My dad was a contractor too. As a little kid I would be out at his projects. One of my jobs starting when I was REALLY little was to rescue bricks that the brick layers had dropped. “Each one is about 25 cents - if you saw a quarter on the ground you’d pick it up - right?”
Another job I had was to straighten out bent nails. It was only years later that I figured out that was just to keep me busy!
Scrapping drywall off the base flooring. “You may think this is a lousy job - but it’s probably the most important job to do on the whole site. If you don’t get it all up and nice and smooth, the final flooring will move, the nails will work out, and the floor will squeak. That’s the main fault that people will notice.”
One of my early jobs was to sort out the lumber that arrived on site as to what was straight or not. And the warped stuff got sent back. I probably did that for 8 years during the summers. Early on there were the few odd boards that got sent back. Those later years, I bet 1/3 of the load would get sent back! I think my dad said they didn’t have the big trees like they used to have.
As a kid (and the son) I got all of the menial tasks. Hot dusty drywall scraping. Digging a drainage ditch in the rain. Building retaining walls with the gooey black tar getting all over you.
Every time he’d come over and see how things were going he’d say “Well - now you know what you don’t want to do when you grow up!”
My job was manual labor. Breaking up concrete curbing with a 16 pound hammer and loading the chunks into a tractor bucket. Working a shovel in dirt eight hours a day. Shoveling ‘mud’ as the redi-mix cement trucks poured the gravelly slush out into the formed areas.
When I first began, I was paid twelve and a half cents an hour, IIRC, which apparently was union wage at the time. Yikes.