It's the same every time. The furtive hope that maybe they won't recognize me — after all, I've cut my hair, gotten contacts and eaten too much Memorial Union food since we graduated. The brief moment of elation when I think I'm free to close that drive-thru window or go back inside with them none the wiser, and then, the horrid moment of recognition.
The phrasing is different each time, but the gist of the one question everyone will ask is perpetually the same: "Are you still in college?"
What these former teachers, or classmates, or women whose names I never learned even though we sat in lawn chairs just a few yards away from each other every Wednesday and Saturday for years, watching sons (theirs) or brothers (mine) play baseball, don't say out loud, they say with looks of pity or judgment.
"What happened to you?" those eyes say as they down their slushes and SuperSonic cheeseburgers. "Did you drop out? Why are you working a fast food job?"
This summer, like the last, I'm working as a crew member at the Tempe Sonic Drive-In near the Tempe neighborhood I grew up in. I'm also working for The State Press as a news reporter (and, right now, moonlighting as a columnist), working as an intern for the East Valley Tribune, freelancing for another local startup paper and preparing to be The State Press's managing editor this fall, as well as taking a one-credit class on the "Contemporary Supreme Court" to meet the 30-credit requirement for my scholarship.
Closing five or six nights a week at Sonic means I'm biking the eight miles home and getting a grand total of about three hours of sleep most nights. It also means that I'm able to devote my sleep-deprived days to interviews, writing and edits, and I'm able to start saving money for grand plans of spending the spring semester in Washington, D.C., or at least out of Arizona.
But the acquaintances I run into while I'm decked out in a red and blue polyester shirt, covered with ice cream, hair frizzy under a mandatory uniform visor, don't know any of that.
Maybe it's just that the area I grew up in (a modest, but still nice south Tempe neighborhood sitting between gated communities full of affluent people in identical homes and the the far less wealthy town of Guadalupe) or the people I went to school with (a bunch of honors students who lived in those gated communities and who could afford not only to take the SAT and ACT multiple times, but take classes that helped them still score less than I did) weren't as accustomed to working. After all, family members and some other students I've talked to seem to understand that summers are for working your butt off and saving money when classes don't get in the way.
And yet, despite all the times I tell myself that it's better to be working hard and well and earning an honest dollar, and that I'll ultimately be happier at the end of the summer than if I had spent it at the beach or binge-watching Netflix, I still can't help but be embarrassed every time a former classmate pulls into the drive-in. Would you like a sense of superiority with that?
Share your awful summer job stories with Julia at julia.shumway@asu.edu or follow @JMShumway on Twitter.
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