Your teenage/ student jobs

[slowwww]

Paper rounds 6 days a week from 12-15 and then worked as a salesman/storeman in a hardware shop. The latter was hard work but great as the Manager/Manageress were an absolute joy to work for. They were a married couple in their 60s, he with a devilish sense of humour and the uncanny knack for impersonating customers immediately after they’d left the shop.

Aged 17 I turned up for work one Saturday morning with my first ever hangover, feeling like I’d waken from an autopsy. Bert and Jo took one look at my greenish countenance and said that the sun loungers that were stored on the third floor needed a thorough ‘sorting’, meaning that I should go and sleep it off. She even brought me a cup of tea after a couple of hours!

I still have very fond memories of them 35 years later when I see the old shop which has long-since been changed into a trendy café.

 

[mjr]

school coach from junior school onward . local school at the time was for what they would call reception now i guess .

Place I lived had what were called school buses but you couldn't really count on them to get you to school at any particular time... hence, the bike.

 

[RWright]

In elementary school years I started out helping prime (pick) tobacco on my great uncles farm, didn't last long at that maybe a day or two. I then helped get up eggs at my grandmother's neighbor's chicken egg type chicken houses, lasted a little while there until the ammonia smell was too much for me. Middle school I tried tobacco priming again for a different farmer. We only worked a half day that day(was too hot in the afternoon) but I never went back, by noon I pretty much had figured out that tobacco priming was not one of my career goals.

In high school I worked for about two weeks at a small mom and pop restaurant. I washed dishes, mopped floors, cleaned restrooms and cleaned the grease filters from the kitchen range hood. I realized fairly quickly that the food service industry was not on my career goal list either. I soon after went to work at an automobile service station. I pumped gas, washed cars, and on Saturdays washed medium size trucks for the local flower company. I even got to change some alternators and do other minor mechanical jobs. My last year of high school I only had to go to school until noon so I progressed to a job as a pressman for my neighbor's printing shop.

In college i worked as a beverage store clerk (beer and wine sales), gas station attendant, bar tender, summer job as helper for a heating and air conditioning company and again got a pressman job at print shop in the town i moved to.

I didn't include mowing lawns for money because that was not voluntary. As soon as i left home at 17 my dad bought a riding mower for the other kids he paid to mow it. I had to use a push mower from when i was 12 years old until i moved away from home.

 

[KneesUp]

I worked Saturday mornings in an iron-mongery warehouse when I was at school. The 'outers' of brass washers were labelled at 50kg. I don't think they were quite that, but they were heavy, and all were lifted by hand. It paid quite well for the time and in hindsight I have probably never been leaner.

As a student I worked in the summer break for an exam board collating and preparing results for GCSE and A-levels. That paid quite well too because you had to work quickly but accurately. If they liked you, they employed you at later to send out mock papers, because you couldn't just download them then. I must have done ok because I worked there three summers, two Easters and for a month or so after I graduated until I had to go on jury service (two cases, both guilty)

After graduating and before I got a full time permanent job I worked in a warehouse for Dixons, at a chocolate factory, at a car loan company (who I remember almost burned me as a witch when I told them how to do a mail merge) and at a major high street bank creating accounts for students - data protection wasn't all that in those days, so me and one of the other trusted temps were sent off to the old branch down the high street with a rucksack full of account applications and accompanying proofs of identity to use the computers there because there weren't enough in the new branch, and the old building handn't been emptied. This also meant that the snooker table was still in the staff room, so we worked out that if we did about 1.5x the applications as the main branch they were happy. And yes, we were both temps that had been with the bank for a week or so before we got 'trusted' status and were sent off with a bag full of photocopies of passports.

 

[Globalti]

Most enjoyable job I had was as night porter at the Gosforth Park Hotel in the mid 70s, it had an Egon Ronay starred restaurant and after a week or so I realised I should be having something to eat during the night, which was when I discovered the fridges, which were an absolute Aladdin's cave of delicious food. Sometimes when guests used to come in late and hungry I'd make them an absolutely mahoosive lashed-up sandwich and take it up to their rooms, no doilies or vases of flowers on the tray, just a decent sandwich with the crusts left on, and I would never give them a bill to sign. There was one night when three drunken reps came and and told me to procure "three harlots" for them, which job I passed over to Billy the head porter. I also used to have to do a clock round, which was when you had to visit about 40 different places in the hotel and turn a key in a clock thingy that you carried around your shoulder to prove you'd been there for insurance purposes. Walking around an hotel late at night you would see a few surprising things, I can tell you. Several people owe me a drink in return for my discretion!

I also worked a lot for Hertz at Newcastle central station, their depot was in an amazing old livery stable. We used to jump into five cars, usually Granada Ghias and Capris, and race down to Marble Arch to deliver them, then pile into one car and sleep while one unfortunate soul got to drive us all back. Many of the drivers were Police officers moonlighting, which was quite educational. In those days you could race down the A1M and not get stuck in traffic jams. Our best time was Newcastle to Marble Arch in 4 hours 30.

Another job was working as a driver for John Nixon Plant Hire in Newcastle, belting around the city delivering small plant and Hydrovane compressors to building sites, many of them were the new Tyneside Metro. I had a few hair-raising moments but never crashed anything. Also valeting cars at Adams & Gibbon who sold Vauxhalls and got one of the first Datsun franchises; I remember the fist Datsun Cherries coming in and being blown away at how nice they were to drive. Later on I had a job driving 3 ton lorries with air brakes for Vestric, which was the most exhausting job I ever did as you had to concentrate so hard and learn all the routes (no twatnav in those days, just maps and using your head). I came very close to ripping all the scaffolding off the front of Stafford General Hospital one fine day. Another job filling a huge warehouse full of thousands of rolls of rockwool, which was hot sweaty work in high summer. We used to get about 7 artics a day coming in and we had to empty them then stack the rolls right up to the ceiling. Some of the drivers who were in a hurry could be persuaded to open the back doors, reverse fast down the alley in the warehouse then hit the brakes so half the cargo flew out of the back, saving everybody a lot of time.

 

[Donger]

"Crappiest jobs?" said the original poster...... My first student holiday job was in a sewage works.
There were two of us doing mostly general painting, gardening and lawn mowing duties, but we skived quite a lot. There was a very inviting road layout in the grounds that resembled a race track. When the boss was away, we would take it in turns to set lap times in the dumper truck. By the time I left to go back to university I was the holder of the lap record. My colleague and rival mis-judged a corner on one occasion and had to jump off before the dumper came to a sticky end in a sludge bed and had to be towed out backwards by a Landrover. Nobody shopped us, but we had the unenviable job of washing the sewage off the dumper before the boss returned.

 

[midlife]

Schoolboy job = paper round
Teenage job = working in a bike shop
Student job = evening dental nurse (yep)

Then into full time employment....

Shaun

 

[TVC]

As a student I worked summer holidays at Walkers Crisps, very well paid at the time but mind numbing. The worst job there was working the waste table. The bagging was automatic and any packs that were under weight or hadn't sealed were rejected automatically and dumped in a container. These were then wheeled back to the start of the line where they were opened by hand an tipped back onto the line. Eight hours of opening crisp bags particularly the prawn cocktail flavour ones sends you .

However when I got the gig in the Walkers laundry that was tops, half an hour loading overalls in the machines - any valuables found went to lost property, any cash was yours. Then a couple of hours playing cards, half an hour loading driers and second wash - repeat until home time.

 

[CanucksTraveller]

I did a paper round for a few months around age 12, eventually getting fired for being late too often... I was never good at early mornings. From age 14 I worked Saturdays in a used book dealer, then later in a bike shop two doors down.
At 17 I left my A levels intending to join the forces, but with a 6 month wait for my intake I went working full time in a French bakery making croissants to make some cash. That was good money, but quite hard work and more silly o'clock starts... I think it was a 4am clock on, although we were done for about 1 in the afternoon.
I also did some (unlawful) evening and weekend bar work in a pub whose landlady turned a blind eye to my age as she was so short of staff. I enjoyed that work and the tips weren't too bad.

 

[Jenkins]

In my early teens I had an evening and a Sunday paper round.

While in 6th Form and for a year afterwards I was a bingo caller.

The Civil Service then got hold of me for the last 5 months of my teenage years.

 

[growingvegetables]

Not my student job, thankfully; my then boss's son - didn't want a job on the estate. Went to a then well-known bacon and pork products manufacturer.

Worked on part of the line, wearing a great big leather apron. There was a great gutter thing which took the blood (and bits) from the slaughter shed through to the blackpudding-making shed. His job was to stand on a platform right over the "blood gutter", and howk out the miscellaneous unwanted lumps and gubbins.

On his own. If he needed a loo break, he needed a manager's permission so that the flow could be stopped.










Took all of four months before management spotted why he'd never requested a loo break. Summarily dismissed, he was.

 

[slowmotion]

I signed up on the books of Manpower for any temp jobs that were going locally. I got sent to a small factory that processed the front axles of Lansing Bagnall fork lift trucks. After three days they realised that I wasn't the fully qualified spray painter that Manpower had told them I was, and that I'd never actually held a spray gun in my life. It wasn't a skill I had ever claimed either.

I imagine a lot of fork trucks rusted away like Fiats about four years later.

 

[SteCenturion]

Leigh Cats + Dogs Home just off the East Lancs?

It must've been going some years then.

Yeah you're right @stephec ....

I think the years were '84 & 85'.

Saw a colleague clamped by a Staffie doing that job.
Loved the dogs, hated the $#!T & the smell of the incinerator.

 

[ColinJ]

In 1974, when I was 18 and it was easy to find unskilled jobs with acceptable pay ...

I had just finished my final A-level paper and was walking in to Coventry city centre when I spotted a small factory unit with a sign on the front saying "VACANCIES: apply within", so I DID. I walked in to the office to see if they had any labouring jobs. They said that they did and asked if I could start the next morning. I said that I could, but then I found out that it was a 6 am - 2 pm shift! Oh well, it would only be for the summer before I went off to do my degree. I soon got used to getting up at 05:15 and my dad got up 30 minutes earlier than usual to give me a lift there.

I've mentioned a few things about that job in the past such as unloading lorries by hand and carrying 50-75 kg of bags plastic granules on my shoulders up flights of stairs, nearly getting chomped by a plastic recycling machine which had a good go at dragging me inside ... I don't think that I have mentioned the saboteur snails before though ...

The plastic extrusion machines in our department used water cooling systems. Without a constant supply of cold water, things went wrong very quickly and we couldn't churn out our products (curtain tracks, plastic pipes etc.).

One Friday afternoon, the machines all started going wrong so we had to stop production. The foreman asked if I would come in for some Saturday overtime to help him sort the problem out. I agreed and turned up the next morning. He had started very early and had already disconnected a few water pipes in the roof of the factory above the machines. As expected, there was not much water getting through.

We systematically worked our way through the piping until we eventually found our first snail! There was a juicy big one stuck in the pipe. Then we found another, then another ...

We got hold of a ladder and clambered up onto the flat roof at the back of the factory where there was a big water tank which fed the cooling pipes. As soon as we lifted the lid off the tank, we found that the water was heaving with snails! We had to clear all of them out and then blast dead snails from practically every length of water pipe in the factory. It took us most of the day, but eventually we got the water supply sorted out ready for the early morning shift on the Monday to restart production.

I think they put some kind of, er, snail retardent in the water tank after that. Oh, and they put a mesh screen over the outlet pipe to catch any snail or other object that might have caused similar problems in the future.

It was a pretty mindless job, but I quite enjoyed it. I kept fit and made myself useful. I loved finishing work at 14:00, especially getting my wage packet on Thursday afternoon and walking down to the city centre in the summer sunshine. I'd go to HMV or Virgin Records and buy 2 or 3 albums (old skool vinyl LPs in those days), have a bag of chips, and then catch the bus home.

I walked that way on a recent visit to Coventry and found that the factory area no longer exists. The industrial buildings have all been demolished and replaced by housing.

 

[TheDoctor]

The usual run of paper rounds, working on stalls at markets and steam rallies and a few dodgy temp jobs.
I spent a week as a lorry drivers mate, navigating a 7.5 tonner round to deliver catalogue orders. That was awful!
I very nearly abandoned the job and walked home from Chelmsford.
I live nowhere near Chelmsford.
Sweeping leaves at Whipsnade Zoo was quite good, except I got pecked by a penguin!