Memory lane of work

My wife and I were talking about old jobs we used to have as kids, and it got me to thinking about places I've worked in my life.  I've worked at some crazy places.  Here they are, in order of when I did them, and my personal pros and cons (names of employers omitted to protect the innocent):

Corn De-tasseling  (Pulling the reproductive parts out of corn)
Pros:  You can do this job before you're 16, since farm work is legal for minors to do.
Cons:  The leaves of the plants are very sharp and so they can slice you as you walk through them.  Plus, it's wet early in the morning.

Cook at a well-known fast food chain
Pros:  Free food.  Also, when you flip pickles against the refrigerator doors, they stick...hours of entertainment.
Cons:  People want customized shit.  Like a burger with exactly 3 pickles and one dot of mustard but no ketchup.  Really? What does this look like, a Chili's?  It's a fifty cent burger, eat the kind that we normally make instead of holding up the line for everyone.

Cook at Pretzel store in the mall
Pros:  Can't think of any.
Cons:  Working the mall on weekends as a teenager is hell on earth.  The stuff they cook pretzels in is caustic and will burn your face off.  And everyone who recognizes you wants free pretzels.

Temp - "Light industrial work" (Looked at cardboard boxes and put them in two different piles if they were ripped)
Pros:  Didn't require a lot of thinking.
Cons:  Some creepy people do light industrial temp work.  Like, ask you if you like Star Trek and then walk away say nothing else to you again.

Lawn Mower - Self Employed
Pros:  Set my own hours, worked when I wanted.  Listened to The Offsping's Smash while I mowed -- I mowed angry.
Cons:  It's a lot of work finding people who want their lawns mowed, since I was not a good salesman.  Plus, if you mow after it rains, you're going to have a bad time.

Dishwasher / Bus Boy at Diner
Pros:  Not many.
Cons:  Paid less than minimum wage, everyone chain-smoked, had to both clean tables and then clean the dishes.

Dishwasher at a Chinese Restaurant
Pros:  Ahhhh-mazing Crab Rangoon.  I ate 10 by myself once.  One of my friends worked with me, which was cool.
Cons:  Getting the sweet & sour sauce off of some of the dishes was impossible.  Sometimes there was this fish dish which was an entire fish, and it smelled horrible and was hard to clean.

Carpet Cleaner, Duct Cleaner, Water Damage Restoration Part 1
Pros:  Paid pretty well for a teenager.  Got to work some cool dude who happened to be felons (for realz).  It made me really, really want to go to college.
Cons:  Ever clean up a basement with 2 feet of water and a hundred suitcases at midnight?

Convenience Store Clerk
Pros:  Can buy pretty much whatever you want.    This is appealing, say, if you are 20 years old.  Also, the pattern of winning scratch-off lotto tickets seemed to be in "bunches" (all the winning tickets were bunched together)
Cons:  Threats to your life, underage kids trying to buy cigarettes, scooping ice cream.  Watching some poor souls buy a fifth of cheap vodka at 8 AM every day.

Carpet Cleaner, Duct Cleaner, Water Damage Restoration Part 2 (same place)
Pros:  Learned to never buy berber carpet -- it doesn't clean, it just gets matted down and looks terrible.  I know it looks amazing when you first get it, but believe me, in like 4 years you'll regret it.
Cons:  Literally no one who was working there a year earlier was around.  I didn't appreciate this at the time, but this is profound -- what an incredible loss of accumulated knowledge, and high cost of replacing people.  I got to crawl around in the ducts of a university cleaning them by hand because no one else fit in them....OSHA would be proud.

Carpet Cleaner, Duct Cleaner, Water Damage Restoration Part 3 (same place)
Pros:  All they wanted me to do this time was show them how to dial into the interwebs.
Cons:  After I showed them how to do it, there was literally nothing else for me to do.  But they made me sit there while they browsed pictures of Chyna.  Also, literally no one who was working there six months prior was still there.  Seriously!

Student Intern in an IT department
Pros:  No one expects interns to do anything.  Got to learn Perl from some really cool old Perl hacker dude, and work in an office!  See above for why this was a very good thing.
Cons:  Not many, it was pretty cool.  Limited opportunities in an old-school IT department.

Software Development Intern at a Startup
Pros:  Too many to count.  Played video games & soccer, invented games crashing office chairs into each other, ate an entire box of cereal, drank 5 free mountain dews per day, found out that the innards of those gummy computer wrist rests are the same as those "sticky grabber hands" we had as kids.  Got paid an unreal amount because we wrote code.  Also, got to write code.
Cons:  None?  The stuff we were building was sort of boring, but evidently made lots of money.

Software Engineer
Pros:  Paid well, good benefits, smart co-workers, sometimes cool projects.
Cons:  See all of Dilbert.  It's all true.

... there's more, but since it's all software engineering / product management stuff, it's not as interesting or life-threatening.

I wish I could summarize all the learnings in one place (another post for another time).  Having done so many different things, I built an appreciation of people.  Most of all, it helped me recognize what jobs suck beyond words, so that when I see someone else having to do them, I'm as nice to them as I can be.