Ice Cream Shop

                Everyone hates their first job and, I am no exception. At the start of the summer of my junior year of high school, my parents decided that I needed to do something “productive” over summer and told me I needed to get a job. Despite my protests, I eventually gave in and went on my first job search. Like many things in life, the first job search is always the worst. I looked in the classifieds of the newspaper to try and find any available job openings but, I didn’t have any experience so did not qualify for any of those positions. Due to this, I decided I would just walk around town and pick up applications from anywhere that looked semi-interesting.

                My door to door job search was quite an experience. I choose first to go to all of the local restaurants, which I considered kosher, to apply for a busboy or server position. This included many pizza places and sandwich shops. Mexican and fried food restaurants were definitively off my list as desirable places of employment and thus, were avoided. After I had exhausted every restaurant in a ten mile radius of my house, I moved on to other obscure opportunities of employment. I applied everywhere from a job at the car wash to a life guard on the lazy river at the waterpark. Eventually after about a week of searching I was hired at a local Ice Cream shop called “Ojai Ice Cream”.

                It was awful. Going into my job, at the ice cream store, I thought it would be fun. I would get to hang out in an air conditioned room all day and eat all the ice cream I wanted. However while I could eat all of the ice cream I wanted, I did not consider the potential downsides to working at an Ice Cream parlor. The first thing I realized was I would have to deal with little kids. My typical customer client interaction would go something like this: Little Johnny would walk in with his mom screaming “YAY ICE CREAM!” Next he would go along the entire pane of glass, which protects the ice cream from the kids, and shout every flavor he knew, while in the process getting fingerprints and spit all over the glass. Finally after about five minutes of debating, he would pick a flavor, always Rocky Road. After this, he and his mother would go sit down at a table to eat the ice cream and Johnny would spill it everywhere and get everything sticky. Then they would leave and, I would have to clean up the soiled glass pane and clean the three foot radius, around where Johnny ate his ice cream, with a mop. It was an awesome summer.

                At first, I thought I was going to have to quit in the first week but, eventually I became semi numb to the effects of children on a sugar high. However, one part about my first job, at the ice cream shop, that I can really remember well, was my first pay check. It was for 192 dollars. I remember cashing it in at the bank and thinking “this job isn’t that bad”. That first pay check was a big step in growing up. I recognized it was the first time that I had earned something. I wasn’t given anything. I earned it. To this day I still look at that ice cream shop and cringe but, I will never forget that it was where I earned my firt dollar.