Earning Money As A Teen And Twentysomething

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I don't remember how old I was when I earned some extra money for the first time. I guess I was around 14 years old. I was a good pupil at German (I'm German and I live in Germany). A neighbour asked me if I could give her son private lessons. He had problems with punctuation and spelling. It turned out that I was also a good teacher - to my disadvantage. I explained things so well that he learned too quickly and ended our arrangement too soon for my liking. No more money from that source! Next, two friends and I went potato picking in our autumn hols/vacations. A picking machine moved across the fields digging the potatoes out of the soil and throwing them onto the open loading area. A group of people, mainly women, moved on their knees behind it to pick up the potatoes which hadn't been grabbed by the machine. How we snickered when we saw the women, all older than we were, on their knees. Of course, we wouldn't do it that way. We were young, we'd do it standing and only bending down. It didn't take ten minutes and we were also on our knees, our backs already complaining. The area where we did this is moraine. There's a lot of peat and the soil is rather dry. I still remember the warm, soft feeling when we touched it. Very nice. I bought my first pair of jeans with the money I earned. Then I helped in a stationery shop in our town. I've always been a paper fetishist and I love everything connected with stationery. The problem was only that there was already a regular shop-assistant who didn't like me much because I understood the job too quickly and effortlessly. The shop was tiny and there wasn't much to learn. She became jealous. I didn't last long there. As a student I had several jobs. I got enough money from home for my rent, food and books. What I earned was for extras. For a while a friend and I worked in the canteen of the university at the dishwasher. One of us put the dirty plates in, the other took them out. After this job we didn't like eating there any more because we had seen that the machine didn't wash the plates properly. Another time a group of students put leaflets into envelopes for a firm which held seminars for business people and regularly sent out invitations. We were told that if about 1% of the addressees responded, the courses would be full. So what we did was futile in 99% of the cases. But it didn't concern us. We were paid well for this stupid job and could chat with each other doing it. I also worked in a supermarket. I stood at the end of a band-conveyor behind the till and put the products the customers had bought into plastic bags. Often I felt like commenting when fat people had bought things that would make them even fatter. Another job was to sell anoraks and handkerchiefs in a department store. I discovered that I've got the gift of talking customers into buying things they don't know they need. Now I use this once a year at a flea market where I sell books and knick-knack at a stall with the local group of Amnesty International. What I did most often, though, was waitressing. It paid well but was hard. If you aren't used to being on your feet for hours, you can hardly keep upright after a shift. I worked in a café, an Italian restaurant and in beer tents. There I got to know strata of society I didn't know existed! Since then I've always been a good customer myself because I remember how hard the job is. After passing my exam at uni I became a teacher and had the same job for 40 years. How boring!:-) --- Photo: from: free photos