I worked in a quarry picking building stone by the ton. Hot and swung a sledge hammer all day. Paid well for a college kid.
I also worked in an industrial steel yard cutting scrap steel with a torch one summer. Railroad cars with big magnets would dump I beams next to you to be processed. The hard hat wasn’t going to save you. The other employees came from the local Philadelphia prison. It was bad but I was a union employee and made really good money.
I was an insurance agent. I had to go out and collect premiums from people who could only pay their premiums week-by-week. It was bad and I was awful at it as I was young and more interested in chasing women. But it was the job that motivated me to go back to college.
I worked in a quarry picking building stone by the ton. Hot and swung a sledge hammer all day. Paid well for a college kid.
I also worked in an industrial steel yard cutting scrap steel with a torch one summer. Railroad cars with big magnets would dump I beams next to you to be processed. The hard hat wasn’t going to save you. The other employees came from the local Philadelphia prison. It was bad but I was a union employee and made really good money.
Washing cars at one of the local dealerships. The car geek in me loves driving 200k dollar cars semi regularly, and i’m detail oriented so doing hour and a half details on new cars being sold was my dream. But with our smoke, heat, and some of the worst management I’ve ever seen, it ruined the fun pretty quick unfortunately.
Summer of 1980 I signed up at a temp agency, I was called to unload a 45 foot trailer filled with 80lb sacks of flour, another day was peeling labels off soup cans, 100’s and 100’s of cans…lol But the worst of worst was getting sent to an insulation factory to help clean the machines, I itched for a week…lol
.
i had some crappy summer jobs. At 16 i was in the pit of an under-construction massive bus garage knocking concrete off a rubber sealing belt with an iron bar for days on end. The friction with bar pushed concrete dust into my hands causing the skin to go hard, shine, and crack. other days i’d be cleaning up inside sites and inhale loads of dust. EHS was in its early days.
However, i have a different take on these things. Sure the job was physically tough and mentally boring, and paid about $1 per hour- but i knew it was only for the summer. i was going to leave, get more qualifications, go to college and get a professional job. There were 16 year old kids on that site doing the same job who didn’t have any other options. Just happy to be working.That was probably going to be their life for the next 40 years. They could look around and see versions of their future - 10 years older, 20 years older, 30 years older…and the guy in his 50s who looks 70 and is so beaten up all he can do is the non-physical stuff like sweeping. I would find that a whole lot worse.
In college, my fraternity would do work for a waste management company to raise money. We would send about 4 guys every weekend of the summer to a different county in Mississippi (everyone had to do at least one a summer). The county residents would bring in all of the chemicals and paint that they weren’t allowed to throw away normally.
Wearing hazardous material suits in +100 degree weather, we would take the paint and other containers from cars and trucks, then dump those various paints and chemicals into large drums. Fill up a drum and move it into the truck. Very hard hot work, which probably didn’t pass any OSHA regulations. It was good money, which allowed us to throw some pretty solid parties. Pretty sure everyone that did these trips graduated, at least in part due to not wanting to ever have to work like that again.
Worked a week on the killing floor as a gut sweeper in a packing plant. Needless to say my next job as a sack boy in HS seemed good.
My 13 year old summer I worked at Domino’s Pizza…specifically I dressed up as the “Noid” (you guys remember that?). 3.5 months of sweating my balls off in a costume standing on the corner of Spokane/Seltice Avenue Post Falls ID and getting sucker punched by older kids on skateboards…lot of character built that summer.
Previous summer a buddy and myself signed up for a random jobs service. We thought we hit it really big when we were informed that one of the head honchos of Star Wars special effects (A New Hope, and Empire if I recall correctly) bought a large estate in Rathdrum ID and needed help landscaping it. We were jacked!
…this guy (I really need to look him up) ended up yelling and berating myself and my buddy for our 12 year old bodies not being able to roll boulders half our size as quickly as he would like. I also recall asking for water was a big no-no. It was a shit week and we disliked the guy so much we did not even bother trying to bring Star Wars up.
Still a big fan of Star Wars and pizza though.
I worked at Hot Dog on a Stick for a few months out of high school. The job was cool but not the perverted men who would buy lemonade just to see us in short shorts.
Summer of 77. I was working at a mobile home sales lot and going to college. My job was to wash the ceilings with bleach after it rained because the roof leaked and stained the ceiling brown. The bleach would run down my arms and give me ugly burns. The other joy of this job was people would shit in the unconnected toilets while touring the homes. Lastly the manager and his buddy defined the word sleazy.
Detroit middle school science teacher. Nothing else I’ve done comes close.
I worked at Hot Dog on a Stick for a few months out of high school. The job was cool but not the perverted men who would buy lemonade just to see us in short shorts.
Why are they perverted, Is there another reason to wear short shorts, then to get people to stare/oogle you?
I never understood this. Rates up there with face tattoos, or implants then having people complain that people stare at them. Didnt you get the decorations so people will look at it?
Had a good life…
DIshwasher at a Ponderosa for a month worked only like 4 days. Quit cause I wasn’t getting enough hours.
Some might say the years I worked at a fish market but it was fun easy work. Just smelled like fish, but after a few months, I never noticed it anymore.
Cleaning toilets at the museum (The Henry Ford) maybe, but that was only in the morning, the rest of the day was walking around dusting old cars, or sweeping the floor or carpets.
Yeah I have had pretty good jobs
I worked at Hot Dog on a Stick for a few months out of high school. The job was cool but not the perverted men who would buy lemonade just to see us in short shorts.
Why are they perverted, Is there another reason to wear short shorts, then to get people to stare/oogle you?
I never understood this. Rates up there with face tattoos, or implants then having people complain that people stare at them. Didnt you get the decorations so people will look at it?
You equate a required uniform for a job to face tattoos?
I remember my first job in high school. As inexperienced as my gf was, it was the greatest thing ever to inexperienced me. But in hindsight, it was pretty bad.
Oh, wait. Your not talking about that kind of job.
I worked at Hot Dog on a Stick for a few months out of high school. The job was cool but not the perverted men who would buy lemonade just to see us in short shorts.
The length of shorts is irrelevant and relative. I am a female and can’t speak for a perverted male but as a teenager, any man old enough to be my parent making sexual comments and innuendos, is not right in the head.
The toy section of KMart during the month before Christmas
.
Dishwasher at a Denny’s during high school and first few summers of college. I haven’t set foot in a Denny’s since then (1986).
Grave digger - not full time but part of being on a summer grounds crew with the town public works department (last few summers in college). I didn’t mind cutting lawns in parks, schools, athletic fields and even cemeteries. Usually the graves where dug by backhoe and then squared off, which wasn’t bad. One time though the grave was on a slope with a huge tree nearby and the backhoe couldn’t get in, so the two full-time guys had me dig it by hand while they then disappeared (of course, it was a very hot and humid day). I had literally just finished and climbed out of the grave as the funeral procession rolled up.
I worked at Hot Dog on a Stick for a few months out of high school. The job was cool but not the perverted men who would buy lemonade just to see us in short shorts.
Why are they perverted, Is there another reason to wear short shorts, then to get people to stare/oogle you?
I never understood this. Rates up there with face tattoos, or implants then having people complain that people stare at them. Didnt you get the decorations so people will look at it?
You equate a required uniform for a job to face tattoos?
Uhm, that was your take away? Yeah I guess I did. I just don’t get it, It would be like a hooters/twin peaks waitress complaining that guys stared at their shirts.
I’ve had some shitty construction jobs.
Also, the spot I was working was a couple hundred feet down a rocky hill from the tool can, so I had to haul a 70lbs jackhammer up and down that hill every day. I frequently got yelled at because, I don’t know, the bedrock was too hard and it was taking too long.
stripping concrete formwork in the summer. There were maybe two lifts of 3/4" form ply I had to strip, clean, then walk up a steep driveway to load on a trailer. By the end I was humping two sheets at a time up the hill at a fast pace, all afternoon, just to spite my asshole boss because I know he couldn’t keep up. I remember holding the sheets over my head as I walked thinking “well, at least I get to work in the shade…”.
worst of all was probably being a labourer for a framer. This guy would run all day, he worked at a feverish pace with no regard for safety. We would be walking on top of the exterior walls of a house with no safety gear. If you slipped you would fall 20-30’. If you hesitated he would chew you out and berate you. It sucked, but, I did conquer my fear of heights that way.
Now that I employee people in construction, I go out of my way to treat my employees well and with respect. I never got that old school mentality of being an asshole to young guys who are just trying to work hard, learn and earn a buck.