I was a ranch kid . loaded bales dug holes skinned bark off of logs cleared land
Ended up with forearms and shoulders of a grown man by 14 lol
Worst job of all was cleaning out the chicken shed ...how long can you hold your breath while shovelling ?

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the rules? there are no rules

Worst job of all was cleaning out the chicken shed ...how long can you hold your breath while shovelling ?[/QUOTE]


Boy, you got that right. My job in the spring as soon as school let out.. One fork load at a time, out the door, throw it in the pickup. Take it out in the meadow and spread it around, back home and wash out the back of the pickup.


Gag a maggot!!

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Eccentric old coot

At 18 I started working I changed my studies to night time and got myself a job.

It was in a salt refinery. My job was: Fill and close 110 pound bags. Mount every 10 bags in a pallet. Get the forklift and store the pallet. Get another pallet. Start all over again. 08:00 to 18:00 lunch from 12:00 to 13:00. Monday to Friday.

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Expect the unexpected

Busting truck tires down for repair when I was 9 YO. Earning 25 cents/hr. Hard rock mining wasn't exactly a picnic either.

Stocking and hanging drywall. You could untie your work boots at the end of the day without bending over.

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That's gonna leave a mark.

Roofing. When I was just out of high school I worked for a guy who did contract work on HUD houses. I was 5'9" and 135lb at the time and lugging those 80lb bags of shingles up extension ladders was no fun at all.

Been there done that too.
Dad & I re-roofed our porch and garage one fall. Every day after school for a week and at least one, maybe two weekends. Bundles of asphalt shingles are HEAVY.

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Send lawyers, guns & money...

Whoa, Big snake..

Man, how I wish we had a bale loader like that. We had to pitch them up onto that size truck and the guy on the truck had to stack them - up to 5 or 6 layers deep (7-1/2 or 9 feet high) on the truck bed. The hard part was the last dozen or so - when the tail end of the bed was already stacked 3 or 4 layers deep. At that point you were trying to pitch them up there about 10 feet off the ground.

You got good at tossing bales using the "hammer throw" technique. When pitching one up from the driver's side of the truck, you start with your back to the truck facing just a little towards the front of the truck. You pivot on your left foot and spin 3/4 of a circle to your left - really HARD and fast - while "boosting" the bale upwards with your right knee and flexing your biceps to lift the bale. If you do it just right, as you spin and lift with the centrifugal force helping you lift & swing the bale upwards at a 45-degree arc/angle in one smooth motion.

By the time I was 12-13 years old I was practiced enough at it that I could pitch an average 40-pound bale up onto the top of 3-4 layers of bales on the truck - a total of about 8-9 feet high from the ground. By 16 I could pitch one a good 4 feet higher than my head - well over 10 feet high.

I've seen A snake in a bale a lot of times and a couple in the same bale a time or two. Never saw more than two in one bale. Most of them were black snakes or rat snakes, but occasionally you'd come across a copperhead. Never saw any rattlers in bales though.

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Send lawyers, guns & money...

Journeyman floorman local 748. Worked for a high end grocery store in S.F.

I was the only floorman, so I got to unload and stock everything from the 40' 18 wheeler by myself. Then take it to the sales floor to restock. Store was a dungeon with a store over it. Stairs, small spaces, bad light. At one point I had tendonitis on both wrists, but, the show must go on, so braces and no breaks.

Then we had to deliver to all the rich folk, so negotiating S.F. traffic Nob Hill, Pacific Heights, downtown, Presidio Heights, etc.

Job for a 20 year old for sure.

That's when I learned that you can work with your head or your back. As you age, your back gives out but your head gets better, so I became a service tech in the graphic arts.

My boss was an idiot, tried to make me be a mover - film processors, plate processors, process cameras. I refused anything sketchy and he hated me for it, but in the end I was right - hire professional movers. That stuff weighs a lot! Add to this, he wanted me to take it up 2nd and 3rd floors with no elevators. Stooge! We had to hire glazers and cranes for some of it to get into a window - no other way and he hated me for not doing it myself. No job is worth permanent injury.

Back in 1948 my buddy Joe got me a job on a 5 man 3 wire baler. Paid 75 cents an hour. I poked the wires & threw the block. to separate the bales. When that job ended the rancher hired us to put the bales in his barn. Paid us 50 cents an hour. Hell, the bales weighed 134 Lbs & I weighed 120 Then.

Loading and stacking 100+ heavy bags into an Airbus or a 737 on a hot tarmac in Phoenix 10 times a day when it's 100 degrees or better outside.

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2 Blessed 2B Stressed

During University holidays, I use to work as a builders labourer (how we spell laborer) for a local construction company.

My Dad taught me to work. When I was six my jobs were to chop kindling,
fill the coal bucket, pump a bucket of water, and bring them all into the house.
Growing up, they would let us out of school every fall for potato harvest.
I did yard work in the summer and shoveled snow in the winter.
Worked in a service station for a while. Set pins in a bowling alley before it
was automatic. Sold newspapers on the street downtown. Had a paper route.

Worked for a rancher who cut hay the old fashioned way. We would
rake it up and pitch it onto the horse-drawn trailer. (That's why they call
them pitch forks). Back then you would see lots of hay stacks. Not many
stacks of bales until later.

Started working on the railroad (section gang) when I was sixteen, and
did it all the way through high school and college (after returning from the
military). I once had a job in a cheese factory. Huge cheeses would go
by on a conveyer with a very powerful light behind the cheese. When I
would see a dark spot I would drill through with a cup shaped bit. It was
most often a mouse that had got into the cheese.

After college, waiting for a better job to start, I worked on a pipeline.
Down in a deep trench connecting the sections of pipe. Not too hard,
but dangerous. Another job filling sacks of feed and seed wasn't too
hard, but I would cough all night. Lots of dust. Before OSHA.

I could go on ad nauseam, but probably already have.

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In Omnia Paratus

like Nevada Ed my first real job (on a payroll) was in heavy construction, working the high iron, but my first duties when hired kept me on the ground as a know nothing rookie, so I was assigned to "car cleaning".

Yea.......I thought so too! What the heck?...cleaning some big-wigs car? Why did I have to buy these steel toed work boots, heavy leather gloves, and be told to wear long sleeve shirts?

Oh No: The "job" was "cleaning RAIL cars, gondolas and flats, and all the real heavy steel structures that would be shipped to power plants being constructed around the nation were shipped in these type cars, so they were resting on, blocked and supported by, 12" x 12", or 6" x 6" creosoted timbers, spiked down the the car bed. Once the structures had been off-loaded, the cars would be returned to the company, and had to have all the timbers pulled and pitched over the edge to a laydown area. How big was the crew I worked with? Foreman told me to look in a mirror to see my partner.

Creosote never really dries, and those big timbers are heavy and I am sure that it was John Henry himself that drove the original spiking that I had to pry and pull.

Got drafted, got married, when I got home I decided that college on the GI Bill sure would beat going back to iron work and as they say " the rest is history".

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Charlie B
SWCA#3083, SWHF#570

I've made my share of Hey, and bailed straw too. helped build Straw, and hey stacks, helped Fill hey mows, with loose, and bailed hay and straw, with while the sun shined mercilessly down on the tin roof of that hey mow, and the outside temperature sometimes at, +100% in the shade.

Other hard work I've taken part in, was the installation of underfloor duct. that job consisted of, carrying, my half of 10' lengths of underfloor duct weighing more than 300#, and helping a fellow electrician, position, weld it into place, and protect it while the concrete was being poured and leveled. This job was sometimes done in -0% temperature, and sometimes 100% temperature, and always in a hurry.

Unloadin, and carrying semi trailer loads of conduit, into a job site, at from +100% to -0% outside temp. the conduit, done up in 10' lengths, 50, to 100# bundles, or maybe single 10' lengths of 5"conduit, was another hard work job.

Another job that was guaranteed to sap your energy was, pulling large wires into large conduits, by hand, or keeping them pulled up, and feeding them into the conduit, while the wires were being pulled.

A hard job that caused blistered hands and sore muscles, was chiseling holes with a hammer and chisel, through solid concrete walls that had steel rerod in them.

There were many other, hard jobs that I took part in, but the one that I hated the most was, Unloading truck loads of electrical material, and carrying it into a job site, through mud. Your feet would quickly become the size of garbage can lids, with mud, and the mud soon covered the job site floors, and everything in sight. For some reason mud seemed to take all of the enjoyment out of my work for me.

Chubbo

Try handling plate/flat glass.

They are big, heavy, awkward, and they break - and they can mess you up! I regularly handed them and I wasn't afraid of them until I saw one break on a couple of co-workers trying maneuver a sheet onto a cutting table. It was then that I understood why we had to wear all the PPE, especially the kevlar wristlit protectors. Other than some minor cuts, no one was seriously hurt.

I went to the autoglass side when I had a large tempered glass pop on me as I was taking it out of the crate. I didn't get hurt, but it scared the hell out of me. At least, on the autoglass side, the windshield glass is laminated and tempered glass is small and comes in a sleeve!

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Thread Killer.

I've always been on the hard jobs it seems. As a youngster I hauled hay with my Granddad for "being there & expected to". Of course we always wanted to be with the grown up men instead of at the house with the wimmin-folks. I mowed yards all over town pushing my mower or pulling it with my bike.

As I got older we hauled hay for the area farmers and got 5¢ a bale, to pick it out of the fields and stack on a wagon, to putting it in the loft, by throwing it, no conveyors. Every Spring we planted tobacco, suckerd it, topped it, cut it and hung it in the t'backer barn. (I hated that part)

After HS I got a job at a barge building yard on the Ohio river, where the new guys got to drag weld the seams in the transom and deck. On yer belly on a creeper, if you got lucky you got ofe of the few fans to clear the smoke. If you didn't, well you ate smoke all day.

Then about the time the Jimmy Carter recession came along, I started to shingle houses. That meant packing all of those bundles up the ladder one at a time, to the ridge, where you spent the rest of the day on your toes and knees. (I'm paying dearly for that now) We got $5.00 for every square.

Then I got moved up to the "hot tar roofs", where we tore off old flat roofs until about noon, and spent the rest of the day laying up a new roof. Using tar that came to the roof at about 525°, where we mopped down multiple plies of felt. We had heat rising up from the roof and beating down from the sun.

If we got into a Coal Tar Pitch system, we got to handle coal tar that would burn you like creosote. (thank the good Lord that stuff is about all gone these days)

I didn't know I was working hard, I was just working. Now my body is forever in pain and arthritis plagues me in all my joints. But I've earned a desk job for the last 20 + years, and I see fewer and fewer young men willing to do the hard work these days. Hard work is darn HARD!

We start young men out at about $17.00 per hour, don't have to know anything, except you have to show up and work. Nobody wants to do it.

We were proud to have a job back in those days, because if you didn't work you didn't eat, or you got "Food Stamps", and that was an embarrassment to our pride. Kids don't have pride anymore, not the "support yourself kind" anyways.

When 11 my brother and I were apprenticed to a tiny old carpenter! We were the framing crew! I learned to drive nails for hours on end. Then my brother and I had to back fill the foundation by hand! Then fill the foundation with about 5 foot of gravel (So 4" of concrete would be at the right height for a basement floor.) 40 to 50 tons of gravel would be dumped in the drive way late in the day. My brother and I would have races moving gravel 40 yards downhill and around to the door to dump it inside the basement then run back for the next load. We went as fast as we could, because when the pile was gone we could go for a swim. Repeat 7 days in a row!

When I was 14 and my brother 19, dad was building various sized apartment complexes. All of June and July I was a shovel and truck operator, Not a steam shovel but a hand shovel, and it was a hand truck (Dad's term for a wheel borrow). Come August, I got vacation! 2 weeks baling and stacking hay and straw on grandpa's dairy farm. Then back to construction until school started back up.

Grandpa always had trouble getting help once my uncles were gone, so he bought a hay baler that shot the bales into a caged wagon. That was the hardest job in my life! Only one afternoon. Ride at the top of the cage, with my feet woven into the bars to hold myself on. As grandpa would drive the tractor fare enough to kick 5 or 6 bales. I would be 15 feet in the air getting whipped all over the place with a hay hook in each hand to catch the green cubical cannon balls that went high or wide or both! Come to a stop, make an adjustment and repeat!

Never saw one dollar for farm work, never needed one! Some of the best times of my life!

My oldest son started on a framing crew late in life, he was 15! Just before he started his senior year of High School, I watch him helping the crew deck the roof, He wasn't 18 so they would not allow him on the roof. So he handed all the plywood thru the rafters to the roof. Sometimes he would have to hold a 4'x8' sheet against the wind! The foreman told me they told him to rest in the shade but he refused to rest without the crew! He would be there standing with a sheet extended over his head with his muscles quivering until they took that sheet and he would run down to ground level and grab the next. It was amazing to watch him work!

Ivan

Our family believed that Hard working boys, made for Smarter working men!

I have worked as a Iron Worker in S. Fla. rod busting. Ran a Jacker hammer horizontally up a rock face from ground level to 125 feet off the ground with another guy. Sold field stone by taking apart stone walls & handloading them into a loader bucket in the New England area & selling them. Retired from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters did every type of carpentry from Simmons Forms to millwork. Owned a farm (10 yrs.)
& raised tobacco & cattle.
The hardest work I ever did was trying to PLEASE a Woman.