Mine was stacking shelves in the vegetables or ‘produce’ aisle at safeway in Douglas, Isle of Man.
I enjoyed it because it was physical labour and I spent a lot of time amongst the general public. There was no boredom whatsoever. I sometimes got free stuff!
There were aspects of it that I did not like - My supervisor was a hitler-wannabe. He was a fucktard of the highest order. How well you were doing a task didn’t matter to him, he would still treat you like scum. Another aspect was the guy who became his boss. This guy was a toff who seemed to have an IQ of twelve.
So, explain your first paid employment and why you left.
I worked for Domino’s pizza when I was 15 answering the phones. My manager was a major control-freak, but of the type that liked to do everything himself. Sometimes when it was busy and the drivers were just popping in and out he would end up making all of the pizzas, getting them out of the oven and arranging the orders, stop occasionally to take an order on the phone, handle a customer complaint, etc. all the while with the phones ringing off the hook. Could damn near run that store by himself - and we never complained, made that job all the cushier for us.
Of course I only got paid $5.15/hr. Took me about a year to get up the guts and ask for a raise - when I finally did my manager acted surprised as if he didn’t know I hadn’t already received one, apologized for it, and immediately granted it. (Bumped me up to the big bucks… $5.75/hr :D)
I ended up quitting my senior year of high school, ostensibly to “focus on school” but in reality it was more to focus on getting high and getting laid, with much more of the former than the latter.
I guess you mean with an actual paycheck, as opposed to babysitting and odd jobs and stuff? I worked the grill at a burger joint in the Soulard area of St. Louis. I started at 90 cents an hour. I quit because I got a job pumping gas and working on cars at a filling station for $1.10 an hour. More money, and the job was way more fun.
I worked six months as a concession employee at a local multiplex. I got to work during the release of the second Harry Potter movie, which was really exciting. Today, I’m a weekend-janitor and a full-time student.
I left that job because my managers weren’t very flexible about the shifts (i.e. you couldn’t ask for specific days off). I was working to pay for my French Exchange, so when it came up and I had to leave the country for 3 weeks, it was easier just to quit than to wrangle with my bosses over the time off.
I worked in a metal foundry in Oxnard, CA at age 16. During the day, it was picking through metal parts to separate the aluminum and magnesium parts from other materials, which always seemed to include lots of dead cats that got squished in the metal piles. I never understood why. In the afternoon, I used a skip loader to dump metal in melting vats where they were melted down into one ton blocks and recycled. I left because the human body is not meant to take that kind of abuse for near minimum wage.
Today, I work in the defense industry as the head of business development for the company.
Working for a carpet cleaner at age 17. Nasty, sweaty, hands-and-knees, hard freaking work for minimum wage. He would disappear, then come back and complain about the work I was doing. Then the bastard wouldn’t pay me.
The next job was at a car wash: nasty, sweaty slave labor, and hard freaking work for minimum wage. At least I got paid.
Both jobs taught me all about what I didn’t want to do for the rest of my life.
I had a job sweeping airplane hangars for a little custom painting company out at the airport. I cleaned up painter’s tape and such debris, keeping the place as dust-free as possible. Yep, at 16 I was a janitor. After a while they promoted me to doing basic office work, and one day I narrowly missed meeting Buzz Aldrin. :smack: I left when I graduated from high school and went to spend the summer in Denmark.
My first real job was when I was seventeen, the summer before I started college. I got a job working at the drop-off spot for the Salvation Army. I was all by myself in a large trailer filled with crap in an empty parking lot. When someone came by (four or five times a day, absolute tops) to drop stuff off, I’d throw it in the trailer and write them up a note for tax purposes.
It paid minimum wage - $4.75 in 1996. Not much money, but it was an okay first job. Certainly it was easy enough. I’d sit in the sunshine all day, reading books and listening to baseball games on my walkman.
As for now, after eight years of being a member of the workforce, I’m back in school doing a masters degree.
I was a “mother’s helper” at 13, which is essentially a glorified babysitter that has to clean the house and run errands too. My first over the table job at 14 was working in a discount clothing store in a bad neighborhood where we got held up every few weeks. It wasn’t my money, I wasn’t brave and I opened the cash drawer right away every time. Looking back it seems nuts but that was just the way it was where I lived so I didn’t question it much.
After a while they promoted me to doing basic office work, and one day I narrowly missed meeting Buzz Aldrin. :smack: I left when I graduated from high school and went to spend the summer in Denmark.