1 and tbh I love it and they give me raises, I kinda lucked out hard. Its not a ton of pay but I'm fine with that. I have a side gig I guess helping at an lgbt center off and on too
Not gonna say what it is its hyper specific
I'm 36, I'll try to list them:
If I had to guess, CVS was your worst job?
You're a bit older than me but that place went downhill staffing-wise every year
We called it Come Visit Satan by the time I left lol
that's hilarious!!
I remember Circuit City! 🧓😂
what was the most surprising dumpster diving find or sale? like something you were shocked was worth whatever someone was willing to pay for it?
This is all over a span of 25 years and a lot of gaps in between. I've worked in 3 different states. So unless I forgot some, 24 jobs in 25 years. I'm very autistic.
this is a really interesting group of industries! dying to know more about the fragrance job, that sounds like it could be heaven or absolute hell
I did 3 different jobs the time I was there. The first was doing picking and packing, then I learned how to make blends. Blending is basically taking all kinds of different smelly oils and powders and mixing like a recipe to make something that smells like apple pie or flowers or musk or whatever. The other thing I did there was "pouring" which involved putting large batches of blends or oils into smaller containers for shipping.
The oils and blends are used for making candles or potpourri, and I even used to make knockoff perfumes and colognes with sum.
i'm 34. worked most of the time since i was 18. i've worked at 6 proper jobs, and a handful of odd gigs between real jobs. 4 of those were food service/grocery store work, and 2 were in construction.
edit: odd jobs have included hand sanitizer bottling during the pandemic, music librarian, and house mover.
Forestry (2), car wash, office, education (3), fast food (3), bike taxi, shelter steward, seasonal jobs (4). 16 jobs and I am in my mid-twenties. Plus several periods doing odd jobs off Craigslist and whatnot...
I got my ADHD diagnosis a few years ago but in common ADHD fashion I didn't do nothing after that.
A lot, and I didn't realize it was a neurodivergent thing. I've worked in construction, logistics, nonprofits, landscaping, R&D, finance... My wife calls me a jack of all trades but the truth is I just get bored with a career after about a decade.
14 that lasted more than 3 months. Closer to like 30 otherwise. As a 32 year old I try to hide that on resumes. Then there's also the bit I was flipping retro games and also I sold drugs for a while.
oh fuck, I forgot about growing and selling weed 😂🤦
I think you're winning the thread 
genres of things I've done:
every time I try to make a list, I feel like I'm leaving something out, and inevitably, days later, I remember the thing(s) I left out, but it's always more every time. I started a Note on my phone for them, and the list keeps growing.
10 years and I've produced nothing of notable value. Usually i barely scrape past a year at any job but the one i have now is alright cos my team is very ND so I don't feel like I'm decaying every day. Also technically I've moved position inside this company multiple times so dnow if that counts
At least 20 if I'm counting all the odd jobs and side hustles, but I know there's a bunch I've forgotten. But since starting my career job I've gone through 4 in 6 years, but I'm pretty happily settled in. It's realy common to jump around in my field though.
Going over it in my head, I've had a fuck ton of different experiences... My life is actually pretty interesting now that I think of it.
before I made the list, I would have said I have lived a very boring life, but making the list also made me realize that I have had some fun adventures and done weird shit nobody would believe now
I bet if I told my neighbors that I used to sell Kirby vacuums door-to-door and read tarot for Miss Cleo they would Lose Their Shit 😂
I'm going to say around 10, though most of the time it takes me a couple of years at least to get a job, so there hasn't been that much time spent actually in employment
i'd have more but the application and interview process is society trying to kill me and i'm fortunate enough to have family keeping me off the street
Sorted mail
Stocked groceries
Year long National service
Admin office job
Data entry/management office job
Within 11 years, depending on how you want to define it 6 (unique companies), 8 (work experiences), or 10 (including promotions with clear shifts in responsibilities). Very happy where I am now, took me a while to find a place where, I feel like I matter (both internally and externally,) compensates me fairly, and has a good work/life balance. I still have felt the strain of burnout, but this place actually has real ladders to climb, not just a step stool, and I am climbing it, plus I get to truly help people, some of whom are in a panic or in medical distress.
helping people who need it is one of the most satisfying things ❤️ really happy for you, this is awesome!!
holy shit! i didn't know that this was a thing and it explains so much. thanks for making me aware.
hope the knowledge helps you give yourself a little grace ❤️
Ten jobs plus one like 6-week temp gig over the course of 25 years or so. That includes two sales associate jobs at different Radio Shacks, the teenage grocery bagging gig that I got fired from after dismembering and trying to melt plastic army men in the breakroom, and an extremely shady electronics salvage/reclamation job that I am pretty sure was a front for a coke smuggler, but said front looked legit enough that the Department of Defense contracted us as a vendor for some workstation PCs at one point.
Edit: At the aforementioned electronics salvage place, I did score a pair of early 1970's Fender tube amps for like $20 out of the warehouse where we were storing all of the old monochrome CRT terminal monitors awaiting teardown. A Princeton Reverb and a Bassman combo; both silverface-era, and both with varying degrees of bird shit on them. The Bassman never did work right, so I wound up selling it to a friend in college. I just finally did a full refurb and a couple of mods on the Princeton about 12 years ago. (I replaced the ground select switch with a standby toggle, and I replaced the AC plug on the chassis with a pair of bias test points, along with adding a trim pot in the power amp bias circuit itself so that I don't have to dick around with resoldering resistors every time I swap out those 6V6 power tubes.)
RadioShack was like the worst job I had. My manager told me I should do coke to get better at sales and didn’t offer me any.
the teenage grocery bagging gig that I got fired from after dismembering and trying to melt plastic army men in the breakroom
wtf, this is so funny
I guess they weren't amused when I said that I just vented the fumes into the bakery because no one could tell the difference.
I started working at 15 and I've had 7 jobs
I had one fast food and two retail jobs. Then I had two warehouse jobs. I also had three janitorial jobs. One of the nicest ones was just being left alone in this place I had to clean for the night by myself. There also a few more im forgetting, but another one was where I worked on an assembling stuff, mainly sewing things.
12? Mostly food service or food processing. I did some travelling landscaping work for a few months and worked myself till the point of delirium. Travelling and landscaping are both exacting labor, but traveling across states for it was too much.
had no idea that traveling landscaping work was a thing! were you working for a famous landscape architect or something?
I worked as a dishwasher in high school and college. My first job was as a bus boy, and the restaurant owner said, after the first two days, that these days had been an unpaid training period, something she had not mentioned until then. She stole my pay from those days, and then I quit. This was an excellent introduction to capitalism, although it took me another fifteen years to figure out that this system was actually the problem. I think the difference between me and a lot of westerners is that although I'm a slow learner, I do actually learn. Westerners don't seem to learn anything at all, except how to wag their tails when their bourgeois masters toss them a bone from the capitalist banquet of stolen labor.
Anyway
I worked overseas in East Asia as an English teacher and university instructor for years. Started a family and we made the huge mistake of moving back to the USA (I was still a lib). My spouse is a nurse and ended up getting a good job after we were both unemployed and living on our savings and family assistance for a year. I was already a Berner by then but it was definitely radicalizing to go from having excellent universal health care in East Asia to having no fucking health care at all in America (with two small kids) while hearing constantly from white liberal boomers on Facebook that universal health care is wrong and terrible and evil and impossible. My whole family had been using it for years by then!
I got involved in local democratic politics, another huge mistake I've discussed here multiple times. It only became a problem when I started winning elections. I voted to defund the police and the sheriff himself screamed in my face, three feet away from me. I started thinking that my family was in danger and that no one would stand up for us or protect us here. The police would run me off the road one late night, there would be an article in the paper about it, and that would have been the end of me. What would I have achieved, except making my kids fatherless? So I quit.
I was unemployed and publishing novels that made no money for years, trying to get a teaching job based on my extensive experience even though I don't have the qualifications the state requires, and anytime an employer googles me they see that I hate the police thanks to a few articles written by a couple of shitheads in our wonderful local family neighborhood newspapers. I worked as a substitute teacher before the pandemic and really enjoyed it. The kids were actually great, only some teachers were weird (the principals are often unbearable in countless ways). Last January I ended up taking an oil burner technician class, among the hardest experiences of my life. It was free and paid for with covid money. I made it through the class and got a job, and have been doing this shit for seven months now. I'm days from getting my journeyman's license, and have hundreds of pages in a book I'm writing about going from white collar to blue collar work. It's still a bullshit job, just a different kind of bullshit. All of these fucking oil boilers and furnaces should be dismantled; instead, my job is maintaining them. My coworkers refuse to unionize even though all the oil companies around here are desperate for workers, so that's cool. Once I have my journeyman's license, I can do everything except installations (which I don't want to do anyway since they are so amazingly unethical), but this also makes me nervous because a lot of the work is really advanced for me. My employer has been honest and fair so far (as much as capitalists can be) but my pay is still pathetic (I'm supposed to get a raise to $24/hr in a few days) and I really, really don't want to do on-call work, so I might end up changing employers soon. I would rather just work for myself, since that's where the big bucks are, but I still need help from people who know so much more than me, and my license also requires a master to sign off on it. The feudal guilds live on!
If I count temp jobs as one job, and likewise with the various campus jobs I had during college, I've got 15. I'm probably forgetting a few. IIRC I once filed 4 W2s in one year, and the longest I've worked at one place was a little over 9 years.
I've had two (2) and I'm fucking done.
I'm now on provincial disability, which pays like shit but it means I don't have to work.
I've considered that it would help me to try to get a part-time job sometime anyway. But there's very few choices available to me for work, and I have an 8 year gap in my resume to explain.
Only two, neither of which lasted longer than a week. I am very disabled and very lucky in that I can get away with not working - currently shooting for disability payments.
At least 16 before I turned 30.
Technically 5, functionally 4
Pizza chain, customer service rep
Same pizza chain but different location as a driver
Corn breeding lab tech
Neuroscience lab tech
Neuroscience lab tech in the lab next door which was run by my original PI’s wife
Currently unemployed and looking for another lab tech or low level scientist job, ideally at the NIH. Gotta be right in the “turn into a shadow on the pavement” range when DC gets nuked
Oh I also did paid acting gigs for a while, it was never enough to like, pay rent though.
I've had a couple, but unfortunately I never had a real-deal "adult" job.
Employers are just so absurdly picky and what few jobs are out there, I don't qualify for. Since when did I need to be some superhuman genius that's a famous world champion in my field just to get any job at all?
10 including bs temporary jobs, 4 actual part time jobs I did while studying/after school. I’m 25.
Real outlier. 4. A supermarket job during high school. Then 3 after university the longest being nearly 10years straight. Finished that to help support my partners job and looking at a short break and then job searching.
11
Just 1 ever, and its the one I am working right now. I struggled a lot in my late teens and early 20's with school and other things, so work was just not possible for me. When I finally was a bit better I searched for almost 3 years, until I got the job I have now. Was really frustrating searching for so long but at least the work right now has been going smoothly
Was ~3 per year in culinary arts for ~6y, then one in manufacturing, then lockdown, then current Cushy Government Gig
I think 5 or 6, I've been at my current job for 17 years because I learned I don't really find any form of work any better than another so something simple and tedious is better than difficult but fulfilling and I cannot handle responsibility I run in terror when it is given to me.
Grocery store - cashier then got promoted to front end supervisor and they wanted to fast track me into management when I was twenty, but I quit because I abhor responsibilities.
Different grocery store, I quit after a day because there was no real guidance on what to do that first day.
Future shop (Canadian best buy before best buy bought and killed it) - I was in computer department, and selling shit to people because I would get a better commission felt really scummy. My boss was a dick who kept trying to get me to flirt with girls despite seeing me being uncomfortable, and a manager scolded me thoroughly my first shift being left without supervision because I went for lunch without checking in something I was not told I had to do. So I quit after like 3 weeks.
A different grocery store that had an electronics department, where I've been for the past 17 years - my department has shifted from having a sizeable portion of the store with tvs, video games, and cameras, movies, music. To eventually being just games, to eventually the department was closed and I got transferred into seasonal, which eventually got folded into housewares and seasonal and toys and whatever electronics we still happen to carry (mostly batteries and whatever games Nintendo ships us). It's okay mostly, but harder on the body as I approach 40. I feel like I'm going to break at some point and just be unable to work anymore. It is unionized though so hopefully I could get an accommodation. I have served as a union shop steward and sit on the health and safety committee. But I basically got volunteered for both and was too afraid to say I don't want to do this. After ten years of steward thing I resigned from it, incredibly stressful role often having to see employees get fired for things they didn't realize was technically theft. No warnings ever given once they caught you and often times I would need to spend 4 or 5 hours writing paperwork and statements to union about meetings and it basically wiped me out for a week or two if I had one. I still sit of health and safety though.
Worked on a startup games website and podcast through some online mutuals; that revealed I don't want to do that, but I was also working at the grocery store so it probably impacted it, if it was paid and I could have only worked on the games stuff it might have been better, but turning a leisure outlet into work production is brutal and it felt like I could never turn off and enjoy life anymore. Also the mutuals who were running the site slowly revealed to be more chud like than I thought so I have slowly melted away from them.
Teaching English as a Second language for high school immigrants (mostly from mexico and japan and Korea). I got my certificate to this right before covid started so had to wait until 2023 before they started practicums. They hired me once I finished that for summer school classes and immediately found myself overwhelmed and shockingly underpaid despite making over 40 bucks an hour. Mostly because I had like 3 - 4 hours of prep time for a class, which I didn't get paid so I was making about the same as my grocery store job, with a significantly longer commute, more stress. So after subbing for the winter semester I declined to take a larger role with that job.
Nothing I do has ever felt good, or let me feel comfortable, but I continue to need to work. And during 2014 until 2021 I had a mortgage that I was often paying off by myself because my ex would get tired of their job and quit or work so badly until they fired them (so they wouldn't have to bother quitting which is funny but kind of rude to me), so during those 7 years I think I had maybe 3 weeks of vacation.
5 or 6 depending on where you draw the line. I had a couple of part time/fixed term jobs as a teenager, then when I dropped out of university I got a job at McDonald's.
Since then I left to work in a factory at an engineering company and I have worked for that company ever since, but I got on an apprenticeship scheme for 5 years and became an engineer.
I have heard that neurodivergent people can switch jobs a lot, however this is probably because most jobs aren't great at supporting us. I am lucky to work somewhere that I feel supported, and it is easy for me to stay where I am.
11, I think, across 4 different sectors: college/work-study jobs, agriculture, food service, small business logistics. Some of those were short-term gigs though. At least 4 gaps of longer than a month where I wasn't employed or in school.
Been fully unemployed and living off savings for the better part of a year, but looking to boost the number, build savings back, and get some businesses going. With any luck, if the businesses take off enough, I'll be able to employ others in a cooperative model, and never have to worry about having to work on the extremely unfavorable terms of someone else again.
I thought it was just part of these times for jobs to only last a year or two. The longest that I've been on any one company's payroll is 4 years and some change.
2, both retail. Im gonna be getting out of it and if it doesmt work out im going to become a professional hobo
I worked like 6 or 7 very different jobs before I got into homeless services. I've had tons of different jobs in the field at all levels from temp overnights to running entire shelter programs, but I kinda count them as the same job even if I change positions or agencies every year or so. If I counted all the promotions and agency hops it would be a lot a lot.
I'm mid-30s and started shelter work 7 years ago. I was also an unemployed disaster through most of my early 20s, so those pre-shelter jobs went by pretty fast too I guess.
It's ADHD, Autism, OCD, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, bi-polar, aspd, etc etc etc etc
“neurologically atypical patterns of thought or behavior”
So, it’s very broad, if you feel like it describes you then it does as far as we're concerned
1.) ableist language=post or comment will probably get removed (enforced case by case, some comments will be removed and restored due to complex situations). repeated use of ableist language=banned from comm and possibly site depending on severity. properly tagged posts with CW can use them for the purposes of discussing them
2.) always assume good faith when dealing with a fellow nd comrade especially due to lack of social awareness being a common symptom of neurodivergence
2.5) right to disengage is rigidly enforced. violations will get you purged from the comm. see rule 3 for explanation on appeals
3.) no talking over nd comrades about things you haven't personally experienced as a neurotypical chapo, you will be purged. If you're ND it is absolutely fine to give your own perspective if it conflicts with another's, but do so with empathy and the intention to learn about each other, not prove who's experience is valid. Appeal process is like appealing in user union but you dm the nd comrade you talked over with your appeal (so make it a good one) and then dm the mods with screenshot proof that you resolved it. fake screenies will get you banned from the site, we will confirm with the comrade you dm'd.
3.5) everyone has their own lived experiences, and to invalidate them is to post cringe. comments will be removed on a case by case basis depending on determined level of awareness and faith
4.) Interest Policing will not be tolerated in any form. Support your comrades in their joy!
Further rules to be added/ rules to be changed based on community input
RULES NOTE: For this community more than most we understand that the clarity and understandability of these rules is very important for allowing folks to feel comfortable, to that end please don't be afraid to be outspoken about amendments and addendums to these rules, as well as any we may have missed