I always considered myself to be a pretty tolerant person, but I don’t think I ever knew the true meaning of the word tolerant until I started working at Sunny Daes. My job as an ice cream scooper requires a lot of patience and attentiveness. I deal with kids as young as one month to adults as old as in their 90's. However, I try to maintain my cool through all of the chaos that ensues around me during my shifts.

“I want chocolate soft serve with sprinkles,” said the customer, roughly the age of 13, talking to her friends while texting or doing something else on her smartphone.

“Would you like it in a cone or a cup?” I respond, trying to mask my annoyance.

“Cone,” she replies curtly.

“Sugar, wafer or waffle cone?”

“Huh, what’d ya say?”

“Would you like a sugar cone, a wafer cone or a waffle cone?”

“A sugar cone with the rainbow sprinkles around it, with rainbow sprinkles on top.”

I smile, gratified that she answered the question of what type of sprinkles she wanted before I even asked it.

“So a soft serve chocolate with rainbow sprinkles in a rainbow sprinkle sugar cone?” I say with a slight question in my voice.

“No, I want hard ice cream,” she replies, and as I go off to scoop her hard chocolate ice cream onto a sprinkle sugar cone and then smother it in rainbow sprinkles she turns her attention back to her phone and takes a few selfies with her friends.

This is just a taste of what I encounter with every customer that enters Sunny Daes and yet I love working. I love knowing that I am earning my own money and that I am being trusted with the responsibility of taking people’s orders and making their ice cream.

I have learned not only the ability to be tolerant and independent in my job but also in my life. I never would have thought ice cream could change anything other than your daily calorie intake and your jean size, but for me, it has changed my perspective on life and on the general public.

Let’s be real for a second — we don’t care about things that don’t impact us on a daily basis. So the lady with the $2,000 bag isn’t going to care about how many times her kids change their order because it doesn’t affect her in the long run.

Working at an ice cream shop has been a blessing and a curse. I can say that I have truly learned things about people I otherwise wouldn’t have. At the same time, there are days when I wish I didn’t have to see the kids that I went to high school with and I certainly don’t wait on them.

This blessing and curse has taught more about how the world works, how difficult people will be in all stages of their life and how selfish people really are.

So as I continue to scoop your ice cream, do you want rainbow or chocolate sprinkles?