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My first employer is the owner of the restaurant in the next village where I was a waitress. He was a weird bloke and very chauvinistic – "Andy doesn’t like to see a woman in trousers" as said by one of the waitresses, but whether he was scared of his stick thin blonde wife who had a good foot on him and usually wore black leather ones is unconfirmed. He also sent a lot of memos about uniform, which of course sounds daft when he had to spend five minutes talking to you about a memo you didn’t get and then go and find you a copy rather than just tell you what it said when in the rush hour of a busy restaurant.
Basically I thought he was a bit of a tit, and I still do. :cool:
I worked as a part-time bingo caller (at a Mecca bingo hall I think) in my first year at University. I kid you not.
I lasted only six weeks. The pay was almost nonexistent and most of the old ladies seemed to want to take me home with them—I was somewhat less nourished then than I am now and probably looked as if I needed "mothering" (or even force-feeding).
My first "proper" job was as a manager of a William Hill  betting shop near Paddington Green.<br>
(Edited by Prufrock at 4:24 pm on July 12, 2005)
Northcliffe Newspapers in 1967 – when they were based in Carmelite Street, London EC4.
I was a "copy chaser" in the advertising department and paid the sum of £7-10s per week.
Regards – Matron<br>:cool:
Very boring I’m afraid, Feb 13th. 1961 Scientific Technical Officer Grade 4(the lowest) with the National Coal Board…………less than 4.00 a week after the dreaded stoppages.
Colin
Dave the milkman, Four days after starting in grammer school in1964 start at 5am finish at 8:30. £2 a week.
Dave was and still is a brilliant guy, used to pick me up at my house, we used to do the round, at 7:30 we would stop at his house and have a milky coffee (with either brandy or whiskey in!) finish the part of the round I did with him, he would drop me at home wait whilst I got ready and drop me at the gates of the school.<br>When he took his annual 2 week holiday he used to get a driver and the weekend lads and I was in charge!<br>His other act of kindness was to make me collect all the christmas takings from the customers and ALL the Xmas tips, most years in excess of £20.
He is still alive and I visit him whenever I go home a brilliant guy.
Got a weekend job with my brother when I was 14 and he was 13 sorting the empty bottles in a local nightclub. The work was during the day and it was miserable. It was in early January and there was frost on the bottles when we went in in the morning and it was freezing cold out in the yard. Also, I have a fear of dogs (wish it was horses:biggrin: ) and they had a doberman which used to roam around the yard glaring at me. Stuck it out for 3 weeks and then we jacked it in. We were paid the princely sum of IR£10 per day each which, contrary to popular opinion, was NOT a lot of money in "those days". Got my own back a la Count of Monte Cristo by puking in the nightclub some 5/6 years later, although the bouncers didn’t really entertain my notions of revenge!
Ian, I think that the "wheely thing" you are referring to is called an opisometer but I have been known to be wrong on occasion.
My first paid job was packing potatoes for Charlie "Biff" McKillop, proprietor of Glens Of Antrim Potatoes. The pay was a princely 75p per hour (this was in 1986!).
On what proved to be my last day, I borrowed a colleague’s BMX to cycle to a local spring where I could wash my filthy hands prior to lunch. On the return journey, I caught my unfashionably flared jeans in the chain of the bike and crashed, lacerating both arms and my face quite badly as I was dragged along with the bike. I had to be rescued by a local farmer and given first aid by Charlie’s daughter Caroline (silver linings etc) while he gave me a lecture about "young people today" before I was mercifully taken to casualty by my mum. I was unfit to return to work afterwards and was docked the entire day’s pay. On the bright side, the painkillers kicked in just in time for me to sneak out of my sick bed and watch Dancing Brave win the Eclipse.
Can’t remember which came first:
a: Washing up for the local fishmonger.  Lovely in the winter when I had to break the ice on the bath before starting to wash the stinking old fish trays.
b: Walking (along with out 6 other people) across fields removing the wild oats.  Apparently they devalue the crop, or did back then.
The former was while I was still at school, the later during the summer holidays.
Sad to say that it has been all downhill since then!
My first employment was a paper round, then when I was 17 I got a job (cash in hand obviously) doing the board in my local bookies. The manager knew I was 17 but he didn’t seem to care too much.<br>When I left school me and my mate both got a job in a factory called Surgical equipment supplies. They had me operating a spot welding machine and my mate was doing something else somewhere. Anyway at about 11pm we had some sort of a break and when I met my mate we both realised the job wasn’t for us and we walked out there and then.<br>The first job I had that lasted a while was as a telegram boy, riding around West London on a Puch moped delivering telegrams.<br>30 years have past since then, and I’ve discovered lots more equally cr@p ways of earning a living.
my first job was with APCK bookshop in Dawson st in Dublin in 1967 , I lasted 5 weeks , got sacked for writing the prices of the new smash hit Ulyses in Pen ink !!!!
It was a place where COI bishops used to come in and demand tea, which was really strange,  as in Ireland then being protestant was very much  being part of a very small community , but a very valued one
Leanne Ryan was her name and she ran a riding centre near me were I worked.
Was great and she was/is totally hot. Summer was great, she really didn’t wear much more than hot pants and sports bra :)
I would nominate my first place of work as a pub on the hills above Saddleworth, run by a squat, dreadful tyrant with his fingers in both the local hunt and the BNP. His favourite wheeze was to banish bar staff to the shed to chop wood for hours at a time, whilst he propped up the bar with the equally estimable regulars and grizzled about how conciliatory and namby-pamby the Telegraph had become.
We all got fired when the minimum wage came in, him prefering to hire "underage kids who didn’t look it" in our stead. Nice man.
Jeremy<br>(graysonscolumn)<br>
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.
My first employer was the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority who were, in their own way, just as unpleasant as Grayson’s initial wage-payer. Just left school, eager to learn and full of wonder it took them only a short space of time to completely and utterly disillusion me and turn me into the grouchy cynic I remain until this day. Much of what went on there makes Homer’s power station antics in the Simpsons look highly professional. Place was a disaster waiting to happen and, guess what, they are still finding nuclear particles on beaches in the vicinity of the plant some twenty five years later. Scary stuff.
One day I went in, gathered up my meagre belongings and walked back out again never to return, spending the next ten months on the dole having the time of my life!
Mine was a retired bank manager who had bought a window cleaning round.
I remember my 1st pay packet, he said he’d pop it around on the Friday night.
I was already out that night and he posted it though the letter box. My brother had got hold of it before I got home and duly spent half of it down the pub…
Blackbeard to conquer the World
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