<p>The reference to the summer job “detassling” in another thread made me think about the dinosaur days back in high school (early 80’s) and the kinds of “grunt work” we did, jobs that high schoolers now wouldn’t even THINK of!! Did you have a job like that? I’ll start:</p>
<p>Here in northern Connecticut there are lots of shade tobacco fields - every summer scads of kids ended up “working tobacco”. You could do it at 15, since it was agricultural. Everyone rode to the fields in these old rickety buses. The boys were usually “pickers” in the fields, the girls usually “tablers” or “sewers” in the barns. Hot, nasty, smelly, sticky, disgusting job. You’d get covered with tar, and inevitably wind up with a terrible rash. I don’t know of ANY kids who work tobacco anymore. </p>
<p>H remembers picking blueberries…they’d hop in and stand in the back of a truck at 6am, hang on tight to the slats on the wooden sides, and bounce up to the wooded fields in Mass. to pick those little tiny wild blueberries. They had to fill up these big gold cans. Cans, and Cans, and Cans of them. We laugh thinking about who would let their kids on a vehicle like that now…there were no things as “safety violations”!!</p>
<p>Yeah, that detassling comment got me thinking. At age 12 I started delivering the morning paper. Route took and hour and had to be completed by 6 a.m. I mostly enjoyed delivery except for winter (yep, Indianapolis got that Star out every day of the 1977 and 1978 blizzards…), but I hated collecting. Did that after dark too. It wasn’t even our neighborhood, but the next one over. What were my parents thinking? People were picky too–everyone had a different way/place they wanted their paper. Nowadays, if they get it on the property, it’s good enough.</p>
<p>That work paled in comparison to detassling. We did it in the old days–no machinery to ride or automatic detasslers. We reached up and plucked every stupid tassle. Got on a bus at 6 a.m., rode to a field a ways out. We were always soaking wet from the dew and all cut up from the leaves. Or at least we were wet until the sun turned it all into a steam tunnel. I thought I was cool though, earning a “real” paycheck. </p>
<p>I do think kids today, especially kids who aren’t exposed to agricultural life, are softer. Ah…the good old days-haha.</p>
<p>My first job at age 15 was as a sort of maintenance man’s assistant at a vacation resort. Which meant that I spent most of my time as a garbage man - hoisting heavy, smelly garbage cans up onto the the truck and emptying them and later at the dump using a pitchfork to pitch all of the gargage off the truck - all for $1.25/hr. I actually first learned to drive by driving that garbage truck around.</p>
<p>But the boys doing agricutural usually had it even worse - picking rocks out of potato fields or bucking hay bales up onto trucks. Dreadful work.</p>
<p>It was my son who did the detasseling, a rite of passage for Iowa kids, even now, all though it is passing. All though it is hard, hot, wicked work, my son felt a certain satisfaction that he was asked back at the end of every day and that he worked every day of the season. In detasseling they start with big crew and as they need fewer and fewer workers each day of the season, at the end of the day they ask back the kids who work hard and fast. It is considered a badge of honor to work the whole season. I think if top schools knew just what it meant to work the whole detasseling season, they would place it right up there with cured cancer and achieved world peace.</p>
<p>Srystress, he did it walking the fields, just like the old days. He would be in the fields by 6, out by 3, home by five, eat dinner and be in bed by 6. Three weeks of that for some $500.</p>
<p>Hospital kitchen. Thick black hairnet. Sending gross patient trays through the dish machine. Making coffee for the entire hospital at 5 am. Cleaning boxes of produce out of which bugs would scurry. Andif you cut yourself badly while cleaning the produce - no worries - they just send you to the ER to get stitched up, then you finish your shift. (I did two summers of that, then switched to KMart which was actually loads of fun because I had a story to tell every night when I got off work.)</p>
<p>I worked retail (King of Prussia Mall before it was gigantic and wonderful) for awhile. The best job was driving the truck (large pick-up hauling a compressor) for my stepfather’s plumbing and heating contracting business. I went all over Philadelphia and surrounding areas- before the days of GPS. When I would go to the Temple jobsite I kept a tire iron by my seat. Very sketchy. It was fun and I met a lot of people. I like construction sites.</p>
<p>While other friends were working in retail, my friend and I got jobs in a warehouse as stockpersons. We filled orders for Hallmark stores. It was kind of fun to see the new items that were going to be on their shelves but the job was boring and dirty (lifting boxes, lots of paper cuts). The manager asked us why we chose to work there when we could be working somewhere better and we replied that we wanted to do something different. He didn’t know we were off to college later that summer.</p>
<p>Soccer referee for a long time before it got to the point where I realized that if people talked to me the same way in real life as they did when I was working a game, I’d have assaulted them. Switched to landscaping… much less stressful. And road construction crew was alright. I shoveled more gravel that summer than any human should see in a lifetime.</p>
<p>I started at 12 picking strawberries (8 cents a quart, 10 cents if you worked the Fourth of July or weekends), then at 16 graduated to electronics assembly, then to hotel laundress–where I learned that a surprising proportion of people wet the bed–then to the night shift in a rocket insulation factory. I enjoyed the last job, actually–the insulation had to be woven by two people working together, one feeding the brittle thread and one catching it with a sort of crochet hook, so you could sit and talk to your partner for the whole eight hours. The thread was made of fiberglass, asbestos, and graphite, and most of the women chain-smoked, and nobody wore a mask, so I wonder how many of them suffered lung problems later in life. That fall, while I was away at college, there was an explosion in the factory and it burned down.</p>
<p>I (female) worked as a copyboy (yes, that was my official job title) for a now defunct afternoon paper in Philadelphia. I was the first female copyboy at the paper, and I had to learn how to answer to “BOY!” being shouted across the newsroom.</p>
<p>Once called by the reporter/editor/rewrite man, you did whatever they asked. Every day (EVERY DAY!) immediately after the last edition was put to bed, the managing editor sent me across the street to buy him five rolls of Tums.</p>
<p>The worst day on the job was the day they found two teenagers–my age–murdered in the fountain at the Art Museum. The reporters were writing the story, paragraph by paragraph, in pieces, all over the newsroom. The other copyboys (there were 8 of us) and I were all running the story paragraph by paragraph down two flights of stairs to be typeset (back in the days of lead type) because the usual methods were too slow to make deadline. It was a gruesome murder and the chaos and horror of the day were overwhelming. </p>
<p>(I just tried to find the story–but it’s lost to google.)</p>
<p>I spent the several summers (after I graduated from high school and after my freshman year in college) working at the headquarters of an indoor/outdoor carpet company. Retailers would get a discount from the company if they ran ads for the products in the local newspapers or on radio/tv. The retailers had to send proof that they had placed the ads. My job was to catalog the ads that came in. I spent hours and hours looking through small town newspapers and cutting out the advertisement for the products. Radio/tv ads required that the retailer send in the script and the date/time the ad ran. I can’t remember how much they paid me, but I do remember that I thought it was a lot of money for work that was fairly easy, but boring.</p>
<p>sryrstress, your description of detassling brings back a flood of memories. I detasseled for 3 summers starting when I was 13. Soaking wet in the morning, with our tennis shoes so caked in mud that sometimes a shoe would come off when you took a step. Then, the afternoons were brutally hot. But each year there was always a group of friends that worked together and we had so much fun! I still remember sitting on the bus headed home each day calculating in my head how much I had earned so far. There was no other way for kids that age to make the kind of money we did (around $150 for 3 weeks work).
My mom made me change clothes in the garage when I got home since they were so filthy. And like lololu says, I’d have dinner, then be in bed by 6, thoroughly exhausted. </p>
<p>All in all, it was a great experience, and certainly helped with my perspective on future high school jobs. If you can do field work in the heat of the summer, you are physically capable of almost anything. An inside job with AC…piece of cake!</p>
<p>My first summer job was working at a bank that was computerizing its installment loans, so that instead of coming into the bank each month with cash and having a payment manually recorded in a sort of passbook, each borrower would have a coupon book and mail in the payment accompanied by the appropriate coupon. Huge transition for the bank, and a bigger one for the customers, who just hated the change. For each loan, I had to pull the relevant information from the loan documents, put it on a form to be used by the data entry folks (who did their magic at night), then the next day mail off the resulting coupon book with the form letter I prepared (no mail-merge in those days!)–and then field the inevitable phone call from the customer who suspected some kind of hanky panky. Not the most inspiring job, but I was sitting at a desk in an air conditioned office, and had it far better than many friends who were working in factory settings where they were allowed to go home if the temperature inside exceeded 95 degrees. I can’t remember how much I made, but I’m guessing it was miniumum wage–$1.60/hr. in those days.</p>
<p>collegeshopping - How fun that you got to be Daffy Duck.</p>
<p>My first job was selling newspapers outside of church when I was 10.</p>
<p>I worked at Dunkin Donuts all through high school.</p>
<p>I worked housekeeping at a hotel one summer in college.</p>
<p>My all time favorite college job was taking the temperature at the Hancock building in Boston. They were having trouble keeping the temp consistent throughout the building and needed someone to go from floor to floor taking and making note of the temp at different spots. I had the top half of the building and another college student had the bottom half. It eventually led to an office job, but I got my start taking the temperature.</p>
<p>I have to confess, I didn’t last long in the tobacco fields. I left them an worked at a local outing facility, where companies go for their summer picnics. Usually I bussed tables, picking up half eaten hot dogs and clam chowder. Sometimes I poured soda or made cotton candy. I swore, if I heard the song “Celebration” one more time, I would get physically ill. It still gives me the chills.</p>
<p>Then until I left for college, I was a waitress in a local ice cream shop/restaurant. My friends were jealous that I got to have all the ice cream I wanted, but the truth was, I never wanted to see ice cream again! I’d come home with my right arm COVERED in ice cream from digging down in the big containers…ewwww. Fun times, though. Always a story to tell!</p>
<p>My uncle – an old crusty bachelor New England farmer-horseman – had a boarding and sales stable. In the summer, I’d go down in the morning. He kept a horse for me to ride and show that was “mine”. After I rode her for an hour or so, he’d have five more greenies waiting for me. Quick brush off, toss on my saddle and out to the ring. I’d do a walk/trot/canter warm up and then he’d come out for a short jumping school, we’d get what we wanted from the horse, then I’d do a mile trail walk, and come back to the barn to do the next one. Maybe 40-45 minutes per horse. He paid me $1 per horse, not including the one that was “mine.” </p>
<p>(Of course "my"horse wasn’t for sale – everything else was. I was able to show and compete with “my” horse … the greenies I rode often sold before they were ready to show. And lots of the greenies weren’t a real fit for me – I was very tall and lightweight and very leggy, and those summers we were doing a lot of large ponies, and small, just over pony-size horses. Some of those ponies I could touch my feet under the belly!)</p>
<p>I also helped out in the barn with feeding and sweeping. Not stalls. And I did tack cleaning. Lots of tack cleaning. I also helped with the vet and the blacksmith when they visited, and showed the sale horses to customers.</p>
<p>I spent one summer in college as a blue jean checker for a store that sold “seconds” merchandise. I had to go through boxes and boxes and boxes (and boxes!) of “seconds” blue jeans and check each pair to make sure there were no holes and the zippers worked. I did that for ten weeks, for $3 an hour. My hands turned blue!!</p>
<p>I must be the only person from small town Illinois who didn’t detassle. H did as did all of my siblings.</p>
<p>My first job was at age 15, clerking in a drugstore in my home town. It was owned by my next door neighbors who were wonderful people. I still think about how great that job was. The other employees were all really nice to me and we had a lot of fun. Many regular customers. I knew just about everyone who worked “downtown”. It was sort of like Mayberry.
Sadly, the downtown is pretty much wiped out and deserted now.</p>