Your teenage/ student jobs

[Globalti]

Worst job: filling and stacking bags of powdered enamel at Ferro in Womborne. Hot, filthy, deafening and exhausting. £1.75 an hour.

Best job: one winter season as "gofer" at a French language school in Combloux in the Alps, driving pupils to and from Geneva airport and taking them skiing every afternoon. No pay, just board and lodging.

 

[Deleted member 35268]

Potwasher in a Restaurant
Glass collector in a pub
Bar steward (lol)

 

[User10119]

Job out the back in a greengrocers (weighing and bagging stuff up) for a couple of years from the age of 10. Walked out on grounds of principle following a dispute with The Management, aged 12. Started a Sunday morning paper round started ASAP after being legally able to work at 13 - great Christmas tips on that one - and shared an Evening Press round with my big sister in a village about 5 miles away too. Oh, and then got a round delivering the free paper once a week round the housing estate near our house. Dropped the Sunday and Press rounds when I got a job in the chippy at 14 and worked in said chippy (and the pizza place next door) for about 5 years. Summers spent strawberry picking and spud scratting from about 14 to 17, then in the 6th form I got a couple of summers working for a contract cleaners mucking out student houses in the summer holdays. Year off with assorted pub and temp jobs in catering/on production lines (agency seemed mildly surprised to have a 18 yo turn up with a wide range of references from people who had employed me for multiple years) together with a couple of domestic cleaning jobs before a few months volunteering on a rare breeds quasi-organic farm in the south of France then uni where I landed a job in the college bar on the first night of freshers week. Holidays spent either volunteering on the farm in France or working in a restaurant kitchen or back spud scratting/onion lifting, with some shifts back in the pub I spent most of my year off in.

Graduated (in French and theatre) and promptly went back to the spud farm to pay off my student overdraft before moving south and accidentally getting a job in IT support....

 

[HarryTheDog]

Mowing Lawns, picking flowers at a market garden farm( that was really hard work), washing dishes in a cafe, best paid jobs were all to do with sh*t, cleaning public toilets ( my brother actually held the contract with the council, I was too young) and the most money to be made was emptying concrete septic tanks, I lived in a area with no mains sewers and the houses were built on sand so the sand used to fill the old septic tanks. The council would charge around a 1,000 quid to rip the tops of the tanks and empy them. Me and my mate charged 200 quid to climb in and empty them by hand. 100 quid each for a weekends work 40 yrs ago was good going for 2 schoolboys. A end got put to it by the local busy bodies informing the council.

 

[robjh]

First job - I'm sure I was only 15 - was clearing and washing glasses at a London Transport social club on Saturday evenings. I was a slightly shy kid and found this rather intimidating.
Then through the 6th form I worked in supermarkets every weekend, which was great as there were lots of other teenagers there and we'd reached pub age.
At 19 I worked in university holidays as a care assistant in an old-style psychiatric hospital and witnessed some rather worrying things that I hope no longer go on.

I was a language assistant in a secondary school in Austria during my uni sandwich year, probably showed me that teaching wasn't going to be a career

Unfortunately the same experience persuaded me I could be a teacher, an error that it took me two traumatic years to get out of!

 

[User10119]

I was a language assistant in a secondary school in Austria during my uni sandwich year, probably showed me that teaching wasn't going to be a career

Unfortunately the same experience persuaded me I could be a teacher, an error that it took me two traumatic years to get out of!

Oh - I'd forgotten that one! Yes, an academic year as a language assistant (followed by a summer working in the nearby curry house and the English local whilst living in a tent on a Dutch campsite 3 miles out of town) in the Dordogne.

ETA - and despite this (and being the child of a teacher) I did a PGCE about 10 years later. Did a bit of supply but never actually got a teaching job.

 

[Will Spin]

Paper round, weekend caretaker/cleaner at chicken factory (hatchery)..ugh, cardboard box factory, the best job though was drayman's assistant for a real ale brewery just before Christmas, free beer at every delivery (driver partook too, not sure that would be a good idea today, probably wasn't then either come to think of it!). I needed the first three if only to persuade me of the value of passing my A levels and degree so that I wouldn't have to do jobs like that again.

 

[Cubist]

I worked on a farm in Aachen for one summer, then on a volunteer work placement in Oftringen, nr Basel the next. First year at Uni I worked in a local pub, then for my girlfriend's father at his accident repair shop. Last year at university I carted straw for a local pub farmer. Long hours, very hard work, but extremely lucrative- dawn to dusk seven days a week for five weeks. Went back to Uni with a massive wad of cash, an incredible tan, and the arms and shoulders of a gym bunny.

 

[Milkfloat]

I had a variety and weird mix.

Picking up golf balls by hand at a driving range - before it opened I hasten to add. At the end of the first week the owner let us hit some balls, but then made us go and pick them up again before the punters arrived. I got made redundant due to mechanisation (an old mini pulling a trailer).

Ice cream and tea seller at the local amusement arcade, then got promoted to change booth and finally bingo caller.

As a student I worked as a Bouncer and then did security at football matches and gigs around the country - this was a good laugh, money was good and i got to saw some great acts. Although there were some hairy times including, being stabbed, the Foo Fighters in 1995 at the Reading Festival nearly bringing down the tent and the fence coming down at Glastonbury when it was stormed by crowds.

 

[Markymark]

Cardboard box crusher for Boots the Chemists when I was 16.

I too crushed cardboard boxes for Woolworths when about 15. I had to do the same maths and written test as everyone else in the interview. The lady who gave me the job said I had the highest score of anyone who'd ever worked in that store!

 

[PK99]

Weekend job:
Waiter at local WMC

Summer jobs:

Egg packing plant (25p per hour)

Chicken hatchery

Pork pie factory

and the worst of the worst of the worst at a Tongue canning factory, 15 minutes into day 1 I was elbows deep in a vat of raw brined lambs tongue

Lab assistant on laser fusion project at AWRE Aldermaston

 

[MarkF]

Paper rounds then a kitchen hand at the Leeds BHS store where I and the other teenage reprobates hid our chewing gum in the food. Then a short spell at a supermarket shelf stacking and I agree with TMN, those jobs made me realise I could never do face to face work with the general public.

 

[iandg]

I had Stafford Prison on my evening paper round. Every so often the 'Express and Stars' were heavier and contained brown paper bags hiding the 'Mayfairs', 'Penthouses' etc. - not that I (as a 13 yr old boy) ever stopped off down some alley way to have peep you understand

 

[Salad Dodger]

Cashier at a petrol station, two evenings in the week and one or maybe two weekend shifts. More weekday ones in the summer after I left school and was suppoed to be revising for my A levels.

The only problem was not having much float money (this was back in the days when there were no card payment machines). On Friday nights, when lots of local factory workers had been paid in cash, they would buy their petrol for the week and use it to "split" a big note out of their pay packet. I frequently ran out of change on those nights, and had to turn all the pumps off and shout over the tannoy that you could only buy petrol if you had the right money!

 

[mjr]

Best job I had was a summer resort cafe washer-up. I was one of the last hires to be paid double-time for bank holidays and if we were on Sundays or Bank Holidays and the previous day's staff had forgotten to get any of the cream cakes out of the freezer to defrost, we got to take them home rather than have them thrown out. :yum:

I did a lot of mediocre stuff like paper rounds and picking crops out in the fields, but the worst were a couple of factory temp jobs that injured me in various ways, one permanent. Most tedious was carefully peeling off stickers from ALPS amplifier components that a previous temp had put on slapdash and putting them back on square to the edges!