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The Sun (England)
November 28, 2006 Tuesday
HEADLINE: Hard? At least cabbies don't have to do THIS
BYLINE: Nick Francis
London taxi driver named toughest job
IT'S claimed London cabbies have the toughest job in Britain - but plenty of workers disagree.
Research by the Discovery
Channel found that driving a black cab is a harder profession than being a trawlerman or lumberjack - thanks to dangerous roads and abusive passengers.
Cabbie Dave Jones said of the findings: "It is a hard job and we have a lot to deal with. Rush-hour traffic, long hours, annoying customers...they all make it tricky." But how does life behind the wheel in the capital compare to the experiences of other employees?
Here, we look at some of the worstoccupations featured in Dan Kieran's book Cr*p Jobs - a collection of testimonies from people at the bottom of the pile.
ZOO KEEPER
IT sounds like a great job, but London Zoo keeper Sebastian Grant reckons life on the other side of the animal enclosure is anything but rosy.
"The thing about looking after animals is there is a lot of mess," he explains.
""What comes out of the end of an animal needs cleaning up. Animals are also potentially dangerous. Even an anteater can tear a hole in a man.
"As well as being dirty and dangerous, this job has long hours. We start every day at 8am - even on Christmas Day. And you don't go home until the work is done, so the hours can be very long.
"I'm not saying driving a cab is easy, but it's certainly not a harder job than mine."
FRUIT MACHINE ENGINEER
ROGER EASTAFF reveals he would drive round pubs in Coventry fixing fruit machines, payphones and pool tables. He says: "An average day was spent in horrible urine-scented dive pubs. Aside from finding used condoms and syringes in pool tables and cleaning vomit off payphones, there was the constant threat of having a pool cue wrapped round your head for the sake of a handful of change."
HOSPITAL PORTER
WHILE working as a porter, Frazer Payne's daily duties involved wheeling the dead to the morgue.
He says: "On one occasion as I tried to move the body, the trolley scooted away from me and I stumbled after it with the corpse in my arms. This set off a whirlwind of panic as the other patients began screaming and fainting. When I finally got the body to the morgue, rigor mortis had begun to set in and the body started to sit up.
"In order to slide the bench into the freezer I had to put my knee on the legs and lie across the body to push the upper torso down. I was never so glad to be sacked."
JIGSAW MAKER
WORKING 11-hour shifts in a cramped factory with two 15-minute breaks for £ 3 an hour was normal for James Prendegast.
He recalls: "My job was to lean on and deflate the plastic-wrapped boxes of jigsaws as they rolled out of a plastic wrapping machine.
"Every week this machine would seize up and when they opened it, thousands of jigsaw pieces would fall out. Virtually every jigsaw was missing at least one piece."
BOX FACTORY WORKER
SAM JORDISON worked in a warehouse for a week where they flattened old cardboard boxes and sent them to wholesalers.
He says: "It was physical agony but it was the mental pain that weighed heaviest.
I was working with a guy who'd been there for 20 years. He told me he dreamed about boxes, saw boxes when he closed his eyes and could taste boxes when he ate.
And every 20 minutes or so he would shout 'BOXES' at the top of his voice."
LAUNDRY WORKER
HOSPITAL laundry worker Ralph El Turk was paid 18 pence an hour extra to work with dirty bedding.
"It just wasn't worth it," he says. "Masses of dirty laundry would come down these big shoots. "They would be covered in human waste, blood, and once, with what looked like someone's kidneys. You spent most of the day with your face in, or near, urine."
WEEDKILLER SPRAYER
AFTER dropping out of university, Dan Kieran took a job spraying weedkiller along roadsides.
He says: "Every day I had to wear a green boiler suit and carry a 35-litre tank of toxic weedkiller on my back. My 12-hour shift consisted of scaling the banks that run alongside motorways.
"When three months of this hell had ended I went on to spray the streets of Slough, which was worse.
"Kids would run up shouting, 'Ghostbuster!' and laugh in my face. One day an incontinent lady tramp came up, patted me on the arm and said, in a soothing BUT LET'S NOT FORGET
The man who REALLY has the hardest job is, of course, England cricket coach Duncan Fletcher
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