Factory one: My first ever job was making various cardboard display units, involving folding, sellotaping, slotting and gluing, both individually and in pairs. I lasted a few weeks there before quitting after one particularly traumatic day in which I left in tears because I was clearly putting far more frantic effort into going fast than anyone else, but continued to produce only about a quarter or fifth of the units as everyone else, as the supervisor kept telling me. As well as speed, I had problems learning the steps of some tasks, e.g. there was a task involving a lot of folding. Everyone was shown once, and I wasn't the only one who hadn't done this particular job before, but I was the only one who had to be shown for the whole two hours over and over again, by a colleague, because I just could not remember the sequence of action.
Factory two: I was too slow putting bunches of grapes into little plastic boxes, so they moved me to discarding bad fruit into plastic bags that I had to keep tying to a rail next to me. Then, I couldn't work out how to tie the bags so that they wouldn't come undone from the rail. Someone showed me, but I often can't understand, remember or imitate other people's physical demonstrations of tasks, so I still couldn't do it. I felt so bad that I feigned illness rather than admit I couldn't do this either, and never went back.
Just recalling all this makes me upset again. Studying IT, I hope to spend most of my working life using the one tool I am comfortable with: the keyboard. I'm quite a fast typist (with the amount of time I've spent online, learning and socialising "from a safe distance" since my early teens, I should be!), but there can be occasional manual work involved as well, even if your job title is "Programmer", and I'm worried that the moment I'm asked to do something slightly more challenging with my hands, I'll fail and have no suitable explanation, and worst of all, cry and humiliate myself.
