[Closed] The Summer What STWers Did As Summer Jobs Thread

From around 8 years old I was an "apprentice" electrician (to my dad) every summer holiday.

During college years I had a summer job at a garden centre and then I worked at a place that made floats that bolted onto oil and dredging pipelines.

Edit: I learned to drive a forklift at the garden centre - and also used one at the pipeline place. A skill I hadn't used again until the early hours of last Sunday morning when I drove one through the streets of Rhyl 😀 (it's a long story)

plenty not worth mentioning.
trying to market internet terminals in cornershops - the terminals tere there we just had to convinve people to use them. most people had no idea what the internet was for. i think this would have been 1999

council post room. 8-4. post delivery twice a day to sort though. we would do one delivery round a day - alternating which round we went on around the huge building. sorting the delivery and the morning round took about 1:30. sorting the afternoon delivery maybe 30 mins. some days there would be a big box of mail to frank other days nothing at all. There was loads of time to smoke. I was maybe 3-5 a day when i started; i was doing 40 just 8-4 by the end of the summer. 😯 Funny names on the post was a highlight of the day. Miss A Minge. 😆 yeah me too mate!!

My first ever job, other than a paper round, was as a "spotter" in a nightclub- basically a troublemaker. Which sounds quite fun except that my main post was the gents, to stop drug deals. So yeah spent 4 hours a night in a shitey nightclub toilet. On the plus side this was before anyone had invented the Toilet Guy so at least they didn't have me selling antiperspirant and paper towels. And I had deranged bouncers at my beck and call so that could be quite fun. Night after I left they had a near fatal stabbing right in my area, glad to miss that!

Every summer off in uni after that, I worked in the edinburgh festivals- helped my brother with his company in the runup and teardown and worked venues during the events. Bloody brilliant- free entry to loads of shows, good chat, lots of room to grow and learn (because everything's so ramshackle and there's no real chain of command. And, well, most important thing to do was to establish yourself as the only straight in the village- I've never been a ladykiller but I had a great time basically by default. Terrible money but, well, money can't buy you love

Dipping sheep.

At 15 I got a job rigging dinghies, issuing buoyancy aids and taking tourists out sailing.
Spent every summer on to first permanent job at 21 teaching sailing, canoeing and windsurfing in Lake, Scotland, Wirral and Merseyside at uni.

I also did turkey killing, gutting and plucking at Christmas, beech tree seed harvesting in Autumn and paper round.

in 1997 (first summer of Uni) I worked in Greenwich, Connecticut in a very affluent neighbourhood, but on the worst house on the road, my face dropped when i saw it.

General handyman type doings for a very strange man, even his kids called him Dracula!

Highlights were stripping then painting a long V shaped roof facia, only to discover that he had given me the top coat instead of the undercoat, meaning i had to strip it all again and paint it for a third time! Getting electrocuted, and falling off a ladder and knocking myself silly! A bag full of spicy maryland crabs that it took about 4 hours to eat!

Did get to Amish country, Philly, Washington DC (he had a house there too) where the tenants had left the dog, so when we turned up it went metal and ran off down the road!

He had about 25 aircon units in his garage that he sold to unsuspecting bargain hunters and none in the house! Yep!

saving grace was NYC which was easy to reach on the MNR.

The day i left the property was one of the happiest days of my life!

happy days!

Currently working selling tickets in the park as my summer job.
Better than my real job to be honest.

APF

Summer jobs during Uni you mean ??

I was a delivery skipper taking yachts across to Barbados and Antigua, also did quite a few stints down to Mallorca/Ibiza/Minorca and a couple to Punta Alla and Malta.
Did a great one in my second year break to Sardinia in a fully kitted out Pilot Cutter, complete with hot showers, TV, full Nav and an Oven !!! Bloody amazing, got 8knts true out of it and spend three weeks pootling down the coast then across the Med.
No money, just food and flights and I could take anyone along with me.. usually ended up with one of my best mates and both our girlfriends at the time..

Did drivers mate for Curry's delivering fridges, freezers, televisions etc. 10-12 hour days, about half of which map reading and sitting on my bum in the van and the other half lugging white goods into all sorts of places. I used to cycle the hilly 15mile round trip to the depot too. Some days I did the Isle of Wight which was much more laid back due to the slow pace between drops.

I worked in a sail maker while at uni. Best job I've ever done for atmosphere and people to work with although work itself was repetitive stitching and gluing dinghy toe straps I used to look forward to every day there.

Others included, sorting mail on night shift, putting up marquees (good physical work that), working in a commercial freezer (worst) and pub.

Bikebuoy wins the thread (b******)!

used to work on friend's farm
all market garden produce (several varieties of apples mainly, plums, pears,...)

oh and "voluntary" work at Brands Hatch for F1 British GP, European GP, etc. etc. was mostly scout troops and a few other youth clubs. think the deal was something like 2-3 hours work per day, the troop/club gets a £100 donation, and every one that volunteered (youth and leaders) got a full weekend pass with grandstand or press enclosure access and camping on site inside the ticketed area.

Shittest job I ever did was working as a cleaner in the BAT cigarette factory in Southampton.

All day shovelling and sweeping tobacco dust off the floor and into the bin.

Every day I came back stinking so much my clothes went straight in to he wash. So much black shit came out of my nose when I blew it, it was disgusting.

Lots of Scumpton on Solent representation in the thread...! 🙂

After my A Levels i didnt have a clue what to do....so i joined a manning agency, spent 5 weeks working as a Static caravan delivery truck drivers mate, up and down the country, which was great until i contributed to a caravan falling off the back of the lorry as i couldnt remember which way the ratchet straps were supposed to sit. That was the end of that. Then i did 3.5 shifts at a cucumber packing factory outside hull, which was so mind numbingly dull that i walked out halfway through the second day morning shift...the only job ive ever walked out of. I then took on a pub managers job out of the blue and satyed there for 18 months until i eventually went to Uni.

I went to university after I left school to avoid starting work.

Used to work as a waiter at a big hotel that was v popular for weddings, was the place to get married locally at the time.

Hotel manager used to seek me out to do the introductions, ie everyone would queue up and I'd shout out their name to the wedding party.

****in hated it.

Farm (after school job really but summers 5 days a week and saturdays for 50p plus meals, I was 10/11 and didn't want to be at homeland got to drive a tractor; win win), de stoning a massive field to be laid to lawn, clearing parish footpaths (2 summers on that, good fun aside from dog shit, bonus paid in undamaged rhythm pamphlet hoard discovery), drystone walling labourer (hard graft, TMS all day on the wireless, lots of tea and rollups all against a backdrop of Cotswold glory)

Other than that I always worked for my Dad in his pottery and at the festivals he sold at for fun (Glastonbury, Elephant, Roghham etc), but never got paid. Was allowed to help on the gallery stuff sometimes, but mainly the functional ware.

Worst summer job was when I was 13 in '66 on a mink farm, that my best mate's dad was manager of. Pay was 5p an hour which was shit even then. Had to feed the little b*st*rds, which consisted of a handful of minced chicken bits (heads & feet mostly) and put fresh straw in their cages, the REALLY dangerous bit!
We accidentally let one out once and then spent an adrenalin fuelled hour trying to recapture the evil little sod. They are related to skunks but instead of a spray, they fire a pellet from a gland somewhere near their arse and that's like being shot with an airsoft pellet that stinks to high heaven.
Minks, sod happy clapper animal liberationists, the best thing you can do with a mink is kill it!

Lots of Scumpton on Solent representation in the thread...!

These threads do drag us out!

I have a sneaking suspicion I may have met a few on here in my uni days but I can never quite put my finger on who they were in real life and I don't like being caught being wrong any more than I already am!

garage-dweller, as long as you weren't at the Dimstitute, you're alright with me!

Dimstitute

Not me. I was once a resident of Monte III you know (back when it was nice and new and slightly posh).

For some reason I now have an image in my head reminding me of drinking BlastAway and Pernod (not together) in the Boilerhouse. Kind of ruins the I was posh and lived in the nice bit of Monte thing!

UEA...
Sotty was on my list, so too Brighton..

'Firewatchman'

Working for an engineering company who were building a new vessel in a pharmaceutical plant, so lots of volatile substances around. We had to build a new tank, remove the existing tank and install the new tank. I was 19 and working with a group of time-served Scouse contractors who knew every trick in the book.

My role was to keep an eye on the welding / cutting and, in the event of a spark starting a fire, I was to run over to the nearest fire alarm and set it off. I was strictly forbidden from actually doing anything to help contain the fire.

Likewise, once the vessel was built up enough to become a confined space for the welders inside, I had to peer through the manway occasionally and make sure none of them had keeled over from gases. Again, should that happen, a sprint to the fire alarm was my duty.

After 90 minutes on the job I asked if there was anything else I could do to help out, and over the course of the two week contract, ended up doing lots of things that would have had the onsite Health and Safety department going nuts if it had come to their attention. Rigging the crane was my favourite. No need for qualifications if it's only a low-level lift, eh?

The rate of pay was amazing, and I'd have earned the same as my student loan for the entire year if I'd worked the extra week I was offered. Sadly, I'd already arranged for my then-girlfriend to come and stay for the week, so I missed out on that payday.

It was a sad moment when I said my final goodbyes to my older and much wiser colleagues. I'd learned a lot from them and I was grateful for the experience. All that was left to do was for them to describe, in graphic detail, the act they thought I should perform with my girlfriend that evening, and I was back to being a bloody student again.

I went back to uni in my mid 20's after leaving school at 16 and doing an apprenticeship at ICI, during which we did various qualifications that I didn't really see the point of at the time. They'd just send you off for a week doing an apparently random course

But now If I could give anyone words of advice about never being out of work..... forklift licence.

Spent my summers in decently paid, hardly taxing jobs in warehouses. Cheers ICI! 😀

I've got a licence for those absolutely mahoosive front end loaders too, but unfortunately never really got to use that 🙁

Bikebouy is definitely winning this thread though. I thought I had it easy 😆

Frozen pea factory (I lucked out - all my mates were on the line, I got a cushy number with the engineers just greasing the line machines a couple of times a shift and sharpening the blades from the nibbing machine).

Then quite a few summers as a plasterer's mate with my mum's partner subbing for Tarmac on social housing refurbs.

Farming from about 10 years old.
Once I could drive did a summer on a friend's veg farm, got out the veg picking as I could drive tractors and be trusted unlike most of the locals.
Next year was grain dryer in old shed and worst summer in memory, hitting 100br weeks through late August and September was fun. Sure the money lasted till at least November

Whilst at Uni one Easter worked as a dustman, most summers a hod carrier (great for rugby training). But in a gap year worked on the front counter of the then DSS. Was regularly threatened. Fun times.

Fork lift truck driver for a major food distributor. The worst bit though was when the stores would send back food / veg that had gone off. If the driver wasn't aware or it wasn't tied down you'd have a truck with the inside covered in rotten fruit. Stank to high heaven.

Then worked on a farm during harvest. Lots of sitting in a tractor waiting for the harvester to be full.

Not me. I was once a resident of Monte III you know (back when it was nice and new and slightly posh).

You posh bastard. (Monte II here).

I could do with a pint of Juicy Lucy right now...

Monte III

Very jealous of those of you who got to sit in the tractor whilst doing farmwork. Many summers spent harvesting market garden produce (lettuce, cabbage, leek and Chinese leaf). Long days of backbreaking work in fields in all weathers on piece rate of 17p per box lettuce / Chinese leaf, £10/tonne cabbage, 50p/box leeks (mid-late 90's)

Best was probably as a chef in a pasta restaurant, hard work in a boiling hot kitchen, but great atmosphere with the rest of the team.

Worst were the uni jobs: selling frozen food door-to-door and cold calling people to sell fitted kitchens. And yes, those two were both at Soton.

And Monte posh? Pfft. Glen Eyre halls checking in 8)

Tomato picking in a giant green house. 5am till 12.30 6 days a week in my uni hols. Minimum wage plus bonus for fast picking. Never got a bonus. The eastern Europeans who made up the majority of the work force got good bonus but we were too busy having tomato fights and chatting.

And Monte posh? Pfft. Glen Eyre halls checking in

They weren't posh they were for royalty!

the cricket pavilion?....
Jeez, I can still see that pint of Grendel now.

Worked behind that bar. 😀

I did the grain trailers for a few years, but also did wild oating. We had to remove all the wild oats from fields of wheat, which involved walking up and down the field pulling up the wild oats (I think it was so that the wheat could be sold as seed grain). It was ok in the dry but not so good in the rail.
Not as bad as working for a flat roofing company, that involved climbing ladders with buckets of liquid (ie very hot) bitumen.

Worked in my Uncle's golf shop. Often for no, or very little pay, but made up for it with discounts and freebies.
Cleaned and sorted stuff out first thing, got that days competition off if there was one, then headed out to play golf all day. Did that every school holiday and weekend from the age of 11-17

Edit.

What ever happened to Chinese Leaf? I used to love that stuff, haven't seen it for years?

Not quite up to Bikebuoy's standards, but I did spend 3 summers crewing on old sailing boats, square riggers, converted trawlers and the like in the early 80s. Mainly taking charter groups to festivals around the coast, to Ireland and France. I was the lowest rating in the crew, sometimes got to sleep on deck and if it was wet on the bench in the engine room - no bad thing as it was the driest and warmest place. Jobs included fixing the sails and checking / greasing the engine. On some trips we even had a bonded store, with duty free booze at £4/litre. I was simply working my board and lodgings, but did get crew pay for days at sea. Spent quite a while on a converted Hull trawler run by maverick University Professor who had a high disregard for authority. Exploring the Brittanny coast was a summer highlight - we'd take a 100ft boat into tiny fishing villages, attempting to drink them dry! Got raided by HM Customs too - who took the ashtrays away for chemical analysis and they found minor traces of weed. Ironically, to continue my seafaring theme 33 years later, I'm sitting not 10 yards from a Royal Navy frigate.

Catering agency work. silver service, banqueting type stuff mostly, some bar work and restaurant work. Lots of weddings, always good for people watching, lots of golf clubs and a few fancy hotels. I'd cycle everywhere, so got in 20-30 miles a day.

Was great for casual work. Decent pay and very flexible. Back from uni: "I'm around, give me everything", say yes to everything for a week or two so you're at the top of the list of people they call for jobs. If you want to work 120 hours a week, you could, double shifts, night porter, breakfast stuff. I used to compete with a mate to see who could work the most. The week after I did a 24 hour shift, he did a 36 hour one. Wedding 2pm-12am, night porter 12-7am, breakfast/wedding setup 7-2. He did the next day's wedding on top.

Rack up some cash, if you need a break: "I'm off to Cornwall for a week or two"

"Have a good time, call us when you're back"

Lows were a few soul destroying shifts at company canteens, and riding home knackered at 3am in the cold and dark with no will to push the pedals any more. The long straight road through Brookwood cemetery back from Foxhills golf club holds a number of those memories!

Weirdest week was staying with my gran in the Isle of Wight and working breakfast and dinner at Cowes Week. Ride 10 miles there, work 6-11, ride home, sleep for a few hours, ride in again, work 6-11. On a 12 hour cycle.

Some amazing memories of riding home in the full moon, though!

Used to work Saturdays and holidays at Uptons department store in Middlesbrough. Ataris, Spectrum, Commodore Vic20 and C64 etc to the left, Raleigh Chrome, Night and Super Burners on my right. Happy days. It's now a big clothes pace selling designer labels to orange sprayed Teesiders.

Did a lot of agency work, night shifts in a paracetamol factory, dull as fk, but never got a headache,
day job in coffee factory, hard work (hefting 36kg crates of beans from containers) hot as hell (from the giant dry roasting flame) and everyone wired on caffeine, black sticky residue in hair, eyes, nostrils, fingernails.
Plenty of clockwatching factory & warehouse Jobs.
One summer an old mate from scouts got me working for the council cutting & mowing all the parks, brilliant fun, if you worked like a bastard for hours the first few hours to fill up your truck with hedges you could spend the rest of the day sunbathing, also sent the community service lot to do their time there, so met some 'interesting' characters.

Best one was Camp America, I was the biking instructor at a beautiful camp near the Green Mountains in Mass. Kids were a very mixed bunch inner city children on welfare, many with behavioural problems, hardest job I've ever done but without doubt most rewarding. Stayed on to do the teenage mum & their kids camp which was even more of a challenge! Offered me to stay on and work year round, but went back to finish my degree, so can't decide if I made the right choice !

Year between secondary school and 6th form I got a job writing software for a local distance learning college, translating their best selling BBC Micro applications to the IBM PC. Throughout Uni I mainly did pot washing in Cambridge College kitchens, which I really enjoyed.

Still really like washing up by hand now....

Drove a RIB on the Med.
Plenty of farming jobs.
Outdoor Pursuits Instructor.
Security at Henley Regatta AKA as sleeping off a hangover.

Brickie's labourer, reinforcing the stands at headingley cricket ground in 1983 I think, maybe 1984. Worked through the NZ test and some country games, helping out with the roller and pulling the covers. Extra cash from supervising parking. Couldn't stand the idiots with their literal backhanders for that extra space when they'd been told it was full. But the old regular guy insisted I take a cut. Waddya gonna do?

Best was bins at the end of the day. The ground gave cash to what looked like a bunch of borderline street alkies for getting rubbish into big metal bins. But these guys were not up to lifting them to the wagon. So at the end of the day I had to jog behind as it drove round the ground hoiking them up. £8 for 15 mins work.

Best paid was industrial cleaning a steelworks (foxes, Stockbridge). They kept me on after the shutdown and I worked 38 days straight and paid my (remarkable for those days) four figure overdraft.

Surprisingly macho come to think of it, and to say my first job on leaving uni was casual stage crew, which involved dressing up as a Russian peasant...

I taught windsurfing and sailing for a UK based holiday company in Greece and Egypt during my uni summer holidays. Didn't earn a lot, but it was a fantastic way to spend the time. Not least because it meant I got rid of all the fat I built up during term time as well as gaining a pretty awesome tan, ready for the autumn term.

It was great fun and I'm glad I did it, but it has left me very unlikely to book a holiday along those lines. The investment in kit tended to be pretty poor (especially the windsurfing gear), and I got the impression that the guests paid a lot of money to be there.

Spent my uni summers roguing tatties.

Basically 12-14 hour days 7 days a week walking up and down fields, in all weathers, digging out rogue tatties/shaws then carrying them around in a sack.

It was awesome.

Evening/weekend job while at school was retail based...
I worked at Olympus Sport in Brent X Shopping Centre & then got a job in the stock room at Primark in Kilburn High Rd; which I think might have been the first Primark to open in England.

I also did agency work which was whatever needed doing - memorable favourites (ahem) were cleaning up a new stock conveyor system at Viglen computers in Greenford and working in a white goods distribution place in Northolt. The white goods place paid me more than any place I'd worked up until that point & a lot of the loads were too heavy for me to move so I was put on tea making duty most of the time.
I also did one shift at a Parcel Force depot, but refused to go back after seeing how parcels were handled.

I then moved onto an agency that did stewarding work for events. That was great.
I worked regularly at Stamford Bridge, White Hart Lane & Wembley Stadium for football & pop concerts.
I worked at The Oval & Lords (The Oval was great, but I hated Lords - a very snooty place).
I also worked twice at Farnborough airshow; the first year selling tickets at the entrance where the buses from the station arrived, the second year I was entrusted with supervising an entire ticket entrance zone & supervising the 6 or so people working on the kiosks. That was a long hard day, but decent pay & worked with some nice people....!

All in all, some quite cushy jobs compared to some.

Packing concrete blocks in a quarry. Stack up a palettes worth, fill the gaps in the blocks with polystyrene, band them up with nylon strapping. 6:30am till 5:30 - knackering! The polystyrene came in giant boxes that stacked up nicely. Built a wall of them and made hidey hole for sleeping behind.

One bloke's main job was putting a bag under a chute, pulling a handle to fill it with chippings (they feed them to chickens you know), moving the bag from one end of the room to the other. 11h a day. Worked on his own and had a massive stack of porn mags.

Grass cutting and washing cars as a youngster + job shared a paper round with a mate - all proceeds went towards BMX. From 17-21 a lot of freelance graphic design stuff, painting murals, making models for exhitibions and customising the back panels of denim jackets patches/baseball hats. Spent a summer in London doing demolition work - it was class. First stop was the Iranian Embassy. Then 3 weeks leveling the top floor in Harrods. Got moved on when i accidentally 'Kangoed' my way though the 4th floor into the sports dept. Ganger moved me to the Criteron theatre (of American Werewolf fame). Got to spend my lunches still beside Eros and people watching (mostly glue sniffing German punks).

World's smallest bouncer (two gigs).
Worlds worst motorbike courier (12 hours).
World's most unsuitable barman (one shift).

I enjoyed working at the beautiful Daily Express building on Great Ancoats Street.
Standing next to the huge machines in the basement, late on a Saturday afternoon felt being in the engine room of a liner.

One journo used to pass me bags of books they'd had in for review, the ladies in the canteen were old school with both recipies and the portions and the printers were always up for buying the kids a beer and talking nonsense.

Whole place smelt of hot print, apart from the journos who just smelt.

During Uni I worked lots of different jobs.

The place that sticks out in my mind the most is the bottling factory: we had great vats of wine shipped in from various places, and we then bottled it up for supermarkets. The level of incompetence was staggering. We once sent a complete run of bottles through with the wrong labels in the machine, and then had to set up an ad-hoc "de-labelling" line scrubbing the labels off by hand. I think that took four people a week or so. Another time a manager asked me to retrieve a fully-stacked cage (about 6ft high, and 3ft per side, loaded with cases of wine) from a storage area which was up a ramp for some reason. I got the cage rolling, then watched with dismay as it gathered considerable momentum down the slope and sped off through the warehouse. I later figured it was at least 600kg, no idea why they thought I could move it on my own. My favorite though was the boxing machine, which folded boxes around bottles of wine, 12 per box, which then toddled off on a conveyor belt to be stacked on pallets by hand. Every so often the poorly-calibrated machine would smash a bottle, and wine would soak the box as it made its way down the conveyor. Then the person on stacking duty would grab the box, the bottom would fall out, 11 bottles of wine would smash everywhere, and we'd shut the line for 20 minutes while we mopped up the wine and swept up the glass. Used to happen at least a couple of times a day. I've no idea how they made any money.

Best job was probably portering for an Open University summer school, which was like a residential for people studying music with the OU. Interesting people, free meals, and free reign of the store cupboard which contained lots of audio kit. I rigged up a crazy "as many speakers as I can manage" soundsystem in my store room lair, and played dub and reggae all day long.

Worked with my dad in forestry from age 10ish to 14ish, i started off by brashing the trees with a billhook so he could come behind and clear fell them then it was my job to bing the smaller pulp wood and throw the brash into the centre, after a year or so of work i was moved up a notch with my birthday present (21cc chainsaw) so i would often fell the smaller stuff and clear that out of the way so he could deal with the somewhat larger trees, eventually moved onto the skyline winch to drag the logs down the hill and drove the tractor/hi-ab. Very hard work in all weather conditions but i really enjoyed it as i was fit as **** after a few years of work.

My dad left the forestry and went back to being a fishing boat skipper so i spent most of my summers (and holidays) aged 14/15/16 out at sea up n' down the west coast of scotland fishing for queenies/scallops with a crew of 5, Started off shovelling queenies/scallops into the shaker then bag them up in the hold. I loved the job as we were out to sea for 10 days at a time (weather permitting) only landing when the hold was full, I had responsibility of reading charts, plotting the tow, shooting the gear away and operating the boat pretty indepentantly which made it all the harder to return to school and deal with all the shite that school entailed.

(all mid to late 80's btw for context - i doubt you'd be able to use your kids as free labour t'day)

I've had some right shitey jobs, best paid was working in a turkey and chicken abattoir near York as agency staff we got given a thick pair of gloves and that was it, so by the times the chicken portions came to us they were in packaging as we had to carry them from an area that was +5 degrees in to the "blast room" which was about -20 to 30 degrees, got into taxi at the end of the second day and pain in leg was terrible, turns out that where your groin sweats during the day when going to the warmer room, the sweat had frozen on my leg and i had 4in square patch of frostbite, ended up with £12000.00 for those two days work..

Worked in a warehouse at docks in Portsmouth taking the stickers off satsumas that said they were from Morocco and putting on Spanish stickers to go to a well known supermarket.

Did firewatch similar to above for guys welding in the dokyyard, stood behind them with fire extinguisher for 8 hours a day doing nothing

Had a weekend job on a milk round from about 13 until I went to uni the first time
Worked some holidays on the same farm, general dogsbody, hay baling etc
Had a job in a pub (Legh Arms, Adlington) as a pot-washer, was awful ditched fairly quick
Worked behind the bar the Moss Rose (now the Drum and Monkey) in Alderley Edge for a while
Did a summer on Camp America, working on a summer camp in North Carolina, proper Deliverance country
Worked a couple of summers for RBS in the branches around Stockport (worked there before going to uni for a second time)
Worked a summer at my then girlfriend's dad's spiral staircase fabricators in Cambridge

Very jealous of those of you who got to sit in the tractor whilst doing farmwork

And Monte posh? Pfft. Glen Eyre halls checking in

They weren't posh they were for royalty!

the cricket pavilion?....
Jeez, I can still see that pint of Grendel now.

Worked behind that bar

(* got in the way mostly, but did do the honours to cash in bar tokens, and bring the drinks out)

Too many good jobs here!!

Whilst I love my job now & wouldn't change it for anything, I've done my fair share of cr@@@y ones!

Worked flipping burgers at McDonald's.
Spring onion bunching in the fields - paid bobbins.
Turkey farm - everything from picking eggs, mucking out, to wa@@@ng stag turkeys 😯

My brother had a job in a charcoal factory - came home pitch black every night.

Was that not Connaught in the old house / quadrangle?

I always though Connaught was a bit ratty and old!

Back on topic the other (unpaid) job I remember well was delivering 100s of programmes once a year for the local charity round town cycle race. They were proper categorised races but the Lions Club used to do loads of stalls and bucket rattling and make a big wedge for local causes at the start/finish area. For years it was one of my favourite days of the year. It hasn't run for years now. I expect insurance and paperwork killed it in the end.

First summer job was at a steel fabricators in Abergavenny building random stuff and towards the end a canal boat! Every Tuesday was market day so I was sent out to the entrance to collect the £1 for parking in their yard. Met a LOT of pretty young ladies that way who were partial to a bit of rogue worker in overalls 😀

Second started as a summer job at the Brecon Jazz Festival after my sister was desperate for staff and it morphed into bar and tech work at the local theatre. Spent many a happy evening wandering round backstage with naked people everywhere (enjoyed the ladies, the men were enjoyed by the gay tech..). LadyBoys of Bankok shows were just trippy, for so many reasons 😯

By college I was fed up of sitting on potato harvesters, so looked for any other outdoor job I could cycle too.
Got a job with a marquee firm on the basis of turning up for a second day, was senior foreman throughout uni'. Mostly festival work and weddings, met a lot of bridesmaids and got lots of party invites.
Lot of hours in a short season, but those 4 months a year were probably better paid than my current salary. 100+ hour weeks were the norm mid season, £4-5k a month. Clocking in/out machine couldn't handle you clocking out 3 days after you clocked in and there is nothing as rabid as a bride waiting for you to finish her wedding tent at 4am on a Saturday morning.

Delivering and collecting cars for a garage group dealing with Rover, Citroen and Subaru. Sounds good but it's meant that I've no longer any interest in cars, driving all day long, swapping from vomit encrusted Citroen Picasso to WRX Imprezza via MG TF and heavily modded classic Mini.

Fun for a while though.

Best one was crewing on a narrow boat for 3 months.
Worst was packaging vegetables for Morrisons. A pointless task.

A couple of memories.....
Imperial Tobacco (Wills) in newcastle; friend of my dad was head of security which included managing the labour pool - all the soft jobs and first dibs on all overtime; yep, that was good.

Co-Op laundry as 'van boy' - driver's assistant, if you don't mind; one round involved collecting the 'meat sheets' from local abattoir - thickly encrusted with blood and bits of dead animal; clouds of flies.

Hay Cart
Straw Cart
Course Building / Arena Steward
Building Showjumps
Painting Houses
Labourer
TV Location Set Hand
Office Outfitting
Greengrocer
Show Steward
Gardener...

Monte? Glen Eyre? Pfft, you're all posh to me, South Stoneham tower, 12th floor (although I could look down on the fancy Monte people from my view point).

Summers were spent setting out on big construction sites and I worked in the Stoneham bar for 3 years during term time.

Checked exam papers. Not marking them but just checking the marks were added up correctly. Did it for 4 weeks before I got "promoted" into doing data entry for kids who'd had marks increased for extenuating circumstances.

Warehouse work. Unloading lorries full of matresses and stacking them in a warehouse. Occasionally putting matresses back onto a lorry to be stacked.

Worked as a QC technician in a paint factory, and yes I did.

Packing live crabs into boxes
pointing fence posts
Gutting farmed Salmon the size of sharks
Extra in Robin williams movie playing medievel soldier
picking grapes in the raison belt OZ.

Ha. I met several Bikebuoy-alikes while doing seasons. Very nice work if you can get it. Doing a trans-atlantic crossing is still on my tick list, although I haven't set foot on a yacht for 12 years, let alone sail one.

A lot of awful jobs, some very amusing ones. Helped build an extension, scrubbed bricks for a day, did some running for a TV ad company round Soho for a day before being 'let go', lifeguard, awful paper round, mechanic, seed packer in Chicago (only English-speaker on shop floor), au-pair in Cincinatti – list goes on.

Favourite temp job was working at Ede & Ravenscroft in Oxford for a winter (which was a break from my summer job). Learnt a lot about tailoring and what goes into a decent suit, met some absolutely wonderful characters (including a mad ex-pilot who delighted in bringing carpet and curtain samples to have made into bespoke waistcoats at a few hundred quid a pop), tried to chat-up a young student baroness (who was blatantly not interested and buying a bowtie for a Playboy party) and sold a sale shirt at full price to a – at the time – recently disgraced Tory MP.

The story of the MP goes that he was talking at the Oxford debating society that evening and was afterwards approached by a female student who said something like "That was wonderful!" to which he replied, rather happily "thank you very much." "Yes," she continued, "I've always been a big fan of yours, Mr. Portillo!". He wasn't Michael Portillo.

turns out that where your groin sweats during the day when going to the warmer room, the sweat had frozen on my leg and i had 4in square patch of frostbite, ended up with £12000.00 for those two days work

😯

I worked for my Dad's firm for a few Uni summers, testing heavy duty weighing equipment. Mostly that meant rigging one load cell on top of another calibrated one and jacking the weight on with a hydraulic press. But some load cells needed dead weight calibration, for which two of us had to stack on weights at regular intervals (1/10 of the nominal range every 15s IIRC)

The smaller cells were OK, but if you had a 1Te nominal, you'd each have to load 2x25kg weights equally spaced onto a cradle every 15s; 10 repeats, then the same again off again so 20 repeats to see how it responded up and down. Now put the cell in a temperature / humidity cabinet, and repeat at 40C and -15C as well as at 20C, and then factor in a batch of maybe 20 cells to be tested. You'd be lifting in 50kg portions literally tonnes of weight and while I had forearms and shoulders like Arnie, I'm sure my back is still paying me back for it. H&S? are you kidding, it was my Dad......

Two summers at school I worked on the ranges at Bisley for the NRA Championships. Living in tents, underage drinking in the NAAFI bar, being 'managed' by a psychotic but ultimately kind-hearted retired Scots guards Sergeant Major (morning catchphrase - "HANDS OFF COCKS! FEET IN SOCKS!"). Present at the window every morning to get your roster for the day; if you were on targets you'd get driven down to the butts of Century or Stickleback, load a target into the frame, steal someone else's scrap iron to balance the other side (if you got them balanced you could raise and lower with a finger, if unbalanced you'd be hauling it up and down with muscle force all day) and then wait for the shooting. Watch for a splash in the sand, target down, put in a marker, paste the old hole with glue and a patch, put the score marker along the bottom (Bull-inner-magpie-outer) and then back up asap so you didn't upset their rhythm or affect timed events. Occasionally the phone would ring, and there were a series of codes to say you'd missed a shot, or they were disputing the score and depending on that you'd get a bollocking off the official overseeing. Plum job was being on the phones....... dead easy.

It was great fun and I'm glad I did it, but it has left me very unlikely to book a holiday along those lines. The investment in kit tended to be pretty poor (especially the windsurfing gear), and I got the impression that the guests paid a lot of money to be there.

Who was that with @soundninjauk? I worked for a similar operator and have an idea of the price breakdown; certainly the company I worked for made about £50 pp on a full-price holiday.

Oh yes - another one. Weeding a Jewish graveyard in Tottenham. Good money for the day I worked, but you earned it.

Mixing plaster for my dad on site - this was before drill mixers - cleaning his kit and making brews - benefits - lots of free porn on site

Life guard open air pool - benefits - lots of ladies on sunny days

Christmas electrical counter - benefits - nice new watch and Christmas snog with a lovely colleague I met there

Stacking timber in a timber yard - benefits - the best meat pie ever and fun when you got to know the regular guys and machinists

I worked in a car repair garage for my future father in law. Treated with huge suspicion by every single one of the workers!

Then as a barman at a local pub.

Last couple of years worked for a local pig farmer carting straw. Dawn to dusk, seven days a week, earning a fortune and unable!s to spend any of it. After seven weeks went back to Uni tanned mahogany, ripped to hell and absolutely ****ing loaded. Good times for Freshers week!
Throughout uni worked on entertainment security. Well paid and great fun .

I did overnight security for the Bristol Balloon Fiesta the year someone stole a four pack...
I saw nothing.
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