McDonalds was my first ever “real” job, at age 16.
I’m still trying to get the grease out of my hair.
I worked a Dairy Queen. We would swap hamburgers for chicken from KFC. When you work at one of those places all the food begins to taste alike.
I worked at an A&W as a cook. I remember sitting in math class the next day, elbows on the desk, head resting on chin, and smelling the grease on my hands.
That actually wasn't that bad of a job, all things considered. Living in Iowa, I worked detassling corn (for you city slickers, it was trying to get corn pollenated, for next year's seed crop). Basically you hit the field at 6AM, in 5 foot high corn, got soaked with dew, plucked the tassles out of the top of the corn, and then by midday, you were burning up to the heat and humidity in a windless cornfield, while you got all chafed from your wet clothes. Plus you got cut by the corn leaves, and had to walk miles. But....
It was a great incentive to study hard in school, to know I didn't want to be at age 30 and beyond with some extreme manual labor kind of job. Some people might like that, and that's ok, but I would rather use my noggin, than my back (and that is what I am doing now).
Much of that work has been taken by our friends from south of the border, though there still are some amount of Iowa teens doing that work. Mexico must really suck, if they would come 1000s of miles to do that crappy job.