Jobs you had before you found your place in the world

[CascadeLuke]

Great thread.
Started as a paperboy in 8th grade delivering 90 every morning on my bike.
Car wash in high school with a group of awesome dudes.
First job in college was at SportsClub LA. Lots of hottie housewife types and famous people. This was back when D Rodman came to town and that dude was making a scene there all the time. Magic Johnson was part owner and a chill welcoming guy. Highlight was serving at a younger Pam Anderson bday party in the restaurant.
Then a window construction Co that showed me central and Southern California. Highlight was spending a summer in Santa Barbara. Low point was a month in Blythe AZ.
Later worked for the Mariners and Seahawks as a server in the suites as I got myself started in mortgage. Those were some amazing days and sport moments. I’d always work my way down to the players. One time Ichiro gave me a mizuno batting glove. The Seahawks were rolling back then and I got paid to watch. Worked Paul Allen’s suite a few times.
Then on to where I’m at now but yearning for more.

[whipski]

150 man hard rock silver and gold mine, the Blackcloud, under Mt Sherman, Leadville, CO, I was 20 yrs, 1200-2500 feet underground

[Gepeto]

Does coke dealer in the mid eighties count as a job?

OP doesn’t say a job with a pay stub

*

Started way young - 10-12yrs old dad would drag me to work; 25¢ an hour to make boxes. Mom bitched when it became regular and I got bumped to 75¢. At 13 I was crosscutting redwood in front of a 12" radial arm at 4 bucks and hour.

At 14 I got a spot on a crew of steeplejackers (painters that do the high work) as a ground man through nepotism. At 16 I got in the air – exclusively rope scaffold and bosun chairs. Mostly the container cranes in port Newark – Elizabeth marine terminal and plenty of petroleum holding tanks along the river. Some hotel and bridge work.

Company quickly expanded to a GC role (more CM with most trades farmed out) and I spent summers floating from sub to sub. Running a pipe machine for a warehouse sprinkler installation. A month with the paperhangers turned into weekend work during the school year when it was just too cold/rainy/windy to hang rope. Framing and took to finish work pretty quick. Some electrical/hvac/pile driving/masons/tilers/tarrazo/plextone & electrostatic finishes in the field/demolition/paving/carpet/vct.

As soon as I could drive I was drumming in a 5pc wedding band on weekends along with a gig in a CW house band on wed/fri/sat nights. Not my genre… quite the grind. The commute (67 miles each way) was the suck @ 17yrs old, but it paid well/incash. All while being under age.

Dad wouldn’t support a major in music, so FU = Right out of HS I landed a job at a Midas Muffler shop and fledged my way into my own mechanic’s bay within a few weeks (and my soul to the SnapOn Guy). Learned to weld, run a pipe bender and a metal lathe….. still gigin nights and weekends.

Things kinda went sideways Nov of that year. Totaled a 3 week old Coupe-Deville, wrecked a 24’ stake truck and got my luxury ride destroyed all inside of two weeks.

Time to leave...

WWII version of the GI bill was as good as an education and was about to expire.

Joined on the 17^th. - Sworn in and gone on the 21^st.
Confidential, Secret, Top Secret and Nuclear Surety to go with 3 stripes – in the first 105 days…..

eta; the above looks like nothing but soul crushing work but there were so many different people, crazy shit, fun stuff, hysterical goof ball pranks and shenanigans, dangerous moments and slacking. Learned a metric fuckton of shit that still serves me well. Along with important lessons like seeing my first person die and watching a guy get a blow job while standing at a bar. Such a wide array of exposure for a teenager.

[Mustonen]

I used to work as a deckhand. It was a summer gig in late HS and college. I did it for five seasons...

My captain passed away recently. Unexpectedly. So those days have been on my mind a bit lately. In times not marred by the pandemic I tell myself I’d have made the drive to attend his funeral. Maybe I wouldn’t have. He made an impact on me, though, and knowing that he isn’t still wandering around his small town makes me sad. He must have been in his 40s or early 50s when I knew him 17 years ago.

The ferry boat operation was run by three brothers. The eldest ran the business side of things and took occasional shifts as captain. It was a seasonal gig for him, though. His “real job” and home were on the other side of the state. The youngest seemed to come and go a little. Some seasons he’d run as many as half the shifts. Some seasons he’d be chasing other things in his lifted pickup, usually some girl (or the same girl).

The middle brother, the one who passed recently, was the operational guy. He was always there. He was also the most colorful. Larger than life. A caricature. He was mercurial and often full of shit and braggadocio….but somehow in a way that was authentically him. He spent his summers running a ferry boat 54 miles across Lake Superior and back again. I don’t know how he spent his winters in a small town with fewer than 50 year-round inhabitants, I just know what he talked about in the 25 sq foot pilot house. Parties and bears and drinking and a handful of women, though mostly just one that was on again and off again who I never met. I wish I’d written down some of the stories, but it’s probably for the best that I didn’t. I gather he was something of a heartthrob in his younger days. Not from him… I remember when I got the job and told my manager at the grocery store where I worked about my new scheduling constraints, she got this faraway look in her eyes and kind of mumbled something about how good he used to be at tennis and other things and won’t I please tell him hi for her.

The boat carried up to 100 passengers to Isle Royale. Mostly backpackers. Some kayakers. Most only stayed a couple days. Some diehards would stay up to two weeks. It was limited by how much shit they could haul in a backpack. Crew on the boat consisted of the captain and two deckhands. We’d get there at 6:30am to clean the boat. Vacuum the floors, wipe down the surfaces, clean the bathrooms. Stock the snack bar and get coffee started. If we got done early we’d have a bit of a lull before boarding.

We kept a close eye on the captain during this time to gauge his mood and get a feel for how the trip would go. Jokes in the pilothouse, or make ourselves scarce? I remember getting it wrong one morning early on. We had a full boat that day and 100 people were lined up, but we had about 5 minutes before boarding. I put my hands in my pockets and leaned against the railing on the dock, preparing myself for the sweaty, back breaking task of packing a hundred backpacks into the 4 foot high hold and then strapping a half dozen kayaks to the top deck. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?” Bellowed at me from behind. I probably jumped a foot. “Don’t you dare put your hands in your fucking pockets!” Then close up, foreheads about three inches apart, rage in his eyes and literally spitting mad, he reminded me, loudly, of all the things that I could be checking on while we wait to board. Crumbs on the countertops, spots on the mirrors in the bathroom. It was a show for the passengers. I’m not sure why they needed it, but he felt they did. Maybe it soothed something in him. Maybe he had a bad night. Maybe I just needed to get my shit together. Red faced, I shuffled off to spray things with windex. I never put my hands in my pockets again, though. Not on the clock. Later that shift he told a few jokes and let me take an extra break in the pilothouse, which I took as something of apology. Honestly, this was probably one of the best lessons I learned at any job. Not so much about hands in pockets as about maintaining appearances and judging the room and not letting your guard down.

The boat made just over 12 knots. Not fast. It took around 4 hours to get to the island, depending on weather. We rotated shifts on calm days, 45 minutes at the snack bar, 45 minutes at the wheel, and 45 minutes downtime. Downtime was spent either on the top deck when the weather was nice, or in the pilot house when it wasn’t. On calm days it was the best job I’ve ever had. Nothing, to this day, beats almost an hour of sitting in the sunshine on a lawnchair with a good book, snacking on whatever the snack bar wasn’t going to miss that day, with crystal clear lake superior stretching to the horizon in every direction. Almost as good were fog days. A jacket and a blanket. 50 feet of water and then just milky white clouds. As long as you stayed out of the diesel exhaust, everything smelled so fresh.

Rough days were different. We still kept to roughly 45 minute increments, but took fewer shifts as pilot and spent more time monitoring passengers, handing out barf bags, keeping the heads clean, etc.. Really rough days had little structure. It was walking passengers to the bathroom, walking them back, cleaning up vomit. On both rough and really rough days you’d try to put an eye on all passengers every few minutes at the top of such a trip, until they settled in and you knew who was going to lose their cookies and who was going to sleep. You’d pray none of those motherfuckers went to the bathroom to puke, and you’d mention it more than once to anybody who looked green. “How ya feeling?” “Not great.” “Well, keep an eye on that horizon.” On rough days you’d tell them that if they felt up to it, they might stand at the rail on the back deck, and if they were going to puke that was the best place for it. If they didn’t feel up to it, or if it was a really rough day, you’d hand them a barf bag and tell them good luck and to stay out of the goddamned bathroom. The bathrooms were tiny, with a steel door and no window. Spending 5 minutes in there trying to wipe up somebody’s morning blueberry muffin and coffee, while the world heaved around you, was a challenge for the most cast iron stomach (which I didn’t have).

We saw lots of rough trips. We had eight to twelves a couple times a season. Twelve to fifteens every season or two. The biggest I remember was fifteen to twenties. A couple seasons after I started we drew the line at twelves. If a twelve foot wave was forecasted as a possibility we’d cancel. Wasn’t worth the risk to passengers. The problem with the big lake is that it’s hard to predict in the morning what the lake is going to look like in the afternoon, so we’d find ourselves out there anyways. The boat itself was more than capable. It was a big round steel plug that felt every wave. There was no clean slicing through smaller seas. A four foot wave made it buck. The concern was mostly around somebody falling and justifying why you made the trip on a day with twelve foot waves. The irony is that people being people, they’re more likely to do something stupid and bang their head on the deck on a sunny, slightly choppy day than on a storm day when they keep their ass in their seat.

The worst weather was three to five foot waves. Nobody was scared of a three foot wave, so they’d hear the forecast, skip the Dramamine, and have a second muffin. They got careless moving around the cabins. They’d pretend they weren’t going to get sick. A three foot wave is bigger than you think and the uninitiated grossly exaggerate their size. They tell their friends about the six to eight footers they saw on the lake. Not on purpose, it’s just hard to look at a thing that has a face as big as you and with a shifting horizon judge how tall it really is. The waves on the big lake are steep; they aren’t swells like you’d see on an ocean. A 3 foot wave has a 6 foot face that feels like it’s straight up and down, even if it’s more like 45 degrees. Six to eight foot waves begin to feel a little bit…scary? Not concerning, really, but there’s a lot of power in a wave that big. You began to feel pretty small. Your world shrinks to just you, and those waves, and the boat. It’s easy enough to maintain your horizon and the outside world for an hour. Maybe two. But with a headwind and six to eight foot waves that 4 hour trip easily stretched to 5, and by hour three there’s not a lot else worth your consideration or your time beside the here and the now.

I remember one time I escorted an older passenger from the back deck to the seat inside the cabin, next to his less able-bodied wife. Waves were probably four to six feet. It was cold, probably in the 40s outside. She didn’t look well. I offered her a bag and a bottle of water and a blanket, and asked her if there was anything she needed. She turned red and told me, very matter of factly, that she had pooped her pants. I blanked. I told her I could help her get to the bathroom. We have paper towels. We have garbage bags. I didn’t know what else to do. So that’s what we did. Her husband accompanied her. I felt awful. I went and told the captain. “Are you fucking kidding me??” No… We checked on them a few times. They eventually made it out. The bathroom was a mess.

I didn’t have an iron stomach. I got sick on most rough trips. I would push around, tend the snack bar, hand out barf bags, hand out blankets, lean over the back railing and puke, drink some water, rinse, wash, repeat. Staying busy helped. Every time I got sick I told myself this was the last time. You could not pay me enough to be sick. Every time was a lie….You’d get to dry land and feel the sunshine and eat a big sandwich or pizza that tasted amazing on your empty stomach and you’d get a little surge of adrenaline and forget about it.

[californiagrown]

I graduated college in the teeth of the recession majoring in an industry very reliant on the economy, and my parents charged near market rate rent for room/board, but allowed me to use one of their cars so i stayed with them. For the first year i worked an internship with my hometown's public works dept 8-4, basically marking sidewalk for replacement and measuring the total lengths of cracks in a street to backcheck contractors sealant costs, then worked 3-4 evenings a week selling tickets at sports game venues for the local Pac-10 university, and then worked 9-4 in the actual ticket office on weekends. 4 days a week i also worked graveyard at 24-hr fitness scanning passes and re-racking weights. I caught sleep when i could, and there would be times where i wouldn't go home for 2-3 days at a time just catching 1 hr naps in the parking lot of my next job. I worked with folks working their first job after leaving prison, was propositioned to be a well paid pool-boy by a gay coworkers rich aquaintence, and saw a full on mexican futbol riot all around my bulletproof glass encased ticket booth (helluva view). Any free time i had i was hammering phones and sending cover letters trying to get "a real job"- i literally had no social life. Finally did get a job, and i was the first hire after the recession for the Engineering firm in the bay area that does all the high profile jobs despite having a 3.2GPA from a shitty out-of-state state school and competing against stanford/cal/UCLA/etc grads. It was a good experience, and i think it has served me well keeping perspective on where i am at now, and what its like to actually work hard to make ends meet.