What did you do?

My family owned a bakery for 30 years. Small shop. I started flipping doughnuts on Saturdays at 7am when I was 9 yrs old cause my brother joined the Army. I had to stand on a bucket over a few hundred degree fryer. Not the safest thing, but it didn't seem a big deal back then. My dad used to say things like "you wipe after you $hit, then why don't you clean up your work" I think starting work at a young age helps later in life. It instills a strong work ethic. Oh and my dad hired the girls from the local high school (catholic....read short skirts) to work the front of the store. I hated some of the hours 3am Xmas eve and Easter, 5 am to get pastries to the local church for 6:30 mass and my whole family was glad when my dad sold it. But I think back, and wish I bought the store from him. It was a landmark in my hometown. The new buyer even had to keep the name to get a loan. It was weird cause the bakery was just my family name.

Anywho, what did you do?

First job,

Not counting the paper route I had in 6th grade, I worked for my dad's landscape business all threw high school. I honestly enjoyed it even when it was 115 outside and we had to dig ditches for the sprinkler system, plant foliage and lay sod. Satisfying work and I kept in shape .

Worked on a blueberry farm. Started the summer after 8th grade and worked every summer from then until after I graduated.

Hmmmm......the first job was walking a dog for an old woman who paid me with a bag of candy.

Then.......lawn mowing and fixing bicycles.

The first paying job was busing tables........I stuck with this for a few years until I went off to college.

Also, I shot pigeons for money.

1st job- babysitting at 13

1st official job- Chess King haahahahahahah

I sold grown men pink blazers and turquoise mesh shirts

suckers

I got my regular allowance of $10/wk, then my dad pd me in checks when i turned 13. $4.00 hr buys a bunkload of now worthless baseball cards.

Come to think of it. I could have moved to Thailand and made Nikes for better pay

^^So you're resposible for the Miami Vice look

Refurbished ovens fron chinese food restaurants.What a crappy job that was Discovery channel should put it on Dirty Jobs!

-Baldy-

Members Only jackets too?

Almost forgot......there was a "lake" in my neighborhood...really just a big pond.

It was surrounded by houses; no public access. We'd fish it by jumping the fences of unoccupied homes.

Most of the people around the lake had no sea wall; it literally just went up into their back yards.

Like most Florida lakes, it was stagnant and full of vegetation; and it really bothered this one old guy when the crap would wash up into his yard.

He scouted out the neighborhood and told all of the kids that if they gathered up the crap in trash bags and haul it off he'd pay us.

It was crappy work, and if our parents had known more about Amoeba we would have never been permitted to jump in that lake. But we spent summer days cleaning lake funk and hauling it off into the woods to dump. When the guy got home, he'd give us a fiver to split up (usually on Copenhagen and gum).

After a couple weeks, he started getting more stingy with his money because the crap just kept coming up into his place (the lake was full of it).

We decided that since he was paying us less, then we would quit hauling it away and instead we heaped up the front of our surfboards with the pond cabbage and just paddled out to the middle of the lake to dump it.

It was more fun that way.

Nah I was responsible for encouraging grown men to think they could attain the miami vice look..I think we sold parachute pants too LOL

Re 11. I had a pair of Z Cavariccis that wore with drakkar cologne. I was the bomb diggity in 1991. BTW what 13yr old needs $75 jeans and reebok pump sneakers. Even if i did get a girl, our parents would have broken it up before i could touch her boobs when they pulled up in the wood paneled station wagon

I began shoveling snow, sold candy, chopped weeds with a sickle, and had paper routes. I took my first "real" job when I turned 14 (minimum legal age to work then) at Dunkin Donuts for $1.05 or $1.10/hour (minimum wage).I cleaned up, mopped the floors and made the donut glazes and fillers for th

Nice. a fellow doughnut flipper. And by made, of course you mean mix with water, sugar and stir?!?

Can't imagine DD whipping up a 50# box of shortening sugar and powdered sugar.

Another bonus was I could carry a 100# bag of flower up a flight of stairs at the age of 11. Still can't bench more than 180 though.

Dang it you guys have me craving donuts and I never eat donuts

Phewy...and good point on the 75 dollar jedans and weird shoes....

I was 15 when I started working at chess king.. All I cared abiut was flying past the quota...used to kik a at sales

Mowing lawns. My birthday falls in early September, and my family never had two nickels to rub together. Add the German work ethic and OCD, and well, a strong desire to work, but no one would hire a 15 year old for a Summer job. So I built my own business, added lawns by word of mouth referral.

Two things kill me to this day...one is, after our family mower died, I still had to mow lawns at home, using my mower, which I paid for with my lawn mowing job (and we had a corner lot, plenty to mow). Still feels like having to buy rope for your own noose. Maybe that's why I still hate yardwork. That, and what we have to pay to have our lawn mowed today. HUGE difference.

First job working for someone else? Winchell's Donuts. Spent three years there, from high school into college. Couldn't even look at a doughnut for 7-8 years after that, but I love them now.

BTW, having a kid in single digit age flipping donuts is just insane. You try that today, someone would send you to prison.

Wow,,I remember Chess King,,thought it was only a NY thing,,,,Delivered newspapers in 5 apartment buildings for years..stayed out of the rain, used the elevators (lots of papers) and made lots of money

#12 Ugh. My mother traded in her 1969 Charger (black over maroon) for a station wagon with "wood" panels. A brown station wagon with "wood. Nothing says "You're not ever, ever, ever getting laid by anyone who has ever seen you in this car" like a brown station wagon with wood.

The few times I was able to take a date out in it, I'd lay the back seat down and spread a blanket, kinda rumpled up, just to piss off my mother.

So why not take dad's car? A 1974 Mustang II. Officially one of the Ten Worst Cars Ever. Seriously, it has made every list of that sort I've ever seen, and with good reason. What a tremendous POS. I can't believe Ford actually made a Mach I version of that...with a whopping 2.8 liter 105 HP V-6 in place of the 2.3 liter 88 HP V-4, the car was based on the Pinto platform.

Lee Iacocca had many good ideas in his day. The Mustang II was definitely not one of them, however. Not even after Motor Trend named it its Car of the Year for 1974 (man, I can't believe any reputable mag would have done that).

The first job I had as a kid (10-15 years old) was pumping gas at my uncle's gas station, back in the early 90s when I recall it being sub-one dollar a gallon.

The next job I had (16-18 years old) was for a different uncle at his auto shop rebuilding transmissions.

My first "non-family" job was when I was 18 at a machine shop in their heat treating department where it was 120-125 degrees in there 24/7/365. I lost 10 pounds the first month I worked there from sweating so much, and I never thought I could drink enough water.

Then I began college after three months of working there in between high school graduation and the fall college semester beginning, and I've been in school ever since... PhD in 5-6 weeks, which leads me to my first "real" job in over a decade.

-JT