Your First Job, age, job

[Lord Zombiac]

15, Carney
First job.
First time I smoked pot on the job (panicked!)
Co-worker was the first person to steal an album from me (trout mask replica)
***
of note:
we were hired to operate rides at a birthday party at Mickey Gilly's estate. Willie Nelson and other big acts performed. The barbecue was awesome.

[aliantha]

17. Maid at a Howard Johnson's. Could not keep up with the older women. Cried every day before I went to work. Luckily they took all summer to hire me, so I only had to work there for two weeks before I resigned and left for college.

[[Syl]]

Sold newspapers for the Elko Daily Free Press when I was ten. I made quite a bit of money for one hour of work per day. I think it was about ten cents per paper that I sold plus tips, so usually at least ten dollars. I had a great route mapped out between the bars and casinos.

Worked for a couple of weeks a few years later as a dishwasher. I didn't really like the place, though, and felt I was being taken advantage of.

My first real job was McD's. Made it about 3 months. Walked out when one of the new managers stole $20 from my drawer and wrote me up for being $20 short that night.

[Vraith]

Throwing hay bales, 14.
Heh...LZ: Didn't get to do a "Carny" thing till older and really, it was circus, not carnival...BUT first time [and only] I saw peeps busted for pot while on a job.

[Cagliostro]

Passing out flyers for a gift store - $1 an hour, aged somewhere between 8-10. Child labor laws were not in effect, or if they were, nobody said anything about it. I got the job because they advertised free soda, back in the day when soda was not regularly purchased at least by my parents. We'd go in, pretend we were looking around, drink soda, and then go over to David's Department store and play their Atari demo for the rest of the day. They approached us, and we thought they'd tell us to stop coming in, but they offered a job instead. VERY nice people. An hour was an eternity in those days, but I found I could buy Star Wars action figures.

Second job: working with my mom's boyfriend at some IT place. I have no memory of what I actually did, but I got paid. I was probably 15 or 16.

First real job: 18, I believe, working at Taco Grande. It sucked, but I worked it for a few years. I got fired for beating up on a pregnant employee (there is MUCH more to this story, and no, I'm not a jerk, at least in this case).

[danlo]

Throwing hay bales, mowing lawns, mucking out stables, painting fences and chopping down trees starting at 12. First real paycheck job working in grease pit Dairy Queen at 16, found $50 under a crushed can while vacuuming the parking lot my last day before I had to go back to the dreaded boarding school...

[balon!]

Best Buy, 17.

Ugh. Great paychecks with all the xtra hours, but the location was in a mall which sucked my lifeforce...

[dlbpharmd]

Laborer on a construction site somewhere in the Stone Mountain area of Georgia, age 15. $4.50/hour. Saved up enough to buy all of my school clothes, a class ring, and since I earned the money myself, bought a pair of Air Jordans too.

[Cambo]

Casual work for my dad, mowing lawns, gardening, etc. from about 13.

First real job at Countdown supermarket on the checkouts. Soul would die a little every time I put the uniform on. Swore blind I'd never work in a supermarket again. I've been working at Woolworths (same parent company) for almost two years now...

[drew]

Newspaper Delivery Person
Ages nine through twelve.

As I lived in a rural area, I had few customers, maybe twenty five or so. The paper was $1.80 per week, so nearly everyone gave me the 20 cent tip; the newspaper paid me about fifteen dollars per week.



Handing out flyers on the street for All Ages Club
Age 17
No pay.

I did this to get the owner to book my bands on good nights!!



First real job:
Courier
Age 18-current (fifteen years now)

[sgt.null]

first paycheck - delivering newspapers. somewhere preteens I guess.

[rdhopeca]

16 - cart collector at the local supermarket - 1 year...

[Damelon]

Worked for my dad, testing transformers, after I graduated from High School.

[Harbinger]

Farm labor. 10. $1 an hour walking beside a tractor and wagon picking up field rocks and loading/unloading wagon.

[lorin]

14 babysitting for a deaf spoiled toddler and two siblings. $2.75/hour. A friggin' nightmare.

[Harbinger]

My first public job was a VIP for the national park service when I was 14 or 15. No pay, but fun and a reference.

[Avatar]

Damn you people are hard workers huh? Guess my first real job was when I was 19. (Managed to avoid it 'til then.) Worked for an arcade game company in London...emptying and moving arcade games around.

Lived above the office, and used to get blitzed, go downstairs, rack up free credits and play games all night sometimes.

--A

[High Lord Tolkien]

I was an usher for General Cinema.
16.
I was paid 2.90 an hour when minimum wage was 3.25
They classified us the same as waiters/waitresses illegally.
If anyone complained about it they were fired.
I was there about 6 months, it was fun.



The manager made/makes his/her money from concessions.
That's why it's so obscenely high priced.
We used to inventory paper cups!
The guy that actually played the movie was a total dick.
Never spoke to anyone.
It was like he was working on the secret of cold fusion up in the projection booth and not jerking off like we all knew he did.

We used to clean the theater wearing these ghostbuster-like backpack leaf blower things.
We started at the top and just went up and down the isles blowing it all down to the bottom where we swept it up.
If there were two or more of us doing the same room and someone found a semi-full soda cup it's would quickly become a hurled projectile.

All the movies that played while I was there sucked.
Lust in the Dust and C.H.U.D for example.....
Gandhi too.
Now Gandhi was a cool movie but not for a teenager and I think it played there for almost a year.

[Sunbaneglasses]

16. City Park and Rec swimming pool. I cut grass, cleaned the pool building, cleaned and changed the pool filters and did other assorted nastiness over the summer. My grandfather was a City Councilman and he got me the job to make money to buy a car over the summer.

[JazFusion]

I'm really happy to know other people got stoned on the job, too.

My first official job was at Taco Cabana when I was 16. I was a drive-thru cashier/food preparer. I couldn't work up front because they sold margaritas, and being under 18 I couldn't sell alcohol.

All of the cooks in the back were Mexican and I knew enough spanish to know that "mota" meant "weed" and so I had a decent enough hook-up there. Plus, the 20something year old dude that also worked there had a crush on me and on break we'd drive around in his truck, get high and then giggle about all the rednecks mispronouncing "pico de gallo". I teased him for voting for Nader in 2000.

Good times, man. Good times.