• Politics are not permitted. There's plenty of places to discuss that elsewhere, and a hot pepper forum is not the place. Thank you for respecting the community!

Job at 14 - Good or Bad?

`
Don't remember exact age, just know it was walking from grammar school to dad's shop and cleaning - dusting - vacuuming - waxing used cars and I needed a step stool to reach the middle of the trunk lid/never mind the roof. Pay? A Bengie half dollar for 2 - 3 hours work then home for supper & homework.
 
Of course meals, clean clothes and bedding at home not free. We learned paying for and budgeting what we used and what we wanted or had to buy..... candy - comic books - christmas cards.....
 
After graduation from trade school and full time job paying $125 gross a week - price was 15 bucks a week as long as I made my bed every morning, picked up my room/dirty clothes in hamper/lawn mowed weekly/all sidewalks & stairs shoveled of snow.
 
It was a different time/era (Who here remembers a pay phone on every major street and store? Or the cost for a local call was 10¢?) and while I lament the simplicity of the time I do embrace the changes. I talk often with my boys, ages 19 to 25, about how I can't imagine their world when my age.
 
I'm 32 so my childhood memories are the payphone prices being 15¢ and then 25¢.
 
I rode the line. I was 14 before there was internet in my house. What pissed me off was seeing Hackers before I got to use the net and realizing that movie made it look a lot more cool.
 
Ghaleon said:
What pissed me off was seeing Hackers before I got to use the net and realizing that movie made it look a lot more cool.
 
I hold a degree is in mathematics.  Having been through more discrete mathematics and cryptology courses than I care to think about, let me be the first to assure you...  there is NOTHING cool (as in :cool: ) about hacking.  That is, unless you really love factorization of the product of large prime numbers, casual discussions about quantum computing, or can converse on the Shor or Coppersmith attack, with nonchalance.
 
Let's face it...  if you love any/all those things, you've probably never run with a "cool" crowd. :D
 
I had to write a paper once on how to successfully break public key encryption.  With all the gory details about advantages/disadvantages of each method, and what the potential risk/reward would be for each one. (including what laws I would violate in the process) Talk about some great reading...  :sick:
 
The people who make it possible for me to just burn my games to disc and play on a hacked system will forever be seen as cool to me.
 
I worked at 15 every fri and sat night and at the end of the year bought a car with my own hard earned dollars for about $6500... and only had a permit, full driver's license at 16, but it's nice to have the car already on that bday... and the values... ;)
 
My 2 brothers and I are at our parent's house working on mucking out the estate, and there have been several discussions of our early jobs, how we got there and such.  The last few days we saw some youngsters across the road selling lemonade.  Well, we had to BuyLocal and Support Young Entrepreneurs... so we went and bought some glasses of CountryTime lemonade.  One brother mentioned a story about some cities fining kids for selling without a business permit and some such crap.  The story is, CountryTime Lemonade said...if you get a ticket selling our lemonade We'll pay the ticket! 
 
SERIOUSLY??!?!???  Some city dick is gonna give a kid a ticket for selling lemonade?!?!????  :rolleyes:   
 
I haven't verified if that is a true story or not, but I seem to remember hearing something about that.  I 'think' Countrytime will also send out cardboard lemonade stands for kids to use.  Not sure on that.  When Evan was selling lemonade at the FM we had to make it from scratch.  
 
Speaking of the FM....I used to sell salsa at the market and make a killing.  I thought 'this is great! I should get it into the stores!'  which I did...and it sold really well in the stores.  And every Saturday, folks would come by our table, taste the salsa and say..'this is the best salsa, I just bought it at the market!'  and walk away....
 
It got to the point where Evan was making a killing selling 80-100 cups of lemonade at $1 each and I was making about $20 selling salsa.  I'm Like...(why am I busting my butt to set up and sample salsa for$20 when he's making $100 selling lemonade?)  Well...as one of the other vendors pointed out, he did have the CUTE factor going on~  ;)  :lol:
 
 
 
 
 
Back
Top