First Paid Job

[Aerides]

I did a few telemarketing gigs in HS/College, but my first real job was the minibar restocker at a hotel. That gig was fun. I was on my own most of the day, going floor to floor, room to room, with a big cart full of all those little bottles and snacks.

 

[Midpack]

I did some caddying in my teens, but I have no idea what I got paid.

My first full time job paid $3.00/hr, a summer worker putting up residential roof shingles in San Antonio TX - yes, it was HOT!!! Back in the days when you carried all the felt rolls and shingles up on the roof via ladder. The owner used a pneumatic nail gun, but his son and I pounded nails with a hammer and apron.

I worked as a server in a very upscale restaurant one summer before I started my professional career. Made about $3000/month, entirely tips as I tipped my busboys more than my hourly pay ($1.10/hr IIRC) - shocking money at the time. And quite a bit more than I made as a starting engineer out of college - though that panned out very well in the long run...

 

[Crewer]

My first W2 job was in the summer working for a pharmacist at the drugstore he owned. Not sure how much I got paid my first summer but by the second I was making $1/hr. I was also doing the cash register opening and closing (counting the money), making deliveries, and picking up something for him to make for dinner since he was there the whole time the store was open. It was a pretty good job and the guy was very nice.

That was so much better than the summer before when I babysat full time - probably 9 hours a day M-F. I'm sure I was paid cash and I think maybe $0.50/hr for the 8 hrs I was supposed to be there (but it was longer than that). Looking back on it the 6 or 7 year old probably had ADHD. I had to entertain him every single minute of the day, preferably by being active, and he didn't like to read with me. Fortunately, he liked to ride a bike so we did alot of that. The worst part was they wanted me to lie and pass as his mother to get into the swim club. I was 16; she was late 30's; and it was a photo id even then. I absolutely could not do it without getting very nervous and I got caught the first time we tried to get into the pool.

 

[jollystomper]

First money I earned was tips for bagging groceries at the local supermarket (my sister worked there so I had an "in" so to speak ) raking lawns in the fall, and shoveling sidewalks in the winter. I probably got about $20/week at the grocer, and anywhere from $1-$5 for raking and shoveling.

My first W-2 pay was working part time in a hospital when I was 14 as a red cross "volunteer" (though I was a volunteer in the hospital eyes the Rec Cross did pay me a stipend of about $30/week). I mainly moved patients between their rooms and various hospital departments. One a couple of occasions I had to take a body down to the hospital morgue.

My first "full time" (40/hr week) job was after my sophomore year in college. I was hired to be an intern and work in Manhattan, in the international finance department of a large a chemical (and other stuff) company. I earned a little more than $1000 for the summer. My duties included tracking various daily economic indicators, including data currency exchange rates, every morning and preparing a report. The department had a plotter connected to their mainframe that no one was using, and I figured out how to program it (hello, Fortran) to plot currency values over time. That wowed them.

One fun memory: since that they did not have a desk or office for me, I would use the office of someone who was on vacation. Since these were all executives, the office were very nice. They had a large corner office on the 40-something floor of the building, with floor-to-ceiling windows with great views for the CEO; for a week that was my office. DW (then my girlfriend) was very impressed when I showed it to her (security was much more easy-going and the department folks did not mind me showing it to her).

I would have gone back to work for them the following summer, had not Megacorp offered me an internship in a much lower cost-of-living area that also paid more than twice what the chemical company would have paid me. At the end of that summer Megacorp offered me a full time job effective once I graduated, and the rest is history... .

 

[OldShooter]

About 15 or 16, part-time electronics technician in the avionics shop at the local airport. Minimum wage, IIRC $1.15/hour. At that point I held a General class amateur radio license and an FCC First Class Radiotelephone license. That start led to a series of electronic tech jobs that carried through graduate school and smoothly into my first "real" engineering job with megacorp. Overall a pretty lucky start.

 

[Sue J]

My sister worked part time at a big department store. When they did their periodic inventory count they needed some extra help and she got me on the list. The store would close early and we’d work until late in the evening. It was just manually counting and verifying goods and getting the totals added. I thought it was great fun and I loved getting paid!

I ended up doing this for a couple of department stores. I think I was 15.

I had been doing lots of babysitting for cash but this was the first time I had a paycheck with deductions. I also had been a summer camp junior counselor but the pay for that was a savings bond and a day at the local amusement park.

 

[Cayman]

Lawn mowing, babysitting, calligraphy (handwritten holiday cards)

 

[Kwirk]

$350/mo at the Astronuclear Laboratory in Large, Pa., part of Westinghouse. The job was an award related to participation in a radio quiz show for high school seniors.

 

[Trailwalker]

Ten years old in 1971. Picked potatoes by the bushel with a bunch of other kids in the neighborhood for a nearby farmer. I visited that field recently, and it’s been replaced by low income housing at the edge of the City of Milwaukee

 

[kwright396]

In 1971, I made $1.60 an hour as a busboy at a seafood restaurant. Gradually moved up to cook at $2.25 an hour. In December 1973 took a pay cut and joined the US Air Force making a whopping $326.10 per month, plus food and housing.

Thought I was rich in high school as I could buy my own clothes and a car!

 

[martyp]

When I was 16 I worked on a construction site for a summer picking up debris and fetching coffee and food for the real workers. What I learned that summer was that insulation batting will make your skin itch for a week.

 

[Idnar7]

Thanks all for participating. Fun to read everyone's experiences. For some, a first job led to a career path.

 

[Exchme]

Paperboy from ages 13-14. Then the folks bought a pet supply and grooming shop and overpaid me to be unmotivated and unenthusiastic.

First job I got on my own was a summer job in a lab, splashing around solvents like benzene, toluene and acetone that people would freak out about today.

Then spent the summer of 1980 working outside in south Oklahoma, it failed to hit 100 F three times, routinely went to 114 F and hit 118 F a couple days - I'd never seen weather like that, anything that wasn't watered died, even the old trees. My car was more rust than car and the air conditioner didn't work. I spent the summer not understanding what anyone was saying, they had a unique accent and most chewed tobacco, so generally had their mouths half full. Oh, and the spiders! I didn't realize until a few weeks in, that those little brown spiders I saw around the apartment every day were brown recluses. The mom of a guy renting the upstairs visited him and she got bitten and eventually lost a chunk of flesh from her arm. He told me about it and after that it was war with the little b@stards. I killed a dozen every day (the back of the bathroom door was always good for one). They laughed at bug bombs. I was too stupid to look for alternative places to rent, not sure there were any that would have been better, not much around.

Those jobs convinced me that I got bored easily, was not a natural with customers, couldn't do repetitive tasks as my mind would wander and I would mess up, hated working outside in the heat and really, really, hated spiders. All but the part about spiders were important in my later job decisions.

 

[latexman]

I was a dairy helper. Ice cream manufacturing plant. $1.60/hr was the minimum wage in 1973.

 

[Act2]

When I was about 8 years old, my Mom would pay us kids to pinch the ends off gooseberries. We had rows of gooseberry bushes and she’d make pie. But you have to hand-pinch the ends off the berries or you get an unpleasant “tail” at one end or an unpleasant dried blossom at the other. I think we made 25 cents for a huge bowl. Much tedious work for that 25 cents!

Later, I babysat. There was a lemonade stand or two in there somewhere.

And my first commercial job was working at a five-and-dime store. I was 15. They paid under minimum wage (I think minimum wage was $2.35); eventually the labor department caught up with them and years later I got some compensation out of the blue.

 

[wrigley]

There were two of them - while at home on summer break from college. This was mid-1980s. I just walked in to a local temp agency and said give me whatever you have.

Job #1: Graveyard shift at a swimming pool supply store. Unloading deliveries, cleaning up the store. Manager was a bozo - the one thing that sticks in my mind - he would have us sweeping the carpets. It's the cheap indoor/outdoor carpeting. Why don't we simply vacuum? Why should I care, they're paying.

Job #2: Graveyard shift at an injection molding plant. You see old black and white photos of folks working with these big machines in a cavernous sweatshop - that's what it was like. It was 8 hours straight of monotonous work. Summer nights at 75-85 degrees no AC just some fans - so it's above 100 in the factory. Same routine over and over for 8 hours...Close the door on the machine, hit a button, wait a certain amount of time, pull the stuff out, clean up the burrs the machine would leave, wait about a minute for the plastic to harden sufficiently, stack them, then repeat the process. I turned it in to a game of sorts, trying to do it as efficiently as possible and as many as I could in a single shift. I know the floor manager took notice as nobody came close to what I would do in a shift. I was usually working on the machine that made bread trays and another for the canister that would go in home ice cream machines (metal canister with plastic piece in the bottom that lets the machine spin it).

Best I can remember, these each paid about $4.50/hour.

Really, your first ever job wasn't until you were in college?

Mike

 

[racy]

Mother paid a penny for each sand burr we picked out of the back yard. My introduction to piece work at 10 years old.

 

[old medic]

My 1st paid job, was 9 or 10, picking rocks out of Great Pas garden. Fill the wagon, he moved it to the creek, then pile them across to build a dam. made $5 a load, and split between my 2 brothers. We split like $75 in a week. Did the lawn mowing snow shoveling too. 1st W-2 job at 15, Gas jockey at the Sunoco station, $2.10/hr

 

[DrRoy]

Picking strawberries, around 13 or 14. Paid by the basket but I forget how much.

 

[pjigar]

Before coming to USA (PPP adjusted in 1993): Checking exam papers. 20 cents per student for a 30 point test. 40 cents per student for a 100 point test.
In USA (in 1999): Making furniture. $5 per hour.

 

[5Miler]

In my early teens I did the usual lawn mowing, snow shoveling and had my own paper route.

My first W-2 job was in 1968 at 15 as dishwasher at a high end restaurant/night club in Columbus, Oh. That lasted two weeks when I was promoted to bus boy at 80 cents per hour plus tips. The tips were great as I usually handled stations for 3 waitresses. Gave me the money to buy my first car, 1956 Pontiac Starchief, a few weeks before I turned 16 and could get my license.

Did the busboy gig until I graduated high school and then started at a Carvel Ice Cream store just opening near my house. After that I got a job as an apprentice electrician though a family friend but the draft came up with me getting lottery number 36 so I enlisted in the Air Force where I spent 9 years learning a trade in electronics. How was I to know that my scheduled draft year was the year they stopped inducting draftees so I would have never been called up to serve.

 

[prudent_one]

Age 8 or 9, selling greeting cards door to door on our street.

 

[pacergal]

First paid job: age 12, babysitting $0.50/hour
First W2 job: age 16, local telephone operator $2.10/hr. Big bucks to me back then!

 

[scrabbler1]

My first paid job was a page at my local public library, at age 16. I shelved books, mostly, and kept them in order, a far more tedious task. I started at $2.25 an hour in late 1979, below the minimum wage because it was civil service (at least that's what they told me). But no taxes withheld, not even SS. I got several small raises in the nearly 2 years I worked there, for reaching hours worked milestones and COLAs, so by the time I left in late 1981 I had reached minimum wage.

My college years included jobs such as a day camp counselor twice, an usher in a Broadway theater, tutoring, and a monitor of the dorm's game room and study hall area. I remember one day at the end of the 1983 spring semester when I got paid for all 3 of those jobs a few hours apart. I later worked at my college's library (NYU's Bobst Library, a huge building).

Some jobs were W-2 but had no taxes withheld except for SS; other jobs were off-the-books. The Broadway ushering job was fun because it gave me a taste of the NYC night life in the mid-1980s.

 

[HenryD]

First cash job: Newspaper delivery, early 1980s, can't recall the rate.
First taxed job: Butchery assistant. £1 an hour, minus union dues, lol. The butcher lied to the store manager about me being (just) under 16 to get me in. I got to see a career-ending band-saw accident and hear about all the warts and diseases they'd get from the meat. Fortunately, my career has been upward from there.