Your English: Idioms: job

‘We had quite a job finding your house’. In other words, it was quite difficult to find it. If someone has a job on their hands, they have a difficult piece of work to do or a difficult task to accomplish, as in ‘Whoever takes over as manager will find they have quite a job on their hands’. 

If you give something up as a bad job, you stop doing it because you become convinced that you will never succeed, as in ‘We spent hours trying to find what was causing the engine to make that funny noise but in the end we gave it up as a bad job’. 

The expression just the job can be used to indicate that something is perfect for a particular purpose, as in ‘That old piece of wood I found in the shed was just the job for fixing the hole in the fence’. 

If you make the best of a bad job, you do the best that you can in a bad situation, as in ‘It was pouring with rain but we made the best of a bad job and went for a walk along the seafront’. 

Prefacing something with the phrase It’s a good job, indicates that it is lucky that you did something or lucky that something happened, as in ‘It’s a good job we booked a table as the restaurant is completely full’. 

The phrase It’s more than my job’s worth is the traditional response of over-zealous officials to a reasonable request from a member of the public to bend the rules slightly. This has led to the creation of a noun to describe such people – a jobsworth.