1973 - I enter high school and quickly discover the “Math Lab” with the “computer” - an old Teletype machine hooked up via a 300 baud acoustic modem to a downtown mainframe. Learned how to program that machine using BASIC.
1974 - 16 years old. My dad arranges a job for me with his company’s “batch processing house.” Southwestern Information Systems, or simply SIS. I work three days a week, learning the data processing business, learning how to sort punched cards, how to run programs on the IBM Model 360-2, preparing printouts, and one day a week, picking up the week’s processing at a downtown Los Angeles clothing manufacturer.
The owner didn’t teach me a darned thing about computers - it was an old grizzled guy by the name of Jim (last name lost in the years) who chain-smoked and taught me slowly and patiently everything he knew about computers. Our hard drives were 18" stacked platter drives (I believe) and our line printer would print 1200 lines per minute, or 20 lines per second! That printer rocked!
I worked there for almost two years, until I went to work for my Dad. The last year there I began working unsupervised, programming in RPG-II, streamlining some of the SIS house programming, and printing out the SIS holiday calendar featuring a big ASCII drawing of Snoopy.
So my first job was working with computers. Rather appropriate.
Other than babysitting, my first job was continuing my family’s multi-generational tradition of scooping ice cream. I was 15, and I worked at Swensen’s for minimum wage, which was then $3.35/hour. (Does Swensen’s even exist anymore? We made some kickass sundaes and shakes!) It was great fun, but they violated all sorts of labor laws. I’m pretty sure 15-year-olds aren’t supposed to pull 16-hour-plus double shifts, going home at 1 a.m. or even later on a Saturday night after cleanup, even if it was summertime.
Mom was totally in denial about how I got home after work (I walked; we had a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.) Of course, the cops in Evanston, Illinois back then pretty much had nothing to do, so they would slowly follow me during my 20-minute walk home. I always wondered why they didn’t just give me a ride. I quit around October or November, because my boss couldn’t figure out why I didn’t want to work 4-11 on schoolnights.
My guess is that having anyone in the car who isn’t under arrest or being held as a possible witness during an investigation exposes the city to all sorts of liabilities and possible legal problems.
I don’t know how long ago your job was, but in these times any man, or men cops or not, who gives a teen age girl a ride at 1:00 AM isn’t thinking straight.
Andy Taylor and Barney Fife used to give people rides in Mayberry all of the time. But they were super friendly folks down there.
My first job was at Blockbuster Video for only three months (I quit). A minimum wage job where I stacked movies for 3 or 5 hours a day before being moved to cashier. Wasn’t much better.
I delivered TV Guides when I was 11. They cost 15 cents then, and I got to keep 6 cents on each one. When the price went up to a quarter, I lost 80% of my customers.
I picked tomatoes and strawberries and cucumbers for the money that helped to start my record collection.
I honestly can’t remember whether my first real job at 15 was washing pots at the restaurant of an inn, or washing and detailing new cars, for $2.65/hr (CDN). But I lost both of them because they were in small towns about 10 miles in the opposite directions from where I lived, and hitchhiking to work was just not reliable enough transportation for my employers.
The summer before my junior year in high school, I worked for the school district replacing all of the computers in the district. Made $10 an hour. Not bad for a first job. I learned how to make network cables and not very much else, but it was fun.
My next job was at a grocery store. I’m not sure how much I made, but it wasn’t much above minimum wage. This sucked because the manager liked to play favorites and I kept getting assigned to the crappy work. Then I worked for the Vilar Center for the Arts, a theater in Beaver Creek. That was awesome. Made $10 an hour again, plus got to see all kinds of cool shows from backstage and learn about the lighting business. I think the best show was a ballet troupe that was all guys, and every single one of them was gay. That was a lot of fun.
Then I was a teller at a local bank, making $11 an hour. The first week on the job, I got to hit the alarm. We had some hispanic guys that had stolen some payroll checks from a local business and were trying to cash them. They got away before the cops came, but it was still pretty exciting.
I don’t know if it counts as a “first job”, since it was only for two days. There was a shooting competition over a weekend, and they needed people to pull targets. (The targets are mounted on tracks. The shooter takes his shot and the puller lowers the target, marks it and runs it up so the shooter can see it, and then patches the hole.)
My first “steady job” was as a ski and binding technician after school. I’d make $2/hour in store credit, and I was certified by Salomon. It was a great way to support my hobby! I had to leave after I blew out my ACL.
Then I was a cashier at K-Mart until I got a minimum-wage data entry job at Edwards AFB. I worked my responsibility and salary up for four years before going to another Defense contractor in L.A. Nine years there, laid off, a year at Lockheed drawing C-130 wiring diagrams on a CADAM system, nine years with TRW/Experian doing data processing, analysis and programming.
Now I’m out of work. I wonder if I can get an $11/hour bank teller job like Mines Mystique? It would be a 50% pay cut, but I have most of my toys already.
Or if anyone in the PNW is looking for a cinematographer with his own 16mm equipment…
Oh, wait a nimute… Before K-Mart there was a short term job as a Census Enumerator. It was nice getting paid for mileage when people in the desert live so far apart!
My first day of work was with my dad when I was fourteen. He did home remodeling and got a job fixing the worn parts of a 100 year old church in Houston. When we got to the church, he handed me a chisel and hammer, pointed to the threshold, a partially exposed 8 inch by 12 inch beam of old growth pine, and told me to take it out. I was paid five dollars an hour, even after three hours when I couldn’t swing the hammer anymore.
I worked with him whenever he needed help and I wasn’t scheduled for my afterschool job. The toughest job I helped him with was when he put a pitch on a flat roof… in Houston in August in the middle of a heatwave. Most days, we worked from ten until two, drank a little water, then went at it until five. I was dying on that roof, but Dad had just turned 65, and there was no way that I was going to ask an old man to take a break. As it turned out, he ended up letting me go towards the end of the job. He couldn’t afford me anymore.
My first job was working at Kings Island as a food service line employee. I loved that job!
Best part about it was meeting so many new people and the people watching that could go on for hours when you weren’t busy. I worked there for 6 years in the same stand and eventually was able to get away with anything. G I would come in at 6 in the morning to get the stand ready and then sleep until 11 or so in the stock room…all the while getting paid for it.
gathering sap from maple trees at sugar season in two feet of wet snow and lugging them to the big vat behind two very large horses. Trees would be anywhere from 5 feet to 100 feet away from the path. Damn that was hard work. Outside of Sutton Quebec, when I actaully lived in Vermont. Yes I worked in a foreign country.
That was very hard work for $2/hr, but the fringe benefits were nice. Fresh maple syrup on homemade biscuits were part of the lunch fare.
