November 20, 2022 -- My First Job

 

My First Job

Carrie Keiser

My first job was cleaning the answering service building where mom worked nights.  It wasn’t a very big place.  My duties included cleaning and mopping the bathroom, the break-room/kitchen area, vacuuming and dusting the entry and vacuuming and dusting the downstairs area. I would do this job once a week while mom was working which meant that I had to spend the night and get ready for school the next morning there at the answering service.  We set up an area for me to sleep under a counter.  We hung a blanket up to block the light somewhat and then I settled down and slept while mom worked through the night.

It was a pretty easy job and I even made a few dollars!  I was kinda fun to see the old phones and switchboards in the entry area.  I might have tried them out a few times, pretending I was an old school phone operator. It was a fun first job. I used a lot of my earnings at the comic book store.

By: Ryanne Leavitt

Reaching back into ones memory is an interesting thing.  I totally remember my first job, it was working for Lee Hatton, but whether it was when I was 12 or 13, I cannot quite pull the answer from my brain.  I remember the responsibilities I had.  I mended fences, mowed the lawn, fed her menagerie of animals.  I also helped fix a greenhouse and did what ever yard work she had…including pulling weeds…that was the first time I was paid to do that…every other time in my life’s history, before this job, that was a punishment for crimes against mom rules. I was making 6$ an hour so I definitely didn’t complain.

I remember lunch times were pretty fun.  I didn’t have to pack one, Lee fed me what ever she and her husband were eating.  It was always much better than the peanut butter sammich or funny noodles I would have had at home. I would say the best part, of lunch was watching, My Dog Spot, sit on his shoulder and eat from his fork.  Did I mention that My dog spot was their cat?

I worked from 8 in the morning until noon, had lunch, then road my bike home, and got back in time for Mum to take me to my all-star team practices.  

It was all going great until she decided to hire a boy about the same age as me to help out with all the work.  She paid him 2$ an hour more than me and he did half as much in a day as me.  He couldn’t even figure out how to run the riding lawn mower, and he also didn’t make it through the whole summer…soooo I think we can all agree on  the morals of this story…wage disparity was alive and well, and young teenage boys are dumb and lazy.

Story Slingers

November 20, 2022

Myrna Flynn

The Jobs of My Life

First a list of all the jobs I can remember since I was 10.

Babysitting; tending yards; feeding chicken; collecting eggs; slopping pigs; fill in switchboard operator; waiting tables and cleaning dorms at Eastern; waitress at a restaurant in Cheney (lasted two weeks, got fired for making good milkshakes)and cleaning houses.

My first real job, with a time sign in, getting a weekly paycheck was at a nursing home as a nurses aide, (this was before you had to a CNA). If was OJT. I learned how to make beds hospital style, clean bedsores and put on ointment, chase a patient down the street when she escaped from her room and snuck out the door.

The most important lesson I learned was probably how much altitude played in under stressful conditions. There were two patients who needed their bedsores treated.The first was a man missing one leg. He suffered quietly the pain and always thanked us when we were finished. The second was was a woman who was missing both legs. She moaned, called us names and complained the whole time.

This is the story of my first real job.

THE END

Story Slingers 

prompt: My First Job

November 18, 2022

Daren Flynn

FRINGE BENIFIT

My first job

As I recall

Was not in Spring

Or in Fall.

No, its was in 

Summertime

I earned my 

Very first dime.

I don't remember

Just how

I got the job

Here and now.

And I do regret

To say

I've no clue

As too the pay.

I may have been

Ten ot twelve

And was hired to

Stock the shelves.

That was to be

My main chore

At the Red and White

Grocery store.

One day it was

My good luck

When helping

Unload a truck.

That a watermelon

Broke

That was the best

Day, no joke.

We all stopped what

We were doing

And had a good

Time chewing.

From my first job

This I learned

Work gives more than

What you've earned.

My First Paid Job

Flynn Family Story Slingers

20 November 2022

By Cary Holmquist

Apart from babysitting for neighbors, my first paid job was washing dishes at the 4-H Chuckwagon cafeteria at the Montana State Fair in Great Falls.  It lasted about 10 days in the summer of 1970, so I was 13 years old.  It also included a little bit of hamburger flipping before the end.   If you want to know what it was like, it was mostly being hot and getting hotter around the hot water and hot grill, in the back of an old wood and canvas-roofed building on the outside of the carnival Midway, across from backside of the horse racetrack bleachers.

At the same place, my sister Sharman had a job taking orders at the tables and serving hamburgers and hot dogs and lemonade—so waitressing.  We both had to get our social security numbers before we could get paid, so the taxes could be withheld.   We started to feel grown up all at once.

Neither of us could drive legally at the time, so we had to get a ride in with our Dad, who was working someplace in town at the time.   So he would drop us off at the fairgrounds gate and we would have to wait a couple hours for the Chuckwagon to open.  And we would have to wait for him to pick us up in the late afternoon.  It was a 30-mile commute each way.  

As a job and experience, it was not very exciting, but we met lots of people and felt lost about it most the time as we were bossed around by EVERYONE else.  We also made a few friends with kids our own age who came in and out doing the same jobs as us on other shifts, though I now do not remember any of them other than that.   

I think we were paid $1.35 an hour, for about six hours a day or so.  I spent all the money and then some to pay for my high school class ring, which I lost about four years later.