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Working in front of the ovens at a pizza shell factory. Lasted all of two weeks.
Four hours catching the unbaked pies off the rollers and throwing them in the blazing hot ovens. Four more hours on the other side getting them out of the blazing hot ovens. All this in the middle of what was, at the time, the hottest two weeks of summer I'd experienced. The tenth day of work I passed out and came to a short time later. The only time in my entire life I've ever passed out. That was it.
It was January, late 80's. I was 18, an agency sent me to the Chevron refinery in Philly. My job? To walk around the refinery with 80 pound bags of salt, covering the ice on the roads. The wind was howling of the river, temperature in the teens, frostbite felt like it was settling in after a couple of hours. I didn't last a week there.
The three days I spent washing dishes at a popular local restaurant in the late 1970s. If someone had handed me a Communist party membership application, I would have signed it.
Wait: you worked 35 years in private sector, 30 years in another job, and then 4 years with the government. You mean you worked 69 years before you retired? Wowza!
LOL. Glad I'm not the only one who saw it that way.
Minimum wage in 1966 was $1.25 or $1.30. No way was a steno pool employee getting $8 an hour in 1966. In 1966, I was making the magnificent sum (to me, at least)of $2.10 an hour working in a file room at a large health insurance company, taking a semester off from college to earn money for a summer of backpacking around Europe.
I worked for the government in 1971 as a clerk/stenographer for the fabulous wage of $2.50/hr., huge jump from my previous secretarial job, $2.25/hr. This was in Los Angeles, CA, & California minimum wage was at that time $1.65/hr., so, no, a steno did not make $8/hr. in '66.
As I said before, thank god I got my butt into college...sitting in a room as a teenager, typing & transcribing shorthand for 8 hours a day while sitting by a window overlooking the Veterans' Cemetery, & seeing guys my age who died in Vietnam being buried there on a daily basis was insanity-provoking.
For my first somewhat real job in the working world, I was hired to paint a guy's house. I was seventeen. When I arrived, he said: "Before you get started on the outside, I have another job for you." He led me down to the basement, which smelled evil. "Unfortunately, my dog was mostly stuck down here all winter." I could see the many small sausagelike shapes giving evidence of his words. "This needs to be cleaned up." I must have looked dumfounded, because he just handed me a mop. "There's a bucket and some Lysol over there. I suggest you make the best of a s***ty situation."
That was his exact finishing sentence. And with it, and with the deception, I learned the single most important lesson I would learn about the working world and employers. There were others, of course, but this was the most important one. As my life went on, I learned that employers were my fundamental adversaries, and that they would all deceive and take advantage of me. Some kindlier, some gentler, some rougher, some more apathetic, but not a one would ever feel bound to tell me the truth and nothing but. Those that treated me decently, I gave good value. Those who screwed me, I sabotaged with every power I could get away with. But none of them can be trusted, none are your friends, and the younger every employee realizes this, the better.
The one I have now. Retail. (no offense). It is the worse.
My first job, as a teenager, was preparing an area to become a camping park (clearing away brush, cutting out paths, making trails etc.), that was fun. My other first "summer job", was erasing school books and preparing them for the next year. That too was fun.
All desk jobs since then, but this here... is hands down the worse.
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...best work advice ever...
