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What was your first job for pay?/where did you work while in college?

mebanedeac

mebanedeac

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What was it?
How old were you?
How much did you make?
How long did it last?
What did you learn from it, if anything?
 
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I worked in the food service department, specifically catering (which is the bottom of the barrel), at Hersheypark when I was 15. I upgraded to a food stand when i was 16.

I learned that amusement parks smell like garbage and the value of finishing high school and going to college. Also, food service is gross, but not quite as gross as you might assume. And finally, major amusement parks are largely run by 16-20 yr olds, which is amazing because teenagers are idiots but also teenagers are more capable than you might think.
 
I unlocked the doors in Reynolda Hall and helped in the Information Desk on the first floor at Wake Forest University.

I was about 14 I think.

I made shit, a few bucks an hour. This was in the early 80s.

I did it for an entire summer.

I learned that I liked to work.
 
not including babysitting (which i started at age 10, and made $5/hour), my first job was working at a saturday night event for middle schoolers called "jammin' at the j", and was hosted at the jewish community center. they hired me because they needed non-jewish kids to work on the weekends when all of the jewish kids were on retreats. i was 16, and made maybe $7.50 (it was like 4 hours/night, 1 night/month). i did it for 2 years, and learned that when you only work 4 hours/month, your job doesn't even cover gas money.
 
Good thread.

My first job, when I was 12-13 or so, was running a paper route for the Washington Post while I lived at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. I had a sweet gig. My route consisted only of the Bachelor Officers Quarters located a couple of hundred yards from my house. Most of my subscribers were young Second Lieutenants who were attending the Engineer Officer Basic Course and were only there for about 3-4 months. I got a $10.00 bonus for every new subscriber to the paper, and didn't suffer any penalty when someone stopped. Accordingly, I was raking in the money each time a new Officer Basic Course started every couple of weeks and about 2 dozen Lieutenants began subscribing to the paper. That, in addition to my route being entirely indoors in a large hotel like building, made that job awesome.

My first "real" job was during the summer after my sophomore year of high school when I was 15-16 and living in Newport News, Virginia. I was a dishwasher at a new and very popular Rock-Ola cafe restaurant. I showed up every morning at 7:00 a.m. and cleaned that place from top to bottom all by myself. Sweeping, mopping, buffing floors, cleaning the bathrooms, etc. Once I got that done before 11:00 a.m., I then transitioned to washing dishes until 4:00 p.m. -- nonstop, hot, messy work in an extremely busy restaurant. All in all, a very hot and nasty job, all for $3.35 an hour (the minimum wage at the time.) I learned some good skills, but more importantly learned that I did not want to do that kind of crappy job ever again if I could help it.
 
I'm assuming you mean actual job rather than babysitting, which I began doing at age 11 for $1/hour.

I was a scorekeeper/statistician for a local rec league park beginning the spring I turned 15 for baseball and I continued each baseball & basketball season through the end of high school. I learned how to keep the book for baseball & basketball and how to run the clock for basketball, as well as learning the rules for both sports. It was a great way to join my interest in sports with a paycheck. It was also nice to get paid while getting a tan during baseball season. ;)
 
It was either working illegally in my friend's dad's cardboard display factory (I was his other "son" if anyone asked) or working for my dad's construction company. I don't remember which came first and I don't remember how much I got paid. Only worked those jobs in the summers starting around 8th grade, and continued some construction through college when I didn't have a summer internship. The good news and bad news about construction was that we started at 5-6 AM to stay out of the heat. Sucked to get up that early, but it was nice to still have my afternoons/nights to play golf, go to the pool and hang with my friends during the summers.
 
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My first job for pay was mowing the neighbor's lawn when I was about 12 or 13. We had one "rich" lady in our neighborhood (she was also a hot MILF which may help explain why she was married to a rich man), so she was the only one to accept my offer of mowing. She began paying me $5 for the 1 hour + necessary to mow her 1/3 acre lawn, which was a ripoff but I was happy to get the money. Then after a few weeks, she started telling me that she didn't have any cash on her and she'd get it to me later. Well, "later" never came. I finally went in the hole for about 3 mowing jobs. The next time she called me I told her that I couldn't mow because I had something else to do. My mom overheard me tell her this on the phone (back then, mom seemed obsessed with staying in the good graces of the rich neighbor) and she yelled at me for a hour about my laziness. I informed mom that I wasn't getting paid anymore, but mom didn't care because she didn't want me to seem lazy to the neighbors. So I mowed that week too, but my parents soon let me out of my mowing obligation to the deadbeat neighbor.

From that experience I learned that its the people who ostensibly appear "rich" who are often the one dodging their financial obligations. I also learned that hot MILFs can get away with it the easiest.
 
ah shit I forgot about my lawn-mowing biz on my street when I was about 10 and up
 
What was it? - caddy at Raritan Valley Country Club
How old were you? - 14
How much did you make? - $50 per bag IIRC
How long did it last? - one summer
What did you learn from it, if anything? - carrying double bags for a bunch of 20 handicappers sucks ass
 
Other than babysitting (where I can't remember my rate), my first real job was lifeguarding at my summer pool. It was minimum wage, so probably like $4.50 in the mid-90's? I was 15 when I started and did it until I went to college (summers only).

It was a pretty sweet gig. Hang out with friends at the pool and get a tan. Had to do some real work in terms of cleaning, etc, but mostly pretty laid back.
 
Not counting paperboy and lawnmowing type stuff:
What was it?Busboy/roomservice at a hotel restaurant
How old were you?15
How much did you make?$4.75/hr + tips (min wage was 4.25 at the time)
How long did it last?until I quit about 2 years later
What did you learn from it, if anything?A hell of a lot. Most of my coworkers were in their early 20s and they corrupted me morally. One of my managers was a coke addict. I regularly got to carve the pig at happy hour and sometimes the Budweiser/Miller Girls were there.
 
First real job was working at Connecticut GolfLand, a place that had mini golf, go karts, bumper boats, batting cages and an arcade. I think I made $5.25 an hour to start - somewhere around there anyway. I was 16.

I learned... parents love to lie and kids don't, depending on the age. We had an age limit of 10 years old to ride the go karts by yourself, and you'd ask kids how old they were in line and they'd sheepishly tell you 8 or not really say anything and glance over at their parents and the parents would insist they were 10. I also learned how to change a tire and some general engine maintenance stuff. I also taught myself to hit left-handed by using the batting cages for free when we had no customers. That job was fun - I worked it for a few summers, including my first one or two during college.

I also learned that job was way better than working at McDonald's. I lasted about 6 weeks at McD's one winter while the golf place was closed down before I said screw that.

Hmmm... after reading some of the other posts, maybe it was less than $5 an hour, given what minimum wage was at the time (mid-90s).
 
When I was 15 I took care of a boy with autism and his brother. It was a little bit more than babysitting due to his needs. I did that for 4 nights a week for a school year but wasn't able to participate in any school activities because I had to be there to get him off of the bus so I quit after the year. I don't remember what it paid but probably $5/hr.

When I was 16 I got a job at a dentist office putting away charts and pulling them/readying them for the next day. I was paid minimum wage which I want to say was $5.25. After a few months I was offered a job at a cleaning service to coincidentally clean the dentist office that where I was already working. I cleaned that twice a week for maybe $40/week. Around the same time I got a job working at Eckerds for minimum wage a few times a week and more in the summer. I worked all 3 from middle of Junior year to right before I left for Wake.
 
I pulled my wagon filled with sodas to sell them to the semi-pro softball leagues that played at my elementary school's playground. We had five fields. I started when I was 10.

I became the youngest player ever in that league.

When I got my driver's license I delivered bakery goods to weddings and other catered events. A couple of the funniest parts of this job were that we were a "kosher" bakery whose baking staff was 90% black Baptists. Another fun part was when the main cake baker, Rocky (it was before the movie) went out late the night before, he wasn't too exact on the size of cakes. If his motorcycle was on the ground or leaning against the store, we knew what was coming. It sometimes took two people to move a "40 pound" wedding cake on those days.
 
Started mowing neighborhood yards at the age of 13, $5 per yard. I was a rich 13 year old at the end of the summer.
 
Other than babysitting or helping my mom out at her office/helping my brother's dad clean carpets...my first real job for pay was working at the National Cancer Institute as a lab tech/running experiments in the immunology department. I think I made like $1500 a month. It was a continuation of the intern program I was in and so I was 18 and it lasted through the summer until I went to Wake. I learned I didn't want to be in a lab long term, I learned a lot of immunological skills, it ended up getting me several jobs in the future and makes it easier to teach general bio (cellular and molecular) now because I know a lot of the basic lab skills stuff from that job as well as specialized stuff like flow cytometry. It was responsible for my first publications (3rd and 6th author) as well as my first poster presentation at a national conference. It was a pretty sweet first gig.
 
I worked for a heating and air conditioning company in my hometown. I was 16 at the time (summer of 1969, before my senior year in high school) and I was the general assistant/gofer for whichever crew to which I was assigned. I made whatever the minimum wage was at that time. My dad copied my first paycheck (which I still have) and I earned $33.48 for my first week of work. I worked all summer, about 11 weeks, and really enjoyed it. I learned some good stuff about fixing heat/air equipment and the location of some pretty good dive restaurants in my hometown that I didn't know existed. I also learned that I needed to stay in college.
 
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