Baling hay. Who knew? Up here in 'da Region, hay is what you yell at someone to get their attention. Hay - you!
Summer before my sophomore year I was a "heater helper" in a train car manufacturing plant, which meant that my jerb was to load metal bars or ingots into a roaring ass hot oven to get red hot, then pull out of said roaring ass hot fire the red hot metal, and stage so the operator could press into various parts for trains. Decoupling bars, brake shoes, etc., as well as box car ends, although the box car ends were cold pressed.
Most of the "operators" only had three fingers on one hand or the other; presses are unforgiving if you make a mistake. I would clock in at 7:00 am, and worked mandatory 10 hour days. Six days a week. They would give you big asbestos gloves with which to hold the tongs (not thongs, unfortunately) with which I would muscle in and out of the oven the train brake shoe pads or decoupling bars. I had no hair on my arms that summer.
Doesn't sound too bad, but the thing was you had to stack the brake shoe pads five on top of one, so it was heavy as hell considering the tongs were about four feet long. And a 110" long iron decoupling bar was my least favorite one to work with. Hard to stage into the press, and the operator was always bitching at me for either being too fast or too slow. And the one time I missed the mark and just missed the operator's leg, but tore his pants, with a red hot iron rod (insert comment...) was scary.
Made piece work that summer, though. Guessing I banked over $10k that summer (not bad for 1979), which paid for most of my tuition and room/board that year at IU.
Thank Jah that my dad, who worked in the engineering department there, got me the job in the first place, but more than that, the guys in the shop liked my dad. So, when I walked on the shop floor the first day, Dino looked me over, and said - are you Bill's kid? I said yes, and with that I was ok. Taught what to do, and what not to do. So many great guys that I never saw after that summer. Ray (left there to become a police man, Stash (that's the Polish Staash) was also great - told me to never sit on cold metal - you get the pyles (meaning 'roids).
I don't think those kind of summer jobs exist any more. Most of my friends had summer jobs at a steel mill, or something. No more.