exactly, growing up i sold fruist & veggies on the side of the road, i washed dishes, i pumped gas, i dug ditches for sewer lines, then joined the miltary. i worked to get where i am doing all the dirty jobs people today don’t want to do...they all think they deeserve to start at the top....well i have news for them...it doesn’t work that way unless daddy owns the company....
I have worked for daddy. Not all it is cracked up to be and certainly not starting at the top.
Exactly!!!! I did baby sitting and was a soda jerk, for those that are old enough to remember that ....lol I also worked at a grocery store for several years and insurance company and did temp work. My hubby started as an E2 in the Navy and worked hard, I mean hard. When he retired he was a Lt. Commander. There is no free lunch in this world.
Hats off to you, my friend.
When I was eight years old, I took over my older brother's paper route because he was too busy mowing lawns. (He had reached the ripe old age of 11.) I've been working ever since. A few years later, I started mowing a few lawns with my brother, and was still delivering newspapers. Then I delivered papers in the afternoon and washed dishes at night at the local steakhouse. Then I detasseled corn in the hot sun, and I lied about my age to do it because I was tired of washing dishes.
At that point I had to give up the paper route to my little sister. I was sad to let go of it. My brother had gone out and sold subscriptions, door to door. He built up the route from around 40 subscribers to around 50. I worked on it a lot longer than he did, and got it up to around 70 subscribers. Of course I was lucky they were building a subdivision just a half mile down the road, and all those newcomers were easy to sell. The same day there was a sign of habitation at a new house, I was knocking on the door. Every subscription was another 40 cents a week in my pocket. But detasseling made me give up all that. I was getting $2.90 an hour from detasseling. That was big money. I was 13 years old, and it wasn't even legal for me to be working.
Then when I was 16, I worked at a gas station in the days when it wasn't self serve, because I was tired of detasseling corn. I pumped the gas, washed the windshield, and then asked whether they wanted their oil or their tire pressure checked. Before I knew it, I was changing oil and rotating tires. Then I started doing brake jobs, replacing hoses, mounting tires and flushing radiators for a big 15-cent per hour raise. I drove a tow truck through the winter, and then I lied about my age again, and got a "good" job building grain elevators, four months before my 18th birthday. That was good money. Seven bucks an hour was a lot of money for a 17-year-old kid in the 1970s. And again, it wasn't even legal for me to be working there.
Again, I was lucky because all the (slightly) older teenagers who would normally take those jobs were going to Vietnam, including my brother. Or they were joining the Navy or the Air Force to avoid getting drafted. Nobody went to Canada to dodge the draft. Anybody who did that would have been disowned.
When my boss found out, he drove me home. He apologized to me because his insurance wouldn't cover him with a 17-year-old working there, and he said he was sorry to see me go. About a month later, on my 18th birthday he gave me a call and asked me to come back.
By that time I was driving a Mustang that I paid for and insured myself, and I was already back at my old job at the garage, and had my first paycheck from that job. My boss was offering to pay for my classes and make me a certified mechanic. All before I was even 18 years old.
Nowadays childhood obesity is a problem? I was eating three huge meals a day and always in great shape, because I was always working it off. There are a few really wonderful and inspiring exceptions among today's youth. But for most of them, if you tell them to go out and get a job like any one of the teenagers' jobs I just described, so that they could buy just one tank of gas for themselves, they'd look at you like you were from another planet.
It just makes me crazy.
I worked for dad - started as a dishwasher. Eventually worked my way up to waiting tables and doing the books. That’s the way it is for a small family owned business. There is no top or bottom. Just whatever needs done.