Christine Junge shares about her summer job experience working at an ice cream shop.
I took an improv class at Stanford’s adult education program a few years back, and one of the exercises was to talk off-the-cuff about our favorite job. Since this was Silicon Valley, many of the students discussed their work as tech execs or corporate lawyers. I could have spoken about my job as a writer for Stanford, but I went in another direction.
Instead, I spoke about my job scooping ice cream as a teenager at a Carvel on Long Island, New York. My best friend and I worked there together, so on slow days I basically got paid to eat ice cream and hang out with my favorite person — what was not to love?
I also worked with a rag-tag bunch of people I never would have met if it weren’t for Carvel: There was a formerly incarcerated man with perennially greasy hair who gave me car advice, and a college grad who hadn’t yet figured out what he wanted to do with himself at age twenty-seven — which he and I both agreed was incredibly old. There was also the cake decorator working not for the money but because it got her out and about. I spent a dozen hours a week with these people, and I got to know them better than any other adults in my life, save my parents.
They talked to me like a peer, and I heard about their marriages, mistakes and memories. I learned from them how to take it one scoop at a time as the line stretched out the door on hot summer nights, how to keep smiling when customers changed their minds — twice! — after you made up their order, and the importance of coming to work on time every day.