First was when I was fourteen and mommy dearest farmed me out to several neighbors for their heavy cleaning and ironing. That was a barrel of laughs. When I was 16, Dad got me a summer job in the library of the university where he was a faculty member; that job was a lot of good fun as well as plenty of work.

Finally, when I was a senior, I worked a few afternoons a week and part of the summer in a nearby sewing factory, owned and operated by a despicable excuse for a human. I felt so sorry for the poor full time women. My girlfriend and I were the only teenagers and he more or less left us alone.

The factory produced men's and boys' trousers by the jillions, all piecemeal. I was pretty darned speedy, I have to say.

I hated baby sitting and would rarely agree to it.

Baby-sitting and then working at McDonald's. I never worked retail, don't know why except that it never interested me.

Other than babysitting, my first job was working at a blueberry farm, first picking, then in the cannery (and I lied about my age to get in there - much better pay rate!!)

After high school, my dad got me a job working as a temp. That job morphed into a fulltime position at a bank (my only temp placement) in their data entry department that paid my way through college.

Baby sitting and then working as a cashier...on the register at A&P

Ya know the old expression about working in retail, " The public are a$$e$". That was my experience, but I had tuition to pay.

Worked at a Subway from age 15 to 19 when I realized that the 9 bucks an hour pay I got for being a manager would not provide me with the lifestyle I wanted. Not only that, but the hungry public are the WORST people to have to put up with. Especially when they are obnoxiously picky,yet to lazy to make their own stupid sandwich at home. I went and signed up with a temp service to get into factory work,which has,oddly enough, led me to a great paying,low stress night shift position that I love.

Not counting babysitting, my first real job was as Assistant Director of the local Youth Center. I was 16. I was in charge of monitoring activities at events, scheduling and providing logistical support for events, running the roller skating program, paperwork, telephone, etc. It was fun!

Besides babysitting...

My first paycheck job at 14 was arranging chairs and tables for conferences. We lived nearby and so they could just call me up and I would walk over.

Second job was summer and break work painting houses through HS and college...and beyond when I needed to.

Third job was washing dishes through college.

Babysitting and then working for the city for 6 weeks, painting and general help, then I went to work at a shoe store

Worked in one of my dad's grocery stores - the mom and pop type - starting at age 11.

What is a button girl? I also don't know what replacing pockets is? I surely would never have qualified for your first job. :-)

Maybe a girl who works on buttons?

Elizabeth, if you've taken clothes to the dry cleaners more than once then you can bet some of your buttons came off and were sewn back on.

no "job" while in HS. worked as a day camp counselors each summer through college. had a few "work/study" jobs in college and made lots of new "friends" when I worked in the college library. WAY before a late book was impossible to get around... wink! wink!

Since I was a farm girl I was an unpaid farm worker. My first paying job was corn detasseling for the neighboring seed corn dealers. They butchered 2 steers to feed us for 2.5 weeks. Good eats there and decent wages, too considering it was 50 + years ago.

Besides babysitting.....

My first job at 15 was at a Flower Shop. There I would put together Rose Bowls for customers, set up the arrangements/flowers to be delivered, clean the walk-in cooler, prepare plant material such as smash the ends of stems (a no, no these days) strip leaves and whatever they needed me to do. It was a very busy, high energy place, but I loved working there and all the beautiful flowers.

My first job was cutting lawns for 2 other farmsteads, I did not make much, but it was my first venture beyond our own farmstead. That was followed by my first real job: driving a tractor for 2 summers for a grain farmer. That involved many hours in a seat on a John Deere B tractor with a hand clutch; That hand clutch made ploughing awkward at the ends of the field because I was pulling an old style plough that required one to hold the pull-rope taut for at least 1/2 half plough wheel rotation. The ploughs were lifted by a dog and pin arrangement in the wheel. My boss had the newer tractor with hydraulic assist.

My next assignment was running a filling/service station after school. During the week, I kept the station open for 3 hours and then closed it. On Saturdays, I was the head grease monkey and performed service jobs including minor auto repair.

I changed jobs for improved pay and cleaner working conditions. That job was a stock and carry out boy in a small supermarket. We closed the store on Thursday mornings to restock the shelves, build sales displays, and assemble white goods orders as needed. Oilfield workers got paid on Friday and Farmers came on Saturday. Those were the 2 busiest days. My feet would be aching after standing on them for8 to 10 hours bagging and carrying out customer's purchases. We also installed window air conditioners and delivered home appliances.

I agree to a point, TG, I think your thoughts make sense. I think all teens should have to do physically demanding, mind-numbingly boring work. Not necessarily customer service as other kinds of work are okay too. The kind of awful jobs that make kids think "I don't want to do this for the rest of my life". The other important lesson is "Hey, if I show up on time for a job and do what I'm told, they give me money!"

I started when I was 16, working in a little restaurant called the Malt Shop. I started at 75 cents an hour washing dishes and chopping lettuce, slicing tomatoes and onions for hamburgers. I soon got promoted to the front, and I worked on the grill, waited tables and was cashier. Then I made 1.25, which was minimum wage back then. Everyday there was a different plate lunch,depending on the day of the week, and the two ladies who ran the place were wonderful cooks. I learned a lot from them. The little town I lived in, was booming because NASA came in and built the space center about 10 miles away. I met and dated a lot of boys who had summer construction jobs. It was a fun job.

I joined the Musician's Union on my seventeenth birthday and got to play for recordings for 'jingles'. I remember going to the union hall for my first check, $35.00. My mother made me get off the bus, transfer to another bus and go in Sears to pay the check on her account. This was 1963.

I had a paper route, mowed lawns, and worked at a car dealership prepping new cars for delivery. I was also a boy scout and played baseball from little league through high school. I was too busy for an iPad.

At 15, I worked weekends at the Holiday Inn at the little restaurant they had. Great experience to the rest of the world, especially watching the county sheriff drop the cook off and pick him up. Scary, but he could make the most beautiful buffet.

I had no idea they hired a special person just for buttons...it must happen more often than I suspected. I did know it meant sewing them on BTW :)

I worked as a busgirl for several months when I was 16. When my boss found out I moved out on my own, she offered me a full time position as a waitress.

I did baby sitting for several neighbors. But we lived in a small town with not much social activity and we didn’t have very many neighbors with small children so I didn’t babysit often.

I played piano and organ so a Lutheran Church getting started asked me to play for their services on Sunday evening. I played for almost two years before going to college.

Living out in the country, there were not many jobs. No way to get to town, as we did not have a car. I worked in Jr. high drying dishes at school, to get my lunch free. My Mother would let me keep the lunch money. Later in high school, I was in charge of counting and wrapping all the money the cafeteria took in and also got my lunch free. During the summer for maybe two or three days, I rode a tomato setter and planted tomato plants for my nearest neighbor. I think I probably got ten dollars for all of that. My Mother also helped the same way. I was married when I was 18 so that ended most jobs for me. I did work for two seasons after I was married in the tomato packing company's lunch room. I got $1.00 an hour. That was more than the men made in the factory, they got $.75 an hour. I never had a paying job away from home after that.

Sue

I worked in the hospital cafeteria after school. And I was a picky eater but their food was really good to my surprise.

I worked in a bakery. The owner had 2 big teenage sons and they would run around in the back room playing an shooting rubber bands off. There were many complaints of rubber bands getting in the breads & cakes.

I babysat and sometimes helped a neighbor clean her house. In high school, I spent a few weekends as a live-in carer for a 21 year old girl who was quadriplegic when her mother was out of town. My first 'real' job was as a waitress at a pizza place.

My first job was between my freshman and sophomore years of college. I signed up through a local temp agency and was sent to a local commercial building supplies warehouse. Materials like windows, doors, shutters, wood trim, stair rails, etc would arrive on a box car and need to be shuttled to the correct location in the warehouse. Or an order would come in and the various items would need to be gathered and placed on a truck for shipping to the job site.

Another temp started the same day as me, he was assigned to unpacking the box car, I was assigned to help fill orders. Around 10:30 on that first day a sliding glass door unit that the other guy was moving on a rolling cart from the train to its storage location started to tip over, and the guy tried to stop it from falling, and it fell over on him, injuring him enough that he left in an ambulance.

Sometimes I would work with warehouse supervisor and we would work hard to get that job done so we could move on to the next order Other times I would work with full-time workers and they would walk and move at a snail's pace, and would tell me "Slow down, take it easy, don't work so hard. You don't want to make us look bad."

At one point the buzzer signaling either lunch or the morning or afternoon break sounded, and the guys I was working with set down the items they were carrying, mere feet from the cart. I think they were the last few items to fill that order, and I put them on the cart and was going to push the cart to the loading dock which was on the way to the break room, and the other workers stopped me saying "were on break, we'll do that after break is over. You don't do any work during break time."

Another time when I was lifting several window units, one after another, to the correct stack in the warehouse, one slipped, crashed to the floor, shattering. I was worried that I'd have to pay for it, since its cost was probably more than I made that summer. But the workers I was with said put it back on the cart, and we'll say it was broken in transit on the train car.

A college friend worked each summer in the Dum-Dum sucker factory in northern Ohio during college. She said that standing there all summer on the production line next to, and across from, women who had been there 20 or 30 years really renewed her resolve to do well at college.

Clerk at Bell of Pennsylvania. In addition to answering phones and filing, wrote numbering plans in spreadsheets for businesses establishing new phones or moving phones to new locations. This was pre-EXCEL and those spreadsheets were huge! I worked there for two summers while I was in junior college. After getting my AS, I worked for an insurance company for three weeks in a programming capability, but I didn't like what I was doing and decided to join the Army.

Haying for the dairy farmer down the road. Wages were lunch and dinner plus $1.00/hour. It was hard work, but WAY better than being stuck indoors somewhere!

My first job was a housekeeper at a hotel when I was 15. It was just for the summer. People can be real slobs lol I wasn't very quick at it either. One time a singer named Jon Secada ,who was very popular in the 90's, stayed there. My mom got to meet him when she came to pick me up one day. Also a little unknown group at the time had stayed there. I just happened to recognize them from the back of one of my teen magazines. I saw the lead singer walking towards me and all I could get out was hi and he said hi back. A girl I work with ended up on the elevator with all of them. You may know them as The Backstreet Boys. haha :)

Oh and yes people are mean when it comes to food but try dealing with people that want their pills ;)

I started out collecting soda bottles and turning them in for the $.02 deposit. Summers in HS, I detasseled corn, baled hay, ground feed and other farm work along with mowing lawns. Also worked construction jobs. After HS, I sold hardware, worked in a filling station and did construction and handyman jobs, year-round while going to Junior College.

Loved all of the work most of the time, but outside work in the coldest part of winter, along with the low earnings, incentivized me to finish college.

When in high school, I took a class called Distributive Education. The teacher got jobs for the students with local businesses where we went to school half day and worked in the afternoon. Since I'd had typing and shorthand, I got a job with a lawyer, so between my jr. and sr. year, at age 16 1/2 I was a legal secretary. I got a whopping 50 cents per hour. I worked for all summer and senior year, then after graduation went to work in the office of the local Frito-Lay distributor for a wide south Texas area. I got a whole $1 per hour there at first. Fortunately, salary increased decently, and I worked there a bit over 5 years, got insurance, vacation time, and loved the people and job. Left when DH and I moved from Alice to Tyler when he went to work for Humble Oil & Refining after college. We had my car, a small U-Haul, a baby bed and a nearly 1 year old daughter. Hard to remember being that young!

My very first job where I got an actual paycheck was at F. W. Woolworth Five & Dime.

I started babysitting when I was 13. I worked in the public library during high school.

Babysitting when I was 11. Then worked at the Arctic Circle (fast food place) for a month.

Babysitting @ age 11. Then at 14, I got my 1st 'official' job working in a bakery on Saturdays. I went in at 4:30 am to operate the front and be there when the bread truck drivers came to pick up their orders for the day. Stayed until closing at 6 pm. All for a whopping $20 a day.

Oh and all the doughnuts I wanted. LOL

My Dad would drive me, and upon arrival, I'd go in and get him a bag of fresh doughnuts for the ride.

Next job was a summer job and I spent 2 days a week dusting furniture in a furniture store. 50 cents an hour. OH how I hated that job!! To this day I hate to dust!

Other summer jobs included hauling hay, slopping pigs, feeding the cattle and gathering eggs on grandparents farm. That was the best!!

On my 16th birthday, I got a job at a steak house. Worked there through all through high school.

Worked in a 5 & dime store behind the candy counter

Being a commercial fishermans daughter, my first job was culling hard clams as they were brought onto the boat. Also worked on the ocean boat sorting the fish from drag nets. Later I opened ocean clams to bait codfish trawl lines. Always paid for what I did, but doubt the labor laws would have approved of the jobs. Would not change any of my early learning.

Yes, a button girl was the one who would sew the missing buttons on shirts, pants, coats, etc. Every so often something would come back because the button i sewed on fell off, hated that.

Replacing pockets on pants is not an easy job, but the ladies there taught me. Came in handy with a hubby and 3 sons.

Can't believe how many people worked retail, I did that too, not all ways my favorite, but I was good with people!'

Managed one of those "pop up" Halloween stores for 11 years, just for 8 weeks each year. 2 weeks to set up and 6 weeks to sell. Then one day, November 1st to pack the store up! Sure was a lot of fun, people are crazy! We learned the first year NOT to keep the Fart Spray out on a shelf! Kept it locked up after that..........I'm telling you it cleared the store!!! LOL!

I grew up in a very, very small coal mining town. There was absolutely nothing for teenagers to do. We just kinda hung out on the main street, nowhere for shelter or even to sit. A lovely, kind lady from town that had 2 pre teens of her own, rented a small room in an abandoned theatre and opened it as an after school hangout for us. There was ice cream and soda, chips for us teens to buy, very cheaply of course. There was a jukebox, 3 smalI tables and about 12 chairs plus 6 bar stools at the counter. I was hired (a junior in high school ) to open the shop on my way home from school. I was the only one there to sell what was available and supervise my schoolmates. Weekdays from 3: 30 to 5:00 this was my job. Friday and Saturday evenings from 6 to 9 the lady and I ran the shop together. God bless this woman for what she did for us kids.

putting together books..for the 'underground typography'..))

you know when somebody prints out pages, somebody puts them in the right order, then somebody actually binds them?

i was putting pages in the right order

April, i believe that is called collating. I collated books in Jamaica for the local school system. It was kind of fun with the small group of girls I worked with.

I thought I posted but I can't find me so I will repeat that my first job was babysitting. Next was waitressing. Next was sales clerk at Sears then health food store.

Never really liked those jobs or working for a boss so I chose self employment when I was able to return to the Workforce. But that's another story.

Babysitting was first I suppose. First pay check was for running a catalog on a mimeograph machine, for the Fargo Diocese. From there I moved to short order cook at a place known mostly for ice-cream. Next I became the first ever female pizza cook at Shakey's...#METOO got me out of restaurant work and on to sales clerk at JCP where I helped move the downtown store out to the big mall. Working with the public is no treat. Anyone with a nickel thinking you are their slave, dirty old men wanting young girls to measure their inseam, but it did MOTIVATE me through college. I have always said wanna know what you want to be when you grow up--work in a mall late January to June. Boredom is a great motivator.

Started in elementary school volunteering as a candy striper at a nursing home. First real paying job was working for my dad after school and weekends in his office. He was an independent insurance agent.

Other than the odd lawn mowing for someone while they were away, my first "paycheck" job was repairing A-V equipment at school. Started out as volunteer, recruited by the A-V Director and my shop teacher since I did well in electronics and had a lot of mechanical ability. They wanted me to work in there during study hall. Like a fool I did it but it became a paying job at the end of the quarter. I enjoyed working on all the equipment. I like tearing things apart and learning how they work and it's a bonus to get it put together again without too many extra parts.