what jobs have you had in the past?

[Black Tiger]

I worked a lot of short or one-time jobs as a kid. I cleaned up a yard of shingles for a roofing company, loaded clay pigeons in a hot tiny room, washed windows for a large clothing store.

Delivered newspapers for a couple years.

Worked a few evenings a week alone at a bowling alley in my mid-teens. Bought a lot of Turbo games during that time.

Worked for a crab fishing company for a while. Went out on one trip on short notice. It was only a day and a half and I was only paid a fraction of what the guy I filled in for would have received, but it was over $1300. I planned on buying a 3DO with SSFIIT, but got a Saturn instead, thanks to the surprise early launch.

After hours stock at a department store.

Worked several retail jobs including a store that sold videos before it was commonplace (was a front for a major distributor). A collectibles store. A music/video store (was a front for a major distributor).

Did a little bit of animation work, but it was soul killing and didn't come close to minimum wage.

Worked at a veneer mill.

I've been working at a dry ice shop which is now more of a plant for 14 years.

I don't get paid directly, but I help my wife and her friends/colleagues who are biologists regularly. I often help feed baby turtles and clean their tubs, catch adults in the wild. Similar work with frogs. Cut down invasive plants and help with restoration projects. All kinds of random stuff.

[hoobs88]

Newspaper Delivery (11 years)
Louis & Clark Drug Store cashier (5 years)
Burger King cashier (1 summer)
Western New England College Food service (2 years)
Just Fun arcade attendant (6 years)
Cyberstation arcade attendant (6 years)
Showcase Cinemas/Rave Cinemas usher (5 years)
Ice Imports sales rep (1 year)
Prima Electro North America LLC shipping & receiving (10 years)

The arcades, cinema job, and working at a college cafeteria were the best!

[NightWolve]

I started as a paperboy which lasted about ~4 weeks as the boredom couldn't be tolerated and I didn't like having to knock random doors to ask for money as an additional duty, having to also solicit for subscriptions in other words...

Moved up to bus boy at a local restaurant for awhile, and then to my uncle's banquet halls out in the suburbs which lasted for most of High School as a weekend job. Kept my pockets plenty full for the arcades and NES rentals.

Somewhere in between this time at 16-17 years old, I worked for my friend's parents doing construction jobs, demolishing old plaster walls to insulate and replace with drywall, install new electrical outlets, and did new ceiling fan installations. I was sent to his grandparents house for additional freelance work there... Changing 1950's 2-prong outlets to standard 3-prongs for the whole house, new lighting bathroom systems, etc. Mostly, I liked the ceiling fan installation work.

A bit before starting at my university, I worked more freelance for a resale shop fixing mechanical failures for their VCRs. Very intermittent, but I used to hang out there all the time so it was a what-the-hell deal since I was handy.

During my university days, I applied for computer lab manager for the IT staff which consisted of random tech support/troubleshooting for anyone using their computers, helping losers finish their programming assignments (sometimes being nice enough to do the whole thing for the beggars), fetching print-outs, maintaining printers, etc. I started in the Mac lab as I had experience on Mac machines from High School, but that Mac room was so barely used, it eventually got phased out as a separate idea as most PCs were operating under Windows, etc. They switched to having a few Apple machines out with everything else.

After graduation, I started working for a software development consulting firm which had 2 main clients, a financial company I did work for, and a bank directory publisher. I primarily relied on Installshield, Visual Basic 6, Active X, server-side scripting, etc. there given the nature of what they needed/did.

After that, I got a full-time job with the bank directory I mentioned above under the title "software engineer." Real hectic, chaotic job, I did so many things in Visual Basic, VC on occasion, Installshield, server-side JavaScript, Java, Perl, etc. Not a very well organized company, but paid well for the time I guess.  That was where I learned most of what allowed for me to eventually do fan translation projects. You had to be a jack of all trades and master of some, but I think that place and formula was a recipe for psychological burnout... :/ I ran into a former co-worker not that long ago who quit, and he says he's perfectly happy working at Walmart now with a loss in pay/salary... I guess that says it all right there!

Years later I wound up in temp construction jobs, framing/drywall installation, then working with a freelance garage mechanic which while I appreciate the mechanic skills I gained, I wouldn't want to do it full time, etc. I liked being able to fix my own car for a while thanks to that, things like total brake system replacement, swapping out an alternator, the gas tank even, and whatever electrical issues, etc.

I had a brief stint back into software development having been hired as a consultant, my 3rd job in IT before the auto mechanic freelance detour, it was PHP website edit/maintenance.

In between all of that, I've always been a landlord/rental apt manager since 17/18 years old (I took over most renter/landlord duties about then) thanks to my dad getting lucky and buying the apartment property he was once renting from. I didn't normally mention this as a job because I could handle it part-time on weekends (tasks like replacing a ruptured water heater, fixing the furnace, changing locks when renters requested it, etc) or inbetween schooling/full-time external jobs, but yeah, it's a family business essentially I was born into.

[Medic_wheat]

Man how many people here were paper boys?  Seems like the majority.

[TDIRunner]

Man how many people here were paper boys?  Seems like the majority.

We used to joke that "paper boy" was offensive.  We preferred the term "paper distribution engineer."

[NightWolve]

We used to joke that "paper boy" was offensive.  We preferred the term "paper distribution engineer."

Yeah, that's a good one, like "garbage man" rewritten to "sanitation engineer" to provide more "respectable" connotations/associations with the job.

[SignOfZeta]

Paperboy is the only job you can have legally at that age so it's not surprising we've all done it. It's a great way for the newspaper company to get your parents pay for other people's newspaper subscriptions when you can't collect. A truely industrial revolution scam that lasted probably a century. When my younger brother did it there was no collection aspect but they did have something even worse; the fake newspaper (even more ads than a normal paper!) they give for free to everyone in the hood that isn't a subscriber of the "real" paper. This amounts to having to deliver 6x and much shit but nobody actually reads these or does anything but throw them in the trash.

[TDIRunner]

Paperboy is the only job you can have legally at that age so it's not surprising we've all done it. It's a great way for the newspaper company to get your parents pay for other people's newspaper subscriptions when you can't collect. A truely industrial revolution scam that lasted probably a century. When my younger brother did it there was no collection aspect but they did have something even worse; the fake newspaper (even more ads than a normal paper!) they give for free to everyone in the hood that isn't a subscriber of the "real" paper. This amounts to having to deliver 6x and much shit but nobody actually reads these or does anything but throw them in the trash.

That was pretty much it for me.  Before I was 16, I cut grass in the summer time, but the paper route gave me money all year long.  Fortunately for me, they were phasing out the collection method, and I only had half a dozen customers to collect from and only one of which was difficult to get money out of.  However, if they didn't pay, it was on me.  My parents weren't bailing me out of that. 

Although, to be fair, my Dad bailed me out of one big paper boy problem.  I had a customer once tell me that the paper I delivered left a newspaper print on his white storm door.  He wanted me to replace his storm door..........REPLACE HIS STORM DOOR.  The guy even came to my house to confront my Dad.  After a short conversation and a few choice words, the guy never spoke to me ever again (a good thing). 

[ginoscope]

I never was a paper boy but I got to play tons of free arcades at the local 7-11 because paper boys would frequent them and always had extra quarters from what they had collected.  I remember they always had 3 cabinets and would change them.  Feel bad for my kids those were good times in the 80s killing time reading comics and playing arcades.

[Medic_wheat]

Man how many people here were paper boys?  Seems like the majority.

We used to joke that "paper boy" was offensive.  We preferred the term "paper distribution engineer."

Silly me. I forgot feminist might not like my mysoginy I meant paper "person" not paper "boy".


Wait wait wait  your version is better lol.

[NightWolve]

Right, that is the other effect of those rewrites, to gender-neutralize the position title. "Garbageman" to "sanitation engineer" achieves both more "respectable" connotations/associations with the job and eliminates the use of "man" (short for hu-man) which apparently can no longer simply represent both genders as it does for most Indo-European languages.

[SignOfZeta]

Paperboy is the only job you can have legally at that age so it's not surprising we've all done it. It's a great way for the newspaper company to get your parents pay for other people's newspaper subscriptions when you can't collect. A truely industrial revolution scam that lasted probably a century. When my younger brother did it there was no collection aspect but they did have something even worse; the fake newspaper (even more ads than a normal paper!) they give for free to everyone in the hood that isn't a subscriber of the "real" paper. This amounts to having to deliver 6x and much shit but nobody actually reads these or does anything but throw them in the trash.

That was pretty much it for me.  Before I was 16, I cut grass in the summer time, but the paper route gave me money all year long.  Fortunately for me, they were phasing out the collection method, and I only had half a dozen customers to collect from and only one of which was difficult to get money out of.  However, if they didn't pay, it was on me.  My parents weren't bailing me out of that. 

Although, to be fair, my Dad bailed me out of one big paper boy problem.  I had a customer once tell me that the paper I delivered left a newspaper print on his white storm door.  He wanted me to replace his storm door..........REPLACE HIS STORM DOOR.  The guy even came to my house to confront my Dad.  After a short conversation and a few choice words, the guy never spoke to me ever again (a good thing). 

That's another thing. Most of the people who subscribed on my block were total a$$holes, basically just hoping to read something cool Reagan did that day. Real uptight f*cks, the kind that would want a new door because it had newsprint on it. Ted Knight would play them in the movie version of my life.

[xelement5x]

I've had a number of shit and awesome jobs:

Lemonade stand as a kiddo.  A friend's dad worked at the local candy factory so we also sold candy he would get at cost and made really good money for only being about 10 years old.  Saved that cash like mofo so I could buy my own TV and eventually a Sega Genesis. 

Landscaping, Mowing, Snow removal for local people as a kid.  Crap around the neighborhood but there were lots of older folks so they were always looking for help.

City Park District as laborer, also helped me build the connections to set up a really cool Eagle Scout project I did.
Sam Goody as a retail minion for a couple years in High School.  The pay was bad but the people and discounts were great and I loved it.

Roofing with my father-in-law while my wife and I were still dating.  Did this during college sometimes and it paid well and I got a chance to hang out and get to know my FiL really well which was pretty cool.  Also made me 100% sure that I wanted to finish my degree and get a job where I was not outside all the time.

IT Intern at a manufacturing plant in my hometown during most of college.  This was my first real taste of the corporate world and I had some awesome to mentors during that time to navigate not only the job but also the social tact you need when people act like idiots and/or children. 

A "marketing intern" for the local Papa John's pizza franchise.  Basically it was a glorified title for setting up jobs to go around and hang ads on people's doors.  I recruited from a single location to get the employees that wanted a break and we would pile in my car and canvas neighborhoods with these things.  Also parking lots; I was that guy you hate who puts crap under your windsheild wiper.  It was fun and I got as much pizza as I wanted, plus I could hand out free pizza cards to people.

I was a resident advisor in college for 2.5 years as well.  It was a pain in the ass many times but it was also awesome as well.  Got to meet a ton of different folks and I'd like to think no one really hated me, but I did confiscate beer a lot from people who weren't smart enough to drink with the door shut and then get drunk for free. Woot.  After I graduated I helped the director a bit with administrative stuff before leaving campus.

Worked doing IT and web development for a family company in Chicagoland.  It was a solid "first job out of school" but the pay was low for living in the suburbs and the only thing that made it worthwhile is I only paid $500 a month for room/utilities in a house owned but the CEO/president.  I lived with 3 other guys in the house, all of which were originally from India, and being a a pastey caucasion it was an awesome cultural experience for me.  Eventually my fiance got a job out of state and I worked remotely for awhile but got laid off during the recession times.  (CEO was heavily leveraged in real estate and got boned when the market crashed).

Now I do web development and systems integration for a multinational corp.  Fun stuff, great coworkers and amazing benefits.  Who knows what the future holds.

[SamIAm]

Ask me about building experimental burgers out of continental breakfast items in the dead of night while listening to chiptunes and keeping an eye out for insane religious nomads.

Okay, let's hear it. 

Ah, I can still taste the old Express Burger.

Basically, it was a bagel sliced in half with several small, cut up sausage patties in the middle. Seasoning included pancake syrup (apply it thinly) or, if you feel like riding on the wild side, a cranberry bagel, which was much better than you'd expect.

Of course, it has to be washed down with a half-pint of chocolate milk. 

[SuperGrafx]

Worked at local pizza place, Papa Ginos

Best pizza in the northeast, hands down!