As a teenager I worked in a dessert factory where my duties included dropping circular sponge wafers, two at a time, into plastic pots as they wobbled past on the production line. I remember imagining I was dropping coins into my bank account, which helped. I also worked as a cleaner in a hotel, where I opened up a suite one morning to find that a well-known film director (now deceased) had smeared a large slice of chocolate cake across a glass coffee table, as he’d attempted to paint with it. As a waiter in a café I would sigh each morning at the arrival of the man who would try, every day, to get me to join him for breakfast, his wife fuming at his side.
The worst job I had as a teenager, however, was the single shift I spent waiting tables at a branch of Café Rouge – still at that point riding its endorsement in Bridget Jones’s Diary – which seemed fine until, as we closed up, the manager informed me that I had passed my “trial shift” and would begin being paid the following week. This unpaid element had not been negotiated, or indeed mentioned, so I quit on the spot with a threat to take the matter public, which I have now done. I could tolerate boredom and weird customers, but not being paid was unconscionable.
Content from our partners
