OT: We all started somewhere- Your first job
My 14 year-old son begins his first "formal" job today. He will be working in a diner kitchen at a summer campground doing various chores and whatever gruntwork the new guy has to do. He's always been a good worker- I'm proud of him, and grateful he has this opportunity.
This got me thinking of my first "real" job. Working at a local vegetable farm. It was April - September, 7 AM - 5 PM (during the summer months- during school, 3:30 - 6 PM), and all manual labor. I was 12. It was hard work- but there was still plenty of time for dirtball fights, smoking cigarettes, listening to the radio, hot-rodding on the farm equiptment, teasing (and learning about) the girls that worked with you, and other various forms of mischief. I learned a lot and would not trade that experience for anything!
So just wondering, MGo community- what was your first job?
Go Blue!
I got my first job when I was 14 working for a telemarketing company in Omaha, NE. I had just moved to North Omaha for HS and my mother refused to buy me "name-brand" clothes, so I was like, "Fine, I'll make my own money and get the clothes I want myself."
This was like 1999-2000 and it was inbound calls mostly for infomercials where we had to follow a set script. I was paid $8/hr but got $3 for each up sell and probably averaged $12-14/hr (really good money for a HS kid at the time). Ronco Rotisserie, Kidsbop, AOL were some of the products sold.
I currently work for the company that wrote my first paycheck. Yikes. But My first job out of HS was working for a meat company that no longer exists. Met a Grand Rapids Owl hockey player there who showed me how to cook smokie links in the glue machine. Burned my ass when a steaming hot caustic cleaning tank overflowed just as I was turning off another. Yeah, good times.
A warehouse job at a store called Best Products in Flint. Don't know if they have them any more. The first floor was a showroom; the second was the warehouse. When a customer would purchase an item, the sales order would come up by pneumatic tube. We'd get the item, and send it down by conveyor. If it was a small item, we'd first put it in a bigger cardboard box, so that it wouldn't go tumbling down the conveyor - except sometimes we'd forget on purpose, just for shits & giggles. I once sent a Procter Silex iron flying down the ramp, nearly taking the head off a sales girl who picked the wrong moment to look up the conveyor.
Good times.
This reminds me of the weekly car thread a little.
Manball should do this once a week for awhile(off season only of course).
-Job with the most fun
-Craziest job
-Job with the best bennies(hot co-workers, etc)
etc
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bet that was hard.
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At least it wasn't polonium.
I was 14 and too young to legally scoop ice cream (I know right?) so I made waffle cones all day for 8 hours a day. For some reason scooping ice cream wasnt okay but using the waffle maker was definitely fine. I still have scars from the burns i received that summer.
worked at the local Texan Restaurant in Midland Mi, made $2.95 an hour. When I left there and joined the Navy out of High School I was making $3.95 an hour. Yikes.
First entrepreneurial venture: mowing lawns in the neighborhood.
First formal employment: painting crew at my high school over the summer.
First retail job: Grooveyard records in Ann Arbor.
First office job: paid internship at a consulting firm.
My first formal job was as a hostess at International House of Pancakes. I ended up working there as a server through high school and some of college. More than 20 years later, I would still love to eat breakfast foods for all three meals in a day!
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I got so many things swiped at the CCRB, physically and otherwise.
And nothing but assholes and elbows. Believe we had about 15 employess. Driver would greet the owner of car and drive it to the steam station, steam man would hit it all over and then this is where me and three others, just after it was attached to rotating chain, would jump in. One person, one corner of interior, windshield, dash, doors, anything in your 1/4. About 15 second per car. Then the vacuum people, 1/4 of carpet, right on through to drying, same way, 1/4 of exterior apiece. 12 hour days and we hit the 700+ on many Saturdays.
About three days before I could go home and not fall asleep immediately.
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My first job was as a bagger at the Goff's Food Store in St. Johns.
Such a long time ago. I worked a drive-thru party store fetching beer, pop, milk etc for people. Made 85¢ per hour. A 12oz pepsi and a twinkie cost a quarter. I saved enough money at 85¢/hour and bought my first car.....a 1965 blue Ford Mustang for $125.00! When I bought it, the car was just an old used car. Little did I know that I bought a classic masterpiece for my first car! I scrapped it out for parts eventually unaware that my first car was that cool. (or was soon to be).........as a side note.....my first concert was GENERAL ADMISSION to the Olympia on Grand River. The band? A little known band at the time making their first big tour. My first concert was general admission to see Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. Great first car, Great first concert.
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So I jump ship in Hong Kong and I make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas.
A looper you ask?
A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I'm a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald... striking. So, I'm on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one - big hitter, the Lama - long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga... gunga, gunga-lagunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, "Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.
I was also a cook at age 16 at Bob Evans on Carpenter Rd. Met a lot of
interesting charactors there.
Worked for Sportservice as a ballpark vendor at Riverfront. Peanuts, popcorn, Coke. If you were high seller on the night on your product you got ice cream the next night; high seller on ice cream got to push the ice cream cart. I hit the jackpot once and got the cart for a Sunday doubleheader when the temperature was in the high 90s. Made about $200 in commission on the day, about $25-30/hr--that was a lot of money for a kid in 1977. (A typical night was more like $15-20 for about three hours of work.)
Great, great job for a teenager. A lot of stairs, which was good because I was running x-country at the time. Saw every home game, got to be part of the show. Boss was a mobster stereotype that seemed like he'd stepped right out of the Godfather...which was funny, in retrospect, when we found out a while later who owned the company. Wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out they were using us to launder small bills. They treated us great, though, as long as you worked. It was straight commission, and if you didn't average enough to pull minimum wage they fired you. That didn't happen to anyone that put in any effort at all.