My first real job was when my stepfather got me into insulating when I was 19. This was after I worked for some time at the local grocery store stocking shelves. First day on the job, I had to carry these big ass 110lb rolls of cladding, I almost crapped my pants after that. Worked in the field for a couple of years after. It definetly paid off well, I had plenty of money to splurge on loose women afterwards, despite enduring the everyday risk of inhaling carcinogenic fibers.
Anyone else?
Every job is a real job. My first paid work was being a paper boy when I was 11.
As an intern at BusinessWeek-Asia for about 2 months.
oops… that was when I was about 16. Worked during the summer holidays.
My first real job after college (everything else was just a summer job) was in a cable TV station. I started out putting out information on the race results and eventually graduated to my own sports talk show.
Oh God! You had to ask, right? 
My first real job started at age 13 at a place called Banning Yarn Mills in Fullerville, Georgia. This was only 2 years after we immigrated to the US in '60. Yeah I know about child labor laws, but my family needed the money, so what?
I was a “doffer”, which meant that when a spool (of about 50 on one side) got full, it would be my job to take the full spool off and replace it with an empty one. Very quickly, so that the entire machine could keep running seamlessly. It was timed so that when I took a full spool off and put an empty spool on, another would be waiting for me, and so it went for 8 fricking hours.
I developed my own style and looked like an Olympian as I used my legs and arms setting a new time record with the other workers looking on telling me I was running them “out of their jobs”, but what did I know?
I did this work until just after 1964, when The Beatles hit the US and my Mom noticed me hitting on her pots and pans shaking my head and going Whoooooo!.She convinced my Daddy to let me try his Slingerlands , and rather than let me beat them all to hell, he bought me my own Gretsch’s! I love my Dad!
Not long after, I joined my very first rock band, The Watchmen, and the rest is history: I now work as a respiratory therapist and have some very fond memories of the bands inbetween.
Q
I assume “real job” means where you have to fill out a W-4 form, show up or work each day (except for days off) and you get a paycheck, less taxes, which have to be reported to the IRS.
That said, I can probably eliminate my first job, which was doing janitorial work at my dad’s store when I was 15 until I was 18. My dad paid me “under the table.”
Using my own criteria specified above, my first “real job” was at Burger King. I started out making a whopping $3.35 an hour, working 25-30 hours a week. I worked there all throughout college. By the time I graduated I was ready to leave, but the job market was looking bleak for what I did in college, so I became a manager and worked this for about two years, leaving in December of 1994.
After Burger King was OfficeMax, where I worked for six years with a small break about halfway, doing tech support, which didn’t work out, and thus I went back to OM.
In December of 2000 I left OM and went to work as a contract employee for Hewlett-Packard, where I currently do printer testing. This, of course has been my best job of all (pay, hours, working conditions, benefits, etc.)
Grocery bagger at 16.
Subway at 20.
First “real” job I guess was hanging sheet rock at 21.
First job that was “real” and more “permanent” was Air Force also at 21.
If you count a real job as working for someone other than my parents, on a regular basis, then I was a stablegirl. I was twelve and nuts about horses so when my dad heard that a local stable needed some help cleaning up and such, I was sooo there. Arabian/Quarter horses! Sulky racing! It was heaven, no matter what I had to shovel.
Filling out a w-4 type real job, that would be waitressing at a sucky restaurant, the summer before college. Made me value the college education I was getting, that’s for sure.
Great replies ! Nice
Reason I’m asking is because Im desperately looking for a new career and I thought it might help if I knew how others got their starts… Thanks guys and keep em coming !
First job was a Cashier at Target at age 18. Turned me into a lazy good-for-nothing whiner into a hardworking lets-get-things-done kinda guy. Well, that job didn’t turn me around, there were a few more in between but it was the biggest start.
I was miserable working there. I frequently had to work 10 hour shifts, and since I was hired during the chirstmas season often it would be so busy I’d be screwed out of a break. Having to stand for such long periods of time sucked. I only worked there for about a month when they transfered me. The store they transfered me to paid .50 less than the one I started at (went from making 7.00 to 6.50 an hour) plus had ENTIRELY different rules for running everything. After a week of being treated like a total idiot, I quit.
As bad as it was, it was a very constructive experience. I can say that I haven’t had a job as bad as that. And I can say that every job I’ve had since then has had either better pay, better hours, and/or nicer staff. I’m currently working as a coach for a tutoring center. I only work 15 hours a week on minimum wage, but I’m WAY happier than I was working full-time at Target.
Assitant in a pharmacy when I was 16. Basically, I took care of everything that didn’t involve physically handling pills or entering insurance information into the computer. That left everything from cleaning the toilet to driving the delivery truck to reloading the lottery machine (they even had to call me up a few times because nobody else knew how to do it) to taking the nightly inventory. Paid $.10 over minimum wage.
Working in a retail warehouse at the age of 16, a job gotten for me by my mother, the operations manager. I was being a stubborn teen and refusing to look on my own, saying I had nothing on my resume, so one morning at six am I was told “Up. Now.” And that was that. Working there for two summers prompted me to go find my own jobs after that.
First real job came late for me compare with you folk. Aged 23, working in a government department, a few months before the first computers came onto the scene, gradually replacing the blizzard of forms and copy sheets and clunky great metal filing trays with … more paper, more forms, and cranky terminals that sometimes broke down just as often as the filing trays jammed. 
My first job would have been the work-study dining hall position I had when I went off to college. But that wasn’t one that I really had to have any sort of qualifications for before I started - I showed up and asked for X number of hours and told them when I could work.
My first “real” job after college was as a customer service rep with a payday loan company. (Well, ok. There was a two month stint at Cheeseburger Charlie’s. I got laid off from that job. sigh).
Oh, and I was 17 with the first job, 21 with the second.
Worked for “Carrier Pigeon” when I was 12-14 delivering papers, then again later when I turned 16 driving around other kids delivering papers.
Worked for Hardees (a burger joint which no longer exists, bought out by Burger King some years ago) at 16.
Sealcoat supply making the black gooey tar stuff they use to refinish roads the summer I was 17. Nasty work. Always came home looking like I’d been barbecued (covered in black dust and grime from head to toe).
Cutco salesman. [Salesman voice]Selling top quality knives! It slices! It dices! It makes Julian fries! See the Double D edge? It’s a patented piece of technology which means the knife is actually cutting on 3 edges! Blah, blah, blah… [/Salesman voice]. I realized at this point that I don’t really enjoy sales.
That, however, didn’t stop me from working another telemarketing job. Feature Films for Families. They’re a company which telemarkets G rated films on video (presumably they offer DVD now as well). That job was … ok… I actually was doing pretty good. I was finally making my regular sales quota after working there a year. Then they told us we weren’t allowed to call people in the Eastern Time Zone. That wiped out half my lead pool and eventually my job as well. That’s ok, if I hadn’t have lost that job I probably wouldn’t be at my current job today.
This post is long enough though… That pretty much covers my job situation from 16 - 20 so I’ll stop there.
I don’t know, I consider a “real job” to be a job that one intends to do for a long indefinite period of time as one’s sole occupation, not just a job that one does during high school or college to make a couple of bucks.
Under the above criteria my first real job was (and still is) being a tax lawyer.
Under the criteria used by other folks above, my first real job was a busboy at a mexican restaurant. I worked at that same place all throughout high school as a host, cashier, and eventually waiter. I then waited tables at a lot of other places through undergrad and sold cars for two summers.
Hardee’s is gone?
Wow.
My first two jobs were at the same time. I worked after school at a place that did electronic drafting (old-fashioned drafting of circuit schematics and such). I did a bit of drafting there along with more than a bit of scutwork.
On weekends and the occasional evening, I worked at the apparently defunct Hardee’s.
At the time, Hardee’s had recently swallowed up Burger Chef, so we encountered Burger Chef paraphanalia from time to time in our workplace. I wonder if Hardee’s lives on in the same way…