What where your first few jobs in life. personal history.

[Orik]

 Well my first and most horrible job was when I was 11 years old and I became a North shore news delivery boy... 200 Wednesday and Friday.  250 on Sunday 3X per week I saw a 50 % increase in fliers on the Friday and Sunday papers

I had to collate and stuff every north shore news paper with so many damned fliers. This was for a most atrocious salary of 30 dollars per month.. Thinking back on it now it was a major rip off  considering for the amount of work one had to actually do. This was 27 years  ago.

If I wanted to buy sweets at the corner store or other toys I had to earn my own money which I supplemented that 30 dollars by going door to door  on Saturdays washing the neighbors cars, mowing their lawns & come autumn it was raking leaves, in winter shoveling snow.. During fall  there was always picking apples, plums peaches and grapes.. the odd job pet sitting and giving dog baths.

On to the second part time job at 12 years old this was delivering newspapers  for The Vancouver Sun  45 news papers per day 6 days per week time to  deliver them approximately 45 minutes by skateboard.. 30 minutes by  bicycle this was the evening newspaper the final edition

This was back  when the Vancouver Sun had a morning edition and a evening edition 2 versions a day, the salary was 280 dollars a month, not great amount of money but it was mostly spent playing pinball and on the odd Slurpee at 7-11 & I think I heard every excuses under the sun when it came time to  collect from the customers on why they didn't have the money to pay... but some customers made up for it with good tips I averaged 325 dollars per month with tips.

The  third Job at 14 was for Burger King were I pretty much worked the whole  thing, Burger prep, grilling machine, steamer bun prep, drink and soft  serve station, deep fryers. Hoods and grill cleaning at night close.  cashier, fry cook, gradually moving up to drive through and night  closer. started at a whopping 5.35 an hour and left almost 8 months  later with a wage of 6.50 as a night closer. that was at the age of 15

I  moved on to Denny's dish pit for 7 dollars an hour at 15

Save  On Gas at 16 for a gigantic per hour wage of 8.25 an hour as a night  closer. full service station... I ate dinners at the Kypriaki Taverna  next door. The lemon rice soup was fantastic & the belly dancer was  magnificent.. I got fired for losing the night drop.. (almost 250  dollars) I was also pretty spaced on 2 doubles of California Sunshine at  the time (That was the name of the LSD we had at that time)

Petro_Canada  at 16 for a huge 6 bucks an hour not as good of pay as save on gas but  they were East Indian Owners and paid horrible. Made up for it with huge  item discounts staff got 40 percent off all none house hold or  automobile items. meaning pop chips sandwiches.. and a few other items.  Plus the full service tips, more than made up for the loss in hourly  rate. earned a average of 25 dollars a day in tips ( this was only a  part time job after all 4 to 5 hours a day 5 days a week)  I got fired  for making 1 to many mistakes on the Visa machine.. owners claimed my  handwriting was illegible.

went to A&W between 17 & 19  for a closing position I was drive-through and front cashier afternoon  to closing, do the cleaning and lock up assist the night manager with  cash out and the money drop it was not a bad job at 17 paid better than  many fast food gigs it was 8.45 an hour & at that time it was huge  money for a night closer. this was almost 22 years ago. I must of quit 3  or 4 times the manager kept talking me into coming back to work... till  I finally had enough of his tyrannical ways.

do you know what  is truly disgusting, well to me what I find truly disturbing or  disgusting, is that the assistant managers and night closers got paid  pretty well back then when a dollar was actually worth something.

Well today most of these jobs still pay the same amount of money but it is only about 2 to 4 dollars  more per hour depending on the job. It is now nearly 25 years later and the dollar has deflated to the point it is next to worthless. how horrid... A cheese burger at burger king 24 years ago was 60 cents. today that same cheese burger is smaller and 1.29 or is it 1.39 cents plus tax... Bah!!!...

What makes matters worse my father filed the T4 tax returns I did the work but guess who got the tax refunds.. thats right he did.. mind I was a dependent child.. and they did apply to get me a social insurance card 2 years before most kids applied for one.    

[Lil Me]

When I was a kid, I recycled a lot of pop cans (yeah for dumpster diving!) and delivered phone books in the summer.

I babysat.

[Sportsdude]

I was an umpire for a summer. Grade 7? No. Grade 8. Gah, can't remember. old.

[Orik]

I thought you were about 24 sportsdude or something to that effect. how can you be so old you cannot remember a few years back... do you smoke a lot of green perchance.  

[Russ]

Paper route.. the real estate weekly. Did it for a few years. Then didnt do much other than school and sea cadets.. made some money as a summer trainee then as a staff cadet. Worked at a place for a bit building escape devices for oil rigs. Worked at a gas station with a car wash for about two years on and off.. then what I am now.

[Sportsdude]

lol Orik.
I'm an old engine in a new body or is it the other way around? Either way, which ever is the old car part is pretty worn down and out at the moment. I've been runnin' on empty for years.

Heaven knows what I'll be like at 35 or so... I lack that 'youthful exuberance' which apparently I'm supposed to have according to my late eighties issued owner's manual.  

When Hunter S Thompson was my age, he wrote The Rum Diary.

"At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles – a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other – that kept me going."

Hootenanny! I'm bringing the rain today. lol

 

[purelife]

 I used to collect those 25 cents from the shopping carts at the malls with my siblings and sometimes, we'd include a friend.  And we would stick our fingers in those phone booths to find any money and we were lucky.  One time, the phone booth was jammed and we got a lot of change!!

There also was the paper route and babysitting and bottle collecting from neighbors.

Oh, also did some bookkeeping at an in-home business when I was in grade 11-12.

Then, worked at Pizza Hut (waitressing) and at a fashion jewelry store called Reflexion which was like Claire's both locations at Lougheed Mall back in the day.
   

[DDD]

 [P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class=MsoNormal]1^st job Little Billy's on Edmonds washing dishes on the weekend did not get home until 3 am.......after that what I do now with a break to work at another place to get more experience.

[TehBorken]

             1st real job I had was right after graduating from High School. I assembled and tested military air conditioners for a sub-contractor in Maryland. They also built the air conditioners used on some of the Mercury and Gemini missions but I didn't work on those. Did that for ~ 2 years, then I went to tech school. It was a 3,000 hour course (2 years). We covered everything from vacuum tubes to integrated circuits. (We didn't cover personal computers because there weren't any, they didn't really exist yet. IBM was a couple years away from launching their first consumer-level personal computer. This is circa 1982 or so, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. Fire had only just been invented the year before.)

I was hired directly out of tech school, seduced like a drunken prom date by [a href="vny!://www.jeol.com/"]a company[/a] that made really cool stuff: [a href="vny!://www.jeol.com/PRODUCTS/ElectronOptics/ScanningElectronMicroscopesSEM/SemiinLensFE/JSM7500F/tabid/393/Default.aspx"]electron microscopes[/a]. For the next 11 years I traveled around the US and Canada installing scanning electron microscopes and transmission electron microscopes (as well as a boatload of other [a href="vny!://www.jeol.com/PRODUCTS/ElectronOptics/MultiBeamSEMFIB/JIB4500/tabid/502/Default.aspx"]scientific doohickeys[/a], like [a href="vny!://www.jeolusa.com/PRODUCTS/AnalyticalInstruments/MassSpectrometers/tabid/227/Default.aspx"]Mass  Spec[/a] Analyzers and [a href="vny!://www.jeolusa.com/PRODUCTS/AnalyticalInstruments/NuclearMagneticResonance/tabid/234/Default.aspx"]Nuclear  Magnetic Resonance[/a] gear). I'd take the disassembled [a href="vny!://www.jeol.com/PRODUCTS/ElectronOptics/TransmissionElectronMicroscopesTEM/200kV/JEMARM200F/tabid/662/Default.aspx"]microscopes[/a] out of a sea crate, put them together from ~20,000 different parts (really), and then [a href="vny!://www.jeol.com/PRODUCTS/ElectronOptics/TransmissionElectronMicroscopesTEM/100120kV/JEM1011/tabid/121/Default.aspx"]install them[/a] on site (anywhere from a week to 2 month's worth of work for each one). Then I'd spec the unit, test it, and certify it. Then I'd train the investigators and/or scientists on how to use it.

I saw a lot of really cool stuff in that job over the years and I had a [a href="vny!://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_clearance"]TS1 clearance[/a] so I could go to places like Los Alamos, GE Vallecitos, Westinghouse/Hanford and other nuke sites. (Plus places Lockheed, McDonald Douglas, Link-Singer, Intel, IBM, AMD, the Rocky Mountain School Of Mines, Montana Ceramics, U of Alaska, U of Calgary, Berkley, Children's Hospital, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, US Army MID Research, to name a few...and way, way  more places than I can possibly remember. Plus a few I'm still not supposed to mention.)

Got tired of traveling after 11 years and more than 1,000,000 air miles, so I hung up my traveling shoes and went to work at a cancer research facility in Seattle. Left there after a year (it was boring and filled with some grade-A jerks) and went to a place that made laser-based particle measuring gadgets. I got headhunted after 2 years and ended up going back to field service working on barcode printers, scanners, and wired/wireless data collection networks. Saw some cool stuff in that job too. I eventually moved from doing field service to working at the head office, and I started doing technical writing. I did virtually all of the tech docs for both the customer support and field service departments.

After 6 or 7 years of doing that I went over to the Dark Side, and became a contractor for [a href="vny!://www.boeing.com/"]Boeing[/a] doing tech writing and web development for them in the IPMDS group. Boeing was a great place to work, and Uncle B was very good to me. I actually built my first website (for me, not for Boeing) while working there, lol. (The pace at Boeing was....errr....pretty relaxed.) The site is still up and running today. No, it's not DiscoverSeattle.

Boeing Jokes:
Question: How many people work at Boeing?
Answer: Oh, about half of 'em.

"Did you hear that they found Bin Laden's brother working at Boeing?"
"Really?"
"Yeah, they found 'Bin Sleepin' and 'Bin Loafin' over in the Powerplant Assembly building!" (ha ha)

I was actually working for Boeing on the morning of 9-11. Everyone was in shock, to say the least, to see our planes flying into the buildings.   After that day, the higher-highers at Boeing knew damn well that no one was going to be buying airplanes for a while, so they flushed all the contractors and we were all gone within a couple of months.My last day there as January 2nd, 2002. I was actually one of the last to go from what I understand.

After that I worked all sorts of contract gigs at Microsoft, AT&T, and several other places. I got fed up at the treatment I received at Microsoft on my last gig and quit in disgust one day, vowing to never, EVERY go back. I decided to take a year off and recover from mind- and soul-raping that I got at Microsoft.

During my time off I fiddled around and for fun, I managed to learn [a href="vny!://php.net"]PHP[/a], a popular web programming language. I built a site selling an online-service that surprised me by becoming very popular. Before long it was making my house payment, and not long after that I realized that I could probably make a living at it. So I went into it full time and that's been about it.

Recruiters still call me from time to time, and I always thank them for the call but decline their offers. One of them, after a loooong pause, asked me, "Don't you want to work??" I thought about for several moments, and it occurred to me that, hell no, I didn't want to work. So I told him, "Well, now that you mention it, no, I don't really want to work." I think that may have been the first time he was turned down when offering someone a job. Sometimes they say that the job is in Redmond (code for "Microsoft"). That's when I say, "Tell me if this sounds like me hanging up on you", and I slam the phone down into the cradle.

And that's how yer 'umble webmaster, Tehborken, ended up here, slaving away over a hot keyboard  27 hours a day.
           

[DDD]

Boeing was a great place to work, and Uncle B was very good to me. I actually built my first website (for me, not for Boeing) while working there, lol. (The pace at Boeing was....errr....pretty relaxed.) The site is still up and running today. No, it's not DiscoverSeattle. [img border=0 src="vny!://discoverseattle.net/forums/richedit/smileys/Happy/12.gif"]


    DV?..................DATW??...........................Guess Her Muff?............memeBee??

    OK are you Fornicator.................Gordy......................EED.........thats it your EED             [img border=0 src="vny!://discoverseattle.net/forums/richedit/smileys/Thinking/2.gif"]                    

[TehBorken]

 DDD wrote:  [div style="font-style: italic;"]DV?..................DATW??...........................Guess Her Muff?............memeBee??[/div]
LOL, I'd be offended if I wasn't laughing so hard. No, none of those.
 

OK are you Fornicator.................Gordy......................EED.........thats it your EED
 
Gordy?? You think I'm Gordy? OMFG. No, I'm not Gordy. For one thing, I'm human. For another, I don't think Gordy could build a web site. In fact, I don't think Gordy could pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel. Good f*cking god, I'd rather be featured on America's Most Wanted than be mistaken for Gordy.

No, I'm not any of those people. If I was, I'd get up right this minute and throw myself in front of the biggest bus I could find.

 

[Little Fish]

LMAO  great responces TB...DDD you really need to read more about the 'umble webmaster here... Thanks for sharing all that TehBorken an amazing history. nice to know we got a good guy here running the show...  

[DDD]

 [P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class=MsoNormal]Well I am glad you had a laugh cause that's what it was [?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /][st1:PersonName w:st="on"]al[/st1:PersonName]l about.............I do like how you described Gordy and what most us would like him to do to himself involving the bus..........As for EED I found him to be entertaining at times at other times I wish he too would find a bus to park himself under. I do remember DV of old where most of us started out from.

[Lil Me]

This past weekend I made peace with some former employers.  When I was 20, I managed a pub for some psycho, crazy owners.  I lived and breathed that place 24/7, even to the point where I slept in the building some nights as the security patrol.  My pay cheques were bouncing, and I finally reached my breaking point.  I moved away and never went back again...until Saturday afternoon.  It was a feeling of relief, actually.

[P.C.]

Were the same people running the pub ?