What Was Your First Ever Job?

[Mad Dog and Glory]

I was reminiscing on another thread about my first ever job, as a tour guide at Cox's Cave, Cheddar. I worked there in my first summer holidays from university, in 1980. Instead of talking about how stalagmites and stalactites were formed, we were instructed to 'dumb it down' (not in those words, obviously). So I had to describe these stalactites as the "butcher's shop at Christmas time" - one was like a turkey, one like a pheasant, and there was a little partridge at the end.

I almost got sacked for snogging a girl in the caves. I was reported to Lord Bath by some busybody tourist. His lordship kindly ordered the manager to fire me, but he decided to give me another chance. The current Lord Bath would have probably made snogging girls in the caves compulsory.

I would have gone back the following year, but all the guides were replaced by the disembodied voice of the actor Patrick Allen (best known for voicing the Barratts ads). He didn't snog any girls, he just seduced them with his dulcet tones. So instead of that, I got a job on a mushroom farm.

So that's me. Anyone else care to share what their first job was?

[Deinonychus]

At twelve, I picked up litter several weekends in a row at a recreation ground that was used for a series of local events. I was paid in food. Cakes, mostly.

I almost got sacked for snogging a girl in the caves.

The mind boggles...

[Opal]

My first job was when I was 16 as a checkout girl in Tescos. I used to be able to turn off my brain when it was a boring day and be able to walk out at the end of a 9 hour shift not remembering a single thing I'd done all day. Amazingly I stuck it out for three years until I left to go to university. I tried going back during the first Christmas break but it wasn't the same (most of my friends had left by then) so I found another holiday job as a tour guide. Less pay but much more fun! :D

[Tess]

Cleaning dog kennels with my best friend when we were 14. We were paid £2 everytime we came to help and so if the kennels were full this would mean around 50p per hour as it would take ages, however there was the odd time it would take around 20mins and this would make it worth it! For some reason 'slave labour' comes to mind :(

[megustaleer]

Selling skirts at C&A. On Saturdays.
Mini-skirts were just coming in to fashion, and it was murder, with all these girls and women with lumpy thighs trying on short, tight, tweedy 'pelmets'.

[My Friend Jack]

Shelf-stacking at Home & Colonial, aged 14. Afetr one week, I broke my arm playing football at school, so had to miss the next 4 weeks. When I returned, I discovered that the shop had become Liptons and my pay for 4 hours work had gone up from 68p to 70p. I was delighted. No, seriously, I was!

[Obskua]

My first job was in school hols when I was 15 - I was working in a strip club in Soho (London), helping the girls dress in between their acts. £10 per week.

Well, it was all I could afford to pay !

(OK, so I 'borrowed' that one from Woody Allen).

Real first job - like so many, I had a Saturday job in a supermarket - in my case, Safeways. Having an ebullient personality, and a sense of humour, I started clowning around while I worked, to the complete confusion of the manager, but to his credit, he saw the customers liked it so didn't sack me. Come to think of it, that's the only job I wasn't sacked from !

[happyfriday]

I was 12 when i got my first job as a Waitress for my summer holidays, and I hated it, its a very thankless job, and my first boss made me cry over SOUP :( !! The same day while he was been a big bully, he shouted at me 'how long have you worked here?' in a really condescending way, so I looked at hime straight in the eye and told him 'Today was my last day' took off my apron and walked out, was only getting paid £1.50 an hour and it was not worth working for a horrible man like that!! So I got another Waitress job working for my Teacher of all people but it was great fun because she was never there and 3 of us more or less ran the place and we done a great job!!!!! :D

[lucyb]

Age 16-ish, cold calling for a charity. Had to work through a telephone directory calling people up to see if they wanted to collect for us. I got fired after about 4 weeks because I couldn't get enough people to say yes. They were so tight, they sent my previous week's pay through the post so they didn't have to pay me for the time it would have taken them to fire me in person if I'd actually turned up to work the following saturday...

[Top Cat]

I worked in The Forte Crest hotel in Nottingham as a waiter when I was sixteen (or The Farty Crust, as some more disgruntled employees called it). Got worryingly good at folding napkins in a pretty manner. My boss seemed to think it was my life's ambition to go all the way and make it to Head Waiter by the time I was thirty. I, on the other hand, was sure my destiny was elsewhere, as a pro golfer. We were both wrong. I lasted about four months, the highlight of which was the comedian David Baddiel sending back some soup that I'd deliberately served him cold in an attempt to get sacked.

[caldron]

When I was 15 I worked as a kitchen-hand (aka pan washer) in an Italian Restaurant managed by one of my aunts (to this day I don't know whether the restaurant was called "Noble Romans" or "Roman Nobles" !!)

I can't remember what was in my first pay-packet either, but I do remember buying a new tennis racket with it :)