My question for the knife sellers, was it Cutco Knives? I forget the name of the selling company. My dad did that when he was young, and we only had Cutco in the kitchen when I was growing up. I had had no idea that my dad sold them when I went to work trying to sell them. Like other home sales positions like Tupperware, Mary Kay, PartyLite, The Pampered Chef, etc., you need friends and family that have a lot of expendable cash to make a living. Unlike the others, Cutco isn’t really a product that will have repeat customers, because they are really great knives that last forever. I have them in my kitchen now, but I won’t do multi-level marketing again no matter how much I like the product.
It was long enough ago and for such a short time that I have forgotten who. I don’t put them on my resume.
Yes, it was in my case at least. Since then I’ve heard that the knives themselves are pretty good, though a little expensive for what they are, but I went away thinking the company seemed to be either a scam or a MLM scheme. I didn’t stick around to find out.
I lasted one session as a telemarketer. The job was to cold call and get people to respond to a “survey” of three stupid questions. Then you tell them that for their cooperation, they’d won free magazine subscriptions. There was, however, a service fee.
I couldn’t do it. Didn’t manage to get a single taker. Never went back.
In the early 70s, a tornado took the roof off my hometown Walmart while I was home for spring break. Walmart was hiring anyone available to help with cleanup. I worked a couple of days and then went back to school. What I remember is how frightening stupid the rules were. We had to throw away cans, but wrapped up rotten meat, moldy bread, sodden cereal boxes, etc., for resale somewhere.
I still have my sample Cutco knives from when I sold them in college. I think I paid $80 for the starter set which was refundable within the first few months. I was also guaranteed $120 plus commissions on whatever I sold if I did at least 20 presentations. I think they figured 20 presentations was too many for the uncommitted to complete but just enough to get the scrappiest sales people engaged.
I did a few presentations and realized it wasn’t going anywhere. Fudging the rules a bit, I padded out my numbers with one last presentation at a bowling alley to 12 or 15 people waiting for their league match to start. I sold a few pairs of scissors and individual knives, but none of the big sets. I turned in my orders, asked for my bonus and commissions, and tried to return my knives. My “manager” suggested I keep the knives in case I wanted to try selling again. Fat chance. He refunded the purchase fee but told me to keep the sample knives in case I changed my mind. In the end, I probably made about $3 per hour for the time invested after backing out the cost of my mileage.
Most of the knives are mediocre. Of the three chef knives I own, the Cutco is the worst at keeping its edge. The scissors are excellent though.
When I was a starving student, I spotted an ad on the job board that said “Earn $25/hr watching TV” so a buddy and I called the number.
It was legit. The CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television Communications) were looking for people to test out the new digital cable system that would eventually replace the old analog system. If I remember correctly, it was to detect whether the piggybacked signal would cause interference, etc…
Sounds like a dream job, no?
We had to meet a chartered school bus on campus really early in the morning, there were about 25 people there. We were ferried to a government complex way out in the suburbs then escorted into a small waiting room where we were briefed and given clipboards, pencils and a examination booklet. We were led to a viewing room were there was a 35" colour TV and chairs. Then the testing began, and it was NOT anything close to watching TV! There were a series of still images in different colours, moving shapes overlapping like an old screen savers, etc… There wasn’t even any real TV or film clips but short video scenes with awful acting they’d obviously created just for this test. and then they’d repeat them! We had to answer things like which one is clearer #1 or #2? Which one has better sound? Do you notice any difference between? Over and over for an hour then a lunch break then another hour. Picture an eye doctor vision test from HELL! My eyes were blurry and tired by the end! It’s not like we could leave either since we were out in the middle of nowhere.
I believe it was about a 9 hour day by the time we arrived back at campus were given a cheque for $50 for the 2 hours I spent “watching TV”. They actually thought we’d all be returning the next day and would recommend it to our friends!?
Pretty sure, I spent the $50 on beer and pizza and slept in the next day!
Ahh, Cutco. Answered one of their cleverly disguised ads and went to their demo. Sat through it, got the guy to teach me how to cut a penny into a corkscrew then left. Sales jobs are not for me.
I attended a Cutco presentation when they were advertising their jobs as “work for students” (via a subsidiary called Vector Marketing). They’re still using the workforstudents.com domain, I note. It’s basically an MLM. When I attended their “interview,” you couldn’t get a refund on your demonstration set, and I quickly realized that they probably made most of their “sales” that way. Of course, you can make money in MLM schemes, but generally speaking if you have the sales ability to do so, you could make a lot more anywhere else.
When we were little we’d pick berries and such during the summer for pay. Get 3-6 cents/lb of berries picked. I also picked green beans for 2.5 cents/lb.
In our state you had to be 15 to get a work permit and get a “real” job. (For our family that was at a hamburger joint.) I think I would have been 9 when I started picking.
FF several years (I was in college). 3 of us are temporarily idle during the summer. A sibling gets the idea “Let’s go make some money picking beans.” So it’s up early and out to the bean fields for us.
We left halfway thru the day.
Once you’ve had a real job, picking stuff is a lot less worthwhile.
While in college, I made the sorry mistake of accepting a babysitting job from a woman with three boys between 6 and 11. I figured I would monitor their homework, get them in bed, and spend the rest of the time studying on my employer’s dime. Sweet, yes?
What I didn’t realize is that these were, “The Children of the Corn”. The youngest was BHD, and the two older ones were sadists who loved tormenting him and setting him off. After an evening of dealing with this, I thought that I had finally gotten them in bed and on their way to dreamland. WRONG. Instead, the two older ones managed to get the youngest into a dresser drawer that they had emptied out and then surfed him down the stairs. It shot across the small hall into the front door, and the drawer was shattered into several pieces.
After the mother got home, we both heartily agreed on an amicable parting of the ways. Total time of employment: one evening.
I got hired at a local grocery store one summer when I was in high school. The manager told me he’d call me back with a starting date. I continued in my not-yet-employed lackadaisical summer meanderings for a few days, one day returning home to find multiple messages for me on the answering machine, wondering why I was not at work. I called and was yelled at and told that I was four hours late for my shift. I said that it was the first I had heard of it, that I was still waiting for his call to tell me when I started. He told me that this was my call, that I was late, and that my shift had been posted at the store. Apparently I was supposed to intuit that, or he thought I was just going to pine by the phone until he called to tell me to come in right away.
He was very unpleasant on the phone and when he asked me how long it would take me to get there, I told him I had plans for today, but if he wanted me to work a shift in the future he could call me in advance. He did not care for that, and I hung up on him.
Near the end of my senior year of high school, I was the assistant stage manager for our yearly musical. The week leading up to opening night, we had rehearsals each night, then the play ran Friday and Saturday night for three weekends.
Just before the rehearsals began, I applied at Home Depot. This was in 1989, and they were new in town at the time. One afternoon during rehearsals week, I went in for an interview. I made it clear that I wasn’t available the next three weekend nights, but after that my schedule was wide open. They said they were fine with that.
Come Thursday afternoon, I got a call from them. They wanted to offer me the job, and I needed to report in at 4:00 PM on Friday. I reminded them that I already had a prior, and MAJOR, commitment. I’ll never forget the guy’s words: “If you want the job, you’ll be here at 4:00 tomorrow.”
To which I replied, “I guess I don’t.” click
But wait, since I didn’t actually get hired, that doesn’t count as the shortest job I ever had. Well, a few weeks later I wound up taking a stupid telemarketing job selling newspaper subscriptions. I knew after a couple of hours on my first night that it wasn’t for me, but I stuck with it for a couple of weeks before getting fed up and quitting.
working as an insert for the la times …. I found a lot of a sunday newspaper is printed on Thursday and Friday like the comics the entertainment and advertising sections …. these sections came in huge bundles separately
my job was to put them together so they could be ran through the machine that puts that little string around them and stacked waiting for the rest of the paper to arrive about 12:30 which would be put together and delivered on sunday
it was boring and I didn’t have the speed for it and 90 percent of everyone hired didn’t pass the first day when I did it they had 8 hs kids the next week there were only 2 that came back and I was one of them
most of the people were cool but it wasn’t worth 45 bucks to me … and since it was in the next town over mom didn’t wanna drive 25 miles there and back my friend whom I got a job there only lasted about 3 or 4 weeks longer than I did
the other reason is I took an unofficial job selling used video games at a swap meet and did that for 5 years and had a lot more fun ……
Worked 3 days at this thing that was like a furniture club… you bought a year membership and got discounter furniture for a year. Running cash registers and telling people about furniture apparently is not my bag.
Forgot about the 2 days I spent working for a TV repair shop. I would drive the van all over the city picking up broken TVs from customers houses. It was awful. People were expecting me to come in and fix their TVs. Instead I was basically to take it hostage, back to the shop so the owner could ransom it back to them for the cost of the repairs. If they didn’t want the repairs or couldn’t afford it he would keep their TV, either to repair it himself to sell or scrap for parts to fix other TVs. It was quite a racket.
He and his wife did not speak english very well. On day two, I remember clearly, she wrote a customer’s address down as St. Joseph Boulevard instead of Boulevard Saint-Joseph (yes, both exist in our region) so we wasted an hour searching for the address on the wrong street in the wrong end of town,which backed up all other “kidnappings” scheduled for that day.
After he screamed and swore at me over the phone about it, I immediately hung up, drove the truck straight back to his shop, threw his keys on the counter, and told him to shove them up his ass.
I don’t remember if it was me threatening to beat him or the mention of calling the police but he got very nervous and cashed me out for the 2 days he owed me.
AFAIK, he went out of business not long after that.
My aunt and uncle decided to go into business cleaning places. They got a contract to clean a 7 Up bottling plant. It wasn’t bad, I have been doing cleaning jobs from high school, but something must’ve happened between my aunt and uncle in the bottling plant and the job only lasted one day.
I worked as a driver for a blue printing company. One day they hired a new driver. I showed him where the keys were, where the cars are parked, etc. He was given his first assignment, but never checked in. It looks like he simply walked off the job after 15 minutes.
Coincidentally, he became a youth leader at my church later. I asked him about it and he said that since the cars were manual transmission and he could only drive auto then he decided to quit. I’m not sure why he couldn’t have said something. My boss said they would have trained him.
After high school got a job at a local college inputting information into computers for minimum wage for 6 hours a day. This was around 2000ish so they had just gotten around to it and had a huge backlog of student and faculty information to input. I was skilled at typing without looking at the screen so I was able to read entire sheets and input them with minimal errors incredibly fast. Apparently nobody had thought of this happening as most of the people around me seemed to still be hunting and pecking their way through the work. Wound up finishing my work every day very early (we would just be given a stack of papers to do everyday and nothing after that presumably because they thought that was enough work for 6 hours) but apparently they still wanted you there for the full six hour shift (as well as the fact it was paid by hour so if you left early you would get paid nothing) so I just went online after I was done and browsed the internet. A few other people in my group (was about 20 or so people) also finished early and so started browsing the internet too. Two days after this the computer lab assistant who minded the computer lab where we worked made an announcement that people were no longer allowed to use the internet and that she would be start walking up and down the aisles to make sure that nobody was on the internet. At this point I asked what do I do when I run out of work and she replied “Recheck the accuracy of your work.” After four days total I left out of sheer boredom as there was no way I was going to spend more than half my time at the job rereading the same damn page over and over again.
I worked at Burpee Seed for one day. I was working through a temp agency. I unloaded one boxcar of seeds (in boxes) and that was it. I also worked as a seasonal (Christmas) driver’s helper for UPS. I went though training, got the famous brown uniform and was told to call in every morning in December at 3:00 AM to see if I was needed. I worked exactly one day humping packages.
