Your hardest earned dollars?

Did a lot of manual work as a kid and before graduating college but a job at 11 years old picking up hay bales and tossing them up above my head on a moving flatbed kicked my but...........and it was minimum wage.
 
My hardest job is a toss-up between being a driller (groundwater monitoring wells), performing buried ordnance detection where I walked up to 8 miles a day carrying a back pack and towing a 1-meter square metal detector, and working as a land surveyor on a river, where I had to cut transects through riparian vegetation, carry bags of cement over sand bars, and work in 100-115 degree temperatures. The life of a geologist! Oh, and there was that day where I and another senior high school class mate cleaned the dung out of a sheep shed with pitchforks.
 
From 2007 to 2017 I had a summer job as an usher at an outdoor concert venue. This was age 52 to 62 so I was not a teenager!

The pay was minimum wage so I was doing it mostly for "fun", but I enjoyed having a thing to go to and most of the other ushers were also in that age range or older.

The venue was Blossom Music Center in Ohio, a very well known concert venue that brought in big name rock, country, and other bands. But it's also the summer home of The Cleveland Orchestra and they had their concerts there every weekend.

The tough part was the long hours standing on concrete and dealing with the public. I had beer spilled on me many times at the non-orchestra concerts. Drunks would behave like drunks and cause havoc or just pass out.

The place had a pavilion with seating but also a huge lawn section for up to 13,500. After the concert the ushers all had to go out on the lawn and pick up the trash left behind, Yeah, for minimum wage. But we had a good team attitude and chatted while we did it and laughed a lot as all us oldsters grunted and groaned as we bent over to grab stuff.

Orchestra nights were a totally different crowd and vibe. Much easier all around and for an orchestra concert we were allowed to sit during the performances.

I did it for 11 summers and while individual concerts were tough, overall I liked the job and looked forward to getting put on the schedule. And all my pay went into my Roth IRA! So it was a good retirement job.

I would have continued doing it but I had my first hip replacement in 2014 and my 2nd hip was starting to go bad and the long hours standing on concrete was making it really hard to continue.
I saw a show, Phish at Blossom Music Center in 1996. Such a lovely venue and I remember how friendly the venue staff were: Mostly older retirees who I chatted with between sets. The day before there had been some sort of a Sesame Street kids event and here the ushers were dealing with hippies on drugs. IIRC, near the end of the show Ken Kesey came out on stage with the merry pranksters

I also remember that there was no actual fence around the venue at that time, and so folks willing to walk a few miles through the woods could just hang out on the lawn and watch the show. Local kids had even dragged coolers down the trails through the woods to sell sodas and bottled water to attendees entering the "ticketless" route.
 
Enterprise Rent a Car around 1995

They said I’d make $21k a year renting cars. What they didn’t mention was it was really $7 hour + OT and if you didn’t hit $21k by 12-31, you’d get the difference the end of the following quarter 3/31.

And it got worse from there. Should have quit after them not being upfront with the pay.
 
Waiting tables and also cashiering in the old days at a grocery store for eight hours or so. In my financial services job, having to stand up and talk in front of all sorts of people.
 
Close. Walking up and down hills in the woods through knee-deep snow, carrying two five gallon pails of maple sap. At least the temperature wasn't below zero, because the sap doesn't run much when it's that cold.

After you do that all afternoon, your arms feel like you can just about touch the ground without bending over. Hey, at least I got minimum wage, so the pay was about $2 per hour. :)
I did that as a volunteer just a few years ago, for a few winters. So I guess it doesn't qualify here.
 
I'd have to say my hardest earned dollars came as a front-line healthcare worker during a global pandemic. Especially in the early days, it was scary times. We did not have proper protective gear, policies and procedures were changing literally every day as new information became available, coworkers were dropping left and right as the virus spread, and nobody really knew what was going on or what to do about it.

Later, as we got more comfortable diagnosing and treating COVID, and we got an adequate supply of protective gear, it was "better" but still grueling. Spending up to 12 hours/day in an N95 mask, gloves, and plastic gown was rough. We all had sores across our nose and on our ears from the mask eroding our skin. And we were just exhausted at the end of the day.
 
I'd have to say my hardest earned dollars came as a front-line healthcare worker during a global pandemic. Especially in the early days, it was scary times. We did not have proper protective gear, policies and procedures were changing literally every day as new information became available, coworkers were dropping left and right as the virus spread, and nobody really knew what was going on or what to do about it.

Later, as we got more comfortable diagnosing and treating COVID, and we got an adequate supply of protective gear, it was "better" but still grueling. Spending up to 12 hours/day in an N95 mask, gloves, and plastic gown was rough. We all had sores across our nose and on our ears from the mask eroding our skin. And we were just exhausted at the end of the day.
Thank you for doing that. It truly was a dark time.
 
I was a paint vendor rep in a car assembly plant in the 90's. One year they were rebuilding the paint line that I supported and I had to work long overtime hours over Thanksgiving weekend. Barely got a quick turkey dinner on Sunday. I made great money, and it wasn't hard labor like many above, but I was very tired and glad when it was done.
My hardest earned dollars occurred on the paint line for auto replacement parts, as a summer college job. There were two of us college kids working the line, along with the rest of the regular employees. I remember that the foreman gave us the hottest, nastiest jobs with the most awkward, heaviest parts. He and some of the more senior employees also taught us to play sheepshead and took a little of our money during lunchtime. It was a learning experience.
 
My dad told me about during the depression he worked in Minnesota corn fields in the winter picking up corn stalks and stacking them into sheaves. The stalks were buried in the snow so he had to dig them out first and he was paid $1/day.
 
I w*rked for a Body Shop jobber for $1.50/hr ca summer 1967. I moved and delivered 55 gal drums of oil and 30 gallon drums of paint thinner by myself to various shops. I had a tool that allowed me to pull a drum (weighing perhaps 400+ lbs) over onto its edge. I'd roll that onto our hydraulic lift. Then the lift would raise the drum to the height of the pick up truck bed whereupon I would pull it over again and roll it onto the truck. So far, easy-peasy (relatively speaking.) Heh, heh, no one at our shop had ever heard of using steel toed shoes but I lucked out that summer with nothing worse than cuts (from body shop panels) bruises from moving heavy stuff around, and of course the ubiquitous verbal abuse from everyone.

At the actual delivery site, I had to lower the pickup's tail gate. Then, using the tool I'd pull the drum over on its side and carefully let it drop onto its side (BANG!) (keeping toes and legs out of the way, of course.)

Rolling the drum to the tail gate, I'd then place an old tire on the ground just below the tailgate. Then I would screw up my courage and slowly pull the drum toward myself. As it finally reached the point of no return, I had to hold the drum back as it slid down the tailgate toward the tire (and toward ME!) I only had one get away from me (I managed to jump out of the way just in time.) I must have looked pretty silly chasing a 55 gallon drum across a parking lot before it could crash into a brand new car waiting to be detailed.

I learned that even in a crappy j*b like that, there were politics! Everyone was looking for their little bit of power over others. Body shop employees complained about "late deliveries" (I called you 30 minutes ago!!) One guy (a body shop owner's son) "turned me in" for almost hitting him in with my truck when he came blasting out of a shop bay without looking or slowing down. Unfortunately, I had no proverbial dog to "kick" when I got home. I just had to "take it."

The pay was lousy, the w*rk was hard (and somewhat dangerous), I was "low man" in the organization but I actually kind of liked that summer. I had a lot of freedom (within limits) and I drove to 3 states with products. I grew a lot by not w*kring for my dad that summer in the family business. It was a "good" experience that I'd never want to repeat and, mostly, it convinced me I needed to finish my university degree.
 
Nowhere near as hard as some of you. Hardest was probably working for the HVAC company for a summer. In hot attic, on roofs, in basements.

Most disgusting was cleaning the grease trap in the fast food joint.
 
I spent a decade logging and sawmilling.

I loved some of it, but I was a kid and insane. I thought it was funny when crazy Barry dropped trees next to me when I was in a dozer without headache protection. Later my brother taught me you don't need brakes on a loaded log truck going down 6 mile mountains.

It took more insanity to get me into a reasonable career.
 
My first real job was delivering newspapers when I was around 10 years old. My route encompassed an entire small town and I would bike around nearly 10 miles every day, rain or shine. And for that I was paid about $25 a month.
 
the more senior employees also taught us to play sheepshead and took a little of our money during lunchtime. It was a learning experience.
Sheepshead? We wish we could find people to play sheepshead. We grew up trying to join our parents games, then finally being invited to the table, then being ridiculed for making mistakes. Aw, good times.
 
My first real job was delivering newspapers when I was around 10 years old. My route encompassed an entire small town and I would bike around nearly 10 miles every day, rain or shine. And for that I was paid about $25 a month.

I did that but with a shopping cart Grandma gave me. Way too many papers to use a bike, I tried. I also had to collect from subscribers door to door once a month. Mine was twice a week iirc.
 
I did a lot of "sweat work" from my teens into my 20's. Work for an ag fertilizer/chemical company in the southwest was like that. Rolling 30 gal drums of toxaphene-methyl parathion across the warehouse and getting inside a 100-ton hopper car to get the last few tons of fertilizer out was all part of the day. Earned my sub-$4/hr. pay and enjoyed it.

The hardest-earned money was at the end of my career. Many hours on trans-continental and red-eye flights and then dealing with dysfunctional teams that needed to be cleaned up, as well as managers of downstream functions that were often hostile and never satisfied. Inevitably, I would go to the office after an early morning return from CA and get a call from my boss before the end of the day asking, "heard from my counterpart, what exactly happened when you were out there?" Was well-paid and earned every penny. Very glad to leave it behind.
 
Physical was summers 8th grade through Junior year HS; worked for dad's small bricklaying company as assistant/helper to the hod carrier. Carrying mortar hod that weighed nearly as much as me up ladders was ... interesting. But it did help me immensely with conditioning for football!

Mental was consulting for my former employer 4 months after retirement. "Just a little help on an appellate brief that you know more about than anyone else." Wrote off half my time. Felt like my brain was trying to high step through rapidly drying concrete! But, the good news is that it removed any slight, hidden vestiges of doubt about retirement from my head.
 
I worked at a Shop Rite warehouse in NJ for 3 months in the summer of '71 to earn money for grad school. I had to push large steel wheel carts with a pallet around a concrete floor in the warehouse and stack cases of groceries from orders then wrap and push them to the loading dock. Overtime was before regular hours so I started around 5am to about 3pm. About 10 of us started. I was the smallest person. Everyone else was linebacker size but I was the only one to make it to the end of the summer. If I quit I wouldn't be able to go to school. All I did that summer was work, eat, and sleep as soon as I got back to where I was staying.
 
I worked for a statewide Board. Having one boss is good, answering to a dozen Commissioners, each with their own political agenda was brutal. Was a no win situation for their staff. Definitely earned my pay there.

Lasted a few years with that board before moving on.
 
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