Tell me about jobs you've had, Eyeson.

[Pike]

Here's the scoop: I'm working for a sinking ship retailer and they're cutting my hours all over the place. So I'm currently looking for another job.

I have no experience with anything aside from retail and as such I'm kind of scared to apply for anything that isn't, well, retail. But I don't want to start applying for a bunch of jobs at random with no idea what I'm getting myself into. So what I'm asking for is this: what sorts of jobs have you had in the past? What were they like? Were they easy to get into? Etc. Hearing other peoples' experiences might give me a better idea of what to look for or consider. Thanks in advance, friends <3

Oh, and I know this is General Chat, but let's try to keep this one at least marginally on-topic, shall we?

[Jessweeee♪]

My current job is my first. I'm a secretary for a new US branch of an international company. There are complications with getting visas for my bosses and any international employees right, so right now I'm pretty much being paid to sit and browse EoFF eight hours a day and maybe answer a couple of phone calls and send a fax or two. When the bosses are able to be in the country, I do whatever they are too busy to do, or I do tasks that would typically be assigned to a professional in that field. My boss once asked me to see if I could find a place I could take a three month course to do paralegal stuff because the actual paralegals had to be paid like paralegals. So basically I do things that an accountant, marketing professional, or paralegal would do, but my boss and I have an understanding that he's getting exactly what he's paying for, that being a minimum wage employee with no college education.

[Shiny]

I've been working as a "daddy" for years. My girls: Psychotic, NorthernChaosGod, and Cuchulainn work the corners from midnight to dawn. Business is good this time of year especially when you've got such fine specimens to work with, but when they get out of line they know I lay down my pimp hand and they best come correct. I know this seems cruel, but before you judge, remember that pimpin' ain't easy.

[sharkythesharkdogg]

None of my jobs really apply to you. I had the high school jobs of fast food at Arby's, and the Toys 'R' Us where I'd assemble larger products in the back, buff floors, things like that.

Then there was Air Force meteorology, retail store manager, and now mechanic.

You love computers, have you thought about website maintenance or Iphone App creations? It could be something part time to help you make some money.

[Iceglow]

I've worked in retail mostly and unfortunately, I'm in the same predicament as you Pike in that the company I am working for is a sinking ship. I am not however the ships captain and therefore I will not be going down with that ship. I'm looking for other working arrangements and unfortunately for me one of the more obvious ones to look in to is actually going back a step or two and seeing if one of the local supermarkets, Marks and Spencer or Sainsbury's would be willing to take me on full time. Ironically even though I've just been promoted in the last few months my pay would probably come up the same with some additional benefits such as cheaper meals at work, lack of travel needed and pay that would definitely increase each year following the inflation trends etc I would however hate the job and that too might just be what I need because I will definitely devote time to leaving that field if I end up in there again.

Other job types I have had over the past 10 years include:

Waiting tables, I actually enjoyed it for the most part, it's fast, furious and there is always something to do. I never once complained as a waiter that I was bored or had nothing left to take care off, whether it was cleaning the tables, polishing cutlery, filling the condiments, checking the salad bar, cleaning the drinks bar, cleaning the pot-wash down or whatever there's always work and I hate standing around doing sweet smurf all more than anything else in the world, even when getting paid for it. Tips were also always a pleasant bonus here, I could most weeks live off my tips alone thus saving the full extent of my wage packet for good times. Of course at the time my bills were a hell of a lot lower. The downsides to this job are simple; the hours suck, they're nearly always flexible and that means you could end up working almost no time in a week but the next week work for in excess of 80 hours! Pay is usually on the minimum wage and doesn't increase often. Some customers are smurfing atrociously behaved and deserve to be slapped but you can't because they're customers.

I spent the latter half of a summer working in a bicycle store. Considering the bikes we sold were sports and extreme sports bmx models and the cost of one of these bad boys (upwards of £500 for a basic model from a reputable brand, for a good model people will spend over £1000 on their bike) most parents purchase the bike extremely early before Christmas so that by Christmas it's all paid for and there's no delays in getting it. Also all parents want a bike brought for their kids to be built, ready and there to go immediately. Kids don't have the patience to wait. My job wasn't shop floor I was back of house upstairs in their warehouse rooms building the bikes it was good fun especially since we had to test the bikes as we built them to ensure they wouldn't come apart under the use they were built for. To this end there was a box and a couple of quarter pipes up there in one end of the room we'd wrap the frames in soft padding so no harm could come to them and ride them around. I will state now; the pay was smurfing terrible.

Working as a Car Cleaner! Ok this was with my brother when he did car cleaning or should we be posh and call it "valeting" lol. Well it was outdoors which is a big change for me, usually I'm indoors outta the elements and even in the summer it was pretty cold in the mornings I learnt the value of thermals doing this in the winter with him. Money is surprisingly good tbf depending on how quick you can clean cars and what the weather is like. My brother cleaned for Ford and Jaguar and a couple of other car brokers in their showrooms all over East Anglia so we always got work which was great.

Worked as an office cleaner. When my Mom's arthritis first started getting bad, she worked as a cleaner and did office cleaning. She couldn't manage the offices alone and so usually I'd end up volunteering to go along with her and help her with the stuff she couldn't do. Her boss after about a month of me doing this on at least a weekly basis actually offered to make it official so I got paid the same as my Mom.

I've had a fair few jobs tbf, wouldn't mind getting my ass in to an office to experience it if nothing else.

[Pant Leg Eater from the Bad World]

Hmm. Let us see...
During middle school and high school I helped my dad with his business. He specializes in marine construction and floatation. So we pretty much re/built docks and floating homes/boat houses. We also did some boat bottom cleaning. But mostly it was putting foam floatation cubes underneath building to keep them floating.

Right out of high school I got a summer job sorting already packaged clothing at a Columbia Sportswear distributing center. My wife's (girlfriend then) father works there as one of the head honchos, which is how I got the job.

And then once summer was over I joined the Marine Corps and became a Helicopter Mechanic.

Hopefully once I get out of the Marines and go to school I can get another cool job.

[Zeldy]

I've had several jobs; worked at HMV, Next, DW Sports and I'm now working at Blockbuster. Done voluntary work at a farm, but that doesn't really count. I've always been really good at getting jobs, I've never applied for a job and not got it, I always put that down to working at Next, looks super on my CV.

I was so happy getting the call back from Blockbuster last month it was, I'm still really new. I'd applied in September and was devastated when I didn't hear back, then in November got a call out of the blue, had an induction, an interview and got the job. Found out later that my application was hand-picked out of about 70 and that I was who the manager was excited about contacting. So good! I now get paid to talk about films and games

[Shlup]

All of my job experience is in education, so trying to find a job when no fields of education were hiring was a nightmare. I worked at Disneyland in high school and Target for like a week when I was a college freshman, but other than that it's been nursery schools and preschools and public schools. With those as experience, I couldn't find any jobs other than subbing, so I started selling my crafts online.

Just keep applying for stuff. It'll work out.

[Quindiana Jones]

I've mostly just done retail, apart from the whoring. Looking into bar work now.

[Parker]

i made tinsel for a while. like for christmas trees. one time this guy got his fingers all cut up in the tinsel machine (the tinsel is like shiny sheets of plastic that come on a roll like tape. nasty blades cut it up and wrap it around the string in the middle) he was mean tho, pretty funny XD

[Crop]

Mostly retail for me too: Iceland, Londis, Argos. The last job I had before I went to the US was working in the office of my councils Legal Department. It was easily the best job I've had, hours and pay were good, all the staff were great and I often got to leave early and still get paid for the hours I wasn't there.
Sadly my contract ran out and couldn't be renewed, but I'm looking for employment at the moment, office work is what I'm hoping for, I hope never to go back to retail - I hated it.

[Old Manus]

Found out later that my application was hand-picked out of about 70 and that I was who the manager was excited about contacting. So good!

[rubah]

My first job was in high school. My friend worked at a local burger place and mentioned that they'd laid off a bunch of people recently. I drove over, talked to one of the managers, had a job by the end of the week. I made milkshakes and took orders. My arms would be delicious when I got off work. I worked there for a summer and quit when school started because smurf that.

second jobs were tutoring and grading in college. I learned a lot of thermodynamics. These were pretty easy to get into since students are lazy and departmental coffers run full.

third job is customer service for vibeo grabes. It's not so bad!

[Peegee]

If your background is in retail and you are trying to branch elsewhere, try to highlight your soft skills and then frame your hard skills to be 'this is what I know but I'm eager to learn'

Every time somebody talks about getting a job or interviews or resumes I post this. My idiot friend swore in the image so I won't hotlink it (he said the s word)

I should edit that word out, but i can't be bothered. OKAY my job history.

telecommunications installerWhen I was 16 years old and had absolutely no job experience I was hired by the company my dad worked for as a contractor during the summer. The company was a telecommunications installation corporation (I don't bloody remember the name - I know my dad used to work for Riser (like the term for a closet, iirc)) and my job basically was involved in terminating telephone (voice) and RJ-45 (data) cables once they were pulled and run into the office furniture position. Everything was taught to me on-site and I helped with some of the small stuff like pulling 100s of feet of cable all over the place. Man memories. I don't even know what happened to those guys bc my dad doesn't talk to them any more.

I made 10$ an hour. I had no expenses. I blew 100$ a day at the arcade like the middle east probably spends America's allocated wealth when it buys oil (omg so much money let's just throw it into Dubai)

....Anyway I did this job for a couple of years, and every year my dad would increase my wage. I eventually maxed out at 18$ an hour after 3 or 4 years, which was when my dad quit his job as he was expecting layoffs and took with him several clients.

wendy's and um...some pharmacyAnyway after high school I worked a short 2 month stint at Wendy's. I helped set up a new store and was a burger guy after I was trained to do everything else. The only thing I can say about a burger place is don't work there unless you have to - it's incredibly stressful during rush hour. However it was my first job where, for a lack of better words I was basically a robot. You want to be a robot, right? I love robotic work - when a system is set up that is streamlined by role, you can min/max your performance to reap optimal gainz.

Basically I'm saying I was an awesome goofball who made wendy's burgers.

After I switched majors from some sort of programming, I took a 3 week contract at a pharmacy. Nothing complicated - they needed us to repaint some several dozen racks that hold merchandise, then install the stuff. I got to spend 8 hours a day with 3 other azn (lol) kids - one was older than I was by quite a bit. I think this was when I subconsciously realized not to stick with blue collar work lest I end up like him. I mean he was awesome but like the guy who trained me in Wendy's he was in his 20s or late 20s or something and had no escape plan.

I'm telling you to look for a new job as an escape plan. Always move up.

I took the Wendy's job for 7.25 an hour and this pharmacy job for 7$ an hour. The pharmacy job was because a friend of my mom asked her - both times I worked those jobs because there wasn't enough work for the telecom installer.

When I was in my younger 20s I learned the rest of the telecommunications installations stuff. There's two ends to everything. One is in a big cool room where these metal stands are mounted to the ground and we terminate piles and piles of cables in an orderly manner. My dad is excellent - he taught me to run cables so that they don't end up tangled, and everything is fed in a specific manner to be very clean. I have seen some very sloppy crap in my day, and I can assure you my work never looks like that.

I'm now telling you that the work you leave behind should be a representation of you

I also learned how to terminate fiber optic cables! Man was that fun!

hong kongAnyway that job didn't go anywhere long term as you probably know. I spent a summer in Hong Kong where I worked as an auditor - very junior, time wasting nonsense. My uncle got me to make sure that the reported records sent in by his customers added up to what they claimed, and I was basically there to keep busy. They paid me the equivalent of about 800$ a month (a stipend) which I spent in the weekend drinking and being a huge slut.

Basically the best job ever. No I'm kidding. It was just fun.

Also you should note in this long winded story that I've never done a job that required a college education. The telecommunications installer job was a godsend in the sense that normally an accredited installer required a week long crash course in a program that costs about 3 grand.

It covered (loosely) how do physically do everything I already knew, plus the specifics of planning that I didn't (how far away our cables had to be from everywhere else, how far away from the switch room cables could be dragged before signal strength was too attenuated to be efficient (hey allies I used a physics term!)) - but was loosely familiar with in the testing process (oh so that's what those words meant!)

IBMUm...so that takes me to being 25 or 26 years old. At that time I came back, and was just bumming around the house. I thought about going back to Wendy's at some point (NOOOOOO) when I was shown this advertisement for a contracting company (Kelly Services). KS was hiring people to contract out to IBM for a new contract they had acquired. Bascially AT&T's internal helpdesk is (was..i'm pretty sure it's 'is' but I'm not 100%) contracted out to IBM where we acted as the level 1 helpdesk for problem description and hopefully first point resolution for their nonsense. omg outlook doesn't work. omg how do i use excel. omg windows. That sort of thing. If you think that's easy it's because it was. While we started with like 100 agents in order to basically maintain an acceptable initial level of performance, we eventually thinned out the ranks until 100 became...um...10. And the 10 of us took 75% of the calls every day. The rest eventually went to India.

Um..the summary here was that I helped people do desktop stuffs. Again all was trained on the spot. You could do this job Pike. You could do any of my jobs, actually.

After 2 years of this I was hired to do something else within the AT&T helpdesk umbrella. If you remember AT&T history they merged with (this was when I was hired btw, or around then) um... SBC [actually SBC bought out AT&T) and Bellsouth and some company that started with C or something I can't confirm in wikipedia. So they needed us to merge BellSouth's all wonky internal active directory (the system that manages users, computers, network drives, printers, etc) with the existing system that we were able to convince the other companies to follow. I was hired to basically do activations and changes to that system. We processed by my calculation something like 15 thousand (that's with 3 zeros) orders per month. I eventually quit that job for two reasons: the first was they kept cutting my wage, and the second was that I was basically goofing around for 6 hours every day because I was able to do 150 tickets in 2 hours, and it basically gave me ... 26 hours to do the next ticket (the turnaround time expected was 24 hours per ticket, so I was a thief and a jerk and a whatever and realized that I could work based on the assigned ticket's entry date, rather than work the whole day). Eventually they caught on when they ran the metrics and I was like well um er I just close tickets fast I guess??

Anyway I was going to be let go in a year anyway - the initial contract was for 5 years and there's zero reason to hire a contractor as an IBM employee to do a job that a contractor at contract wages was working.

Royal BankThat's when I go this current job which I'm STILL trying to escape. Now I work for the largest bank in the country basically telling commercial customers how to push money around. I sometimes streamline casual conversations to say that all I do is support some user-based java program that functions like a web banking interface, but it's so much more than that. Payroll, direct debits [automatic clearing house] , Positive Pay, Disbursement Auditor, wholesale lockbox, arg my head hurts I can't itemize it. If I have to update my CV i'm just going to ask my supervisor to send a link to my own job description.

The point though is even this job was taught on the fly. I spent like 2 months training until my brain was stuffed and i was passing out during the day when stuffed to capacity.

--

So that's that. Right now I'm still at my last job, functioning at roughly the best agent on the desk despite being a new hire. That's only because my supervisors demand high turnover for their best performers. Everybody I look up to has been promoted, and since I came back from vacation I have been using the bank's internal self study programs to refresh myself on things like windows servers, and then later I'll refresh on active directory and the like. My friend (who got me this job) just got hired to do another job that sounds much easier than this job with more pay. This is my last bit of advice: I'm a lazy bastard so FIND A JOB THAT IS EASIER BUT PAYS MORE Don't tell me that they don't exist - there's CEOs that do nothing but have control over a bunch of stocks which they do insider trading or whatever to control prices to go up and down. That's like the super easiest job ever. Even easier than the time I wrote an essay lambasting globalisation just to get laid. So yeah easy jobs - go get one.

[NorthernChaosGod]

I've had three jobs, none of which are particularly hard to get into.

My first job was in high school, I worked at Vons as a bagger for a while. It was alright, I kind of hated it, but I liked having money so I kept at it for a while. I kind of wish I had stuck with it longer though and taken it a bit more seriously, but I was only 17 when I started. This probably doesn't help you.

My second job was probably my favorite. I worked overnight stocking the shelves at Walmart. It was hard work but the day usually went by pretty quickly since there was so much to be done. I wouldn't recommend this since it's so physically tiring.

My "current" job is working summers as a lifeguard at a water park. It's not particularly hard to get into as long as you're a decent swimmer and not a complete trout while on the clock. This one has its ups and downs, but it's pretty cool on days that aren't too busy. I enjoy talking to the guests quite a bit, especially the ladies. /smug

I realize that none of this helps you. Sorry, Pike.