Heh. My mum taught at my school from k-6, so I went to her work every day. It sucked being in her music class, I have to say (she would tease me in front of my classmates about not having my oxfords with me and insisting on having my hair hanging in my face all the time), and man, I couldn't get away with anything--my mum would hear about it in record time. I did like sitting in her classroom after school teaching myself cursive writing, though that's probably why my handwriting's so atrocious. I also got to overhear some juicy gossip about the teachers I hated, and my sister and I were the only kids who'd seen the inside of the staff room. Ooooooh.

My Dad took me to Take Your Daughters to Work Day a few years when he was still active in the Marine Corp. I didn't really understand what he did (he was a lawyer with appellate defense, so there's not much to "see", although I did get to sit in the courtroom for one thing), but I did know that everyone wore fun uniforms, and he was in downtown DC, and we got to eat out for lunch, and as we walked down the street everyone saluted him.

About 18 years ago, when my dad was working at the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, I visited the clinic. I distinctly recall one thing in particular. They had a sort of "hall of fame," a glass case of objects the docs had extracted from children's throats, which they'd presumably tried to swallow. There were the usual assortment of plastic toys and crap, but also a large Brillo pad and a sink strainer. I don't think they were in the same kid, or at least not at the same time.

I liked going to my father's office when he was an industrial chemist, he always had some cool examples of what chemicals could do. I clearly remember him showing me how to mix a couple of things together to make an instant foam sponge thingie.

And then later he was the head of an R&D division for a gas company with robots and lasers and stuff that you needed super high security clearance to even look at. That was fun!

My father was a DJ on the local classical radio station. One time my brother and I got to say something on the air during a pledge drive.

My father was a contractor. I had to go to work with him every school vacation, every summer break, many weekends, and quite often, after school.

elizard: I had a similar experience, only in preschool. Before she became a preschool teacher, she was a music teacher in a small high school.

Going to work with my father was about the coolest thing ever when I was six, as he had loads of interesting machinery and heaps of cool junk in his room (he worked as a car electrician back then) and there were other, just as interesting machines (tractors, trucks and other farm machinery) standing outside.

I got to go to work with my father a few times. I don't have any interesting stories about it, in fact it wasn't even inherently interesting at the time, but I will admit that I absolutely cherished that time with him.

My dad was a banker. He worked his way up from entry-level to Treasurer. He wore suits to work and had a giant office with a crystal ashtray on the desk. Everyone would make such a fuss when we'd visit, trying to score points by lavishing us with attention and praise.

Once he took us with him to a business lunch in NYC. We went to Windows on the World and when we couldn't decide what to have for dessert, he ordered one of everything. I vowed that someday I'd do that with my kids. But now I can't and that makes me really sad.

The bank went through a bunch of mergers and acquisitions over the years and my dad was eventually laid off, which lead to some rough times. He works for an insurance company now. One of those ones that insure weird stuff. I've never been to his office.

I never really was able to do a traditional job shadow with my father as our living situation made it relatively moot. The larger half of our house was devoted to and entirely composed of business operations and large equipment, so if I ever wanted to see what was going on I would just wander out into the shop and attempt to not get in the way.

The first time I actually "worked" for my father was a very intense experience. I was instructed to run a jig he had built, of which the basic action revolved around two drills driven by a belt mechanism which were then brought forward into the edge of a workpiece by a simple lever system. The table or work platform of this jig had some recessed areas where countersunk holes had been drilled and screws were inserted to attach it to a big cabinet system where the vacuum exhaust was running. I didn't think much of it at the time, but these recessed areas would slowly fill with sawdust debris that wasn't getting cleared away...

After running about 100+ parts without stopping to clear this debris my father came back in to check on my progress. I thought he would be proud because I felt like I was going at a great pace, but he got a very frustrated look on his face after attempting to fit two of the components. He looked around the jig and found the source of deviation in the dust-filled pockets, pointing out to me that I need to make sure to clear out those areas after a handful of pieces had been completed.

I scoffed and said "What, that little crud right there? Who cares about that?" The next five minutes were probably the most frightening of my entire existence, I have never seen an adult so enraged. I didn't work the rest of that day, but I did learn a valuable lesson about attention to detail that has stayed with me to this day...

My dad owned an ice cream store, Foster's Freeze, which was sort of a 'po cousin to Dairy Queen, same sort of thing.

So in high school and college, that was where I worked, schlepping out soft serve, shakes, sundaes, etc. White pants, white shirt, etc.

This was during the late 60's and early 70's in a beach town in So. Cal. So one thing I remember is people showing up in town, and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, etc.

In college, I resented having to work there in that I had to pass up some better jobs, but by then my dad had died, and my mother took over.

This, until the in laws, who owned the land, sold it out from under us, for a huge profit.

So I can't say if it was good or bad. . it was life, and the only one I knew.

I grew up hanging out with my parents while they were working (documentary filmmakers), basically this means my childhood toys were office supplies and various doodads that fell off video equipment. I've internalized the experience to the degree that I can't tell if it was good or bad, it was merely the landscape of my childhood. I hung out with a lot of 1980's nutcase oddball punkrock new yorkers and the smell of patchuli, cheep reefer and hot dust (forced air industrial heaters dontcha know) throws me back to the age of nine and building a crossbow out of a t-square, rubber bands and a pencil and wondering when the Chinese food was going to arrive and if I was going to be sleeping on the office couch again and if there were anymore half inch RUN DMC videos I could watch or if the light called a "Sun Gun" was really as hot as the sun (essentially it is, don't fucking touch it, ok?).

I also got to travel to many places in America where no one would go if they didn't have family there or were arresting someone and meet a lot of very nice but deeply fucked up people who had strong feelings about certain subjects.

When I graduated college I worked for my mom for a hot minute on a movie and it was a great experience because I got to live in New Orleans and put my college degree to direct use for the first and only time, but I have to say that if you have my personality and my mom's personality you probably shouldn't work for your mother.

I never really got to hang out with my dad at work, but I got to eat lunch with him and visit him while he was working a bunch. He worked as a UPS man for more than 25 years, and my mom and I would occasionally meet him on the route to either get his check or to have lunch with him. My favorite part of his job was the christmas gifts he would bring home.

My mom-however- she worked as a lunch lady at my school (which was a little embarrassing considering that I rarely ate there). She was bringing the best bits home for us.

One time, just before I had to give a big speech at the school, I was serving lunch near her, and threw up. I felt especially bad because she had to clean it up.

I never went to work with my Dad. He was a salesman, so maybe he was simply trying to spare me some agony. I once helped my mom, a schoolteacher, with her night-school ESL class, that was kind of fun as I recall. It kind of instilled in me the idea that working with people to directly give them something useful might be cool, but I've never pursued it.

I freaking loved going to work with my mom. She owned a secretarial service. Tons of fun office supplies to play with AND a copy machine! She also took care of leasing the offices in the building (she got a discount on her office rent) - so she had keys to all the other offices in the building AND the keys to the vending machines! (She didn't let me go through leased spaces - but she would let me make forts and such in empty offices.)

She also had those old style phones that had tons and tons of different lines on them with all the lighty up buttons (rotary phones, even!) - since she owned the business and was divorced I remember spending quite a few nights in a sleeping bag in the office.

Then when I got older - I got to do random busy work for money. Mostly copying stuff for an attorney she did a bunch of work for (this was when I was in high school and college).

My dad worked at a Ford plant - the only times I went with him were on vacations when he had to go get his check...but even that was fun to me. (We did go with him for a plant anniversary once and that was pretty nifty - actually got to see the inside of the plant.)

My dad worked in the Silicon Valley for awhile, at one of those office parks with an artificial stream and a sand volleyball court. I was too young at the time for "Take your Daughter to Work" Day, but I did get to visit him after work and on weekends from time to time. He had a cubicle, which I thought was really cool; and a lab, with an honest-to-god stream running through it and a duck pond! With little plastic duckies in it! There was also this big Faraday cage where they did sensitive electronics testing; I thought it was scary.

I did get to go to work with my mom; she was an administrative assistanct at a manufacturing plant, which means she answered phones and did a lot of data compilation and plotting. Boring work, but she payed me $4 an hour to file these giant sheets of production numbers at the end of each month. I also got to tour the factory and see all the big machinery, which was fun.

Finally, I spent summers in high school working for my parents in their shop. I hated it at the time, but they taught me how to drive a forklift, tow a trailer, and correctly use a drill press, so it wasn't all bad.

Going to my dad's office was always a Big Deal that involved getting dressed up and then being walked around the office while a lot of grownups fawned at you (he was the CEO of several different companies; the job visits were all basically the same) and made dumb comments like, "Aren't you getting tall! My, my!"

It was cool though when he was in charge at Fieldcrest because one time there I got to go see the design department, which I really liked. The people seemed happier and more interesting than the office drones and my father had had them name a sheet pattern after me, Felicity. It was a truly hideous super psychedelic early 70s pattern with huge bulbous overlapping flowers and you could get it in several different colors. I had pink and blue, and I got the marketing signs, big cardboard things, to hang in my room. One was black and said felicity in lowercase white letters (how totally sophisticated & hip) and the other one was white and had the dictionary definition of felicity (happiness. joy. bliss.) in lowercase black letters. I had these signs in my room for YEARS until they finally deteriorated too far.

I went to work with my dad only a few times, but it was always cool. He was an architect, so he had tons of paper and special pencils and pens for us to play with. The thing I remember most were the little models of houses and stores and such lying around--that was one of their specialties. As someone who didn't inherit the artistic gene, I still marvel at his drawings, the amazing detail, the odd abstractness of a two-dimensional rendering of a 3-dimensional object.

Mom was, and remains, a college professor, so it was neat to visit her, too, to see Mom, the woman who made dinners and cleaned toilets, as a respected intellectual.

Oh... I thought you meant "going to work with" as in "getting a job with". I didn't do that, but my older brothe did. Upon graduating from college, he went to work for the same advertising agency as my dad. Because my dad didn't have a four-year degree, my brother eventually ended up as my dad's boss for a short period of time. He told my dad, "Hey, remember all those times you grounded me? Well, it's payback time!"

Heh.

As a mini geek, I absolutely loved spending occasional Saturdays in the office with my dad when he was an IT manager at a big bank in London. The obvious highlight was going into the 'computer room', with its loud air-conditioning machines, rows of mainframes, massive tape readers and hard drives, and the big bank of PCs monitoring the whole lot.

But it's the little things that really stick. Being shown preview builds of Windows 95, and completely not understanding the point of multi-tasking ("but you're just one person, why would you want to have two programs running at once?"). Becoming enamoured with After Dark, that classic screensaver that ran on most of the machines there (in particular the Rose module, which sparked my interest in graphics programming). Getting to play with NeXTstations and their amazing OS and development tools (the precursor to OS X's tools today). Having my first taste of 'sticking it to the man' when I used company toner and paper to print out my report on 'Great Explorers'. Sliding his security pass back underneath the revolving door so we could trick it into letting me in to the cool places as well.

And my dad, in charge of it all (at least, as far as I knew at the time). It was awesome.

My parents never took me to work for a day. There was once when I had to pick my dad up at the plant that I was allowed to go beyond the security gate to the shed where his "office" was. And, a couple of times when my mom was cleaning office buildings she took me along and let me vacuum.

When I was very little my father drove a delivery truck for Wonder Bread. Once while in the truck with him, I had to duck down when we passed the store, so his boss wouldn't see me in the truck.

My dad has been a floor supervisor for a division of Emerson Electric for over 30 year now. I remember his office being a glass box in the middle of the plant, so he could see what was going on I guess. My sister and I would play golf on his computer and play with the carbon paper. They had the kind you feed through the dot-matrix printers, so there were the strips with holes that you pull off each side. These are actually snakes, not just paper with holes in it. Sometimes they can be as long as 30+ pages of paper. I also remember the oil and metal smell of the plant. It is just so the smell of my father.

My dad ran two historical societies during his life, one for 25 years, both in charge of fantastic 19th-century house museums. I got to spend time behind the scenes in all the odd little rooms they don't show the public, the technological adaptations that they have to hide, and so on. I also did a lot of busywork for my dad, who appreciated that I learned quickly and worked without much supervision -- usually. He hired a bunch of really, really nice people to work for him. I learned basic office procedures, from phones to letter-typing styles, as well as more esoteric things like book cataloging, genealogy research, artifact preservation, and the basics of planning major public events like a tour of homes.

My mom worked in a Fannie Mae chocolates store, then in a library materials processing lab, and was a county supervisor (now she's a social worker). I got to see some stuff there, learned all the different types of chocolates (at one time I was pretty good at identifying them from the squiggles on top), and got to use laminating equipment at the library, and meet local politicians at all the political functions she had to attend

"My daddy goes skiing in Colorado!", was my reply to the nursery school teacher when she asked what he did. No, not a professional--I was just picking up on their excitement about the trip. My parents went to Aspen for their honeymoon and went back every year until I was fourteen.

What he really did:
Work at my grandfather's bookstore until it was sold the year I was born to what's now Target.
Unravel my godparents' estates after my godfather died intestate and my godmother killed herself six weeks later (making sure first she set up a will).
Manage an arcade of shops on Hollywood Boulevard that he co-owns with my uncle.
Run a small computer store from 79-85.

For the last three, he rented an office; I helped out with the computer business--answering phones, filing-- one summer after I was kicked out of fat camp (personality clash with one of the people in charge).

What really annoyed me was when he would post classified ads and list the house number instead of the one at the office--he's prone to fobbing off his responsibilities.

Lately he's been working to help stop sweatshops.

For much of my childhood my mum was a bartender and, sometimes, she was also the cleaning crew. On weekend mornings she'd take my younger brother and I into the bar with her while she cleaned. My brother and I checked the booths for money and were allowed to keep anything smaller than a $20. We were also allowed to mix drinks, non-alcoholic of course, with the "gun". We'd make these weird concoctions mixing Coke, Dr. Pepper and whatever other sodas were on tap and we'd top them off with some grenadine and as many maraschino cherries we could fit into the glasses. Yummm!

Later on I needed a job in the summer between my junior and senior years in high school. By that time my mum was working for a savings & loan. My mum talked to her boss about it and they let me interview. I was hired on as a full-time temp and did finish-typing on loan documents (my desk was a table in the corner of the lunch room). In my senior year I was hired permanent part-time and worked after school. After my senior year I went to full-time and worked there for a total of 16 years. There were a few times my mum and I had to work together and it worked out okay. A lot of the time our co-workers didn't realize that we were related.

I worked weekends and summers with my Father from the time I was ~10. At the time he was a refrigeration and major appliance technician with a little electrician thrown in for variety.

One memorable job was a Re&Re on a self contained heat cool unit. The unit was hung off the customer's eave above his carport. The new unit needed a different plenum which meant someone (IE: me) needed to work inside the attic.

Usually this is pretty straight forward but the homeowner had bribed the workers of an insulating contractor to give him a little extra when they blew in the loose fill celloulous. And boy did they deliver, there was a good three feet of insulation in this guy's attic. I had to literally dig my way to the eave from the hatch and then excavate around the old plenum to free up enough space to remove it and install the new one.

Ratcheting the difficulty up a notch was the temperature. People never phone for A/C work until the outside temperature is 30 degrees. This job was well into the season and despite starting at 7AM the roof temperatures were into the upper 30's by the time we were finished. The attic temps must have been in the mid 40s.

Despite that I learned lots and it was better than sitting in front of the TV. But if I never again have to go from a 40 degree roof to the inside of a malfunctioning yet still -10 walk in freezer and back again it'll be too soon.