Your first job

[mr natural]

I did a search and I don't think anybody's done a thread on your first job. I had all the kid jobs from paperboy to mowing lawns to shoveling snow (I grew up in Buffalo so the last was extremely lucrative).

Anyway, when I was 15, I lied and said I was 16 and got a job at a gas station. I show up for my first day, the boss takes me around back and gives me a bottle of cleaner, some sponges and a toilet brush and plunger. He shows me the bathrooms. He says, "welcome to work, kid. You'll be doing this for the next 50 years or so." Kind of sums it all up, doesn't it? A week later, I was laid off because they called my parents and found out how old I really was. The boss paid me cash under the table for the week and said to come back when I was 16. How about you? I'm sure there are some interesting stories out there.
-Mr. N.

[cotecj]

I worked at an ice cream stand. I was 15, but at the time, you could get a work permit and get paid "student wage" which was $3.85/hour. What a terrible job that was.

[Fendrcaster]

My first job at 14 was throwing hay and shoveling cow manure. A year later, I moved up to dishwasher at a fancy restaurant.

[morroben]

When I was 14 I got a job at Little Caesar's at the corner of Lake Otis and Abbott in Anchorage, Ak. The basic job description was to answer the phone saying, "Little Caesar's on Lake Otis, would you like to try our cheezer cheezer special. It was 2 single topping medium pizzas for $14.95. The job paid $4.75 an hour.
I got the job at the beginning of the summer and road my bike to and from work. Once winter rolled around the biking was out. There wasn't bus service or anything like that out where we lived, so it was up to my Mom to drive me back and forth. She quickly grew tired of me wreaking of pizza and garlic, causing her car to wreak of pizza and garlic, and she made me quit.
The following summer I got a job at Bruce's T-shirts in the Dimond Center. He was the guy that airbrushed t-shirts in a kiosk in the middle of the mall. He worked the day and then I would come in after school and work the rest of the night. I kept that job through the rest of high school.

edit: AND the other day I got a box from my Mom. It had a denim jacket in it that Bruce painted for me back then. I was just starting to play guitar and I was a Clapton fanatic so Bruce had painted the Journeyman album cover on a denim jacket for me. I've never worn it...never would. I don't even know why he thought that was something I would like. But it's funny that I still have it after all these years.

[Lerb21]

Guitar builder. I've lost close to 500 bucks.

It beats washing dishes.

[PaisleyIsGod]

I worked at a Harvey's for one shift. My friend and bandmate worked there and we thought it would be cool if I got a job there too. I finally got a call back and went for an interview and whatnot. Only catch was that my friend quit around that time because after giving them a few weeks notice about not being able to work a shift because of a BOTB we were playing and having them give him the OK, they told him he had to work again. This escalated and turned into a big personal battle between him, his family, the workers and management. So he quit, and I was given a job. Anyway, I worked my first shift, a Thursday, and during it they told me I would be working Friday to cover Mike's (my friend) shift. Turns out they called me BECAUSE he quit. They knew we were in the same band and everything. I know it's kind of stupid to quit a job over missing a gig, but I didn't like how sneaky they were with the whole thing.

My first REAL job was at a Shoppers Drug Mart.

[PennyCentury]

I was a checker in a local supermarket. I felt I had a better job than the kids I knew working at McDonald's next door.

[EdgarHF]

Not counting my paper route and odd neighborhood jobs. My first job with a regular paycheck was Goldblatts downtown Chicago on state street.

I got a chuckle a few months ago when I bought a Jimmy Reed album and heard him singing in one of his songs about how he had a "Cadillac car and a charge account at Goldblatts"

[outbreak]

Well first job i guess was at bunnings (big hardware chain here) My dad worked there, they get in their cheapo wheelbarrows unassembled because it's cheaper to ship and the manufactorer gives them $5 per wheelbarrow to cover bunnings costs of assembling them. I did this from like 14-16 about once every 3 months or so. Funny thing was after the first couple times i had a routine done and would do 2 pallets in a morning (about 100 wheelbarrows (some were noly $3 can't remember how it worked)) i was making like $450 (au) and going home at 3 in the arvo. Making more then the real staff! This job paid for my car when i turned 16 and got my learners.
once they caught on how much i was getting (took them about 2 years) they ended up keeping the cash themselves and using someone who actually worked for them to assemble them.

Next job i got was just in a supermarket in the fruit and vege. Very easy cruisy job.

[Brad Pittiful]

my friends father was a beer truck driver and worked out of a distributor...this was in southwest philly...i was 15 or 16 and he asked if i wanted to work in the yard...my first day the owner said...you can do almost anything but dont lose one of the beer hand trucks

these were like a hand truck but made with tubing...pretty sturdy for a very flimsy looking thing and could hold 10 cases of beer or soda...and the cases were the wooden ones...nice and heavy...anyway...at the end of the day they were one of these beer hand trucks short...he gave me my days pay and say get the F*** out of here...ooops!

[smsuryan]

Wendy's......you know why the burger is square? you can see all 4 edges so it APPEARS to be larger then the competitors who have round burgers hidden under the veil of the bun....the only thing i remember from my brief employment flipping burgers...

[jazztele]

bagging groceries at the local supermarket, started just before i was 16.

i was a cheap little punk then, i was able to save almost every penny i earned and bought my first tele with the money i stashed away a year and a half later...

[Veitchy]

Well, I grew up on a farm so that was kind of my first job. Had a fixed wage from my mum for various jobs. Hay season was the best. After I finished school my first proper job was working in a wood treatment plant straping up packs of treated wood. 5:00 AM wake up for 6:00 AM start. $13.50 an hour. Now I work as a barterder, though that wheelbarrow gig of Outbreak's sounds pretty sweet...

[outbreak]

that it was veitchy, given the chance i'd still go do it every few months when needed for some quick on the side cash.

[Dan German]

KFC kitchen. In a part of town where our busiest day was when government cheques came out. Might be why I am a vegetarian today. The building still stands, boarded up, right on my route to school/work.

[Groovey Records]

you know after thhe paper route stuff and working for my Uncle in his Bakery.

I guess my first job was as a gopher in my local record store.

They couldn't get rid of me so they figured they better give me a job.

$80 a week after school and Saturday, plus a lot of records.

[Guitar_Ninja]

Pushing carts at Wal-Mart. I got the job the summer after high school and worked there as a seasonal employee until they laid me off at Christmas. They told me I could reapply in January. Somehow I never quite made it back there to do so...

[Nash]

Still looking for mine, seems no one wants to even bother calling a person with no experience

I fill out tons of applications and get maybe one call every 3 months and then I go down there and it's usually a pre-interview interview and then I'm told that there are tons of other applicants and it's unlikely that I'll be picked because I have no experience and so far that's been the case.

It's no fun having no money.

[emu!]

Grew up on a farm, so my first job was in the fields starting at age 10. When I got my DL, I went to work at a bank as a mail boy. I was in heaven because I got to work in an air conditioned building.

[Warm Gums]

Lawn mowing...
I started doing my grans, at 14 & after a summer of that my dad figured that I could handle a mower without cutting anything off (or mowing over too many shrubs, flowers etc.) & I was allowed to move on to the neighbors, I had 4 or 5 lawns including the acre of the owner of the local music store (high end "don't touch that" place, Gibson & Fender guitars, Selmer winds, Baldwin Pianos, salesmen wore ties) He seemed to like me & offerd me a 'Saturday Boy' job when I was 16. My mum hit the roof..no way was I working in a music store part time & screwing around with music classes in school. I was "leaving" & getting a "proper job" at the mill. That didn't work out & I ended up going back to school for my last year, & working for a friends older brother who opened a guitar shop in the front room of the family home! After a year of that I left to study music at the U & have been "screwing around with music" ever since
I'm still not welcomed at home...

[outbreak]

Originally Posted by emu!

Grew up on a farm, so my first job was in the fields starting at age 10. When I got my DL, I went to work at a bank as a mail boy. I was in heaven because I got to work in an air conditioned building.

Oh yeah man, when i started in the supermarket i used to just spend the night shifts/weekend shifts hiding in the freezer room downstairs. Now and then we'd get nuts/chips/chocolates that came in broken so we'd take those down the coolrooms and just chill out eating while it's 40 outside

[Harvy]

watering flowers at Home Depot for 8 hours a day... during the summer... in Texas, that got old very fast

[boneyguy]

"My very first job, I said thank you, please
Had me scrub a parkin' lot, down on my knees
Then I got fired for bein' scared of bees
And they only paid me 50 cents an hour"

Delivering newspapers I guess or maybe caddying at the golf course.

[ibobunot]

Starting at thirteen worked at the largest Tropical Fish Importers/Aquarium Supply shop in Dallas wholesale and retail.

On the weekends I volunteered at the Dallas Aquarium or reptile house at the Dallas Zoo. When I was at home I maintained the thirty fish tanks in my room.

I was also a member of the Dallas Aquarium Society, American Killifish Association and the American Cichlid Association.

This is my friend at the time Dr. David M. Schleser.

[boris bubbanov]

Well, I caught crawfish in the sewerage outfall in Blacklick Creek in Ohio and sold them to the bait-man for cash. Got paid a TON.

Time passed, then I worked at a golf course as a caddie.

I raised money selling candy, etc. door to door for boy scouting trips and school concert band trips. Uniforms, meals, trip pocket money.

Then we made some money (and partially repaid our parents) playing loud guitar music at birthday parties.

Then UPS 3.5 hours a night 5 nights a week while full time in college. Threw packages.
Make this truck trailer empty as fast as humanly possible.

[Brad J]

Originally Posted by Veitchy

Well, I grew up on a farm so that was kind of my first job. Had a fixed wage from my mum for various jobs. Hay season was the best. After I finished school my first proper job was working in a wood treatment plant straping up packs of treated wood. 5:00 AM wake up for 6:00 AM start. $13.50 an hour. Now I work as a barterder, though that wheelbarrow gig of Outbreak's sounds pretty sweet...

You got paid for working on your parents farm!?!

I had to work on our farm just not to get kicked out of home from the age of 12!

So I moved to Perth when I was 15 and got a job as a labourer in a signwriting company,
therein ended my dream of being a signwriter, the job sucked!

[chezdeluxe]

Working in the warehouse of a furniture factory at 14.

Half of the factory was dedicated to making coffins and part of my job was as an offsider to the truckdriver making deliveries to funeral parlours.

One day the inevitable happened and I saw a dead person for the first time.Everyone else just took it for granted but it rattled me a bit that day.

[Tim Bowen]

My first job was maintaining a putt putt golf course, at the age of thirteen. I held the course record for hole-in-one's, and consumed way too many RC colas and Moon Pies along the way. I've never not had a job since. After that, it was off to bagging groceries, working in sweat shop carpet and textile mills (including a disposable diaper factory), a wide variety of restaurant work, manual labor carpentry work, planting trees up and down the sides of mountains for twelve hours a day, and donning arm-length orange plastic gloves toward the goal of removing cow placentas and after-birth as a veterinary assistant at farm jobs. It took a while for me to find a gig that actually had anything at all to do with my personal interests and specific educational pursuits.

[Bill Hullett]

I was 16 and a buddy of mine asked me if I wanted to sing for $$$ , so the next day after school we took the bus downtown to "TIKI RECORDING" and got a gig singing background on a local Chevy dealers commercial...... "E.Z. Davies Chevrolet" it took about 30 minutes and it paid $15 (this was in 1966 minimum wage was $1.10 hr.) needless to say, I was hooked for the rest of my life to be a studio rat!!!!!!!

Bill Hullett

[getbent]

cutting fish
hawker at angel and ram games and concerts
paper boy

[edgemarc]

15 years old living in Prescott Arizona 1976 hanging around the horse track and an old timer asked me if I could ride "sure!" I says so he tells me "50 bucks a week you'll exercise Quarter horses and Thoroughbreds then groom em and clean stalls till noon be here at 5AM tomorrow" I worked there all summer even got to work at the Bicentennial rodeo cleaning up and helping load bulls/broncs in the shoots. To this day the #1 adrenaline rush I've ever had was breaking out of the gates on a Quarter horse, imagine a rocket made of muscle. Man what a summer I wish I could go back.

[Warren Pederson]

$.85 an hour. Washing cars in a a building where the cars were fed through on a track, while the owners watched through the glass. We got absolutely soaked,there was water and soap spraying everywhere, while we hand scubbed them. When they came out the other end some of the crew had to towel dry them. Nice thing was you didn't have to do it all the time. Just show up after school and you were put to work. If you didn't show up for a day or a couple of weeks it didn't matter none.

[Brian blaut]

LaRosa's

Cincinnati area pizzaria.

[Westerly Sunn]

My 1st job "real" job (requiring Soc #) was driving a forklift at a pickle plant, but I grew up mowing lawns and "barning" tobacco... i.e suckering, cropping, trucking, hanging... etc...

I did have the proverbial "Paper Route" once... I took it over from my younger brother, but I was around 18 or so at the time... It was... legendary... LOL! Both my younger brother and I took it as a race against time challenge! I was driving a '73 (iirc) Chevrolet Laguna at the time and made some really good times...
Worse, with me, my friends would come along for the "ride" and help keep the refreshments going... It was unthinkably Dionysian.
Fortunately while alone, I was once stopped by a State trooper, who was also fortunately a family friend... I had just made the last drop at the Bar-B-Que place out on the highway at the edge of town. Stopping the car was unthinkable, and as there was a lot of traffic coming into town, I proceeded up the left shoulder of the road; reaching highway speed while waiting for a break in traffic to cut across to the right lane...
Trooper Pridgen happened along about that time... When he asked me just what it was I thought I was doing, I explained it and told him that I thought it was alright for me 'cos I was the paper boy...
He advised me that contrary to my thinking, that it was in fact, "NOT ALRIGHT"... but he let me go...

[kman900]

The coolest holidayjob was at the winery, where we lived and my dad was administrator. We had a big sound system installed in the wineyards, that could play warning-cries of the birds, that used to drop by in huge swarms and ate alle the grapes. So i sat on a raised hide and switched the speakers on and off in the area the birds wanted to land.
I also had some kind of starter pistol to chase them away . .

Good job . . payed my first hifi system.

[jjkrause84]

My first "real" job...I worked at the BBQ beef sandwich hut at the County Fair when I was 15. It was horrible. Truly horrible. The vast majority of it was boot-camp-esque "scrube every inch of this tiny little hut" work. The smell of BBQ beef smoke was so bad that it actually entered my skin such that when I showered that night the smell came out of my pores and the bathroom stank just as bad as the hut! It was disgusting. The smell woudl start slowly as the hot water released it from my skin....after a few minutes it made me wanna gag.

At least I learned to take quick showers

My next job, at 16, was at a local water park "Raging Waters". That was HARD and I can't believe how much power and authority they gave a 16 year old but my job was to cater to the special parties/functions at one of three "picnic" sites around the park. This meant I had to be there hours before the park opened (I got my one and only speeding ticket at 6.30 on the 4th of July because I was late!) and I was resopnsible either alone or with a very small team for feeding anywhere from 50 - 1,000 people. The cool part about that job was being MacGyver. I had no guidance or supervision to speak of so I had to run around scrounging food and condiments, plates and napkins from various departments and food stands around the park. I then had to cook it all myself and feed the multitudes. I fixed propane tanks and BBQs (despite having no idea what I was doing), helped set up nominal "entertainment" (usually a couple girls who would come play with the small children), and was held accountable by both customer and manager alike. It was damned hard work and there were plenty 10 - 12 hour days but at least I left work feeling like I'd "Accomplished" something.


Thanks for bringing back the memories!

[shades]

Besides doing chores at home from the time I was a lil' fella, the first real job requiring working papers was a caddy at the local country club. Some carries were good tippers and some were lousy tippers, the worst carry was a double for two old broads as they usually had enormous golf bags and couldn't hit the ball more that 100 feet but in opposite directions. The second summer I got the job taking care of the members golf bags & clubs and had the ability to carry for only the best tippers plus took care of the members golf carts which became a pretty lucrative gig. Another good way to make cash at the country club was to work the parking lot on tournament days...those folks didn't want to look like a cheap schmuck and would pony up big time for a kid to take their clubs to the pro shop(they didn't know they would be paying me again). Didn't take too long to figure out that if ya schmooze these country clubbers and blow smoke up their ass they would slick ya up with cash for helping them out...did this until I was 17 and most days I was walking back home with $50-$75 bucks cold cash in my pocket.
The movie Caddyshack was an amazing portrayal of country clubbers...however I'll hang out with a better class of losers thank you very much.

[Eric Karonen]

My first full-time job was cool. I answered letters from kids wanting information about various types of pollution ... circa 1970.

I worked for the newly created Ministry of the Environment - when I was hired I had to swear an allegiance to the Queen of England!

Anyway, I'd read the letters and respond with the appropriate pamphlets for whatever the child was interested in learning about.

I enjoyed that job, but after a year, I went back to school.

(I had a whack of part-time jobs before the full-time position.)

[P-Nutz]

... at his junk store. He and my grandfather owned side-by-side junk shops for years; they were actually an institution where I grew up, I was paid 50 cents an hour, which I promptly gave right back to him to buy books, comic books, and other cool stuff he had lying around, including my first guitar and bass ...

Peace.

[imsilly]

My first job was a local College helping students apply for courses. Seeing how filling out forms and answering stupid questions is like torture to me and doing it for other people is even worse it turned into some Kafkaesque nightmare.

The people I worked with were cool though, still go for drinks with them even though it was years ago and only worked there a couple of weeks.