Age 16 - Cosmetologist training. Best part: free highlights. Worst part: Doing a pedicure on an 82 year old woman with bunions.
Age 17 - Donut shop casher. Best part: small town noteriety. In a town of 8000 people, I STILL go home eight years after high school and people say "I know you, you're "the white girl who worked at the donut shop!" Apparently that's my name in my hometown. Worst part: waking up at 3:30am.
Age 19 - Fast food shift manager. Best part: my crew. Worst part: the customers in a shady part of town. I had someone get stabbed in my parking lot over a drug deal gone wrong. People would leave heroin spoons in our bathroom. Customers were shady af.
Age 21 - Commercial Lines Insurance agent. Best part: moneeeey. Making real money after being a fast food manager for 3 years. Worst part: the overtime when a natural disaster hit. The week of Hurricane Sandy I was crosstrained for incoming claims. I worked close to 80 hours trying to deal with pissed off new Yorkers whose cars were underwater.
Age 24- Life insurance agent. Best part: having a job. We moved to Colorado, it took me 3 months to find work in the insurance field. I would take anything. Worst part: holy cow life insurance is the worst job ever, don't do it. Some of the calls are absolutely heartbreaking incoming claims calls from someone hysterical who lost their dad/uncle/grandpa. Some of them are from greedy grandchildren who aren't sad sounding at all that grandma is dead, they just want to know what their cut of the money is and how fast they can have it. I don't know which call made me more sad.
Age 25 - rage quit the insurance industry because it sucks in Colorado. Go and get my marijuana badge. Apply at every dispensary in Northern Colorado. Get hired to do inventory at one. Best part of that job: getting my foot in the door in the industry. Worst part: unloading trucks in the 103 degree heat in the summer. I didn't quit that job, my knees quit that job.
Age 26- another dispensary closer to home offered to hire me to be an inventory manager. It was more administrative than heavy lifting. That's what I do currently. Best part-- waking up at 6am to go weigh weed for a living. Worst part-- being accountable for all of that weed down to the hundredth of a gram.