The FJ team shares their first ever jobs

Oh, the humanity.

Working at Fashion Journal may look pretty sweet on our resumés. But unfortunately for us, it wasn’t always this way.

If you look hard enough on our CVs, you might just see some of the embarrassing and totally uncool jobs we first held.

From wearing XXL Hawaiian shirts at Smorgy’s, to cleaning boys’ toilets for ridiculously meagre sums of money, the FJ team has done it all.

Let our pain be your pleasure. 

Leah

My first job was at Smorgy’s. I got to clear leftover food into buckets and wore a Hawaiian shirt that was 10 sizes too big. Glam! And once I saw a couple get married under the ‘Talking Tree.’ True romance. 

Tara

My first job was at Wendy’s. I was paid something shocking like $7.50 an hour and I gave free ice cream to all my friends. Not even sorry ’bout it

Veronica J.

A Chinese restaurant connected to a pub when I was 14… I think. 

Worst: It was connected to a pub and in a town centre of about 100 people.

Best: I used to get free fried rice or leftover meals at the end of my shift. Oh and it was money.

Veronica S.

At the ripe age of 13, I became a cleaner of the local Scout hall. Cleaning the boy’s toilets was particularly traumatic, especially because I still thought boys had cooties.

Keats

When I was 23 the call centre I worked at stopped giving me shifts because I kept leaving behind half-eaten LCM bars at my desk, so I took a cash job at a car wash ’round the corner.

They let me smoke ciggies on the job, but they told me halfway through the shift they were gonna pay me $10 an hour with a free pie and Coke at lunch, so I told the boss to shove it and jumped the back fence.

I know what I’m worth.

Luke

I worked at an art gallery that asked me to clear out the knee-high piles of dirt from a “wine cellar” they discovered under a bookcase. It had been hidden there for years, untouched.

After spending half a day obliviously carting piles of garbage out of it, my boss appeared wearing a safety mask and told me it was because he thought the cellar was full of asbestos. I didn’t get a mask.

Kris

My first job was working at Beat Magazine as a kid during my school holidays. This was before there was email or internet or anything, and I remember collating the results of a readership survey by hand all day, every day for six weeks. I also had to make sure the evaporative cooler was full of icy water because the office was in a shitty old building with no ventilation or air con. If I spilt any of the water I got 50 lashes. 

Rob

Miniworld, CBD car dealer, full of sharks. My first job at 21. The sales guys used to glue 50c pieces to the footpath outside, hide inside the showroom rolladoor on Elizabeth st, then come out and snigger as people spotted it and tried to pick it up…

I lasted three weeks. I finally resigned when I sold a guy (who was in the middle of a divorce and was trying to impress his kids) an open top mini moke he couldn’t afford. He came back the next day and tried to return it but the owner wouldn’t let him. The contract had been signed and an exorbitant finance deal was sold to him. He begged me to take it back, was happy to forgo deposit but I wasn’t allowed. I’ll never forget his face.