My first ever job? Lets see. I held a paper round for a few months as a kid but I hated it so jacked it in, I wasn't the up at 5am type tbh as a kid. I then worked for a local independent computer game store for a few years cash in hand. It was fine but considering there was no real contract with the boss there it was a case of I could earn £40 for a full days work or £40 because he had to leave in a hurry and asked me to step in and watch the store for 2 hours. I was essentially the assistant manager in that place by the time I was 17. In the mean time, I spent a few weeks up in Essex when I stayed at my brothers putting bikes together at a cycle shop because it was the Christmas orders for some extra money. I also began working with a friend on our own "business venture" we'd repair PS2 consoles for £30 a pop (far cheaper than the £75 Sony asked for) splitting that income between us and my bosses store since he'd let us use the shop to do it all in. Was a good earner because when you pop a PS2 open the most common fixes take no cost to repair and a maximum of 15 minutes, 2 consoles at a time, 15 mins a console - 10 each on the repair. Sometimes we'd earn up to £100 apiece for repairing them, plus if we done any alone/on our own time/property we'd keep the full wage.

My first official contracted, income declared job would be Sainsbury's where I worked as a general merchandise (read; dogsbody) assistant. Essentially my department was things like; furniture/electricals/clothing/books/dvds/cds/cookware and so forth. However being nothing on my department was perishable, we'd often be seconded over to other departments, most notably checkouts. I also ended up spending a lot of time on beers wines and spirits, fresh food and produce (fruit and veg) worst job in the world was being asked to put the flowers display up in winter when I wasn't on my anti-histamines. It was during this job I found the time to work as a writer for Serial Dreamers as though I worked some 30 hours a week officially I was still part-time and my shifts would be Sat - Tues only.

After leaving there, it was HMV, simultaneously balancing that and Pizza Hut to make ends meet at the time I started. After a while though I solely worked for HMV since I managed to get full time work. I quit there and frankly in hindsight it was the luckiest escape ever, that company is in dire straits and genuinely whilst I was one of their best sales staff there was and still is so much that company does wrong that it could do so right I feel I had no other choice.

Currently I'm now working as an inbound customer services tech support. I answer calls where customers are having trouble streaming stuff. Now if I can fix the problem this is great and I get lots of thanks, unfortunately when it's a customers equipment/own fault you tend to get a lot of abuse. I'm a pretty open person and I will outright state to a customer that they called me as they needed help, if they continue to be rude or aggressive towards me, I will not help them. Most of the time that shuts them up, they're calling a premium rate number, more often than not from their mobile and get abusive when told to do stuff they need. It's like half these customers think I'm sitting there with a magic button in their acct waiting for their call to go "Oh don't worry sir, even though you're receiving a line speed of 300kbps I'm just going to press this button and allow you to stream regardless" rather than tell them the truth of; "the minimum speed you need is 2.4mbps, call your isp because clearly there is a problem with your line speed at this time."