Working

[Trilby]

At what age did you start working and how many jobs have you had since that time? Did you ever have a period where you did not work and what was that like?

My first job: aged 16: Ponderosa (local chain steak house) started as the drink girl ("iced tea? Lemonade?" we were told to push those two as were cheapest)

Burger Chef (not to be confused with Burger King)-lasted 1 1/2 months

IHOP-five years as a waitress--made great bux--usually 60.00 per Sat./Sun. mornings. Partied like a madwoman with co-workers. Also worked as a puller/line judge for Skeet Club

Hospital--student X-ray tech, then as real X-ray tech in a clinic. then in a bigger clinic tech. THEN-got RN degree and....

RN cardiac unit
RN occupational health (GM and a steel mill)
RN for Coca-Cola
RN for State Hospital
RN for hospital-psych/home health care RN
now--part time RN for university and full time Uni student.

I have worked since the age of 16-sometimes 2 jobs-and haven't had a break despite 2 pregnancies (worked the very day both sons were born) and divorce and suicide attempts--day after I had my stomach pumped I was at a job interview--and I got the job. amazing what a person can do if motivated.

[glatt]

When I was a kid, I would mow lawns and shovel driveways around the neighborhood. Babysat too. Must have been around 12-13 when I started those odd jobs.

First real job job was working in a college bookstore for the last summer of high school.

Then had cafeteria jobs all through college. Everyone should work food service at some point in their lives.

For a few summers and winters I worked at a local mom & pop corner store. That was awesome, ran the place myself for up to ten hours a day. First job with real responsibility. It was the store I used to take my pennies to when I was a kid so I could buy candy. Felt like I had come full circle when I was selling the same crap to the next generation of kids.

My first post-college job was working in an antique furniture restoration place. It was fun, but unhealthy. Scary warning labels on all the products we used. I learned a lot about furniture there. And racist southerners, like the owner.

Then I was unemployed and borrowed/embezzled enough money to live poorly on from my parents for 6 months before I got a job temping in a law firm. They know about the money, but forgave the debt a long time ago.

That temp job turned into a permanent job, and I've worked my way up the ranks of this firm over the last 15 years. Don't see myself leaving any time soon.

[glatt]

Oh I forgot the question about what it was like to be not working.

It sucked. I lived in a cheap basement apartment alone. I had friends in my town, but rarely saw them because I had become nocturnal. Actually, that's not true. I didn't become nocturnal, I started a new sleep/wake cycle. I like staying up late at night, but also like getting a full night's sleep. I found that the ideal length of a day wasn't 24 hours, but was more like 27 hours. So I started living a 27 hour day, which meant that I was coming into and going out of phase with the lives of my friends. Sometimes we would be awake at the same time, and sometime we wouldn't.

Those six months were both wonderful and depressing at the same time. Like a long lonely slovenly vacation in a dump.

[melidasaur]

My first job was when I was 15 - I worked in a donut shop called Donutland in Ames, Iowa. It was really fun.

In the summers during high school, I worked at Six Flags Great America.

In college, I was an RA.

After college, I was a residence hall director.

During law school, I was a residence hall director (free rent, who can pass that up?).

Now, I'm a law clerk.

I'm sure there were other jobs in there, but they weren't as memorable.

[Spexxvet]

Sold knives the summer between high school and college.

Through college, I delivered copy paper at Penn.

I've been hired by 4 optical companies, all of which changed hands while I was there.

[Shawnee123]

13 years old--local large produce farm picking strawberries and "packing" corn (for large scale distribution) It was about 3 miles from home and I could ride my bike...later moped to work.
Continued there every summer all through college.

College: cafeteria (what a fun job--we worked hard and had a blast)

Post college--

manufacturing (soldering to mil-specs, made safety/arming devices for missile systems right about the first gulf war time) testing, etc--later on supervisor/solder school teacher)

Another manufacturing QA job, testing airplane generator parts (commercial and military)

Another manufacturing job, QA Supervisor in charge of testing and calibrations for a printed circuit board maker (not the components...the boards themselves...single layer, multi-layer, flex...all kinds of complexity, commercial and military)

Another manufacturing job testing RF filters and trying not to get fried in the large amounts of electricity involved in some testing

Current job in financial aid at a college--5 years.

All through post-college jobs also worked at the popular downtown bar, and the country club...bartending, waiting tables, cooking...also bartended private parties in people's homes.

I miss the physicality of my old manufacturing jobs, but my organizational skills and love of documentation made me a prime candidate for my current job (which is a state job so have public employee bennies.)

My first job, other than the ranch/farm work of normal kids that grow up on them was at 13, sand-blasting tractor-trailers for citrus.
I cannot begin to imagine how many jobs I have had since then, well over a hundred.

[Sundae]

First job - kitchen hand in a family-run restaurant on Saturday evenings & Sunday lunchtimes aged 13

I can't list the rest, it would bore you senseless - I don't have as many as rkzenrage but with my evening and weekend jobs I'll easily have 50

I've worked as a hostess in a late night drinking establishment, food sampling for a supermarket, a barmaid, waitress, and shelf-stacker amongst others.

Often my criteria for choosing my part time jobs is the perks. If I'm poor enough to take a second job I usually expect it to feed me

[Pie]

Book shelver at the local library ~ age 13 (volunteer, since you can't hire a 13-year-old. My mom made me -- something about building character.)
Doctor's assistant (podiatrist) from 14-16 summers/evenings.
Summer intern (mostly programming) at PPPL, 16 summer
Programmer at the Astrophysics department, 18 summer
Lab tech in the EE dept, 20 summer
Got my bachelors and my masters
Optics engineer at Lucent Technologies/OFS from graduation till they folded.
Sold my soul to the devil; am now an EE at a defense contractor.

[Shawnee123]

Originally Posted by Pie

Book shelver at the local library ~ age 13 (volunteer, since you can't hire a 13-year-old. My mom made me -- something about building character.)
.

A farm can.
That's funny, I got my part time job because dad suggested it--he said it was either find some part time job or he would find work for me around our place. I knew he would have me filing blades of grass with a nail file, so I got the job at the farm. Best thing my dad ever did as far as teaching me a work ethic...and I have great memories of there...later I worked in the market as a cashier etc, and became really close with the family. The job kind of grew with me.

[Elspode]

Lawn mowing and babysitting (!) from 13 to 15
At 15, I started washing dishes in a local motel restaurant. Lots of fun stealing beer from the adjacent bar on Sunday mornings when I took out the trash, which my buddies and I would then go swill in the park on balmy Sunday afternoons.

At 16 to 17, I worked for my uncle's rental business, mostly cleaning lawnmowers and sharpening blades when they were returned, and other nasty stuff that no one else needed to do. I was the shag boy, only shagging doesn't mean in the States what it does in Britain. I did learn to back trailers pretty well while working there, though.

At 17, I worked painting and generally restoring HUD foreclosures for my Grandfather. The work was too inconsistent to count on, and I didn't much care for being on top of 40 foot ladders, or in the parts of town where we worked. Also, the whole getting up at 5:00 AM thing got my partying hippy ass down.

Still at 17, I took a job cleaning restaurants after they were closed for the day, six nights a week. This was a nasty job, the company owner was a drunk and a thief, and often gave us bad checks for payroll. I was living in my own apartment at the time, and I could barely afford drugs on what I made, let alone rent, fuel and food. My friends didn't understand that I worked all night, and so would usually show up to party about the time I had been asleep for an hour, so I never slept, and became a speed freak. I moved back home and became unemployed. That wasn't bad for the most part, as my unemployed buddy and I would go up and skate and screw around with hockey sticks and pucks all day at the local rink for $1.25. Still, I was too poor to buy my own booze and drugs, and had to bum them a lot.

At 18, I got a job building cabinets - assembling the main body portions. This was the most fun job I ever had. We were an even split of hippies and hicks, and we all got along great. We'd come in stoned, go out to lunch to refuel, and come back and work with dangerous power tools half blasted. Every weekly payday, the boss would go to the liquor store across the street, buy gallons of beer, and hand out the checks while we all sat around and bullshitted and boozed.

The cabinet job petered out, and I was married by this time, so I took a job in a very small manufacturing operation right up the street from my apartment. Nasty, dirty, boring, and all the guys that worked there were redneck jerks. But at least I got to see lots of neat guns.

When that job went toes up, I went to work for Quik Trip. It sucked. Long and hard. It was decent money for that point in my life, but it was incredibly stressful, with very long days and lots of corporate BS to contend with. I did that for six years as I had a kid and a mortgage by then. That was the worst of drunken years, as you needed to be a total sot to bear working there. I got fired from that job for short inventories (that's a story in and of itself - suffice to say that I wasn't the one doing the stealing, and didn't know who was).

I then started a housecleaning business, and did that for three years. I was pretty shell shocked from the QT gig, and had no desire to ever work for anyone else again in my life. However, I'm not very disciplined, so I quickly got into tax trouble. That phase of my life ended when I had my colon out.

After six months off, I started as office manager for a roofing company. I worked for them for 11 years, then left to start a local office for an out of town roofing company. 60k a year, free run of the whole thing...and fired after 20 months, despite a two year period guaranteed to us to become profitable. Why? Because we were about to become profitable, and the jerk who ran the home office location wanted a piece of the big city action, so he poisoned our well. Dude ran the place into the ground within a year.

Six months unemployment, and I came on here as office manager for an insulation firm. I also delievered pizza for a few months. This place is neither fun nor interesting. Pizza delivery was at least fun, sometimes.

Man, this got kind of long, huh?

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Elspode

Man, this got kind of long, huh?

Yeah, but it never got boring.

I really miss working. I have never understood people who complained about it. Even when working eighty hours a week at a very physical job (while having arthritis and spinal problems), I wanted the job instead of just not having one.

[SteveDallas]

Originally Posted by Brianna

Burger Chef (not to be confused with Burger King)-lasted 1 1/2 months

Awwww I remember the Burger Chef fondly! When I was a kid it was the only fast food close to us. (There was a McDonald's but it was wayyy over on the other side of town.) I don't remember when the Burger Chef in our town shut down--it must have been in the late 70s. Now, of course, there is one of every chain you can imagine on every other block.

Anyway. Umm 9-11 or so. Sold Grit. I guess it was my idea initally, but my mom wouldn't let me stop after I discovered I hate talking to people. In spite of all this I managed to move a few dozen copies a week.

12-13? A former teacher & friend of my mom's did a summer day camp kind of thing at the local college. They got hold of a couple Apple ][ systems, and she got me to come in and teach the kids some computer stuff.

17 wrote some dinky education computer software for my high school. (I thought I was a computer programmer then. Blech.)

During college, worked some in the music library as circulation desk clerk/shelver/etc. Worked much more in the campus computer center as a lab assistant and senior lab assistant. (Senior meant I got to help with the scheduling and be on call one night a week to triage any catastrophes.)

During grad school I had a fellowship so I was essentially paid to go to school. The summer in between I signed up as a "Kelly Girl." My first temp job, at a Big Pharma company to fill in while they found a replacement for an administrative assistant who had transferred, ended up lasting the whole summer, which was cool. Highlights included setting up a mail merge that almost didn't work, because we had to use a form with 5 carbon copies (and I mean literally carbon copies), and we couldn't come up with a printer that would print all the way through. (We finally tracked down an old daisy wheel.)

When grad school ended, went to work doing low-level tech support at a local college. Ended up doing a bunch of other stuff, including training, managing student workers, unix sysadmin, and setting up the first gopher and web servers. After a few years of that I went on to a similar job at a smaller school. I am currently in a VP-ish position, but we are small enough that I am still hands-on.

Odd jobs: When I was in school I made some nice pocket money tutoring (mostly math, with some physics, and even German once) and typing papers for other students. I have also been paid for my clarinet playing on rare occasions--maybe 3 or 4 times total.

[glatt]

You sold Grit? I always saw those ads and wondered about that. If I recall, the kids in those ads made tons of money. Was the magazine any good?