Summer job roulette
Illustration by Cam DiVenere.
Dylan Hostetter, Opinions and Humor Editor
Summer is a time of vast opportunity — the sun is shining, the birds are chirping and the money is flowing. I had three months to kill and two pockets to fill.
It turns out most corporate internships require something called a “resume,” whatever that is, so I had to go for a more classic approach. Thankfully my local pool had an opening.
Generally, lifeguarding requires serious training, but I pulled some strings to bypass all the fuss. I didn’t care to sit through some long safety lecture to remind me to not put my goggles on upside down, and I felt pretty confident in my ability to sit in a tall chair and sunbathe four days a week.
That being said, I did get a little nervous when all the splashing started. My uncle, who’s a lawyer, said I couldn’t technically be charged with negligence since those two kids eventually coughed all that water up. Suffice to say though, I was fired.
With 10 weeks of summer still ahead of me, I went back on the hunt for work — this time landing a job bussing tables at a small family-run restaurant. You would think washing dishes all day would be a fairly easy gig — but what I didn’t consider was that dirty dishes are pretty gross.
No matter how thick my gloves were, I didn’t want to be touching some guy’s half-chewed burger, or scraping crab cake residue off of forks — so I came up with a solution. Instead of washing the cups and dishes, I just tossed them with the rest of the food.
Turns out replacing all those plates and silverware cost the restaurant thousands of dollars — I threw away so much stuff. Needless to say, when they were forced to close their doors from bankruptcy, I was laid off.
I looked to the post office for my next job. Everybody gets mail, so I expected they could use some help.
They were all out of right-hand drive trucks, but I figured I could just put a brick on the gas pedal of my car and steer from the passenger seat. It worked surprisingly well for the first few stops until the car kept getting faster and I had to start just throwing the mail out the window.
That job went well for a few weeks until I had to deliver to a neighborhood that ended in a cul-de-sac, and my car veered right into somebody’s house and through their dining room. I unscrewed my license plates so they couldn’t pin me to the accident and hightailed it out of there with 40 pounds of mail I also had to get rid of. Both were buried in a nondescript location in the forest which I can not be traced to.
With no job, money or car, I was really in a tough spot. I realized that — other than the disgusting dishes — I enjoyed the restaurant environment, so I decided to take another crack at it. After more help from my uncle forging some culinary school documents, I was back in business.
I landed in a small bakery run by a couple of old women. Working there was exactly like “The Bear,” though it turns out all that yelling is much scarier in person. The bakery was the only job I quit myself — I could only take so much cursing from 70-year-old women on a daily basis.
Afterwards, I held several positions that only lasted a day each, from which I was fired for no legally provable reason — I stocked the shelves at a small bookstore until a mysterious fire burnt it to the ground, I mowed lawns in my neighborhood until a family’s cat mysteriously went missing and I sold tickets at a movie theater until I made a kid cry by telling her all the Minions die at the end of “Despicable Me 4.”
As the summer neared its close, I had barely made any money. A litany of jobs, nearly avoided lawsuits and dumb mistakes later, and I was practically back where I started. It was at that point, I decided to call in the pinch-hitter of summer jobs: retail.
The only place that would hire me so last-minute was a local women’s boutique. I never considered myself much of a salesman, but let me tell you, I absolutely unloaded some blouses and capris. The commission I got from selling pleated tennis skirts to pickleball aunts alone made up for all my past troubles.
The customers loved me there. They called me their “little shopper boy” — a title which only makes me only slightly uncomfortable. I feel as though they would protect me if ever the police did any real snooping into my exploits this summer. I’m just too valuable to them.
