First job chronicles

This thread may be titled "first job," but it doesn't necessarily have to be THE first job. It doesn't have to be your first job in journalism. It can be stocking the shelves at your local grocery.

But tell us about that job, what you did, etc. More importantly, what you learned.

 

I'll start.

This wasn't my first job because I previously worked at a local grocery store and at Burger King. However, it was the first job I'd had for anything approaching two years. I worked as a student assistant at my community college's library where I typed forms with information about books the library was considering ordering. I would go through the card catalog to see what books we had.

I definitely improved my typing speed in part because of that job, but I took one thing from that job that was most important: I learned how to be professional.

 

Technically, my first job was delivering the Seattle Times when it was an afternoon paper. The main thing I learned was I hated delivering the Sunday papers, which were massive, and in the morning.
I hated the day the Times switched to mornings because then I had to get up at the crack of dawn to deliver papers.

My first real job was bagging groceries at a Red Apple store. It was OK. My favorite part of that job was collecting carts, just because it got me out of the store. I was always grateful to the lazy fucks that would leave their carts 7 miles away across the parking lot, because that meant I got to be outside longer.

 

My first job was rolling newspapers in a truck for my cigar-smoking dad. I learned real fast that newsprint takes a lot of scrubbing to get off, and that I had to bow my head down a bit so I could breathe below the haze.

 

Summer of '74 following my sophomore year in HS, I was a sandrat at a bronze/aluminum foundry that did a lot of smaller jobs -- usually 1,000 pieces or fewer. Entailed, you guessed it, shoveling a lot of sand for the molds.

I thought it was the coolest thing in the world to be working at a real 40-hour-a-week job. I rode my bike to and from work (about six miles through an area filled with junk yards and got chased every day by dogs along the way). I got to wear one of those navy blue work shirts with your name sewn into it.

A couple of the older guys (we're talking 25 or 26 years old) took me under their wing. They would let me have a couple of beers with them after work and I'd wobble my way back to my house on the bike.

I remember unbelievable heat from the furnaces and the brightness of the liquid metal as we skimmed it. Only the older guys were allowed to poured it for safety reasons. I think the bronze was green and the aluminum orange, or it could have been the other way around.

I also remember how overplayed "The Night Chicago Died" was that summer and that satisfied kind of tired you feel when you're proud of your accomplishment.

At the end of the week was a paycheck for $100 minus taxes. I made $2.50 an hour.

 

$2.50 an hour isn't bad considering in 1996 I was making $5.15 an hour at the grocery store and I was in a union. Of course, you were working full time and I was part time, but still.

 

First job was in 2000, washing dishes at a local seafood joint. Started out as one day a week, basically a favor since the owner went to church with my family.
Moved up to a few days a week, then over to the fry station. After a while, moved over to making plates.
By the summer of 2001, after I graduated high school, I was the de-facto kitchen manager. Spent the summer sweating my ass off and drinking as much cold beer as humanly possible.

 

My first job was in 1992 for a credit card company. I ran all over town putting these little application cards on people's doors, on windshields, etc. Every weekday for an entire summer. Got to see some interesting parts of Trenton, N.J. For a 15-year-old kid it was a little intimidating but I pretty much learned if you don't fuck with people they, for the most part, won't fuck with you. Very valuable life lesson.
The pay sucked ass. I was supposed to get $1 for each card that got mailed back, but I think the guy in the office just gave me whatever petty cash was on hand. Every two weeks he'd give me something like $50. It did let me buy Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES, though, which created plenty of fun memories of its own.
I remember the manager was a chain smoker who hit me with the wise words, "If the only color you ever see in life is green, you'll do OK." And during the interview there were five or six of us in the office and one guy was falling asleep while we were waiting to be called. I wore a shirt and tie, not knowing this was a douchey job. That guy had a hat on that said, "I'd rather be fishing."
Did that for two months until I got sick for a few days and got out of the routine. School was starting in a couple weeks anyway and I wanted some sort of summer vacation. The next year I got a job selling ice cream at Six Flags.

 

My first job was monitoring a group of inner city kids during the summer at a local recreation center. It was the worst.

I had a group of about 15 children ranging from ages 7-10. Many were from disadvantaged backgrounds and didn’t have much home training (not their fault), so it was brutal trying to teach these kids discipline.

You had to tell them everything twice, and they didn’t listen unless you were darn near screaming at them. I’m not a screamer so half the time they didn’t follow me.

What’s weird was at the end of the summer a lot of them cried when I was leaving, despite running roughshod over me for three months.

I was so drained coming home from work everyday, but that $7 an hour seemed worth it at the time.

 

Unlocking and locking open houses all summer in a posh neighborhood, golf cart and all, just to be able to buy baseball cards and video games. It was the best job I've ever had.

 

When did you get out of prison?

 

My first real job was the summer after freshman year at college. Wildland firefighting. In retrospect, probably should have done an internship, but man that was fun.