What is the most unusual job you ever had?
7When I was stationed at March AFB back in the mid 70’s my then-girlfriend was the leader of the on-base Brownie Troop. I assisted her for a while, then she got transferred to another base…and I took on the job as leader. I took those girls on trips to Sea World, Universal Studios and (of course) Disneyland, and we camped out on base in front of one of the most secure buildings on the west coast.
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I was a girl scout leader when my niece was young. so I was 18 and lead her troop and a second troop and was the unit cookie leader too, and I did not have a child of my own.
But the most unusual job I had was ornament personalizer at the world’s largest Christmas store. I helped fulfill online orders. It was fun and my “resume” was the handwriting on my application.
@mbersiam My mother was an ornament artist and personalizer at the Christmas Shoppe inside Islands of Adventure at Universal Studios Florida! She loved it.
I was a water meter reader for the City of Atlanta back in the '60s. You shoulda seen what I saw while out in the streets, backalleys, and secret corners of that place.
It was a job that took one into places that normal folks never go. But we started at daylight, retriving the route books from the Water Dept at City Hall and were usually finished by late morning, except for driving routes which took longer.
We were given bus tokens to get us out to various neighborhoods, where in uniform and carrying a meter stick (to lift the covers of the in ground meters with a hook on one end and a rubber squeegee on the other, all one needed was a glimpse of the meter to record the reading), we walked and filled out the route book as we went.
Later, when finished, we returned the route books to City Hall.
My first job after getting working papers at age 14 in 1977 was at the Queens Botanical Gardens near my home in Flushing NY (NY City). It was a seven-week gub’mint funded Summer job for economically disadvantaged youths (my dad had died when I was 11) and I learned quite a bit about tending tulips and roses as well as pulling weeds and the like. I did it the following Summer as well.
I was one of the only kids willing to weed the fenced in area around the bee hives (the QBG sold the honey), so it became one of my areas in the gardens.
My first paycheck was for a bit less than $50 (24 hours at $2.10/hour, less the FICA deduction) and a fair amount of that first paycheck went to watching Smokey and the Bandit and Star Wars four times each in four nights after work. Sally Field was really hot, the Trans Am was cool, and the special effects made the Trans Am seem commonplace.
Even working immediately next to the various hives for a total of 14 weeks over two Summers, the one time I was stung was during a honey harvest near the end of the first Summer, when I was about 1/2 mile from the bee garden.
@baqui63 Sounds like the CETA Program I worked for in the 70’s. I was assigned to the cemetery upkeep crew.
@baqui63 @MAPinnick We had it too in Ohio. SYETP. Summer Youth Employment Training Program 1980s. I worked it three summers: 1. Local rec center pulling weeds and picking up trash. 2. Army National Guard office, cleaning up their government paperwork mess. 3. Union IBEW Local 1076, more office work. Then my fourth summer I worked at the SYETP office processing other youth through the program, until I discovered I could work for the temp agencies for 3-4 times the pay.
After my freshman year of college, I got a summer job working for a regional dairy. I worked in the ice cream “vault”, as we called it. More of a warehouse, thousands of square feet, as I recall. One end was attached to the production area (conveyor belts ran through square holes in the wall) and the other end opened to the loading dock where anything from typical dairy delivery trucks (vans) to semi- tractor/trailer rigs would back up for loading (again via conveyor belts through the wall).
Straight out of production, the ice cream would be too soft to transport, so would have to stay in the vault long enough at sub-freezing temperature to harden sufficiently, usually a matter of several hours to overnight.
They always added extra help during the summer to accommodate the extra demand and production. Workers were stackers and/or loaders.
The usual unit for regular ice cream was the “sleeve”, a flat piece of cardboard folded into a rectangular tube, open at both ends. Ice cream generally came in “squares” (bricks) or “rounds” of 1/2 gallon each. A sleeve for squares would hold 5 (2.5 gallons) and for rounds hold 3 (1.5 gals). The weight was a variable, controlled by density of cream vs. air in the mix. (They had to be within certain limits, but didn’t always make spec.) Too little air would make a quite dense and heavy mix, about like frozen butter, and be more expensive to produce. Too little would be light weight and gyp the consumer.
There were also three-gallon tubs, quarts, pints, cups, and “novelties” such as popsicles, fudge bars, and ice cream cookies. These usually were bulk-packaged in brown bags.
My job as a stacker was to pick up the ice cream, usually two sleeves at a time (twenty five pounds, maybe, for squares) off the conveyor belt coming in from production, and carry it to the stack for that particular flavor, and then literally stack them up to a maximum of maybe 8-10 levels (too high would literally squish the cartons, as I unfortunately found out my first day – nobody had warned me!) They could go a lot higher after being hard-frozen, which we would do if we ran out of floor space. We had dozens of flavors, including mellorine and sherbets and even some custom-ordered higher-butterfat products. A typical production run was maybe 1000 gallons at a time.
Loaders would work in teams of two people on the inside and one or two on the truck. On the inside of the vault, one would be close to the conveyor belt and the other at the stack. Sleeves would be thrown and caught, two at a time, sometimes over quite a good distance. It built up good upper body muscles! And keeping the sleeves together on their flight took a knack.
The first times I worked loading, I didn’t yet have the muscles, so was a catcher. I didn’t have the technique (or strength) down to catch only with my hands, so got my arms and shoulders beaten up pretty good and developed the bruises to show for it.
Best part about the job, at least for me, was working in extreme air conditioning during the Dallas summer and getting to eat practically as much ice cream as I wanted, especially the novelties (the bags they were in frequently tore during handling – fresh ice cream sandwiches, while the cookies were still crisp, just cannot be beat! ). Also, I did surprise myself by how much muscle I put on and lost body fat. Working in extreme cold burns A LOT of calories.
Downside of the job was the pay – minimum wage. But I did get to work a lot of overtime, typically mid 50’s hours per week. Absolute worst part was having to occasionally work outside on the loading dock in the hundred degree heat. Nothing like getting soaked in perspiration, and then going back in and having your wet clothes freeze on your back.
Summer after my sophomore year, I went back to the supervisor and got immediately rehired. (Most new workers didn’t even last several weeks.) And a promotion, of sorts, though no higher pay. I got a key to open up the vault and be the only worker inside to start the early shift at 4 a.m. I’d clock out mid-morning for lunch, but then work until one or two p.m.
Important fact I hadn’t yet mentioned. I was told that the refrigeration inside the vault ran at NEGATIVE 24 degrees Fahrenheit, with large industrial fans for circulation. That is what I faced when I would first go in there every morning. It would warm up considerably through the day, with the open hatches at the end of the conveyor belts, plus workers in and out of the vault doors. I wore personal knit long underwear, plus regular shirt and jeans, the company provided a selection of quilted tops, bottoms, and hoods for the middle, and then I had a uniform overalls over it all (one from a set of 3 that came out of my first paycheck). But it still took a while to acclimatize each day. By the end of my work day though, I could be back down to regular street clothes and go back inside for 10 or so minutes if I needed to. The cold is what made most people quit.
Anybody else here ever work in a similar job inside a freezer?
@phendrick I never worked inside a freezer but I worked outside where the temperatures ranged from minus 20 to minus 60. Your biggest catch would be failure to acclimate to the heat in Dallas too since you were switching back and forth between really cold and really hot. It would make both feel worse. I can understand why some quit as you just have to tough it out until you adapted and learned how to dress accordingly. I’d guess some of those workers never had to keep going when things were miserable. Valuable lesson to learn.
When I was in Canada and had finally acclimated to the cold, I went home for Christmas and the minus 5 where my parents lived seemed positively tropical. When I worked in FL taking adjudicated youth canoeing across it we’d laugh when the Maine staff came down and would fight over sleeping in the walk in cooler (3 could fit and about 5 or 6 would fight over it. One even moved stuff on a shelf and managed somehow to cram themselves on a shelf). In vain we’d try to convince them to just tough it out and after around 3 weeks (I found it took around 3 weeks to acclimate) it wouldn’t seem nearly as hot. And then you’d need a fleece jacket walking into stores on your off time.
Several years ago I worked for Walmart’s plant vendor in a Walmart store and it took a while to get used to manual labor in the hot sun with sweat dripping off one’s eyelashes. That vendor had the same problem - most people quit shortly after being hired due to the initial misery level.
@Kidsandliz Aside from perspiration, the heat didn’t usually bother me that much in Dallas. It was relatively low humidity most of the time (at least compared to Houston or [choke] Atlanta GA where I had to spend some time several summers.) And the A/C pulled the humidity out of the air in the IC vault, so it was a very dry cold. Frost buildup around the entry doors was phenomenal. So at that age I didn’t really have much trouble going back and forth H<->C…
As I got older, I could tolerate high heat but didn’t like it so much. Now though, I have trouble tolerating it much at all when it gets above 80s, depending on RH.
Funny thing, my aunt from Buffalo NY would visit us in Dallas and complain about the cold during the winter. She said it just felt colder than her home environment. We decided it must have been something to do with the humidity. I had no problem with the cold there during Christmas visits; in fact several times i’d go jogging through the snow in the parks there. But I’d motorcycle in freezing weather in Dallas, as long as the roads were clear.
Your story made me laugh. Sometimes when I’d open at 4 a.m., the guy in production would not have started his operation suitably on time and I’d have to wait up to an hour to have any product to deal with. So I’d find an empty spot in one of the wooden storage shelves the novelties went into, and crawl in and take a nap. (He’d come in and alert me.) I could actually get fairly comfortable as long as no direct fan on me.
@Kidsandliz The summer after my junior year, I had a complete change of pace. I worked with an “engineering” crew for a general contractor, primarily on air conditioning and plumbing, mostly in new construction. Much of it was outside, all day long. I was classified as a plumber’s helper (not the toilet kind). Even hot inside, no air conditioning (since we were still installing it.) Pay was much better, but no ice cream provided.
That summer I had my single worst day ever working. It was my first day on the job, so I was kinda clueless about a lot of things. My task was to wrap fiberglass insulation around air conditioning ductwork going into the ceilings in some new apartments. It was in the high 90s or so, and absolutely no circulation inside. I was miserably hot and sweating profusely, so had the bright idea to pull my shirt off and go topless. I then got a lot more miserable pretty quickly. I did mention it was fiberglass, right? I don’t think I was ever that itchy again, even from poison ivy. Check mark. Lesson learned. To this day I wear a long sleeve shirt when messing with fiberglass.
Besides getting a lot better pay that summer, I also acquired a lot of how-to-do-it knowledge. I soldered and sweated plumbing connections, ran pipe, hung pipe in attics, balanced cold water lines, fabricated ductwork, insulated ductwork and pipes, installed water heaters, was a welder’s aide. On one job site, we spent several days changing out a steam system to a hot water system (used for heating wax for sealing cartons). There were several hundred feet of line and it was overhead and we worked from very high ladders. (And the pipe had not completely cooled from the steam.)
@Kidsandliz @phendrick
Huh. This sentence surprises me, or maybe I’m misreading it.
I’ve lived in both Houston and Atlanta. Clear Lake area of Houston, and Midtown Atlanta.
In my experience Houston was both hotter than Atlanta and was more consistently humid.
Maybe you had some other reason to choke over Atlanta.
@Kidsandliz @Limewater I was in Hotlanta in August three years running, and each time whenever I was outside, I kept wanting to pull my shirt off and wring out the perspiration. But the last time was over 20 years ago. And I don’t remember a bit of breeze. Maybe it has gotten better with climate change?
Note: I did NOT say Houston wasn’t hot or humid. But maybe the mosquitoes there kept me from assessing Houston’s climate its proper due.
.
@phendrick
I’ve worked for the farmers market vendors where you have to unload and load all their flowers, set everything up and sell the flowers. People may think Michigan doesn’t get that hot but when we’re in the upper 90’s and we have 70-80% humidity it’s absolutely miserable. Starting work at 2am when there’s no sun may seem nice but when the humidity is so high your sweating the first step you take it sucks. We’d work from 2am till about 4pm 3 days a week. It still was one of my favorite jobs ever bc I loved working with flowers and being outside all summer long. Also getting to talk to people about gardening was cool.
IT Support contractor at Johnson Space Center in the early 1990s. Actually the official title the contract was STOC (Space Transportation Operations Contract) I supported the Payload Capacity department. A group of about 60 people that their sole job was to figure out how much weight a shuttle could carry each mission given the factors of people on board, experiments, length of mission, was there a satellite launch, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Back before the days of being able to remote into PCs on the network, I spent a weekend going to each employee’s machine, running a script that would audit the content and applications of the machine. Looking for bootleg or unauthorized software, checking for viruses, and removing the games that came with standard Windows. I remember one machine, the guy actually had Solitaire in the startup menu. Your tax dollars at work!
@ironcheftoni We always insisted that Solitaire was necessary to maintain necessary hand-eye coordination for using the mouse, and so made us more efficient users!
@ironcheftoni @phendrick
@phendrick I think they were just mindful of someone could always be watching. One of the other rules was that if we traveled for work. Even if we were offered a free upgrade, we couldn’t fly first class in case a member of the media was to report it. "Here’s a nasa employee/contractor flying first class. Your tax dollars at work "
I built high end racing bicycle wheels for a summer in the 90’s. Learned about spoke cross patterns and strength, a lot about real world applications of geometry, and drilling out deep section carbon fiber wheel blanks to accept spokes (pricy if you screw up, thankfully my boss had done all the hard work and made nice templates and jigs so I rarely messed up product). There was a lot that goes into wheels I had no idea even existed. People could order exactly the rim, hub, spokes, and spoke pattern they wanted and I built them in the shop. Who knew there were so many kinds of spokes? And how to work the puzzle of spoke tension to make the wheel perfectly straight and round (or, if things don’t go right, lumpy and wobbly).
This was at a place that served serious riders including the high end racing and triathlete markets. It was pretty cool thinking that some of the wheels I built could be ridden by professionals to win races. It’s a job I’d do today if it existed and paid anything. I bet it’s all done by machine now though (but it would take a hell of a machine).
@djslack Did you tension spokes by their sound when tapped on? I always heard that was a thing. (In addition to making sure no out-of-round section by a run-out indicator.)
@phendrick Nope, just all the tools (radial and lateral runout on the truing stand, and a spoke tension gauge) and a set process for building. But I wasn’t an old hand at it either. I haven’t thought about the details of that job in decades, but I’m pretty sure I did get to where I didn’t use the tension gauge that much and instead did that by feel. It was the truing stand that mattered.
Now in the field, I could see that being useful to think about. It would be easy to tell the loose one by sound if you couldn’t tell by sight, and assuming you can tighten it you could probably get pretty close by sound, kind of like tuning a guitar. So I think it’s valid, but not accurate enough especially in the shop where all the right tools are at hand.
I worked as a Radiation waste technician…sounds more impressive than it is. I basically cleaned the power plant. Pay was not bad but I got to see the inner workings of the power plant…which was pretty darn cool.
@sweetjoey I had a good friend whose job was monitoring everything that flowed out of a nuc plant for contamination/radiation. He died of cancer 2 years ago. Maybe related to his job, maybe just coincidence. Who knows? Take care.
@sweetjoey
Remember SNL skit called The Pepsi Syndrome?
Back in 1981, I was laid off, collecting unemployment, and not looking particularly hard for a job, tbh. A friend of a friend was looking for traffic counters, $25/hr, cash. Considering minimum wage was $2.10/ hr, and my old job was $15.50/hr, hell yeah, I’ll do it.
Was great, never had to leave the car, was given a fancy clipboard with manual counters that could be configured to conform to the intersection, and listen to my Walkman, and was averaging $250 cash/week for a couple of months.
Always wondered what the government contract amount was for that, because the woman I worked for was a subcontractor to the guy that had the actual contract because obviously they both would be making enough money that would afford to sub-subcontract at $25/hr.
It’s a toss up between the summer I worked as a handyman at a Girl Scout Camp. Camp Bay Breeze, Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capital. It was a nice job on Chesapeake Bay just up from the Patuxent. The mosquitoes were terrible, but we got to watch the moon landing on a grainy 19" TV in the camp mess hall. I was the guy who poured lime down all the outhouse holes to help keep the odor down.
Or the summer I spent cleaning the cigarette butts out of the little grooves in the escalator stairs at Northwest Plaza in St. Louis. Did you know they had a special tool, like a little rake, just for that purpose? At the time it was the world’s largest shopping mall. The janitor’s closet was behind the back wall of the stage at Chelsea Street Pub, you could feel the music through the cinder block. I had to actually join the union to do it, the janitor service was a closed shop. It was horribly boring, but it was a stop-gap while I was waiting to get drafted.
@2many2no
I remember NW plaza. Grew up in Florissant in the early 70s. Went there once or twice (it was ‘far away’ at that time) Still remember the Famous-Barr and SBF stores. Mom worked there in the later 70’s early 80’s for a home fashions store (can’t remember the name though)
Due to budget cutbacks, they had to let the gym teacher at my daughter’s school go. That seemed like a bad idea to me and some parents, so I was the gym teacher, for free, every Friday for a full year (other parents had the other days) and would then show up to work after lunch. I was getting paid hourly at this point so it was actually costing me money to do so, but it was one of the most rewarding yet strange job I ever did.
I fell into a gig at a regional theater about 10 years ago. A community-theater friend who’d gone pro had been offered a part that he couldn’t take, but he put in a good word for me. I had the right skillset (could act, sing, and play guitar) and the endorsement, and the director was desperate, so I was offered the part without even auditioning.
The show was “Hank Williams: Lost Highway,” and it was fun. We got a week of intensive rehearsal, then performed six shows a week for ten weeks. It was one show a night Tuesday through Friday, two on Saturday, with Sunday and Monday off. The pay wasn’t great - I think $240 a week - but it also came with free housing and cheap meals at the attached restaurant. I picked up a little extra money by busking at a big art fair they hosted, and could have worked as a waiter at the restaurant, but was sick of that kind of work at that point. So I spent a lot of time hanging around in cast housing, doing headshots for the other actors, and basically enjoying a paid vacation.
I kind of halfheartedly pursued an acting career for a little while after, since I had a foot in the door at that point. But what they don’t tell you about acting is that until you get big enough to have an agent, a good 75% of the job is looking for your next job. I can’t live like that, so I took the next “real” job I could find. Still, it was a great experience, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to give it a go.
Here’s a reel of production photos. I’m the cowboy with the red shirt.
I worked at Celestial Seasonings when it was still a privately-owned company, in the “labor pool”, which meant I’d help in other departments when they needed extra people or work on special projects. It was fun - I learned to drive a forklift, and if I helped in the mixing/milling dept. I’d go home smelling like cinnamon or peppermint (and the dust would scent the whole apt. after I showered.) A lot of crazy hippie types worked there; one guy in the teabag dept. showed up tripping on acid every day - not sure how he didn’t mess up, but it was a pretty tedious job, working on a mechanical line pushing the bags up into the boxes, closing them, putting on new boxes, etc etc etc.
I wish I’d stayed long enough to earn some company stock, but my mother was pressuring me to go back to college. Moms don’t always know best.
Walking beans. For those of you lucky enough to not know what this is, farmers rotate their fields from corn to beans to add nitrogen to the soil. Any corn kernels that fell during last year’s harvest would sprout up into this year’s soybeans, and result in lower harvest prices. Enter the bean walkers, teenagers tasked with walking the bean rows to lay waste to any cornstalk or weed that dared cross our path. It got suckier as the season went on, as the beans grew chest-high and the corn to the size of small trees. The heat, mud, blisters, spiders and sunburns were constant companions. We endured all this for $2.10 an hour. We really should have unionized.
Winding underwater cable in a clean room at ITT cable hydrospace.
This is the phone lines running in the ocean between countries and the cable is miles long.
The cable is about as large around as an arm and is perfectly white. The room is a 25’ pure white circular room. You had to wear their white coveralls & a white hat and white shoes.
The cable fed from the center top of the room at a steady pace and I’m below winding it to even rows. After just a few hours you start seeing colors and hearing things. There also was no sound except your own voice and the cable.
I know of someone that fell asleep, the cable was tangled to a mess.
@daveinwarsh , a big room with about 10 tanks on each size where the cables were stored before getting the outer copper wrap and black outer jacket. then they went into the hugh Green tanks for final storeage… i was there from 74 to 78…
Something that’s may be more in @PooltoyWolf’s realm – costume character.
@narfcake Heheh
@narfcake @PooltoyWolf
What character?
@Kyeh @PooltoyWolf
@narfcake @PooltoyWolf
Cute! I see that Koolhandjoe has done costume stuff too!
@narfcake @PooltoyWolf So who is this guy? I found a gif of him electrocuting himself
.
@Kyeh @PooltoyWolf That’s typical. Cuddles (Happy Tree Friends) is quite the curious rabbit.
(The costume is Mondo Media’s, and my job was just for the weekend around their booth at SDCC. Also it’s been 15+ years and dammit, I feel old!)
@Kyeh @narfcake @PooltoyWolf I have a couple of characters, but I used them as Halloween costumes when my niece was little
@narfcake @PooltoyWolf @tinamarie1974
Tree Friends?
I feel old because I knew nothing about them.
They remind me of Takashi Murakami.
@Kyeh @PooltoyWolf @tinamarie1974 Think Itchy and Scratchy turned up to 11, with lots of gratuitous cartoon violence. It’s definitely not for kids.
@narfcake @PooltoyWolf @tinamarie1974
Not for me either, I think!
When I was going to school, like many students I was always short of cash. I took a job with the local power company as a night watchman. My responsibility was strictly and solely babysitting a trench where the power company had to dig up a cable for repairs. I figured it was a cake job. Getting paid to sit there and study, do an hourly log entry about the status of the trench and any public contact. Lacking foresight, I didn’t consider when I accepted the job that I had to sit in a lawn chair right next to the trench. No sitting in my cushy car seat out of wind and cold. Made it a little difficult to concentrate on my studying. I watched that cable for three straight nights and I can say with confidence: it didn’t budge a millimeter. I turned in my notification to vacate after that one assignment.
@ruouttaurmind I briefly worked as a security guard, and it’s a strong contender for the worst job I ever had. Chasing hookers out of a Kroger parking lot in the middle of the night is even less glamorous than it sounds.
This one.
a place had a quota where x people needed to be on-site at all times, so i was literally paid to sleep there.
@axemurderer Tisk tisk sleeping on the job LOL Hope they provided a comfortable bed in a quiet spot. That is pretty amazing they approached it that way. Nice for you though.
I have had several odd / unusual jobs… here are the top 5 IMO:
@Koolhandjoe OK, so where to start…
Furbee and Beanie Baby store - that would drive me to monsterfy them - just to pay them back for all the times they made fun of me
Shill for Santa - wow. Was he a faith healer in “previous career”?
Shipped “sketchy chemicals” to home schoolers - just makes me think of
/image Irwin Mainway
Seems like a typical linear career path!
Porn.
Actually, I translated pornos into Spanish for the Spanish-speaking market because I am completamente bilingue. I got paid by the reel, regardless of how much dialogue was on it. The dubbing company would give me scripts sometimes, but with the pornos, the actors tended to go off script so they were basically useless. Had to come up with a lot of, let us say, enthusiastic exclamations to keep things interesting.
@GrandmaLyn
You win!
I used to awkwardly poke gravid turtles.
For SCIENCE, ya pervs.
@brainmist Yeah? Maybe you can advise @tinamarie1974:
https://meh.com/forum/topics/turtle
About 15 years ago or so I dressed up as a snowman and stood outside of bath and body works and danced around and greeted people for the holiday season. My friend was dressed up as a princess inside playing with kids. I really got the short end of the stick. The costume was huge and barely fit in my car. The head took up my whole front seats so I got lots of weird looks driving with it. The head was made out of hard plastic and would hurt my shoulders really bad after the 3 or 4 hours were up. The costume was made for someone taller than I was so I really couldn’t see out of it so sometimes I would get lost in the mall hallway and people would have to bring me back to the store. Teenagers were real assholes. They would want me hug little kids or shake their hands but not being able to see made it really difficult, I could just hear them and feel them. While bending over to hug someone I got pushed from behind and then rolled down the hallway of the mall. Bath and body workers came chasing after bc I couldn’t get up by myself. Another time while trying to shake hands some asshole teenagers came out of the store and shook my hand laughing really hard. While I tried to continue shaking peoples hands all I could hear was “oh no, honey get away from the snowman” or “mom, what’s that on the snowman’s hand?” After a while bath and body workers got curious and brought me to the back of the store and had found that somebody and put white lotion on my black mitten to make it look like cum. That’s not even my worst job.
I spent a summer poking turtles in awkward places where turtles don’t like to be poked.
(No, not THAT awkward place. Hind leg shell gap.)
The summer I turned 14 a friend of the same age and I spent much of the summer counting insect larva in the tops of peanut plants for the princely sum of 75 cents per hour at the nearby university. We were considered skilled labor because we could count and tally the numbers. Her older brother worked there, too, as a janitor, for 50 cents per hour. He was 2 or 3 years older, but his job was classified for unskilled labor.