They threw me in the computer lab and I just played addictinggames.com until it was time to go home.

Prepared me more for office work than I thought.

I was the kid, mom was working in a call center

I learned that people suck, and I still hate talking on the phone.

I also learned sudoku because you have to do something between calls.

My dad was an editor for the WSJ and I used to go in during the summer and download pirated music using their ultra fast T1 connection (1.5Mbps)

My mother used to work a state govt job. I don’t think she ever had a “take your kid to work” day, but there were a few times when she brought me into the office for the day. She was the manager of an entire wing of her building, so she could just bring me in anytime and no one said anything about it.

Her coworkers were always so nice and had apparently heard all about me because they all seemed to know me intimately. I sometimes wondered if her coworkers were only nice to me because I was the boss’s kid. But my mom was a genuinely nice person who was always looking out for others, so I wouldn’t be surprised if her coworkers actually liked her.

Sometimes I’d get tours of various offices, sometimes my mom would just set me up with something to do to entertain myself. I drew a lot in my childhood, and my mother would always put up my artwork in her office to show off to her coworkers.

My dad ran his own business and as long as I could remember, it was just him and his secretary renting out a large office space in the cities. He had a partner originally, but his partner died really young, so my dad was left with the whole company to run himself. Fortunately, my mom’s govt job paid the bills, so my dad didn’t need to make a ton of money with his small business.

Every time I went to my dad’s office, he would set me up at a computer near his secretary and I would spend the day either playing Wolfenstein 3D or Pac-Man. This was back in the early '90s, so you had to boot these games from a command line. The computers themselves were Windows 3.11 or so.

EDIT: I never had kids of my own, and I retired young, so I won’t ever get to experience taking my kids to work.

Went to my mom’s work a couple of times when i was in elementary/middle school. She was working as an engineer, and they let me doodle on one of these huge boards where they drew schematics by hand. Also played minesweeper and some keyboard learning game on one of their computers.

Went to my dad’s work a few times. He was the manservant of the crown prince in-waiting to the Fire nation, and they let me drink tea and play paisho at the palace.

My grandmother worked at a bank in the 90s and I remember seeing the cool pneumatic tubes for the cars (like five lanes) in the teller lanes; that was pretty cool while I was that young.

As a teenager in the early 2000s I got to take a trip to a family friend’s job working with Linux all day. That was around the time that I myself started getting into Linux and it was really fucking cool seeing people with big monitors everywhere programming, using the terminal and all that.

My Nana took me to her job at the DMV when I was 7. They let me take the photos and print the IDs. I had a blast.

I went to my dad’s office a few times as a kid. Never as a take your kid to work day, but he was a network admin.

I basically just played on my Gameboy trying to beat the latest Pokémon or he let me play Brick Breaker on his phone.

He showed me the server room and I thought it was noisy and cold, but cool.

I went to work with my dad once, but only for a couple of hours. I can’t remember why, but we went to a really nice house, and I just sat in the basement while he did something with wires. I think he was in a hurry because he usually took extra time to explain things to me whenever we did stuff together, but we didn’t really talk about whatever he was doing that day.

Went to my dad’s work when I was in grade school , not sure what I did, printed out coloring book pages I think. Went to my mom’s work in high school, don’t remember what I did then either, (my highschool had a bomb threat that day so classes were cancelled but I still got marked absent for the day).

Don’t remember specifically what I did but I went to work with my dad who was a contractor. I worked for him in the summers anyways and I probably got paid for the day, so basically take a day off school to work.

Welllll, not really.

I’ve never had the kind of jobs where it was possible. My main two on the books jobs were as a nurse’s assistant and a bouncer (including some titty bars). You can’t usually drag a kid into a patient’s home, and you can’t have anyone not employed there or a relative/representative of the patients present when providing care in nursing homes.

Now, the drag club, I would have gladly taken the one kid I partially raised in, but the whole alcohol laws made that a no-go. And my current kid, we’ve already got a trip to the city planned for when they can get in legally just for a good drag show.

However, back when I was raising what was essentially a nephew, but not related by blood, he did come to the office with me a few times when I was in home health, and did hang out in the office with me and my boss in the office during the day when one bar wasn’t open.

But only the home health place was a semi official “take your kid to work” thing. Once was an inservice where we could bring kids since it was during hours they’d be out of school, the other was an actual bring your kids day.

The inservice one was decent enough, since I wasn’t the only one to bring a kid, and they all had a lot of fun snacking and playing games supervised by a lady that was originally a peds nurse. The other, it was more of a boring-ass tour thing, so it flopped. But he wanted to go, and I didn’t have anything better planned.

Went to my dads work, and at the time our school still used punch cards and ditto machines a lot, and my dad’s work had a photocopier (WOW!) that he gave me free reign on. I photocopied a bunch of images onto transparencies , then arranged those on top of each other for some final copies. It was like building an image in Photoshop with layers, at a time when graphic art would have been 100% manual cutting an pasting of actual paper and vinyl tape spools. Pretty awesome day.

my whole elementary school class visited my dad’s workplace once, cos it was cool. it had a huge anechoic chamber.

and the cantine had canada dry.