Wow... very cool reading everyone's stories.
When I was 16 I worked at Taco Bell... the day I saw a cockroach drop in the refried bean pot and the manager said, "just stir it in, that happens all the time" I just walked off the job and quit. (Incidentally, a few months later they got a B rating, then a C and finally closed down... hopefully that manager is no longer with the company - ewwwwwwww)
When I was 17 I cleaned apartments at the complex that my mom & dad managed. It wasn't too bad pay-wise, I made $30 per vacant apartment cleaned, but WOW was that some hard work. And yes... people ARE pigs - I couldn't believe some of the gross stuff I found. But... I could work at my own pace, and got paid depending upon how many apartments I cleaned (it was a 500 unit complex), so my weekly salary was pretty much up to me. I liked that.
When I was 18-19 I worked as a motel manager for a cockroach-infested dive in Lawton, Oklahoma when hubby was in the Army. It was an awful place - I had to rent out the rooms, clean the rooms, stock the supplies and keep the drunken maintenance/painter guy in line. But it wasn't the worst motel on the blvd... at least ours was the only one that didn't have an "hourly rate" - lol The cockroaches are the one thing I'll never forget... then again Lawton was plague after plague after plague for us - lol
That's about it... after that I went into corporate property management and stayed there for several years before getting into this biz. The worst part about that was dealing with corporate spoiled brats, collecting rent and going to court for evictions... I always hated that part of things.
Reading some of the jobs here though I think I was pretty lucky - even WITH those icky cockroaches. *shudder* <_<