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‘I burst into tears and ran’: our worst summer jobs

Started by ZLoth, June 15, 2016, 12:31:38 PM

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ZLoth

From The Guardian:

"˜I burst into tears and ran': our worst summer jobs
QuoteThe social history of the summer job has not been written but it must begin in the early 1950s. There had always been seasonal employment at the seaside, in agriculture and in public parks and gardens. But by the early 1950s a growing cohort of working-class undergraduates was available every summer to boost numbers in the factories, already suffering from labour shortages due to full employment. There don't seem to be any UK figures, but the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates between 45% and 60% of teenagers worked each summe (pdf) in the USA.

Today, a part-time job is part of the undergraduate way of life. But the difference is that the summer jobs of the Keynesian era were often "real" , well paid and with the offer of permanence if you would just give up your degree, stay in your home town and go to work.
FULL ARTICLE HERE
I'm an Engineer. That means I solve problems. Not problems like "What is beauty?", because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy. I solve practical problems and call them "paychecks".


Max Rockatansky

#1
I actually worked for a NASCAR race team back when I was in high school.  My Dad was really good friends with one of the owners in the series back then and his company was a associate sponsor on the car.  That being the case my Dad grabs me one afternoon when I was 13 and told that I was going to North Carolina for the summer to work at the race shop....he wanted me out of the house.  :-D  So basically for three summers I would live and work at the race shop during the week then would live in the back of the car hauler on race weekends.  Mind you this is the late 1980s/early 1990s when this was going on so it wasn't anything that had the slightest tinge of glamour to it. 

The race shop was filthy...but at least somewhat comfortable when I was alone at night.   My bed was the couch on the race shop office which had a shower in the bathroom.  I had access to a fridge, a TV with cable and pretty much all the sort of normal things you'd expect.  It was actually a lot of fun to wander the shop at night and dig through all the parts that were laying around since it was a very old shop.  Probably the worst part was that there was a graveyard kind of close to the office which you could see out the window...definitely creepy at night. 

Race weekends I would sleep in the lounge room of the hauler floor in a sleeping bag.  It's amazing how quiet a racetrack can be even on race day before the crowd got in.  The last time I went to the Carolinas for the summer was for just two months.  The team owner actually paid pretty well and basically all under the table.  It wasn't an easy job by any stretch, for all intents and purposes it was 70 plus hours of work and it felt like it.  Basically if there was a general shop duty or something needed to get somewhere I was the one who did it.  Actually taught me a ton about cars and more so a lot about managing money...the team owner was basically a master of budgeting to keep the race team going through the years.  After that I just worked in a garage in town all year until I graduated high school and went into the military.  I think a lot of people would call it an "awful" or "worst" summer job but it had so many invaluable merits to with the life lessons learned in those years.

Edit:  The WORST part about that job was the souvenir trailer or driver autograph signing events at die-cast car shops.  My job was to keep people from stealing merchandise and believe me people sure tried especially when they were drunk.  There was probably at least a dozen incidents where I ended up chasing someone through a crowd or down a street and having to hold them to the police came.  Thankfully I was a pretty big kid that played sports in high school which gave me an edge chasing people down and all the rest that came with it...most of the time anyways.

formulanone

#2
Quote from: Max Rockatansky on June 16, 2016, 11:09:54 AM
I actually worked for a NASCAR race team back when I was in high school.

Come now, can't tell us the team name? I think the statute of limitations on overtime pay is long gone... :D

Back the mid-1990s, I threw newspapers (Gainesville Sun) from my car to make a little extra cash for the summer...no classes that summer. This lasted about three months until something better came along. You woke up at 2am, ambled downtown, folded, rolled, and bagged the newspapers, and stacked them in your car. Sunday papers were the worst, because they required additional "assembly", and they didn't always fit nicely into the bigger bags. It took about a month to perfect the paper tossing technique; a bad throw took up time. Not to mention, you wanted to reduce your "exposure" as much as possible. My run was in couple of nice neighborhoods, but a few apartments. The latter meant climbing stairs at 3am with about eight or nine papers, and gently laying it down on their front doormat. A ton of memorization and things changed from week-to-week. The annoyance was that if someone had a complaint, the paper would give them my number. Some folks really had issue that the paper didn't land on the right-side of the driveway versus the left.

I only met two customers, one got up early because he couldn't sleep, and was waiting at the foot of his driveway...Seemed nice enough. The other was one of the apartment-dwellers, he thought I was stealing papers. When I rattled off that apartments 102, 103, 108, 204...[et cetera] all got them, he believed me. I started to think I could get in some kind of serious misunderstanding over a bunch of BS, and I figured it was time to find another endeavor. Also, at one of the stops, colored tree frogs would occasionally jump onto my dashboard the moment my car stopped...I'd heard they were a bit poisonous!

The worst of it was that I didn't read the fine print: you were technically an independent contractor, you bought the newspapers and supplies (although many of us either donated the supplies if they were quitting); the assumption was that the each was pre-sold, so a "missed" location hot you to the tune of five successful deliveries. It was their word against yours if someone else stole their paper...they'd ding your pay for each complaint. By the last few weeks, I could nail the route without issue and cut it down to about 2.5 hours of travel time, folding, throwing, and going home. Ideally, you wanted to be done by 6am. Fortunately, during times of cheap gas, youth, and the ability to get by on minimal rest, the $250-300 a week over 12-13 weeks was decent for what amounted to 3-4 hours of work per day.

Follow that up against your yearly taxes, and it turns out that I "purchased" over $5000 in goods for resale...so I was taxed an additional $1000 at the end of the year (I may have ignored the withholding amounts). I wasn't allowed to bargain the terms of delivery unless I wanted to cold-call people out of the phonebook, at home, in my spare time - which was filled with another job and life's other purposes. No thanks...this has put me off from ever being an independent contractor again. So I think I cleared about $1000 after gas and maintenance was considered. The roof of my car had dents from the stacks of newspaper, and my vehicle stunk of newsprint for about 6 months after the job was finished. Amazingly, the Neon handled thousands of 1-2-1-2-1-2-3-2-1-2-1 gearshifts without a clutch replacement or transmission repair.

There isn't much in the way of not-so-loud music you can play at 3:00am so at least I picked up an appreciation for jazz and classical music (lyrics sometimes distract my concentration and studying of lists). John Coltrane makes a crap job go by nicely, there's few distractions at 3am in the morning, there was no risk of sunburns, and the the cops don't seem to care if you're driving on the wrong side of the road at slow speeds while bags of information are jettisoned from it. All in all: an odd learning experience, nothing too crazy, and became a bit wiser about it.

GCrites

Quote from: Max Rockatansky on June 16, 2016, 11:09:54 AM


Edit:  The WORST part about that job was the souvenir trailer or driver autograph signing events at die-cast car shops.

Oh man, late '90s early 2000 there were die-cast shops/NASCAR stores EVERYWHERE. A town of 20,000 would have at least one if not two. Most malls in my area had them as well. At my video game store we have a small die-cast collection from people trading in ones they don't want any more. It's not a major portion of our business but it's neat to have that stuff around.

Max Rockatansky

Quote from: GCrites80s on June 16, 2016, 02:01:40 PM
Quote from: Max Rockatansky on June 16, 2016, 11:09:54 AM


Edit:  The WORST part about that job was the souvenir trailer or driver autograph signing events at die-cast car shops.

Oh man, late '90s early 2000 there were die-cast shops/NASCAR stores EVERYWHERE. A town of 20,000 would have at least one if not two. Most malls in my area had them as well. At my video game store we have a small die-cast collection from people trading in ones they don't want any more. It's not a major portion of our business but it's neat to have that stuff around.

There was a couple die cast stores on US 27 in Lansing that I would go browse though once a week when I was high school.  They were all Mom and Pop shops which had the the rarest die casts out of the 80s and 90s.  Once sponsors got involved and you had higher end diecasts which cost more like Action it really ruined the hobby.  I still have a ton of Racing Champions and Revell stuff sitting on the mantel at home.  The old tent shops at the actual races were a gold mine also for rare birds.  My Dad and I used to spend hours sifting through the tent shops several times a year, we never went to the the team haulers.

GCrites

The diecast doesn't come up for sale nearly enough on ebay in order to value it properly. Too many variants; too many rare ones, too many different ones that come up for sale only once a year. We have to use a 2015 Beckett book like its 1989 or something. No Video Game Price Charting for NASCAR stuff for sure.

Max Rockatansky

Quote from: GCrites80s on June 16, 2016, 10:22:42 PM
The diecast doesn't come up for sale nearly enough on ebay in order to value it properly. Too many variants; too many rare ones, too many different ones that come up for sale only once a year. We have to use a 2015 Beckett book like its 1989 or something. No Video Game Price Charting for NASCAR stuff for sure.

Yeah it's funny how saturated that whole market really got in the early 2000s.  For awhile all the Dale Earnhardt stuff was worth a pretty penny since it was almost all higher end diecasts.  Problem was they started doing re-releases on lesser diecast platforms and pretty much almost every driver got the same high stuff. 

Speaking of racing video games I would kill to find a copy of NASCAR Racing 1996 to run on DOS box...or even the 1994 version.  I remember using a back door DOS menu to reprogram the drivers I didn't like to go slower in the simulations.  The paint shop in both those games was a lot of fun and you could get really creative making new paint schemes...or just updating the looks for each year.

GCrites

^I spent hours upon hours doing that. Still have the first PC NASCAR in the big box.

Max Rockatansky

#8
Quote from: GCrites80s on June 17, 2016, 11:21:20 AM
^I spent hours upon hours doing that. Still have the first PC NASCAR in the big box.

They had a CART simulation game that was basically the same thing but it in Indy Car form.  Those games were so far ahead of all the racing sims that came before them that's it's strange how often they are forgotten now.  The only crappy thing was that the controls were pretty dicey.  I had a pretty advanced steering wheel and pedal device for the PC that worked okay but was way too sensitive for steering or throttle control.  I often found myself using the directional keys for steering, cntr for gas and space bar for the brake.  The oval tracks were pretty spot on but it was a lot harder to do road courses with a lot of accuracy until you got really good with the controls.

Funny thing is that I had a lot of PC games back then so I played a lot of the early FPS games like Wolf 3D, Doom I/II/Final, Duke Nukem 3d and Quake.  I never kept up with the genre into the modern generation (I want to say Doom 3 was the last I played) so it's kind of amusing to watch people react to me playing those games with the keyboard exclusively.  My preference for the controls are as follows:

Strafe:  Alt
Run:  Shift
Shoot:  Ctrl
Open/Jump:  Space
Map:  Tab
Directions:  Directional Keys
Look Up (if applicable):  pgup
Look down (if applicable:  pgdn

Hell I even learned how to play emulators using typing position with my left hand and the directional keys with my right.  It works perfectly fine for about 98% of games, the major exception being Zelda II on the NES.  For some reason that control scheme never really fully captured what the jump and slash move I would use on those knight guys with the shield.

GCrites

Quote from: Max Rockatansky on June 17, 2016, 11:33:30 AM
The only crappy thing was that the controls were pretty dicey.  I had a pretty advanced steering wheel and pedal device for the PC that worked okay but was way too sensitive for steering or throttle control.  I often found myself using the directional keys for steering, cntr for gas and space bar for the brake.  The oval tracks were pretty spot on but it was a lot harder to do road courses with a lot of accuracy until you got really good with the controls.

I crashed a TON. I thought I just sucked at the game, but looking back it was really the touchy controls. My buddy had a wheel, but I only had a PS1-style pad and a keyboard.

Max Rockatansky

Quote from: GCrites80s on June 17, 2016, 11:40:51 AM
Quote from: Max Rockatansky on June 17, 2016, 11:33:30 AM
The only crappy thing was that the controls were pretty dicey.  I had a pretty advanced steering wheel and pedal device for the PC that worked okay but was way too sensitive for steering or throttle control.  I often found myself using the directional keys for steering, cntr for gas and space bar for the brake.  The oval tracks were pretty spot on but it was a lot harder to do road courses with a lot of accuracy until you got really good with the controls.

I crashed a TON. I thought I just sucked at the game, but looking back it was really the touchy controls. My buddy had a wheel, but I only had a PS1-style pad and a keyboard.

I even think you could make the car wheel hop and spin if you tried to hit the brakes at anything than other than a straight line.  Basically it was probably less of a learning curve to actually learn how to control a real world car than one in those games.  :-D

noelbotevera

Is it bad that I have to experience this in at least five or more years? Considering that I'm the youngest person on the forum, I think this thread would make good precedent. Excuse the off topic post, but I also read through the interviews thread here too.

Max Rockatansky

Quote from: noelbotevera on June 17, 2016, 09:23:37 PM
Is it bad that I have to experience this in at least five or more years? Considering that I'm the youngest person on the forum, I think this thread would make good precedent. Excuse the off topic post, but I also read through the interviews thread here too.

Pretty much everyone goes through a glut of $#!++y jobs from high school to maybe 22-28 years old for some people.  Best advice that I can probably impart is find out what you want to do, find a way to get into entry level for some real word experience and work on some community college level schooling unless you can get a scholarship somewhere.  Student loans are a total jip these days and honestly you'd be better off saving the money on the 2-year degree while you're building career experience.  A lot of people still go through college thinking that a 4-year degree is going to mean big time bucks when it isn't translating in the real world since career experience means just as much if not much more in today's workplace reality.  That's not to say you can't sign up for the military and get out after four years to use the G.I. Bill.  That's still one hell of a bargain all things considered and usually the military will find something for you to get good at.  Not to mention they basically they pay for your room, board and medical....really even someone entering boot camp gets about what maths out to 30k in real world pay when you factor your food allowance and barracks housing.  Just don't be one of these kids that's staying at home with the parents until they are into their mid or late 20s bouncing through entry level jobs.  I feel like 25 has become the new 18 in the last decade and a half.

GCrites

Yep, I left my last crappy job at 29. I was scrubbing carpet in a warehouse with 2 Master's degrees.

formulanone

Quote from: noelbotevera on June 17, 2016, 09:23:37 PM
Is it bad that I have to experience this in at least five or more years? Considering that I'm the youngest person on the forum, I think this thread would make good precedent. Excuse the off topic post, but I also read through the interviews thread here too.

If life means only taking one or two crap jobs...life is still pretty good. It's rare that entry-level work is "fun", but we all started somewhere. Something has to pay the bills or cover expenses, and you can make work fun if everyone else* has a great attitude.

* good luck with that



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