Hello everyone,
For reasons I won’t get into here, I’m looking for a minimum wage job where I would still have enough downtime to self-study an online course I’m doing. I’ve been thinking something like this might be possible in a receptionist style scenario. Has anyone done this before? What sorts of jobs are good for this? I’m gessing it’s probably jobs where they are looking for a person to pay just to have someone on-site and on-call…
Security guard - with the right post it can be any time, but night shift is your best bet.
Any business where locations exist simply to increase territory/coverage. Here in Canada, this includes certain cannabis retailers, vape shops, certain gas station locations, that kind of thing. Places where the job is clean stuff at a certain cadence, then wait for customers, where customer volume is kinda low. Obv don’t rely on these being forever jobs - the cannabis and vape store that fits this will eventually close - but you can get paid to basically study until then.
My father told me that he worked on cars in a garage while he was getting his degree. He would stick study material under the cars while he worked on them. He also was able to get away with short naps under there. I doubt that’d work today, but just throwing out something I heard about.
I have an IT position that has an incredible amount of downtime. It’s a government org. I read books in between calls. You won’t be able to study if you get an IT gig at an MSP (Managed Service Provider). They have lots of clients and the work never ends. You want IT that’s in-house.
Any sort of service desk could work really. The front door security guy at my office spends a lot of time on his phone when he’s not signing in visitors.
True, I’ll look into this too. Do you think it’s a good idea to ask the employers how much downtime to read etc. there would be when applying, or is it better to keep this to myself?
I don’t drive so I couldn’t confirm my theory, but if you do any jobs where you do a lot of driving around and you have a device that can read your study content to you, I imagine you can study while working because you can double-task while driving long distances.
If you can get into machining, which is harder to just get in than stay in, a lot of companies I’ve seen even offer tuition reimbursement for entry machinists to get whatever degree(they want you to get an engineering degree).
I was grading seed at a grain processing/storage facility for a few years and it had enough down time during the evenings to do any schooling. I managed a full-time pre calculus to shore up my post secondary education requirements. My coworker ended up going back to college for programming and did a lot of his work on the afternoon shift. Our schedule was a 6am-2pm with little down time, and then an afternoon shift from 2pm-10pm with way more free time.
In my case, you didn’t have as much down time as some other quieter jobs but they paid ~$30 an hour so there’s value if you are looking for some extra cash. No prior experience required.
There was a 12hr night/day rotation for other parts of the facility where you’d swap every few days and get a week off somewhere in the mix but that schedule wasn’t for me.
Might check into hotel reception too. I worked nights at one, and my main duty was making sure the building didn’t catch fire or disappear while waiting to do the audit and start morning coffee before I left.
Thankfully never, not sure how I would have recovered from that one! Did catch it pretending it was on fire a few times. It was alerting the local FD our alarms were triggered when on site, it was quiet an no burning was going on. They called a couple different times about it and even showed up once… in case I was lying? Bet safe than sorry I guess.
At my last job, the fire system kept calling the fire department with false positives so often that they told us to fix it or the city was going to start fining the company LOTS of money. One of the dumbass HR people asked if we could just disable the fire system to prevent it from making false positives. The very patient fireman had to explain that no, we could not intentionally disable fire safety equipment in a populated building, and the company had to actually fix the broken detector.
The elevators also broke down a lot, one time with my intern inside. I called the fire department to get her out, and my boss’s boss said I should have waited longer before calling the fire department, for some reason. I forget why.
I never signed an NDA, and I think I’d be fine telling you the name of this global company. But to be safe, I won’t. I’ll just say that most of the people here have probably interacted with customer service run by this company before. I AM CERTAIN OF IT.
Oh wow! The places they deem fit to try and cut corners. My manager at that hotel spent some time stuck in one our elevators after he"fixed" it himself and then had to have Otis come out.
Night time security shifts might work well for this. A buddy mine did that for a while and called it “money detention” for all the activity he did during. I think he mostly read comic books.
This was going to be my suggestion. But even day time is good for this. I did security for 12 years. The vast majority of jobs are sitting on your ass watching movies on your phone. Couple tips if you go the security route:
Security is different in each US state (if you’re in another country this whole thing is gonna be meaningless). In some states it requires a 40 hour course, in others a 10 minute training class. it varies widely, find out what your states guidelines are.
If you get certed for security, you’ll never want for a shitty, low paying job. If you get fired, there’s another job around the corner. But, contracts change a lot, so don’t get too attached to any one post.
Gate guard is primo. You normally get a shack, you’re normally alone, and you normally deal with people only during shift changes. That means 6 hours of an 8 hour shift are totally yours.
Hospital security SUCKS.
If you need extra cash, concerts and other events pay well, and you get to listen to live music for free.
If you live anywhere with Weather™ put a change of clothes, food, sleeping bag and other gear in your car. I once got stuck on a post, snowed in, for 4 days.
Keep shit in your car in general. A steam deck is awesome, a switch is good.
If you’re on a post with another person, like 2 guards in a tiny shack for 8 hours, make sure you’re upfront about if you’re an intro/extrovert. Most guards have been doing it for long enough that they truly don’t care if you don’t wanna speak at all in 8 hours, they just wanna know up front where their plans should be. Nothing more irritating than thinking you’re gonna have a friend for a day and end up bored because you didn’t bring your stuff with you (which is why you should keep it in your car), or thinking you’re going to have a day to catch up on school/video games/shows and you can’t get 5 minutes to yourself because the other guard won’t STFU
You are not a cop. Don’t act like a cop. You aren’t even Paul blart. You’re a person in a uniform made of old trash bags whose whole job is to get an insurance discount for the company you’re posted at
The guard shack almost never has cameras, and for some reason, people on tinder/Grindr are freaking wild about hooking up in a guard shack
ETA: only thing better than gate guard is posts where they want you to park your own car and sit in it for your shift. You just sit in your car all day/night. Which means your own sound system, and basically everything you wanna bring with you at your fingertips. It’s awesome.
Also, midsize semi local security companies are better. Securitas and similar companies are kinda shitty, and the really small ones are always, like, weirdly militant. If you happen to be in Tennessee or Virginia I can probably hook you up with a company that’ll get you a good post.
Thanks for all this info. This is all very useful for me to know.
Where did you find these jobs? Were they just on normal job sites or is there a different method? (I’m in the UK but I imagine this will all be pretty universal)
You can probably search for security jobs on job boards, or ask anyone wearing a shitty guard uniform if they’re hiring. If it’s the same there, they’re always hiring.
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