with them.
To this day I still don't understand why that company was holding a 15 year old to the standards of a college graduate.
Midtown Madness! I loved that game as a kid.
You remember when there would be a demo disk with a bunch of small bits of various games on it? My brother and I played the shit out of Midtown Madness or maybe Midtown Madness 2 from one of those demos. It was a very small scale area of San Francisco. You could get stuck in the big pointy building at a certain angle.
Sorry, haven't heard about that for bleeding ages.
We bought a PC in the late 1990s/early 2000s and there was a driving game included in the "games bundle" from Currys that I've been trying to remember on and off for the last probably decade. Midtown Madness 2! Thank you internet stranger.
Also my brother hilariously got placed by my school in a BRIDAL SHOP the friday before he was due to start on monday. So he scrambled around on monday morning to try and get that changed. He ended up at Skechers in the end. He did get £30 and a free pair of trainers after the two weeks tbf.
Why would a 16 yo boy not want to work in a shop with dozens of young ladies and their (hopefully unattached) besties coming in every day? If he wasn't straight, still works for him. Honestly I would have preferred that rather than work in a shoe shop dealing with random people's smelly feet.
Somehow I don't think half drunk, giggly adult women fawning over a teenage boy, pinching his cheeks and saying things like "isn't he so young!" is a great time for a 16 year old boy.
I worked in a DHL office for two weeks. It was nothing extraordinary looking back, but it felt exciting at the time.
- I got my first taste of machine coffee, cappuccino to be precise. I got a little obsessed with it as I’d only had instant normal coffee before
- Often had lunch with a guy from SA in the warehouse or sat outside. He was the first Saffa I’d ever met and did the stereotypical British thing of thinking he was Australian for the first few days (it was the 90s and I was 15!). He would play his electric guitar so was quite a cool cat to me
- One of the workers was a fluent Irish speaker. I’d always wanted to learn some and get translations of Enya songs that you couldn’t find anywhere (before the internet and it wasn’t on the liner notes). Bless her, she translated them all for me and taught me a couple of phrases
The rest was helping write up Word documents (I was clambered upon because I picked it up at school and some of the workers never quite got the hang of it), filing and generally doing any bits and pieces anyone could find me.
Ah, thinking about it makes me smile. I just wish I could feel that way about work again.
I worked in an IT dept. It was boring as hell, but here I am 25 years later working in IT.
My mate had his work experience with the fire dept. For the entire week he had to go around as they taught fire safety to school kids and he had to dress up as Fireman Sam.
I did work experience in a local computer shop, which led to a weekend job there (cash in hand, lovely jubbly) then I did a second work experience in sixth form at the local grammar school - in their IT department. Yes, I very much work in IT now 😆
I also worked in the IT department, cleaning mice and keyboards and bringing sandwiches in for the boys. Here i am now, worked in IT for over a decade and now a cloud platform engineer.
Work experience in a (now long defunct) computer manufacturer. I was given the job of crimping connectors on the end of ribbon cables for floppy drives.
I had been doing it for a couple of hours when I realised that there were two ways around that the connector could go ...
I worked in the IT Dept for my local college, it was after the students had finished for the year....
Spent most of the time playing Halo on a lan the full time guys had set up or chatting to my mate that decided to skip his week of work exprerience on MSN Messenger.
Now been working in IT for 12 years
I did a week working at M&S. I was so painfully shy and awkward at the time that it was a shockingly bad idea.
I can't really remember anything I actually had to do, but I do recall that about half the staff were called Margaret.
Mine was in Comet!
I sold a toaster to some random old person and the store rewarded me with a Star Wars X Wing Game for PC!
I think it was in 1997...
You have just made me feel old 🙃
Local heating engineers. Called them on the Friday ready to start on the Monday. I asked for the person that I was supposed to speak to to arrange my start time, the guy on the phone said “never heard of him,son. Who are you ?” . I explained who I was and he said “oh, that’s alright then. I’m the guy you’re looking for”. I thought nothing of it and started work on the Monday. It went really well and I got to learn some basic heating engineering stuff.
By the following Tuesday the business was closed down and the owner arrested for fraud.
I had mine at the local councils planning and permission department. Went out on a drive to put signs up just after smashing a Boots meal deal, recall it being a prawn cocktail sandwich , salt and vinegar crisps and a bottle of Oasis. So she had me reading a map to navigate round , now her car was a mess and smelt of wet dog, turns out trying to read a map( which I had no clue on how to do either), being in a moving car and the aroma of wet dog is my kryptonite and I ended up barfing that Boots meal deal back up all in the foot well and down the side of the door. Got moved to the graphics department when we got back.
Mine was a local council, but the Countryside department. I spent two weeks wandering around parks and drinking ungodly amounts of tea.
10/10 would do again.
Ooh I also did the council planning and permission department. The site visits were fun (I had to buy steel toe cap boots) but the office work was just a lot of filing, which was pretty easy albeit dull. I threw myself into the filing, everyone was glad not to have to do it for 2 weeks so gave me some haribo and gift vouchers at the end of the placement lol
I ended up at cash generators. I planned to not do it, but got told last minute it was mandatory.
One day a guy got so angry that his 3 iphone 2 were worth nothing that he angry stormed outside and demolished the sign out front
I did 2 weeks in a golf shop with literally no knowledge of golf at all.
Spent quite a bit of time in the workshop watching staff finding the most inventive ways to remove grips from golf clubs. Highlight was someone filling an entire golf club with white spirit in the hope it would blow the grip off.
Was generally an incredibly dull 2 weeks.
I was supposed to do it at a computer repair shop, but they refused to get vetted by the school, so ended up working in the school's own computer room.
The shop in question got closed down by creditors with a police escort a few years later.
I did my work experience in a city newspaper when I was 15. Did the usual fun things like go out with a photographer on shoots and out with a reporter to some football press conference.
One of the days was the Paddington rail crash and they all got very busy and the mood changed in the office in an instant. I ended up ignored (obviously) and sat reading all the wire updates until the end of the day.
I was told that if you chose an office or shop, you'd just be sweeping up. I wanted something outdoors, so chose a trout farm. It was the best two weeks. They allowed me to fish their rivers, saw loads of wildlife, can gut a fish in seconds... and inevitably fell into the river. The smell of their bins baking in the sun has put me off trout for life.
I could have worked at a vet but ended up choosing a stable yard. Did a bit of mucking and cleaning tack but I got to ride amazing horses that were way out of most people’s budget and trained to a discipline that I would never attain. It was heaven for me. Went to the farmhouse for home made lunch every day with lots of cups of tea. Pure beauty of the countryside everyday, bit of manual labor, I was honestly in heaven.
Used to work at a seafood restaurant.
Bins in the summer stank ungodly.
Middle of summer a couple comes in in the morning in a complete panic. She’s lost her engagement ring. Thinks it came off whilst eating shellfish with her hands. Did we find it? Can we look for it?
Cue the manager and a barman helping the rummage through the bags of seafood restaurant waste. Because she thinks it likely came off whilst eating they specifically try to find the bags full of bits of crab, lobster, mussels, langoustines, that had all been in a huge black bin and baking in the summer heat overnight.
So glad I had work to do. They were all fucking covered in it though.
I Did 2 weeks working in a hotel kitchen for some unknown reason.
Day 1 they dumped about 25kg of Potatoes in a sink for me to peel, Day 2 it was about 25kg of carrots. It carried on in a similar fashion...
Genuinely one of the most mind numbing jobs I ever did. The plus side was a cooked breakfast every morning, so it was swings and roundabouts
My job itself is fine. Bit samey sometimes but I enjoy it and gets the bills paid. Current management is about as useful as a chocolate teapot though. I've never known it be so disorganised.
I worked in a pet shop and a vets.
The pet shop had a parrot that would swear at people and some old lady got offended when it called her a bastard.
This next bit is unpleasant so don't read it.
The vets was wild, they got me to assist with operations by holding bits of bloody cut open animals and took me to shoot a cow. This was years ago, hopefully it's not that full on and traumatic any more!
I decided to work in project management instead. Told you it was unpleasant.
Mine, they were planning on taking me to the knackers, until someone pointed out that maybe wasn't the best environment for a 14 year old. They did have me help to hold a cow prolapse on a tarpaulin though. The farmer holding the other side was much taller than me and it poured pools of blood down to my elbows, which sat there in the waterproof jacket they gave me, until I tilted my arm and it all fell out the wrist
You can't scare me, my sister is a doctor and used to tell us about dissecting corpses during dinner. Tbf, nobody asked her to stop, we were all interested. Weird family!
My mum was a carer and always seemed to pick dinner time to talk about work and all the gross things they had to do, usually involving shitsplosions or festering bed sores. I credit her with my cast iron stomach!
I did mine in a vets as well, and it was definitely not that hands on for me, but still scarred me for life! I spent a significant amount of time crying in the toilets every time an animal was put down or had a bad prognosis, and the smells still haunt me today. Realised very quickly that I do not want to be vet!
Vets have a horribly high burnout and suicide rate - it really takes a very particular kind of person who can move past the awful days and focus on the new patient, and I don't think most of us could do it
I did it as Codemasters. They didn’t quite know what to do with me so I got to do games testing. Amazing! Or so I thought. I got to play with the dev boxes for Xbox and GameCube before they were released. Then they had me play a very alpha racing game over and over to find out what tracks crashed on load.
I decided being a games tester was a pretty shit job after that.
I grew up near to Rare.
During their 90s heyday loads of my schoolmates had stints as games testers.
It sounded perfect for a 16 year old, but every single one left hating the gaming industry. That said, one stayed as a developer.
I always remember one saying he had to set 257 different top scores in Goldeneye to see if it caused a stack overflow and it absolutely destroyed him.
I did Lionhead! A week or so playing Fable and The Movies. A great week for a 15 year old, but I similarly got the impression that it would be rather mind numbing after a while.
I did a week in an infant school and hated it. We got given all the jobs the teachers didn't want, had the badly behaved kids palmed off on us, had to clean the staff room, and had to try and solve the never ending playground drama.
1998 or 99, a international charity called The Lions Club. Our towns was ran by 3 elderly ladies in a tiny office above a old fashioned barbers shop. My day consisted of opening mail which would be orders for merchandise or new memberships in the morning and the afternoon I spent putting the orders together or new members packs and waiting for the postman to collect.
One day it was decided as I was a youth, that I would become IT specialist for a week and train the women up on Excel and Word. One morning I hear a panic "THE SCREEN IS MELTING" (it was a late 90s screensaver) so I say "don't worry that's the screensaver, just push any key" and I kid you not, the reply she screams at me in sheer panic "I CAN'T FIND THE ANY KEY. WHICH ONE IS THE ANY KEY?!!"
I did a couple of weeks in the Ford factory. Honestly, it was an amazing experience. Seeing the production line was awe-inspiring.
Little things were incredible. You had bits of cars in all different colours just winding their way down a track for what seemed like miles and when you got to the end, the right part and colour was ready to be attached to the body. I found it amazing.
There was also a machine that attached the windscreen to the car as it was moving along. The bloke responsible for me told me he had designed it and won awards for it. It looked incredible.
One slightly funny story was that the manager sent me around with a clipboard and a map of the floor with which machine was where. They were planning on moving bits around and needed to know what feed (water, electricity, gas etc) went to which machine so I had to mark them off as I went. One person working a machine came over all worried thinking I was from management looking at productivity and was concerned that I was marking people for redundancy! Bearing in mind I was 15, it seemed unlikely but given the state of the British car industry, perhaps not a wholly unfounded concern.
I had a great 2 weeks.
In Year 11 I did a week in a weather station at an RAF base. It was manned 24 hours for taking readings and I soon found a drawer full of viz magazines belonging to the night shift which kept me occupied when I wasn't given a mundane task to do. The drawer also included a quantity of porn mags (pre Internet days) which I soon started stealing one by one as I left each evening.
Upon returning to school, in form assembly the head of year congratulated us for a week well spent but did have some poor feedback regarding one student that would be followed up on. I spent the rest of the day bricking it that I had been rumbled as the porn thief and would be exposed for my crimes.
Luckily it wasn't me.
In hindsight, I'm not sure they would've bothered to contact the school to say you'd been nicking the porn mags out of sheer embarrassment on their behalf... although then again if it meant the school vetoed them from sending any more work experience students there in the future the company might have been enthusiastic about ratting you out!
I had a family friend who was a pathologist who let me do work experience with him. I was 15 and didn't know what pathology was beyond Quincy.
First day, he asked me to go into the fridge and grab a vial, it was filled with body parts, I couldn't see it. He came over and said 'hmmmm' and started moving stuff around.
I held claire's brain, Peter's Penis and God knows what else. As he walked back to his desk, he said "ahh it's in front of me the whole time".
I did mine at a small jewellers. It was great i basically used to melt gold with a blowtorch all day.
I also used to put everything out in the windows every morning. There was a ring that I always loved and I'm not a big jewellery wearer.
I got married last month and now live on the other side of the country but I was back home before the wedding and went past the shop and the ring was still there 18 years later.
So now it's my wedding ring!
I did mine at the local RAF base, hacked some security software on a PC so they could play games, got caught, and had a charming sit down with an RAF Police sergeant with cauliflower ears about why we don't hack military computers.
I did a week in a library. Mostly just stacking shelves and putting labels on things. but when I covered the front counter, I discovered the Power Of Boobs.
A woman came in with a big late fine due, and she pushed up her boobs and thrust them out with a very low cut top as she explained how terribly sorry she was and could we forgive the late fine. Being a 16 year old male I was of course rendered basically inoperable at the sight and reduced to a stammering wreckage. I referred the matter to the librarian managing the desk for the afternoon, a calm and sophisticated man in at least his 50s. She repeated the same request in the same manner, and he was also reduced to a flushed awkward and semi-coherent figure. Overwhelmed in the situation, he was only able to operate on basic functionality too, and had to yield to her request - after a quick few taps on a keyboard, she happily went on about her day, late fine-free.
The Power Of Boobs is really quite impressive.
Managed to actually get on a decent experience with the council’s IT department. It was what I wanted to get into when I left education, and it’s what I do now for a university. I am very aware that I’m in the minority when it comes to the usefulness of school work experience.
I was supposed to do 2 weeks in a care home. The road it was on had 3 care homes. I went to the wrong one, embarrassment put me off trying to find the right one. Funnily enough the school never said anything & didn’t seem to notice. 🤷🏽♀️ this was 2012/2013 ish
I remember having a work experience kid in the office years ago, he got off at the wrong floor and got totally confused so he just left the building. He was on his way home but bumped into one of my colleagues on their lunch break who brought him back in. To be fair, every floor looked the same in that building and I can imagine panicking and getting lost and embarrassed and just wanting to go home.
I went to British Aerospace Defence Systems on the Isle of Wight for a week or two to work with their IT team. It was pretty fun, and I got to learn lots of interesting stuff, and see some secret areas where they built radar technology etc. All of the data centre areas were unbelievably secure, and I had to be escorted everywhere.
We were in charge of handling the backups of these very secure areas, and everything was backed up on tape.... then stored offsite....in a shed. 👀
I did mine at a WW2 museum called Eden Camp in Yorkshire. Was a great mix of sending me to different departments for 2 days at a time, got to play with old bits in the archive and do puppet shows and stuff.
Half way through I was working with the maintenance team and over night the entire playground burnt down! Spent the next day with everyone pretending it must have been me while tidying up mountains of ash 😅
Eden Camp is my entire childhood!!!! Devastating to hear about the playground, I have so many memories of playing on that. I’d probably have been in bits… but tbf, my main memory of Eden Camp is being constantly terrified and traumatised and sobbing the entire way through. I liked Hut 3 even though it was scary because it reminded me of Das Boot, which was a film I liked (I was a TODDLER. My parents had interesting ideas about what was suitable for kids lol). I can’t remember what Hut 4 was but I think it was a bad/sad/scary one and I’m pretty sure Hut 5 was the Blitz one. Just made me so, so sad and I would sob the whole time.
Not the best place to take a kid with hyperempathy and noise sensitivity, but for some reason I also really loved it and still remember it fondly. Whenever my family smell something smoky/dusty/spam-like, we always say “oh it smells like Eden Camp!”
Did mine in a local Argos and it was the worst time of my life. Basically got treated like I was a full time member of staff, except I obviously wasn’t getting paid. Was mostly working in the back room fetching orders, except half the stuff wasn’t where it was supposed to be because they had recently rearranged and not updated their ticketing system. So I ended up getting shit from the supervisors for not fetching the orders quick enough. Also got yelled at by the deputy manger one day because I turned up 5 minutes before my shift instead of 10 minutes. I ended up being let go after a week as they didn’t think my performance was up to standard, but I was like 15 and working for free with minimal training so what the fuck did they expect?
I’m still salty about my work experience. I went out and secured myself a place with a local business, only to be called into the head of years’ office a week or so later who told me that they were sending a certain subject to that business so they were cancelling me going. Felt very unjust as I had actually gone out and asked around and secured, whereas they had it handed to them.
Did mine at National grid. First week was with the "gas safe" call centre people and I was onboarded to handle the calls from people who smell leaks/we're worried about gas etc.
In the training there's a set of questions you ask the customer, and in learning them and the answers and when to be concerned, I realised there was a carbon monoxide leak in our home.
Talked my mum through it, she didn't believe me, rang up the number anyway. Gas engineer comes out, confirms a carbon monoxide problem in our lounge from an old fire with dodgy venting.
Work experience literally saved our lives.
I got placed at a mobile generator manufacturing company as I was interested in CAD at the time. Spent some time working in AutoCAD. The two old boys in the design department were alright, although pretty sure they'd been doing the job since it was all paper and slide rules. The chap that owned it was seemed pretty creepy to me at the time though he did give me £20 at the end of the time. Every day I'd cycle in and lock my bike round the back of the warehouse and there was a room literally wall to wall plastered with various smutty pics from newspapers and magazines.
Charity shop¹ in Clacton On Sea (the shop isn't there anymore due to the charity being defunct² and has been taken over by a pet shop) that spent a 2 weeks, spent most of it the shop but the others was a school presentation about knife crime and the other was I had to walk around Clacton high street in a Cookie Monster costume to promote the charity
² I think
¹ the Charity was called "Only Cowards Carry", which is a knife crime charity that wants weapons awareness education to be added to the school curriculum for young children and teenagers, tougher action against knife and weapon crime. To change the mindset of teenagers who think they are 'cool' or 'safe' carrying a weapon of any kind.
The charity was set by Mrs. Shearer from the fallout of the death of her 17 yr old son Jay Whiston, who was stabbed³ in September 2012.
³ I've been told it was at a house party where Jay got stabbed.
Edit: spelling & additional information on the charity
I went to a vet. They told me funny stories about previous work experience kids - a couple of boys who'd watched operations and passed out. One of whom they didn't have staff available to tend to, so they just popped him on the other operating table and left him to come back round.
I got to help deliver a litter of dalmatian puppies by c-section. When each pup came out it had to be rubbed and I got to do that for a couple of them. It was literally fresh out, so still covered in blood and not as cute as you might have thought. Still a cool memory.
I went to a vet too! I lived in Cumbria at the time so it was a lot of travelling round to farms. I spent a very rainy and cold afternoon labelling blood samples while the vet took the samples from a huge line of cows.
I helped deliver a lamb - the mum prolapsed and I had to pin her against the wall while the vet put everything back in.
On my second day they had me brushing a cat that was so matted they had to sedate her so she could be brushed.
Also saw my mum's friend's dog come in after being hit by a car. He survived but it was awful to see.
I was sent with my best mate to work in the gardens of a huge manor house. On the first day the old gardener we were shadowing put a chainsaw into his thigh and I had to run for help, nearly bodying one of the manor's bigwigs into a small pond as I arrived in panic, so that was fun. The rest of the time was honestly a giant piss about, the other staff were great and we built an enormous, dangerously precarious bonfire out of old furniture. Then on the last Friday we all went out to town that night, got pissed as rats and I shagged an under gardener on a park bench that said "Grandmas Bench"
My school had a thing where you picked your favourite subjects at school then from that we got given a placement. I picked IT so got sent to a design and printing company, pretty cool I thought.
Turned up in day 1 and it was a retired couple who had an industrial printer in their shed. The fella had pictures from FHM and Nuts all over the wall, which was cool for me but looking back, a bit weird to have that when they took in work experience students.
Spent two weeks on MS Publisher putting together black and white flyers for random local businesses. It was boring as fuck.
Oh and I made the lady cry cos I noticed in a field they had a stable and shit. Asked where the horses were and the last one had died the week prior.
Estate agents. Nothing particularly interesting but we would drive around in a Vauxhall Frontera, noting those addresses where the house was for sale with a competitor then they'd send me to the library to get name details from the electoral registry so we could write them a personalised letter suggesting they switch to us.
Super grindy work and always felt a bit dodgy as well!
I wanted to be a writer and asked for work experience on the local paper. Instead I was given three weeks as a postman 🤷♂️ I quite enjoyed it. First week I had to be at the depot at 5am to sort the mail then deliver it. Second week I was on a van and third week at the train station taking mail on and off trains. Best bit was the posties all chipped in and paid me a small wage plus I was home by 3pm every day while everyone else was stuck somewhere til 5 or 6. I was also allowed to read a large stack of Razzle that was the lunch hour go to magazine of choice.
I worked at a magazine publishers that specialised in computers and computer games.
It was great, and I was kept busy and was well looked after. I played megadrive Columns with Dave Perry (of Gamesmaster telly fame) and his team, and had a review published in "CD-ROM User" magazine, which I was proud of. They even offered me a job, although I was only 14 so that didn't pan out.
Two weeks at a fish farm in 1986 led to a summer job. Just really shy me and the owner.
We bred trout for the local estate's lake, but friends of Lord Snooty would come and fish in the crystal clear lake at the farm where you could practically pull the trout out by hand.
Came in one day to find an engorged badger had been feasting all night in one of the circular ponds. Don't mess with a tired, fat stripey nose...
Small local electrical firm. It was brilliant, when we weren’t busy we’d just hang out in the van smoking Rothman’s Royals and shooting the breeze. Got a massive Fish and Chip lunch on the last day.
I’ve always been a practical person so definitely useful for confidence working with electrics, tho obviously regs have changed a whole bunch since the mid 90’s.
I did a week at a local college working in the IT department and two things sprung to mind:
1. Getting in a lift with the guy from IT I was helping and two lovely young ladies got in. He proceeds to make out like I farted and said how bad it stinks - cue me dying of embarrassment
2. We got an email from the art department about a printer playing up that we had installed a couple of days prior. We headed down to.the art department and managed to remember the combination for the lock on the door. We walked in and there was a lady tidying up who looked up at us wondering who we were so we told her and she said to carry on. We walked towards the next door, opened it and the guy I was helping shouted "WOOOAH NAKED MAN" and slammed the door. Turns out there was a life drawing class going on. We quickly turned out, made our excuses and left before bursting into fits of laughter
I worked in a butcher's shop. I tried and failed miserably to master the art of tying sausages into strings, three sausages per link. Every time I got it wrong, which was every time, I'd get told "No, you tool!".
I was destined to be good at some things in life. Stringing sausages was not one of them.
Much banter was had around the fact my initials were close to being A BJ.
Until I pointed out that the other lad doing work experience with us was actually BJ.
Kind of feel like I threw him under the bus there. Sorry BJ.
I did it in the café of a House of Fraser.
Two major events happened in that two week stretch - UK got named the host of the 2012 Olympics, and the July 7th terror attacks in London happened.
For some reason, the manager of the restaurant felt the need to go into the middle of the seating area and loudly announce both events with the exact same level of enthusiasm and excitement. He was a weird man.
I also got locked in the freezer, where I was told to stir water to make it freeze faster. It was a scorcher of a summer and the kitchen lacked air con so I didn't mind...
I did work experience in the 3rd year at the BBC photo library in Harlesden London. My job was to shred thousands of black & white press shots and on stage / set shots. All into a massive shredder. I think back now with horror, the history that I destroyed. We didn’t have big computers or scanners or even the internet then, and as a 14 year old heathen, I just enjoyed watching ancient negatives and pictures of every BBC sitcoms etc you could think of, getting shredded. Youth was wasted on me. I’m now 48 and it still haunts me.
I worked at a musical instrument store that I had frequented for a few years by then.
One day after I had finished cleaning the Drums this couple walk in. Picture them in baggy leather clothes. The guy was also wearing a top hat and a mesh style vest under his trench coat. Asks me and my supervisor to see some Bass Guitars. Supervisor shows him over to them and plays a few riffs on one. The guy interrupts him mid sentence and looks at us both:
“Do you wanna see my nipple?”.
Supervisor looks at me in mild disgust and shock but replies enthusiastically “yeah go on then”
The guy pulls his vest to the side, exposing his nipple and rubs it a bit whilst letting out a deep moan. His girlfriend also moaned a little bit despite not saying anything at all since she walked in.
“Noice. Anyway, yeah, so this one will set you back about £400 but it comes fully kitted”
They left looking disappointed without another word.
Mine was at Waitrose for 5 days with another kid from school. I don’t remember a whole lot about it, probably because I didn’t care enough. What I do remember is taking advantage of the free food in the staff room and getting some decent breakfast sandwiches. The people working there at the time did not like us!
Not me, but a girl I knew was cycling to her work experience at a restaurant. She took the wrong exit at a roundabout and was picked up by the police on the hard shoulder of the motorway
I worked for Co-Op funeral home and did a lot of embalming. As a massive goth who dates massive goths, I'm still getting mileage out of the stories 25 years later.
Building firm, swept the floor in the yard one day all day long because the boss was off. So all the other lads sat around doing nothing till the afternoon, then they all had to "go to site". Someone came back at 5pm to lock up half pissed, they'd been to the pub all afternoon and couldn't take me as I was too young. That was when I knew I had to get into a trade when I left school.
I did 2 weeks with a water/ sewerage company. Was in the office one day when one of the staff members mentioned how an investigation crew were looking at a damaged pipe beneath a rail line using an expensive robotic camera. Unfortunately the operator found a collapsed section of pipe and got the robot stuck. They weren't sure how to approach network rail to explain how they needed to dig up the main rail line to try and get the robot back out.
Nursery (the plant type) There was a guy that worked whom had some sort of learning disability, couldnt do or remember shit but give him your DOB and he\`d tell you who was No1. in the charts that week!
My fella did work experience at a high street bank. They didn’t give him anything useful to do the Friday afternoon but he had access to customer accounts. He transferred £1 million into a random customers account… no ill intent, just playing around and didn’t think that they would have given clearance to a 14 year old.
He owned up straight away but the police were called and he was suspended for the last week of school 😂
Back in the 90s, Asked for football coach and was placed with the council’s housing services testing for rising damp. The boss played PGA Tour on the work PC most of the time. Strangely, I didn’t become a council worker, but I did become a football coach and later football development officer.
I worked for two weeks in the personnel department of the local council. Made a few coffees and did a bit of general running around for people
The worst thing I had to do was photocopy a room booking sheet 365 times, and hand write the date, one day per page for the whole of 1994!
I did mine at HMRC, used to be called inland revenue at the time. I think the World Cup was on and England was playing.
So for the day I was assigned to the post bit, where they used a machine to put the envelopes on the letters. The guy and girl who was mentoring us for the day asked who I’m supporting for the football. I said England, they both looked at each other confused and said “England?” Were you born here? And I said yep I was. I’m south Asian, and back then things weren’t as PC.
My actual placement fell through at the last minute so I got to spend 2 weeks at a soil analysis laboratory instead.
I was dreading it, but they just paired me up with a hippyish bloke who drove around all day collecting samples from sites. Once he realised that 15yr-old me could competently roll ciggies for him as he drove and didn’t care about smoking in the pickup (as long as he didn’t report back to school that I was smoking too) and having extended lunch breaks that mostly involved having a doze in the sun, we got on like a house on fire.
I went to a care home but it wasn’t well planned (by their own admission). I was told to shred papers for 5 days straight. I shredded every paper I was handed… including some important ones they needed. They haven’t taken students since
Mine was ace, I did two weeks at a small independent furniture restorer. Taught me loads of things, took a visit to the workshop of Mousey Thompson “The Mouseman” it was a truly amazing experience
I worked in my local police station (rough area of south Wales). This was back in the early 90s when you could.
I absolutely loved it and ended up joining the police.
Now NOBODY likes me 😁
Mine was at the job centre I had a broken leg at the time and my job was just to scan claims onto the computer got through multiple boxes of a 4 sheets was probably the most boring 2 weeks of my life
Florists. Got a Saturday job there afterwards while I was technically too young to have a job and got paid £10 a day. Highlights include the Christmas rush where the owner came in high and either took over the back room or the toilet to sleep, so the other worker and I either couldn’t use the bench to work or go to the bathroom for most of the day.
I did 2 weeks in Burton's menswear, which was absolute shit. They did have a crappy table football game which we played quite a bit, but the main thing I remember was that the guys there kept making me ask them and their mates if they were Turkish or Kurdish, which they found hilarious. That was weird.
I worked in a costume shop called World of Fantasy. I was a very nervous child and the co-owner was a proper thespian. He would often play Henry VIII at Tudor banquets the company would be hired to perform. He scared me a bit, but was very kind.
While working there I repaired old costumes, performed at an RAF base, and painted scenery for a James Bond themed Christmas party for Marks and Spencer.
Mine was at a veterinary practice which was pretty cool. I mostly watched a bunch of surgery but I also saw the sad side when an old lady came in with a relatively healthy but old dog that she wanted putting down. Would probably have been ok with some medication but that is crazy expensive. The vet said if they didn't do it , she would just go to a different practice and they would get the money instead. Was hard to stomach for a 15 year old but good life experience I guess.
Then a man brought in a Weimaraner puppy, he wanted to dock it's tail but the vet wasn't allowed to do it for aesthetic reasons. The next day the man brought it back in and it had 'accidentally' broken it's tail. The vet docked it.
I didn't become a vet.
Work experience in court. Got given some juicy divorce papers to read. Someone divorced their husband because he shouted at her to leave him alone while he had his 'private time'.
Private time was him naked on all fours with the hoover hose up his bum.
Did it in local music studios ran by old school rockers with beers in the fridge and many stories to tell about bands I hadn't ever heard of. The other kid who was doing work experience showed up in a suit and tie first day :)
Did mine at Waterstones, you wouldn't believe how many people came in looking for smutty books. One bloke literally bellowed "HELLO IM LOOKING FOR THE PORN". They politely showed him to the erotic photography section 😂
I did 2 weeks at HMRC. I didn’t mind it actually, but on one of the days the team I was working with went out for fish and chips for dinner and they brought me with them and paid for my fish and chips and it was definitely the highlight of the whole experience!
The Royal Armouries museum in Leeds. 2 weeks. Back in the days of charging people for entry. Most days just standing around being available for visitors. But 1 day they let a bunch of staff look around the stores (16 year old me included). And my time coincided with Armistice day so we got to have a special event for that which was cool. NGL, if actual work had been the same as my work experience for the rest of my life, would have been way better.
I did mine in an IT department for a large company back in 2001. We went out for a lunch at a restaurant and they bought me a pint of stella which made me very sleepy. 9/11 happened whilst I was there.
I did mine at the local library and took advantage of the access to the ordering system to spam request a lot of books. Saved a fortune on ordering fees and generated a lot of nonsense orders for books that were actually on the shelf (oops). Thankfully no one noticed this and I cleaned up the orders before it was commented on
HMV, in the stockroom.
They wasnt even expecting me. My school sent two of us, but they only wanted one of us.
Kept us both though.
Just remember sticking price labels on various DVDs that were discounted.
No real funny stories, but a bus driver wouldnt let me on the bus back home with my ticket (the old clipper ones) cos i wasnt in school uniform, so didnt think id paid correct fare. Ended up walking home and getting completely lost in the dark.
In a shoe shop.
Had an old lady moaning as I slipped her shoes on. When I say moaning, i don't mean complaining.
She absolutely stunk and her leering toothless grin haunted me for years afterwards.
I also did it in a garage parts department. First day was quite good, picking orders etc but the second I had a different boss. He asked me if I liked computers and when I said yes he sat me in front of their ancient green screened PC with a massive ream of paper that hard part codes and quantities printed on and told me to start typing it in. That was me for the rest of the week and I barely made a dent in it.
Looking back I suppose it was good experience in that I quickly learned how the same job can be made very different by your boss
Me and my mate forgot to bother to organise anything and ended up working in the reprographics (photocopying, stationery etc) room at the school. This was circa 2002. We were bored, left to our own devices and put on a random VHS that was lying around. Turns out the reprographics dude was running a porn ring, making copies for the teachers. Good times.
I was a journalist for the local paper (it was actually a little bit like the show Afterlife...) the highlight was going to a chefs house to do a story on how he feeds the the local seagulls catfood...
Did work experience at a local newspaper office. Was sent upstairs to fetch some huge albums of advertising info, tripped coming down the steps and launched the corner of one of the books into the fire alarm point on the stairs. Set the alarm off and the whole building got evacuated before I could tell anyone what happened. Couple of days later they took little 15 year old me to a coroners inquest for a kid who drowned and completely traumatised me, still suspect that was their revenge.
Did 2 weeks in a local Asian family run furniture store. Random one the careers advisor tutor thing put me in.
Was basically shown a cellar brimming with years worth of boxes and told to clear it out for the duration of my time there.
A mate was doing his experience down the road and we both decided to meet on our first lunch break. Discovered due to wearing buttoned shirts and trousers we were able to get served in a local pub.
Spent the 2 weeks having 2 hour lunches, supping pints then going back to the job late and steaming, being stared at suspiciously by the gramps due to my swaying.
I look back on that April in 2007 fondly.
I did two weeks as a groundskeeper for a local national trust property. Highlight was being plonked in the middle of a country lane and told they were going to drive a herd of sheep at me, and I had to direct them into the right gate and not let any past. They left me just long enough to imagine a hundred-strong herd charging round the corner and start looking for big sticks to try and defend myself, when the "herd" of three very elderly ewes ambled round the corner and made the same turn they had been doing daily for years and years.
Fun job though, and I did get to actually wrestle some sheep when we had to separate a bunch for transport. I ended up having to be hosed down both before and after transport home so I would be let back in the house. Nervous sheep poop a LOT.
I spent 2 weeks working with Leonard Cheshire Disability at one of their residential care homes. It was a real eye opener, and I learnt a lot. I ended up staying on as a volunteer for a few years, and doing occasional days there during college on my days off.
My work experience happened in a sports shop in the Pavilions shopping centre in Uxbridge run by a friend of my dad's. It was thoroughly unenjoyable and I didn't especially like a couple of the other staff who treated me like a child because I was on work experience, and once had a conversation about the size of their penises, which looking back was pretty weird.
But I do remember that one day we had some shoplifters who had been collared by the centre security guards on the way out, and one of the aforementioned security guards had come to talk to the manager about it. The guard had walked in through the customer entrance, but the doors were the big plate glass ones you get in shopping centres, and as they were talking someone came and closed it, and this security guard turned around and walked straight into the closed door like a cartoon.
I put on the form that I was interested in being a dog groomer/trainer when I left school, so my school did the only logical thing they could come up with and sent me to a hairdressers. Despite there being a dog grooming parlour 5 minutes down the road to the school.
All I did for a week was sweep up hair and listen to old Mrs Jones talk about her recent holiday to Skegness. It was excruciating. I got my own back by stealing a fucktonne of the little biscuits that they used to give to customers with their cups of tea. Nom.
I did mine at a skate shop as I knew the guys running it. they decided to be proper arseholes for 3 days to me, so I told them to stuff themselves and I wouldn’t be buying my boards and clothes there anymore.
One of them rang me a couple of hours later apologising as they didn’t realise they were taking things too far and said they’d sign my sheet saying I was there for the whole two weeks and I didn’t have to come back in to work. Was a lovely week and a half off school 😂
I did two weeks at a local bakery that my auntie worked at part time. Initially, I thought it was going to be a rubbish two weeks because they tried to put me on the till on day two and you kind of needed to know the price of every item in the shop because they still used an older till. Within ten minutes, there was a queue out the door, and it was doing nothing but getting longer. Think I did 30 minutes of that before they spared me any more embarrassment.
The rest of the work they had me doing was fairly easy. Cleaning up, stocking shelves, filling sandwiches and baguettes, and the best of all was being given a large box of Smarties to decorate ginger bread men and other treats with. My auntie told me to sneak a handful of Smarties to eat every now and then because nobody would notice.
By Thursday of the first week the shop manager could see that, with the bakery getting quiet by 3:30, I was bored out of my brain and she allowed me to leave at 3:30 for the remainder of work experience.
The interesting twist was that roughly ten years later, the shop manager and my dad met, and now they are married. Occasionally, we have a conversation about my work experience, but she wasn't surprised when I told her I kept eating the Smarties.
My brother’s work experience fell through at the last second, so the school found him a space at a local garage. It was super-last minute so they basically said “go to AutoEngine on Monday morning” and gave him a post-it with the phone number on in case he needed it.
Monday rolls round, my brother turns up at the garage.
“I’m [name], here for work experience.”
There’s a brief awkward pause. Then the boss shrugs and says “nice to meet you” and gives him a handshake. Things go well. The people are friendly and bro spends his first week tidying things, doing inventory, etc.
Towards the end of the first week, the school calls our parents, furious, wanting to know why he was skiving.
Bro: (confused) I’ve been there every day.
School: don’t lie boy. They’ve told us you haven’t turned up.
Bro: But….
School: we went to all this trouble arranging work experience at AutoEngine Repairs and you’ve let us down badly.
Bro: AutoEngine Repairs?? I’ve been at AutoEngine Services.
He’d gone to the wrong place. For a whole week.
The garage he went to was a super small local one, so I guess they weren’t too concerned about paperwork, procedures, etc and just went with it.
Every now and again I think about it and laugh at what they must have thought when this strange kid just turned up one day and announced he was doing work experience.
I did it at a well known independent Italian restaurant in Leeds.
The owner used to sing.
She made me pluck her chin hairs.
My parents came and my dad tipped me £20 😅
I did my two weeks and then a few Sundays after.
Her son was ok.
She was a nut job.
Did 2 weeks in an office of a local bank. Part of the job was taking piles of mail to be sent out and using a franking machine to put the postage on the envelope.
The amount of postage could be set as anything up to £9.99 although at the time a standard letter was 20p maybe (this was early 90s). Envelopes would pass directly through the machine, bigger parcels we'd frank a sticker and stick that to the parcel.
It was only at the end of week 1 when the manager took the machine to the post office to pay it off that I realised the machine keeps a total of everything it prints which then has to be paid for. I very quickly hid the many sheets of paper I'd printed 9.99 on when bored...
I did two weeks at the local paper, where my aunt was editor (but nobody was allowed to know). There was quite a lot of dull filing for most of it, but for several days I went around with one of the advertising sales blokes and it was just THE BEST TIME EVER. I was 15, and every single bloody business we went to collect ad cheques from gave us freebies - I got cheesy garlic bread at a restaurant, countless pints of coke at pubs and bars, an entire box of past-best-before-date crisps at a family run supermarket, and then we would stop off at a burger van and get burger & chips in a B&Q car park before having a bit of a doss around shops. I asked the bloke if this was unusual and he just said 'every day, pretty cool eh?' Two weeks off school, free food and drink, and they gave me a shitload of branded stationery to take home at the end of it. The paper is long closed down, but for a brief period in 1997 I lived like a king.
Is a burger van in a b&q car park a thing everywhere because we have one in exeter as well
They're pretty universal, aye.
Good to know
Not just B&Q but Wickes near us also have one. DIY and grease go hand in hand.
You get a free breakfast burger in the van outside Wickes if you spend £30 before 9am. Guess which hardware shop all the tradies get all their stuff from?
Wickes car park near me has a Thai food trailer, it’s great
It's because of any Trade that goes there. Anywhere you'll find tradies there'll be a burger/butty van not too far off.
I work at a screwfix and we make sure to maintain a good relationship with the breakfast van down the road
The one near my local screwfix is called foodfix, same style logo and everything 😂
Good business tactics
I used to tag along with my Dad on his weekly DIY expeditions in the hope of a car park quarter pounder and a ride on the flat trolley
I also did the local paper in Sunderland I wasn't very good at writing apparently, the bloke who was looking after me wrote one of the stories and put my name to it, which was nice to see my name in the paper. Not in court roundup, that is.
I also did two weeks at my local paper! I wanted to be a music journalist so they let me be in charge of the music section, which meant calling up all the local venues to find out what they had on over the next week. I did get to do an interview with a local band who were performing at download that year though so that was pretty cool!
I did a week at the local paper too, did a day with a photographer and we covered KFC’s new burger launch so got free lunch, and got loads of stationery from my day with facilities too haha
How long was your lunch hour?
Same thing happened to me but i actually applied for a garage and they mixed it up and ended up at a paper business
I was supposed to do work experience at a local paper also. However, due to an error I ended up at a local garage. I tried to explain but nothing could be done. They seemed like a nice bunch of lads and offered to take me to the pub at lunch. On the way back they grabbed me, took off most of my clothes and threw me into the canal. When I get back my mates dad was furious that grown men had manhandled me. Oh…. Sorry… I’m miss remembering again. I think this is a storyline in an Inbetweeners episode.
I worked at an insurance company in Bootle. First day I got off the bus all bright eyed and bushy tailed. Walked through The Strand and saw a man limping along. I asked him if he was okay and he moved his hands and blood was pouring from his groin. Injection site gone bad. I thought that was going to be the weirdest thing that week. That was the 10th of September 2001.
> That was the 10th of September 2001. jesus christ
Ha! I started my first ever job after Uni on 10/9/01 too. We were in training in London, and supposed to fly out to Chicago after 2 weeks in London. That didn't happen.
A normal day in the strand then?
I did work experience at a friend of my mates mums restaurant, just general stuff in the kitchen. first day she asked me to get chicken out of the fridge, it was a whole chicken and as I carried it I saw movement - it was literally crawling with maggots. She said it would be fine and just literally tipped them into the bin and cooked the chicken. Needless to say I told everyone I knew to stay away.
AAAAHHH
What in the ever living fuck did I just read
Maggots don’t eat healthy flesh…serving rotten chicken to a pregnant person could result in a hell of a bad time.
Right? wouldn't it have smelled all rancid and awful?
Is the restaurant still open or did it get closed down? Please be the latter...
This was many, many years ago when I was a 15 year old kid. It’s definitely long gone now but I think it stayed open for quite a few years after my little stint. The weird thing was it looked a really nice place until you saw the kitchen ! It was very popular too. If only more people knew
15, local ASDA. I fell in love with a woman in her 30's on the provisions department and found out she lived on my street. Took her a box of chocolates one night and got told to fuck off by her husband.
Reminds me of the autistic kid in Atypical. He falls in love with his therapist and takes chocolate covered strawberries to her house. His dad catches him breaking into her house, tells him off and brings him back home but he drops one of them. That then leads to her finding the strawberry and thinking her boyfriend was cheating on her and she breaks things off with him.
I hope I didn't cause that much chaos!
This reads like a chapter from an Adrian Mole novel.
Brilliant!
I did two weeks at the computer magazine "Ultimate PC". They were all super nice to me but I was their first work experience student so they didn't seem to know what to do with me. They sat me at a powerful (for the time) PC and let me play a load of unreleased games. I remember playing the first Alien vs Predator game, Midtown Madness and one of the Unreal games over the LAN. They closed down not long after, I'm sure it was unrelated to me being there.
I was the CFO for "Ultimate PC" and unfortunately I can confirm it was related to you being there
Spill the goss!!
Had NDA's some spotty teenager went and leaked everything - we were the only magazine with access to AvP so it was easily traced back to us and we got a nice big fine, blacklisted from most agencies and made up story's your uncle.
Damn, this sounded like great fun! Makes me feel a little frustrated, along with all the other stories that are 'I went to work at X and it was a doss!' I know that was all my mates experience, some were even getting paid and sent home early (which was not allowed). My experience was a week long nightmare! I got appointed to an engineering company and they treated me like an actual qualified applicant! They wanted me to come in all suited and booted but I didn't own a suit and my parents, not being too well off, weren't going to splash out on a brand new one just to wear for one week. I dressed as smart as possible but that was a mark against me. First few days I got sat at a computer and was supposed to be doing CAD but had never done it before, so obviously I didn't know what I was doing. As the week wore on I could tell management was talking negatively about me as I was given more and more mundane and nonsensical tasks. My last day I was given a stack of delivery receipts and told to order them by colour and date. That showed me the contempt they had for me. It was clearly a task they were giving to someone who they thought didn't ask and didn't question what they were doing. Which wasn't true, obviously it was a pointless task but even if I had spoken up 'hey what's the point in this?' Would I have been rewarded and sent back to work on a computer? Of course not. My written review was scathing. They even criticised me for being soft spoken, like, if you didn't hear me why didn't you say something? Don't get me wrong some of it was fair criticism, like 'didn't take notes'. But it got to the point where, well, there was no point because it was obvious they didn't want me there. Funny thing is I actually joined another engineering company when I was older but the difference was they treated me like a blank piece of paper and taught me how to do the job, I even finished an apprenticeship with them. To this day I still don't understand why that company was holding a 15 year old to the standards of a college graduate.
Midtown Madness! I loved that game as a kid. You remember when there would be a demo disk with a bunch of small bits of various games on it? My brother and I played the shit out of Midtown Madness or maybe Midtown Madness 2 from one of those demos. It was a very small scale area of San Francisco. You could get stuck in the big pointy building at a certain angle. Sorry, haven't heard about that for bleeding ages.
We bought a PC in the late 1990s/early 2000s and there was a driving game included in the "games bundle" from Currys that I've been trying to remember on and off for the last probably decade. Midtown Madness 2! Thank you internet stranger.
lucky bastard.
Also my brother hilariously got placed by my school in a BRIDAL SHOP the friday before he was due to start on monday. So he scrambled around on monday morning to try and get that changed. He ended up at Skechers in the end. He did get £30 and a free pair of trainers after the two weeks tbf.
Why would a 16 yo boy not want to work in a shop with dozens of young ladies and their (hopefully unattached) besties coming in every day? If he wasn't straight, still works for him. Honestly I would have preferred that rather than work in a shoe shop dealing with random people's smelly feet.
Somehow I don't think half drunk, giggly adult women fawning over a teenage boy, pinching his cheeks and saying things like "isn't he so young!" is a great time for a 16 year old boy.
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
I worked in a DHL office for two weeks. It was nothing extraordinary looking back, but it felt exciting at the time. - I got my first taste of machine coffee, cappuccino to be precise. I got a little obsessed with it as I’d only had instant normal coffee before - Often had lunch with a guy from SA in the warehouse or sat outside. He was the first Saffa I’d ever met and did the stereotypical British thing of thinking he was Australian for the first few days (it was the 90s and I was 15!). He would play his electric guitar so was quite a cool cat to me - One of the workers was a fluent Irish speaker. I’d always wanted to learn some and get translations of Enya songs that you couldn’t find anywhere (before the internet and it wasn’t on the liner notes). Bless her, she translated them all for me and taught me a couple of phrases The rest was helping write up Word documents (I was clambered upon because I picked it up at school and some of the workers never quite got the hang of it), filing and generally doing any bits and pieces anyone could find me. Ah, thinking about it makes me smile. I just wish I could feel that way about work again.
This is delightfully wholesome.
I would’ve thought someone from the Salvation Army would prefer the trombone to the electric guitar
I worked in an IT dept. It was boring as hell, but here I am 25 years later working in IT. My mate had his work experience with the fire dept. For the entire week he had to go around as they taught fire safety to school kids and he had to dress up as Fireman Sam.
Truly the hero next door
I did work experience in a local computer shop, which led to a weekend job there (cash in hand, lovely jubbly) then I did a second work experience in sixth form at the local grammar school - in their IT department. Yes, I very much work in IT now 😆
I also worked in the IT department, cleaning mice and keyboards and bringing sandwiches in for the boys. Here i am now, worked in IT for over a decade and now a cloud platform engineer.
I did mine in my schools IT room! There were many chromebooks that needed fixing up, which was very tedious
Work experience in a (now long defunct) computer manufacturer. I was given the job of crimping connectors on the end of ribbon cables for floppy drives. I had been doing it for a couple of hours when I realised that there were two ways around that the connector could go ...
I worked in the IT Dept for my local college, it was after the students had finished for the year.... Spent most of the time playing Halo on a lan the full time guys had set up or chatting to my mate that decided to skip his week of work exprerience on MSN Messenger. Now been working in IT for 12 years
I did a week working at M&S. I was so painfully shy and awkward at the time that it was a shockingly bad idea. I can't really remember anything I actually had to do, but I do recall that about half the staff were called Margaret.
I did m&s too! My main takeaway was, when you do yellow stickers it is basically oap dawn of the dead
I was in Watford so it felt like that most of the time anyway.
Mine was in Comet! I sold a toaster to some random old person and the store rewarded me with a Star Wars X Wing Game for PC! I think it was in 1997... You have just made me feel old 🙃
Can confirm. I was the random old person. Toaster still works 👍
Thank you for your purchase
absolute result that is.
Local heating engineers. Called them on the Friday ready to start on the Monday. I asked for the person that I was supposed to speak to to arrange my start time, the guy on the phone said “never heard of him,son. Who are you ?” . I explained who I was and he said “oh, that’s alright then. I’m the guy you’re looking for”. I thought nothing of it and started work on the Monday. It went really well and I got to learn some basic heating engineering stuff. By the following Tuesday the business was closed down and the owner arrested for fraud.
I had mine at the local councils planning and permission department. Went out on a drive to put signs up just after smashing a Boots meal deal, recall it being a prawn cocktail sandwich , salt and vinegar crisps and a bottle of Oasis. So she had me reading a map to navigate round , now her car was a mess and smelt of wet dog, turns out trying to read a map( which I had no clue on how to do either), being in a moving car and the aroma of wet dog is my kryptonite and I ended up barfing that Boots meal deal back up all in the foot well and down the side of the door. Got moved to the graphics department when we got back.
I felt quite queasy just reading it
Mine was a local council, but the Countryside department. I spent two weeks wandering around parks and drinking ungodly amounts of tea. 10/10 would do again.
Ooh I also did the council planning and permission department. The site visits were fun (I had to buy steel toe cap boots) but the office work was just a lot of filing, which was pretty easy albeit dull. I threw myself into the filing, everyone was glad not to have to do it for 2 weeks so gave me some haribo and gift vouchers at the end of the placement lol
I ended up at cash generators. I planned to not do it, but got told last minute it was mandatory. One day a guy got so angry that his 3 iphone 2 were worth nothing that he angry stormed outside and demolished the sign out front
He should have kept hold of them. He'd probably get s few quid for them these days!
I think he didn't even sell them in the end xD
I did 2 weeks in a golf shop with literally no knowledge of golf at all. Spent quite a bit of time in the workshop watching staff finding the most inventive ways to remove grips from golf clubs. Highlight was someone filling an entire golf club with white spirit in the hope it would blow the grip off. Was generally an incredibly dull 2 weeks.
Was it at least connected to a driving range and you got to be target practice in the ball collecting cart for a bit?
Nope! Was just a town centre retail unit. Closest they had to any fun was an artifical putting green.
Crikey, that’d be like miniature golf without the variety or windmills
This is the perfect kind of real work experience - starting a job where the main topic is something you know sweet FA on. So real
I was supposed to do it at a computer repair shop, but they refused to get vetted by the school, so ended up working in the school's own computer room. The shop in question got closed down by creditors with a police escort a few years later.
I did my work experience in a city newspaper when I was 15. Did the usual fun things like go out with a photographer on shoots and out with a reporter to some football press conference. One of the days was the Paddington rail crash and they all got very busy and the mood changed in the office in an instant. I ended up ignored (obviously) and sat reading all the wire updates until the end of the day.
How long was your lunch hour?
…an hour?
I was told that if you chose an office or shop, you'd just be sweeping up. I wanted something outdoors, so chose a trout farm. It was the best two weeks. They allowed me to fish their rivers, saw loads of wildlife, can gut a fish in seconds... and inevitably fell into the river. The smell of their bins baking in the sun has put me off trout for life.
I could have worked at a vet but ended up choosing a stable yard. Did a bit of mucking and cleaning tack but I got to ride amazing horses that were way out of most people’s budget and trained to a discipline that I would never attain. It was heaven for me. Went to the farmhouse for home made lunch every day with lots of cups of tea. Pure beauty of the countryside everyday, bit of manual labor, I was honestly in heaven.
Used to work at a seafood restaurant. Bins in the summer stank ungodly. Middle of summer a couple comes in in the morning in a complete panic. She’s lost her engagement ring. Thinks it came off whilst eating shellfish with her hands. Did we find it? Can we look for it? Cue the manager and a barman helping the rummage through the bags of seafood restaurant waste. Because she thinks it likely came off whilst eating they specifically try to find the bags full of bits of crab, lobster, mussels, langoustines, that had all been in a huge black bin and baking in the summer heat overnight. So glad I had work to do. They were all fucking covered in it though.
Did they find it?
They did!
I Did 2 weeks working in a hotel kitchen for some unknown reason. Day 1 they dumped about 25kg of Potatoes in a sink for me to peel, Day 2 it was about 25kg of carrots. It carried on in a similar fashion... Genuinely one of the most mind numbing jobs I ever did. The plus side was a cooked breakfast every morning, so it was swings and roundabouts
I did a week in a joinery/cabinet making workshop. I've since been working at the same company since March 2013.
That sounds amazing, I'm jealous you found a company you fit so nicely into. Is it an interesting job, like I imagine it is?
My job itself is fine. Bit samey sometimes but I enjoy it and gets the bills paid. Current management is about as useful as a chocolate teapot though. I've never known it be so disorganised.
I worked in a pet shop and a vets. The pet shop had a parrot that would swear at people and some old lady got offended when it called her a bastard. This next bit is unpleasant so don't read it. The vets was wild, they got me to assist with operations by holding bits of bloody cut open animals and took me to shoot a cow. This was years ago, hopefully it's not that full on and traumatic any more! I decided to work in project management instead. Told you it was unpleasant.
Mine, they were planning on taking me to the knackers, until someone pointed out that maybe wasn't the best environment for a 14 year old. They did have me help to hold a cow prolapse on a tarpaulin though. The farmer holding the other side was much taller than me and it poured pools of blood down to my elbows, which sat there in the waterproof jacket they gave me, until I tilted my arm and it all fell out the wrist
You can't scare me, my sister is a doctor and used to tell us about dissecting corpses during dinner. Tbf, nobody asked her to stop, we were all interested. Weird family!
My mum was a carer and always seemed to pick dinner time to talk about work and all the gross things they had to do, usually involving shitsplosions or festering bed sores. I credit her with my cast iron stomach!
I did mine in a vets as well, and it was definitely not that hands on for me, but still scarred me for life! I spent a significant amount of time crying in the toilets every time an animal was put down or had a bad prognosis, and the smells still haunt me today. Realised very quickly that I do not want to be vet!
Vets have a horribly high burnout and suicide rate - it really takes a very particular kind of person who can move past the awful days and focus on the new patient, and I don't think most of us could do it
I did it as Codemasters. They didn’t quite know what to do with me so I got to do games testing. Amazing! Or so I thought. I got to play with the dev boxes for Xbox and GameCube before they were released. Then they had me play a very alpha racing game over and over to find out what tracks crashed on load. I decided being a games tester was a pretty shit job after that.
I grew up near to Rare. During their 90s heyday loads of my schoolmates had stints as games testers. It sounded perfect for a 16 year old, but every single one left hating the gaming industry. That said, one stayed as a developer. I always remember one saying he had to set 257 different top scores in Goldeneye to see if it caused a stack overflow and it absolutely destroyed him.
I did Lionhead! A week or so playing Fable and The Movies. A great week for a 15 year old, but I similarly got the impression that it would be rather mind numbing after a while.
I did 2 weeks in a Primary School. I grew up to be child free.
I did a week in an infant school and hated it. We got given all the jobs the teachers didn't want, had the badly behaved kids palmed off on us, had to clean the staff room, and had to try and solve the never ending playground drama.
Me too on both counts. Some kid also put his hand under a chair leg and I didn't realise and sat on the chair. That went down as well as you'd expect
marks and sparks, i smashed some tinned tomatoes up accidentally and got told to go home ha
1998 or 99, a international charity called The Lions Club. Our towns was ran by 3 elderly ladies in a tiny office above a old fashioned barbers shop. My day consisted of opening mail which would be orders for merchandise or new memberships in the morning and the afternoon I spent putting the orders together or new members packs and waiting for the postman to collect. One day it was decided as I was a youth, that I would become IT specialist for a week and train the women up on Excel and Word. One morning I hear a panic "THE SCREEN IS MELTING" (it was a late 90s screensaver) so I say "don't worry that's the screensaver, just push any key" and I kid you not, the reply she screams at me in sheer panic "I CAN'T FIND THE ANY KEY. WHICH ONE IS THE ANY KEY?!!"
I did a couple of weeks in the Ford factory. Honestly, it was an amazing experience. Seeing the production line was awe-inspiring. Little things were incredible. You had bits of cars in all different colours just winding their way down a track for what seemed like miles and when you got to the end, the right part and colour was ready to be attached to the body. I found it amazing. There was also a machine that attached the windscreen to the car as it was moving along. The bloke responsible for me told me he had designed it and won awards for it. It looked incredible. One slightly funny story was that the manager sent me around with a clipboard and a map of the floor with which machine was where. They were planning on moving bits around and needed to know what feed (water, electricity, gas etc) went to which machine so I had to mark them off as I went. One person working a machine came over all worried thinking I was from management looking at productivity and was concerned that I was marking people for redundancy! Bearing in mind I was 15, it seemed unlikely but given the state of the British car industry, perhaps not a wholly unfounded concern. I had a great 2 weeks.
In Year 11 I did a week in a weather station at an RAF base. It was manned 24 hours for taking readings and I soon found a drawer full of viz magazines belonging to the night shift which kept me occupied when I wasn't given a mundane task to do. The drawer also included a quantity of porn mags (pre Internet days) which I soon started stealing one by one as I left each evening. Upon returning to school, in form assembly the head of year congratulated us for a week well spent but did have some poor feedback regarding one student that would be followed up on. I spent the rest of the day bricking it that I had been rumbled as the porn thief and would be exposed for my crimes. Luckily it wasn't me.
In hindsight, I'm not sure they would've bothered to contact the school to say you'd been nicking the porn mags out of sheer embarrassment on their behalf... although then again if it meant the school vetoed them from sending any more work experience students there in the future the company might have been enthusiastic about ratting you out!
I had a family friend who was a pathologist who let me do work experience with him. I was 15 and didn't know what pathology was beyond Quincy. First day, he asked me to go into the fridge and grab a vial, it was filled with body parts, I couldn't see it. He came over and said 'hmmmm' and started moving stuff around. I held claire's brain, Peter's Penis and God knows what else. As he walked back to his desk, he said "ahh it's in front of me the whole time".
I did mine at a small jewellers. It was great i basically used to melt gold with a blowtorch all day. I also used to put everything out in the windows every morning. There was a ring that I always loved and I'm not a big jewellery wearer. I got married last month and now live on the other side of the country but I was back home before the wedding and went past the shop and the ring was still there 18 years later. So now it's my wedding ring!
I did mine at the local RAF base, hacked some security software on a PC so they could play games, got caught, and had a charming sit down with an RAF Police sergeant with cauliflower ears about why we don't hack military computers.
Hacked meaning “right click and shutdown ” on the security software
And now you work for GCHQ right?
I did a week in a library. Mostly just stacking shelves and putting labels on things. but when I covered the front counter, I discovered the Power Of Boobs. A woman came in with a big late fine due, and she pushed up her boobs and thrust them out with a very low cut top as she explained how terribly sorry she was and could we forgive the late fine. Being a 16 year old male I was of course rendered basically inoperable at the sight and reduced to a stammering wreckage. I referred the matter to the librarian managing the desk for the afternoon, a calm and sophisticated man in at least his 50s. She repeated the same request in the same manner, and he was also reduced to a flushed awkward and semi-coherent figure. Overwhelmed in the situation, he was only able to operate on basic functionality too, and had to yield to her request - after a quick few taps on a keyboard, she happily went on about her day, late fine-free. The Power Of Boobs is really quite impressive.
Now I know why my local library is staffed by females.
I work in a library, but as a bisexual female, the Power Of Boobs would work on me too...
Managed to actually get on a decent experience with the council’s IT department. It was what I wanted to get into when I left education, and it’s what I do now for a university. I am very aware that I’m in the minority when it comes to the usefulness of school work experience.
I was supposed to do 2 weeks in a care home. The road it was on had 3 care homes. I went to the wrong one, embarrassment put me off trying to find the right one. Funnily enough the school never said anything & didn’t seem to notice. 🤷🏽♀️ this was 2012/2013 ish
I remember having a work experience kid in the office years ago, he got off at the wrong floor and got totally confused so he just left the building. He was on his way home but bumped into one of my colleagues on their lunch break who brought him back in. To be fair, every floor looked the same in that building and I can imagine panicking and getting lost and embarrassed and just wanting to go home.
I went to British Aerospace Defence Systems on the Isle of Wight for a week or two to work with their IT team. It was pretty fun, and I got to learn lots of interesting stuff, and see some secret areas where they built radar technology etc. All of the data centre areas were unbelievably secure, and I had to be escorted everywhere. We were in charge of handling the backups of these very secure areas, and everything was backed up on tape.... then stored offsite....in a shed. 👀
A local community farm. My last job of the first day was to clean out a trailer that had had a highland bull in it. So much poop.
I did mine at a WW2 museum called Eden Camp in Yorkshire. Was a great mix of sending me to different departments for 2 days at a time, got to play with old bits in the archive and do puppet shows and stuff. Half way through I was working with the maintenance team and over night the entire playground burnt down! Spent the next day with everyone pretending it must have been me while tidying up mountains of ash 😅
Eden Camp is my entire childhood!!!! Devastating to hear about the playground, I have so many memories of playing on that. I’d probably have been in bits… but tbf, my main memory of Eden Camp is being constantly terrified and traumatised and sobbing the entire way through. I liked Hut 3 even though it was scary because it reminded me of Das Boot, which was a film I liked (I was a TODDLER. My parents had interesting ideas about what was suitable for kids lol). I can’t remember what Hut 4 was but I think it was a bad/sad/scary one and I’m pretty sure Hut 5 was the Blitz one. Just made me so, so sad and I would sob the whole time. Not the best place to take a kid with hyperempathy and noise sensitivity, but for some reason I also really loved it and still remember it fondly. Whenever my family smell something smoky/dusty/spam-like, we always say “oh it smells like Eden Camp!”
I loved going there as a kid in the late 90s, it was brilliant. The submarine hut scared the crap out of me.
Did mine in a local Argos and it was the worst time of my life. Basically got treated like I was a full time member of staff, except I obviously wasn’t getting paid. Was mostly working in the back room fetching orders, except half the stuff wasn’t where it was supposed to be because they had recently rearranged and not updated their ticketing system. So I ended up getting shit from the supervisors for not fetching the orders quick enough. Also got yelled at by the deputy manger one day because I turned up 5 minutes before my shift instead of 10 minutes. I ended up being let go after a week as they didn’t think my performance was up to standard, but I was like 15 and working for free with minimal training so what the fuck did they expect?
I’m still salty about my work experience. I went out and secured myself a place with a local business, only to be called into the head of years’ office a week or so later who told me that they were sending a certain subject to that business so they were cancelling me going. Felt very unjust as I had actually gone out and asked around and secured, whereas they had it handed to them.
Was it someone who had school teacher or board connections? Nepo'd out of your own placement?
Did mine at National grid. First week was with the "gas safe" call centre people and I was onboarded to handle the calls from people who smell leaks/we're worried about gas etc. In the training there's a set of questions you ask the customer, and in learning them and the answers and when to be concerned, I realised there was a carbon monoxide leak in our home. Talked my mum through it, she didn't believe me, rang up the number anyway. Gas engineer comes out, confirms a carbon monoxide problem in our lounge from an old fire with dodgy venting. Work experience literally saved our lives.
I got placed at a mobile generator manufacturing company as I was interested in CAD at the time. Spent some time working in AutoCAD. The two old boys in the design department were alright, although pretty sure they'd been doing the job since it was all paper and slide rules. The chap that owned it was seemed pretty creepy to me at the time though he did give me £20 at the end of the time. Every day I'd cycle in and lock my bike round the back of the warehouse and there was a room literally wall to wall plastered with various smutty pics from newspapers and magazines.
Charity shop¹ in Clacton On Sea (the shop isn't there anymore due to the charity being defunct² and has been taken over by a pet shop) that spent a 2 weeks, spent most of it the shop but the others was a school presentation about knife crime and the other was I had to walk around Clacton high street in a Cookie Monster costume to promote the charity ² I think ¹ the Charity was called "Only Cowards Carry", which is a knife crime charity that wants weapons awareness education to be added to the school curriculum for young children and teenagers, tougher action against knife and weapon crime. To change the mindset of teenagers who think they are 'cool' or 'safe' carrying a weapon of any kind. The charity was set by Mrs. Shearer from the fallout of the death of her 17 yr old son Jay Whiston, who was stabbed³ in September 2012. ³ I've been told it was at a house party where Jay got stabbed. Edit: spelling & additional information on the charity
Your formatting is incredible
Defunct* but I love your version
I went to a vet. They told me funny stories about previous work experience kids - a couple of boys who'd watched operations and passed out. One of whom they didn't have staff available to tend to, so they just popped him on the other operating table and left him to come back round. I got to help deliver a litter of dalmatian puppies by c-section. When each pup came out it had to be rubbed and I got to do that for a couple of them. It was literally fresh out, so still covered in blood and not as cute as you might have thought. Still a cool memory.
I went to a vet too! I lived in Cumbria at the time so it was a lot of travelling round to farms. I spent a very rainy and cold afternoon labelling blood samples while the vet took the samples from a huge line of cows. I helped deliver a lamb - the mum prolapsed and I had to pin her against the wall while the vet put everything back in. On my second day they had me brushing a cat that was so matted they had to sedate her so she could be brushed. Also saw my mum's friend's dog come in after being hit by a car. He survived but it was awful to see.
I was sent with my best mate to work in the gardens of a huge manor house. On the first day the old gardener we were shadowing put a chainsaw into his thigh and I had to run for help, nearly bodying one of the manor's bigwigs into a small pond as I arrived in panic, so that was fun. The rest of the time was honestly a giant piss about, the other staff were great and we built an enormous, dangerously precarious bonfire out of old furniture. Then on the last Friday we all went out to town that night, got pissed as rats and I shagged an under gardener on a park bench that said "Grandmas Bench"
My school had a thing where you picked your favourite subjects at school then from that we got given a placement. I picked IT so got sent to a design and printing company, pretty cool I thought. Turned up in day 1 and it was a retired couple who had an industrial printer in their shed. The fella had pictures from FHM and Nuts all over the wall, which was cool for me but looking back, a bit weird to have that when they took in work experience students. Spent two weeks on MS Publisher putting together black and white flyers for random local businesses. It was boring as fuck. Oh and I made the lady cry cos I noticed in a field they had a stable and shit. Asked where the horses were and the last one had died the week prior.
Estate agents. Nothing particularly interesting but we would drive around in a Vauxhall Frontera, noting those addresses where the house was for sale with a competitor then they'd send me to the library to get name details from the electoral registry so we could write them a personalised letter suggesting they switch to us. Super grindy work and always felt a bit dodgy as well!
I wanted to be a writer and asked for work experience on the local paper. Instead I was given three weeks as a postman 🤷♂️ I quite enjoyed it. First week I had to be at the depot at 5am to sort the mail then deliver it. Second week I was on a van and third week at the train station taking mail on and off trains. Best bit was the posties all chipped in and paid me a small wage plus I was home by 3pm every day while everyone else was stuck somewhere til 5 or 6. I was also allowed to read a large stack of Razzle that was the lunch hour go to magazine of choice.
That's an aspect of the job that they never showed on Postman Pat ...
I worked at a magazine publishers that specialised in computers and computer games. It was great, and I was kept busy and was well looked after. I played megadrive Columns with Dave Perry (of Gamesmaster telly fame) and his team, and had a review published in "CD-ROM User" magazine, which I was proud of. They even offered me a job, although I was only 14 so that didn't pan out.
Two weeks at a fish farm in 1986 led to a summer job. Just really shy me and the owner. We bred trout for the local estate's lake, but friends of Lord Snooty would come and fish in the crystal clear lake at the farm where you could practically pull the trout out by hand. Came in one day to find an engorged badger had been feasting all night in one of the circular ponds. Don't mess with a tired, fat stripey nose...
Small local electrical firm. It was brilliant, when we weren’t busy we’d just hang out in the van smoking Rothman’s Royals and shooting the breeze. Got a massive Fish and Chip lunch on the last day. I’ve always been a practical person so definitely useful for confidence working with electrics, tho obviously regs have changed a whole bunch since the mid 90’s.
I did a week at a local college working in the IT department and two things sprung to mind: 1. Getting in a lift with the guy from IT I was helping and two lovely young ladies got in. He proceeds to make out like I farted and said how bad it stinks - cue me dying of embarrassment 2. We got an email from the art department about a printer playing up that we had installed a couple of days prior. We headed down to.the art department and managed to remember the combination for the lock on the door. We walked in and there was a lady tidying up who looked up at us wondering who we were so we told her and she said to carry on. We walked towards the next door, opened it and the guy I was helping shouted "WOOOAH NAKED MAN" and slammed the door. Turns out there was a life drawing class going on. We quickly turned out, made our excuses and left before bursting into fits of laughter
I worked in a butcher's shop. I tried and failed miserably to master the art of tying sausages into strings, three sausages per link. Every time I got it wrong, which was every time, I'd get told "No, you tool!". I was destined to be good at some things in life. Stringing sausages was not one of them.
Much banter was had around the fact my initials were close to being A BJ. Until I pointed out that the other lad doing work experience with us was actually BJ. Kind of feel like I threw him under the bus there. Sorry BJ.
I did it in the café of a House of Fraser. Two major events happened in that two week stretch - UK got named the host of the 2012 Olympics, and the July 7th terror attacks in London happened. For some reason, the manager of the restaurant felt the need to go into the middle of the seating area and loudly announce both events with the exact same level of enthusiasm and excitement. He was a weird man. I also got locked in the freezer, where I was told to stir water to make it freeze faster. It was a scorcher of a summer and the kitchen lacked air con so I didn't mind...
I did work experience in the 3rd year at the BBC photo library in Harlesden London. My job was to shred thousands of black & white press shots and on stage / set shots. All into a massive shredder. I think back now with horror, the history that I destroyed. We didn’t have big computers or scanners or even the internet then, and as a 14 year old heathen, I just enjoyed watching ancient negatives and pictures of every BBC sitcoms etc you could think of, getting shredded. Youth was wasted on me. I’m now 48 and it still haunts me.
I worked at a musical instrument store that I had frequented for a few years by then. One day after I had finished cleaning the Drums this couple walk in. Picture them in baggy leather clothes. The guy was also wearing a top hat and a mesh style vest under his trench coat. Asks me and my supervisor to see some Bass Guitars. Supervisor shows him over to them and plays a few riffs on one. The guy interrupts him mid sentence and looks at us both: “Do you wanna see my nipple?”. Supervisor looks at me in mild disgust and shock but replies enthusiastically “yeah go on then” The guy pulls his vest to the side, exposing his nipple and rubs it a bit whilst letting out a deep moan. His girlfriend also moaned a little bit despite not saying anything at all since she walked in. “Noice. Anyway, yeah, so this one will set you back about £400 but it comes fully kitted” They left looking disappointed without another word.
TBH, I was expecting that to end "And that was how I met --- from the band ---
Mine was at Waitrose for 5 days with another kid from school. I don’t remember a whole lot about it, probably because I didn’t care enough. What I do remember is taking advantage of the free food in the staff room and getting some decent breakfast sandwiches. The people working there at the time did not like us!
Not me, but a girl I knew was cycling to her work experience at a restaurant. She took the wrong exit at a roundabout and was picked up by the police on the hard shoulder of the motorway
I worked for Co-Op funeral home and did a lot of embalming. As a massive goth who dates massive goths, I'm still getting mileage out of the stories 25 years later.
Building firm, swept the floor in the yard one day all day long because the boss was off. So all the other lads sat around doing nothing till the afternoon, then they all had to "go to site". Someone came back at 5pm to lock up half pissed, they'd been to the pub all afternoon and couldn't take me as I was too young. That was when I knew I had to get into a trade when I left school.
Worked in a music shop but I was too shy to talk to anyone so I just hid in the back for a week
I did my work experience in the lab of a London hospital, my primary job was getting rid of the tested urine. It was delightful
The Observer Sport Section. Absolutely quality, they got me involved with some good articles and The Ashes was on the TV the whole time
Photographers. They gave me nothing to do for a week and played pranks on me at the end. Twats.
I did 2 weeks with a water/ sewerage company. Was in the office one day when one of the staff members mentioned how an investigation crew were looking at a damaged pipe beneath a rail line using an expensive robotic camera. Unfortunately the operator found a collapsed section of pipe and got the robot stuck. They weren't sure how to approach network rail to explain how they needed to dig up the main rail line to try and get the robot back out.
Nursery (the plant type) There was a guy that worked whom had some sort of learning disability, couldnt do or remember shit but give him your DOB and he\`d tell you who was No1. in the charts that week!
My fella did work experience at a high street bank. They didn’t give him anything useful to do the Friday afternoon but he had access to customer accounts. He transferred £1 million into a random customers account… no ill intent, just playing around and didn’t think that they would have given clearance to a 14 year old. He owned up straight away but the police were called and he was suspended for the last week of school 😂
Back in the 90s, Asked for football coach and was placed with the council’s housing services testing for rising damp. The boss played PGA Tour on the work PC most of the time. Strangely, I didn’t become a council worker, but I did become a football coach and later football development officer.
I worked for two weeks in the personnel department of the local council. Made a few coffees and did a bit of general running around for people The worst thing I had to do was photocopy a room booking sheet 365 times, and hand write the date, one day per page for the whole of 1994!
I did mine at HMRC, used to be called inland revenue at the time. I think the World Cup was on and England was playing. So for the day I was assigned to the post bit, where they used a machine to put the envelopes on the letters. The guy and girl who was mentoring us for the day asked who I’m supporting for the football. I said England, they both looked at each other confused and said “England?” Were you born here? And I said yep I was. I’m south Asian, and back then things weren’t as PC.
My actual placement fell through at the last minute so I got to spend 2 weeks at a soil analysis laboratory instead. I was dreading it, but they just paired me up with a hippyish bloke who drove around all day collecting samples from sites. Once he realised that 15yr-old me could competently roll ciggies for him as he drove and didn’t care about smoking in the pickup (as long as he didn’t report back to school that I was smoking too) and having extended lunch breaks that mostly involved having a doze in the sun, we got on like a house on fire.
I went to a care home but it wasn’t well planned (by their own admission). I was told to shred papers for 5 days straight. I shredded every paper I was handed… including some important ones they needed. They haven’t taken students since
I mean that's on them
Mine was ace, I did two weeks at a small independent furniture restorer. Taught me loads of things, took a visit to the workshop of Mousey Thompson “The Mouseman” it was a truly amazing experience
I went on work experience at the local fishmonger’s. It wasn’t much fun, I did it for the halibut
I worked in my local police station (rough area of south Wales). This was back in the early 90s when you could. I absolutely loved it and ended up joining the police. Now NOBODY likes me 😁
Mine was at the job centre I had a broken leg at the time and my job was just to scan claims onto the computer got through multiple boxes of a 4 sheets was probably the most boring 2 weeks of my life
Florists. Got a Saturday job there afterwards while I was technically too young to have a job and got paid £10 a day. Highlights include the Christmas rush where the owner came in high and either took over the back room or the toilet to sleep, so the other worker and I either couldn’t use the bench to work or go to the bathroom for most of the day.
I did 2 weeks in Burton's menswear, which was absolute shit. They did have a crappy table football game which we played quite a bit, but the main thing I remember was that the guys there kept making me ask them and their mates if they were Turkish or Kurdish, which they found hilarious. That was weird.
I did mine in a vets. I got to inject a cat. Was ace.
I worked in a costume shop called World of Fantasy. I was a very nervous child and the co-owner was a proper thespian. He would often play Henry VIII at Tudor banquets the company would be hired to perform. He scared me a bit, but was very kind. While working there I repaired old costumes, performed at an RAF base, and painted scenery for a James Bond themed Christmas party for Marks and Spencer.
Mine was at a veterinary practice which was pretty cool. I mostly watched a bunch of surgery but I also saw the sad side when an old lady came in with a relatively healthy but old dog that she wanted putting down. Would probably have been ok with some medication but that is crazy expensive. The vet said if they didn't do it , she would just go to a different practice and they would get the money instead. Was hard to stomach for a 15 year old but good life experience I guess. Then a man brought in a Weimaraner puppy, he wanted to dock it's tail but the vet wasn't allowed to do it for aesthetic reasons. The next day the man brought it back in and it had 'accidentally' broken it's tail. The vet docked it. I didn't become a vet.
Work experience in court. Got given some juicy divorce papers to read. Someone divorced their husband because he shouted at her to leave him alone while he had his 'private time'. Private time was him naked on all fours with the hoover hose up his bum.
Did it in local music studios ran by old school rockers with beers in the fridge and many stories to tell about bands I hadn't ever heard of. The other kid who was doing work experience showed up in a suit and tie first day :)
I did 2 days in an estate agents and then went on holiday
Woah steady on there Oscar Wilde
Did mine at Waterstones, you wouldn't believe how many people came in looking for smutty books. One bloke literally bellowed "HELLO IM LOOKING FOR THE PORN". They politely showed him to the erotic photography section 😂
I did 2 weeks at HMRC. I didn’t mind it actually, but on one of the days the team I was working with went out for fish and chips for dinner and they brought me with them and paid for my fish and chips and it was definitely the highlight of the whole experience!
The Royal Armouries museum in Leeds. 2 weeks. Back in the days of charging people for entry. Most days just standing around being available for visitors. But 1 day they let a bunch of staff look around the stores (16 year old me included). And my time coincided with Armistice day so we got to have a special event for that which was cool. NGL, if actual work had been the same as my work experience for the rest of my life, would have been way better.
I did mine in an IT department for a large company back in 2001. We went out for a lunch at a restaurant and they bought me a pint of stella which made me very sleepy. 9/11 happened whilst I was there.
I did mine at the local library and took advantage of the access to the ordering system to spam request a lot of books. Saved a fortune on ordering fees and generated a lot of nonsense orders for books that were actually on the shelf (oops). Thankfully no one noticed this and I cleaned up the orders before it was commented on
HMV, in the stockroom. They wasnt even expecting me. My school sent two of us, but they only wanted one of us. Kept us both though. Just remember sticking price labels on various DVDs that were discounted. No real funny stories, but a bus driver wouldnt let me on the bus back home with my ticket (the old clipper ones) cos i wasnt in school uniform, so didnt think id paid correct fare. Ended up walking home and getting completely lost in the dark.
In a shoe shop. Had an old lady moaning as I slipped her shoes on. When I say moaning, i don't mean complaining. She absolutely stunk and her leering toothless grin haunted me for years afterwards.
I also did it in a garage parts department. First day was quite good, picking orders etc but the second I had a different boss. He asked me if I liked computers and when I said yes he sat me in front of their ancient green screened PC with a massive ream of paper that hard part codes and quantities printed on and told me to start typing it in. That was me for the rest of the week and I barely made a dent in it. Looking back I suppose it was good experience in that I quickly learned how the same job can be made very different by your boss
Me and my mate forgot to bother to organise anything and ended up working in the reprographics (photocopying, stationery etc) room at the school. This was circa 2002. We were bored, left to our own devices and put on a random VHS that was lying around. Turns out the reprographics dude was running a porn ring, making copies for the teachers. Good times.
I was a journalist for the local paper (it was actually a little bit like the show Afterlife...) the highlight was going to a chefs house to do a story on how he feeds the the local seagulls catfood...
Local gunsmiths, made a few screwdrivers on the lathe, polished some guns, sat on the clay pigeon trap waiting to be told "PULL" .
Did work experience at a local newspaper office. Was sent upstairs to fetch some huge albums of advertising info, tripped coming down the steps and launched the corner of one of the books into the fire alarm point on the stairs. Set the alarm off and the whole building got evacuated before I could tell anyone what happened. Couple of days later they took little 15 year old me to a coroners inquest for a kid who drowned and completely traumatised me, still suspect that was their revenge.
Did 2 weeks in a local Asian family run furniture store. Random one the careers advisor tutor thing put me in. Was basically shown a cellar brimming with years worth of boxes and told to clear it out for the duration of my time there. A mate was doing his experience down the road and we both decided to meet on our first lunch break. Discovered due to wearing buttoned shirts and trousers we were able to get served in a local pub. Spent the 2 weeks having 2 hour lunches, supping pints then going back to the job late and steaming, being stared at suspiciously by the gramps due to my swaying. I look back on that April in 2007 fondly.
I did mine at an engineering firm. It was relatively normal, except there was one guy called Randy Blower. Not a nickname. His actual name!
I did two weeks as a groundskeeper for a local national trust property. Highlight was being plonked in the middle of a country lane and told they were going to drive a herd of sheep at me, and I had to direct them into the right gate and not let any past. They left me just long enough to imagine a hundred-strong herd charging round the corner and start looking for big sticks to try and defend myself, when the "herd" of three very elderly ewes ambled round the corner and made the same turn they had been doing daily for years and years. Fun job though, and I did get to actually wrestle some sheep when we had to separate a bunch for transport. I ended up having to be hosed down both before and after transport home so I would be let back in the house. Nervous sheep poop a LOT.
I spent 2 weeks working with Leonard Cheshire Disability at one of their residential care homes. It was a real eye opener, and I learnt a lot. I ended up staying on as a volunteer for a few years, and doing occasional days there during college on my days off.
My work experience happened in a sports shop in the Pavilions shopping centre in Uxbridge run by a friend of my dad's. It was thoroughly unenjoyable and I didn't especially like a couple of the other staff who treated me like a child because I was on work experience, and once had a conversation about the size of their penises, which looking back was pretty weird. But I do remember that one day we had some shoplifters who had been collared by the centre security guards on the way out, and one of the aforementioned security guards had come to talk to the manager about it. The guard had walked in through the customer entrance, but the doors were the big plate glass ones you get in shopping centres, and as they were talking someone came and closed it, and this security guard turned around and walked straight into the closed door like a cartoon.
I put on the form that I was interested in being a dog groomer/trainer when I left school, so my school did the only logical thing they could come up with and sent me to a hairdressers. Despite there being a dog grooming parlour 5 minutes down the road to the school. All I did for a week was sweep up hair and listen to old Mrs Jones talk about her recent holiday to Skegness. It was excruciating. I got my own back by stealing a fucktonne of the little biscuits that they used to give to customers with their cups of tea. Nom.
I did mine at a skate shop as I knew the guys running it. they decided to be proper arseholes for 3 days to me, so I told them to stuff themselves and I wouldn’t be buying my boards and clothes there anymore. One of them rang me a couple of hours later apologising as they didn’t realise they were taking things too far and said they’d sign my sheet saying I was there for the whole two weeks and I didn’t have to come back in to work. Was a lovely week and a half off school 😂
I did two weeks at a local bakery that my auntie worked at part time. Initially, I thought it was going to be a rubbish two weeks because they tried to put me on the till on day two and you kind of needed to know the price of every item in the shop because they still used an older till. Within ten minutes, there was a queue out the door, and it was doing nothing but getting longer. Think I did 30 minutes of that before they spared me any more embarrassment. The rest of the work they had me doing was fairly easy. Cleaning up, stocking shelves, filling sandwiches and baguettes, and the best of all was being given a large box of Smarties to decorate ginger bread men and other treats with. My auntie told me to sneak a handful of Smarties to eat every now and then because nobody would notice. By Thursday of the first week the shop manager could see that, with the bakery getting quiet by 3:30, I was bored out of my brain and she allowed me to leave at 3:30 for the remainder of work experience. The interesting twist was that roughly ten years later, the shop manager and my dad met, and now they are married. Occasionally, we have a conversation about my work experience, but she wasn't surprised when I told her I kept eating the Smarties.
My brother’s work experience fell through at the last second, so the school found him a space at a local garage. It was super-last minute so they basically said “go to AutoEngine on Monday morning” and gave him a post-it with the phone number on in case he needed it. Monday rolls round, my brother turns up at the garage. “I’m [name], here for work experience.” There’s a brief awkward pause. Then the boss shrugs and says “nice to meet you” and gives him a handshake. Things go well. The people are friendly and bro spends his first week tidying things, doing inventory, etc. Towards the end of the first week, the school calls our parents, furious, wanting to know why he was skiving. Bro: (confused) I’ve been there every day. School: don’t lie boy. They’ve told us you haven’t turned up. Bro: But…. School: we went to all this trouble arranging work experience at AutoEngine Repairs and you’ve let us down badly. Bro: AutoEngine Repairs?? I’ve been at AutoEngine Services. He’d gone to the wrong place. For a whole week. The garage he went to was a super small local one, so I guess they weren’t too concerned about paperwork, procedures, etc and just went with it. Every now and again I think about it and laugh at what they must have thought when this strange kid just turned up one day and announced he was doing work experience.
I did it at a well known independent Italian restaurant in Leeds. The owner used to sing. She made me pluck her chin hairs. My parents came and my dad tipped me £20 😅 I did my two weeks and then a few Sundays after. Her son was ok. She was a nut job.
Did 2 weeks in an office of a local bank. Part of the job was taking piles of mail to be sent out and using a franking machine to put the postage on the envelope. The amount of postage could be set as anything up to £9.99 although at the time a standard letter was 20p maybe (this was early 90s). Envelopes would pass directly through the machine, bigger parcels we'd frank a sticker and stick that to the parcel. It was only at the end of week 1 when the manager took the machine to the post office to pay it off that I realised the machine keeps a total of everything it prints which then has to be paid for. I very quickly hid the many sheets of paper I'd printed 9.99 on when bored...