pondering

[burntcopper]

seperis just wrote a story that involved what servants actually do in a big castle, and this is rousing memories of the first time I watched Edwardian Country House (reality tv experiment where they made people *live* it in full Upstairs Downstairs mode - if you can get your hands on it, it's a fascinating social experiment) and yelling at the tv at the scullery maids who couldn't hack it - seriously, most of the first ones had never even done their own laundry before. Because I'd *done* that job in my teens. Slopping things out, cleaning, non-stop washing up, scrubbing floors - the only difference was that I'd done it for 8-hour shifts, not 14-hour ones. Still came home stinking and shattered. It's called Burger King and understaff in restaurants.

So, out of curiosity, how many of you lot did the equivalent of scullery maid/hall boy jobs?

Comments

[snowballjane.livejournal.com]

I worked in a hospital decontamination unit all summer once, which is similar -- cleaning, non-stop washing up of surgical instruments, folding and stacking scrubs! That was hard work.

[fahrenheit-f430.livejournal.com]

Nursery assistant. Promised: 9am-3pm for 5x days, NNEB entrance, 'more like being a classroom assistant, really'...

Actual: 7am-7pm for 5x days (8am-6pm every 3rd Saturday). Serving breakfast/lunch/tea to demanding 18 month to 6 year olds. Washing up. Emptying potties. Scrubbing the play tables (before & after meals and activities). Hoovering & mopping. Cleaning out the hamster. Dettoling everything from high chairs to Duplo. Washing the bedding in the afternoon-nap cots. Fetching coffee and answering the phone for the NNEBs. Bleaching the play area of squirrel & pigeon shit. Running errands. AND emptying the Dreaded Nappy Bin at the end of the day.

That's leaving out the play area supervision duty and H&S sweeps - neither of which I was supposed to do as unqualified 17 year olds need to have qualified members of staff stuck to them LIKE GLUE. Ferreting around in play area conifer bushes for broken glass and used condoms, and watching 60 running-about crazy under 5s isn't stuff a teenager should be left alone with.

All that for £30 a week. Every day I came home and cried for 3 months. Crap money, no qualification, long hours, BUT they STILL had to fire me! Best firing ever. I've never had a boss before or after say "YOU JUST DON'T FIT IN HERE! God, I thought you'd get the message when Leanne** was given a tabard!"

I now consider it my mission in life to warn anyone with kids away from 'professional' child care/minding services.

** Leanne spent more time demonstrating the perfect fanny fart, and gabbing with the NNEBs about how many nightclubs/drinks/men she'd got through on Friday night than doing any work.

[alasdair.livejournal.com]

I worked for Sainsbury's as a fishmonger. Came home stinking, shattered and with fish scales in places.

On the bright side, there is no washing up I'm terribly bothered about, and very few things I'm squeamish about handing, I don't care how foul and stinking it is. It cannot be worse than 8 hours up to my elbows in fish.

[gmh.livejournal.com]

Summer job when I was 15, back in 1989. Working for a tourist restaurant on the north side of the Abbey Courtyard in Bath.

(Because of what I'm about to say, I won't name names; suffice to say that it's still there and the only restaurant in that location. I hope it's improved since I was there.)

8 a.m. - 6 p.m. (or 12 a.m. - 10:30 p.m.) working as a waiter and server and washing-up person.

The kitchen: ambient temperature about 50C (according to the thermometer on the wall); small, cramped, and the chef (to abuse the term) was a tattood psychopath who liked throwing kitchen knives at passing waiters.

The room was so full of airborne fat that it was often difficult to see the opposite wall of a room (less than 4m away!).

And let's just say that I never ate another tuna mayonnaise sandwich after witnessing how the chef mixed them together.

The storage room: Since the restaurant had an ice cream bar attached, there were large chest freezers upstairs in a room - that was also used for storing the day's rubbish. Or the week's rubbish. When you're dealing with cheap binbags, there was often seepage - and as this was summer, a couple of days with no collection meant that the room stank; a primeval abomination of a smell that was easily noticeable throughout the whole upper floors of the building (the non-public areas); there were days when the only way you could get restocks of the ice cream was by holding your breath while in the room; the alternative was involuntary retching.

I could go on at length; at least one of the managers had a slightly unhealthy interest in some of the waitresses; it was known that you had to be careful about being left alone with him.

The pay? - this was before the minimum wage, and I was under 16; I think it was about £1.50 per hour.

The facilities were cramped (on one occasion, due to the lack of space, I got a teapot full of boiling water over the back. Which was fun.)

The one good thing about the place was the fraternity among the peons, many of whom were young and/or foreign; I learnt any number of Spanish obscenities that summer.

Suffice to say that I haven't set foot inside the place in the 20 years since.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I worked Sundays and some holidays as a housekeeper (=cleaner) at the school my mum worked at, which was for kids with severe cerebral palsy. Slops buckets, yep. Endless washing up, yep. Toilet cleaning, yep. Mopping, bleaching, scrubbing, yep.

[sgrio.livejournal.com]

*raises hand* I was nominally "wait staff" at a big catering company, but we were really general dogsbodies- we set up for banquets, washed and sorted the dishes, cleaned, took out the garbage and the recycling and sorted the laundry, scrubbed and polished and generally did everything that needed doing. Everyone else on site- chefs, kitchen staff, bar staff- came in, cooked/served, and left. The cleaning staff didn't clean up after dinners, so we did it. It was ok, actually. Hard, but there's worse work.

[twoweevils.livejournal.com]

I worked for a cleaning service after university--it doesn't really compare with some of the stuff you all have done, but there was one part of it I really hated.

Mostly, we just cleaned people's houses, which was fine. People tend to clean up a bit before the cleaning lady comes, anyway. But the owner of the company had also contracted with a construction company to clean up the houses they were building as they were finished and before the new owners moved in.

I can't speak for all construction workers, but these guys were PIGS. The bathrooms were all incredibly filthy--the toilets were like the men's room in a gas station, and because they routinely stored drywall in the bathtubs, they were all scratched and had gunk stuck in them that would take hours to clean. The kitchens were almost as bad--I'm 90% sure the workers would pee in the sinks. I always laugh when I hear someone say, "I want to buy a new house because everything will be new and shiny!" Yeah, right. You should have seen your new house two days before you moved in.

But the capper (that made me quit by leaving a message on the owner's voicemail while she was on vacation in the Caribbean) was when I was told to get out on the porch roof of one of these houses and scrape something off the front windows. Not for $4 an hour, I'm not.

I'm glad it was the 1980s and not the 1890s or I would probably still be crawling out on people's roofs for a pittance, instead of being happily employed at a job where I can sit down.

K.