Hmm.
There was all that babysitting while in high school, which was hideous, but that hardly counts. Seriously underpaid, I was, for the three monsters I had to watch.
My first paid "real" job was folding tacos. Not entirely an accurate description - the taco shell slid by on a rack, and I put lettuce and cheese on it and shoved it further along. One after the other after the other. All shift, standing in one place, next to a vat of particularly caustic-fumed chili sauce. It was my feet that hurt the worst, but my eyes watered profusely and constantly. I really, really hated that job. Still not fond of chili sauce, either.
Then I worked in a local TV station, running the tape machines - I was responsible for videotaping our local programming, and making sure commercials were cued up on the machines when the time came for them to be broadcast. That sort of thing. I liked the job, but had to drive a long way late at night in a very old car that kept breaking down. No bueno to be a very young woman broken down by the side of a deserted highway in the oilfields, were there were a lot of really skeevy characters. Five mile walk to a pay phone. In the dark. At 2:00am. In all kinds of miserable weather. As they used to say locally, in the winter there's nothing between there and the North Pole but a "bobwar" fence. (Wincing just remembering that!) Ok, then...
I was a lineman for the phone company - the first woman they'd ever hired for that job in that part of the state, apparently, given the static my first boss gave me when I reported for work the first day to pick up my airline tickets to training school wearing sandals. "They can make me hire a woman, but they can't make me "work" her in the field!" (sigh. Those were the days, all right. ) Made it through the month-long training school top of my class in electronics, first aid, etc. But was just not good at climbing telephone poles. Developed a paralyzing fear of heights after "burning" 18 ft down a pole while still belted on when my cleats dug out of a rotten spot in the wood of the pole. I had splinters in interesting places. My ankle is still a little messed up....
Then I worked in a laundry/dry-cleaners, handling some of the most amazingly filthy clothing. Including one heavy coat soaked in crude oil, brought in by an oilfield worker who was just back from the North Slope of Alaska. We ran it through the dry-cleaning solution by itself, six times, before we got it pretty much clean. Smelled awful. I probably will have brain cancer from having my arms up to the elbows in those chemicals. It's also kind of amazing I didn't get all sorts of diseases - we had to pre-treat underwear and underarms for stains, and there were some pretty gross articles of clothing.... People would bring in huge boxes full of absolutely reeking clothing that I'd have to sort through. As in, did you people REALLY wear them smelling like that? And no, we didn't have protective gloves to wear, either. I did have a stick I'd use to pick up those that were just too, too gross to touch! This was out in the desert southwest. It'd be 90F with 90F humidity in that building from the steam presses (which I also ran) so we'd go outside on break to where it was 110F but only 15% humidity to walk to the gas station to buy a bottle of coke from the vending machine. That coke was soooo good! Made it a couple of years there, saving every penny I could.
Then I moved to the big city (you'd laugh at which one) and worked on an assembly line, making the first calculators, and the first digital watches. Heat in the apartment was so bad that I used to sleep in the bathtub in the winter, because the bathroom had an open-flame wall heater and it was the warmest room in the house. The cat's water bowl used to freeze over in the kitchen. It was the Happiest Christmas I'd had for years when someone gave me an electric blanket! The cat became my new best friend, too, always under the blanket purring. On Friday nights (payday) when I got off work at midnight I'd go to the all-night grocery store and buy a box of cookies and a quart of milk, then go home and read library books all night with the electric blanket pulled up to my ears, snarfing cookies and really cold milk. It wasn't a bad life. I was 120 pounds at 5'11", and I could eat all the cookies in town at that point and it didn't put any weight on me. Wish that was still true! (Both the weight and the cookies part!)
Then I worked for 10 years running mainframe IBM computers. The ones with the blinky lights and spinning tape reels, just like in the old sci-fi movies. I loved that job - I was the graveyard shift, usually alone in a rather large building, and had the radio blaring... probably explains my partial hearing loss now. One of the computers had the first "Star Trek" DOS game on it, and I was famous for accidently firing photon torpedos while in dry dock, thereby earning a serious reprimand from the operating system. (Hey, it wasn't all work!)
Then I was a full-time mom and Uni student for about 8 years. While doing that I did some part-time gigs in Uni offices, and also testing water quality in nearby lakes and ponds for a state agency - throw the sampler out, bring in the water, play with the test tubes and chemicals, write up the reports and mail them in .... had the kid doing it at 7 years old, she was good at it!
I'd have loved to have gone back to working with the computers, but they were obsolete by then. Talk about feeling old, in my Uni there was a museum in the business school. It had glass cases in it filled with all the things I'd used daily with the machines - the keypunch cards, etc.... sigh.
Plus, rotating-shift childcare was and pretty much still is non-existent.
I was then a landfill inspector. Basically, an area governmental body had secured pass-through grants to various small-towns for waste recycling and environmental issues related to their landfills. So, my area was out in the mid-west, the size of the State of Indiana, and I had to travel several days each week (several highway hours each way) out and back to the respective towns, look at whatever it was we funded (often involving heavy boots and hazmat gear and a hike in a landfill), and report back that it was/was not on plan target. You meet some ~really~ unique and interesting people out in the boonies, you know? And yeah, Landfills REALLY REALLY REALLY smell bad. Spent a lot of time trying to not retch. (The guys thought it was pretty funny they'd sent 'a woman' out. Right. Did not retch in front of anyone.
)
Then I started working at a University, for which all of my prior employment so adequately prepared me.
While there I worked for several departments, one of which was the Theater and Dance dept. In the summers a local rep used our facilities. Whomever was directing and all the crew would be around. Was carrying a box of files to the basement when Whoopie Goldberg got on the elevator. She was really nice, pleasant to talk to. And there was the actor who played the creepy alien bounty hunter on the "X Files" who I'd run into from time to time. Usually came around a corner unexpectedly and gave me heart failure. Also a really nice guy, but I instinctively saw him as the character he played. Especially as he was very quiet when he'd come up behind you and you'd turn around and he'd just be right there..... Oy!
Somewhere in there - I think while doing my "mainframe computers" gig - I was also an extra for "industrial" films. (Those horrible training films that some companies make their new employees watch in orientations.) I remember one time I got to pick up a folder and walk into a closet (which was supposed to be another office), in the background of a shot, at least two dozen times in a row while they were taping, until the lead talent got it the way the director wanted. Hell, it paid good so I was happy to do it on my "off" hours! Somewhere out there is a personnel film on how to interview employees, with my starring role as an executive walking into a closet in the background. (Ready for my close-up now, Mr. DeMille!)
And soon, hopefully very soon, I will find something interesting and bizarre to do that is new, in the UK. I guess I could be a dog walker. Or a lolipop lady. Or a firewatcher. Or something....
