The thread about paper route advisability made me curious how many “odd jobs” we have had as a collection of working stiffs. Rather than ask for lots of jobs I never had, and don’t know much about, I’m listing the ones I’ve had or know to be in the “less than desirable for a profession” types of ways to earn money.
Add to the list of things I left out and we may have a follow up poll when Other gets bigger than any other specific job type. 
(poll coming – anonymous and multiple choice)
Just these “Other”:
People who know me now would never credit that I was once employed as a cleaner!
As opposed to Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction? 
Unfortunately, there was a dead body (one of the shunters was crushed between two railway waggons), but it wasn’t on my shift – I’m glad I didn’t see it – and I certainly did not have to clean up afterwards.
Camp counsellor.
Way before the advent of nice big plotters, I hand painted custom soils type maps. Sounds kind of fun, but it was boring as hell. Basically paint by number every day all day.
Some of these maps where so detailed that you could only get about 8 square inches done in a day and took a couple of weeks to complete just one.
Babysitting
Airforce - Payroll and travel claims admin
Office manager - small meat distributor
Office manager - technology company
Project manager - IT
Never did newspaper delivery but I did newspaper collation for the Chicago Tribune. They pre-printed all the supplementary Sunday edition stuff (auto section, coupons, comics, arts & living, fashion, etc) and our job was to stuff the auto section into the living section or tuck the comics into the arts section. The hours were 4:30pm-2am Friday night, 8am-2pm Saturday and then 2am-5am on Sunday morning. Oh, and we were 14 or 15 years old and the job paid piecemeal (20 cents per bundle of auto sections stuffed into arts sections). Good times.
On the flip side, while in college I worked Master Control for a TV station. It was about ten minutes of prep work involving cuing tapes and then eight hours of sitting around, screwing with the giant satellite dishes trying to catch HBO, ordering pizzas and occasionally getting up to do a meter reading off the transmitter. As long as you did the first ten minutes right, you almost never had a problem and the rest really was “good times”.
• Page in a library (book re-shelver)
•“Games Hostess” (carnie barker) in an amusement park
•Nurses’ assistant in a nursing home
•Test tube wrapper in a scientific supply warehouse
•House/babysitter
Babysitter
PBX Operator/Mail clerk
File Clerk
General Office Flunky
The last three all were part of when I worked at my dad’s office on weekends and in the summer. I started out opening the mail and running the switchboard on the weekends (in 1970) for $2/hr and when I left in 1973, I was making a whopping $2.25/hr, which was more than minimum, and I’d acquired assorted office skills - like running the mimeograph and the flex-o-writer. You’d think being the boss’ kid would come with bennies, but you’d be wrong. I got all the crap jobs. But I made good money for the time, and I learned that I never wanted a job like that.
I’ll be retiring at the end of July - we’ll see what kinds of jobs I may take to fill my time.
My brother had the paper route so I only filled in when he was sick. I clicked boxes for waiting tables and grocery checker. I ran a cash register at KMart in high school, did a stint as a pharmacy tech at CVS. Restaurant hostess, cocktail waitress, emergency bartender through college. Spent two summers in different shoe factories running insoles through the glue machine. I also babysat (this was as a married adult with a degree from a prestigious and expensive private college :rolleyes:).
My last job before starting my “career” was an ed-tech at a semi-private high school. That steered me to grad school in education–I have been an elementary school teacher for the last 20 years.
Somehow I avoided the fast-food experience, but have tons of empathy for the folks who staff all of those grinding, hourly-wage jobs.
I did the fast food and waitering thing as well as some groundskeeping work.
I did the paper route and yard work thing as a kid. I worked in a car wash for a couple of months, and I worked with a carpet cleaner for an even shorter period of time when I was a teen. Both were slave labor grunt work for minimum wage.
I was a dog washer for a summer. As far as odd jobs go, it was quite nice.
Every job in the local supermarket in high school (3 years)
Student administrative assistant to a college department (3 years).
Bartender and wedding caterer in an upscale hotel (3 years) -This was probably the best of the bunch. Sweet job with excellent perks.
Teaching and research assistant (2 years).
IT systems analyst (15 years)
I don’t know if the yard work counts, because it was for my parents, while I was a kid. It wasn’t in our own yard, though, I wouldn’t have been paid for that. It was at a couple of rentals and they could deduct the cost on their taxes.
Also babysitting when I was a kid.
When I was older:
filing,
stuffing envelopes,
pilot high-solids anaerobic digester feeder, included gathering fresh dairy manure and lab testing,
chemical waste collector,
pizza delivery, and
data entry (into database, not on punch cards).
Demolition, hot roofing, mason tender, convenience store cashier/manager, busboy to name a few not on your list.
Soda jerk (for you children out there, that means work a soda fountain in a drug store; soda fountains in drug stores disappeared by around 1955). I also worked for three years as a lab tech doing various jobs. The most long-lived one was operating an analog computers. Someone claimed it was the largest electronic analog computer ever built. But even if not, it was a beast. And the vacuum tubes (know what they are?) were constantly burning out. Still it paid for my first three years of college (I got a scholarship for the fourth and a TA-ship for my last half year).
Other:
Babysitting, house cleaning, bartending.