Yesterday, the daily prompt asked about what we learned in high school. In the spirit of that topic, I present another edition of “Did I ever tell you…?” This one is a high school edition and really, contains a whole list of other things I learned in that era.
Did I ever tell you that my first job was working at Dairy Queen? I don’t remember what the assignment was in college, but I remember that I wrote a whole essay about the horrors of working at Dairy Queen during the summer in the south. I still have a copy of it somewhere and although I don’t remember everything I included, I do remember that I closed the essay with a quote from a Smashing Pumpkins song. It summed up my attitude about working at an ice cream shop when it’s ungodly hot during the summer. The line was: “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.” Some of those customers made me so mad and yet, I couldn’t leave. I was stuck there until the end of my shift.
Not all of the customers were bad. The ones I particularly didn’t like were the ones who were lactose intolerant and consumed ice cream despite that fact and then chose the bathroom that I had to clean to allow their digestive system to wreak havoc on the dairy they had just eaten.
I worked there at the beginning of the period when they first started advertising that blizzards were so thick they could be served upside down. Because we did, literally, have to serve them upside down. It gave me anxiety when someone would order a banana split blizzard because I knew what would happen if I tried to turn one of those upside down. Those always had pineapple, strawberry, and chocolate syrup in them, i.e. fruit that was juicy and syrup that was runny. Not all of those creations stayed in the cup when I turned them upside down for a customer.
Same thing happened with the ice cream cones that I dipped into the hot chocolate that would harden into a shell on the outside of the cone. There was a whole technique to doing that right. You had to arch your hand with the cone in a rainbow arc motion into the chocolate dip and rainbow it back out. But you better not hold it in the dip for too long because if you did, you were going to pull an empty cone back out.
The worst day ever working there was on the 4th of July. I was scheduled to start working when we opened at 11:00 and my end time was “slow down”. Meaning I could go home when business slowed down enough and my manager deemed me unnecessary. I was never deemed unnecessary that day. I was there until we closed at 10:00. The chafing on my inner thighs was awful by the time I got to go home.
Of course it wasn’t all bad. I did get pretty good at making blizzards with fruit thick enough that they wouldn’t always spill out all over the register when I flipped them over. I also perfected the rainbow arc and didn’t drop much ice cream into the chocolate coating bin once I got it down.
What I remember most about my time working there was the friends I made. I started working there halfway through my junior year and quit not long after graduation the next year. My best friend in high school became my best friend because of working there. She had been in one of my classes and I distinctly remember she was someone I didn’t like because I heard her making ugly comments about me. Much like many of my other classmates did. Like I said yesterday, high school was rough for me. But I had already been working at Dairy Queen for about a month when she joined the staff.
I don’t know how it happened, but from being forced to work together, we just became really good friends. After we would get off work, we’d go get something to eat at one of the local spots in our tiny little town. Often that was followed by going to a pool hall called Speakeasy’s and shooting a few games of pool. Nine ball was our game of choice. We were allowed in because we weren’t trying to drink. In fact, we only ever stuck to our favorite table in the back, smoked cigarettes and fed money into the jukebox.
I have my job at Dairy Queen to thank for my friendship with her. It continued long after high school and well into our college years, even though we went to schools that were several hours apart.
I also have Dairy Queen to thank for having a place to go in high school where I was accepted. I hated the school experience and wasn’t one of the people who went to house parties on the weekends or drank and did other wild teenage things outside of school. But I did go to work. And even though some of the people I worked with were people from school, the rumors about me and the bullying that took place didn’t happen there. We just got along and had fun the best we could on our shift together. In fact, not long before I stopped working there, one of the guys who had bullied me at school started working there. I told my manager about him and they assured me he wouldn’t do that there. In fact, the boy himself told me he wasn’t going to give me a hard time. And he didn’t.
My time working there was really interesting in that it was annoying at times, but my best memories from high school revolve around that job. From what I’ve heard, the place has since closed. Bittersweet in a way. And even though it’s been 25 years since I worked there, I still walk into the one where I live now with an air of superiority as I silently judge the workers there while they make my blizzard. When they hand it to me upside down, I think to myself “I’m not impressed. I can do that.” Kind of like those former high school quarterbacks who watch the games on Friday nights reminiscing about their glory days. There wasn’t much glory working at Dairy Queen. We didn’t have to pay for the ice cream we ate if that counts for something. The memories though, that’s much more glorious in my mind.
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