5 lessons from extremely weird work experiences

It’s no great secret that I came to copywriting and content writing the long way around. I went freelance during 2020, but I’ve been writing commercially since 2016, trained as a journalist for 4 years and have been doing creative writing since I could hold a pen.

The world of work experience is a completely mad place. Whatever I was doing, I usually found a crafty way to include writing - even when I wasn’t supposed to be writing. I’ve done some ...different… jobs in my time, and here are 5 of the most important lessons I’ve learnt on the way at 5 of the strangest jobs.

1. Roman baths, short stories and mummified heads

When I was 14, school randomly selected me to do a work experience placement at Jewry Wall museum. The museum in Leicester sits on the site of a second century Roman bathhouse, and it’s opposite a Holiday Inn on an inner-city roundabout, which I’m sure the Romans would’ve loved. I mostly worked in the catalogue room which was either boiling or freezing, sometimes both, organising the less important pieces in storage. It was mostly bits of old pot (Time Team style) and there was also a mummified human head in a deep freeze - stored on behalf of the permanent Egyptian exhibition down the road. Maybe their freezer was too full up with Cornettos and peas.

One of my tasks was writing up a report on the former Roman baths, which I completed with enough speed and panache that I had spare time to secretly write and print out a short story. Oops.

The lesson: writing fiction is more fun than peering at mummified heads.

2. Media sales, fake emergencies and running in heels

This one is still embarrassing. It was immediately after graduation, so the summer of 2008 before I’d decided to carry on studying. I applied to a media sales job - it had ‘media’ in the title, so it had to be good, right? The boss seemed pleasant, if a bit full-on, and I turned the charm up to 11, wore something resembling a suit with heels (WHY, RUTH?!) and got a trial. 

Turns out ‘media sales’ was four frustrated people stuffed into the world’s smallest office, on inappropriately networked phones, trying to sell advertising space in newspapers. I had made a grave error. When I finally gathered the courage to make a call, me picking up my phone caused someone else’s call to cut out and the death stare I received still haunts me. I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I sent an SOS text under the table and someone helped me fake an emergency so I absolutely had to leave immediately, so sorry, don’t worry and definitely do not call me. BYE. I practically galloped down the street and promptly bought a cheap pair of trainers to limp back to the station.

The lesson: too many to list. “Don’t apply for jobs you don’t want to do” is probably the main one.

3. Giant cheques, village fêtes and unmentionable spillages

Local newspapers are a hotbed of excitement. You get to see all the important issues, big and small, and you get to bicker with frazzled sub editors about spelling misteaks. I went back to the same local paper for 3 consecutive years doing work experience placements. I got my first headlines and bylines, and interviewed a lot of older people about milestone wedding anniversaries, covered all the pressing local issues and accompanied photographers on exam results day leap in the air shoots.

It was a great experience, except for when another reporter and I were sent to a neighbouring town to check on a rumour but en route we drove past an exploded slurry lorry which was pouring god-knows-what onto the highway. It was 25℃ that day. It was baking onto the tarmac and the smell was making people pull over to be sick. Trying desperately hard not to breathe, laugh or gag, we hot-footed it back to the office and the reporter wrote that story up while I mentally recovered.

The lesson: sometimes you will literally be writing about a giant pile of shit.

4. Whisky, whiskey and as many adjectives as you can manage

The booze shop was the most fun summer. At 20, me and two other students were being paid to taste alcohol - clearly this was genius - and then wrote the tasting notes. Between descriptive writing and learning the difference between whisky and whiskey-with-an-E, the creativity was my favourite part. And I held the record for getting a well-known and extremely chatty local celebrity customer out of the shop in the fastest time. 10 points if you correctly guess who.

The lesson: product descriptions rock.

5. Soap, no, you can’t eat that, and customer service

I worked for LUSH for more than 5 years so there are approximately 1,000 lessons I could share. The biggest and most abiding lesson it taught me was how to speak to absolutely anybody about almost anything. I also know a lot about essential oils and buyer psychology, which is probably less important. Yes, there was a lot of soap and strongly advising people against eating cosmetics, but it also taught me accounting skills, time management, people management and more. Some of it is pretty useful today. Customer service skills, when fed back into copy and content writing, is crucial for helping you get into the customer’s shoes. Figuratively speaking.

The lesson: a career is what you make of it.

Throughout all the difference work experiences, the main lesson I learnt was that creative writing, copywriting and content writing are my thing. Maybe even my thang, if we’re feeling like cool kids. There’s always something to take away from even the most unlikely experiences, and that’s finding a way through words. If you’ve got a project that needs demystifying, simplifying, or you just want to work with the writer that once dressed up as a squirrel in the middle of the road for a charity event, then I’m the one for you.

For product descriptions, newsletters, website copy, tone of voice, or blogs like this one (maybe not exactly like this one) get in touch and let’s chat.