Anyone else do this when you were a kid? You’d knock on people’s doors and ask if they had any jobs you could do for them and people would hastily dream up menial tasks. I think I would have been about 8 or 9 at the time, and it was mid 90s. Mad to think of inviting little kids into your house with no supervision these days.
Am I a boomer now?
I remember the casual employment of my childhood.
What was it? Part of the scouts or a blue Peter thing?
Yeah, was scouting thing. Bob a job week.
Destroy the paint on the neighbour’s cars. Smear their house windows (downstairs only). Scalp their lawns. Etc.
Yeah i did this, was through the scouts. And as @TeaRex says basically badly washing cars or mowing lawns. 
Yeah we did this occasionally.
Once a group of us were at the house of someone who lived right next to a caravan park, when we decided to do this. So we went round knocking on the doors of the static caravans and asking people if they had jobs for us to do.
At one point some members of the group felt that others weren’t pulling their weight, and there was an argument about who should knock at the next caravan to ask if they had a job. And I think the guy in there heard the bunch of teenagers outside his house and came out to see what was going on and we shouted back “do you have a job?” at him? And he was understandably quite offended and said “yes actually, I’m a musician”. And at that point we realised we should have worded the question better.
mum joke
Aged about 13, four or five of us (scouts) were bizzarely tasked during Bobajob week with night security for a horsey gymkhana. This entailed sleeping on straw bails in the marquee, and eating a fairly weird/elaborate cold meal that the horse people left for us.
Things were going ok, until about 1am when Dave began blasting food from both ends. The cold chicken was probably the issue.
We then had to hike in utter darkness to a farmhouse and call Dave’s dad.
Dave’s dad took us all home. I imagine the horsey people were medium-concerned the following day at the disappearance of the scouts, although afaik not concerned enough to make enquiries.
no
Did it for cubs which is when you are really young isn’t it, 7 or something?
Mainly remember washing cars & mowing lawns.
my gran used to call having a dump “bob-a-job”. she had a funny turn once and when the ambulance arrived she was in the downstairs loo, they knocked on to check on her and she was like, “give me a minute, im doing a bob-a-job!”
Used to do it as a cub, but no one ever let me in their house.
It was always stay in the garden and water the grass etc.
Did she go round knocking on people’s doors asking if they wanted her to do a bob-a-job for them?
lol absolutely not
I think so.
Suppose I’ve done it as an adult too - when i worked in a bar I’d take on loads of little jobs for customers ’ walkkng their dogs, cleaning for them.
When i was 20 i lived with some scientologists in sydney and one of them was a bit of a wheeler dealer so he’d always rope one of us into odd jobs, moved furniture, inflated bouncy castles, cleaned, de-hoarded houses, did all sorts. Felt like that lad on Instagram, Alfie odd job.
I’ve never heard of this and it sounds bizarre. If kids knocked on asking to wash my car or some shit I think I’d be terrified that I was being trolled.
Robert-a-Jobert
no
This is an incredible post
she did not
i’m sorry what