I’ve been sick. Yesterday I sat in a chair for fourteen hours, shivering and achy, and perpetually on the cusp of vomiting and/or shitting myself. I never crossed over, though, and that’s unfortunate. If I’d been able to find release, I probably would have felt a little better. Oh well.
Today I’m almost back to normal. I’d say I’m operating at 80% of full capacity, which is a major improvement. I’m not prepared to do a set of squat ‘n’ thrusts, or anything like that, but I’m feeling semi-OK.
I didn’t go to work last night, which is only the second time I’ve called off in three years. If I’m expected to be there, I’m almost always there. But I felt like I had Malaria, so funk dat. When I called to check on them, I found out there were three of us who didn’t make it to work: three out of ten. So, obviously I picked up somebody’s illness spores there.
And how disgusting is that? I bet we’re sucking up other peoples’ spores, all the time. Most don’t make us sick, so we don’t realize it. But I suspect there’s spit and snot smeared everywhere, and lung mist hanging in the air. Blecch.
Thursday was a scheduled day off, and I had a long list of things I wanted to accomplish. I got out of bed all fired-up and ready to jump into it with both feet. And by the time I reached the coffee maker in the kitchen, I’d already said fukkit.
The main task on the docket was roughly the last thing I wanted to do, so I didn’t do it. Probably not a great habit to get started…
I spent the day doing chores, though. It’s not like I just hung around the house power-farting into upholstery. I was out and about for most of the day, and it felt good to be in the real world again. I should’ve been at the library, but I was craving the real world.
And within thirty minutes I hemorrhaged almost $140:
Gas: $55
PO Box renewal: 22
Case of the golden elixir: 18
Grocery store: 46
Or roughly the price of a new Kindle, which I still don’t own. Grrr…
I fork over about $60 per week for gas, and only drive back and forth to work. So, my commute must cost ten dollars per day. Holy crap! That’s $3000 per year. It’s the kind of thing I wish I didn’t know. Three thousand dollars for the pleasure of driving back and forth to work? That’s goddamned depressing.
When I worked at Fas-Chek grocery in Dunbar, I made $3.35 per hour. So I’d have to work almost 900 Fas-Chek hours (more than 22 full weeks), just to cover my current commuting bill. Damn. I should probably just put down my calculator, shouldn’t I? Whenever I start busting out the Fas-Chek hours, nothing good ever comes from it.
What was your first job? Fas-Chek was my second real job (after toll collector at the Dunbar Toll Bridge — $4.60 per hour), so I’m cheating a little. But I’d like to know about your FIRST real job. Not a paper route, or helping Old Man Watson clean his basement, or shit like that. Your first real job at a real company, where you punched the clock, etc.
How much did you make? Did you like it? How long were you there? Any good stories from that era? What’s your most vivid memory? Please tell us all about it in the comments section below.
And I hope to be running at 100% tomorrow. Unless I have a relapse, I’ll see you then.
Have a great day!
Good Afternoon Surf Reporters…..
Glad you are feeling better, Jeff. The sickness is out there. One reason I seldom go out.
First job was for KFC…or Kentucky Fried Chicken as it was known then. I made the staggering sum of 90 CENTS an hour when I started. Yes, you read that correctly. I was paid every two weeks and one check was for 120 hours in those two weeks and I brought home $95. I quit soon after that.
We had one guy who dropped the tater mashing machine on his arm and broke it. His arm that is. He was tipping it back to wipe the counter underneath and his hand slipped off. It only dropped maybe 4 inches at the most. He must have had bones made of dried pasta.
Another guy was kind of an odd individual. I think he was a manic depressive. Or bi-polar as it is now known. One evening he stripped off his shirt and painted a giant smiley face on his chest with magic marker…with his nipples for eyes. He worked about an hour that way until customers started to complain. He was fired soon after that.
The manager was a little smarmy character who drank heavily and would bring jugs of vodka and orange juice in to the store a couple times a week and everyone would get semi-snockered. Most of the people working there were underage but he didn’t care. I think he was trying to score with a couple of the girls working the counter.
I worked at Young Floral in Chas. during high school and college. I don’t remember what I made, but it was pitiful, I’m sure. The next job was during a semester off from college. I worked at C&P Telephone as the mail clerk. I made the whopping sum of $55 per week. Of course, that was back in the dark ages (1961)
FIrst real job…Evangiline Pumpers.
It was a crude oil production company. I Worked there full time in the summer and half time during school. Summertime wage was $50 a day, schooltime was $20 a day.
No matter what, everyday I got paid that much, $1000 a month, and I thought I was a high roller.
Depending on the job that was going on, if it was raining too much I would go and clock in and leave. Easy $50. Sometimes we would have to work 13 hours in south louisiana summer, that was a hard $50.
I also worked on the weekends for $25, all I had to do was check the production of wells by measuring the amount in the holding tanks. I could usually just rough estimate based on how much natural gas was being used compared to how much force pump was being done.
Pretty shitty job all in all.
Wow, top five!
First job was at a cafe type restaurant in a mall. I think I got about $3/hr plus tips.
Taco Bell. Other than the horrific polyester uniform, it actually wasn’t that bad, I got paid pretty well for a high schooler, and I’ll still eat there.
The worst job was in college, when I worked food service at a free city zoo. Just day after day after day of a parade of human trash and listening to the Sparky the Sea Lion show three times a day. I still can recite the whole thing…
I too, did the Taco Bell thing. The one I worked at was staffed mostly by kids from my high school’s crosstown rival, and I had to endure a lot of ribbing; some of it good natured, most of it not. The fact that I was a backward, pimply geekazoid in those days didn’t help, I’m sure.
I ended up quitting after the management refused to do anything about the family of mice that had moved in behind the deep fryer. One of the managers even started giving them names. The place was closed and demolished shortly afterward.
Mt first job was at a little burger-joint style restaurant on the 9th hole of a golf course, called the Halfway Cafe.
I was 16 and my job was to show up around 430pm and work until 630p (when they closed) and clean the place. I had to clean everything except the kitchen. The place was small, luckily, but the bathrooms were HORRENDOUS!! It was by far the worst part of the job and I hated it. Men’s bathrooms are DISGUSTING. I made $4.25 an hour and I worked about 16 hours a week. Not much, but I had money to go to the movies and to put gas in my car.
Every once in a while I’d work a weekend day at the clubhouse and we’d set up and serve a brunch-type lunch for the groups that they were hosting up there. That was when I really raked it in. (at least in my 16-year-old eyes) I could make roughly my entire weeks salary in one day. It wasn’t the best job and wasn’t the worst job, so I really can’t complain, althought I sort of just did.
The crappy part was that I was the only one of my friends who took any initiative to get a job, so I was the only one who had money. Ever.
Having pissed on that hydrant, on to bidness…
Hope you’re feeling better, Jeff. I had that creeping crud for a few days last week, and it suck-diddly-ucked. It’s mostly gone now, except for a lingering cough.
My first “real” job was cooking burgers at McDonald’s for $1.95 an hour in 1975 when I was in high school. I got a small raise for taking a crew training class, but then the minimum wage increased so that I was, once again, making minimum wage. As a job it sucked, but it was better than nothing, and there wasn’t much work to be had in Berkshire County at that time. The upside was that I met my first real girlfriend at that job, which makes up for a lot.
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I was a refried bean pot washer at a small Mexican place. That is all I did. Wash bean pots. Giant, crusty, ten gallon bean pots. I’m pretty sure it was a below minimun wage situation. I don’t think it lasted very long, maybe three or four pay periods. Sucked.
My first real job was as a summer intern in 1999 at Dialogic, “an Intel company”. Dialogic had been bought up a few months before I got hired.
Anyway, I worked there for three months after my freshman year of college. I made Dialogic’s web site look like the Intel web site. It involved moving content over to various templates, and ensuring that everyone’s page had the right color schemes and whatever. Grunt work.
But it paid $17 an hour, which was insane for a 19-year-old. I was practically a millionaire.
The dot-com bubble burst right after that, and I couldn’t get another internship in computers. Instead, I worked at Blockbuster the next year for $7.50 an hour. It took a couple of weeks to learn the computer system, since it was a really basic text-based interface… you had to just know to hit F-4-E or whatever to pull up a customer’s history. It was very unintuitive. During that time, I had a couple of people yell at me and call me an idiot for not knowing how to use a computer. Good times.
Short-n-Sweet’s comment just reminded me that my first “real” job was when I was 15… I was a caddy at a country club. I worked almost every day during the summer, and then worked there on weekends during the fall.
That job really sucked. I was too weak to carry two bags, so I was making $25 or so for four hours in the hot sun. Plus, that was just the four hours of actual work. The clubhouse manager required caddies to be there by 7:00am for some reason. But then he would first send out all of the caddies that were his buddies… these were the guys in their 30s who made a career of caddying.
So I’d be way down on the list of caddies and wouldn’t go out until maybe 10:00am, and wouldn’t finish until maybe 2:00pm. Then I usually couldn’t get in a second bag for the day. So I’d get $25 for “working” from 7:00am to 2:00pm. I hated every day of it, but my parents made me do it. I think it was in order to build character or whatever.
I was 13 years old (almost 14), when I landed my first “real” job where I actually received a paycheck. It was at a small delicatessen run by a very prominent Italian family in the city. The family owned the deli, a car wash , and a small hotel right next to each other. Very, very prime real estate…They left the deli in charge of the youngest son who was 19 years old at the time. All I had to do was clean the tables, wash dishes, etc, which was easy because we never did have much business. Did I mention the prime real estate thing?
Anyways, the son and I would spend most of our time either playing catch, or shooting hoops in the parking lot out back. I think I made minimum wage for 1979. Whatever that was. I worked there for over a year until I decided to join the high school swim team and didn’t have the time anymore.
It was a GREAT job. The family ended up selling the three lost a couple of years later for over 4 million bucks, and the son is now on the city council.
Besides working for short stints at a department store (my Mom managed personnel), my first real job was deburring aircraft parts. My pay was $3.75 per hour, or $150 per week. Back in 1974 that bought plenty of beer.
The downside was a pair of hands covered with cuts, burns and scrapes, and lungs full of aluminum, titanium and steel dust. Plenty of noise, too. Not to mention the daily hangovers, and starting Saturday mornings at 6:45 AM still half in the bag.
My first job was working for a cutting edge firm that made calulators when then they first came out. The solar recharging kind. My job was to test and increase the charging rate and capasity in real time use. I worked the night shift.
My first job was to dress up as a giant donut and walk around the mall. There was a neighbor girl that did it with me. Her mother was some kind of manager at the mall and she got us the job.
We were supposed to walk around the bottom floor of the mall and say, “Jack ‘n Jill is up the hill” while handing out donut holes. The donut shop was called Jack ‘n Jill you see, and it was upstairs.
It was miserable. He wouldn’t let us use the back of the store to get dressed so we had to drive to work in white body suits with white face paint on. And our donut costumes were absurd. The hole of the donut was at your back, so you stood in the right hand side of the donut, facing sideways. The donut was so heavy that it would drag the ground as we walked around, and the girl part of my team said fukkit a few times. We got her a skateboard so her donut wouldn’t drag the ground.
We only lasted a couple of weeks. It was humiliating and dangerous – not just because of the bastard teens that would try to knock you down, but also because the costume would often get caught in the esculator, not to mention the increadable strain it put on our backs.
OMG…Let me get a mental picture of this…….priceless!!
My first job was working for my father. He was the food service director at IUP (Indiana University of PA). Once I turned 16 my mother insisted I didn’t freeload anymore. But of course I wasn’t happy about it and told her so. I figured if I had to work to pay “rent” then…fukkit…I’ll just move out. She threw a bunch of paper grocery bags and said “don’t let the door hit you in the ass”…
So I worked on the cafeteria line. Can’t remember how much. I had a BLAST! Met a bunch of hot-ass college guys. When my father drug me out of a frat house party, my cafeteria line days were pretty much over. Helloooo McDonalds….
Love to read about your experiences, Jeff –
except this one.
Hope you are on the mend now. This is also going around in Chicago and the worst thing is that if you get stressed – it comes back. Take some more time off.
My first job was at 14 and I was paid .39 an hour. (that’s thirty nine cents)
I got fired because we were in the back taking inventory and I got my finget caught in a baby bottle.
Yep- since I am older than dirt – baby bottles were glass then.
First real job was a runner for an auctioneer – taking merch to the buyer if it was small, or waiting around til when the auction was over and help the buyer load the big stuff into their pickup truck or van. We also cleared out houses of people who had died and their estate was to be auctioned. Taking antique furniture down three flights of rickety, narrow stairs in old New England houses in the hot summer with no AC. Only good part was when I got to drive the moving trucks – that was fun for a 16 year old. Pay was minimum wage for MA in 1977, whatever that was. Good enough for beer, gas, and the movies once in a while.
Worst job was is college, as a QC tech for the company that made the fat for McDonald’s fat fryers – refining beef tallow. Pay was great ($8/hr in 1983) but the job sucked. The details of beef fat refining are too sick to go into here, maybe another time when we have a gross out contest.
Get better soon, Jeff, we’ve had trouble in NC (or is it SC?) too.
First job was working at a local Hampton Rhoads area of VA sub shop chained called Zero’s. Owned by the local Greek mafia family.
I made $2.10 hr. and had to wear a second hand brown and yellow polyester shirt that reeked of onions. It was the end of my Sr. year of high school and the summer before I went to college.
The 1st store was a converted old gas station in a scummy area of Norfolk’s beach community. Got held up once.
I transferred to the big “nice” store closer to home in Va. Beach. My 1st day I dropped a loaded pizza, face down on the floor while taking it out of the oven…right in front of my new boss. meh.
Management would hire teens almost exclusively(except for management positions).
We’d lay bets when some new zitster got hired on how long it would be until he/she would cut something off using the industrial meat slicer….this was back before the laws that keep teens from running dangerous machinery. I saw a kid cut his entire pointer finger off clean off.
The best part was when we got supply deliveries….they didn’t come of trucks. The owners black Cadillac would pull up to the back door, they’d pop the truck and we carried in blocks of cheese, tubes of meats, boxes of lettuce, etc. from the car.
I suspect alot of this stuff had “accidently” fallen off of legitmate businesses supply trucks and luckily been “rescued”.lol
My first job was at Mott’s Five and Dime. On my third or fourth day, my Mom came in and commented to the manager that she couldn’t believe they gave me a job at 14 ( I had lied and said I was 15), so I was fired. The job I really consider to be my first was one that I got a couple of months later,at Dairy Queen. It only paid $2.15 but get this…FREE FOOD! Hell, I used to let my girlfriend (now wife) go into the back and make her own ice cream treats. Not a bad first job.
Village Inn busboy
3.35 + tips from the haggard, chain-smoking, hateful servers.
Loved it!
My first job was at a pickle factory when I was 18. As well as normal pickles, they also made pepperonccini, a bad smelling BBQ sauce and this noxious vegan version of mayo called Nayonaise. Most of the various lines smelled horrible and shifts started really early in the morning, so many days it was hard not to puke. The one non-stinky line was the fresh-pack, hand-packed spear line, but that line you had a quota that I couldn’t meet, so I was put on other lines.
I was only there about 7 weeks because it was a temp assignment and if you work 8 weeks or over in MA you would get unemployment when you were “laid off” even if it was intended to be temp. I only made about $6.50 or $7 per hour (hand pack line got bonuses if they got over quota) but it was full-time with some overtime.
It was a pretty horrible job, but most of the time I was working with one of my best friends and we could entertain each other somewhat. The nicest thing about the job was that sometimes there would be a problem somewhere on a line and work would have to stop and you would get paid for sitting around talking.
Spear line tended to have the most stoppage, because if someone broke a jar putting it back on the belt, work would have to stop while everything was cleared from that area and it was done by just the people closest to where it happened and the line leader and the rest of us would sit there eating cukes out of the bins of broken cukes (the broken pieces mostly went to relish making) and flicking seeds at each other from the “bad” cukes bins.
Vivid memories are few.
One was the day a friend and I were on the gallon jar line, and we were assigned to emptying full jars from the line for the first part of the day, and spent the last part of the day “dumping glass” (flipping boxes of empty plastic jars onto the line). Some part of the machine in the middle of the line broke badly early in the day, and we spent over 3 hours sitting around while it took several attempts to fix it. We ended up working OT to make up for it (all made product must get packaged each day) and started getting loopy when we went into OT (our brains were very bored) so we started singing random songs while we were dumping glass and crushing boxes.
Another one was when I spent 1 3/4 days in a row on the “briner” of the small jar line, usually people only got stuck with 1/2 day at a time on that spot because it sucked so bad. Basically, in that spot you stand between the machine that pours brine into the jars that have been filled and the capping machine and push pickles that have floated up back into the jar and make sure they have a bit of air space at the top. You get splashed with a lot of hot pickle brine; if you are short and therefor have short arms, you end up with brine running down you apron and bare legs (it was super-hot in there, we wore shorts usually). Other than the supervisor/machine operator (who was my friend’s aunt), my friend and I, all the other folks on that line were family. At the end of the day when we were cleaning the line, the family decided to start a water fight, so my friend and I were soaked to the skin and reeked of pickle juice when our ride picked us up. I kept those sneakers, hoping the smell would go away, because they were so comfy, but never got to wear them again, because after 3 years they still stank.
That always reminds me of the guy who got fired for sticking his penis in the pickle slicer at the factory……..
… Oh yeah… she got fired too.
I worked at an ce cream parlor, The Freeze. Maybe the one from the song, I don’t know. 🙂 I was 14, made some under minimum wage amount(no taxes at the time as I was underage). Best perk…free food!! Plus if you messed up someones ice cream order, in the freezer it went for you to take home. Many a night I messed up one to have a treat while I rode my bike home.
To be that young again!!! lol
My first job was at a florist’s, I made minimum wage. It was actually pretty hard work, I spent a lot of time scrubbing out 5 gallon buckets full of scummy rotten flower water. I still have bad feelings towards Valentine’s Day. It could be interesting, like the client who would come in every flower-giving holiday with two orders, one for wifey and one for the mistress.
My second job was much better. I worked at Poison Control. It still amazes me to think about how many people accidentally drink Clorox in this country every day. That seemed to be the most common call. I got in trouble once for laughing at a woman. She was absolutely convinced that her daughter had rabies because her hamster bit her. I asked if she had noticed any foaming of its little hamster mouth, and then giggled. But honestly, a rabid hamster?
It could happen… my sister works at a pediatric emergency room, and they had a kid come in for rabies shots after getting bitten by a rabid goat at a petting zoo.
First job was working a grocery store register. I started at 8AM and quit that day at Noon – they even sent me check for the 4 hours I worked. It was awful, no way I was going to do that, even at 15.
Next job was also at a grocery store but stacking shelves. That was good. This (in England) was back when stores were shut on Sundays and Public Holidays. I got double time on Sundays and triple time on Public Holiday PLUS no annoying customers. Triple time, stacking cans, wearing your Walkman, free cakes/cookies/batteries (it’s a grocery store!) is not a bad way to make money when you’re a high school student. We could also drive the forklifts (boy are they fun in empty parking lots in the rain) but that came to an abrupt end when a similarly unqualified 16 year old co-worker drove one into the warehouse forks raised and wedged it into the roof… 🙂
Had a paper route at age 11 (officially it was my older Brothers route) I just did all the work. First paycheck job was in a Spring Factory in Millvale PA. About 10 guys in total worked the plant; I was the Summer help so guys could go on vacation. I made $5/HR. It was hot and dirty and hard work but I learned the value of work. It was great motivator when I was in college and thought about skipping class.
Glad you are on the mend, Jeff. Nothing worse than having the stomach blahs.
My first real job was being a housekeeper at Pipestem State Park. $1.62/hour. I learned that people are slobs when they stay in hotel rooms. Even worse when they rent cabins. And nobody ever thinks to tip the housekeeper. I did manage to get a good inventory of linens. Not to mention my first acid trip. Good times.
Burger King at age 16, 3.35 per hour. So goddamn interesting that I don’t think that WVSR readers can fukkin handle it.
First paying job that wasn’t a paper route was cleaning the neighbor kids’ uncle’s bar on Sunday morning. Dollar each for the three of us, and a bar frozen pizza and free beer when we were done. Wisconsin back then was pretty liberal with the underage drinking. Then cleaning the Surf nightclub on weekends with my crazy aunt, who got me the job. $1.35 an hour. Sundays the wife half of the owners of the place would send me to the local Coney island hot dog place, and we’d sit around after work and eat dogs and drink draft beer. When I turned 16 and got my first car the owner of the appliance store next door to the nightclub hired me for $1.65 to clean the store after school and on Saturdays. I stayed there until graduation frrom HS, and 8 days after that, at the age of 17 I was inducted into the army. $267 a month, which seemed like a lot of money for a 17 year old kid with no bills to pay, but which went pretty quick at fifty cents a beer at the PX (or a quarter out of the beer/soda machines in the barracks a couple places) after basic training ended. Looking back, it’s no wonder I turned into a full-blown juicehead and was labeled antisocial by a judge. been past a couple decades now since I’ve had a beer, joint, hit of acid, or any of the other favorite recreational hobbies of my misspent youth.
My first job was at a soul food restaurant called Po’ Folks. Fried chickin, collard greens, okra, red beans and rice, drinks served in Mason jars, etc. A real hoot of a place!
I was sixteen and had just gotten my first speeding ticket for doing 47 in a 30. My parents were “displeased” and insisted that I learn responsibility by getting a job to pay the fine (for 16+ over the speed limit it was a doozy – a million dollars, or so it seemed to a kid with about 4 bucks in his wallet).
So off to Po Folks I went for about 3 or 4 months. Started off in the dish room working with a guy named “Mad Dog”. He was the head dishwasher; me the lowly assistant – very humbling, even at 16. My job was retrieving the freshly cleaned dishes from the dishwasher, which involved not only reaching through the steam and scalding water dripping on my arms every couple of minutes, but then stacking the 150 degree dishes before the next batch arrived. Where the hell was OSHA in those days?!
But the real treat was watching Mad Dog – a heroin-thin, vagrant-looking guy who on his best days mumbled incoherently. As the bus tubs were brought to the dish room window, Mad Dog’s job was to scrape the food waste into the trash, rinse the dishes and load them into the dishwasher. It was his first responsibility that I enjoyed watching because Mad Dog would look over each plate for “edible” scraps of fried chicken – “edible” defined as any piece with meat left on the bone. He’d eat it right off the plate as he scraped the rest of the contents into the trash!! Some images never leave you… as much as you want them to.
One day the building’s sewer line backed up, and my job was to go under the building with some high-tech tool (seems like it was a broom handle) and try to unclog it. Leave the rest to your imagination – reality was far worse!
Add to this lost dignity that they bounced my paycheck! I think it was my dad that marched into the restaurant with me the next day and demanded they take cash from the till to pay me as I quit. I assumed they had gone out of business after that because that store closed a short while later, but through the magic of Al Gore’s internet I see they’re still going in a few locations across the country (http://www.pofolks.com/).
I often wonder what Mad Dog did for food after that.
MMA Winner Pukes After Win
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8J1u7t1d50
Projectile Vomit Rocks!
Jeff this is a must see if you have not already
I was in high school and I worked at Sears as a floater (worked in any department they needed me). I think minimum wage at that time (late 70s) was $2.10 and we got a 10 cent cost of living wage every January. Whoopee. I worked there for two years.
One day, I was ringing up an Asian guy and I looked at the name on his credit card. It was Long Dong. I “forgot” to give him his card back so they had to announce over the loud speaker “Mr Long Dong, your Sears credit card is at customer service”. Good times.
Happy Monday, Surfers!
First job (after the paper route) was 7 1/2 years at Bob Evans. I don’t remember how much I made, but I worked 40 hours a week the entire time I was there, even at age 14. Too many memories to sort out just one. The stories were well documented here in the “Fun with Chris and Bob” feature. If you still have the disc you saved those on, feel free to put them in the “best of” section.
The only thing I hated about Bob Evans was the Christmas bonuses. 10 dallahs per each year you were there, and a box of honey, biscuit mix and a roll of sausage. Bob was a cheapass hillbilly. Guess that’s how he got rich.
I abuse hand sanitizer and Lysol at my job, so I don’t think anyone’s funky illness can get through the anti-bacterial wall that I create at my desk on a daily basis. Yeah, it’s going around down here too.
First real job…
I painted a small house for 50 bucks in 1976 when I was 13 but the first real job was Hussons Pizza in Snalbins, WV.
2.90 per hour was the going rate in 1979.
Worked at an egg processing plant after school. Just me and another guy, scraping broken eggs off the floor, cleaning eggs off various pieces of machinery. Paid minimum wage, $3.35, which was as good as you were going to get in 1983. Worked 20 to 25 hours a week during school and then it went full time in the summer. One of the jobs they put me on was packing the carton of eggs into cardboard boxes. I think each box held 36 cartons of eggs. I looked like Lucy back there, I could never keep up. It would have been tough enough just stuffing 36 dozen eggs in a box, taping it up and sending it down the conveyor to the cooler and then taping the bottom of the next cardboard box, but you had about 5 or six different styles of eggs rolling down the line at you and you had to sort them into the right box. All in all working full time sucked, luckily I broke my leg two weeks into the summer (drunken go carting accident) and I was unable to continue.
Jeff, Step away from the calculator. Recently I added up the withholdings from my paycheck and realized that my withholdings are more than my mortgage payment. So… I could own a much nicer house or pay off my house much faster or pay off my student loan debt (also more than my mortgage payment). No good can come from math like this.
First job – working at a radio station. Have you seen Pirate Radio? Ok, it wasn’t as fun as that, but it was really fun. Lots of booze, loud music, hanging out with bands. Very good times. Unfortunately, the pay was terrible so I quit to go to law school. Much less fun, but I can afford to live indoors, which is, I guess, a fair trade-off.
Tilly’s first job was at Thom Mcan shoes. We were in high school, and she wanted me to take her to the mall to look for a job; they interviewed her on the spot and hired her. She was so excited – until we got all the way back out to the parking lot at which point she got mad at me for letting her take a job in a shoe store, because I know how much she hates feet.
First job was working at the Tastee Freez. Kinda like Dairy Queen only better. Best memory was when the sheriff and two city cops came in for supper and my girlfriend played “I Shot the Sheriff” on the jukebox. He loved it.. That was probably the entire on-duty law enforcement that night and they were sittin’ in Tastee Freez shootin’ the shit with a bunch of teenagers. Good times! One of these same cops busted a beer party out in the country one night–said he had to take all of our names and call our parents. He left, came back after his shift was over and brought more beer. Partied for another hour with us. That’s small town life for ya…..
My first job was working outside sales for a mailbox repair firm. It was straight commission. I landed a few nice accounts in the first couple of weeks (missing the mailbox flag, wanted to add a place to put the newspaper, etc) but when that dried up I got creative. I’d drive by the nicer neighborhoods and beat their mailbox in with a 2×4, then I’d leave my card inside. Sales went through the roof. I was bringing down $30, sometimes $40 a week.
But the bosses got word of what I was doing and I eventually lost my job because of “destroying private property”. I was ruined in the mailbox repair business. Nobody would touch me. I’m still trying to recover from that silly mistake.
Further Evidence is great today! I never knew WV had roughly the same size economy as Iraq. Makes me proud!
My first real job was at Pizza Inn – I’m pretty sure that was a WV knockoff of Pizza Hut. Minimum wage was 3.85 and I got to wear the awesome brown plaid polyester uniform.
My firat actual job was a runner for my dad. Basically I sat in his office and ran to get whatever the hell anyone wanted. I worked 18 hours a day and got paid $50 a week. I lasted about a week before my mom came to the office at midnight and told everyone it was my bedtime. I think I was 12, so of course I was mortally embarrassed by it all and never showed my face there again. Or at least until I was 16. Something like that.
My first job. 1994, worked for $5.00/hour plus commission at an Mom & Pop Office Supply/Equipment store. One would think that selling computers would’ve been quite profitable during the pre-Internet PC boom. Well it was, just not for me. I order/returned, configured/repaired, installed/trained every PC we sold along with its printer, I unfortunately sold very few because I was too busy doing all the above mentioned things for the Old uneducated well established salesmen that had worked for a company 30 years before I got there, even my boss who started the PC sales promptly forgot everything there was to know about computers just days after I got my first paycheck. The boss did take pity on me and required the salesmen to split their 5% commission with me if we made at least 30% profit. So if I worked 6 hours ordering/assembling/configuring/delivering/installing/training a $2500.00 pc and printer I’d make $62.50 all the while the salesman that sold it would take 1 hour and sell the same customer $10,000.00 worth of furniture, and supplies make their $562.50 commission and be onto to make another sale. I’d get my butt chewed for not making enough sales at the end of the month and they’d make bonus for selling more than they did last month. On top of that my boss would make “sales” on the golf course and I would end up repairing or installing stuff for his buddies for no profit and therefore no commission. The final straw was when I was offered another job. My boss knew he couldn’t run what was now a full fledged computer consulting firm so he agreed that he would double my base salary $10.00/hour and give me half of all of the commissions on computer and printer sales, so I let the other job opportunity as the network admin of a large school system go. When I got my first paycheck, he did give me the commission deal, but no salary increase and he acted like he did me a favor by giving me the commission. I went to school got my Microsoft Engineering cert and paid for it by myself despite how much he offered by reimburse me, because I wanted to quit and owe them nothing and that’s exactly what I did.
First timecard type job was with an architectual model company, I was 16 and didn’t have a car yet so I would leave high school and hop on a few busses to get there to work with an exacto knife cutting itsy bitsy things for scale models. It was mind-numbing work, I didn’t get to do the fun stuff, just the little repetive things like the wheels for a million tiny RVs or something. Eventually they had to let me go because of how long it took me to get there on the bus; I was only getting a few hours of work in before they closed. Don’t know what they were thinking when they hired me really. I think I made $5.75/hr, which I’m sure was minimum wage at the time.
The one thing that really stands out in my memory is what one of the guys working there told me when I was leaving the last day. He told me to go work for a big company where I was only a number to them. He looked sad, and since he was working for a 5-man shop and recommending this I can only imagine why.
I guess we WVSR fans are a bunch of old farts. Lot’s of $3.10 and $3.35/hr comments.
43 is not an old fart. And $3.35 was “righteous bucks” dude!
Try buying stuff in Hawaii! We bought a six pack of beer fro what we could have bought a case of it here. Longboard beer (which I REALLY enjoyed) was $6.00 a bottle! Missed one huge snowstorm while there, but a new one is brewing tonight – oh well – it was great!
After the paper route, then the military, I went to work for a place that did industrial style painting. We did all sorts of stuff, like painting the interiors of defibrilation machines with this silver based paint that cost $200 a gallon back in 1979. I ran the chem plating line used as primer for steel and aluminum parts. It was a family run business, and the people were so great to work for. The pay was more than adequate, and the owner would take us all out to a great lunch every Friday. $5.00 an hour to start, and ended up a year later at $9.50
When I got an opportunity for a much, much better paying job a year later, the owner encouraged me to go for it, and told me that if it didn’t work out, I’d always have a job at his place. After I got the better paying job (in Alaska), I used to stop by the painting place when I was home on vacation. It was like coming home to family.