What is the most awesome job you had /have?

[Ben808]

Newspaper boy. I had done odd jobs (e.g. weeding) up that point so paper route was my first steady gig. I made (to me) good money and had my own disposable income for the first time in my life. (I got no allowance or hands out just because I wanted something.) Had to work for everything but learned value lessons. I saved and even grew my "business" by soliciting new subscribers.

[scrabbler1]

Back in my sophomore year of college, I had 3 fun jobs at the same time. The first was a job ushering at a Broadway theater in midtown Manhattan. The show was "Oh! Calcutta!" (the nudie show) during its 1980s heyday. It didn't pay much, but it was off the books and tax free. And when I worked on Saturday nights, I had a nearly free dinner from Nathan's a few blocks away. The theater's assistant manager had a friend who worked in the Nathan's marketing department and got lots of freebie coupons. I would make a food run there and pick up bags full of food for the other box office staff, ushers, and the bartenders. The soda was free, of course.




The other 2 jobs I had were in the dorm I lived in. The first was a study hall attendant which became the overall study hall and game room attendant. I'd get a lot of my homework done in the former, and became a good pool player in the latter. I often went right from the ushering job to the graveyard shift as the attendant.


I was also a tutor for some students who lived in the dorm. It didn't pay much but it was pretty easy work. I even met one of my future dorm roommates this way.


One day, I earned money from all 3 jobs. I got paid for the two dorm jobs and that night did some ushering. None of this interfered with my academics because I had my best semester, getting onto the Dean's List for the first time.

[check6]

Being a sailing instructor in Hawaii was the coolest job but being paid to fly this was not bad either:

[marko]

For 30+ years I worked for a company where "image" was very important. Flying coach and staying at Motel 6 was "very concerning" as we used to say; flying first class and staying at the Four Seasons was expected.

My job as VP was to travel worldwide for those years visiting our remote offices; Europe, Asia, Japan and throughout the US. While not for everybody, I was on the road 200 days a year (yes, DW could accompany me) going to some pretty exotic locales.

Hard work and long hours but there was also a lot of free time to do a lot of fun stuff most people do for vacation and see things most people don't even know exists.

[check6]

Quote:

Originally Posted by marko For 30+ years I worked for a company where "image" was very important. Flying coach and staying at Motel 6 was "very concerning" as we used to say; flying first class and staying at the Four Seasons was expected. My job as VP was to travel worldwide for those years visiting our remote offices; Europe, Asia, Japan and throughout the US. While not for everybody, I was on the road 200 days a year (yes, DW could accompany me) going to some pretty exotic locales. Hard work and long hours but there was also a lot of free time to do a lot of fun stuff most people do for vacation and see things most people don't even know exists.

I think that would be the perfect job if like you said you had the extra time and being able to take your wife. I traveled but most of the time the longest layover was just 24 hours and I slept most of that time.

[Car-Guy]

The one I have now.

It's demanding. I'm on call 7X24X365 to respond to any whim I (or the DW) might have. No time off from this one, ever. Biggest headaches is arguing discussing with the DW (who is the CEO so she usually wins) on where we're traveling to next, or where to go out to eat, or which car to buy next (she's a car gal), how long to stay "somewhere", etc, etc. Tough job, but somebody has to do it.

I've only been at this for about 5 years now but I'm planning to kept this job until the day I die.

[marko]

Quote:

Originally Posted by check6 I think that would be the perfect job if like you said you had the extra time and being able to take your wife. I traveled but most of the time the longest layover was just 24 hours and I slept most of that time.

The long layovers were usually built in because we seldom went home. We'd go from one place for 5 or 8 days and then on to the next for another week or so.

Careful planning (ahem!) on my part would have us with long lag times (several days to kill) in choice locations. Our locals were also expected to entertain/act as tour guides during our stay so we got to see a lot of cool stuff that only locals know about.

Funny story: One night my Japanese contact took me aside. "Ah, marko... we've known each other a long time and so I have a favor to ask...would it be ok if I not take you out to dinner tonight? It's because my wife had a baby three days ago and I haven't seen it yet because I've been out with you...not good..."

[John Galt III]

OK, I'll admit it. I actually did have a 4 or 5 year window of time at IT Mega during which I had the perfect j*b. I was project leader and lead programmer of a function I was well versed in, and had between 0 and 3 programmers working for me at any given time. I determined the deadlines, wrote all the specs, even did some programming. The best times were when I was the only programmer and had zero programmers to supervise. Bliss.

[athena53]

Oddly it was my last one. I was told to take over a database they'd collected at great expense, tease out useful market intelligence from it and create some good graphics. I also migrated it from a patchwork of Excel spreadsheets to SQL (which I'd never used before but I learn quickly) to a fantastic business-intelligence platform called Qlikview, all in a matter of months. Give me a big pile of data, ask me to look for interesting stuff in it and let me play with graphs and I'm in hog heaven. Too bad the politics surrounding it were so ugly (I swear they were setting me up to fail) and I quit.

[Pilot2013]

Bartender at most popular college bar in the small College town where I attended college!

[AlbaCrush]

Years ago, I worked as a Private Investigator. i did several undercover assignments that were related to employee theft. What made this job cool, was I got paid two salaries at once. The companies would pay me the hourly rate for actually doing jobs like their employees, and then I also got paid for doing my PI work at the same time.

Other cool jobs were the Marine Corps and my Law enforcement career. Both had their good and bad days.

[Bir48die]

Five of us started the first recycling center in the Portland area. I ran the small operation and we were paid $1.00/hr. Was 1/2 mile walk from the high school and across the street from the best burger chain.

I will say we had quite a Playboy collection by the time we had to close it down for new development.

[Dawg52]

I can't think of any job I've had I would consider awesome. The job I retired from was good in that it enabled me to make enough money to early retire. So that part was awesome.

[hesperus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by check6 Being a sailing instructor in Hawaii was the coolest job but being paid to fly this was not bad either:

F4 Phantom?