I was interviewing some prospective residents today and one of them - a 20-something woman - is a fork-lift operator at Walmart. $20/hour not bad! But that reminded me that *I* used to be a fork-lift operator back in the day - early 80's - the first female they ever had in that particular company (med lab - Fisher Scientific.) I worked for them doing data entry until my terrible typing skills sent a human skeleton to Alaska - from Florida - by truck! Can you say $$$$$$$$$ mistake?

I said Hmm can I drive that fork lift in the warehouse instead? And they said yes LOL.

It was fun work, I really enjoyed it! But at the time it was unusual.

Carried boxes of books from a library basement to the 2nd floor of a rebuilt library. OMG!!!!

Brush hog on grandparents farm one summer. Had to bounce drive up a steep deeply rutted loggers trail in a Chevy with no shocks to get to the top of the hill where they left the tractor. John Deere had no ac and no music. I could tolerate no ac, but no music? Eek. $10 an hour though, which was decent then.

Drove a truck laying irrigation pipe. Scraped and painted a hog barn, and sprayed muskthistles. All on grandparents farm. This was above and beyond the everyday chores so they paid well.

Helped Janitor at the high school one summer scraping gum, washing walls and other grody things. You can bet how loud I complained when somebody put gum under their desk. Minimum wage there.

As a teenager in the 70's,

part of a crew tearing down old (Farm) Barns.

All nails removed, Beams / Wood sorted out.

A good (Man Building) experience.

Bouncer at a bar on Friday night. My girlfriend and I joked around and asked for IDs from the cute guys while standing at the door. The bar owner hired us. Said he had much less trouble with 2 women at the door than the guys he had on Saturdays. Of course this was 35 years ago, when people were a little more polite and not looking to fight so much.

Security guard in the late 70s. Not many women did that.

Hand copied bid results to call in and send to bidders. Way before everyone had computers and camera phones.

My daughter still talks about her job at the Cemetery. She did database work cataloging and mapping the graves, as well as some landscaping, and weeding. Whenever she has some grim humor she says, "what do you expect from someone that worked at a cemetery."

Injecting Drosophila (fruit flies) with Clomide (a fertility drug that promotes ovulation) or saline solution (the control), mating them, and determining the rate of mutations in the experimental and control groups.

Kathi,.

WMH, shipped a skeleton to Alaska,sure your names not Archie? Charlie

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Oh lord, the jobs I've had, don't get me started. I have two memorable jobs.

Runner up: Lasted one day. I was about 18. A company called Rosan, long gone. They made $600 screws for B-52's and other aircraft. My job was in shipping, I had to get a security clearance. My first and last day they took me to this table where these bolts from the machinists arrived in wood racks, individually separated.

My job he explained, was to screw little red caps to protect the threads, then put each one in a protective container. Think "screwing the cap on toothpaste." For this I was paid $9 an hour in the '70's when min wage was like $2.65. I was ready to slit my wrists by noon!

The next job was worse... Behr Paints. I was a paint maker. Lasted two or three days. First you took a fork lift and collected your pigments in 100lb sacks. These were dumped into giant mixers that held a couple hundred gallons.

When the paint was mixed you canned it on a conveyor belt. Everything went great, until a can tipped over before it reached the paint dispenser - which dumped a gallon at a time. The shut off switch was across the room. By the time I got it stopped about 20 gals was one the floor.

This was OIL based. We actually had a pressure hose with paint thinner, like a garden hose, to clean the paint into the floor drain.

I had to nearly take a bath in paint thinner. If you don't hear from me again, it's probably the toxic chemicals finally gave me cancer...

Detasselling corn. I was was 6'2" in high school, wore 20" high stilts in the field (like drywall stilts) and STILL had to reach up and pull the corn stalk down to reach the tassel.

No air movement in the corn rows, mud, the leaves held the dew so we were drenched after just a few few feet, and corn leave will slice your skin so we had to wear long sleeves.

WORST: they put me up in the barn attic to stack hay bales as they came off the conveyor belt. (farm kids know my pain!)

Thought I was a big shot when the farmer let me use the front loader to clean out a hog pen. WOW! That odor will burn thru your clothes! I put the manure on a spreader trailer and pulled it across the field. It had chains that flung the potent hog shirt out the right side 50 feet in the air. I turned to make a big right circle and started to feel drops of something before it was too late. The big stuff was already in the air and covering the tractor and ME!

Even worse: a J.O.B. They had control over my life and family in too many ways to list here. But it motivated me to

FREEDOM!!!

BRAD

Brad20K,

One cold winter on the dairy farm the manure spreader simply froze (and the automatic barn cleaner broke). The dairy cows were inside most of the time during that part of the year. So we kids (I was the oldest at 15) shoveled manure into buckets, hauled it out to the manure spreader and when full dad pulled it out to the field and we stood in the stuff tossing it out until empty.

At least in the bitter cold there was no smell.

And yep, hauling bales of hay into the loft in the summer was also our job. It was kinda fun (but scratchy) because we later built all sorts of forts and "spooky houses" using the bales.

My first job was picking asparagus. Me and 1 other person picked 5 acres every day. Talk about backbreaking! I lasted there about two months.

I once worked for a company in L.A. that tallied box office grosses. This of course was before everything was computerized, and there was a room full of callers (myself included) we had lists of theaters across the USthat we called to find out the gross money various movies made each evening.

Roy,

The birds and the bees...

Corn is ambidextrous sex wise - both girl and boy at the same time.

The tassel at the top becomes the powdery boy part and pollinates the "female" silks.

To raise a hybrid corn plant for seed the farmer plants 4 rows of "female" corn and 2 rows of "male" corn.

To create a new breed we pulled the tassels from the girl corn plants so their pollen would not mature and pollinate anything.

Corn is a grass, grows in layers so the tassel just pulls right out with a little suction and a pop sound. Toss it on the ground. That plant can now only "receive".

At harvest the farmer reaps the female corn to sell for seed then comes back thru to harvest the male corn for the animals, cornflakes...

Most of the corn in our area went to Seagrams for whiskey.

I made $1.50 per hour in 1970.

BRAD

Thanks Brad20K for that great education in detassling corn,...I learn something new here every day.

Did a lot of janitorial/temporary jobs to put myself through college so I found myself in some interesting places like police locker rooms, medical clinics, seed research facility (smelled soooo good), old courthouse, etc.

Delivering phone books as a part time job for extra

money I was young. Had to climb three flights of

outside stairs to apartments near a college. I definitely

go my exercise.