First job chronicles

[forever_town]

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.

 

[forever_town]

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.

 

[Angola!]

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 ****s that would leave their carts 7 miles away across the parking lot, because that meant I got to be outside longer.

 

[dooley_womack1]

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.

 

[cranberry]

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.

 

[Angola!]

$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.

 

[Appgrad05]

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.

 

[Batman]

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 **** with people they, for the most part, won't **** 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.

 

[Paper Champion]

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.

 

[Herbert Anchovy]

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.

 

[Rumpleforeskin]

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?

 

[statrat]

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.

 

[Flying Headbutt]

First job was washing dishes at a restaurant when I was 15. On the first day the manager, who had never met me, told me to drive to the grocery store and buy a bunch of burger buns. He was a little stunned to find out that I um, didn't have a car. I sucked most of that summer in trying to learn all the duties and not taking all damn night to finish up. But I gradually picked it up and also got to cook some here and there.

 

[BigSleeper]

My first job was as a paperboy, back when newspapers actually hired kids to sling a heavy bag (Sundays really sucked ass) over their shoulder, walk a route a collect subscription fees. I wish I could say I most remember things like learning what good honest labor was, but the no. The thing I remember most was learning what embezzlement was. At age 12. For those of you too young to understand how such a lesson could come to pass, let me explain:

The newspaper would deliver your papers to your house. Once a week, a bill for those papers would arrive. Your job was to collect some monthly fees to cover the bill. At the end of month, there would always be some folks left over and that would be your profit. Pretty soon, stupid ol me, started "borrowing" from myself, taking some here and there, figuring I'd just have less profit that month.

Pretty soon, I was in the red, nearly ****ting my pants and scheming of ways to make up the money. My parents soon found out and, well, they weren't happy.

I still cringe at the thought of sitting in my silent bedroom, waiting .... father pulls into driveway ... the rusty screen door hitting the doorjam .... some muffled conversation from the kitchen ... the steps creaking ... the first leathery SNAP! echoing up the stairway (my father snapping his the ends of his belt to let us know, here comes the pain) ... SNAP! ... SNAP! ... then pain.

I vowed never to steal again, and haven't.

 

[BYH]

Like Angola and Big Sleeper, my first gig was technically a paper route. (Unlike big Sleeper, I never stole from my employer ) My sister and I split the route for two years...one week for me, one week for her and we both went out on Sundays.

It did send us on irreversible financial paths, though: While she saved every penny, I poured every penny I made into the crack habit known as baseball card collecting. My grades went south around the same time (hi Stormy!). Twenty-odd years later, she has a nice house and perfect credit and I...don't.

Anywho, she quit after two years and I kept the gig until I turned 15, when I got a job at the A&P. That sucked. A lot. Stocking shelves, chasing after carts and bagging groceries, all for a boss who sported a miserable toupee and a worse disposition. Not my fault you wasted your life at A&P, jerkoff.

the last summer with the paper route was the best, though. Crawl out of bed at 6 am every day, put on my Walkman with "Purple Rain" or Dokken's "Back For The Attack," walk the route, go home, flip on KC101 and play Nintendo until noon. Then I'd get on my bike, ride to the pool and swim all day. Ahh yes. That was the life. And that was 20 years ago this summer. ****.

 

[Trey Beamon]

My first job was a golf caddie at a country club.

Best part? Free round every Monday night, $20-40 for three hours work, snacks (candy, hot dogs) before starting the back nine.

Worst part? Cheap ass members who'd roll up in BMWs and not tip you for taking their bag.

 

[MU_was_not_so_hard]

I started umpiring baseball when I was 14. Other than shoveling driveways, it was, for all intents and purposes.
I'd say the best thing I learned (other than what sun block didn't come off with sweat) was how to ignore people. You can only hear so many insults before your ears start to bleed.

 

[buckweaver]

First job here was also umpiring baseball.

Man, those all-day Saturdays were something else: 10 a.m. U-8 teeball, 11 a.m. U-9 "coach pitch", 12 p.m. U-10 pitching machine, 1 p.m. U-12 pitching machine. Half-hour break. 2:30 p.m. U-12 pitch, 4 p.m. U-12 pitch, 5:30 p.m. U-14 rec league, 7 p.m. U-14 rec league.

8 games in 11 hours. Got $12/game for the first four and $20/game for the last four. That came out to $128 for a full day of work. Pretty nice for a 16-year-old, but as everyone knows, officiating is as thankless as police work. And umpiring games of players who were just three years younger left me especially vulnerable to uber-competitive rec-league coaches. But I had some pretty good partners (including one, a year older than me, who's now umpiring in the Carolina League), so we didn't have many problems.

Except for the time I almost learned the hard way that just because the law prohibits a parent/fan from "assaulting" a 16-year-old umpire doesn't mean he won't.

 

[PCLoadLetter]

During my breaks from college I was an "Attractions Host" at Disneyland, which is Disneyspeak for a ride operator. I worked in Fantasyland, on the Matterhorn, Carousel, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, and Peter Pan. Great job for a college kid, especially since a huge percentage of the people I worked with were also seasonal hires from colleges all over the country.

Great job to learn how to deal with the public. It's not easy, and the standards are very high.

Great for celebrity sightings, too. Cher came on the Matterhorn - Sonny Bono must have been a dwarf, because I remember Cher towering over him and she was maybe 5' 7". Barbra Streisand was staggeringly homely. Unfortunately Michael Jackson came on the Matterhorn on my day off, so I missed him. He asked if it was a real mountain.

 

[MU_was_not_so_hard]

During my breaks from college I was an "Attractions Host" at Disneyland, which is Disneyspeak for a ride operator. I worked in Fantasyland, on the Matterhorn, Carousel, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, and Peter Pan. Great job for a college kid, especially since a huge percentage of the people I worked with were also seasonal hires from colleges all over the country.

Great job to learn how to deal with the public. It's not easy, and the standards are very high.

Great for celebrity sightings, too. Cher came on the Matterhorn - Sonny Bono must have been a dwarf, because I remember Cher towering over him and she was maybe 5' 7". Barbra Streisand was staggeringly homely. Unfortunately Michael Jackson came on the Matterhorn on my day off, so I missed him. He asked if it was a real mountain.

I would have shot myself.