Various tutoring, paper grading, etc. jobs as an undergrad. Paid only minimum wage (maybe $1.60 at the time), limited hours, didn’t know from one term to the next if it would continue. But it put me on the “inside” of things academic. And that’s a whole 'nother world.
Seeing the lightbulb turn on in other students’ heads was priceless.
When I was in my early 20s, I worked as a clerk at a 7-11 in Oxnard, CA.
When I started there I was new in town, almost homeless, and didn’t know a soul. The staff became my best friends and surrogate family. Everyone was ultra cool and the boss man didn’t mind if you had a beer or two —on the house— during your shift. The pay was shit (minimum wage), but my wonderful co-workers, laid back management, and almost complete lack of discipline and formality made it my favorite job ever.
Caddy/bagman/maintenance man at a public golf course. Two words: free golf.
I worked at an upscale retail store in the ritzy part of LA (the kind of place with a silly name and awkward decor, that sells $300 coin purses and such) for a while. Celebrities came in [insert name drops here], and during the December holiday season, a lot of the businesses in the area would have a little champagne tour. I’ll admit I was a little hesitant at first about having to deal with these kinds of uber rich douche bags, but the customers were surprisingly pleasant. Let me tell ya, the four days I worked at JC Penney before quitting due to unbearable douchebaggery were much worse. I actually liked working at the little fancy shop, but at $10/hr, forget it.
Summer Intern while I was in college.
Pay: Minimum wage.
Job…worked in a larger bank (not nation-wide but close) in their car leasing division.
By the beginning of the second month, I was setting loan rates and RESIDUALS for car leases for the ENTIRE bank. We’re talking thousands of cars a month.
I had 2 degrees of freedom. I could set loan rates and I could set residuals. Loan rate is self explanatory. Residuals are the amount of money the bank will buy the car back at the end of the loan. I had a computer set up on my desk and I would spend all day looking at different makes and models (that car dealers used to find banks) and trying to get my bank to be the top company that came up by just a teeeeennnnnyyy bit. Every once in awhile I would compile all the corrections I wanted to make and fax it to the software company so they could input it into the system.
This was a position in which I could cost the company multi-millions of dollars…and I was a college student…paid minimum wage…and I was doing it COMPLETELY UNSUPERVISED!!
During the whole time doing this…only one person in the company noticed (a sales person) who said he typed in a random car into a dealers system and we came out #1 by a tiny bit…so he congratulated me.
I did a good job, IMHO…but it wasn’t hard. There was only one other bank in the ENTIRE WORLD that had someone doing what I did. That bank was Chase. Everyone else faxed in changes every month.
It was a BLAST. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I also learned that:
Big companies can be idiots. I mean, shit, who the HELL lets a college intern do a job that could cost the company so much money unsupervised?
Why wouldn’t other big banks do this? Hell, we probably received so much more auto leases for just having our cost a few pennies less then everyone else. It boggles my mind.
Never overestimate the business saviness of a big business 
I worked a temp job as a computer cleaner. That means I took printers, cash drawers, all kinds of hardware and duh cleaned it off. And let me tell you, the bottom of a retail cash drawer is very very filthy.
Still, it was great exercise, met lots of cool people, and you had a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. The boss gathered us into a big room and said we were 30% ahead of production, so raises were in the offing. Two days later, I got a call about a real job with more money and benefits (who laid me off 3 years later). I should have turned them down…
I miss that tiny sweaty room, sweeping the water under the warehouse door when it rained, playing football on sunny days, walking to a good italian resteraunt for lunch…sigh 
Teaching judo and self-defense. Didn’t make much, but I was young and in school - I didn’t need much. Train all the time, kick each other’s asses nine ways from Sunday, and go out after and drink beer and argue politics. And white belts bought the first pitcher, which was like a buck.
I had no money, and all the time in the world. Now I got money and no time.
Sigh.
Regards,
Shodan
Same here. We had to hustle sometimes, but there were so many pluses: the free movies, the free popcorn and cokes, early screenings, all that stuff you mentioned, plus a couple more:
[ul]
[li]One theater in the town where I worked was a really old one, with fancy woodwork on the walls and balconies. The balconies were always closed, but since we got to know the manager of that theater (same parent company), he’d let us sit in the balcony if we wanted to. That’s a treat you don’t often get today, lemme tell ya…[/li][li]A lot of celebrities go to the movies, were on good terms with the managers, and sometimes we’d either have special screenings or just see them come by. I worked the door when the whole cast and crew of City Slickers bought out one side of our twin theater to watch Goodfellas during a filming break. (In case you couldn’t guess, this was in Santa Fe). The cast of Young Guns was around a lot, too, and others at times (Bill Murray and Val Kilmer spring to mind).[/li][/ul]
Very fun, but also very minimum wage.
A second job during my last two summers in high school was operating a carousel at a very small amusement park. (Ferris wheel, small train, little boats on water…and a half dozen chickens.) New mothers with huge smiles would often strap their toddler on a horse in anticipation of the glee this would bring to their child. Then the music blares, the lights flicker, there’s a slight jerk as the platform begins to move and whatever that is you are sitting on is starting to rise and fall with increasing speed. Not all kids thought this met the definition of fun.
Every weekend, a kid or two would scream "frickin’ bloody murder death kill! and no comfort Mom could provide would calm them down.
Enter Merri-go-Round Man!®
If Mom looked panicky, (or if the kid screamed loud enough to scare the chickens), I’d step onto the moving platform and, if allowed, take the child in my arms and step off the 'round. Minimum wage plus all hot dogs and popcorn I could eat.
However, the job I loved beyond words was when I helped establish the first charity for a rare and often nasty autoimmune disease. I created the first multi-page website on this topic, put a professional voice and veneer on the printed materials, set up an online support group, first conference and counseled newly diagnosed patients. I worked free for over 10 years. Besides the awesome feeling of reward helping others provides, having something meaningful to do helped get me out of depression and on the road to recovery. Help others, help yourself.
But I still have to envy cousin who worked for Sealy as an actual mattress tester.
I was paid six dollars an hour to be a teacher’s assistant in a CDC classroom. I loved the children and the teacher was super cool. She was going through a heated divorce so I was in charge of the class a lot while she was off cursing, smoking and talking to attorneys. I got to pretend to be a teacher.
In hindsight it’s kind of scary that they let me be in charge so often. I’d never been tested or had a background check done, I was uneducated and had no classroom experience.
Still it was a great job and I’d have kept doing it but I was switched to vision screening the next year, then went on to start my career in construction.
My first proper job was in ‘creative media’. I was paid to research, write and produce all sorts of things from training videos to short promo documentaries and marketing brochures. The hours were longer than long and the pay was worse than bad. The great thing about it was that I worked for such a fantastic variety of clients, large and small, in almost every industry and sector you can imagine, that it gave me a near-comprehensive understanding of business and industry that proved invaluable later on. Plus I was learning how to produce good results in different media (printed material, audio, video and live events) and to do it on budget and on time.
I did this for about four and a half years. Terrible pay, but a terrific education that paid off handsomely in later life, and in many ways is still proving very useful today.
Chocolate Fountain Attendant. It actually paid well for the work I did, $15/hr.
Basically, I went to weddings and fancy receptions, set up a fountain, ran some chocolate through it, and then talked to people, wandered around or read until the event was done, wiped everything down and went home.
It was a blast. I was encouraged to eat the chocolate and share it with anyone else working, and I enjoyed watching all the wedding festivities from my fairly low stress environment.
The only problem was events were few and far between. One a month at best.
Student orientation guide and then later student academic advisor at my University
The pay was not much, but I got to spend my summer hanging out with incoming freshman, giving campus tours (and I really love the Madison campus. Hell, I used to just wander it myself without an entourage of nervous incoming freshmen) and helping students plan a curriculum in the engineering department.
Great fun. I never cared that I didn’t make much money. The dean used to buy us ice cream all the time from Babcock Hall. I don’t like ice cream but I LOVED the stuff.
Two best summers of my life.
In high school I was the “cart boy.” Sucked being there at 5:30am on a weekend but it was a great job. Put all the carts out, go get free breakfast. Wasn’t supposed to get the free breakfast but the cook liked me (always be nice to the cook). Take the cart for a spin around the course, chat up the marshalls and the drink girl. Occassionally go change a flat, pick up a dead cart and even once had to pull one out of a pond. Go back later for my free lunch. Clean off the carts as they came back and charge them up. You would not believe the things people leave in a golf cart.
One of the duties was to empty the bottles from the bar and we had a big bottle we would drain the dregs into and when it was full enough mix it with rootbeer. Yeah, it was gross, but that’s the kind of shit we did. Made dart guns out of the club shafts.
Good times. Oh yeah. And free golf all the time.
Working on my school paper in college. It paid minimum wage, and because the university limited how many hours per week students could work at campus jobs, we only got paid for a fraction of the hours we actually put in. But it was a fuckin’ blast. The office was basically like a big clubhouse where staffers could hang out, surf the Web and play video games between classes (if we weren’t working on any stories that is). And at the end of the week after we’d finish putting together Friday’s paper we’d all go over to somebody’s house and get drunk.
I was a closed-circuit “Video Operator” (low grade TV producer) at a Greyhound racing track, it was great! I had awesome toys to play with (I had a 100,000 watt stereo, a full video production studio and 996 TV’s).
I had clearance from the Texas Racing Commission to go places that the owner (Paul Bryant Jr.) could not go.
My office was perched on the roof of the tallest thing for miles and the view sure was nice.
The $ was ridiculously low and I had to move on as I was slowly going broke, at one point my car broke and I couldn’t afford to fix it so I borrowed a buddy’s extra car for a few months.
Unclviny
I took kids caving everyday at a summer camp, which was great.
In college, I got a job at a local easy-listening radio station - the overnight shift. It was ironically cool.
During an in-between-colleges period I worked as a security guard from 4-midnight in a medium sized office building. I signed people out up to around 6:30, let the cleaning crew in and out, then had the place to myself. I read, wrote letters, listened to music, pretty much passed the time doing what I wanted.
Another job that I like more in retrospect than I did when I was actually doing it was moving pianos. I had a crew of two or three guys, usually students and/or musicians. We’d load up the piano and head off to another adventure in physics, puzzle-solving, and brute strength. Went into some pretty interesting homes.
When I was still in high school, I spent a summer working for the Youth Conservation Corps on the opposite side of the state.
It was hard, back-breaking work, but I had a blast. We built a trail system, cleaned up slash piles, cleaned up a contractor’s dump, built a water line and gravel pads for a camp ground, broke up a road, built amphitheater style seating around a fire pit, planted trees, and several other things.
The pay was minimum wage, but I had a blast. There was a sense of accomplishment as we watched our progress; the people I worked with were fun, there were pranks and jokes galore, and I was away from home.
We even dug a pit and roasted a pig and invited the town down the road from the state park I worked in to dinner.
This was clear back in 1981 and I still have the clearest memories of working there.
I actually enjoyed a brief stint as a social worker, but I couldn’t live on what the salary was.