Remembrances of youth jobs

She worked at Mickey D's. Harris's campaign wants the world to know it. This ad is running in battleground states, highlighting her middle class origins and affinities.

As the Washington Post reports:

One in 8 Americans have worked at McDonald’s at some point in their lives, according to the fast-food chain. McDonald’s announced that statistic last year when it introduced the 1 in 8 initiative, a campaign to celebrate its vast army of current and former workers. The company said it surveyed a representative sample of American adults and found that 13.7 percent of people said they had worked or currently work for the chain.

I never worked at McDonald's -- the fast food giant had barely launched nationwide in my youth. I remember vaguely when the Golden Arches appeared in suburban Williamsville. We tried it -- phew, dead burgers, not food. Dairy Queen was still better.

But kids and very young people did do marginal jobs before McD's. One of my oddest was delivering the New York Times daily to faculty and a few intellectually inclined (pretentious?) students at my high school. A bundle would be dropped at the school office, and I'd run the newspaper around to home rooms and student desks. I doubt anyone read it diligently, though I can say I glanced at it.

A little later, I worked as an answering service operator. Before phone service came with voice mail,  small businesses and busy people would pay to have their calls picked up by a live person who hand recorded their callers' messages. There was some cachet, a pretension of professionalism, in having an answering service instead of just letting calls go unanswered. Two-bit lawyers particularly thought having "a girl" on the line sounded upstanding. 

From the point of view of those of us answering for these lawyers, they were slimeballs. Most of the calls we took were from desperate clients who complained that the lawyer -- court-appointed I assumed -- never returned their calls. We couldn't do a thing for these callers. I didn't last long at that job, just held on through the Christmas bonus, then quit.

Like Kamala Harris, most of us have memories of jobs we were glad to escape -- if we did escape. I invite readers to comment on their youthful work experiences. Do these "opportunities" still exist? What were these jobs like? Did they make you proud to be a worker? or just make you miserable?