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

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.
[img] [/img]