First jobs are awful, but you should get one anyway

Here's a fun game: what was your first job? Mine was a classic of the genre: at 16, I went to work (after school and at weekends) on the checkouts at a local supermarket.

- Victoria Richards, The Independent

I can still remember my wage (£3.32 an hour), the checkout code for Maris Piper potatoes (1014), the pain of having to start work (quelle horreur) at 6.15am on a Saturday and the pervasive sense of mindless, crushing boredom. It was so utterly torturous that I used to draw little circles on my hands to represent each hour of my six-hour shift and would colour in the quarters - every 15 minutes - just to have some sense of the time passing. Once, someone had a heart attack at my checkout.

Another time, a regular customer waited for me outside and asked me out (and yes, he was old enough to be my dad and no, the store manager did nothing about it). Still, I remember thinking at the time, it could be worse: I could've been on the fish counter.