Your first (paid) job...

[snorri]

Anyone who remembers their first wage is either lying or gives too much of a sh*t about money

Aye well you'll have forgotten how to convert from pre-decimal currency.

 

[annedonnelly]

Although I'd intended to go straight to university after 6th Form I was offered a job as an industrial student with British Gas in their pipeline testing plant. People are usually a bit mystified when I say I worked with intelligent pigs.

 

[subaqua]

Anyone who remembers their first wage is either lying or gives too much of a sh*t about money

easy for most people of a certain age. it was a YTS which was fixed sum.

for me , paper round 2p per paper per day , with a bonus of £5 a week for a clear collected round by Friday, which meant if you used your tips to cover up to 3 houses you were on a winner as most would cough the double the following week.

you learned the poor payers quickly and they got papers stopped.


after that silver service waiter for a Masonic lodge where the company my mum worked for did the catering. £20 a night cash in hand and was about 1 a week on average. plus lots of free beer bought by drunk Masons !

then i had a culture shock and staretd the real worldof work in a tyre warehouse ( I lied in interview that i wanted a distribution job as a career to get a summer job ) £28.50 per week plus travel expenses - £42.00 of which I had to give my mum £20 board.

Went back to do A levels as needed them for RAF entry. got bored in school so applied for apprentice with RAF rather than going in as officer cadet. got in , got busted out after 5 weeks with broken ankle . cant remember money as nothing to spend it on !

started electrical apprenticeship 12 months later than same year group i was in school with. YTS plus JIB meant £49 a week plus travel expenses.


am i obsessed by money . no , but knowing what I earned and how it ( and job happiness) improved as the harder I worked has helped my Daughter understand the benefits in working hard in School and getting a good job she can be happy in.

I plan on staying with same company till i keel over and croak, or get retired . Thats how much i love it. sure its hard work and not an easy job , but I am happy. it pays well and demonstrates to a lot of the trainees that you can go from the bottom of company to nearly the top .

 

[John the Monkey]

Caddy - a full day's work for a fiver. Tedious, and the golfers wouldn't let you watch the interesting bits once they got to the green (because they were supposed to pay you extra if you attended at the hole, tightarses). It gave me a lifelong loathing of golf, and I only did one day, spending the money on Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back".

After that, I had a Saturday/Summer job in the warehouse of an Argos-a-like shop - a far better job, and we used to get luncheon vouchers as well. Order picking, stock taking, unloading deliveries &c

 

[swee'pea99]

Caddy - a full day's work for a fiver.

My Dad's ad agency used to have a yearly golf day, for higher-ups & clients. As a keen amateur photographer, I was hired to take the photos. Not a hard gig; I basically had to trudge around all day making sure I got at least two shots of every attendant: one striding purposefully, one swinging manfully. This was an age before digital, so you never knew what you got till they came back from the lab, so it wasn't *that* straightforward, but nor was it hard. Unless of course you slightly over-indulged at the generous hospitality lunch on a steaming hot day, then fell asleep just off the 11th green ("Who's the young feller in the long grass?" "Oh, that's Mr Swee'pea's son..."), waking in a panic with no clue of how long, how many, who missed...

 

[PaulSecteur]

Fitting tyres at "Cargo club" which used to be on the sit of the B&Q in Wednesbury, opposite ikea. £6.30 an hour... not bad at the time.

 

[ufkacbln]

Anyone who remembers their first wage is either lying or gives too much of a sh*t about money

I have a file that contains the first pay slip from each of my jobs

 

[martint235]

Tape monkey at a carpet factory. Start at 5pm Monday to Friday, make sure everyone is logged off the system, put two backup tapes in and start the backup job. Go and play pool against the security guard for a couple of hours then go and replace the first tape. Go back around 9ish, put the tapes away in a safe, start a smaller backup, finish that at 10pm. In local pub (which had a strange view of licensing hours so didn't close till 1ish) by 10.30pm. £75 of your English pounds per week take home.

Notable for drinking some of the contents of the CEOs drinks cabinet and also for logging the system console off the mainframe (not recommended)

Oh and I got overtime once a month running the statements print job overnight.

 

[classic33]

Delivering leaflets, whilst at school, for two local shops. Not much but it was just over £2 an hour starting out.

Then onto a YOP, working alongside the CAT, the YTS came later.

 

[byegad]

I delivered flowers for my Uncle who was, strangely enough, a florist. Saturday mornings riding in the van and popping out to deliver them while he turned the van round. Pay was 2s6d for the morning and 5s if I was needed in the afternoon, which wasn't often enough for my income!

 

[Smithbat]

Working on a market stall in 1989 when I was 14, I got £7 to do from 8-6 on a Saturday and £10 for the same on a Sunday, I thought I was as rich as Croesus.

 

[swee'pea99]

Pay was 2s6d for the morning

Blimey, he just didn't care, did he, your Uncle? Died a pauper no doubt...

 

[iateyoubutler]

My first paid job was back in 1993, my mum was running a school kitchen and she employed me, for a grand total of 2 hours/week to go around the school grounds (in all bloody weathers!) picking up litter. £6.30 was a lot of money to a 16 year old then!

 

[Drago]

I delivered flowers for my Uncle who was, strangely enough, a hit man.

FTFY.

 

[jhawk]

I worked as a room cleaner in a local inn!