Summer job?

I've only been able to work as a cashier making minimum wage. There arn't any jobs here anymore, the businesses are cutting back on employment, which in addition to the loss of jobs means more people fighting for whats left. The only good job I have found is as a computer technician, which I was turned down for being under 18 because some nanny stating bitch apparently thinks forklifts are tools of death when used around minors (this job required me to do some work in a warehouse). And of course Uncle Sam takes part of what I earn so it can fund its ads to support its genocidal rampage against drugs, and to brainwash children in our reeducation camps into blind acceptance of the aforementioned atrocity. Maybe if I work for the next year without paying for food or anything else I can get enough money to afford repairs to my car that was just trashed by some moron who, in an apparent effort to prove that idiots can drive cars too, smashed my car trying to read email and drive at the same time.

hmm

sorry to hear about everyone else's troubles, but... mind if I gloat?

so damn cool. well this isn't a summer job but still. Well if you have a Wal-Mart (I know, I know, its a horrible place, full of inbreds and people who can't speak english) they will always hire people. I started at 7.00 then 3 months later I made 7.28 (4% raise). I made over $500.00 dollars a month after taxes. Well at least last month. See after 1 year there (I've just been at mine for over a year, started in July) and if you are near or over 18, you can become a manager. I've snagged a personel manager posisition making $15.50 an hour, I'll start out in a few months with that pay as I am only a manager trainee, ATM. So lets say I work 30 hours a week (can't work too much because of school) and I make 15.50 an hour, that a good $465.00 a week before taxes . Yeah its a sh<b></b>it job right now, but it usually pays off in the long run at Wal-Mart. The reason is this: usual Wal-Mart employees and managers, like the customers are not the smartest in the world. Most anyone here would double all but one of my current managers in terms of IQ. They need people who don't grunt and drool on themselves so that this vast empire of theirs doesn't crumble.

Of course, I'll probably quit when I go down to Pheonix for the Art Institute down there and get a manager job at a computer store like best buy or compUSA.

Doesn't Wal-Mart have drug tests ?

Cashier for the summer, part time at the local rainbow foods. $7.15 an hour, and all I do is pass the UPCs by the little scanner and smile at & thank the customers. By the end of the summer I'll have about $1300, enough to blow on a new computer. Whoopee.

At least in Minnesota, the only restrictions on jobs that minors can do are time and safety related. People under 18 can only work so long, and so late, and they can't do things like operate forklifts or work in the freezer. Not being able to do computer work because of age is just ridiculous.

Don't even get me started on Wal Marts attempts to suppress the workers' right to organize, or their sexist policies when promoting workers.

Wal-Mart sucks. Become a Sysadmin! $25 an hour and you get to play god!

Or play freakin' easy piano songs for plays like me....TONS of downtime (good for reading), very funny people, free food, and lots of girls...well sorta

_-_

Dank: yeah. most places have drug testing.
Rogue: we can organize all we want, there just isn't a Wal-Mart union. And hell what the hell for, most managers are too dumb to take advantage of you and also most people who work there are either part-time or minor, both in which have to pay union due but are not protected. And so you save money on not spending half your check on union dues. There is no point then to have one.

Well

I wouldnt really complain....i get paid 2.63/hr.

Im a waiter at the local friendlys, i get paid jack, but the tips are amazing. It totally compentsates for the fact i don't get paid any thing. The other night i got 50 bucks in tips for 5 hours...thats on top of my pay. Its good stuff, but when its rainy, or slow i get nothing more than 2.63

Treeplanting is where its at...

If you live and canada and dont mind working hard, you should look into treeplanting. This is my second season treeplanting, and you can make TONS of cash. You get paid by the tree, and price per tree averages about 8 cents canadian. Once you learn how to plant well, you can plant 2000-3000 tree's per day, average. Of course, there are slower days, but you also have huge 5000 tree days too. The season starts early may, and goes until late june. Usually you'll get about 40 planting days in. So, at approximately 150 bucks canadian per day, times 40 days, is about $6000 bucks for 2 months work. Not too shabby eh? Not to mention, there is always other work in July in august. My friend made 12000 from may to august last year. Plus, half of the money you make is non-taxable becuase you get a remote worksite allowance, and all you camp costs and hotel expenses get returned to you at income tax time because you are considered self employed.

This seems sweet, but it has its drawbacks. Doing the same thing 10 hours a day, 6 days a week grates on some people minds, and then consequently lose their ****, or just quit. And you don't make copious ammounts of money your first season becuase you suck for the first 2 weeks. It's definately not for everyone, but you'll have the time of your life, meet the coolest people ever, and party harder than you ever have before. I love it, and im going to do it for at least 4 more years. The best part is, you earn every penny. If you wanna make cash, you do, if you don't, you don't. Piecework rox.


Cheers

ChROmE

Hmm, it doesn't sound *too* bad if that $180 is after tax.

But you'll probably find that a lot of office work pay is heavily based on experience. I started on around £350 per month after tax(about 10 years ago) and now earn almost 10 times that for doing pretty much the same job. OK, I do it a lot better than before, but not 10 times better!

Seriously though, you probably have to compare it to the wages and prospects of new-starters of your age who have a permanent job there. Will their salary rise through merit/time/promotions? Do they recieve formal training for the job? The answer was 'yes' for me on both of those counts so starting on a crap wage wasn't so bad cos I knew it would go up or I would have the training to move on to a better job. But then if they also took on a temp, they could hardly pay them more than the permanent staff of the same age/experience, could they?

Also, as you get older you may find that qualifications don't really mean anything. OK, they'll get you into a job and started on with a career - which IS a pretty important thing. But after that, if the minimum requirements for getting the job were either a degree or 'previous experience', you'll probably find that everyone you work with also has a degree. Then the wages are purely down to how good you are at your job, and so 'previous experience' generally becomes more important.
Then when looking for work in the same field, with a different company - the salary they offer you will be based only on your experience and interview manner. Not qualifications.

You wouldn't believe how irrelevant the work covered in many degree courses is to their relevent careers, as opposed to the in depth knowledge you get from a few years on the job.

techsupport... 8 bucks an hour

but that pertty low for techsupport.

PDQ.net used to pay 7 an hour for there support thats just not right, especially with there caller volume

Just think of it this way phatcat: if the company you are doing the tech support for has a large caller volume, you know that company must suck anyway.

yeah I work now @ HAL-PC I used to do volunteer techsupport a few years ago. but recently they need ON STAFF tech suppot

I get 8 an hour, and the call volume is REALLY low. Also most of the people are nice

get a few ID-10-T's now and then but most who don't know what they are doing are good at following simple directions

I know what ya mean

I got some co-workers here that don't do shit, don't know techsupport, and just talk on AIM all day

ehh.. but they get fired. heh.. one is get'n can'ed soon

i have had so much trouble finding a decent job this summer... first i was painting for a College Pro Painters franchise, but my boss was a cocksucker so i quit. it was that bad... he was a complete idiot. if any of you ever get the chance to work for a college pro franchise, make sure you know what the manager is like. i've heard a lot of bad stories about them.... that job was $9 a hour (canadian) which is decent, with my $442 a month rent in downtown toronto. ouch.

then i was telemarketing, which no one should ever do. it's fu cking awful... again $9 an hour, but i sucked, so they fired me after two weeks. then i found my current kickass job, $10 an hour, doing maintenance for a non-profit arts organization. great boss, hours, co workers, wage, etc... i love it. my girlfriend still hasn't found a good one yet though.

i am going to look into that tree planting for next summer. also working on a cruise ship.. that would be great. lots of hotties , and nice ocean breezes, cheap cubans and rum. i'm there.

Originally posted by Elite_Soldier
Uppity, the main problem with my job (I really don't want to sound arrogant here) is that I am WAY more qualified for positions than people 4x my age. I mean, they hardly do any work around the office, they frequently arrive late, leave an hour early almost everyday, have obscenely long lunch breaks, and generall treat me like shi<b></b>t. I do practically all their work, while they check email, or call friends. I am in another room, working my as<b></b>s off, sometimes after hours, coming in from lunch early, while they check email. Jeez. And I get paid $5.00 an hour, while they get $20+. And I have friends who do far less work (actually they deliever two things a day, than have the 5+ hours left free), who get paid for 7 hours of work while doing 1. They also get 3 hours of lunch. We get pretty much the same pay.

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I'm still not sure that your job sucks. It just seems that the other-guys are on a cushy number - and believe me, these are few and far between. The vast majority of jobs involve constant, hard work for at least 8 hours a day. But its just plain wrong if you are doing all of their work while they do nothing. At the end of the day though, generally jobs which require more qualifications to get started on are usually difficult jobs and so need you to get loads of extra training/experiance before you become adept at that job. This costs the company money as training IS very expensive. So you'll probably find it impossible to find a summer job doing more difficult, well-paid work because companies only like to invest in ppl who they think will still be there in a few years time. Sad, but true.

Personally I've fallen lucky in that I'm currently on a bit of a 'cushy number'. In my last job, I worked 50 hours a week for a fixed £16k per year. Now I work 35-40 hours a week for £28k. And not all of that time is work. OK, some of it is waiting for responses from ppl, decisions to be made, problems to happen. But also some of it involves working all weekend (nights too), working away, being on call and being on your own trying to fix stuff which is costing the company hundreds of thousands of pounds every hour that the problem remains unfixed. So yeah, sometimes I may be mucking around on the net, coming in late etc. But I do need to know what to do and how to react quickly when the brown stuff hits the spinny thing, and for my line of work, it does take years to learn that.

Originally posted by Elite_Soldier
And about school/college helping jobs; thats the strangest thing. I had to learn almost everything at the office, and NONE of it corresponded to what I learned in school. Mathematics? They are simple. English? I learned damn near most of it on my lonesome, or on the internet. Computer skills? Hehe, like a school is good at teaching that. Learned it on my own. They taught me how to make passports... but that is hardly degree requiring work. I think a hard working highschool student could do much of the work in a modern day "office" given the proper instruction. Hell monkeys have the number of opposable digits on their fingers, all they need is a little time

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Yeah, I work in IT, doing mainframe work. Show me one degree course which teaches about mainframes in any detail and doesn't say that Cobol is dead, and I'll buy you a pint. A computing degree only shows that you have the ability to do the work. We still have to teach new grads how to use a mainframe/program in cobol or natural/understand mainframe databases etc.

Originally posted by Elite_Soldier
I agree experience should have a certain role in qualifications... but discriminating by age is just ridiculous. They assume since I am 16, that I must be mentally retarded, and obviously less "skilled" than they are. Than once they see I have my shi<b></b>t together, they tell me to do their work for them. Can I do anything? Of course not, summer hires shouldn't complain, because we are doing "nothing".

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Well, you just have to decide. Do you want the money enough to put up with the job? You're lucky in a way in that you are still young and so don't have too many ties so you still have a choice.

Personally I'd say give up the job and enjoy the summer. You won't get many long breaks like that once you're working permenantly and the hot summers will just pass you by as you're stuck in the office