[Closed] What was your first job? (excluding paper rounds)

aged about 15 I think - shelf stacker in Fine Fare with bunch of my mates.Good boos - used to allow us off on Fridays to go to gigs on basis we'd make the hours up later...

allied to that, tattle picker - big money in those days !!

Sainsbury's bakery. My wife worked on the deli, that was 21 years ago, I was 17.

mining engineering stoodent, did a 13 month stint with the coal board but jacked it in before going to college & not long before the miners strike - after only 9 months of coalface training it took 2 weeks of clean air before I stopped coughing up the black stuff 😯

Army at 16

Bricky's mate at 15. When I wasn't carting armloads of bricks up ladders and scaffold I was mixing the mud and carting that up ladders and scaffold.

allied to that, tattle picker - big money in those days !!

Left school in 1986 3 weeks before my 16th birthday and rang loads of places to be told you're too young sorry.
Ended up doing 18 months of on/off temporary clerical assistant work for the inland revenue in Leeds , my mates were all on YTS schemes earning £27 a week and I took out £56. The work was boring filling stuff mainly but it was flexi time and myself and the other temps would make up most of our weeks hours from monday to friday lunchtime then have a 2 1/2 hour liquid lunch and spend an hour in the afternoon hammered before we could go home 🙂 Happy days.

Golf club caddie - earn around 80p (value today) per 9 hole course.

Usually £1.60 per day.

😮

Bikeshop mechanic. Convinced the local bike shop to let me do my 2 week work experience there. Kept me on as a saturday job.

Courier. Mostly carrying artwork around Manchester city centre for graphic designers. Did it two summers in a row. Really quite enjoyed it.

bn, answer you email for christs sake!

Saturday jobs - Turkey killing, plucking and gutting at Christmas.

Weekend job that became holiday job that became career - go fa at sailing school, dishing out buoyancy aids, rigging boats, fishing people out of water...

YTS Gamekeepeing and Game Farm Management £27.95 a week.

Full time work with 4-6 week of collage at the end of every year to study then do the exams. 1st year someone fired a 410 shotgun in the dorm we used cig papers and toothpast to cover the hole in the ceiling LOL

abbatoir butcher ... !

Saturday mechanic at a very early incarnation of Scotby Cycles in Carlisle.

Shelf Stacker at Safeway while at College. £442 per month. Then Travel Agent for first Choice for 12 months £1100 per month. Then joined the Army for 3.5 years.

Gardener. Age 15, printed off some leaflets and dropped them at all the posh houses on the outskirts of the village. An old boy rings up and asks if £4 an hour would be enough. 20+ years ago - too right it would, I was hoping for £2.50 like all the boys working in shops got. And I could fit it in round rugby on Saturday and Sunday. Perfect.

Apprenticeship at 16

Gardener in the local psychiatric hospital during the summers whilst at university. I quite enjoyed it and I remember that the weather was good.

The students got to do all the hard graft while the old timers sat around drink tea and smoking woodbines. On the joining the head gardener said to me "what do they learn you at university?" I replied " the don't learn me anything they teach me". He took it reasonably well, and 30 years later I am still a smart arse.

The first job with a real pay packet was data processing, mainly inputting book club orders (off the back of sunday paper magazines) in to a computer.

Farm Hand, driving tractors at 14/15 around the farm, milking etc, took my test at 16, summer was good stacking straw bales on the trailer getting a good tan radio up!

Renting deck chairs on Southend seafront. Pay was appalling, £20 for a +10 hour day in 2004. They gave me a bike to ride around on to collect the money. So getting paid to ride a bike around the seafront in the sun was actually quite nice. Used to spend a lot of time just chatting to mates I'd bump into, or doing some skids and wheelies on the supplied bike. £1.50 to sit on a deck chair, the local old folk were appalled! I was a pro at putting, taking down and carrying up to 8 wooden deck chairs in one go.

17, just after passing my driving test: Delivering Thompson telephone directories. Got utterly humped by them. Rate of pay was X-pence per 100 directories and I was given a whole bunch of really rural routes, took days to do a few pounds worth. Because I was too honest to chuck them all in a skip (a lot of the places I delivered to said they hadn't had a telephone directory in years other than ones they'd found fly-tipped in hedges) it cost more in petrol than I earned. The only saving grace was on the last day I got mauled by a farm dog badly enough for the police to have to be called and the copper gave the farmer the choice between having the dog put down or giving me enough cash to replace my torn clothes in return for a blind eye being turned.

Renting deck chairs on Southend seafront

Friend of mine did similar work in Brighton that involved repairing them as well. He took one apart and re-assembled it in such a way that no matter what you'd did you could make the deckchair stay up. Whenever they got an arsey customer he gave them the doctored deckchair. Despite the fact it was unusable, and no matter how big a winge-bag they were, they were all to proud to bring it back and say they couldn't work it.

First proper job where I earned good money was brashing and snedding/binging pulp for my dad in the forestry up in Argyll, 12 yrs old and my very own cute 24cc chainsaw with an ickle bar, to be honest as it was a 90 min journey to go into school at Oban on the village bus I often didn't go in for weeks at a time but went to work with him in the wood instead , I soon progressed to stealing one of his wood sheds to store and chop hardwoods that we felled whilst working through the plantations, I supplied pretty much everyone within a 10mile+ radius of the village with bags of firewood and I earned enough over the winter to buy a new kx80 motocross bike and full sinisalo riding kit, a Canadian style canoe (we stayed right on the shores of loch awe) loads of camping kit, Abu Cardinal fishing equipment and a muddy fox courier mtb from the bike shop in Oban not bad for a 13 yr old in 1985 😀

I've never earned quite so much in my life since 😕

1st paid job, berry picking, then moved onto lambing.

Had a summer job stitching tarpaulins together on 12 hour weekend shifts. Well paid and often didn't involve much work as the huge industrial machines were pretty unreliable.

Then had a job in a parasitology lab for 2 months another summer. Basically collecting, sieving and examining poo. Paid for 3 weeks seeing practice in Vancouver and a month travelling around western Canada though.

Cattle ranch, herding said cattle and fixing/maintaining fences

Left school at 16 (very nearly 17) in 1987 after doing my GCSE's - got reasonable results by the standards set in those days 4 x B's, 3 x C's, 2 x D's (plus an O Level B in Art, which we were allowed to take for some reason). All poor by today's 'easy pass' A+++++ standards.

Didn't have a clue what to do, careers advisors at school were less than useless. Worked in an Off Licence - a big one - sorting stock/stacking shelves for a couple of weeks in the summer hols. Heard of a local bloke looking for apprentice sparks - didn't have much of an interview, started on the YTS (the only way to get an electrical apprenticeship back then), learned my trade - sparky/foreman/supervisor/manager for 23 years at the same firm.

It all went to shit and I started working for myself in 2010.

Audio Technician at the BBC. Firstly at Radio Manchester and then at Television Centre. That seems a [i]very[/i] long time ago now.

I worked in a big sainsburys as a student - pretty much every department, meat, fish, deli, produce, grocery, bakery, trolleys and the dreaded checkouts.

It taught me [s]two[/s] several things:

People will buy anything if you put a "reduced" label on it.
The general public, at large, are idiots.
Middle-aged women (as a demographic) are extremely rude.
making jam donuts is the worst job in the world
I must, at all costs, never work in retail ever again.

When was that Bregante?, my mate used to be principal sound engineer for R3 but started his BBC career on R1 in the early 70s before moving over to R3 and R4 before leaving in mid/late 90's

agricultural labourer on an apple, plum and pear farm

my first company car was a Massey Ferguson, often with fork lift auxiliary accessory on the back.

Christmas work at a catalogue company's distribution centre, loading and unloading three piece suites from delivery trucks. Dirty, heavy and hard work. The attitude of some of the permanent staff was shocking, their method of unloading a brand new leather suite that was stacked three high was to slide it out until it fell to the floor, you could hear the frame break when it landed!

First proper job was........

carlosg - Member

Ended up doing 18 months of on/off temporary clerical assistant work for the inland revenue in Leeds. The work was boring filling stuff mainly but it was flexi time and myself and the other temps would make up most of our weeks hours from monday to friday lunchtime then have a 2 1/2 hour liquid lunch and spend an hour in the afternoon hammered before we could go home Happy days.

.......this, but in Manchester in 1990. As you say "happy days"

Christmas work at a catalogue company's distribution centre, loading and unloading three piece suites from delivery trucks. Dirty, heavy and hard work. The attitude of some of the permanent staff was shocking, their method of unloading a brand new leather suite that was stacked three high was to slide it out until it fell to the floor, you could hear the frame break when it landed!

First proper job was........

carlosg - Member

Ended up doing 18 months of on/off temporary clerical assistant work for the inland revenue in Leeds. The work was boring filling stuff mainly but it was flexi time and myself and the other temps would make up most of our weeks hours from monday to friday lunchtime then have a 2 1/2 hour liquid lunch and spend an hour in the afternoon hammered before we could go home Happy days.

.......this, but in Manchester in 1990. As you say "happy days"

somafunk I was at Radio Manchester in 86-87 and then a sub contractor at Wood Lane (their engineering/r&d unit) where I was a sub contractor working for FWO Bausch. When they extended Television Centre ( it was called Stage 5 from memory) I worked on all the hard wiring installations in what was to become the home of Radio 1-5 until the project was signed off to the BBC. From memory that was 88-90.

First proper job was working a few evenings a week in a video shop. Pay was rubbish, but it wasn't too bad as you could just sit there watching films waiting for customers.
From there I got a job at Olympus Sport in Brent Cross shopping centre and from there to the heady heights of Primark in Kilburn high St. That was before Primark was well known; around late '94/95.

Sounds like some of you had some pretty interesting jobs.

My first job was a part-time one whilst at 6th form stacking shelves at our local Gateway supermarket . It was a good introduction into petty office politics and how to be exploited. We had to stay behind after the store closed and 'face' the shelves for usually two hours without being paid for it. After working two evenings and a Saturday a week I was able to practically blow all the money away on Saturday night in the pub!

16yr old junior leader in the army that was an eye opener!

Cleaner at an Army base.

Bregante - that fits the timescale when my mate "Neil Espley" worked there, his stories from the early days of R1 are priceless. He's now sunning it up out in Cyprus..... Lucky bugger!

I started as a checkout lass in a supermarket at 18 (first months wage was £94),then bakery/deli assistant and shelf stacker. Great times. Thinking back I think everyone under 20 was nursing a hangover most Saturday shifts. Great times with a great bunch!

Lifeguard, which was fun and pretty well paid for a 16 year old.

Games developer for a little software house in Sheffield (when I was doing my BTEC in computer studies). Great job, I was a USELESS code developer tho. Ended up copying disks. So 500 blank floppies (!), 1 master disk. Open drive, copy, close drive, put copied disc into folder, start again. Except one Night I did it the wrong way round and overwrote all of the master copies.

A good metaphor for my future career really 😉

served a four year apprenticeship in a ship repair yard.

Introduced me to hard work at an early stage, met and learnt a lot from craftsmen. Most of those craft skills have gone now, blacksmith, coppersmiths, boilermakers, riggers, engineers.

Long hours, no health and safety (apart from the government sign at the clocking in station).

A good metaphor for my future career really

Please don't tell me you're now in the poisons and antidotes industry now 🙂