Early jobs I had

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The first job I can remember having is taking out the trash. I started
doing it in kindergarten. Once a week hauling the trash barrels out to the
road, then back in the afternoon. When I first started it, going through
the snow was tough; the cans were metal and cold. But, soon after, my
father got plastic ones and they slid more easily. I kept doing that one
until I left for college.
The second one I can remember having is raking leaves. I always hated
that. It always gave me blisters. I never saw any point in doing it.
There was nothing fun about it. I broke a tooth jumping into a pile of
leaves in high school, and thereafter didn’t like that part of it either.
My mother would often have me rake the lawns of neighbors as gifts to them.
I didn’t get anything out of it, which only made me hate it more.
At some point, my father began to trust me with the lawn mower again. It
was in junior high. That added mowing the lawn as well. (It has always
annoyed me that after I left for college my parents started paying for a
service to do their lawns. I asked why my brother didn’t have to do it and
was told, “He isn’t good enough at mowing in straight lines”. I took that
to mean “he knows if he does a bad job, you’ll have someone else do it for
him.”)
The first job I ever got paid for was working at a supermarket as a bag
boy. I did that for a couple of years in high school. It was an OK job.
I worked with some other folks who were fun to work with. It paid very
little.
It was a very sexist job. Women could only be cashiers or work at the
customer service booth. Guys had to start as bag boys, but could be
promoted to other departments. If you were a guy, the only way to get a
raise was to be promoted to another department. Because women couldn’t be
promoted, they got raises every 6 months they worked there.
I worked there 2 years. I never got promoted. My boss said he stopped me
from being promoted because I was “his most reliable worker” and he didn’t
want to give me up. (My friend John was told the same thing.) But, I
missed out on 3 raises because of that. The women hired at the same time
as me, working for the same boss, got those raises because they didn’t have
a chance at other jobs.
I’ve always thought that was wrong both ways. I didn’t see why women
couldn’t put cans on shelves, arrange vegetables or slice deli meat. I
don’t see why guys in one department shouldn’t get the same raises based on
time worked there everyone else got.
The week I gave my notice because I was going off to college, I was offered
a promotion. I didn’t take it. They were surprised, and I don’t know why.
Living at home, I did manage to put a good bit of money aside for those two
years, even without raises. There was a bank across the street and I started
my first account then. It all went to college, but it was the first time I had
money that no one else could take from me.
In college I went to work in the dish room on campus. It was mostly fun.
Most of my friends worked there. It also didn’t pay well. Looking back on
those days, I was quite the asshole. I certainly would fire anyone now who
did the stuff I did back then. But, I was young and insane as were most of
the folks around me.
In college yebo and I did a project at the Worcester Science Center.
Through that we were offered jobs there on weekends. That was fun. It
paid $.50 more an hour than cleaning dishes. I got to play with big
telescopes and planetarium projectors. It was on the other side of the
city and I had to ride my bike over there. With classes and all, I
sometimes I to ride back and forth a couple of times a day.
They gradually reduced my hours and my duties to sitting in the solar
observatory all day. If it wasn’t sunny, I’d get sent home.
For a month they did pay be $15 an hour to dress as a gorilla for a special
exhibit, but only for 1 hour a day on weekends. It was still more than
triple my base salary, so I did it.
During college, I also made money working security for concerts and events
on campus. We had some fairly good shows come to perform there. Being
security got me in to see them for free, a t-shirt for the concert, and
usually enough money to buy a meal afterwards at one of the all night
places in town.
The job mostly involved keeping people off the stage and throwing out
drunken people who were causing trouble.
One of my best memories of it was chasing a drunk guy who didn’t want to
get thrown out through the crowd. He tripped and landed in a big pool of
beer. I landed on top of him and surfed him through the pool. Then his
fraternity grabbed me. While I talked them out of pounding me, my friend
bounced the guy out the back door.
Getting my degree in the winter of 86 (6 months late) I had trouble finding
a job right away. (I refused to do military work which was the big growth
industry for engineers in the Reagan years.) So, I got a job a McDonalds.
More than half the closing crew had college degrees. We could close that
place in ¼ the time of other teams. It also paid poorly, but would give me
as many hours as I wanted.
Like the supermarket, they were sexist about who did what jobs. Guys were
supposed to be the cooks. Women the cashiers. My wife (then girlfriend)
didn’t want to deal with people and wanted to cook. I didn’t like cooking
and wanted to work out front. Unlike the supermarket, the pay was the same.
The McDonalds was just down the street from the Worcester Centrum (now
called something else) where all the concerts came to play. So, once the
concerts let out, tons of people would come to us for food.
That was the time I got to work the registers. The managers were happy to
have a big guy who used to work security at concerts in front when it was
that crowded. Although I was sent back to the grill when the rush was
over, I broke the record for the most money made on one register in an hour
for that store.
I worked there for about six months before I finally got a job as an
engineer.