Living in a tourist destination has a lot of pros and cons, but perhaps the most positive aspect is the fact that you get to live and work in a place where people vacation. Scooping ice cream at the same family-owned business for six years has taught me a lot, not only about the world of ice cream, but the world in general. Perhaps after reading, you’ll understand that the young individual behind the counter of your local ice cream shop knows much more than the ingredients in Monster Cookie.

First of all, scooping ice cream has taught me the importance of specificity. When you come up to me and tell me that you want a vanilla ice cream, I’m not just going to say “okay!” and scurry off to make something I’m not even sure if you want. I’m going to ask you a million different questions like “what size?”, “cup or cone?”, “soft or hard vanilla?”, “sugar or wafer cone?” , etc. It may seem annoying at first, but I promise that I’m only trying to make you happy and avoid any miscommunications.

Which brings me to the next lesson I learned from scooping ice cream: patience really is a virtue. When you come into the shop with a thousand screaming children that all want samples and won’t stop running around the building, I’m not going to roll my eyes or get angry. I’m going to remain calm and understanding, even when you make each child tell me personally what they want, and most of them will want you to talk to me instead. I will patiently take all of the time your group needs to decide what they want. Why? Because I know what it’s like for me when customers are impatient, and I would never want someone else to feel like I do when that happens.

Scooping ice cream has also taught me to go easy on arm day when I have work later. You may think that scooping ice cream is an easy job, and in some instances, it is. However, when you run out of Chocolate Peanut Butter and you need to grab another one from the back only to find that it’s frozen solid and your customer absolutely NEEDS that flavor or they will roll over and die on your shop’s floor, you will truly understand just how difficult it is. Have you ever tried to scoop ice cream that’s rock solid? No? Well I’ll tell you right now, there must be a certain level of Hell where you need to scoop completely frozen Salted Caramel ice cream because it is the absolute worst thing that could happen to an ice cream scooper. After one summer of working at an ice cream shop, you’ll find that your dominant forearm is so much stronger simply from working through those physically tougher orders.

Finally, scooping ice cream at a family-owned ice cream shop for six years has taught me that you really can be extremely close to people who aren’t related to you by blood. My co-workers understand my ice cream-related struggles, and they’ve been there for me through all of my mid-shift breakdowns. There is no group quite like co-workers at an ice cream shop, and I was lucky enough to meet some of my best friends at the shop in which I spent most of my summers.

So the next time you go into an ice cream shop and see that worker behind the counter, be sure to pay them the respect and patience they deserve. It really is hard work, but if they’re anything like me, they’ll love every minute of serving you.