My first job was at McDonald’s. I was 15 and I worked there for a year. I made $5.75 an hour. My grades dropped low because of it so I had to quit my job and take night school courses to catch up. I eventually graduated high school and everything was fine and dandy!
My first job was at a Round Table Pizza at fifteen (and don’t even ask me the going rate back then). I was canned in short order for:
(1) Wondering loudly about the sauce. The commercials of the time claimed that Round Table was “the last Honest Pizza” and didn’t use sauce from a can. Technically accurate – they used tomato paste from a can, water and a packet of premeasured seasonings.
(2) Asking loudly what the manager could possibly be doing in the bathroom that made him so much more lively, friendly and energetic once he’d come out.
(3) Making monster faces on the pizzas with the toppings.
(4) Laughing like a maniac whenever somebody ordered “Merlin’s All-Meat Marvel” (still strikes me as a bit dirty sounding).
16, on a farm, £1 an hour, 12 hours Saturday, 12 hours Sunday.
Sheep stink!
16, at Footlocker. I lasted 2 years (on and off), and outlasted 4 managers. Interestingly, the first manager managed to steal about $10,000 from the store and apparently headed down to Mexico with it.
It figures: the first time Footlocker ever hired an intelligent manager, and he rips them off for $10,000.
11 or 12, worked in a lumber mill stacking lumber as it came off the saw. Nothing like being in a Virginia summer, with temps in the 90s and equal humidity, covered in sawdust.
I was a camp counselor for 3 weeks. Got paid $240 for what was essentially a 24-hour, 7 day/week job, but I was a bad counselor (it’s a good thing my kids were 12-13 year olds). I spent a lot of time smoking behind the girls’ bathroom.
I was fifteen and worked 7am - 11am Saturday mornings in a local newsagent for £1.86 an hour, which was low even then.
I got a job at the food court when I was 15. I made a whopping $3.50 an hour.
It was a lot of fun. I met my best friends there and with them had a social life that never had a chance of existing in school. The manager was only 10 years older then I was and he really didn’t give shit what we did.
I still miss it sometimes.
My first real job was at the age of 16 working for the Haunted Mansion in Beaumont, TX. When people walk into the thing, they go up the stairs and enter a long hallway. the first thing they see is a jailcell with a body in the electric chair, animated by the sounds of electricity and a strobe light.
It was my job to sit in a little alcove in the ceiling and stare at this strobe light for about FIVE HOURS A NIGHT! I would hold onto a rope and pulley system, and when the big burley drunk guy would show how tough and unscared he was by grabbing hold of the bars and screaming at the “obviously unscarry guy in the costume,” I would release my rope and let a dismembered corpse swing down from the ceiling and smash into the bars.
Then I’d watch his freaked girlfriend and other compatriots scream and push him as fast as they can past the jailcell…and right into the wall in front of them 
MAN, I loved that job (epileptic siezures and crazed hallucinations aside).
Hostess at a Mexican restaurant. 17 years old.
I learned very swiftly that people, particularly hungry people, are assholes.
This knowledge has served me well in the years since.
Commercial fisherman: when I was twelve years old I caught and sold catfish to the Piggly Wiggly for 50 cents a pound. Some weeks I would make as much as 25 dollars, big bucks when you are twelve.
The summer when I was 15, Iwent to work at a packing shed unloading cucumbers. I lived at the shed and we usually finished about 11 or 12 o’clock in the day. I would hangout with the girls that did the grading or the migrants. My Spanish was not bad at the time but not acceptable in mixed company.
15 - 4.75/hr maybe $5.00 I worked in the kitchen of an old people’s home. I had a great time and enjoyed most of the old folks.
One Chrismas eve, we took cookies around to all the residents. Some of them were so happy to have someone stop by, they cried. That was a very real lesson for a 15/16 year old. One that I have not forgotten twenty five years later…
Burger King. $1.35/hour. I would get reamed out every day for putting more than one pickle on a burger or three pickles on a Whopper. Yes, he counted the fucking pickles. When he wasn’t looking, I’d make pickle and cheese sammiches and chow them down. I ended up getting fired for telling my supervisor off when he tried to corner me in the cooler. I dumped strawberry shake sauce on him. Moved on to McDonald’s, where I stayed for 1.5 years.
Does baby sitting count? Seems like I babysat for every kid in the neighborhood at one point or another.
I worked for three hours, two times a week for $15 cleaning an office. Not sure what the actual business was, the but owner hired young, buxom blondes as the secretary/receptionist, who never did much of anything except reapply their lipstick as far as I could tell. It seemed like there was a new one each week.
I dusted the end tables, ran the vaccuum cleaner and pretty much smiled while boss owner told me how pretty I was (even though I wasn’t blonde, nor was I buxom). It creeped me out and I only lasted about two months.
At 15 I was an assistant janitor in an elementary school. I made about $2.50 per hour, below minimum wage at the time. I learned many important lessons in my year long stint:
-schools can legally pay less than minimum wage
-taxes suck
-lifting heavy trashcans and slinging a mop for a couple of hours per day makes one buff pretty quickly
-kids in bathrooms wll find a way to fingerpaint, though the color scheme was somewhat monochromatic
-hard work IS rewarded
16 years old - $1.50/hour - 12 hour days - picking peaches … in hell
Alabama summer, when the temperature and humidity meet at 7 am at about 95°. Long pants and long sleeves. The itch of peach fuzz is unescapable. Fire ants and poisonous snakes like peaches, too.
Lessons Learned:
- Any job in air conditioning is a good job.
- Look before you pick.
- Bathe, every chance you get.
- No matter the price, go to college.
Well, there she was, knealing before me…
What?
About the summer after 3rd grade. Picking berries- strawberries, raspberries, loganberries, blackcaps, etc. 3 cents a pound (but blackcaps were 2.5). Make a couple dollars a day. Over the years, I got better at it and prices went up to 5-6 cents a pound. Could make $5-6 a day, once made $8 when a harvest was delayed and the bushes were loaded. Picked Blue Lake beans near Blue Lake a few times.
I’m 17 and still at my first job, which I began…maybe a month ago. At first I was going to work four days a week and that has now been shortened to Sundays only, mornings or evenings.
I work at an upscale retirement community’s restaurant, serving meals. It’s rather easy compared to other serving jobs–I don’t handle money (although that also means no tips), and it’s generally the same customers day in and day out. $6/hour, but it doesn’t really matter since I’m not in it for the money (I seriously just wanted something to do).
14 years old, cutting grass at electric company substations.
Wage was $1.65, IIRC and it was the ultimate male bonding experience.
5 guys in the cab of a stake body truck-a midsummer moment.
10 minutes of travel, half hour of work-time was managed like a NASCAR pit crew.
I did get a helluva tan that summer. 