Today’s Fun Friday asks you to write in the comment section!
(Gasp! Writers have to write? The horror!)
Dan Balow found a fascinating article about the 1891 census in the United Kingdom published in Spectator magazine. What made it fun were some of the unusual occupations given by those who were counted.
Stick polisher, owler, clod hopper, cowleech, slubber doffer, lum swooper, potato badger, and more! (Also listed was devil.) In case you were wondering, a “lum swooper” was a chimney sweep.
This made me want to ask all our readers, “What was your first job, other than doing chores around the house, for which you got paid?” or “What is the most unusual job or job title you’ve had?” Please post your answer in the comment section below. FUN!
My first paid job was envelope stuffer at my dad’s office for a week. $1.80 an hour. Sat there with a half dozen others and stuffed envelopes all day. I thought I was rich!
Bored, but rich.
The next time you are able to gather with friends or acquaintances, use this question as an icebreaker.
Once you’ve answered, come back later and read the other entries. I’ll bet we’ll find that everyone has done something other than being a successful writer in their lifetime!
Every Book Doesn’t Need to Shake the Earth
My first paid job was a demonstrater. I was 12 and my gymnastics coach was getting older so she hired me to demonstrate skills for her classes.
I was 10 years old. My grandpa paid us 1 cent for each thistle weed we dug out of the cow pastures. I thought I would be rich.
My first paid job duties were loading clay pigeons for trap shooting, pulling, and keeping score for both trap and skeet.
I was a cashier at Kmart. It feels like forever ago when I was punching the keys of the cash register and pushing the slide-thing across credit cards!
Roofer’s helper. I was four years old, helping my dad replace the wood shingles on the detached garage. I was paid four dollars, which was a lot of money in 1949. What did I do? Sit on the roof, pull another shingle from the bundle, and hand it to my dad when he was ready for the next one.
When I was in the fourth grade, I mowed and edged my neighbor’s yard, which took most of the day because line trimmers didn’t exist. I had to trim around the foundation and walkways with hand trimmers. I was paid $1.50 for that day’s work.
I do not recall what the title to my first job was , but I do not think I received pay for it. I was with Los Angeles Unified School District as a file clerk. I was in high school and I graduated at the age of sixteen so it must have been illegal child labor! So let’s skip that one.
My first PAID job was as a live credit report, before Credit karma was invented, or any kind of online credit report. People would call in & we’d go to the tons of credit files, find the person’s credit history & read off the scores. It was fun; I got Doris Day once!
In 6th grade I worked as a waitress in a little restaurant by our elementary school and was paid with a free lunch. Many students ate there, and they needed someone to help out during that busy lunch hour. To have a hamburger or hot dog with French fries was a treat for me since I normally took a lunchbox to school with a Lebanon bologna sandwich.
I was a bus girl at the PX cafeteria in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Other than babysitting for $.50/hour for neighborhood kids when I was 11, at 13, I cleaned my dad’s offices weekly. It was an all-male environment–the men’s bathroom . . . Less said about that. The first Saturday I came home and cried.
Eventually, I was promoted to make copies of blueprints using the huge blueprint copier. It used an ammonia-based solution that was gross, but it was so cool using this monster machine and watching the plans magically appear.
Other than babysitting, my first job was in the kitchen of our local A&W root beer stand, grating cabbage for coleslaw and flipping burgers–less glamorous than being a carhop, but it paid well.
In high school, I worked in a commercial laundry with two of my best friends. The roughest part of the job was folding shop towels from a metal shop. Every once in a while we would be smoothing out a towel to fold it and get sliced by a hidden metal shaving. Ouch!
I also worked in the advertising department of a newspaper, putting together the advertising inserts that would go in the daily newspaper. By the end of my shift, my hands would be black from the fresh newspaper ink.
My first job, at 12 yrs old, was picking tomatoes, in South Jersey, with migrant workers from Puerto Rico.
Clod hopper–interesting, I’d always heard that term growing up but didn’t know where it came from. Since they listed it as an occupation I assume they listed it in jest–Webster’s defines it as either a “clumsy and uncouth rustic” (that would be me, LOL!) or “a large heavy work shoe or boot”. So neither are technically occupations. 😎 I don’t hear people use the term much any more–maybe that gave way to redneck? Anybody have more insight on this word?
As for me, I have no such interesting job names. First job was as a pepper picker. LOL!!!!!
According to the Google Machine, clog hopper was slang from the late17th century meaning “one who works on plowed land.”
There you have it.
And how many peppers does a pepper picker pick? LOL!
Like Terri, I babysat for $.50 an hour. I was 12. My next paid job was writing a high school column for my town’s newspaper.
Like you, Louise, my first job was babysitting neighborhood kids at age 12 for fifty cents an hour. After the kids were in bed I would wash dishes and clean the house. No extra pay for that,either. Then in high school I got paid to write a monthly column for a county newspaper.
I was a telemarketer for a local newspaper for $1.65/hour. Twenty years later, I married the CEO of a newspaper.
My first paid job, not counting babysitter, was as a kitchen helper in a retirement center. Wasn’t that thrilled with the job, but loved the people who I worked with and who lived in the center.
I inserted flyers into the weekly newspaper for my first job. I remember stacks and stacks of flyers that seemed taller than me waiting to be collated.
When I was 15, I worked at McDonald’s — all for the sake of love. Yep. The boy I liked happened to work there and that was enough motivation for me to don a polyester uniform — matching cap included — and sell burgers and fries. My efforts worked, too. He asked me out one day while flipping burgers on the grill.
I assembled toilet duck pods that clip to the rim. Far from glamorous, but I could do the work from home, so it suited this homeschooled teenager who lived way out in the country. I also set the record for the most boxes done in an hour after developing a one-person assembly line procedure. 😆
At the age of 12, I traveled about five hours from my home (one year by bus) and drove a tractor on a tobacco farm for my sister’s family. I worked there two summers as my first jobs.
My first job was stuffing flyers a local newspaper. They were 8-hour shifts of standing on your feet and extremely repetitious.
My first job was as a carhop at Bob’s Big Boy. It was entertaining. One time I put the meal on the tray at the car’s window. The next thing I knew the chicken dinner was sailing towards State Rd after a strong wind carried it away. I also remember spilling a milkshake in to a guy’s Corvette. Couldn’t believe it when he asked me for a date.
At 15, I went to work under a government program for impoverished kids. My first assignment was soaping screws. There was a guy mounting doors in a newly built dorm for the local boarding college/high school. He had to drill screws into the doors, and he said the soap made the screws go in easier. This was before liquid soap, so I was heating the soap and scraping it with the screws. The first day I soaped about 400 screws. The second, 500. The third, I begged for a different job because the shrieking of the drill was making me crazy. I spent the rest of the summer washing windows. I washed every window in that dorm. A year later there was a flood from the waterfall above the school, and I read that every window had blown out of the dorm. All I could think of was, I washed those windows…
Excluding paid farm work for family, my first professional gig was working as a deputy county tax collector (collecting property taxes and titling/registering motor vehicles). NOT a publicly popular position. 😁
I was 13 and was a shelf reader in my junior high library. Essentially I got all of the books back to their right location, either alphabetical by author’s last name or by the Dewey number. Once that was done, the librarian took inventory of the collection. I think I earned $20 for the whole job plus and ice-cold bottle of Coke in the middle of the morning. The school was not air conditioned, so the Coke might have been the bigger deal.
My younger sister’s first job was at age 14 detassling corn in central Indiana. I drove her to the bus every morning at 4:30 for the better part of a month. They were in the fields all day long, and I’m pretty sure whatever she earned, it wasn’t nearly enough.
Like many teen-aged girls, my first paid job was baby-sitting. My most unusual job was watering a neighbor’s cows while he was away. It sounded easy enough–just walk down to his place and fill the big tub with water. But when all the cows lumbered that direction, it got a little scary. And their enclosure was pretty stinky.
First Job: Ran my own lawnmowing business in elementary and middle school.
Weirdest Job: Worked in an ice factory where we made block and crushed ice.
When I got tall enough to push a lawnmower, I cut yards in the neighborhood for one dollar. We didn’t have self-propelled back then. Haha!
My first paid jobs were weeding neighbors’ flower beds and washing dishes for a neighbor across the street. She had 3 kids … don’t know why they weren’t pitching in to help wash dishes, but dishes would pile up until every plate and piece of silverware had been used. Then I’d go wash the mess. Interesting (and sometimes gross) to say the least. But hey, I was in grade school, earning money!
When I was 14 I was an egg knocker. I worked in a hatchery where we knocked eggs together before putting them in an incubator. A certain sound meant one of the eggs was cracked and needed to be tossed out. I got pretty good at it!
The summer I turned 12, I worked in the fields with some migrant workers weeding beets with a hoe. The tool kind…
I was the groundskeeper for an old country cemetery. In the oldest section, the headstones were just rocks. The underground yellow jacket nests were the worst part! It was a minefield!
My first paying job was as a babysitter where I received twenty-five cents per hour to care for two little girls. My first job where I actually went out into the “world” was as a janitor’s helper. I scrubbed floors and toilets after hours at a bank! I think I earned $2.00 per hour. Seemed like a lot at the time.
My first job was waitress/cook/dishwasher and I pumped gas and diesel at a truckstop about a mile from our house. Rode my bike to work much of the time. All for the sum of $1.36 an hour plus tips. I was 15 years old. The name of the truckstop was the Wildwest Trading Post.
My first job was detassling corn in Illinois farm fields. Graduated to head of the crew when I was in college so I got to chase high school kids through the fields with a machete life ordering them to stop goofing off and cut that corn
I wish I could go back in time and put this occupation on the “what do you want to be when you grow up” form we had to fill out in high school:
-Teacher
-Chef
-Machete User toward Slacking Teens-MUST for short.
On a (not) completely unrelated note, is that job still available?
Dad planted pine trees along the edge of the yard where he was renovating an old community hall to be our new house. There was no faucet yet, so I hauled it from the neighbor’s in a bucket. He paid by the tree, so I nearly drowned those poor little saplings in the beginning but, as I lost interest in becoming a fortune 500 company, the watering dwindled to only when he reminded me. Those trees are now twenty feet tall and, I’m glad to say, know how to get their own water.
I had a typical teen job. Making ice cream cones at a Dairy Whip. I could not get the twirl on the top correct. I cried when I went home that night and promptly quit the next day. I did much better at babysitting. I had the chance to write and paint during the times I was able to babysit. Hummmmmm, should have listened to my heart calling sooner.
Let me see if you can guess it. “You want fries with that?” I rocked a brown polyester uniform and the drive through intercom way before headsets and computerized menu boards were a thing.
Cherry packer. When I was 13, my mother, I, and 3 other girls worked as a cherry packing crew on a farm. Mom was the chaperone, crew boss,, and cook. We girls took the big boxes of picked cherries, slung them up on stations sideways so the cherries rolled out. We separated the cherries from their stems and leaves, and packed them in tidy boxes. I collected 7 different kinds of spiders that I pinned to the walls of my station. I did that job every summer through high school. I forget what I was paid, but I think I might have been paid by the box, and I don’t remember how much, but I earned enough for my school clothes.
As many of the ladies said, “Beside babysitting for 50 cents an hour,” my first paid job was during one summer when in high school. I worked at a ladies wear shop downtown in Mobile, AL. I did not understand why the employees liked their required break so much. I thought sitting around with them was boring.
My first job as an 11 year old was babysitting for my neighbor with her baby. My mom taught my twin sister and I to change a cloth diaper, prepare formula and hold the baby. She told the woman she would be next door to help if we needed it. We got paid 50 cents an hour. Which we split.
Babysitter. I was 11 when a neighbor got my mother’s permission to leave her 3 year old with me while she ran to the store every week.
I babysat for $.25 an hour and cleaned houses for $.50 an hour. At fourteen I landed a real job at the local drugstore and was paid $.98 an hour. I was rich!
I really like the (unofficial) title of a job I had in the late ’90s. I was a ‘Reader’ for Focus on the Family Canada.I read letters from constituents. Part of my job was praying for their concerns and writing back to them and sending them books and other materials that I thought would benefit them. I feel blessed to have had that opportunity.
I was something of an entrepreneur. I made potholders and sold them to neighbors, picked up corn the corn picker missed and earned money from my dad, and walked along the railroad track picking up bits of discarded iron I could sell at the junkyard. My first “real” job, however, was as a model for Colony Shops in Florida. To be paid to wear the latest in teen clothes on the runway and in ads? I was in! too bad I spent much of what I earned on purchasing clothes from the store.
Selling and delivering GRIT newspapers. Lasted all of a couple weeks. May have made a dollar or two. Total.
I was in third grade when I set my heart on buying a pair of clip-on sparkling earrings at my favorite store. My mom gave her permission but said that I had to earn the money. No problem. I went door-to-door and offered to wash our neighbors’ basement windows for a quarter per household. My efforts paid off. I still remember the day I proudly made my $3.00 purchase.
My first job was working my tail off at Tastee Freez for a dollar an hour at age 15. At least we got to eat our mistakes!
(Also besides babysitting for 50 cents an hour) my first paid job was at Lake Plata, a 6-acre lake in NE Ohio that had been completely lined with concrete to make a giant swimming pool, complete with lifeguard stands, “islands,” 1-, 2-, and 3-meter diving boards, and a slide that was advertised to be 100′ tall, but couldn’t have been. (Maybe the winding stairs up to the top were 100′ in length?) I worked in the concession stand and also was a “swimming teacher.” That meant that early in the morning, before the lake opened to the public, I had to try to get adorable pre-schoolers to get used to putting their little faces in the water and paddle with their arms while they were shivering and their lips were turning blue. Mine were, too. I hated it as much as most of those little ones did. Mixing the fountain drinks in the concession stand and flirting with the boys was much more fun!
Nearing age 50, I decided it might be fun to be a Mystery Shopper. Since I love giving my opinion so, what could be better than getting paid for it? “Shopping” restaurants was fun since I got paid for eating. But then came the assignment to “shop” a maternity clothing store. I was to try on an outfit (which took some dishonesty on my part — “for my daughter-in-law”), and be SURE to note if the staff came back with a baby bump pillow so I could see how darling I looked. That ridiculous image of my middle-aged pregnant self was clear evidence this job was not a fit!
Still working on the “becoming a successful writer” in my lifetime1 LOL Like others, babysitting was my first job. But my first real job was working in a podiatrist’s office. It was so long ago, I have no idea what I was paid!
Besides household chores and mowing neighborhood yards my first job was as a nut knocker. A local almond grower was doing hand knocking of his orchards before switching to machine knockers the next year. We would tarp the ground under the trees, beat the main branches with large clubs wrapped in leather. Then we would knock any remaining nuts in higher branches with long bamboo poles. That’s when I learned that in the trees the nuts are almonds. Once they are on the ground they are “amonds” because we had knocked the L out of them. Regrettably I spent almost every sent of what I earned on that job on two Barry Manilow LPS.
My first job was a ‘child watcher’ at a Bowling Alley in B.C. Canada. I would bus to get there once a week before school. I watched a mish-mash of aged children, from infant to 5 years in a tiny room smaller than some walk in closets! I managed to get toddlers and preschoolers seated to color and make little crafts, while I made up stories to keep them all quiet; all the while the babies were in one of two tiny sized crib like things. I got 7.50 for two hours work, and that was it! Once a week, that was nice to get spending money at 14.
It sparked interest and I ended up becoming a Pre-school to 12th grade teacher!
The first job I was paid for was babysitting. After I got my driver’s license (with a few provisos that I still needed an adult in the front seat with me), I got a job at McDonald’s. I was the Fry Girl. All I did was cook fries & hashbrowns and clean the lobby for 2 1/2 years. But I earned a college scholarship for every full semester that I worked there.
Besides babysitting, my first real job was a bag girl then became a grocery clerk. The pay was good, but the customers most rewarding, including the fact that I met my husband while checking-him-out at my register stand (in more ways than one). We were unknowingly encouraged into a relationship by his buddy’s girlfriend who noticed Larry flirting with me. Without his knowledge, she asked other employees if I was “taken.” I found out and assuming he’d sent her, was waiting anxiously for him to ask me out. On his own and without knowing of her inquiry, he got the nerve to ask and I said yes to our first date. He was blown over at my quick “yes” and worried about what kind of gal I was to be so easy. When we married seven months later, he would tease that he got his “bag at Mayfair.” We’ve been happily married for 51 years now. Guess we both bagged a good one.
Being hired right out of college in 1980, Conoco offered to title me anything besides a LandMAN. I said I had to be a Landman or no one would know what my job was and if anyone couldn’t tell I was a woman, that was their problem, not mine. I loved that job!
When I was 12 years old, I worked as a plate scraper for the school cafeteria. I scraped uneaten food into the garbage. It paid for my school lunches.
This is great fodder for ALL your creativity!
Not an exhaustive list, but just look at this sampling!
Cabbage grater. Cornhusk detasselers. Clay pigeon loaders. Toilet duck pod assembler. Landman. Screw soaper. Fryer. Towel folder. Nut knocker. Egg knocker. Window washer. Bag girl. Bus girl. Cherry packer. Sapling waterer. Gas pumper. Tomato picker. Floor scrubber. Cemetary groundskeeper. Ice maker. Telemarketer. Library Shelf Reader.
I am wondering if one of our group here took too much delight in chasing boys out of the corn field with their machete!!! HAHA.
Tax Collector? Um… at least it was biblical (Zaccheus and Matthew).
I suppose that census from 1891 doesn’t look so exotic!
I picked blueberries. We were poor, so every summer from the time I was in early elementary school until I was old enough to get a “real job,” I picked blueberries to earn money for school clothes. With that said, I wasn’t very successful earning money this way, because as soon as I picked a bucket of berries, I would sit under a bush and reward myself by eating some of the berries before I went to have them weighed:)
These are amazing! I think my favorite is “clodhopper”. My first paid job was babysitting a newborn. It was a learning experience. I learned that in addition to going shopping on an empty stomach, it’s also a bad idea to go to the store after receiving a fifteen hour work week paycheck. My mother was appalled at the junk food I brought home. I also learned that babies like to be held while you’re standing up and/or walking. You might think she’s asleep because her eyes are closed, and she hasn’t made a sound in twenty minutes. However, before you fully commit to the crib, just sit down for a few minutes on the brown leather recliner in the living room. If her status is unchanged, congratulations! You have a sleeping baby. If, however, she opens an eye or starts fussing, put your boots on. You aren’t done walking.
At about age 12 or 13 I sat at a phone system, waiting for calls. When a call came in, I plugged in the 8-track tape the caller requested. It was all about health topics, and there were about 100 topics available. I guess it was an early form of a podcast.
Straight out of HS, I got a temporary job as a keypunch operator at a Green Stamps store. It last about a week and when I left, they gave me a bonus of filled in books of Green Stamps. I used it to buy Pyrex for my kitchen. That was in 1967 and I’m still using that Pyrex.
My first job, as a junior in high school, was working as a cashier at Butler’s Shoe Store. My second job, right out of high school was as an original cast member at Walt Disney World. Big change, and lots of fun!
I was only 11 years old when I was carrying nine large beers on a tray to back highway at my mother’s root beer stand. The only pay for this job came from the tips. Most of the tips were nickels, dimes, and quarters. Nevertheless, the life long wages I pocketed were customer service skills and how to connect with smorgasbord of people.
The career title that gave me the chuckles came with a key role in one of Texas’ state universities. The title was Corporate Affairs Officer.
With this title I should be writing romance novels.
Like several others here, I detasseled corn in Kansas when I was a freshman in high school, and I had a boss just like Maggie! 😉
Ok, this is going to sound really weird but my first paid job–well sort of– was when I was in seventh grade. I would take my weekly allowance purchase penny candy at a local gas station. I would then sell the candy at school for 5 cents each making a 4 cent profit per piece. I became very popular that year. Best job ever! LOL
I worked for a Chinese laundry (really!) in high school. 😅
I was a life guard at Galion City Pool, Galion Ohio!!! loved the job, the summer between Junior and Senior year and then the summer after graduation until I entered nurses training in Cleveland!!! It was good money in 1961!!
Babysitter and camp dish washer!
My first job was at a mechanic shop in Germany (I worked at the front desk) I was the only girl there and I knew nothing about cars and it was almost funny how many customers’ told me who they thought my celebrity look alike was… no one ever said the same celebrity. Maybe that’s just mechanic store small talk…? Anyway, it was fun while it lasted. Also worked at a gas station and a flower shop before starting my own business as a professional photographer… and now a writer.
At six years old I started helping my brothers fold and deliver newspapers. My oldest brother had the third largest route in the county. I continued till I was fourteen. At least I got to read the headlines every morning and afternoon.
The most unusual job I ever had … I was a Chicken Catcher. Yes, that was my job title. A big van would drive around and pick up the workers from around the town and drive us to the barn of the night. We worked about 5 barns a week and each one had multiple tens of thousand chickens in it ( I don’t remember the numbers anymore … I’d like to say 20 000 and 60 000 chickens per barn ).The chickens were loose and free in the like a big moving chicken carpet. We worked nights because it made the chickens docile and easier to catch. They had pre-established methods. We enter the barn, the first thing you notice is the sharp attack of horrible odor of chicken urine that smells like ammonia, we’d bend over, walk gently towards the chicken carpet to not scare them, and start swooping our hands and arms … each swoop caught a chicken by one leg and you had to have 7 chickens for the walk to the truck, four in one hand and three in the other, because that’s how many fit in each crate the transport was stacked with. At the truck we’d have to lower the chickens towards the ground a bit to get enough momentum to swing them up high enough for the receiver to take them from us and put them in the crates. Back to the barn. Swoop, swoop, seven birds flapping and scratching, back to the truck, back to the barn. That’s how the whole night went. The pay was pretty good. Tens of thousands of chickens a night. Where did you think your chicken dinners come from ?
My first job was when I was 16. My high school had a trade and industry program where I worked part time and attended school as well. They got me a job as a secretary/typist for a one man lawyer’s office in a tiny rural town. I made $25 a week typing “from the northwest quadrant of the southeast quadrant of the . . .” Ugh!
When I was 5 or 6 years old, my mother worked at a “Mom-and-Pop” grocery store. The owners treated us like family, and allowed my mother to take me to work. I priced cans of vegetables, etc. with a marker. For “pay” I could play with the mascot cat, Doody, or go outside in the fenced-in yard. I had fun. Too bad my paying jobs weren’t as fun!
What a fun question! My first job was working at my grandparents’ orchard and auction barn. My dad was the auctioneer. They had a sandwich shop there and my siblings and I would sell homemade apple cider, burgers, fries and a whole lot more off the menu to folks who came to the auctions. Lots of fun memories!
While in high school, I cleaned shrimp during Maine’s annual shrimp run in February. Small slippery shrimp, cold feet, smelly clothes! Another time I climbed apple trees on strange ladders that came together at the top end to fit among the branches. I was a really slow apple picker, but the orchard owner took pity on me and kept me on through the season.