Jesus' Nature Reserve
as a youngster me, my cousins and some friends were playing in the local park when the local nutjob (jesus look-a-like with long hair and a massive beard) came over to where we were playing and said he had a proposition for us. like any sensible youngster we werent to taken by the sound of this. until that is, he told us there was a gameboy in the offering if we helped him out.

so of course we all gathered round as he told us all about how he's been working with the council to help make the estate nicer and they had given him permission to build a pond right where we were standing in the middle of the park. he also said if we helped him he would buy us each a gameboy out of the funds he'd been given to say thank you for helping.

so off we all ran back to our houses to grab whatever digging implements we could find and rush back to start digging. and dig we did. for about 4 hours we toiled away until we had a nice 4 metre square hole about a foot and a half deep and a giant mountain of mud beside it. all the while 'jesus' sat on the bench eating cheese and some apples that he was slicing up with a huge fúck off knife whilst he oversaw our excavation.

it was at about this time, an old woman walked past somewhat bemused by the goings on but we reassured her "it's ok, the council told us to do it". seemingly unconvinced she left us to it, only to return a few minutes later with the boys in blue, who through the use of expert detective work determined the guy did not in fact have permission to dig anywhere and he was in fact merely a raving nutter.

when the probability of each getting a gameboy started to seem highly unlikely we decided to cut our losses, so we all legged it to avoid any kind of remonstration, meanwhile the police forced jesus to fill the hole back in on his own.

and that was how the essex constabulary put paid to what would no doubt have become the 8th wonder of the world... the jesus gardens of basildon.

apologies for length/width/height/girth/circumference/etc...

p.s. the crazy fool did actually come good on his offer and a couple of the lads who helped in the digging did get a gameboy to share between them.
( HatBeard, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 20:30, Reply)

Newcastle United - Robbing Bastids
My first job was working at St. James' Park on match days serving food to the prawn sandwich brigade that had just bought their season tickets to look fashionable. The fans were wankers, the people I worked with were wankers and they cunts refused to pay me because they didn't take my bank details properly. I walked out on my third day after arguing with a customer and only returned to throw my uniform at them and inform them of my bank details. They paid me shortly after.
(Peter Sutcliffe's Right Bollock, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 20:24, Reply)

dog kennels
£15 every saturday for cycling 7 miles to clean up dog shit and get chased by numerous incarnations of Cujo from 9-5pm.

Ace.
(bazmataz, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 20:14, Reply)

My mum uses child labour when ever she can.
I've been making her website. She's vague and quite confusing.

But the pay is good.

Edit: She currently owes me £70. I would have already had at least £1000, but I owed her some money.

Edit2: I owed her about £1000

Edit3: I do all the cooking at home, she burns stuff. I made lamb chops last night, with gravy and veggies. It was yummy.

Edit4: She still wants me to get another job at somewhere like Marks and Sparks though. She's been wanting me to get a job since I was 11.
( Rev. Cleo still alive, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 19:53, Reply)

YAY!
It's the weekend! So in celebration I'm going to go and place my order for 17 copies of The Sunday Times and then sit on my doorstep waiting, laughing like a streetcrazy at the poor little sod who'll have to deliver it.

Just to join in the whining-paperboy-a-thon, when I did my round the best part was the christmas tips that everyone got. Until the papershop got taken over and suddenly our £20 bonus from the happy paper-getters was kept by the new owner who instead bought us a selection box (value - £1).

Tight cunt.
( Gleeballs is mostly made out of chocolate and hate., Fri 17 Feb 2006, 19:46, Reply)

shovelin'
I grew up in a very rural farmhouse. My parents were authentic hippies and there were 8 kids in the house. We had running water but it was from a hand-dug shallow well. So to save water we all had to use the outhouse for number twos. Every summer we would dig a big hole by the garden and haul the piles of shit out form under the outhouse to be buried. Needless to say, it was a dreaded chore. But my siblings had it much worse than me because, by sheer luck, I was born with no sense of smell. I don't know how I could have stomached that chore otherwise. Thank god for small disabilities...
(n1k, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 19:31, Reply)

At least most of you were paid.
I worked for my dinner -- literally. As a child,I was often home for hours on my own while my Mum was at work. Left to my own devices,did I cause chaos in the neighbourhood or teach myself to build pipe bombs?

Oh,no. . .I decided to learn how to cook.

We aren't talking about boiling water and adding the pasta,either;I had mastered layer cakes,roasted chicken and several sauces by the tender-as-my-pie-crusts age of ten.

My Mum,though clever,has never been much of a cook. It didn't take her long to figure out how to best exploit my new hobby. Soon,I was the proud owner of several shiny new cookbooks and I got to do all of the menu planning and shopping!

Twenty years on,I own over six hundred cookbooks and my Mum only goes into the kitchen when the microwave dings. Our Christmas card this year read 'Wish you were here;you'd do all the cooking.'.Bless.
My sister and I figured it out one day -- if you want servants but don't feel like having to pay them,what do you do? You have kids.
(louveciennes , Volvospotter, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 18:49, Reply)

Newspaper Round
In the early 90's I got paid £4 a week to deliver 40 papers, 7 days a week. It was the same rate for everyone in the village but everyone else was delivering lightweight Daily Stars and The Sun at the "council end", whereas I had to do the posh end with huge broadsheets and countless supplements - the bastards. And why did those posh cnuts have to have such small letterboxes?

Still, it was all worth it for my daily dose of Page 3 tits - very important for a young growing lad like me. It was the only tabloid I had to deliver but at least it was down a deserted lane where I could knock one out if the model was decent enough.

I gave it all up when I found my mates from the next village were getting £11 just to deliver a handful of Daily Mails.
( caldini Have you seen my polar bear?, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 18:38, Reply)

Working at the rubbish dump
When I was 17, I spent a day working for the woman who had the scavenging rights at the council rubbish dump - we all called her "Smelly Mary". 10 hours stacking empty beer bottles in the middle of an Australian summer. I stank like six month old piss. Got paid $10. Didn't return the next day.

Found a great copy of a very explicit porno mag though.
(Maclir, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 18:31, Reply)

The things I've done...
Most kids normally help out in the garden, a little bit of weeding, maybe planting some stuff, carrying spades around, that kind of thing. I did that, although my Mum's definition of helping out in the garden differed somewhat. By orders of magnitude, and then some.

My Mum's definition of helping out in the garden was me building it from scratch. This involved shifting several metric tonnes of hard core, building retaining walls, moving a lot of turf, building patios, steps, raised decks, fences, dog houses, as well as planting etc. However, the planting ranged from the very tiny grasses, to bloody huge eucalypts. Also, this involved the use of heavy machinery. Yes, I was forced to build my mother's back garden nigh on single-handed. Landscaping is bloody hard work!
( jim_bob can herd cats., Fri 17 Feb 2006, 18:30, Reply)

Pikey Cunt
My cousin used to work on a milkround when he was a young-un (around 14) and I was around 3 years younger. I had guessed it didn't pay very much and involved getting up at around 4 every morning. So he jacked it in.

It wasn't until the next week, when I stayed at his for a few days, that I actually found out why he stopped working on the milk-rounds.

He prodded me awake on the Thursday morning at 3, told me to get dressed... then handed me a black balaclava. Once attired, he walked me around his old milk round. Casually walking up to doorways he used to deliver to - then come back to the street.

It turns out that Thursday was the day when people left their payment out on the doorstep for the milkman to pick up - and THAT payed more than the job itself.

That cousin was/is a cunt, and I don't speak to him today.
( dogbomb, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 18:10, Reply)

factory
taking lots of drugs instead of concentrating on GCSE`s found me at work at 16 as an apprentice. Not so bad you may think, but this was in a back street foundry in darkest brum. Apart from the appalling wages (100 notes a week at 20 in 1993), intense heat and dangerous machinery (some of them should have been in a museum) the worst was the factory women.
As a cute 16 year old it certainly opened my eyes and made me grow up very quickly; go to college at night and get the fuk outta there.
Ah but i`m not bitter, tho the mammories still haunt me.
( Bobson, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 18:10, Reply)

I was paid in peanuts...
...well, Pistachios actually.

I got my first job straight out of school, on an apprenticeship as an aircraft electrician. As part of the training, we were also taught to wire houses and do machinery maintenance. I was nearly at the end of my first year and was only 17 at the time, so I was a little naive in the ways of the guvvy job and didn't realise I should agree a price with a customer before starting a job. (stupid boy)

Anyway, a guy who I used to catch the bus to work with had a problem with the electronic controller on his central heating system and had asked me to take a look at it. I told him I'd check it over and if I couldn't sort it, I'd disconnect the controller and pass it to the electronics lab people.

I turned up at his house and started work, checking the connections and the battery back up unit, but couldn't find anything wrong. I suspected it was the built-in processor, so I decided that it needed an expert eye to run a diagnostic check. Just as I was about to remove the controller, the guy's wife told me that there'd been a 24hour power cut while they were on holiday the previous week, so she'd tried to reset the unit but couldn't sort it. It turns out she'd totally ballsed up the reset procedure and had got 24hr mixed up with am/pm operations. (hence the heating firing up at all sorts of odd times) I reset the system and everything was fine. Now, bearing in mind I should've at least charged a call out rate, I was too shy to ask for anything so I told th guy that it was a freebie. (even though I'd been there a good couple of hours) As I ws leaving, he followed me out to his car and threw me a bag, saying "Something for your trouble".

It was a 2lb bag of Pistachios.

The guy who I did the guvvy for was the factory "nut man". He got cheap nuts in the months coming up to Christmas and figured I'd prefer a bag of nuts to a few quid towards beer.

What a twat.

I was a bigger twat though for letting him get away with it.

Never did another guvvy again after that.

Apologies for length, just felt it was worth it to express the sense of irony in the story.
(The Graduate Adding to the confusion since 1974, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 18:10, Reply)

Door-to-Door Sales
I remember sitting in a sweaty gym with my teen friends, listening to the pep talk by the company flak, trying to get all fired up about selling cleaning products door-to-door. I remember how far apart the houses were in our semi-rural neighborhood, and how heavy the stuff was. And I remember the pittance.

Lots of drunkards in my neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon. I had no idea....
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 18:00, Reply)

Washing up dishes in an old folks home.
I washed up dishes and served tea and coffee to the old dears. For £3.50 an hour.

I kept it up for six months and spent the lot on a hi-fi. When the CD player broke, so did my heart.
(CerberaSpeedTwelve, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 17:59, Reply)

When I was about 13 or so,
I got a job as one of them blokes that ride around on those stupid bikes and sell Ice Cream treats. These bikes were about 200 Lbs. each, and I had to push it up hills, when I was only about 120 pounds myself. (I've put on about 100 more since then, ho ho ho!) Anyway, how much did it pay for an 8 hour shift back in 1999? $6... per fucking day! Fucking cunts!

I quit after three days.
(Human, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 17:54, Reply)

...
One summer I got a job on a farm, I spent five days shovelling various kind of animal shit. Saturday I go to collect my pay and the farmer tells me I owe him money. Wait a minute I think, this is not how it is supposed to work. Turns out I was being charged for cups of tea and lunch that his wife had kindly offered to make me, for a rusty old spade that had literally dropped to pieces when I had picked it up, for the diesel he had to use to go and buy another spade and whole load of other little thing that were supposedly my fault. Long story short, I didn’t pay but I didn’t get paid either.
(Badger McAdams, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 17:10, Reply)

wood cutting
my (brilliantly clever) father turned labour into a game. see, we always had a ton or so of wood piled up in the garden for some sap (me) to chop hinto fire sized pieces. now, i didn't mind it, it was better than other chores, but it was still a chore. but then i got a bigger axe (note that i was about 8 when he gave me this razor sharp 'Proper' axe. his trust was incredible) rather than a little hand axe i'd been using. He said it was possible to split a match length ways laid on the log to be split and proved it. left me the box of matches, the axe and 2 tons of wood. by the end of the day i split every match i laid down.

"theres two tons of wood coming today. i wonder i..."
"I'LL DO IT!"

clever clever man...

and to all you buggers with paper rounds. Me too, on the steepest hill you have ever seen. 5 rows of houses, all the supplements and local papers on a saturday and sunday morning. farms out in the hills too. for 75p a day. and on a week day i had to have it done by 7:45 so i could catch the bus to school and somethimes the papers only arrived at half seven. detention for absence or lateness (after getting a bollocking from parents because i had missed the first bus which was 'my fault' ) meant missing the only bus home so would get a bllocking from the parents for making them drive half an hour each way to come and get me after THEY had eaten tea and i'd stood in the dark alone outside school for 2 hours hungry and knowing i was about to get a bollocking. when i wised up and said i was leaving the owner of the shop cried till i backed down. for another year...

i only did it cause my parents were skint and it bought books and stuff for school. mind you, wasn't as bad as some of you. i'll shut up now...
(unlawful odour i dunno..., Fri 17 Feb 2006, 16:41, Reply)

ah yes, . . fruit picking
In 1995 the going rate having picked a punnet of raspberries was 20pence. And the buggers complained if the fruit was a) too squishy or b) tubs overfilled.

Come the end of the week you would have calculated what you thought you'd earned, and upon collecting your dosh, surprise surprise, it was about a tenner short.

All this and the pleasure of a half six start during your summer holidays.

Still at least it was cash.

HAPPY DAYS!
(tootlepip, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 16:23, Reply)

Babbysitting
One whole week of my summer was given up to chasing three brats around their mother's disgusting house all for a hundred bucks. It sounded great to me (I was fourteen), till I worked out how much per hour that was.
(nabi, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 16:22, Reply)

Golf
At the age of 12 myself and a friend were paid a pittance to collect golf balls from a driving range. Apart from it being a back breaking chore we had to bring our own plastic gloves to rummage in the septic pool on the 150 yard mark on the off chance any of the Volvo driving tossers hit a good one.

If that wasn't enough the manager of the place and his friends used to occasionally drive balls at us whilst we were doing it to 'keep us on our toes'.

(At least he did until my mates dad found out and twatted the bastard. Which was the end of that job.)
(DrTugnut, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 16:20, Reply)

Forget being a child!
My first bloody job paid £1.60 an hour, and I was stupid enough to do it.
( Biggus Dickus , it was like that when I found it, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 16:13, Reply)

child labour
I was employed by the local theatre to deliver posters to all the shops in town. They weighed a fucking ton!

But the did pay me £25 per show, which back in the 80's fueled my underage drinking to new and unplumbed depths. I could get me and my mates shit faced for that!
( Fire & Forget it's the only way to be sure, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 16:07, Reply)

I got paid around 3 pounds...
to cut our over-growing jungle of a backgarden with a pair of sheers.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 16:06, Reply)

Easy Money?
Slightly off subject, but...

When I was a teenager back in the '80s I had a series of the usual rubbish jobs for crappy money - garden centre, old people's home, McDonalds - but when I turned 18 I got my (then) dream job working behind the bar in the local pub. I bloody loved that job and kept on working there in Uni holidays too. Anyway, one summer I was saving up for something so was working loads of split shifts (anyone else remember the days when pubs closed in the afternoons...?). There were a few local old men who used to come in for a half of mild and I'd chat with them and, me being 18 and quite busty (ah, those were the days), they quite liked it. One day, when the pub closed after lunch, I went out to my car and found one of the old guys lurking in the car park. I'd been telling him earlier how I was trying to save up some money, and he asked me if I wanted to make some extra. I swear to God, what went through my head was "Shit, he's going to ask me to do some gardening". Strangely, instead of asking me to mow his lawn, he offered me £20 for me to unbutton my blouse and let him grope my tits. The words "Just a little look and a feel" still ring through my head. Being the polite well brought up girl I was, I actually apologised to him for not showing him my bosoms. I got my own back by getting him barred though. Teenage girls can be so unforgiving.

I still have a nagging feeling that I turned down the easiest £20 I would ever make.
(I Love Your Shoes, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 16:06, Reply)

Shit
I was paid to shovel shit.

Horse shit, at a local stables, for the princely sum of one pound a day. Kids who complained about so-called exploitation were told not to come back, "as there are plenty more young people out there who'd LOVE to work here with our wonderful horses". So, we wage slaves, thinking no further than where the next quarter of sherbert lemons was coming from, just kept our heads down and dug.

The stable owners bagged up all the crap we diligently mucked out of the stables and sold it to local gardeners for rather more than a pound a bag, a state of affairs we found distinctly unfair.

We vowed that something should be done. Something ironic.

I'd estimate then, that about 2 per cent of bags sold contained a genuine human poo, skilfully dumped by way of awful revenge. I'd love to see the state of their tomatoes.
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 16:01, Reply)

Toys R Us
Whilst at school doing my A'levels, I also managed to squeeze in 36 hours a week at Toys R Us, being paid the grand sum of GBP 1.96 per hour. Absolute daylight robbery. I once accidentally let someone through the tills with about GBP400 worth of toys (it was Christmas time) and forgot to get them to sign their credit card slip. The manager called me to his office and carpeted me for it - I actually burst into tears! (I was only 18 remember). I offered to pay the amount myself (it would only have taken me a few MONTHS to work it off!!) but he then told me that he had already contacted the customer and they had agreed to honour the payment... bastard...
(Mad McMad, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 15:59, Reply)

shrooms
I've done the mushroom picking lark...

four huge bunkers suffocated in plastic tarpaulins, cold and damp inside, illuminated by long neon lights that cast a flickering, eerie glow. Racks of shelves, covered in coffin-like boxes, full of moist dark earth, in which there were lurking small pale fungi, their soft heads held up by stunted, flaccid stems. I worked with my back to the wall wherever possible, suspecting that among the endless rows of mushroom birthing-boxes, there lurked a horror, after the warmth that my youthful, hot young body exuded.

£4 p/h though, not bad for a summer job!
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Fri 17 Feb 2006, 15:59, Reply)