My ancient experiences with the underclasses (summer jobs) and the first out of school job: Flagman, turning a stop/yield sign around to let traffic through a

My ancient experiences with the underclasses (summer jobs) and the first out of school job: Flagman, turning a stop/yield sign around to let traffic through a construction area. Boring as hell. Graduated to: laborer, basically using a giant heavy metal rod to tamp down earth around power poles we'd just dug a hole for and inserted. Even with gloves, turned my hands to mush. Graduated to: instrument man, because I was doing math in university, started doing surveying for previously mentioned power poles (and eventually metal towers). Graduated to: surveyor for the construction of a large container pier. Job involved sitting in a rowboat, and dropping a chain into the water, and measuring the depth, telling people "more fill here," and repeat. The real perk here was that sitting in a rowboat all day gave me an awesome tan. Graduated to: a graduate in CS. Went to work for a small (tiny) oceanographic firm as sysadmin/developer/data entry/anything that was required. They put what was at time a state of the art Unix system on my desk (Motorola 68020 processor, with I think 2 mb of RAM) and it was my baby. That job, the first full time one, actually paid less than the previous summer job.