Ah, summer. The classic best season. I’ve been going back to that word a lot this summer: classic. I feel like once you start looking for tropes in your summer, you’ll never be able to stop seeing them. I was at the pool the other day and one of the lifeguards blew their whistle to stop some kids from running on the deck. I mean come on, talk about classic!
To be fair, I have missed a lot of classic tropes. There’s no mall in my town, so no Stranger Things shopping montage for me. The reason I’ve kept coming back to this word is one simple reason: my job. Oh, is it classic. But I need to keep you on the hook, so I’m not gonna tell you what it is until the end. My job is so classic it made me decide to consider what truly are the most classic summer jobs. So for this summer-edition of the Newswire, I present the top 10 most classic summer jobs:
10. Dog walker: For the first few, we’ve got jobs that technically are year-round jobs. Yeah, you can walk a dog any time of year, but I’m picturing a little kid biking around the neighborhood on a hot summer day knocking on doors and offering to walk dogs. It might not be the most classic, but that’s why it’s at the bottom.
9. Car washer: OK now I’m picturing some teens in swimsuits washing cars to save their favorite rec center. Then one person accidentally splashes another, they splash back, and it’s a whole water fight! You can’t tell me you didn’t read that and think classic.
8. Coaching sports teams: This is another year round job, but I think it gets more classic in the summer. Teaching a bunch of kids how to play baseball so they can beat the rival town in the summer league? Sounds like a summer blockbuster waiting to happen.
7. Landscaping: You can’t say it’s not a classic sight when you roll past some sweaty teen mowing some old geezer’s lawn. This also counts gardening and stuff like that, so maybe it bleeds into spring a bit, but lawn work is classic summer work. The only jobs more classic are the rest on this list.
6. Ice cream scooper: Do I even need an explanation for this one? Kind of year-round, but come on.
5. Snack bar attendant: This is a job I had back in the day and it was pretty dang classic. I flipped burgers, fried fries, and I went to the window and yelled “Order up!” Not actually, but some people definitely do, making this an easy number five.
4. Teaching swim lessons: Now we’re in the territory of jobs that actually are summer exclusive. I guess some people can learn to swim in indoor pools, but that’s kind of lame. I’m talking about a bunch of kids in one swimming pool with one flabbergasted teen trying to teach them a backstroke. Now that’s classic.
3. Golf caddy: I hear this is quite the lucrative job, so if you’ve got a connection, hit me up. I mean seriously, why wouldn’t some rich old geezer want to pay some kid to carry all his heavy clubs on a hot day? I feel like this job sucks, but it’s definitely good money and it’s definitely a classic.
2. Lifeguard: Now this is the job most people guess when I say I have the most classic job. It’s true, this job is so classic. When I was a kid this is what I imagined all teenagers did with their free time, just be lifeguards like in the movies. Not even actually guarding lives, just sitting around talking. Now that would be the pinnacle of classic, if it wasn’t for…
1. Camp counselor: Come on. This is the king of classic summer jobs. It can only happen in the summer and it’s in all the movies and TV shows. I mean, that just seems like a natural progression. First you’re a kid, then you evolve into either a lifeguard or a camp counselor. But being a counselor just entails so much more summer then lifeguarding: you could be cooking s’mores, hiking in the woods, all that classic stuff. If it’s a sleepaway camp, that ups the classic by like 10%. If you were being stalked by a serial killer, then that might just be the most classic summer job there is.
So this summer, if you don’t have any of these jobs, go out and do something classic. You deserve it.
By Aidan Callahan | Features Editor