First paychecked job was as a food runner/busser at a restaurant, at age fifteen.
At the age of fourteen I started working summers at a fireworks stand. Its still the best job I’ve ever had.
I rogued. In our small western Kansas farming community, wheat was a major crop, & it was important to keep the strain pure. In the early spring, the sowing machines laid down wheat into the furrows in a straight row. Later in the spring/early summer, teens were hired to walk down the rows of wheat & hoe out any plants that strayed from that strict row. (These were considered “rogues”, that is, not having been planted, but perhaps having blown into the field or being left from the following year). We started just before sunrise & finished about 4:00 pm. We all gathered at a local school at about 3:45 am & were loaded onto a bus. We all came equipped with lunch, hats, & suntan lotion.
In 1967 we were paid minimum wage – $1.35/hr. I remember that my weekly paycheck was about $65, and I was so proud when I saw my first $50 bill (President Grant’s on the bill? Whoa!)
Love, Phil
PS Why suntan lotion? In 1967 it was all about the tan. Sunscreen was for old ladies.
In high school, I worked briefly doing some transcription for a doctor. He was my Spanish teacher’s partner at the time.
Just after high school, I had a job on the campus dealing with books, inventory, repairs, cleaning out lockers, and reassigning locks. Fun stuff.
Cemetery maintenance when I was 15-summer job.
Between being 5 and 6 me and momz lived in a house boat in Marina Del Ray, CA. My mom and I knew just about everyone in the marina. I used to get paid $40+ to wash/clean boats and $10 to wash cars.
My first job was for NASA in 1963, at the age of 6. I was trained to climb into fueling management equipment, where adults could not fit, and dab the nuts and bolts with special paint to allow later verification that they had not been tampered with. The job was temporary, just for the duration of part of that project.
Now I’m a physicist in industry.
When I grow up, can I be Napier at the age of 6?
First regular job was in a food bank warehouse, first year of college. It was awesome. I had just gotten with my girlfriend, and we stayed up until about 3 every morning, then I was at work at 7 a.m. I’d do that during the week, then crash on the weekends with a HUGE migraine. A co-worker usually had a joint to burn at lunchtime, so I would spend most days half asleep and/or stoned driving a forklift around. The loading dock at that place will never be the same.
It was strenuous work, though. I lost about 50 pounds in six months.
Quit because I wanted to make getting stoned a full-time gig.
Currently a newspaper editor.
First paid job was mowing cemetaries at around 10 yo.
Now I’m a lab tecnician.
Holy crap - you mean minimum wage only increased by $2 between '67 and '83?
Same first job and same reason for quitting as me. Worked in cheapie grocery store. Saw my fair share of wackos, that’s for sure. It was boring but easy and it helped give me some spending money for when college came around.
First under-the-table job, working at my best friend’s dad’s sanitation company. 14 years old, driving garbage trucks into the garage (fun!) to pressure-wash them inside and out (disgusting!). $4 an hour tax-free, and my friend and I would “confiscate” the porn magazines and videocassettes we would find in the cabs. Other days, we’d stuff billing envelopes, or clean/sand/repaint dumpsters. Hard work, but the checks could be surprisingly large; a couple weeks’ of work in the summer, a couple of $200 checks, and free porn in the days when free porn was something to be excited about. Great stuff for kids too young to even legally drive.
First legit job at 15, worked at Mr. Bulky’s, one of those overpriced by-the-pound candy places. It never occurred to them to ask my age, and I didn’t go to school, so I worked full-time day hours, used ladders and power equipment, and did everything it’s illegal for minors to do. I somehow memorized the price and register code for every product in the store in a few days (and thus could run the cash register faster than anyone else, since most customers forgot to tag their products, or mistagged them, which usually required the cashier to run over to the candy bin), and had a nearly Rainman-like ability to toss a customer’s candy into one of the hanging analog scales and give them an exact price without having to do any calculation, as well as the ability to scoop a precise weight (within the margin of error afforded by the weight of individual pieces of candy). $3.35 an hour.
…I also discovered at that job that elderly people had a surprising number of racist names for licorice candies.
Talk about coming full circle:
My first job was running batch jobs on an IBM System/360. I’d get there after school, the data entry clerks would have the cards punched for the day’s jobs, and I’d run the batch, print the results, remove carbons and burst the continuous forms, and have them ready for the morning courier to deliver back to the client by 8AM.
I now repair home computer systems.