Summer Jobs
Make me feel fine, blowin'
written by Kyle on May 16, 2025

It’s that time of year again: time to load your wretched family into your wretched SUV and go on a wretched vacation to some godforsaken, humid hellhole.  Or, if you’re in college, time to catch a glimpse at the wretched wage slavery that awaits you in a few short years!  

Yes, it’s summer job time.  Whether you’re slinking back to your miserable hometown to catch up with all the kids who dropped out of high school to enter the lucrative field of mind-numbing factory work that you’d assumed was performed by machines by now, or you’re staying in your now-abandoned college town, it’s time to get off your ass and find a job, hoss; there are only so many Patrick Duffy/Juggernaut-related YTMND.com sites, and the new video game consoles aren’t out ‘til the fall.  

So what are your options?  That’s what I’m here for.  I’ll be giving you the run-down on the summer job front, using my patented “Pointer” (patent pending) system to help you build the skills you need to score that perfect summer job!  Let’s begin.

Retail
This is a common choice among students who hate themselves and want to die.  The tedium of a retail job is only matched by the inanity of your co-workers.  Good news is, you can probably use your college boy wit to score with that cute cashier!  Bad news is, she has two kids and their father is a crazed redneck who will probably land his four-wheeler on top of you mid-coitus and proceed to choke you to death.  So unless you want the last image burned into your retinas before you shuffle this mortal coil and enter Elysian fields to be a self-applied Insane Clown Posse tattoo, it’s best to avoid putting any moves on anyone and resign yourself to retail zombiedom.  

 
Death, thy name is Jugalo [sic]

There are some perks in working retail, however.  You’ll probably have some customers who are really ugly or have weird voices or have the word “JESUS” shaved into the back of their head, and you can tell your friends about it later.  Also, stealing from your employer is incredibly easy, and you have a perfectly acceptable moral justification for it, too: that one manager is such a dick, jeez.  Finally, you’ll have lots of free time to figure out the perfect robbery of the store you work at.  Want to know a foolproof way of sticking up a Blockbuster?  Send ten bucks to Larcenous Dude, [address deleted], Charlottesville , VA , 22903 !  Aw man, I can’t type in my actual mailing address.  Curse you, NetNanny!  CUUURRSE YYYOOOUUUUU!!!

Food Service
The food service industry has all the soul-crushing misery of retail work, but with the added bonus of lessened pay and increased danger.  And I don’t think you can even defraud the company by intentionally injuring yourself on the job!  Check out what I did to my hand working at a country club snack shop last summer without receiving so much as a free tube of Neosporin:

I did get a few free packets of magical healing yellow mustard out of the deal

As with retail, though, there are some upsides of food service work.  You’ll get to eat all the grease-encrusted shit your arteries can handle for free, and, if you work at a chain restaurant of any kind, you’ll get to smugly tell people “you don’t even want to know what goes in that food,” even though you yourself don’t know and did not actually observe any sort of health code violations or identifiably gross things going into the food.

Waiting Tables
With all the exposure to food—such that you’ll never want to eat another meal from your once-favorite restaurant again—of working food service with none of the possibility of at least the marginal degree of dignity that comes with working back in the kitchen, waiting tables is a perfect career opportunity for any college student, out-of-work actor, or depressing middle-aged homosexual.  Waiting is an ideal summer job for those low in self-esteem, because any waiter is guaranteed to get hit on by tables full of “wacky” old ladies who go out once a month to wear silly hats and order elaborate drinks that come with parasols and crazy straws; any waitress is guaranteed to get hit on by droves of dismal, drunk businessmen.  You will also learn valuable skills in phony obsequiousness that will serve you well when you graduate and get a real job: squat at that table!  Say you’ll be “helpin’ y’all out tonight!”  Touch your customers’ arms and laugh at their corny jokes!  Did you know that drawing a smiley face on the check increases a waitress's tips by eighteen percent but decreases a waiter's tips by nine percent?  The idea is to make your customers think you’re their buddy and that you maybe want to have sex with them.  Pro tip: don’t actually have sex with them.

Summering in Switzerland , studying abroad in Beijing , etc.
Burn in hell, you rich piece of shit.  

Temping
Temp jobs are Mother Nature’s way of telling you to stay in school and major in a practical field, for the love of God.  You have one of two options while temping: hanging in there, baby, with a bunch of corny, fat secretaries whose mindless conversations threaten to turn your brain to mush (get used to talking about riblets, cute animated gifs, and Grey’s Anatomy), or performing grueling manual labor for slave wages.  At least you’re only there for a month or so, whereas these other miserable husks of humanity are in it for the long haul!

 
While humorous, this type of animated gif is not likely to endear you to the secretarial pool

On the other hand, temping can be a thrilling, wonderful experience if you let it!  Allow me to relate this tale of a temp job I took several summers ago: when I was growing up in Lynchburg , Virginia , there was a series of commercials for a local used car dealership starring the owner of the place, who called himself Mr. Car Man.   Mr. Car Man was a moustachioed older gentleman who would dress up in his commercials as “Carzan” or stage topically humorous ads where he’d bite the ear of a car or some shit because Mike Tyson=lol.  Or something like that; he’d essentially just generally make a fool of himself to sell cars. These commercials stopped airing probably around 1999 or 2000, but they always stuck with me.

Well in the summer of 2003, I got a temp job working as a “runner” at Camp Jeep, which is a collection of Jeep enthusiasts from the all over the country, who convene every year at Oakridge Estates in Nelson County, Virginia, to do Jeep-related things.  My job as a runner was basically to drive a golf cart around to various food and merchandise stations to check on their inventory and run errands.  The first day at Camp Jeep was orientation, and we were all introducing ourselves.  Well, one rather large worker introduced himself as Pete, but then he added that we might know him better as Mr. Car Man!  He’d shaved his moustache, but it was clearly him.  Evidently, he worked at Camp Jeep every year not because he needed the money, but because he just liked doing it.  He seemed like a good ol’ boy, grandfatherly type, always jovial and trying to put everyone at ease. Then the last day rolled around, and all the runners were on break. There was me, Pete/Mr. Car Man, a guy about my age named Kevin, another fellow named Travis who was also our age, and then two rather depressing middle-aged rednecks, Dave and Jimmy.  Well Dave, Jimmy, and Pete were all talking about cars, and Kevin tried to get into the conversation by, for some reason, piping in with, “If you put bologna on a car’s hood and let it sit in the sun, it’ll peel the paint.” To which Mr. Car Man, genial grandfather, husband, and recent retiree, replied: “I ate a foot-long hot dog out of a woman’s cunt once. Sometimes it had mayonnaise on it, sometimes it didn’t.”  

Interning
Being an intern grants you the chance to practice your flunkydom in case you ever become a supervillain’s henchman or humorously servile comedic foil.  As an intern, you will be introduced to the exciting world of data entry and errand-running.  Coffee needs making?  Intern’ll do it.  Document needs transcribing into some outdated word processor format?  Intern.  “Business trip” to the Bangkok ladyboy district needs planning?  Intern.  Murdered corpse needs garbage disposing and/or comedic sexual servicing?  Intern.

 
This could be you!

Now for the best part: you’re not getting paid.  Some companies run through interns like toilet paper, leaving you at the end of a few months with questionable job experience and a possible recommendation, if they remember who you are, but no more money than you started with.  Not unlike indentured servitude, except there’s no hope of getting a cool silvery hand as a result of a colonial on-the-job accident.

Working in a professor’s lab
Are you a nerd?  Asian?  Maybe you just enjoy killing small animals on a scale that the Geneva Convention would consider genocide?  Then working in a lab is the perfect summer job for you.  Your tasks will involve doing everything the professor doesn’t want to bother with and can’t in good conscience delegate to his grad students.  Cutting off mouse tails, exposing yourself to chlorine gas, that sort of thing.  Your reward will be a summer of smelling like rat droppings and the possibility of a professor recommendation for grad school.  Unfortunately, your professor thinks you are a huge chump and probably doesn’t even know your name.

Camp Counselor
The pay is generally actually pretty decent, and you invariably will get your ego stoked.  If you’re male, the boy campers will idolize you and the girl campers will be in love with you.  Don’t forget that just because little Madison tells the camp newsletter you’re “like a cross between Jake Gyllenhaal and a surfer!” doesn’t make it true.  If you’re female, the male counselors will want to have sex with you.  On the other hand, you’re working at a fucking summer camp.  Don’t be surprised when the careers don’t exactly come a-knocking once you graduate.

Sales/Surveys/Telemarketing/Secret Shopping
Jesus Christ, don’t take a job that you heard about via spam email or a dirty flyer you found in the gutter.  What the hell is wrong with you?  Enjoy being considered a parasite on society and probably falling victim to identity theft at the hand of your employer.

So there you have it!  Where summer was once a magical time of camping, baseball, and firefly-catching, it is now an occasion for the most mind-numbing drudgery you’ll find yourself victim to until you graduate and have to find a real job.  Savor those papers and lab reports while you have time!