QotD: My First Gig

What was your very first job? 
Submitted by Laurel.

When I was 8, my dad ran a small water company. I built a billing system out of a simple word processor-spreadsheet mail merge function on our Commodore 64, and that became a regular gig where I called myself a "Billing Manager" I kept doing that until I was 12 or 13, and that was the first time I ever interacted with angry customers or had to communicate with a community. We had little water conservation notices and community alerts on the water bills, and on rare occassion I would talk to people on the phone to troubleshoot an issue. (Usually they didn't understand how we estimated water bills for people when we didn't get a meter reading.) Invariably, the customers would call me "ma'am", and I'd have to explain "I'm male, I'm just young."

That really wasn't what angry customers wanted to hear.

After that, I helped out (I guess today, it'd be called consulting or contracting) with creating a grading app for a college professor who lived in our neighborhood, letting her manage all her class schedules and calculate weighted grades for all her students in all her classes. I kinda count that as more of a real job because it was someone that wasn't my dad and I got the gig myself. I ended up doing a lot of that kind of stuff around town.

My first "real" job that I applied for and got a paycheck for was as a networking/systems integration consultant, the summer after my junior year of high school. I was installing and configuring networking hardware, Windows (it was Windows 3.0 back then), and Novell Netware as a summer job. That was pretty fucking awesome because I was making a stupid amount of money for a high school kid.