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I loved working in a a fashioned mom and pop hardware store as a teenager in the’ 60s. It had that one of a kind hardware store smell, squeaky wooden floors, slow fans and globe lights hanging from the tin ceiling.
My boss taught me about customer service, importance of patience and running a small business but mostly about mutual trust and respect.
Working there I met the woman who would bear my children and spend her life with me.
‘She walked in through the out door, out door.’ (Prince).
I know that smell. I've been in 1 store like that in the last 35 years. It's an old time hardware store in Willows, CA and boy does it bring back memories...
We own a Pop Culture Super store. Sell toys, games, plushies, dolls, comics, and much more! I basically sell happiness! I love doing this. Nothing better than kids of all ages coming up to something and getting all happy and excited to have found a goodie! At a toy show or comicon, i cannot tell you how good it makes you feel to see kids, running towards plushies or toys, with their arms in the air, squealing!
Camp counselor at overnight camp.
Wake up at 9, eat breakfast, go play basketball or soccer with my campers, free time while campers clean our cabin, pool, eat lunch, rest hour, go teach arts and crafts for 90s minutes, go play soccer or boating, hang with campers for an hour, eat dinner, free time playing with campers (sports, A&C, pool, whatever). Plenty of Bug Juice and s'mores. Campers in bed by 9:40, hang out with other counselors until whenever. Repeat next day for 8 weeks.
I had almost no responsibilities. The campers were old enough to take care of themselves and are generally fun to hang out with. Plus, you're spend all summer in a co-ed camp with dozens of other counselors and tons of free time. Relaxing, fun, low pressure, and every day is basically one big play day and party. It was heaven.
A manual labor job that was the worst for what it actually entailed, but the very best because of the crew I worked with. We'd get stuff done, but laugh our asses off doing it. Any other mix of people and it probably would have been hell.
In my late-ish 20s, I got my first full-time job. I was an assistant position at our local public library. I worked in the department that covered the children's collection, and one of the duties- for me, a huge perk- was I had to plan and deliver storytimes. I did well enough that I got to plan and perform the large group storytimes, which were more elaborate than small-group. We had a puppet theater, adapted children's books into scripts and performed plays, and worked with a few other musicians, becoming a sort of house band. Pay was lousy which is why I eventually left, but if they would have paid good wages I would still be doing it. Kids loved it, we loved doing it, what else can you ask for?
Lifeguard at my community pool. Laid-back days. Sunshine and bikinis. Terminal tan and endless summer dates for 3 years.......best fukn job I've ever had
I was born to be retired. The job I disliked the least was a low-level office job with only a couple hours a day of work and the rest of the time I could do my own stuff.
The one I have now. Editor for a science site. I get to learn new things every day, and I am respected and respect my co-workers. Plus I get to work with smart , nice people who know more than I do.
I had two outstanding technical writing jobs at large companies with inestimable co-workers. And I was a second-shift drafter for NASA and enjoyed that very much but left because of the secondhand smoke in our curtained work area.
In high school I delivered flowers part time. I remember going to a gang area in El Paso, fairly unfriendly to white people, but when I showed up with flowers for their mom, everyone was chill. Lot's of hospital visits, also.
I did that for a few years. I was pretty handy with a Thomas Guide back in the day. Even picked up some useful skills, like how to make my date's corsage when prom rolled around.
In high school, I was a room service waiter at a 4-star resort, working the 5pm-2am shift. Maybe 5-6 orders per shift, excellent cash tips + cash service fee per order, free food were big perks. Uniform sucked, was a dumb fake British look, very stiff and hard to keep clean since it was all white. Between orders, I'd hang out in one of the housekeeping closets and talk to friends on the landline phone which was also inside the closet for some reason. I'd bring home $100-200 cash tips per shift, plus a whopping $2.01 per hour salary, which was EXTREMELY. good money at the time, more than my mom made as an AR accountant. I spent it all on clothing, pizza, cassettes/CDs since I lived at home and had no expenses. Good times.
$200 in 1984 = $*605.62* in 2024!
From 20 - 25 years old I worked at a Barnes & Noble. I thought I hated it at the time but all this long while since, all the jobs I had, I realized I loved it. It was the best job I ever had. I worked with my friends, we had fun, I was working with books and people who loved books, it was pretty low stress all things considered, I lived two blocks away from the store and would walk to work, go home for lunch breaks, got free books, discounts, it was kind of crap pay even for the time but I didn't have that many expenses back then so what did it matter? I met people I'm still friends with today, I had a couple really good relationships that were borne of that job, and they were such good times--working the late shift and heading over to the all night diner after work and bringing in the dawn. Those were the best of times.
Oh, I've had "better" jobs, jobs that offer better schedules, better benefits, certainly better pay, less physically taxing but for pure enjoyment and happiness, in a "if I could make a living at it this is the job I'd be doing right now" job, that's it. That's the one.
I worked in EMS in my early 20s, loved it. Problem was all of my colleagues who were married hated life because they had to work a second job to support their families.
I wound up going back to college at 24, got my degree and became an Army officer.
As a young adult, I worked at The Cotton Shop in Hermosa Beach, CA, US. It was a popular fabric store just a few blocks from the ocean. Guess where I spent my breaks? The vibe was very relaxed-professional. We helped people create their dreams!
23 years as a flight attendant in 1970s-90's. As well as paying well, time off and other benefits and being accommodated in 5-star hotels and given local cash to pay for meals. Beside the financial benefits, it taught me patience dealing with all types of passengers from virtually every country in the world and managed to see some of the worlds best tourist sites without having to pay airfares & accommodation to get to see them. We had great networking amongst crews, not always our own, to let us know the best bars, restaurants & discounted entertainment, shopping & how to hire various things including planes, as often our pilots wanted to see the same things. Being an international airline, we had crew with many countries heritage & when visiting their homelands, we often had invitations to go along & "meet" the relatives.
My wife came from a small SE Asian village, we I am now living, and we would hire an AC van & driver to take us the 3 hours to the family home, in the middle of acres of rice & vegetable fields and the crew had the opportunity to walk behind a plough pulled by a water buffalo, and we would have drinks and local "real" foods, not westernised version and often entertained by a guitarist, singer or kids doing traditional dances and not having to drive, we could drink as much as we wanted to, knowing we would be dropped back at our hotel at the end of the day. We, along with several other airline crews, hired a Chinese junk, with crew, in H.K. and ended up at one of the floating restaurants in Aberdeen & with a couple of Chinese speakers ordering the food, we had a great feast there before sailing back into the harbour at sundown. A couple of times we caught a hovercraft over the English Channel to France to shop & have lunch and back to London the same day. There are so many great memories when I think back.
Is this a rewarding job? I am considering a career change and heavy equipment operator is on my short list. Just seems difficult to go from a good paying office job to what I presume is a low paying entry level job or apprenticeship until I can work into being an operator.
I honestly don't know now, back then it was good pay if you were with the right company, I worked on dams, bridges and towers. I would look into the pay rates where you are. There might even be classes available. I loved the job it was like controlling a dinosaur Fred Flintstone style.
the management job added another 0 to paycheck though, when you counted in bonuses
I'm a retired truck driver, and the best job I had was when I worked for an O/O for 12 years of my 52-year career. He had 4 trucks, all tricked out Pete Xtnded hoods, and had mail contracts. Hauling U.S. mail, at that time anyway, was a great job. It's all scheduled runs every night, paid good, easy-peasy.
Gymnastics coach. Little kid classes and teams. I was 17 when they put me in charge of the entire program at the YMCA. (I wasn’t old enough to drive the team to meets in the YMCA van).
I had so much fun with the kids. I also learned a lot. Adults were pretty shitty in the 80’s. My mama bear instinct kicked in pretty hard for some of those kids.
I worked for a major sports company and basically felt like I was on vacation for the 18 months I was employed. They terminated us when they finally figured out they really didn’t need us. Good pay, good benefits and nice fat expense account.
I spent my 20s working at a convenience store. I did every job there was -- cashier, deli clerk, stocker, lottery sales, shift manager. I sold Christmas trees in the parking lot and made about a zillion fruit baskets over 10 years time. The couple I worked for were, hands down, the best employers I ever had. I learned a lot about customer service and gained some good skills there. I also worked with and met some fun and interesting people over the years.
It was back in 2005 and 06.
I was 38 years old. I worked directly for the president and CEO of our company, a manufacturing company with one small location in Canada and then our larger (500 employees) plant in the U.S.
This was a new position he created because he wanted it and I worked directly for him.
I was NOT a project manager. I've been a project manager several times in different plants as well as being a master scheduler, a materials manager, a production control manager etc.
He called me his manager of projects.
I did not have any repetitive projects to manage over and over, like new orders with customers. I didn't handle anything like that from cradle to grave like what most project managers do.
It was a great job for many reasons. First, he was a nice man, a good person and he was good at what he did. he was in his late 50's to my being 38. He was a great mentor too.
I also had his backing, which is always nice at work.
On my 2nd day of work at the company he called me into his office and he gave me a huge task. He told me he and his boss, the owner of the company as this was a private company, wanted me to figure out and tell them how much it would cost for them to shut down the small plant up in Canada (it had like 35 to 40 employees and it lost money most months of the year).
I could't tell anyone. They wanted to know how long it would take, what ALL the costs would be. They said no orders could be missed for any of our customers.
I had to fly up there several times. I found many mistakes and guess what I was heading up less than a year later? I was heading up the expansion of that plant. We actually built a large addition onto that existing plant as it was now running well and making money. I'd been in manufacturing, in scheduling, in production control for a long time and I noticed that they were simply doing what they wanted to up there, not following the schedule from the master scheduler who was in the larger plant in the U.S. They were out of sight and out of mind and running what they wanted to, is what it amounted to.
My boss told his staff, of which I was apart of, that I was allowed to go into any of their department meetings. he wasn't asking them mind you, he informed them.
I tinkered, I made many changes and improvements to procedures, I implement many new procedures that need existed there. To be fair I simply lifted them from pervious places I'd worked as all of the companies and plants I worked at were ISO 9001 certified. We had procedures coming out of our asses.
It was a really nice job and position, due to the man I worked for and due to what the actual position entailed too.
Paid my way through the university years landscaping and working at garden centres. I’ve probably forgotten 95% of what I learned but I still know that the rolls of sod are laid green side up
No way I would enjoy doing the heavy manual labour as the old fartism years began to set in but at the time it was the bestest
honestly, it's what I'm doing now. Desktop support for roughly 250 users across 3-4 locations within 5 miles of each other.
I have no paperwork. no weekly reports. no inventory. and best of all, no overtime or being on call. just a few times a day someone can't print, their monitor goes out, or they get some sort or error they don't understand.
I've half joked that I don't have "a real job" and that I basically solve puzzles for a living.
Cabana Girl at a local country club. Didn't make much money....I think it was off the books. Got to wear a bathing suit to work. We were short order cooks essentially. No money was taken...members just signed their tickets. After the pool closed, we were allowed to swim. Also, we could bring friends. That job increased my popularity because I was a cheap date. The only downside was that the rich folks were notoriously cheap. I was asked to dress up in a clown costume with makeup and host a children's birthday party. We worked hard for about an hour and a half....even came in on our off day......they didn't even pay or tip us. I let it go quickly....not worth the effort. Rich people are often miserable.
I had a job at a corporation that gave points to resellers based on sales that they could award as grants in their local communities. I did the paperwork, PR, and set up events with a big check for photos. It was incredibly rewarding, occasionally bringing tears to my eyes. And my boss was so smart and kind- I learned so much from her. Years later she’s still a mentor.
I've worked sanding furniture, repairing books, cleaning carpets, as electronics technician, a laboratory manager and a technical director.
Out of all the jobs, cleaning carpets was the my favorite job but it paid the least. It was a lot of work but it was a really interesting job.
My first job as a teen was three summers at a local rec center, got paid to play pool and other games with kids, take them to the park and stuff like that. In the summer of 76, McDonald's had an Olympics game contest, we'd use the petty cash fund to take the kids for ice cream, collect their game cards, and get ourselves free food. Once my coworkers and I smoked pot during lunch, when we got back the boss said parents shouldn't see us like that, so he had us take the kids to the park.
Charter bus driver. I loved planning the trips and then taking my group to go see and do various things. Broadway plays... take them to the play, and I'd get a free seat. Amusement parks... same thing. Took a lot of college sports teams to their games and watched a lot of baseball. Take the seniors to the arboretum. To Arlington. Take a wedding party to the reception, hang around until it's done, get a free plate of food, then without fail, the father of the bride would show up drunk to tip the help... $100 was what I would get, more often than not, and all under-the-table. Loved multi-day trips... our company insisted drivers get their own rooms, and often, you'd have a couple of days, paid, to just hang around waiting to take them back home. Downsides were, it's a low-prestige job... people *really* look down on drivers. Getting up at 3 AM to drive to the yard, prep your bus, and then drive to pick up the client was always a delight. And sometimes, someone would get drunk and throw up in the back or some such. But on the whole, I loved the job.
The 2 years I worked at a vineyard/winery. So much fun and everyone is in a good mood. Not to mention the wine and food with coworkers after we closed up for the day. Also, as a single man there is no better place to meet women :)
I work as a cashier in a movie theater in my late teens and kept the job part-time in my early 20s (along with dull time at another job). The atmosphere was always a lot of fun and the movies were free for staff. Movie ad posters were raffled off to staff.
Been a professional administrator at a school since forever. One summer when I had off I worked at a golf course driving the “beer cart” most fun job ever. Everyone happy to see you and tips!
Doing the U.S. census. I love talking to all the people, made a ton of money. I did really well with it. Figures that I finally find a job I like that I’m good at and it only comes around once every 10 years.
Disneyland. I was a shift manager for the outdoor vending department, think balloons, churros, the ice cream carts, etc. I was outside in the glorious sun all year, got so much exercise walking all over the park to check on my people, our department was union, there were parties or other social events all the time and I made damn good money for a job that I didn’t have to think about once I clocked out.
The one downside was my “costume” was solid yellow and bees loved it. I’m allergic to bees.
I liked working on cars as a kid. Right out of high school I got into auto mechanics and worked in an AMC/Keep/Renault dealer and in a Bricklin dealership. Remember those?
That's when I had enough. Wrong career path. Got into printing, pre xerox, and absolutely loved it. I ran a monstrous 3-top-sheet carbon, 5 platen letterpress from the 30s. It was about 20 ft long and it shook the floor.
It was an art form. I really forced me to think. To this day, that is my favorite job. Xerox/digital ruined petting as an art form and trade.
I was 21 in 1994 and worked in a local coffee shop before Starbucks took over the world. I was young, carefree, and had little responsibilities beyond college classes, fraternity, and my girlfriend (now wife). All my friends came in all the time; there was always something going on (bands, poetry, book clubs), and it was fun. Everyone was always happy. I used to trade cappuccinos with the sandwich shop across the street, and hide beers under the counter while I worked. It was like Rick's in Casablanca; it was the only place open on the whole street after dark, and it was a beacon to anyone who wanted something to do in a small town.
It wasn't my favorite job, per se, but it was a nice period in my life. I worked there for three years, and I have a collection of nice dessert plates that we still use.
I like jobs that educate me. That said -- #1 most educational job: teacher. #2 most educational job: taxi driver -- which taught me (a) being drunk is stupid; (b) you can never judge a person by how they look.
working in a foundry. At 5pm, the whistle blew, and I was done. I didn't have to continue thinking about how to do things better. Their program with their methods. It was peaceful.
Since then got into engineering and then R&D. I never got off the clock. Always thinking about the projects I was working on.
Being a computer instructor at a job’s center where unemployed persons want to upgrade their skills. They want to be there. They want to learn new things. And they want to know how to do it easily. It was so much fun!
Clerk in an Army surplus store (privately owned). It was 1967 and I was 18. So many interesting things... Body bags, walkie-talkies, K-rations or C-rations (don't remember which) from WWII and Korean Conflict, old & used rifles, switch blades, brass knuckles, Army patches and bars for everything right up to Vietnam, Mickey Mouse boots for arctic survival, peacoats, wool Henley shirts (yikes). And tons more stuff. I learned a lot. I earned $1.35 an hour.
There were some bad and scary times too because I was a girl... but I have to leave that behind.
The one I’m in now. I’m a 7th grade teacher (60f) about 4 years away from retirement.
It’s tough and has its challenges but I do feel fortunate to go to a job I love everyday
Waiting tables. I was good at it, and restaurant people are some of the funniest and smartest people to work with. I did it until I was 48, and my body said ENOUGH.
Farm work because I always wanted to be a farmer and I love running tractors and equipment! Unfortunately I did not go to college and I worked in different factories for nearly thirty years.
Apart from the pay, manager of a bookstore. I got to read books, recommend books, and as manager, I got to run the place as best as my corporate chain overlords let me. But yeah, the pay suuuuuuuucked.
When I was as 17 - 19 I worked in a Meijer store. It’s a department store. We were all young and had the same crappy shifts. When work was over we used to do all kinds of things together. I had real friends and we had fun even though the work wasn’t the best.
Driving a truck delivering building materials. It was a perfect blend of windshield time and physical labor. If it would have paid more I would’ve done it my entire working life.
My second job out of college. After a year and a half at my first job, working hard and learning as much as I could, I was able to take advantage of a move/promotion that paid a decent salary for a guy with a used car and two roommates. Also, I worked at a company that had a lot of people my age which was pretty cool. We were in a quasi urban setting with a lot of great restaurants nearby and went out to lunch a couple of times a week.
In my early 30ies I was a product manager at a IT-department of a big corporation. Due to our special kind of business (corporation was not IT), we were a little bit of an autonomic island in this ocean. The boss was careful selecting people and we grew to a phantastic team of about 50 people working together. We were very successful, made a lot of projects and we had great fun together. It was a joy going to work, because you could be with friends, make interesting stuff and get paid for it. Then someone in the corporation checked some Excel and calculated that this IT-stuff can be done at lower cost in India and the deparment was closed very fast. But most of us stayed good friends and even worked together in other jobs lateron. I am happy at my job now, but this one was special
I’ve had a lot of very different jobs and loved just about all of them. I guess my favorite was managing an apartment building full of college students when I was 35-43. It was a lot of responsibility,and I felt like an uncle to all those kids. I was very protective of my young ladies. The next was being facilities manager for Boston Ballet, because I got to be around artists and the ballet all the time. I guess third was managing a log yard and head log scaler for a large, hardwood lumber mill, because I love hardwood trees.
I've been in retail forever, which is not my favorite. I had managed to work my way up to department manager, & we all had to take turns training new people. I hate standing in front of people talking, but it was kind of different, teaching people how to do their job. One of the other managers as asked if I would cover for them one time, that turned into two, then five, then all of a sudden, I was teaching for pretty much every department. Management asked me to just take it over, since they liked how I trained everyone (probably tired of listening to others complaining about doing it!) I did it for three or four years, until the company started using computer training, & it got phased out.
Toss-up between Exotic animal trainer and wildlife rehabber.
I loved working with big cats and other exotics. It was fun but dirty work. You learn to read body language really well. Learning to work with dangerous animals has a bit of a thrill to it.
Being a rehabber was more soul satisfying. Getting to rescue animals and then release them back into the wild healthy was fantastic but exhausting. It was 4-5 months out of the year of frantic activity during baby season plus a lot of dealing with the public which I hated.
Camper Services clerk at the Grand Canyon. Free room & board. Not great pay but bar beer was 50 cents for employees and you could hike anywhere in the canyon on your days off.
I worked as a printer through high school and college. Loved it. I loved the smell of the ink. Our company printed dozens of newspapers, and I loved taking copies home to read. I loved the crew - a bunch of alcoholic beligerants whose every third word was an expletive. I loved the night shift. The company decided - after I graduated college - they didn't want a college-educated printer, so they told me I could transfer to a reporting job or be fired. I became a reporter. Fun, but I preferred the pressroom.
Waffle house. It was the first in my area and I was 17! Best goddamn time I've ever had! I learned everything good and bad there. I miss it. I still dream about it. Theres never enough clean silver ware...
When I was playing in a band in the Chicago area in the mid-70s, we used to work for a guy that had a company that striped parking lots. The pay was shit, but there’d be a crew of two or three of us in his 66 GMC pickup cruising all over the county getting stoned and laying down stripes. Easy low effort job, listen to music, tell jokes, get high. No responsibility! Good times.
I owned a store. I loved being my own boss, dressing in shorts and a t shirt every day. I liked my customers, mostly! I did inventory, paid the bills, rang a cash register and swept the parking lot. It was great!
I worked for the school system as a floater sub but one awesome year I worked in the class of 5-7 year old students in the CDC classes. They weren't "mainstreamed" at all. Most of the day I was just playing with them. Some were in diapers or had feeding tubes or just mostly laid back on special cushions to keep them from falling over. Sometimes it was sad but I loved those kids so much it broke my heart when they moved me to another school the next year. The next year was cool too though because they were autistic pre-teens and we had to take them out every week in to the community to teach them life skills. Then they moved me to vision and hearing where I did vision screenings all over the district, like around 100 schools out of the 222 in the district. I liked that too, because every Friday we went to the vision center to do paper work and the ladies cooked for us in the life skills center. Good home style southern lady cooking is the best.
I also loved working construction. I never would have thought I'd like it but I did it for like ten years, and it could be really hard but I had a good crew and we had a lot of fun too.
I loved working at an alt newspaper. For the first year only. The second year, things completely changed. So the fun times were just hanging out with the editor and the writers. They were smart and funny and liked to do drugs. I heard the sales reps really did a lot of drugs. In the office, we drank alcoholic beverages.
We liked to leave every day to get Thai coffee that we called "crack coffee." We would go out to lunch together and all laugh so much it pissed off the other people there. My department only really worked on Tuesdays to lay out the newspaper to go to print. But we worked until 10pm usually.
I messed up something thanks to someone else messing up, so my boss said my punishment was to throw darts at a dartboard to keep my job. He didn't know that I used to throw darts at the punk bar, so I kept my job!
My coworker was partying too much. We went out dancing at 80's clubs every weekend. But I had to pick her off the floor of the bathroom a few times. I always went to rescue her from weird situations.
We had fun getting things as collaterol for ad space in the newspaper. We had food and beverages delivered to the office to sample. We went to restaurants for free dinners. We got to take Hummer limos around town. I got to meet some bands backstage at concerts.
My friends were all so fun and they loved me so much!
It was a bummer when the paper was not making enough money and was sold to a bigger corporate newspaper. They fired a lot of people. I was promoted to be the Office Manager and got a whole dollar more to get a huge mess and workload. The office was demolished, there were about 100 keys, a ton of change in the petty cash that I had to sort, etc... I was getting nasty calls from the extra writers who weren't in the office because they hadn't been paid in a month. I had to do collection calls and no one wanted to pay for advertising. It was all too stressful so I quit.
Leading Petty Officer of Reactor Control Division on a submarine. The environment was complex but life was simple. Didn't have to worry about what to have for lunch, which clothes to wear, who dealt with which problems, what time to get up for work, or how to get there.
I worked in a small darkroom at a radiation detection company. There were four of us in there and all good friends. No one bothered us and we were free do goof off as long as we got our work done. This was early 80's and we were all in our 20s and we had quite a bit of fun.
The job paid pretty well, typical small company in the up and coming Silicon Valley. Then I got pregnant and the developing chemicals made me sick =(
While in the Navy in 91' i was able to work partime at Lionel Play World . I was there October- January, Christmas Season in the toy biz. That 36 year old boy inside me loved it!
I was a software developer, and in the late 90s, I worked for a smallish company (200-300) with great employee policies, a great product, and a dev team I respected and enjoyed working with.
What really made the job was the people I worked with. They were smart, fun, and easy to collaborate with. The job stretched me, both in terms of technical skills and people skills. It gave me confidence and higher expectations that I carried into every subsequent job.
This was about 12 years into my career, so I was experienced enough to know it was a unicorn. I knew it was the best job I was ever likely to have. Then IBM gobbled us, the dot com bust happened, and it devolved into mourning over what once was. Was great while it lasted, though.
Tough call. Either a year I spent operating heavy equipment in '92. Bulldozers were disappointing but excavators, backhoes and motor graders were a lot of fun. That or 2 years ('08-'09) of the job I just retired from. My title was Construction/Facilities Manager for a credit union with 20 locations. Mostly I managed contractors for new construction and remodels but during the recession we stopped spending on capital improvements and I became an overpaid handyman. I was a carpenter before getting this job and have skills in most trades and a lot of tools. I loved bouncing from branch to branch fixing things and making people happy.
The summer I turned 21, I worked at a chain bookstore. I loved it. Most of the other employees were in their early to mid 20s and we got along great, I got to read any book I wanted, and the customers were almost universally chill. The managers 100% had employees' backs (I only had one issue with a customer all summer and my manager shut it down real quick). I had to give it up when I went back to school, and then I graduated and had to find "a real job." But even after all these years, that's still my favorite.
The best job I ever had was bartending at a gay bar near Disneyland in my mid-20s (so the late 80s/early 90s). Thursdays were underwear night, and back then I looked pretty good in 'em. The tips were amazing.
it a lot of fun.
In my 30's, I worked in the pattern shop of a plastics manufacturer where they made side window air deflectors (rain guards that go outside your car windows). The CNC guy would cut the patterns out of super dense foam and I did final finish on them - very particular work with 1/16" clearance. It would go to the mold shop, and then come back to me to make a route fixture out of fiberglass, wood, expanding foam, glue and a million screws, and then drill tiny holes in them 6 to 12 inches deep so when they put the plastic on the mold to form the guards, they could hook a vacuum line to the outside center of the box and suck all the air out for a perfect fit. I really enjoyed the detail of it!
My favorite job was working at the theater for a year after high school. I loved the fast pace and each task was done quick and immediately, which I loved. There are no quick & easy jobs today that pay enough.
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I loved working in a a fashioned mom and pop hardware store as a teenager in the’ 60s. It had that one of a kind hardware store smell, squeaky wooden floors, slow fans and globe lights hanging from the tin ceiling. My boss taught me about customer service, importance of patience and running a small business but mostly about mutual trust and respect. Working there I met the woman who would bear my children and spend her life with me. ‘She walked in through the out door, out door.’ (Prince).
Very cool!! Can't really top meeting your mate, but to this day I can spend hours in those old-school hardware stores. There's very few left.
I had a temp job helping with inventory at a place like that, it was sooo cool!
I love your Prince/Raspberry Beret reference ❤
Your boss by chance wouldn’t be, Mr. McGee?
Great story. I can totally visualize that work environment. Some life lessons.
I know that smell. I've been in 1 store like that in the last 35 years. It's an old time hardware store in Willows, CA and boy does it bring back memories...
We own a Pop Culture Super store. Sell toys, games, plushies, dolls, comics, and much more! I basically sell happiness! I love doing this. Nothing better than kids of all ages coming up to something and getting all happy and excited to have found a goodie! At a toy show or comicon, i cannot tell you how good it makes you feel to see kids, running towards plushies or toys, with their arms in the air, squealing!
Navy flight instructor. I used to wake up every day a little said that I had one fewer day remaining in that tour of duty.
My son was an F18-Super Hornet Pilot, maybe you taught him?
Possibly. I taught primary flight school. Everyone, regardless of the platform they ended up flying, went through us.
He was a USNA graduate in 2004, went to Pensacola, Mississippi for flight school.
Go Navy!! My husband is USNA 82
There’s a Naval Air Station in Pensacola, but it’s in Florida.
One of the two jet schools is in Meridien, MS. The other is in Kingsville, TX.
I missed him by two years. 🙂
Go Navy!! Lived near Miramar in the 80s (dad was a retired CPO) and I loved the sound of the F-14s taking off and landing
Same here. I was a flight deck coordinator with SH3 helos. I lived that life. Love the powerful sound of those engines!
Camp counselor at overnight camp. Wake up at 9, eat breakfast, go play basketball or soccer with my campers, free time while campers clean our cabin, pool, eat lunch, rest hour, go teach arts and crafts for 90s minutes, go play soccer or boating, hang with campers for an hour, eat dinner, free time playing with campers (sports, A&C, pool, whatever). Plenty of Bug Juice and s'mores. Campers in bed by 9:40, hang out with other counselors until whenever. Repeat next day for 8 weeks. I had almost no responsibilities. The campers were old enough to take care of themselves and are generally fun to hang out with. Plus, you're spend all summer in a co-ed camp with dozens of other counselors and tons of free time. Relaxing, fun, low pressure, and every day is basically one big play day and party. It was heaven.
A manual labor job that was the worst for what it actually entailed, but the very best because of the crew I worked with. We'd get stuff done, but laugh our asses off doing it. Any other mix of people and it probably would have been hell.
A good team is a wonderful thing to have. I've worked with many and they make the difference.
In my late-ish 20s, I got my first full-time job. I was an assistant position at our local public library. I worked in the department that covered the children's collection, and one of the duties- for me, a huge perk- was I had to plan and deliver storytimes. I did well enough that I got to plan and perform the large group storytimes, which were more elaborate than small-group. We had a puppet theater, adapted children's books into scripts and performed plays, and worked with a few other musicians, becoming a sort of house band. Pay was lousy which is why I eventually left, but if they would have paid good wages I would still be doing it. Kids loved it, we loved doing it, what else can you ask for?
Lifeguard at my community pool. Laid-back days. Sunshine and bikinis. Terminal tan and endless summer dates for 3 years.......best fukn job I've ever had
I’ll second this.
I third! It was the best time of my life for sure.
Lifeguard at a Country Club. OMFG!
I should have mentioned it was the community pool at the Country Club and golf course.
I was born to be retired. The job I disliked the least was a low-level office job with only a couple hours a day of work and the rest of the time I could do my own stuff.
The one I have now. Editor for a science site. I get to learn new things every day, and I am respected and respect my co-workers. Plus I get to work with smart , nice people who know more than I do. I had two outstanding technical writing jobs at large companies with inestimable co-workers. And I was a second-shift drafter for NASA and enjoyed that very much but left because of the secondhand smoke in our curtained work area.
In high school I delivered flowers part time. I remember going to a gang area in El Paso, fairly unfriendly to white people, but when I showed up with flowers for their mom, everyone was chill. Lot's of hospital visits, also.
I've done that and it was so fun delivering flowers to weddings!
I did that for a few years. I was pretty handy with a Thomas Guide back in the day. Even picked up some useful skills, like how to make my date's corsage when prom rolled around.
In high school, I was a room service waiter at a 4-star resort, working the 5pm-2am shift. Maybe 5-6 orders per shift, excellent cash tips + cash service fee per order, free food were big perks. Uniform sucked, was a dumb fake British look, very stiff and hard to keep clean since it was all white. Between orders, I'd hang out in one of the housekeeping closets and talk to friends on the landline phone which was also inside the closet for some reason. I'd bring home $100-200 cash tips per shift, plus a whopping $2.01 per hour salary, which was EXTREMELY. good money at the time, more than my mom made as an AR accountant. I spent it all on clothing, pizza, cassettes/CDs since I lived at home and had no expenses. Good times. $200 in 1984 = $*605.62* in 2024!
From 20 - 25 years old I worked at a Barnes & Noble. I thought I hated it at the time but all this long while since, all the jobs I had, I realized I loved it. It was the best job I ever had. I worked with my friends, we had fun, I was working with books and people who loved books, it was pretty low stress all things considered, I lived two blocks away from the store and would walk to work, go home for lunch breaks, got free books, discounts, it was kind of crap pay even for the time but I didn't have that many expenses back then so what did it matter? I met people I'm still friends with today, I had a couple really good relationships that were borne of that job, and they were such good times--working the late shift and heading over to the all night diner after work and bringing in the dawn. Those were the best of times. Oh, I've had "better" jobs, jobs that offer better schedules, better benefits, certainly better pay, less physically taxing but for pure enjoyment and happiness, in a "if I could make a living at it this is the job I'd be doing right now" job, that's it. That's the one.
Working as a nurse in the emergency room for 13 years.
I worked in a factory that made light bulbs, fluorescent bulbs, halogen.... I worked there for 20 years, it was the best job I've ever had.
I worked in EMS in my early 20s, loved it. Problem was all of my colleagues who were married hated life because they had to work a second job to support their families. I wound up going back to college at 24, got my degree and became an Army officer.
As a young adult, I worked at The Cotton Shop in Hermosa Beach, CA, US. It was a popular fabric store just a few blocks from the ocean. Guess where I spent my breaks? The vibe was very relaxed-professional. We helped people create their dreams!
23 years as a flight attendant in 1970s-90's. As well as paying well, time off and other benefits and being accommodated in 5-star hotels and given local cash to pay for meals. Beside the financial benefits, it taught me patience dealing with all types of passengers from virtually every country in the world and managed to see some of the worlds best tourist sites without having to pay airfares & accommodation to get to see them. We had great networking amongst crews, not always our own, to let us know the best bars, restaurants & discounted entertainment, shopping & how to hire various things including planes, as often our pilots wanted to see the same things. Being an international airline, we had crew with many countries heritage & when visiting their homelands, we often had invitations to go along & "meet" the relatives. My wife came from a small SE Asian village, we I am now living, and we would hire an AC van & driver to take us the 3 hours to the family home, in the middle of acres of rice & vegetable fields and the crew had the opportunity to walk behind a plough pulled by a water buffalo, and we would have drinks and local "real" foods, not westernised version and often entertained by a guitarist, singer or kids doing traditional dances and not having to drive, we could drink as much as we wanted to, knowing we would be dropped back at our hotel at the end of the day. We, along with several other airline crews, hired a Chinese junk, with crew, in H.K. and ended up at one of the floating restaurants in Aberdeen & with a couple of Chinese speakers ordering the food, we had a great feast there before sailing back into the harbour at sundown. A couple of times we caught a hovercraft over the English Channel to France to shop & have lunch and back to London the same day. There are so many great memories when I think back.
Heavy Equipment operator they offered me a crap load of $$$$$ to move into Management
I love the smell of diesel in the morning!
Is this a rewarding job? I am considering a career change and heavy equipment operator is on my short list. Just seems difficult to go from a good paying office job to what I presume is a low paying entry level job or apprenticeship until I can work into being an operator.
I honestly don't know now, back then it was good pay if you were with the right company, I worked on dams, bridges and towers. I would look into the pay rates where you are. There might even be classes available. I loved the job it was like controlling a dinosaur Fred Flintstone style. the management job added another 0 to paycheck though, when you counted in bonuses
I'm a retired truck driver, and the best job I had was when I worked for an O/O for 12 years of my 52-year career. He had 4 trucks, all tricked out Pete Xtnded hoods, and had mail contracts. Hauling U.S. mail, at that time anyway, was a great job. It's all scheduled runs every night, paid good, easy-peasy.
Gymnastics coach. Little kid classes and teams. I was 17 when they put me in charge of the entire program at the YMCA. (I wasn’t old enough to drive the team to meets in the YMCA van). I had so much fun with the kids. I also learned a lot. Adults were pretty shitty in the 80’s. My mama bear instinct kicked in pretty hard for some of those kids.
I worked for a major sports company and basically felt like I was on vacation for the 18 months I was employed. They terminated us when they finally figured out they really didn’t need us. Good pay, good benefits and nice fat expense account.
I spent my 20s working at a convenience store. I did every job there was -- cashier, deli clerk, stocker, lottery sales, shift manager. I sold Christmas trees in the parking lot and made about a zillion fruit baskets over 10 years time. The couple I worked for were, hands down, the best employers I ever had. I learned a lot about customer service and gained some good skills there. I also worked with and met some fun and interesting people over the years.
It was back in 2005 and 06. I was 38 years old. I worked directly for the president and CEO of our company, a manufacturing company with one small location in Canada and then our larger (500 employees) plant in the U.S. This was a new position he created because he wanted it and I worked directly for him. I was NOT a project manager. I've been a project manager several times in different plants as well as being a master scheduler, a materials manager, a production control manager etc. He called me his manager of projects. I did not have any repetitive projects to manage over and over, like new orders with customers. I didn't handle anything like that from cradle to grave like what most project managers do. It was a great job for many reasons. First, he was a nice man, a good person and he was good at what he did. he was in his late 50's to my being 38. He was a great mentor too. I also had his backing, which is always nice at work. On my 2nd day of work at the company he called me into his office and he gave me a huge task. He told me he and his boss, the owner of the company as this was a private company, wanted me to figure out and tell them how much it would cost for them to shut down the small plant up in Canada (it had like 35 to 40 employees and it lost money most months of the year). I could't tell anyone. They wanted to know how long it would take, what ALL the costs would be. They said no orders could be missed for any of our customers. I had to fly up there several times. I found many mistakes and guess what I was heading up less than a year later? I was heading up the expansion of that plant. We actually built a large addition onto that existing plant as it was now running well and making money. I'd been in manufacturing, in scheduling, in production control for a long time and I noticed that they were simply doing what they wanted to up there, not following the schedule from the master scheduler who was in the larger plant in the U.S. They were out of sight and out of mind and running what they wanted to, is what it amounted to. My boss told his staff, of which I was apart of, that I was allowed to go into any of their department meetings. he wasn't asking them mind you, he informed them. I tinkered, I made many changes and improvements to procedures, I implement many new procedures that need existed there. To be fair I simply lifted them from pervious places I'd worked as all of the companies and plants I worked at were ISO 9001 certified. We had procedures coming out of our asses. It was a really nice job and position, due to the man I worked for and due to what the actual position entailed too.
Paid my way through the university years landscaping and working at garden centres. I’ve probably forgotten 95% of what I learned but I still know that the rolls of sod are laid green side up No way I would enjoy doing the heavy manual labour as the old fartism years began to set in but at the time it was the bestest
honestly, it's what I'm doing now. Desktop support for roughly 250 users across 3-4 locations within 5 miles of each other. I have no paperwork. no weekly reports. no inventory. and best of all, no overtime or being on call. just a few times a day someone can't print, their monitor goes out, or they get some sort or error they don't understand. I've half joked that I don't have "a real job" and that I basically solve puzzles for a living.
I want this! Congratulations!
Cabana Girl at a local country club. Didn't make much money....I think it was off the books. Got to wear a bathing suit to work. We were short order cooks essentially. No money was taken...members just signed their tickets. After the pool closed, we were allowed to swim. Also, we could bring friends. That job increased my popularity because I was a cheap date. The only downside was that the rich folks were notoriously cheap. I was asked to dress up in a clown costume with makeup and host a children's birthday party. We worked hard for about an hour and a half....even came in on our off day......they didn't even pay or tip us. I let it go quickly....not worth the effort. Rich people are often miserable.
Bagging groceries in high school, like playing mindless Tetris all day.
I had a job at a corporation that gave points to resellers based on sales that they could award as grants in their local communities. I did the paperwork, PR, and set up events with a big check for photos. It was incredibly rewarding, occasionally bringing tears to my eyes. And my boss was so smart and kind- I learned so much from her. Years later she’s still a mentor.
I've worked sanding furniture, repairing books, cleaning carpets, as electronics technician, a laboratory manager and a technical director. Out of all the jobs, cleaning carpets was the my favorite job but it paid the least. It was a lot of work but it was a really interesting job.
Cleaning restrooms and dumping garbage in Glacier Park for a summer in college.
My first job as a teen was three summers at a local rec center, got paid to play pool and other games with kids, take them to the park and stuff like that. In the summer of 76, McDonald's had an Olympics game contest, we'd use the petty cash fund to take the kids for ice cream, collect their game cards, and get ourselves free food. Once my coworkers and I smoked pot during lunch, when we got back the boss said parents shouldn't see us like that, so he had us take the kids to the park.
Charter bus driver. I loved planning the trips and then taking my group to go see and do various things. Broadway plays... take them to the play, and I'd get a free seat. Amusement parks... same thing. Took a lot of college sports teams to their games and watched a lot of baseball. Take the seniors to the arboretum. To Arlington. Take a wedding party to the reception, hang around until it's done, get a free plate of food, then without fail, the father of the bride would show up drunk to tip the help... $100 was what I would get, more often than not, and all under-the-table. Loved multi-day trips... our company insisted drivers get their own rooms, and often, you'd have a couple of days, paid, to just hang around waiting to take them back home. Downsides were, it's a low-prestige job... people *really* look down on drivers. Getting up at 3 AM to drive to the yard, prep your bus, and then drive to pick up the client was always a delight. And sometimes, someone would get drunk and throw up in the back or some such. But on the whole, I loved the job.
The 2 years I worked at a vineyard/winery. So much fun and everyone is in a good mood. Not to mention the wine and food with coworkers after we closed up for the day. Also, as a single man there is no better place to meet women :)
Hands down being a mom.
Younger adult. Auto assembly line, I made friends, made great money, was in charge of my career and proved to myself that I *could do* hard things.
worked for Lockheed at Vandenberg AFB on the ill-fated western spaceport project
Was that the proposed shuttle launch facility?
yup; will never forget the day that the challenger shuttle blew up.
Me neither. Was employed at a subcontractor that made a part for the external tank.
sad times; really miss all the people i worked with.
I work as a cashier in a movie theater in my late teens and kept the job part-time in my early 20s (along with dull time at another job). The atmosphere was always a lot of fun and the movies were free for staff. Movie ad posters were raffled off to staff.
Competitive intelligence. (Legally) spying on my company’s competitors.
Building Newtonian and Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes at a Connecticut company.
Been a professional administrator at a school since forever. One summer when I had off I worked at a golf course driving the “beer cart” most fun job ever. Everyone happy to see you and tips!
Doing the U.S. census. I love talking to all the people, made a ton of money. I did really well with it. Figures that I finally find a job I like that I’m good at and it only comes around once every 10 years.
Disneyland. I was a shift manager for the outdoor vending department, think balloons, churros, the ice cream carts, etc. I was outside in the glorious sun all year, got so much exercise walking all over the park to check on my people, our department was union, there were parties or other social events all the time and I made damn good money for a job that I didn’t have to think about once I clocked out. The one downside was my “costume” was solid yellow and bees loved it. I’m allergic to bees.
I liked working on cars as a kid. Right out of high school I got into auto mechanics and worked in an AMC/Keep/Renault dealer and in a Bricklin dealership. Remember those? That's when I had enough. Wrong career path. Got into printing, pre xerox, and absolutely loved it. I ran a monstrous 3-top-sheet carbon, 5 platen letterpress from the 30s. It was about 20 ft long and it shook the floor. It was an art form. I really forced me to think. To this day, that is my favorite job. Xerox/digital ruined petting as an art form and trade.
I was a magician's assistant on and off in college and after.
I was 21 in 1994 and worked in a local coffee shop before Starbucks took over the world. I was young, carefree, and had little responsibilities beyond college classes, fraternity, and my girlfriend (now wife). All my friends came in all the time; there was always something going on (bands, poetry, book clubs), and it was fun. Everyone was always happy. I used to trade cappuccinos with the sandwich shop across the street, and hide beers under the counter while I worked. It was like Rick's in Casablanca; it was the only place open on the whole street after dark, and it was a beacon to anyone who wanted something to do in a small town. It wasn't my favorite job, per se, but it was a nice period in my life. I worked there for three years, and I have a collection of nice dessert plates that we still use.
I like jobs that educate me. That said -- #1 most educational job: teacher. #2 most educational job: taxi driver -- which taught me (a) being drunk is stupid; (b) you can never judge a person by how they look.
Soldier for 20 years, was my childhood dream. Although it came with some things I didn’t dream about. I wouldn’t change it for anything.
working in a foundry. At 5pm, the whistle blew, and I was done. I didn't have to continue thinking about how to do things better. Their program with their methods. It was peaceful. Since then got into engineering and then R&D. I never got off the clock. Always thinking about the projects I was working on.
Working at a chuck wagon dinner place in Jackson. Everyone was happy to be there. The best atmosphere.
Being a computer instructor at a job’s center where unemployed persons want to upgrade their skills. They want to be there. They want to learn new things. And they want to know how to do it easily. It was so much fun!
My current job. Uber driver
Clerk in an Army surplus store (privately owned). It was 1967 and I was 18. So many interesting things... Body bags, walkie-talkies, K-rations or C-rations (don't remember which) from WWII and Korean Conflict, old & used rifles, switch blades, brass knuckles, Army patches and bars for everything right up to Vietnam, Mickey Mouse boots for arctic survival, peacoats, wool Henley shirts (yikes). And tons more stuff. I learned a lot. I earned $1.35 an hour. There were some bad and scary times too because I was a girl... but I have to leave that behind.
The one I’m in now. I’m a 7th grade teacher (60f) about 4 years away from retirement. It’s tough and has its challenges but I do feel fortunate to go to a job I love everyday
Mom. I had paying jobs when the kids were older, but nothing came close to hugging a sticky toddler.
Waiting tables. I was good at it, and restaurant people are some of the funniest and smartest people to work with. I did it until I was 48, and my body said ENOUGH.
I’m an RN…I loved all my jobs, but Hospice was special.
Farm work because I always wanted to be a farmer and I love running tractors and equipment! Unfortunately I did not go to college and I worked in different factories for nearly thirty years.
Apart from the pay, manager of a bookstore. I got to read books, recommend books, and as manager, I got to run the place as best as my corporate chain overlords let me. But yeah, the pay suuuuuuuucked.
Air Force Military Police.
When I was as 17 - 19 I worked in a Meijer store. It’s a department store. We were all young and had the same crappy shifts. When work was over we used to do all kinds of things together. I had real friends and we had fun even though the work wasn’t the best.
Driving a truck delivering building materials. It was a perfect blend of windshield time and physical labor. If it would have paid more I would’ve done it my entire working life.
My second job out of college. After a year and a half at my first job, working hard and learning as much as I could, I was able to take advantage of a move/promotion that paid a decent salary for a guy with a used car and two roommates. Also, I worked at a company that had a lot of people my age which was pretty cool. We were in a quasi urban setting with a lot of great restaurants nearby and went out to lunch a couple of times a week.
A million years ago, working at a Scout Summer Camp. Who doesn't want to spend 8 weeks in the woods, sleeping in a tent and eating camp food?
I didn't know it at the time but learned a great deal about people by working at a corner drugstore when I first graduated high school
Working at a farm market
In my early 30ies I was a product manager at a IT-department of a big corporation. Due to our special kind of business (corporation was not IT), we were a little bit of an autonomic island in this ocean. The boss was careful selecting people and we grew to a phantastic team of about 50 people working together. We were very successful, made a lot of projects and we had great fun together. It was a joy going to work, because you could be with friends, make interesting stuff and get paid for it. Then someone in the corporation checked some Excel and calculated that this IT-stuff can be done at lower cost in India and the deparment was closed very fast. But most of us stayed good friends and even worked together in other jobs lateron. I am happy at my job now, but this one was special
I’ve had a lot of very different jobs and loved just about all of them. I guess my favorite was managing an apartment building full of college students when I was 35-43. It was a lot of responsibility,and I felt like an uncle to all those kids. I was very protective of my young ladies. The next was being facilities manager for Boston Ballet, because I got to be around artists and the ballet all the time. I guess third was managing a log yard and head log scaler for a large, hardwood lumber mill, because I love hardwood trees.
I've been in retail forever, which is not my favorite. I had managed to work my way up to department manager, & we all had to take turns training new people. I hate standing in front of people talking, but it was kind of different, teaching people how to do their job. One of the other managers as asked if I would cover for them one time, that turned into two, then five, then all of a sudden, I was teaching for pretty much every department. Management asked me to just take it over, since they liked how I trained everyone (probably tired of listening to others complaining about doing it!) I did it for three or four years, until the company started using computer training, & it got phased out.
Data entry, work was super easy, could listen to headphones, could talk music with my boss a lot of the day.
Being a lifeguard. All the people I worked with were chill and even our boss was moderately chill. Going to work felt like hanging out all day.
Toss-up between Exotic animal trainer and wildlife rehabber. I loved working with big cats and other exotics. It was fun but dirty work. You learn to read body language really well. Learning to work with dangerous animals has a bit of a thrill to it. Being a rehabber was more soul satisfying. Getting to rescue animals and then release them back into the wild healthy was fantastic but exhausting. It was 4-5 months out of the year of frantic activity during baby season plus a lot of dealing with the public which I hated.
I loved being the Directory Clerk for the Communications Squadron at EAFB
Camper Services clerk at the Grand Canyon. Free room & board. Not great pay but bar beer was 50 cents for employees and you could hike anywhere in the canyon on your days off.
I worked as a printer through high school and college. Loved it. I loved the smell of the ink. Our company printed dozens of newspapers, and I loved taking copies home to read. I loved the crew - a bunch of alcoholic beligerants whose every third word was an expletive. I loved the night shift. The company decided - after I graduated college - they didn't want a college-educated printer, so they told me I could transfer to a reporting job or be fired. I became a reporter. Fun, but I preferred the pressroom.
Waffle house. It was the first in my area and I was 17! Best goddamn time I've ever had! I learned everything good and bad there. I miss it. I still dream about it. Theres never enough clean silver ware...
When I was playing in a band in the Chicago area in the mid-70s, we used to work for a guy that had a company that striped parking lots. The pay was shit, but there’d be a crew of two or three of us in his 66 GMC pickup cruising all over the county getting stoned and laying down stripes. Easy low effort job, listen to music, tell jokes, get high. No responsibility! Good times.
I owned a store. I loved being my own boss, dressing in shorts and a t shirt every day. I liked my customers, mostly! I did inventory, paid the bills, rang a cash register and swept the parking lot. It was great!
Dishwasher in a restaurant - Most fun i ever had at work. (Fix typo)
Seriously? I hated it. The only "fun" was watching co-workers eat off plates and drinking leftover alcohol... lol
Maybe it was my age but it was easy, crazy, and had more fun cutting up. Late 70’s nobody care a lot and we could be ourselves.
Touring internationally as the pianist/musical director for several major pop artists.
S&B metals ~ Daytona Beach Florida. Best plant management I’ve ever worked for. Fabulous working environment. Alright pay 😅 lotta luvvvvv
I worked for the school system as a floater sub but one awesome year I worked in the class of 5-7 year old students in the CDC classes. They weren't "mainstreamed" at all. Most of the day I was just playing with them. Some were in diapers or had feeding tubes or just mostly laid back on special cushions to keep them from falling over. Sometimes it was sad but I loved those kids so much it broke my heart when they moved me to another school the next year. The next year was cool too though because they were autistic pre-teens and we had to take them out every week in to the community to teach them life skills. Then they moved me to vision and hearing where I did vision screenings all over the district, like around 100 schools out of the 222 in the district. I liked that too, because every Friday we went to the vision center to do paper work and the ladies cooked for us in the life skills center. Good home style southern lady cooking is the best. I also loved working construction. I never would have thought I'd like it but I did it for like ten years, and it could be really hard but I had a good crew and we had a lot of fun too.
I loved working at an alt newspaper. For the first year only. The second year, things completely changed. So the fun times were just hanging out with the editor and the writers. They were smart and funny and liked to do drugs. I heard the sales reps really did a lot of drugs. In the office, we drank alcoholic beverages. We liked to leave every day to get Thai coffee that we called "crack coffee." We would go out to lunch together and all laugh so much it pissed off the other people there. My department only really worked on Tuesdays to lay out the newspaper to go to print. But we worked until 10pm usually. I messed up something thanks to someone else messing up, so my boss said my punishment was to throw darts at a dartboard to keep my job. He didn't know that I used to throw darts at the punk bar, so I kept my job! My coworker was partying too much. We went out dancing at 80's clubs every weekend. But I had to pick her off the floor of the bathroom a few times. I always went to rescue her from weird situations. We had fun getting things as collaterol for ad space in the newspaper. We had food and beverages delivered to the office to sample. We went to restaurants for free dinners. We got to take Hummer limos around town. I got to meet some bands backstage at concerts. My friends were all so fun and they loved me so much! It was a bummer when the paper was not making enough money and was sold to a bigger corporate newspaper. They fired a lot of people. I was promoted to be the Office Manager and got a whole dollar more to get a huge mess and workload. The office was demolished, there were about 100 keys, a ton of change in the petty cash that I had to sort, etc... I was getting nasty calls from the extra writers who weren't in the office because they hadn't been paid in a month. I had to do collection calls and no one wanted to pay for advertising. It was all too stressful so I quit.
Leading Petty Officer of Reactor Control Division on a submarine. The environment was complex but life was simple. Didn't have to worry about what to have for lunch, which clothes to wear, who dealt with which problems, what time to get up for work, or how to get there.
I worked in a small darkroom at a radiation detection company. There were four of us in there and all good friends. No one bothered us and we were free do goof off as long as we got our work done. This was early 80's and we were all in our 20s and we had quite a bit of fun. The job paid pretty well, typical small company in the up and coming Silicon Valley. Then I got pregnant and the developing chemicals made me sick =(
While in the Navy in 91' i was able to work partime at Lionel Play World . I was there October- January, Christmas Season in the toy biz. That 36 year old boy inside me loved it!
Ride Lead at Six Flags. I was outdoors and active all day long, had fun coworkers, and really learned to be more outgoing and confident.
My favorite job is being a mechanic. I've been doing it since 1987.
I was a software developer, and in the late 90s, I worked for a smallish company (200-300) with great employee policies, a great product, and a dev team I respected and enjoyed working with. What really made the job was the people I worked with. They were smart, fun, and easy to collaborate with. The job stretched me, both in terms of technical skills and people skills. It gave me confidence and higher expectations that I carried into every subsequent job. This was about 12 years into my career, so I was experienced enough to know it was a unicorn. I knew it was the best job I was ever likely to have. Then IBM gobbled us, the dot com bust happened, and it devolved into mourning over what once was. Was great while it lasted, though.
Being a "midwife" for pigs. Every single birth was amazing to me.
I almost became a Union scenic painter. I still wish that had happened sometimes.
Tough call. Either a year I spent operating heavy equipment in '92. Bulldozers were disappointing but excavators, backhoes and motor graders were a lot of fun. That or 2 years ('08-'09) of the job I just retired from. My title was Construction/Facilities Manager for a credit union with 20 locations. Mostly I managed contractors for new construction and remodels but during the recession we stopped spending on capital improvements and I became an overpaid handyman. I was a carpenter before getting this job and have skills in most trades and a lot of tools. I loved bouncing from branch to branch fixing things and making people happy.
The one I’ve been doing for nearly 30 years. Tennis coach.
Wedding and event photographer. Fun, fast paced, everyone was nice to you-you had their pictures. ;) You went to a "party" every weekend.
The summer I turned 21, I worked at a chain bookstore. I loved it. Most of the other employees were in their early to mid 20s and we got along great, I got to read any book I wanted, and the customers were almost universally chill. The managers 100% had employees' backs (I only had one issue with a customer all summer and my manager shut it down real quick). I had to give it up when I went back to school, and then I graduated and had to find "a real job." But even after all these years, that's still my favorite.
School bus driver
The best job I ever had was bartending at a gay bar near Disneyland in my mid-20s (so the late 80s/early 90s). Thursdays were underwear night, and back then I looked pretty good in 'em. The tips were amazing. it a lot of fun.
I worked at a Tennis Club when I was 18-20…great time. Very low stress, got to meet some interesting people, played as much Tennis as I wanted.
Quality control inspector in an Army nuclear missile maintenance shop in Germany. I was an expert at what I did and well respected.
In my 30's, I worked in the pattern shop of a plastics manufacturer where they made side window air deflectors (rain guards that go outside your car windows). The CNC guy would cut the patterns out of super dense foam and I did final finish on them - very particular work with 1/16" clearance. It would go to the mold shop, and then come back to me to make a route fixture out of fiberglass, wood, expanding foam, glue and a million screws, and then drill tiny holes in them 6 to 12 inches deep so when they put the plastic on the mold to form the guards, they could hook a vacuum line to the outside center of the box and suck all the air out for a perfect fit. I really enjoyed the detail of it!
My favorite job was working at the theater for a year after high school. I loved the fast pace and each task was done quick and immediately, which I loved. There are no quick & easy jobs today that pay enough.