Your first jobs.

[theskald]

Something got me thinking today about all the jobs I've had in the past. I started working at 14 as a "farm hand" (read: errand boy) for about 5 months, and though it was pretty fun and interesting the most memorable part for me was getting the job in the first place, as here in Colorado you had to be 16 (later 15) to get a job. Maybe it doesn't count, as I was getting paid essentially under the table, but I worked sometimes 8 or 9 hours on Saturdays.

What I meant to type first is this: What kind of jobs did you get when you first started working, household chores notwithstanding? I'm sure some of you have interesting stories to tell. Here're the big questions, though: How much did you get paid? How'd you get the job? If you got paid over 8 bucks an hour, was it just luck or can you give me advice on getting a job with halfway decent pay with no more than a high-school diploma? How'd you quit/get fired?

Next I worked in retail (shiver...), a gym for people who really like to spend money (my employers found my lack of plastered-on-perpetual-smile apalling), a copy/print/design shop that was not FedEx/Kinkos but was rapidly being outcompeted by said (despite our having employees who actually help and know what they're doing), a camera store, and then as an actual farm/ranch hand.

Interesting story 1: when working at the camera store I was fired by the manager (or quit, depending on who you ask) after refusing to help him do something illegal and expressing concern to a coworker about the incident. Needless to say I do not put that job on my resume...

 

[Bigfoot3814]

I worked at a library, putting away books as well as a lot of things it wasn't really my job to do. Also not the greatest people. Good pay though. 6.75 at first and 7.75 at the very end before I left to do my radio internship.

 

[Harbringer]

I worked in a factory as "general maintenance" which roughly translates to whatever the Supervisors damn well pleased.

 

[Phlegmak]

I worked as a janitor at my highschool for my first paying job. Very low pay.
Then I worked as a janitor at a mall. Very low pay.
Then I was self employed as a tutor. Relatively low pay.
Then I worked as a programmer, which is my current career. I was making good money, considering it was entry level and the wages in Louisiana aren't all that high in general.

That's what I consider to be my first jobs, even though that timeframe spanned many years.

 

[TheLastOne36]

My first job ever is when I worked at the first Burger king in Poland! i was a cashier guy. There are only 4 Burger Kings in Poland, and i worked at the first one to be built.

 

[Masquerouge]

My first job was a summer camp counsellor. Very low pay. Next year I went to another camp, and had a much better pay. Then the next two summer I did some interim job in a high-tech plant, even better pay, and that was the end of my summer jobs - after that, a couple of internships, the first one with a crappy pay but it was for the experience, the second one with an great pay. And after that, a real job, as a consultant, awesome pay.

Of course, a great pay for a 17yo is not the same thing as a great pay for a 25yo

 

[Dell19]

My first job was working at Woolworths over the Christmas period which is in the process of closing down. I think the pay was something like £4.2831 (It was an odd number) an hour.

 

[JollyRoger]

My Ladder:

Busboy
Grocery Store Sacker
Janitorial
Receiving Clerk
Mailroom
Tax Preparer
Trust Administrator
Software Tester
Lawyer

 

[LucyDuke]

I babysat for a while. Pretty typical for a teenage girl. I think I commanded an amazing $5/hr for hanging out with kids and then hanging around while kids slept. That's not bad at all when you're 13-16, don't have any real bills, and it's not taxed. They were pretty reasonably well-behaved kids, too.

 

[Grimz101]

419s
10 char

 

[silver 2039]

My first paying one was this HRM thing when I was 16, where they would tell me the type of people they wanted for a particularly profession and then I would go on some website I forget which and find the people that met their requirements and then sent them the info and I got paid if they called them in for a job.

I got paid 500 Rs once for one person. And then the guy who owned the company fled the country. It turned out that he was a wanted criminal. He was apparently using the HRM company as a front and was in fact using scam porn sites to gain access to people's credit cards and taking money from their account. He had armed guards and stuff because the police were after him. So he ran away....bah and I only got paid once.

 

[Ecofarm]

We did this like 3 weeks ago.

(very recent) Dupe Thread.

I worked at a "Chuckie Cheese" type place... video games, ball-filled net-rooms, skee-ball, wack-a-moles, puppets that sang in the dining hall... you know what I'm talking about.

I was able to give my little brother bags upon bags of tokens to play all the games to his heart's content. Sometimes, he would bring friends and give them tons of tokens too (I made assistant manager quickly but was not 18 so it was not official, but could hand out tokens as I saw fit). Oh yea, and all the free pizza, cheesy sticks, soda, etc that me and my friends wanted. It sure was a shoddly run place and I made the best of it. I'm not sure what I got paid (near minimum, of course) but I'm sure it did not compare to the freebies I recieved and handed out.

[sidetrack]

I drove my 1969 Camaro (cherry red, 400SB 4bolt main engine from a 71 truck, sidepipes, jacked up with hydrolic shocks, spiffy wheels) to work.

The only pics I have of the Camaro are poloroids

Let me tell you, going around that uni-body with sidepipes was real hell, but it created fantastic torque (backpressure) that was needed because of no catalytic or mufflers. I got the car for $2000 (a gutted 1/4-mile car with AC) and spent another $2000 on sidepipes, wheels, shocks, etc. I loved smoking new corvettes with a $4k car. With 4 wheel drum breaks and a 6-cylinder suspension (lighter) it was a real rocket... no turning or stopping allowed. I got ~8 mpg (from a 2-door car lol). Needless to say, this was before my environmental days but I do not regret it at all; I might do the same thing even knowing what I know now.

[/sidetrack]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

(mid-1980s)

The thread starts Nov 30 and last post is Dec 5.

 

[sanabas]

Here're the big questions, though: How much did you get paid? How'd you get the job? If you got paid over 8 bucks an hour, was it just luck or can you give me advice on getting a job with halfway decent pay with no more than a high-school diploma? How'd you quit/get fired?

Check what the award wages are for various jobs. Check what the penalty rates for various stuff are.

If you're looking for higher pay without needing to acquire too much in the way of higher skills, find stuff that involves shift work and/or late nights/weekends. Pulling beers & bouncing heads at 4am on a Sunday morning at the end of a 10 hour shift paid much better than pulling beers and bouncing heads on a weekday lunch shift, for instance.

 

[JoeM]

My first job was as a Bass player in a bar in Portugal, I was 12, I think I got the equivalent of about £4 per night.

 

[Fifty]

My first real job was as a banquet server at a restaurant attached to a golf course. Pay was decent, ranging from $15-$40/hr, usually around $20-25/hr IIRC.

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

Help desk at the University Center computer lab.

 

[dwaxe]

Does forcing people to pay for your teaching them how to play chess (I always teach them anyway) count as a first job? If not, I have yet to get one .

 

[jessiecat]

paper boy
pea-packer
pusher
painter
politician
roadie
writer
retailer
record-keeper
retired
researcher
and rubber worker

(all true, but not in any order)

 

[warpus]

My first job was a co-op (internship) position at Canada Trust (now owned by TD), doing COBOL programming, making $16 an hour or so.

Yeah, I never did the burger flipping thing.

It was horrible and it taught me a valuable lesson: COBOL programmers can make a lot of money, but it's one of the most boring jobs you'll ever do.

Yeah, $16 isn't "a lot of money", but if I had stayed in the "field", there's tons of fairly well paid COBOL jobs at banks. That kinda thing ain't for me though.. It was mindless spaghetti coding...

 

[History_Buff]

I worked as a grocery store cashier for just less than a year, which had it's moments, but was a pretty big drag. The people were great, and I have fond memories of days where nobody would come into the store at all (really cold out, really hot out, hockey team on a run). Most of the time it was a madhouse however, and I realized that working harder only meant working more. I did get a 33% raise off my starting salary in the first 4 months though, so that was nice. The most unexpected thing was just how depressing it was to sell cigarettes and lottery tickets to the same people every week. First hand account of how much money these people were just throwing away.

Following that, I was a survey assistant at a land surveying firm, which was much more education-appropriate. This last summer I worked processing GPS/INS data for my company's helicopter tracking/guidance package.

Edit: I see we're posting wages; $7.50->$10/hr cashiering, $14.50/hr w/ copious amounts of overtime surveying (I was underpaid, but got to stay in city), and $20/hr most recently.