Ice cream keeps me off the streets

My youth and my well-being are for sale. You know what I get in return for giving away such cherished treasures? Minimum wage.\nI, like most everyone, am a slave to The Almighty Dollar. The Dollar says, "Jump!" I say, "How high, Mr. Dollar, sir, and would you like a waffle cone with that?"\nYou see, I work at an ice cream store. I can honestly say the only reason I scoop ice cream is because I get paid to do it. Sometimes I make a sad puppy face when I realize huge chunks of my time are devoted to other peoples' dessert, rather than enjoying the few seconds left of my youth as they slip away like sands through the hour glass.\nIt's times like these when Paul McCartney reminds me of something very important: Money can't buy me love. It can, however, buy me a burrito, which is what I spent all of my tips on the other day.\nLet me take you on a tour of the dark, sinister underbelly of dairy confections.\nPeople are very serious about their ice cream. You should hear the screaming and whining when there is a shortage of cake batter, a popular flavor, especially among the female Greek demographic. Check out this SAT analogy: Sorority girl is to cake batter ice cream as junkie is to heroin.\nFood service jobs have their own special hellish niche. If you've ever worked at a venue that sells edible things, you feel my pain.\nWhile I'm speaking of pain, customers always ask, "Do your hands/arms get tired?" It can be awkward when we tell them the truth. A coworker of mine once candidly said, "Sometimes it makes me wish I didn't have hands."\nWith all my scooping of rock hard, frozen ice cream and squeezing bottles of fudge, I can't help but wonder if I've unknowingly purchased a one-way ticket to Tendonitis Town. While it may sound like a fun spring break destination, I've looked at the brochures, and it's no Cancun.\nAt the start of my ice cream career, I developed my own special variation on tennis elbow. I dubbed it ice cream claw, a disfiguration making me somewhat resemble a velociraptor.\nBesides health side effects, dealing with the general public is any food job's major downfall. A phenomenon often occurs when Joe Customer is presented with choices. His brain simply shuts down. His glazed-over eyes stare blankly ahead and a line forms behinds him.\nMy remedy to this mental phenomenon is to only offer one flavor of ice cream. But I fear my ideas are too revolutionary.\nAlmost as bad as John Q. Public are the ridiculous rules and protocol. I will never forget the day my manager from a previous job pulled me aside to inform me, with a grave tone, that my uniform khaki pants just weren't quite khaki enough.\nThey say these jobs build character. Combining my food service experience, I should have enough to build a life-size replica of the Taj Mahal completely out of character - kind of like Legos, but wiser and with fewer plastic pieces.\nBesides stocking up on the character, I need to buy burritos. And I don't want to wander the streets with a trash bag full of aluminum cans going by the alias of Ashtray McMurphy and returning to my home under a bridge.\nYou might react to my whining by saying, "You're lucky to have a job," or "There are jobs out there that are a million times worse than vending creamy treats."\nYou know what I say to that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.\nAt this point, baffled by my shameless attitude, you stand up on a chair and sing, "You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life, the facts of life .."