I pumped industrial strength glue from the barrels into the gallon containers.
Bag girl
Fast food worker
Waitress
Retail, and… One of my first jobs …
Milk goats. (seriously).
Before I was 21:
Babysitting
Movie usher/concessions counter
Taxi dispatcher
Burger King French fryer
Car wash car interior cleaner
Count inventory at Skil factory
Department store stocker
Gas pumper
Auto repair shop greeter
Phone charity ticket sales for a carnival
Mini-mart person
Blueprint delivery driver
Supermarket deli worker
Punch press operator for commemorative coins
Three of the above lasted only two weeks once they found out I was underage.
The oddest job I’ve ever had was part-time staff at Aaxtion Video in Honolulu. An adult video and “book” store. I needed to pick up some extra cash my last semester at the U of Hawaii, and a friend worked in the shop’s adjacent strip club and recommended me. My main job was to keep the little video booths in order, which basically meant sweeping up the used Kleenex – there was a dispenser handily supplied in each one – after the patron had finished, um, watching the movie. Restocked the Kleenex too. It was actually a neat job, as there were quite some interesting characters that worked there. Some “live action” booths in the back too, where some girls would entice you into a booth, then they’d perform for you behind a glass wall as long as you kept feeding dollars into the machine.
One of the big managers hadn’t caught on that I was working part-time only because I was a student, and since I wasn’t the sleazy type that they often got, he started promising to bump me up to full-time until I told him I really couldn’t. But they did trust me to go out with them to the airport and pick up the visiting stars who were performing for a week or two at their strip club. To carry their luggage and stuff. Some of these were major porn stars whose names you might recognize. There was also the girl with a 100-inch-plus bust. She’d been on some national talk show due to her breast size. Was pretty nice to talk to. It turned out that she’d had friends in the past who lived in the same aprtment complex I used to in Albuquerque, although I don’t think at the same time as I’d been there. The reason they needed someone they could trust was because this meant I was privy to the hotel room they used in Waikiki to put these girls up. That was a company secret, because the girls needed to be able to rest assured where they were staying wouldn’t get out, and most of the staff were not allowed to know where this was. Strictly a need-to-know basis.
No, much more prosaic. [spoiler] He was in Germany for a summer in the 1990s and got casual work repairing the roofs on the remaining buildings within the museum. However, I got the camp wrong: it was Dachau.
He said at first he was horribly freaked out by being there but after a while he got used to it and even ate his sandwiches up on the roof.
A few days after telling the story, he brought in a little box of tacks he had found up on one of the roofs, with the Nazi eagle printed on it. I personally would not have wanted it, but he kept it as a souvenir.[/spoiler]
Thanks for the explanation!
Computer lab monitor.
Lifeguard at a water park, ice-cream scooper, camp counselor and soda seller at a concert venue
The very worst was collections agent for a home electrical repair company. I worked there from Novemeber - February.
Paper Route, data entry clerk, cash register programmer, field auditor for a data processing company, answering service operator, movie usher, bartender, cook, bouncer, computer/electronics repair tech, bar manager, web designer, pizza delivery, poultry farmhand, role-playing game “dungeon master”-yes, I actually got hired to do this a few times, department store inventory temp, supermarket technology field tester and instructor, home computer use instructor, bakery delivery driver, disabled student learning assistant…
My “others”:
babysitter/live-out nanny
switchboard operator (when I was in college–very small school)
Student theater technician–we ran props, lights, etc. for outside groups that performed at our college’s theater. In this role, I was once paid for stripping clothes off a dancer
Lawn cutting and yard work, lifeguard, shipping clerk, assembly line at a jelly factory, driver for an escort agency, and restaurant dishwasher. Computer programming has been it for the past thirty-five years, and yes in some ways it is the oddest of all odd jobs.
One I’ve had that is not listed there is delivering pizzas. I was 20 and femail (Still am. Female that is, not 20) and sometime during the first week one of the other women deliverypeople took me aside and advised me that if I was in it for the money I needed to cut my cutoff jean shorts higher and my T-shirts lower.
It worked.
the hardest job I’ve ever done was pull corn. I did it for my father (he could have hired it done but “let” me help him because I needed the money.) He had a huge farm & only about 2 acres of it was in feed corn. I stood in the back of his pick-up truck, wearing heavy canvas gloves, and twisted/tugged each ear of corn off each stalk, inch by inch down the row. Then up the next row. He would pull the truck forward a few feet, & I would continue to pull & fill the bed of the truck. I had blisters on my blisters. The top ones were blood-filled, underneath those were the ones whose fluid ran clear, and under that were calluses…we finally finished. He paid me. After that I got 2 part-time jobs, one office & one customer service…& I never kissed anybody’s ass because I HAD PULLED CORN. I knew what I was worth & still challenge anybody to do bettern’ me. Daddy taught me a lot, & it made me a better person.
Lots of odd jobs working thru my 10-year undergrad degree. Some were mini-careers and sidetracked me for awhile (hence the 10 year college career).
One job was pumping gas (jet fuel) into airplanes at the airport, so I checked “pumping gas” on the survey.
From high school to undergrad degree:
-truck driver (UPS)
-school bus driver
-ambulance driver
-crane operator
-semi-submersible “driver” (offshore stuff)
-race official for sailing club (I got to fire a cannon)
-flight instructor
-retail computer sales
-meter reader