what was the first job you had where taxes and SS were taken out. I worked on a work study program at Penn State in the

[3catwoman3]

29. JC Penney's women's clothing section when I was 16 in 1967. $1.60 an hour.

At some point, after asking, I got a raise to $1.65. The boss was a finicky, fussy sort of guy who always wanted us to "look busy" even if there were no customers in the department. If you worked until closing, all the stock had to be straightened before we could leave. If you worked first thing in the morning, and there were no customers yet, you still had to look busy so we would go around all the racks and shelves pretending to straighten stuff that was already all tidy from the night before. Kinda silly.

While a 5 cent raise seems like nothing, it was 3%, actually a bigger raise than the final raise I got at my last nurse practitioner job. There had been no raises for a few years because practice income had been stagnant. OK, understandable. When the managing partner told me, during my annual performance review, that they were finally able to grant a small raise, she wasn't kidding - it was a 65 cent increase to my base hourly rate - equal to a paltry 1.3%. Not even a dollar! I was so pissed I felt like telling her to keep it. It was insulting.