What was your first job?

Almost worth it. More so if it was real vomit.

Insert "special sauce" joke here.

Does the first job you should have paid taxes for but didn't count?

I worked at an independent movie theater, hub of one of the coolest part of Minneapolis, with my best friend. A fantastic (if exhausting) job. But I was paid in cash, and didn't realize how under the table it was 'til later. Getting a stack of bills was fine with me.

This was also the job where I rode my bike home in the wee hours of the morning through one of the most dangerous parts of the city. Drive-by dangerous.

Picking berries, at ten cents a box . . . i was makin' good money . . .

Buh-huh. You said "insert."

Ugh, working at Wendy's... never ever again... I hope.

I worked in a steel plant. Back then Australia had "full employment" and there were plenty of jobs around for kids like me who were at school and wanted to earn some money over the long summer holidays. I was just a labourer, picking up, carrying, putting down, but doing some of that stuff a couple of hundred feet above the ground without a safety net.

I liked it because it made me feel like an adult and I could swear a lot and no-one yelled at me for it

This will annoy most everybody - at age eight I was in a tv commercial in NY. My father was the director and I was an extra. It was a Toni commercial, for those antique enough to recognize it. A few years later I was in Hallmark commercials, not as first fiddle, that I remember. Cheap talent.. this was at the beginning of tv advertising.

My first real job started the day I turned sixteen and I have worked ever since, after school and weekends, and then thousands of weeks, and am f/cking tired of it. 48 years now. I think I've paid for the luck of being in those commercials.

So, the first real job was taking x-rays. No kidding. And I had just turned sixteen. And this was a pretty good hospital.

It turned out that they did something like the old shoe fit fluorographs - only a few will remember these. When you went to try on Buster Brown shoes, you went and stood with your feet in a slot in a machine and it x-rayed them. Well, those were photofluorographs, and they were used similarly in hospitals to xray inpatients to see if they had tb.

Small xrays, they were, about 3 x 3 inches. I took them of patients after school and on weekends at this particular hospital, and then... a couple of years later, was hired by a med student guy to do a survey re the results and patients' charts re whether or not they caught cases of tb.
Fascinating... I spent more time in med records that my paid hours since it was so interesting...

but no, they caught no tb in 10,000 photofluorographs and I worked myself out of a job. [Those photofluorographs gave 500 x the rads of a single 14 x 17 xray, I was told. Not sure if that's true.]

However, they shunted me up to admissions (or was it cashier's, I forget).

Whatever. I found a sort of home in that place - a fairly busy hospital but with a good group atmosphere among us, high and low on the totem poles of staffing.

My first job was clearing snow off of cars when I was about seven years old. I was usually paid a quarter (25 cents) for each car although some generous persons would pay more and I once made the big time getting a whole dollar! No taxes were paid directly on that job although there were indirect taxes when I would go to a local store downtown with my earnings and buy something.

The first job I had which reduced my gross pay to a net pay and me to a sniveling malcontent was working for a Church through a city program which hired low income teens to work at various non-profit organizations and institutions. Not a lot of money but it established me as an adult what with Federal, State, City and local taxes as well as a Social Security and un-employment deduction each week.

My first tax-paying job was as a sales person at Sam Flax, an art supply store. I liked it well enough, being surrounded by artist materials was satisfying (being an artist myself) and working in the paper department and responsible for wrapping and pricing merchandise, I gave 'discounts' to friends and special customers that I felt a connection with. :wink:

I used to go to Flax in west Los Angeles - wonder if it was the same company. It was a good - but expensive - art supply store.

The same indeed. There are Flax stores all over the country.

I remember in one of the romantic novels by Judith Krantz or somebody, the heroine bought art supplies from Flax in L. A.

Don't know where the first originated. I still shop at Flax today, in Atlanta. And would you believe, they won't even give me a discount??? :wink:

Yes, I'd believe it. I bought from there when I first started drawing and painting and ... money evaporated fast fast fast.

Wow, I haven't thought about this for a long time!
I was 16 and became a candle maker at a local candle factory. It was very antiquated by todays standards I'm sure. Every candle was literally made by hand and we cranked out about 10,000 per day. It was brutally hard work and I remember my hands being so bruised and cut up and sometimes burned by the hot wax. There was a lot of little old Portuguese women there who had worked for the company for years! It only took me one summer to know that this was not a career for me, even though they asked me to stay on after summer ended. No thanks!

Wow. Candlemaker? May I ask, when and where? It does sound incredibly quaint.

Of course you may! It was in 1972 in a little bitty town on the coast south of San Francisco called Moss Beach. The company was named Blue Gate Candle Company.

They actually made fabulous candles and the biggest treat of the day was getting to work and smelling the scent of what we were pouring that day. Some were so delicious you could almost taste them by the scent alone.
Huge vats of melted wax hung over our heads supported by very old wooden catwalks. The "recipes" were considered top secret. I know several years after I left, the factory burned down and was never rebuilt. Arson was suspected, but I never heard the whole story.

I grumbled about the painful labor, but you're right. In a lot of ways it was very quaint. Hand dipped tapers, incredibly scented pillars, votives and tea lights. Although not their candles, to this day I still have and burn candles in every room of my house. They must have got me started on something.

Isn't that something? As recent as '72. I thought surely you'd say it was the 1960's or earlier even.

Re: What was your first job?




hello Chris,


I worked as a ladies dressmaker for over two years.
I quit then because it became way too monoton and boring..
However, since I stopped I regularly make dresses for myself.