The neighborhood ice cream shop down the street is hiring for the summer. I know this because I was in there the other day, trying to pay for the scoop of Chocolate Brownie in a sugar cone that I'd ordered while handling the same, already dripping on my hand, when the sign posted by the register caught my eye. (This was mostly because someone had done some vigilante copy editing on it, something I generally approve of -- correcting spelling at the very least.) I briefly flirted with the idea of getting a summer job scooping ice cream, because hey, why not -- I've done it before.

My first stint of being gainfully employed -- i.e. my part-time job in high school -- was quite the novelty. I worked in a restaurant / ice cream parlor starting the fall of my junior year and ending about four years later, if you count the sporadic stints when I went home for the summer and college breaks. Looking back on the job, it's probably made more sense to me in terms of work environment and "office drama" than anything else ever has. If you were a girl on the staff, you were probably a hostess or server, and if you were a guy, you started off life as a busser / dishwasher. If you somehow "proved" yourself, you graduated up to the highly touted rank of… wait for it... Fountain Boy.

Working the fountain meant that you were ultimately responsible for several things: you filled all the drink orders, you scooped ice cream, and you manufactured whatever sundae or shake order came from customers or those who chose to sit and order at the counter. (Those of you that were born before 1989 probably had a good grasp on that concept, but I thought I should run it down anyhow.) If it was slow or daytime, the Fountain was a one man job. On the weekend nights during the summer, the number would be four to five before it got too crowded.

I had been working about three months before I got the proverbial "call up" to the fountain and started getting scheduled there. I worked hard at it, took care of business, and annoyed the living crap out of the more senior guys. Times were good! After a few months, there were some departures because of graduations and whatnot, and that's when the fun really began. I got to start making stuff. Ingredient-type stuff like chocolate syrup, hot fudge, brownies for sundaes... pretty much everything that couldn't be ordered pre-made had to be regularly cooked up every few days.

I realize at this point that I pretty much have to admit to being a total dork.

There are a lot of great anecdotes involved with these responsibilities -- like the time I actually managed to set a pan of brownie batter on fire (still a mystery). There was a bit of an incident when I once had a gallon container of caramel tip onto me while mixing it. And, oh yeah -- hot fudge explodes if you don't stir it while cooking. It forms a hefty layer of skin that wells upward inside of its five-gallon pot until it reaches the top and -- if you're lucky -- boils over, or less fortunately... pop! That happened occasionally to everyone, although I think I'm the only one that did it to such great effect that the line cook made me take the stove apart and clean it at the end of the night.

After about a year and a half into my tenure, everything kind of peaked for me. I was getting to be one of the more senior fountain boys, my schedule was generally free, and eventually I was tapped to learn how to make the ice cream. We did it all in house, approximately 38 flavors, but this new duty had its ups and downs; on one hand, I had to spend a lot of time skulking around a deep-freeze that stayed 30-below. It made for long Saturdays during the school year, when I had to come in during the day to make ice cream and then stay on at night to serve it. But on the other hand, once the process got rolling and I was doing the large runs of vanilla (about half the total stock) required, I went out back with the cook and teed off stolen range balls into the empty field beyond the parking lot.

Yea, verily, I was now king of the dorks.

Pranking and other assorted malicious behavior was something of an accepted reality. I was on the receiving end of it more than I would have liked, but I now know that goes hand-in-hand for not only being the king of the dorks, but acting like it as well. So occasionally, car keys got frozen inside blocks of water (easy when there's a deep freeze on hand), sometimes cans of whip would be rigged to not stop spraying once the nozzle was pressed and there was a really charming moment when someone found and left a loaded diaper on the hood of my car. Not to say that there wasn't retaliation on my part -- in the dead of winter I managed to cover the car of the owner's son in an inch of ice during the course of a night in reply to the diaper thing). Sometimes I'd go a little more obvious, as in the case where I covered my hand in a lay of hot fudge and smacked it on Dave's ass at the beginning of a shift (there's even a picture of this). Or you could always help trap someone inside the deep freeze for a few minutes. Quality stuff.

In hindsight, the restaurant / ice cream parlor was the sort of place that was tolerant of, or perhaps even embraced, dysfunctionality to a certain degree. All of my "adult" jobs have always sought to repress that type of thing, to deny that sort of culture. And the companies might have been worse off for it. When you try to replace what's so natural to so many people with, well... "acceptable behavior," then it just generates more points of personal friction.

Too bad that scooping ice cream just won't pay the bills.