Your first jobs.
- Thread starter theskald
- Start date
Bamspeedy
CheeseBob
http://www.dol.gov/ESA/minwage/chart.htm <---If anyone needs to check what the minimum wage in the US was when they worked many years ago. Obviously, this doesn't include seperate state minimum wages.
Before 18 years old:
Clerk, Maid, etc at my parent's 9 room motel in a small town (not sure if this really counts as a job, but it was a little more than just 'household chores'). Parent's owned it from when I was 5 until after I moved out. Can't remember doing anything when I was 5 because I was too young to do much obviously, but as I got older I was doing more work until I was left alone to watch the motel and rent out rooms (13 or 14? honestly can't remember when I was first left by myself). This was just for allowance money (or punishment-"If you don't want to go to Sunday School you will have to clean the motel rooms")
Paperboy (Weekly Shopper type newspaper)-delivered free papers to every house in town once a week (280?) Got a couple hundred bucks a month I think.
Paperboy (Daily newspaper)-delivered 50-75? papers every day before 6 AM, had to collect $ from some of the subscribers once a month. More money than the weekly paperoute obviously.
After 18 years old (Almost always working 2 jobs, so one of the pizza delivery jobs overlaps with one of the other jobs):
Cashier at a gas station/restaurant (Started at $4.25/hour, eventually made $5.25/hour from a raise and minimum wage increase), literally right next door to my house. Restaurant was closed most nights (everyday except Friday and Saturday night), so I was most often all alone. Started here when I was 18 (old enough to have a license for selling beer and cigs), when I was still in high school and still worked here while I went to a tech school. Business was slow enough (2 gas stations in a town of 800 people, and the other gas station was a big chain so they got the bulk of the business), I could work on some school work while 'working'.
Pizza delivery (bowling alley)- Averaged maybe $40/night in tips, plus minimum wage, plus $.50-$1.00 fee per delivery, starting to hate the job because I was being shifted to cook more often than driving. Expensive pizza so generally had upper-class customers. Worked here will also cashiering and going to the tech school. Worked here for 2-3 years.
Pizza delivery (Happy Joe's)-Only worked here a couple months, had seemed like it would be a better job (more $), but it really wasn't except for that I didn't have to cook. A little cheaper pizza, and thus a little lower-class customers. Was dating a girl who worked here so that combined with having to cook at the other place is why I went here.
Pizza delivery (Pizza Pit/Pizza Zone)-Much better place for making $. Averaged $80-$120 in tips a night. Right next to campus so delivered to lots of college kids (and drunks) and delivered until 3-4 AM. Cheapest pizza, got some of the lowest-class customers. Made more $ in tips because of making so many more deliveries, not because they tipped better. Went here because I knew some people who worked here and heard how much $ they made in tips. Eventually quit here when I was making enough $ at my current job (and was tired from working 2 jobs-practically 7 days a week for several years). Worked here for 2-3 years.
Factory ($7.25/hour)- Auto parts manufacturer, which was mostly interior stuff like armrests. Went here to earn more $ than the cashiering job and to do something else/get out of the small town. Very boring, most of the jobs had you at a press machine where you push a button and the machine pushes something like 1000 pounds down on a piece of plastic to make the part, so for safety your hands were chained so that you couldn't get your hand stuck in the machine and obviously lose it. About 80% of the workers were Hmong. For an 8 hour shift you would get a 20 minute paid lunch and then just two 5-minute 'bathroom breaks', which meant pretty much that...couldn't go have a cigarette or anything. Union job, but the union was a joke (it was a union in name only, it was essentially controlled by management). Worked here 3 months and was sick of it so I quit.
Boot manufacturer ($10/hour)-Very hard on the hands to be stretching rubber all day, and just the repetitive motion often causes people to get carpal tunnel. Lots of older workers (obviously having the easier jobs because of their seniority). A few 80+ year old women still working there, mostly I think because they would be bored being retired or something. Since it produced mostly winter boots, the factory closed down every summer for like 3 weeks. Worked here about 2.5-3 years.
Union was alright, but was weak in negotiating pay increases (got a $0.10 increase when contract was renegotiated), but that was because they were delaying the inevitable of the factory shipping off to China for the cheaper labor (which is what eventually happened).
Towards the end the union organized a protest against our congressman, which was weird in several ways. First, the union basically told us "We agree with him on all other issues except this one (some law or something which made it easier for jobs to move to China, or didn't do enough to prevent it), so we don't want the protest to be nasty, so we want to let him know that we still support him generally". Second, I guess it was more of an 'anti-china' protest than anything because some Tibetans were invited to speak about their 'Free Tibet' agenda. It looked like the Tibetans screaming 'FREE TIBET!' were going to blow the 80 year old ladies over or give them a heart attack.
Brewery worker ($7/hour)-One summer when I was laid off from the boot manufacturer. They hired alot of 'summer help', which you had to do if you ever wanted to get into the company year-round. Some people worked there 10 summers before they would get hired year-round. Summer help only got paid $7/hour, the year-round people got paid something like $16-18/hour. Union job, but since I was summer help it didn't really mean a whole lot except for $ being taken from my check. Some of the jobs were hard to keep up on (unless you are an expert and quick with a forklift), while other jobs are insanely boring, the hardest part is staying awake. When the summer was over, the boot manufacturer called me back so I spent only about a week on unemployment.
Rather than shut the lines down for people to go to break, someone (a floater) would take your place while you went to break, then when you get back from break he would replace the next person on the line, etc. Cool parts of the job (from an employee viewpoint, but it cost the company $) was that some of the stations had two people (when one was only really needed), so the floater would replace both people and let them both take double their break time.
And once a week you could buy cases of beer for like $5. These were typically cases that had a slightly ripped package or printing error or something (beer was fine, it just wouldn't look good on a store shelf). 10-20 years or so before I worked there they would actually let you drink on the job, and someone had the job of re-stocking the breakroom coolers with beer. Some people would call their wife to come pick them up to drive them home because they got drunk at work! OSHA eventually put an end to that.
Warehouse (started at $10/hour, now making $18.35+/hour, plus $1/hour in quarterly incentives)-Where I currently work, and have been working for 9 years. Learned about this job from some co-workers at the boot manufacturer who were going there since the boot factory was closing. Mostly the 'weekend' shift (3-12 hours days), but spent a year and a half on the 'weekday' shift (4-10 hour days). Most of it was in the Dry Grocery (1-50 pound cases, stacked typically up to 7-8 feet high), but spent 6 months in Meat and Produce (up to 100 pound cases stacked up to 6.5-7 feet high). Some pallets are pretty much all the same thing so the stacking is easy, other times you are getting only 1-2 of each item, and if it is smaller items you could have 2 pallets that consist of 3-500 cases, all of different sizes, so the stacking is terrible. After working here for 2-3 years I quit my other job so this has been my only job (except for a few months described below) for the last 6 years or so. Started working there when the warehouse was newly built. First couple of years was crazy, sometimes working 16+ hour days for months until they got the staffing figured out and didn't have the crazy turnover rate anymore. Most jobs you are there for x hours, whether there is work to do or not (or there is always work to do or they simply lay people off when there is no work). At this job, there is work everyday but some days are busier than others, and you aren't done until everything is done. So one day you could work 14 hours, then the next day only work 6. But in recent years the hours have been more stable (management has been more aggressive to get help from other shifts during busy times to prevent long days and using VTO (voluntary time off) on the short days so that the day stretches out a little longer so that the workers who stay get to work more hours to get their full 40 hours or close to it.)
There I spent 8 years as an orderfiller, which is stacking cases on a pallet. Got paid $0.50/hour more, plus could earn up to 30% more of my base pay if my production was 130% (101%=1% bonus, 110%=10% bonus, etc, capped at 30% for 130%). You wear a headset that tells you were you need to go and how many cases to take and then you talk to it to confirm that you grabbed the right amount of cases and then it tells you were to go next (much faster than paper and putting labels on every case!, like at other warehouses). But talking into the headset can be frustrating because the voice recognition technology isn't the greatest (especially with background noises), so people will use different words for some numbers (blue=two for example), which would be easier for the computer to understand. They had to prevent people from changing their numbers/words to obscenities because some people were quite frustrated. Eventually, I used different words for almost every number, not just for clarity but so that I could speak faster and move faster, since there was sort of a competition/ego factor of pulling high production numbers. For me, the numbers 0-9 were: Ow, One, Blue, Three, R, V*, Beer, Sev, A, Ni. *Honestly can't remember right now what my five was since I transfered to an easier job 1.5 years ago.
Non-union job. Got $0.75/hour 'cost of living' increase the first year or two, and $0.50/hour increase every year since then. Had to take a drug test when first hired, and there is a drug test if you have an accident (that causes an injury or causes more than $500 in damage), and there was always talk of other random drug tests while being employed, but it never happened to anybody until last year when they got serious about it. My name was chosen three times in the first 5 months (a couple dozen people out of the 900 employees would be chosen every month). I thought I was really unlucky until I heard someone else was picked 5/7 times.
Day laborer ($7.50/hour)-Worked a few months at Manpower (while having my other job at the warehouse, was just doing this for some extra $ since I had 4 days off every week). Did several different jobs here, basically it was a new job every day. They call you up (usually at 7-8AM) and tell you who needs a worker that day and basically what the job will be and you can accept or refuse (but you had to accept at least once every week or so if you want them to keep calling you). Most often I was a janitor at elementary and high schools. Could typically get the job done in 5 hours and then the 'full-time' janitors would send me home, but sign off on my time card that I was there for a full 8 hours. It doesn't take them 8 hours to do their jobs either, they just spend more time goofing off in the breakroom or napping in the teacher's lounge (if it was in the evening/night when all the teachers are gone). What I really hated about this job was the one time I was working the cafeteria during lunch hour at the high school.
Other jobs I did as a day laborer, usually for one day was:
Fire restoration- Not sure if that is what the name is, but it's where you go to a house that has been fire and water damaged-from the fire hoses- and take everything out of the house, furniture, carpet, everything. And you either load the stuff into a truck if it is still good/can be recovered, or you throw it in a dumpster. Interesting part was when they moved the large screen TV (that took 3 people to lift up the stairs). "We don't know if it works, but you have a choice, either we can just write it off right now and dump it (insurance will pay for it, but the value won't be as much as it would be to buy a brand new one), or we can try to recover it but then it will cost you some money if it doesn't work (transporting fee)". It went into the dumpster.
Replacing mattresses in a hotel.
Work in a factory on a simple punch press that I operated by pressing a button with my foot (a much smaller and safer punch press than at the other factory I worked earlier, so I didn't need my hands chained).
Printing company-Worked a few days here. Taking stacks of flyers off the assembly line and stacking them on a pallet. Easy and boring, except for several paper cuts.
Forklift operator-I really hated this one. I told manpower that I could operate the old forklifts that had a steering wheel, but I was uncomfortable with the new 'stand-up' forklifts that have the 'joystick' for steering. I get to the job and find that the forklift was the newer types, grr... Suffered through the day hardly getting anything done and they wanted me back again (I don't think they really did, it just said on the paper that I was going to be assigned to them for x days), but I refused and insisted that they need to get someone else. But I got a sense for how working at a smaller grocery warehouse works compared to where I work now. No computers at this small place so you have to search to find the pallet you want, which kills alot of time. The warehouse is smaller in size too, so I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of cases that company ships out in an entire year, my company ships out in a single day.
Before 18 years old:
Clerk, Maid, etc at my parent's 9 room motel in a small town (not sure if this really counts as a job, but it was a little more than just 'household chores'). Parent's owned it from when I was 5 until after I moved out. Can't remember doing anything when I was 5 because I was too young to do much obviously, but as I got older I was doing more work until I was left alone to watch the motel and rent out rooms (13 or 14? honestly can't remember when I was first left by myself). This was just for allowance money (or punishment-"If you don't want to go to Sunday School you will have to clean the motel rooms")
Paperboy (Weekly Shopper type newspaper)-delivered free papers to every house in town once a week (280?) Got a couple hundred bucks a month I think.
Paperboy (Daily newspaper)-delivered 50-75? papers every day before 6 AM, had to collect $ from some of the subscribers once a month. More money than the weekly paperoute obviously.
After 18 years old (Almost always working 2 jobs, so one of the pizza delivery jobs overlaps with one of the other jobs):
Cashier at a gas station/restaurant (Started at $4.25/hour, eventually made $5.25/hour from a raise and minimum wage increase), literally right next door to my house. Restaurant was closed most nights (everyday except Friday and Saturday night), so I was most often all alone. Started here when I was 18 (old enough to have a license for selling beer and cigs), when I was still in high school and still worked here while I went to a tech school. Business was slow enough (2 gas stations in a town of 800 people, and the other gas station was a big chain so they got the bulk of the business), I could work on some school work while 'working'.
Pizza delivery (bowling alley)- Averaged maybe $40/night in tips, plus minimum wage, plus $.50-$1.00 fee per delivery, starting to hate the job because I was being shifted to cook more often than driving. Expensive pizza so generally had upper-class customers. Worked here will also cashiering and going to the tech school. Worked here for 2-3 years.
Pizza delivery (Happy Joe's)-Only worked here a couple months, had seemed like it would be a better job (more $), but it really wasn't except for that I didn't have to cook. A little cheaper pizza, and thus a little lower-class customers. Was dating a girl who worked here so that combined with having to cook at the other place is why I went here.
Pizza delivery (Pizza Pit/Pizza Zone)-Much better place for making $. Averaged $80-$120 in tips a night. Right next to campus so delivered to lots of college kids (and drunks) and delivered until 3-4 AM. Cheapest pizza, got some of the lowest-class customers. Made more $ in tips because of making so many more deliveries, not because they tipped better. Went here because I knew some people who worked here and heard how much $ they made in tips. Eventually quit here when I was making enough $ at my current job (and was tired from working 2 jobs-practically 7 days a week for several years). Worked here for 2-3 years.
Factory ($7.25/hour)- Auto parts manufacturer, which was mostly interior stuff like armrests. Went here to earn more $ than the cashiering job and to do something else/get out of the small town. Very boring, most of the jobs had you at a press machine where you push a button and the machine pushes something like 1000 pounds down on a piece of plastic to make the part, so for safety your hands were chained so that you couldn't get your hand stuck in the machine and obviously lose it. About 80% of the workers were Hmong. For an 8 hour shift you would get a 20 minute paid lunch and then just two 5-minute 'bathroom breaks', which meant pretty much that...couldn't go have a cigarette or anything. Union job, but the union was a joke (it was a union in name only, it was essentially controlled by management). Worked here 3 months and was sick of it so I quit.
Boot manufacturer ($10/hour)-Very hard on the hands to be stretching rubber all day, and just the repetitive motion often causes people to get carpal tunnel. Lots of older workers (obviously having the easier jobs because of their seniority). A few 80+ year old women still working there, mostly I think because they would be bored being retired or something. Since it produced mostly winter boots, the factory closed down every summer for like 3 weeks. Worked here about 2.5-3 years.
Union was alright, but was weak in negotiating pay increases (got a $0.10 increase when contract was renegotiated), but that was because they were delaying the inevitable of the factory shipping off to China for the cheaper labor (which is what eventually happened).
Towards the end the union organized a protest against our congressman, which was weird in several ways. First, the union basically told us "We agree with him on all other issues except this one (some law or something which made it easier for jobs to move to China, or didn't do enough to prevent it), so we don't want the protest to be nasty, so we want to let him know that we still support him generally". Second, I guess it was more of an 'anti-china' protest than anything because some Tibetans were invited to speak about their 'Free Tibet' agenda. It looked like the Tibetans screaming 'FREE TIBET!' were going to blow the 80 year old ladies over or give them a heart attack.
Brewery worker ($7/hour)-One summer when I was laid off from the boot manufacturer. They hired alot of 'summer help', which you had to do if you ever wanted to get into the company year-round. Some people worked there 10 summers before they would get hired year-round. Summer help only got paid $7/hour, the year-round people got paid something like $16-18/hour. Union job, but since I was summer help it didn't really mean a whole lot except for $ being taken from my check. Some of the jobs were hard to keep up on (unless you are an expert and quick with a forklift), while other jobs are insanely boring, the hardest part is staying awake. When the summer was over, the boot manufacturer called me back so I spent only about a week on unemployment.
Rather than shut the lines down for people to go to break, someone (a floater) would take your place while you went to break, then when you get back from break he would replace the next person on the line, etc. Cool parts of the job (from an employee viewpoint, but it cost the company $) was that some of the stations had two people (when one was only really needed), so the floater would replace both people and let them both take double their break time.
And once a week you could buy cases of beer for like $5. These were typically cases that had a slightly ripped package or printing error or something (beer was fine, it just wouldn't look good on a store shelf). 10-20 years or so before I worked there they would actually let you drink on the job, and someone had the job of re-stocking the breakroom coolers with beer. Some people would call their wife to come pick them up to drive them home because they got drunk at work! OSHA eventually put an end to that.
Warehouse (started at $10/hour, now making $18.35+/hour, plus $1/hour in quarterly incentives)-Where I currently work, and have been working for 9 years. Learned about this job from some co-workers at the boot manufacturer who were going there since the boot factory was closing. Mostly the 'weekend' shift (3-12 hours days), but spent a year and a half on the 'weekday' shift (4-10 hour days). Most of it was in the Dry Grocery (1-50 pound cases, stacked typically up to 7-8 feet high), but spent 6 months in Meat and Produce (up to 100 pound cases stacked up to 6.5-7 feet high). Some pallets are pretty much all the same thing so the stacking is easy, other times you are getting only 1-2 of each item, and if it is smaller items you could have 2 pallets that consist of 3-500 cases, all of different sizes, so the stacking is terrible. After working here for 2-3 years I quit my other job so this has been my only job (except for a few months described below) for the last 6 years or so. Started working there when the warehouse was newly built. First couple of years was crazy, sometimes working 16+ hour days for months until they got the staffing figured out and didn't have the crazy turnover rate anymore. Most jobs you are there for x hours, whether there is work to do or not (or there is always work to do or they simply lay people off when there is no work). At this job, there is work everyday but some days are busier than others, and you aren't done until everything is done. So one day you could work 14 hours, then the next day only work 6. But in recent years the hours have been more stable (management has been more aggressive to get help from other shifts during busy times to prevent long days and using VTO (voluntary time off) on the short days so that the day stretches out a little longer so that the workers who stay get to work more hours to get their full 40 hours or close to it.)
There I spent 8 years as an orderfiller, which is stacking cases on a pallet. Got paid $0.50/hour more, plus could earn up to 30% more of my base pay if my production was 130% (101%=1% bonus, 110%=10% bonus, etc, capped at 30% for 130%). You wear a headset that tells you were you need to go and how many cases to take and then you talk to it to confirm that you grabbed the right amount of cases and then it tells you were to go next (much faster than paper and putting labels on every case!, like at other warehouses). But talking into the headset can be frustrating because the voice recognition technology isn't the greatest (especially with background noises), so people will use different words for some numbers (blue=two for example), which would be easier for the computer to understand. They had to prevent people from changing their numbers/words to obscenities because some people were quite frustrated. Eventually, I used different words for almost every number, not just for clarity but so that I could speak faster and move faster, since there was sort of a competition/ego factor of pulling high production numbers. For me, the numbers 0-9 were: Ow, One, Blue, Three, R, V*, Beer, Sev, A, Ni. *Honestly can't remember right now what my five was since I transfered to an easier job 1.5 years ago.
Non-union job. Got $0.75/hour 'cost of living' increase the first year or two, and $0.50/hour increase every year since then. Had to take a drug test when first hired, and there is a drug test if you have an accident (that causes an injury or causes more than $500 in damage), and there was always talk of other random drug tests while being employed, but it never happened to anybody until last year when they got serious about it. My name was chosen three times in the first 5 months (a couple dozen people out of the 900 employees would be chosen every month). I thought I was really unlucky until I heard someone else was picked 5/7 times.
Day laborer ($7.50/hour)-Worked a few months at Manpower (while having my other job at the warehouse, was just doing this for some extra $ since I had 4 days off every week). Did several different jobs here, basically it was a new job every day. They call you up (usually at 7-8AM) and tell you who needs a worker that day and basically what the job will be and you can accept or refuse (but you had to accept at least once every week or so if you want them to keep calling you). Most often I was a janitor at elementary and high schools. Could typically get the job done in 5 hours and then the 'full-time' janitors would send me home, but sign off on my time card that I was there for a full 8 hours. It doesn't take them 8 hours to do their jobs either, they just spend more time goofing off in the breakroom or napping in the teacher's lounge (if it was in the evening/night when all the teachers are gone). What I really hated about this job was the one time I was working the cafeteria during lunch hour at the high school.
Other jobs I did as a day laborer, usually for one day was:
Fire restoration- Not sure if that is what the name is, but it's where you go to a house that has been fire and water damaged-from the fire hoses- and take everything out of the house, furniture, carpet, everything. And you either load the stuff into a truck if it is still good/can be recovered, or you throw it in a dumpster. Interesting part was when they moved the large screen TV (that took 3 people to lift up the stairs). "We don't know if it works, but you have a choice, either we can just write it off right now and dump it (insurance will pay for it, but the value won't be as much as it would be to buy a brand new one), or we can try to recover it but then it will cost you some money if it doesn't work (transporting fee)". It went into the dumpster.
Replacing mattresses in a hotel.
Work in a factory on a simple punch press that I operated by pressing a button with my foot (a much smaller and safer punch press than at the other factory I worked earlier, so I didn't need my hands chained).
Printing company-Worked a few days here. Taking stacks of flyers off the assembly line and stacking them on a pallet. Easy and boring, except for several paper cuts.
Forklift operator-I really hated this one. I told manpower that I could operate the old forklifts that had a steering wheel, but I was uncomfortable with the new 'stand-up' forklifts that have the 'joystick' for steering. I get to the job and find that the forklift was the newer types, grr... Suffered through the day hardly getting anything done and they wanted me back again (I don't think they really did, it just said on the paper that I was going to be assigned to them for x days), but I refused and insisted that they need to get someone else. But I got a sense for how working at a smaller grocery warehouse works compared to where I work now. No computers at this small place so you have to search to find the pallet you want, which kills alot of time. The warehouse is smaller in size too, so I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of cases that company ships out in an entire year, my company ships out in a single day.
MrPopov
King
- Joined
- Jul 25, 2006
- Messages
- 985
I worked at a Ford Dealership my first job. I was a lot attendant which included duties like organizing the cars by make/model/year, etc. We also would clean, and gas up any cars sold for customers.
It was a pretty sweet job considering I had just turned 16 so was basically learning how to drive on brand new cars and trucks, some standard some automatic transmission.
One of the best memories was when a customer who recently bought a car accidentally locked their keys in it, and I was called out to their house to break into it for them. LOL they weren't sure to be happy I did it, or worried some kid came over and just broke into their brand new car!
It was a pretty sweet job considering I had just turned 16 so was basically learning how to drive on brand new cars and trucks, some standard some automatic transmission.
One of the best memories was when a customer who recently bought a car accidentally locked their keys in it, and I was called out to their house to break into it for them. LOL they weren't sure to be happy I did it, or worried some kid came over and just broke into their brand new car!
GoodGame
Red, White, & Blue, baby!
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2004
- Messages
- 13,725
I'm surprised there were still any around. The ones in my area (of USA) went under like 20 years ago.
BamSpeedy said:
I've heard that way back when, people used to drink beer in biology labs, while handling germs.
Bobbtjoe
Emperor
My dad worked at Mcdonalds.
It was originally part of the same company but it survived after the US bankruptcy. It went bankrupt a couple of years ago.
The name still survives online in the UK. It has shops in Germany and Cyprus.
The name is used in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand but they never had any connection to the group - they just copied the name.
Foot Locker is the modern incarnation of the traditional Woolworth's in the US and across the globe.
/End boring business history.
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