What Was Your First Job Ever?

First job where your parents didn't pay you to clean your room or get out of the house. (I saved up enough money from that to pay for my freshman year. )

I made shave ice at Matsumoto's. Its probably the equivalent of ice cream in the mainland. (Milk is expensive here.) Its just crushed ice sweetened with syrup with different flavors like root beer, passion fruit--all kinds

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Blonde Klingons: Because it was a good day to dye!

Paperround @ 15. It was good - £8 for a little over 2 hours work.

Then at 16 I worked in an office for a summer. The worst job with terrible pay ever. I shall never be stuck in an office again.

I wanted to work in a fish & chips shop but my dad wouldn't let me. (I LOVE FISH & CHIPS!) But when I turned 16, he let me work for this friend of his, an old archaeologist who worked in the British Museum. I put all his books back on the shelves (he had thousands, they were all dusty & they were all cataloged Dewey Decimal), typed labels for his coin collection, and cleaned boring shipwreck pottery shards. "Wow, this shard looks just like Wales & this one looks like the South of France!"
Bleech!

But when he died, he left me 100 ancient Roman & Greek coins in his will, so I will always think of him as the best boss I ever had, even though he only paid me 16 pounds a week at the time.

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Pigsnie, Vicar of Fries!

Wow lucky you Pigsnie, the oldest I've got are some late 18th century and early 19th century Portuguese colonial coins...

Ha! This is a good thread... My first job was (and don't laugh) at MacDonalds, selling their junk at the counter and occasionally making it 'round the back! The pay @ 15 was something like AU$5.35/hour which went up to AU$6.55 when I turned 16 (which is US$2.62 and US$3.21 respectively) !!!

That was when I decided that I will never have another boss again, nor work as a physical worker, or clean another dining room again!

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Black Holes Suck!

I just got my first job this month actually - I get to telecommute to work, it's basically all online, with some phone contact. Great job - pay is around the same as I'd get at McDonald's, but I get to do what I like to do, and don't have to go anywhere.

Delivering pizza. Wheee!
Raced my '67 Mustang all over town with the stereo blasting and got paid for it. That was a fun job.


like AU$5.35/hour which went up to AU$6.55 when I turned 16 (which is US$2.62 and US$3.21 respectively)

$2.62!! Is stuff cheap down there?

Zephyrus, you can get so many reasonably priced ancient coins on E-Bay, it's almost sickening. (Just yesterday, I spotted a Dutch auction of real silver denarii at $22 each!) But how happy my old professor would have been! By the way, of the 100 ancient coins the impish fellow left me, roughly a fourth were UNCLEANED and encrusted with the filth of the centuries!!! I had to clean each one with sulphuric acid (citric acid if I thought it was gold, I only found three) and it took the better part of a year for me to do the job right. Anyhoo, because I found that I liked cleaning off the filth of the centuries (I'm good with clogged drains too!), I became a very amateur numismatist.

PS. You kids with '67 Mustangs ... ARFFFF !!!

Nah, not really, nothing is cheap down here, probably more expensive than in the US!! It's what we call one step up from cheap child labour like in the third world countries!! By the way, what's the MacDonalds pay in the UK and the US??

By the way, compared to that (which was only about two years ago), I am now working as a very part time tutor (only work five or six hours a week), and I charge $25 an hour or $30 for an hour and a half (which again is quite cheap compared to what other tutors charge over here, usually around ~$35 - $40)! It's better than serving Big Macs all day (and having to ask someone "Do you want any deserts with that" when they've already ordered a sundae )!!

Pigsnie, that really sounds unbelievable, but I've never bought anything on auction on e-bay or any other such site, so I have almost no idea how it works...(I mean with paying, delivery, trustworthiness etc.)

$25 - $30 AN HOUR!!!! THIS IS AN OUTRAGEOUSLY GOOD SALARY !!! Why go to college at all? Hee hee. Still, that is a huge amount of money! By the way, What subject do you tutor, Oh Western Breeze? Enquiring minds want to know.

On the subjecthood of E-Bay -- type out ROMAN SILVER DENARII DUTCH SALE in the search function. (I tried posting the URL, but it didn't take.) E-Bay URL is, of course = http://www.ebay.com


THAT is quality silver Roman denarii, Zephyrus. And only $22 each for coins with profiles of the emperors -- I see some Gordian IIIs (grandson of Gordianus Africanus, murdered by Philip the Arab, his Praetorian Prefect, in 244) and what might even be a Commodus (YEAH, that Commodus, Joaquin Phoenix!) down there near the bottom of the photo. Amazing, innit? I haven't got a Commodus yet, but wouldn't it be nice to have a display of COINS OF THE DELICIOUSLY EVIL EMPERORS?

As for dealers' trustworthiness, you just have to sniff out the bad ones. Look at their feedback ratings, the ratio of negative feedback to positive, how good are the photos, things like that. I've been on E-Bay for about 3 years and So far, I've been pretty lucky, I reckon.
[Edited by Pigsnie on 03-22-2001]

If you consider $25 an hour an outrageously good salary, you *really* ought to get into web development.

Seriously, though, it's a very profitable profession. I could recommend a few tutorials to get you started and such. A certified Java programmer makes $80,000 a year on average these days.

$30 an hour is indeed a great salary for a high school student. I've played tutor in my old schooldays, and the most I could get was 6 pounds an hour! And my mum thought I was overcharging!

As for programming, I think I will pass. I have no head for such things. I will write whatever you like: mock verse, magazine articles, little bursts of fiction (and I make a pretty good living at it, I might add) but officially, I am computer illiterati.

You don't have to be, though. Might be fun. You can always turn to the artistic side of web development - design and graphics creation.

I made $3.35 per hour cooking hamburgers at a "gourmet" hamburger restaurant in Amarillo, Texas (called Doodles. If you're in the neighborhood, stop on by. My step-mother's father owned the place at the time, but he's since sold it.) It wasn't a bad job as far as high school jobs go. We closed at 9pm, so I was always home no later than 10pm. And they were closed Sundays, so I always had that day off. We had a pretty regular clientele, so we got to know many people in the community. And they always cut us slack when we screwed up and allowed us to provide better customer service (since we got to know the people, we could use that to make their dining experience better). And because it was "gourmet" hamburgers (sort of like Fudruckers, if you have one of those in your neighborhood), we didn't have to rush as much as someone cooking at a real fast food place would.

It also re-enforced my desire to attend college since I knew I didn't want to be slinging hamburgers all my life.

All in all, I would say it was a good experience, but if I could've made $30 per hour and not smelled like grease all the time, I would've taken it (but one couldn't start a web page creation business back in my day. Not that I would necessarily been interested in that anyway. I didn't even have a computer when I was in high school. I was too into playing guitar and growing my hair long).

At Maccas, I realised that I never want to work at a place where your best qualities are obeying orders given by a superior and repeating the same lines over and over again like a broken gramphone !!

So in that regard, $30 an hour for sitting around and teaching maths and chemistry to high school students is pretty good! And other tutors around here charge $40 or $50 an hour, so I'm doing 'em a favor!

As for the Roman Denarii, I can't believe how cheap they are?! It's a pretty good deal...I don't get one thing though, is it $22 for the whole lot, or per coin, or what? I would have thought that it costs something like at least a couple of hundred $$'s!

Oh Western Wind, the denarii deal is a Dutch Auction. If you look at the merchandise description, you will see that the dealer has 778 coins for sale. Unless, bids come in for all 778 coins (which is doubtful), the price will stay at $22 FOR EACH DENARII until every coin has been sold. You can bid for as many coins as you like.

As for the availability of Roman coins, they are not as rare as you think (The most expensive -- because of their popularity with history buffs -- are coins minted by the really famous dudes, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Caligula, Mark Antony, etc.) . Hundreds of millions of coins were minted in the course of the Roman empire, and while there are a lot of ugly, worn featureless coins out there (WATCH OUT for the "Uncleaned Roman for $1 each"), there are also a good number of exceptional pieces at reasonable cost. (A lot of these good coins are usually found in large hoards buried by Roman soldiers on their way to war.)

Thanks for the info Pigsnie, I'm a relative newcomer to both numismatism and e-bay! Wasn't it Caligula that put a horse for a senator?! Nero and Caligula are definitely my favourite empereors!

Favorite emperors? That's sad! Almost as sad as the fact that I have a favorite font.

For the full nasty (and sometimes spurious) history of the Scandalous Caesars, from Julius C. to Domitian, read THE TWELVE CAESARS by Suetonius. Best translation is by Robert Graves; he based his books I CLAUDIUS and CLAUDIUS THE GOD on Suety, as my loony Classics Professor liked to call him.

As for Caligula, he threatened to make his horse a Consul, but he never did. He did convert part of his Palace into a high-class brothel however, and was the first Roman emperor not to have received a state funeral.

Hmmm, my favorite emperors. Hmmm, that's a toughie: I suppose I like Caligula & Nero too, because they were the naughtiest. LOL.

I have a favorite brand of floppy disk. That's even sadder!

Why not have favourite emperors? They were all pretty wierd, and they only got wierder and wierder...

While on that note, there's a theory that the reason why Nero and Caligula behaved like they did possibly had something to do with lead poisoning...i.e. they drank from lead cups, and all the lead dissolved. Could be a valid explanation...!