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...being called at 2pm and told to work all Friday night, all Saturday and all Sunday is shit. (Quote: "Maybe finish at 4 and get some sleep so we can start at 9 in the morning").

The fact my clients are up with me is the only silver lining.

Anyone else got a crummy aspect to their job they want to share? Or facing the prospect of working 60 hours in three days?

If you let yourself get talked into working these hours, I've no sympathy at all.  Work to live, not the other way around.

My instincts are with Skeletor on this one. Presumably your salary this week is a bit more than ?300?

I agree with Bumsex.
er...
anyway, tell them to fuck off.
What I hate about my job? Well, i like it.
Junkies can be bams, though. And one or two of the "client group" can be a bit disconcerting.

I've not had a job for three months and it's been fecking marvellous. No moany punters, no slacking workmate and no pissy drinks machine coffee. I do miss the stationery, (or will when the haul is exhausted!) some of the piss ups and of course the pay cheque but in general do it for yourself if you can - only yourself to blame when it goes tits up!

...and just for the record, I don't love my 9 to 5 job in the least. But then it does tend to occupy my thoughts 16 hours a day, which I suppose is the nature of project work.

Thanks for the sympathy. Being self employed, and this being my biggest client, I can't say "no".

I think you'll find you can.  Don't get suckered into the idea that you're beholden to the job and those you work for.  There is always flexibility, if only you'll look for it.  It might sound harsh, but I'm afraid it's true.
Never be afraid to tell someone you work for to go fuck themselves.  The day you can't do that, you may as well tattoo 'Welcome' on your back.

I'm not working now. The crummy aspects of that are that I don't have much money and it's difficult to organise my time.
 when I work, I'm usually teaching. The crummiest aspect of that job is occasionally having students who have no interest in the study. For example, I had a bunch who were just doing it for visa requirements and spent all their time trying to not be in classes whilst being counted as present (favourite trick was to arrive on time then disapear for two hours).  
  Sorry to hear about the awful hours there.  I hope the rest of the job compensates for it

With a bit of luck you might even miss the England match - or at the very least the whole country will be feeling as tired, emotional and gutted as you come Sunday evening. Seriously though, tough luck on a crummy weekend but don't worry it'll soon be Monday.

"Or facing the prospect of working 60 hours in three days?"

One of things that got me out of design work was the job where I did 35 hours straight, early Thursday morning through to late Friday afternon, after which my boss told me that I could have 'a couple of days off' as compensation.

Foolishly, I didn't think he was referring to the weekend which followed. A 19 hour day ensued on the following Monday.

"Anyone else got a crummy aspect to their job they want to share?"

The above experience was central to my decision to get out of the graphic design business.

This has left me working in customer service, two years of which has led me to understand that the great British public can be the most unreasonable, unpleasant, whinging bunch of fuckers on the face of the planet.

I am thus considering re-training as a plumber and wondering why my careers advisor at school never counselled this as an option.

Bah!

Jim

I've already decided that my two boys (1.5 years and 3.5 years) are going to have proper jobs, eg plumber or electrician, and not some useless media type job like their parents.

BALLCOCKS!

With my three university degrees I was thinking of going from academic researcher to handyman, but I've found a couple of jobs to apply for, so I'll put that off at least until I know the outcome of my latest efforts to continue my existing career (so-called).

"BALLCOCKS!"

Indeed! There's money in them thar drains ...

Of all my contemporaries, by far the most successful, by any measure I can fathom, is the one who didn't waste several years at university and went off to set himself up as builder and plumber.

?250K house[1], two cars, two kids, works for himself, generally seems very conent with his lot.

Cheers

Jim

[1] In Nottingham, 250K still buys you quite a lot of house ...

I love my job.

I really do.  Every time we have a little old lady who is delighted with the new kitchen, bathroom, windows and doors we fit, and make the wiring in her house safe instead of being the same that moses used on the PA system on the Ark, I feel that my job is worthwhile.

HOWEVER. When I get some dirty, scummy, scrounging, never done a days work in their life wanker who thinks that he deserves MORE than what we can offer, and decides to go to the local 'crusading' paper and tells them that we have left his house like a bombsite when in fact we've all come out of his house stinking of rancid cooking fat and covered in fleas and have had to have shots 'just in case' I lose my rag. And for every nice person who's grateful, there's 10 of the wankers!
Makes me wonder why I travel 160 miles a day to go to work.

Late licenses are only fun when you're on the right side of the bar. And 'drink up, go home' means just that. Not sit there for a half hour pretending you can't hear me yelling. People in Cardiff can hear me yelling. And I'm not overly keen on what a year of lumping barrels about, mopping floors and lifting full bottle bins has done to my physique, but at least there's some free booze involved. I could go on, but I think I'd rather go wash the stink of leaky gin off me...

" moses used on the PA system on the Ark"

Moses on the  Ark?! - Get thee to the divinty school!

"People in Cardiff can hear me yelling."

- It's true: we can.

And I think biceps look attractive on a woman.

Ok. My mistake.... NOAH. Must remember bible studies!

I love the freedom afforded by my job, and the fact that I answer to no-one other than myself.

The fact that I don't get paid is a major downer of being unemployed, though.

I often dream of retraining as a dry stone waller and going to live a hermits life on Rathlin Island.

As for working all those hours, charge him an appropriate rate (double it every eight hours).

Link: Rathlin

That tourist guide misses the biggest draw of Rathlin - that you can get monumentally hammered and don't have to worry about the cops.

I think biceps look attractive on a woman.

I must say, i agree with that, an athletic physique is much better than skeletal chic.

As long as it's not in the stylie of Fatima Whitbread!

I had until midnight last night to submit my application form for a civil service job. I sent my email with the application form attached at 11.33pm - and immediately received a reply from their postmaster saying my message had been received, but could not be delivered. Several more attempts, from several mail accounts produced the sam response. I tried to deliver it by hand today, but their offices don't have a letterbox.

Now I'm left with the option of sending it in the post and phoning them up on Monday to explain why I was unable to get it to them before the deadline - because their email system was rejecting emails. Can you tell how much I want to work for them already?

"I think biceps look attractive on women"

Really?

i always worked ludracous hours when i was a chef.

but now i own my own company,i honestly work less which is odd i know,but i always felt the hours went with the job and i loved my job so it never bothered me.

all about mind set i geuss,

I take the good with the bad in my job, because we sell Airconditoners as our main thing I can do between 50 & 70 hours a week in summer(in all honesty I have enough work in summer to be there nearly 24hours a day) but its made up for in winter when I'm just down to standard 40 - 45 hours perweek.  cant complain though I just brought me self a brand new car and have to pay for that bugger now.

CU Radbacker

Can you tell how much I want to work for them already?

Possibly not so much that you didn't think to send off the application any earlier...

Sorry to hear about you're crummy job hour's but,i love my job being a self employed artist who sell's to tattoo parlour's all over but still 60 hour's! that just SUCKS!!!!

::"and 'drink up, go home' means just that."

I've been on both sides of that one:  

As bar staff, you see a herd of drunken cattle and wish you had a cattle prod to get the 'orrible things out so you can clean up and go home - after all, you get paid a pittance etc.

As bar customers, you can't figure out why they let you buy a pint seemingly two seconds ago and now they're barking at you and looking at you as if you're drunken cattle that they wish they could electrocute.

---

Oddly, this seems particularly British.  When I was in Oz (and maybe I was just lucky) the method of removing people was more like "hi, I wonder, if you wouldn't mind, but we were thinking of closing up..."  

When someone's that polite, you find the inner strength to polish off your drink quick smart and make a hasty exit.

...hate it when clients insist that blurry, badly-lit, lo-res images taken on their phone should be used instead of professionally-taken stock images.

This happens on the same type of job as when you put a great deal of time & effort into a top-notch design, only for the client to insist that the original which they knocked-up in Word is better - and ultimately what they want printed.

Slowly, genius artwork turns into a mere InDesign version of what they started with, and you begin to wonder, "What's the point of me?"

M@

haha

similarly they hire you because you can use the latest version of Flash to do a high-end, all singing all dancing ,whistles and bells, mutimedia interactive 'learning experience' and they come back and say " sell we'd like it to be more like the powerpoint presentation we sent you"


Ladies with biceps? lisa Lyons aaaalright in my book:0

"This happens on the same type of job as when you put a great deal of time & effort into a top-notch design, only for the client to insist that the original which they knocked-up in Word is better - and ultimately what they want printed.

Slowly, genius artwork turns into a mere InDesign version of what they started with, and you begin to wonder, "What's the point of me?""

And that, right there, is the other reason I abandoned design work ...

Because even fairly basic software lets people produce something that looks vaguely like a logo, no-one sees why they should have to pay for it these days.

I once spent two whole days on a brochure that a customer had done in Publisher. He insisted that it was printed exactly as he'd supplied it.

Except that all his proofs were done on a six-colour inkjet and his images were RGB.

Two days, just to make his document look the way he wanted and match his crappy layout. I could have done him something lovely from scratch in about four hours, including doing the scans myself instead of having to extract them from the Publisher job, get them into Photoshop, etc, etc ...

[Sigh]

Cheers!

Jim

I did a whole load of animal-related logo concepts recently - and all of them got trounced by an image the client nicked off Google and asked me to copy for the eventual design. I did so with a heavy heart.

It's frustrating when things like that happen, but it's evened out by the occasions when you get comments back that show a client is very impressed and you've delivered exactly what they wanted - and sometimes even exceeded their expectations.

M@

i hand my notice in tomorrow to go contracting again, with my short-lived attempts at working for other people being files under "go fuck yourself"

the worst thing is having to stay there for 4weeks and be glared at for not being flexible enough to do an extra 8 hours a week unpaid

thinky

I had a great job up until recently where we all told each other to go fuck ourselves on a regular basis. There's very few places where this works so well.



I was a local roadie and the fun to be had.....

"I did a whole load of animal-related logo concepts recently - and all of them got trounced by an image the client nicked off Google and asked me to copy for the eventual design. I did so with a heavy heart."

Oh God, the horror ...

I remember doing a mini-catalogue for a shoe shop. Bear in mind that almost half the stuff in there was New Rock product, or variations thereon.

I found this fantastic font (Dmitri, I think), a great, heavy, angular thing - all straight lines and 45? angles - lower case the same height as upper. The company name was VIVID and the word looked fantastic in this font - changing the first 'I' to an exclamation mark made the logo look like it should read the same upside down (although it actually didn't) and I finished the thing off with a lovely distressed metal texture and a bevel.

Looked fucking great. I'd seen the shop and some stationery, and there was no specific branding - design-wise, they were a mess.

"Oh, no," says the client, "we wanted the logo to look like this."

... And produces a piece of paper with the word VIVID, all in caps, Comics Sans, with a rainbow fill left to right.

AAAAAH!

Jim

Funt: I noticed that in Oz too. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work quite as well in central Portsmouth. Hence the yelling!

And many thanks to all the charmers in the.. er... bicep massive!

New sign behind the bar which made me chuckle:
'Due to the current water shortage, our beer will now be served at full strength and solid objects will now replace the occasional playful spray with the soda gun'
Heh!

I don't work, but I am starting to get itchy feet.

I also hate working under other people.

I would love to be self employed.

Best way to be.

But I would naturally work what ever hours I like.