July 21, 2025
Continuing on the topic of money —
What is the hardest thing you have done to earn money?
I’ve never dug a ditch for money, but I helped build a hiking trail (for free) when I was in the Girl Scouts. Dirty work, but fun because of the other girls working on the project. Being a camp counselor was hard, but basically was a summer-long camping trip and I enjoyed it.
Then there was the job I had cleaning a weekly newspaper office in a small town. This was back before the work was computerized, and the night before publication, there’d be the remnants of sticky paper all over the floor and desks. They had to be pulled or scraped off using a paint scraper. That would happen in the afternoon, after the final version of that week’s edition had been taken by car to a print shop in the neighboring city.
That evening, a small team of three would insert the week’s ads (The color ad pages came pre-printed to the office.) into the folded papers and put labels on the ones that were to be mailed. The address labels came on large rolls and were pasted on the papers using a machine controlled by a foot pedal. This was back in the day when the ink used on newspapers rubbed off on your hands, so imagine what my hands looked like when the tasks were finished!
Then there was my gig working at a sugar mill factory.
This involved sugar beets, not sugarcane. The beets came from local farms and would be brought to the factory by the trailer load. They would be ground up and processed, with white sugar being the result.
I had one of the easier jobs, collecting samples. I’d go to certain spots both inside and outside the factory, retrieving tubes of the partially finished product (in different stages of processing) and running a variety of tests on them.
One of the sample sites was outside, behind the factory, in a basically unlit area. Since I was working swing shift, the last sample of the shift was an adventure, requiring the use of a flashlight and nerves of steel.
But that isn’t why I left that job. I was a newlywed, and my husband was working revolving shifts at a different company. It seemed like we never got to spend time together. I didn’t mind the work, but hated being apart.
The worst job?
I did a short stint as a waitress at an extremely busy pizza/Italian restaurant. I’d worked at a small restaurant previously, and thought I knew what I was getting into, but was wrong. This new place was so busy that all I did was run. No time to interact with customers, just run, run, run. I lasted there only one week. And I don’t remember the tips being enough to make me regret leaving.
How about other authors? What is the hardest job they’ve done? Find out by following the links below.
As always, until next time, please stay safe.