Being remote means that the typical watercooler discussion of the office tends to be reduced to sharing neat links and cute dog photos in our Campfire rooms. This is another reason I enjoy our company meetups: it’s a chance to learn a little more about your coworkers. It’s much more rewarding when we share snippets of daily life, like our current workspace status.
One thing we definitely all have in common is a first job. That moment you get a check (or money under the table) for hard work is one you won’t forget. I can guarantee there’s great and hilarious memories behind each first job as well.
I asked everyone at 37signals what their first job was, and I was impressed by the range of jobs, including movie theater projectionist, sign painter at a butcher shop, and even a search engine submission monkey. We even had several programmers and web designers right out of the gate. Of course, the lion’s share was what you would expect: cashiers at drug stores, office suppliers, copy shops, ice cream cone slingers, waiters/waitresses, and grocery baggers.
The best part of this discussion was the amazing stories that came out of it. Here’s a few:
When I turned 14 I got a job cooking french fries. I lasted there for over a year before quitting on-the-spot after a ketchup mishap, the details of which I won’t elaborate on. Suffice it to say I stormed out covered in 3 gallons of Heinz, never to return.
One of my fondest memories to this day [as an ice cream seller] is being given a metal rod and told to “defend the product” overnight during the Taste of Chicago. [...] We drove around Buckingham Fountain in a golf cart and did donuts in the middle of Lake Shore Drive while the rest of the city was asleep.
I worked at [a video store] when I was about 15. I learned about how humans can be cheaper than robots, chased off the local hooligans who attempted to steal things daily, once attempted to ring up someone’s groceries because I wasn’t wearing my glasses, and had my bottom pinched by the elderly lady who also worked there.
My first week on the job I brokered a deal between my school and the [smoothie shop] for thousands of dollars worth of smoothies each week. They cheated me on the bonus! (Great business lesson learned.)
I sold TVs. It taught me how to sell a product, and accessories, insurance, and the like. It was also a great playground for social experiments. I would take on different accents and personalities to see if it affected the way a TV was sold. I had way too much fun with it.
What was your first job? Do you know what your coworkers’ first job was? Ask, and I bet you’ll learn something new about who you work with.
Thanks to Jeremy for feedback.
Ger
on 25 Mar 13My first job was at 11 when every Monday my dad would pull me out of school to deliver raw meat all around Ireland.
Besides making less of a pip-squeak (it was pretty physically demanding), it thought me to get an education cos I sure didn’t want to deliver meat all my life.
Kevin P.
on 25 Mar 13My first actual job, one that wasn’t working for my dad on weekends, was as a bus boy at a restaurant named “The Firetower” in the Adirondacks. My pay was 10 percent of the waitresses’ tips, plus an apparently random amount that the owner would pull out of the cash register every night, while trading between his pockets and the till. I learned that you can put Sysco ketchup in Heinz bottles, that you can easily live on one calzone and a few mozzarella sticks for a day, and how to spot a big water drinker when they come through the door.
Also, the Firetower burned to the ground before I returned the next summer. How strange.
natalie
on 25 Mar 13I worked at a pizza place and had to wear a giant pizza suit. Instead of giving the samples to potential customers, I would sit in the alley and eat the samples.
Martin
on 25 Mar 13My first job was doing whatever the owner of a general store told me to during school holidays. The store sold all sorts of cheap goods to the poorest of the poor in our town. There was a multitude of lessons learnt including: 1. This type of work would never look good on my CV despite what my Father told me. 2. Hard work doesn’t always pay, especially if the intimidating owner ‘forgets’ to pay you – several times. 3. I learnt a lot more from watching TV than I ever did from the soul-destroying work I performed in that shop for a pittance. 4. The smell of ‘achar’ (google it!) will eventually seep into your skin and invade your dreams. 5. I’d much rather work smart than work hard.
Daniel Zarick
on 25 Mar 13Referee for soccer games. I often had fights with parents who didn’t like my calls.
Adam Wride
on 25 Mar 13Popping and flavoring gourmet popcorn for an aunt’s store when I was 14. Did an early morning WaPo route and worked at an FBO fueling/moving little planes around when I was 16. Great fun.
jeff white
on 25 Mar 13My first job was working for my grandfather, every saturday doing whatever he needed help with. I mowed the lawn, weeded the garden, sanded old rusty things that I didn’t understand, and generally learned a work ethic unlike any I’d ever experienced. I started this around age 8, and worked for him off and on up until I was 16 or so and got real jobs that prevented me from being able to help him. I think he then hired some neighbourhood kids to do what I used to, but most of them didn’t really get just how hard he was to work for and most of them simply couldn’t handle the expectations.
I then had a series of ‘real’ jobs that had an actual paycheque, not just cash from my grandfather’s wallet at the end of a long day. These were pretty weird—I worked as a mussel farmer on weekends, freezing my ass off out in the middle of the Atlantic hauling in mussel socks, and then spending 4 hours picking the beards off the damn things in a freezing boathouse. I also mounted posters, cleaned B&B rooms and spent my 16th summer working as a gopher at a graphic design studio. I’m pretty sure I had all of these jobs around the same time and I can’t recall which came first.
Benjy
on 25 Mar 13I worked for a collegiate clothing store in my town, and made the mistake of going in to apply on the day before our town’s the annual “Sidewalk Sale” weekend—it was the first summer in 6-7 years I hadn’t been away at camp, so I didn’t even know it existed! Talk about being thrown into the line of fire! The job was fun the rest of the summer, but then most of the staff went off to college and I ended up being among the more senior staff. I ended up getting scheduled for more shifts than the agreed upon amount once school began in the fall. And most Thurs nights when store was open late ( not 1x month), because of some vaguely sexist thing that it wasn’t safe for female employees to be out after dark. When it began interfering with homework and extra-curriculars, I ended up quitting.
Matt Henderson
on 25 Mar 13My very first job was picking up rocks in my uncle’s back yard for $5. Awful.
Second job was as a bagger and floor-mopper at Kroger. “Mayonnaise spill on isle 5!” Pretty awful, but got better once I was “promoted” to a cashier.
Third job was in college as a co-op at Georgia Power’s Plant Yates. That was supposed to be “related to your electrical engineering studies” — but they ended up having me running a long thermometer into a hot boiler and cleaning pressure gauges.
After university, things got a lot better.
Alan
on 25 Mar 13Mine was when 14 and plucking Turkeys for Christmas, like Ger, here in Ireland.
There were specialists who would break the Turkeys neck to kill it before you start plucking. You needed to pluck them while still warm.
One eager chap wouldn’t wait and decided to break the neck himself only to proceed to pull the head clean off, blood everywhere and Turkey flapping away.
Oh the memories of an Irish childhood.
Jon R.
on 25 Mar 13The parks department in the city I lived in had a summer program for high school kids that paid minimum wage for building trails in the various parks. One of my supervisors smoked, but only the first half of the cigarette because the other part was “worse for you”.
Rob
on 25 Mar 13My first job was in a hardware store. The owner also did lawn mower repairs and during the summer he would leave me minding the store while he went off to watch the cricket. I learnt to deal with all the people that came in to collect their mowers that he promised would be fixed by the weekend but he hadn’t repaired yet.
During the summer he would hand me the keys and he would go off on holiday for a week and I would be in charge of everything, I was 15. The best thing was I earned enough to by a TV for my bedroom so I could plug in my Commodore 64 in and play games without disrupting the rest of the family.
Ashe Dryden
on 25 Mar 13Florist when I was 14. I thought it’d be a cheerful job, getting to play with flowers all day. Sadly, the people who are buying flowers are due to funerals or fights.
On the plus side, the owner was an Israeli expat. I learned a ton about Israel, the culture, the food, and heard tons of neat stories.
Ricardo Vazquez
on 25 Mar 13My first job was at a movie theatre serving popcorn. I was taught how to find happiness amidst gluttony and wisps of burnt butter. I learned how to smile with purpose, regardless of the person who was receiving it.
Dan Magnuszewski
on 25 Mar 13When I was 12, I began mowing my neighbors lawn and cleaning out their cars (they were smokers and during a time when there were ash trays) for $10 each.
John Miller
on 25 Mar 13My first “real” job was dishwasher at Ponderosa as soon as I could legally work at 16. Prior to that, I spent summers picking blueberries for 10 cents a pound, delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, and anything else I could do to earn money to buy computer equipment to feed my habit.
Michael
on 26 Mar 13Kevin P., I must know. How do you spot a big water drinker?Because I totally am one.
My first job was gofer/supply runner at an apple orchard. The pay was minimum wage but I had unlimited free cider and donuts (and sometimes pie.) When the season slowed down I’d sit in the kitchen and listen to the farmers’ wives who worked there talk about the business of farming. I’m fond of those memories.
Ashraf
on 26 Mar 13When I was 7 or 8, my brother and I peddled ‘tapai’ (fermented cassava) from door to door in our little village. Once in a while, we’d harvest kangkong from a nearby swamp and sell them in the market for pennies.
Dave
on 26 Mar 13First ‘over the counter’ job was washing dishes at a pastry shop. Still (!) the only job I was ever fired from, owner was terrible to all of us except the teenage girls whom he basically harassed openly. Quickly swapped over to a bus boy (and eventually waiter) at a french restaurant where I learned more about human nature (both good and bad) than I have in the 20 years since. I strongly recommend that everyone work in the food service industry in some capacity to pick up the same life lessons all of us did LOL. Fun topic.
Tim
on 26 Mar 13First job was at the Perth Royal Show when I was 15. I’d sit in a bunch of mannequins wearing a devil mask and suddenly jump out with a plastic pitchfork scaring people senseless! Pay was peanuts but I’m not sure I’ve ever achieved the same level of job satisfaction.
Michael
on 26 Mar 13The day after I graduated eighth grade I landed a job as a dishwasher/busboy at a retreat center run by the Sisters of Mercy. Between morning and afternoon shifts I’d either work for the chefs who ran their catering businesses from the kitchen, or loiter about the grounds putting some distance on my summer reading lists. The Archbishop would visit for the occasional weekend, and I was allowed to borrow his little metal rowboat between shifts. I spent that rest of the summer doing the usual 14-year-old stuff – performing impromptu experiments with dry ice, making ice sculptures in the freezer with a chainsaw, swinging along rafters to clean ceiling fans, dodging nuns with overdeveloped senses of righteousness, reading out on the water, etc.
One afternoon the rowboat sank right out from underneath me, and I was stung by jellyfish swimming back to shore. Later that same day I broke a dish and it sliced my knee, and I had to get stitches and a tetanus shot. I experienced a wicked reaction to the tetanus shot and was out for a few days. The morning I got back I got blasted in the face with a bucket of fresh-squeezed lemon juice. Then I puked all over one of the chefs after he punched me right in the tetanus shot.
I learned a ton that summer – about people and about how to adapt to ratcheting circumstances outside my control.
Ryan
on 27 Mar 13My dad got me a gig working at my uncle’s head shop where I sold things I never new existed: tazers, cable descrambler boxes, black light posters and ‘incense burners’, ahem.
I left for greener pastures delivering subs shortly after I was held up at machete point by a neighborhood teenager in a ski mask.. Those were the days… or not.
Yeah, definitely not.
Sam
on 27 Mar 13I sold weed out of a Burger King drive-thru. And Burger King food sometimes as well.
I highly suggest a service job for youngsters. Those early “dealing with human beings” reps that I took have helped me throughout life. Waiting tables is a great way to learn how to deal with customers as well. 10-20 interactions per night and before you know it you’ve got a real skill set – empathy, fixing problems, suggestive selling, etc.
I’ll push my kids towards a service job that provides lots of reps prior to college. I hope they won’t sell weed, however. The risk is too high and the margin too low.
Steve
on 28 Mar 13My first job was at the age of 15 at a drive-in movie walking around the back of the lot to make sure that people didn’t sneak in. The first movie that I worked at was “The Joy of Sex”. Later moved to the projectionist position, so I was paided to watch movies.
This discussion is closed.