I have a moment during my teenage years that I’m not particularly proud of. I bought something from a scientific catalog called the “Impossiball”. It was basically a half-foam, half-rubber ball that wobbled in the air and didn’t roll down ramps because of its undistributed weight. The magazine described it as “defying gravity,” and I, being the idiot thirteen-year-old that I was, got mad and called the company.

Me: “You guys have some false advertising! When I opened the package, the ball didn’t float!”

Employee: “You’re complaining because a $3 ball doesn’t float in mid-air?”

To this day, I have no idea what I was thinking.

I’m a sixteen-year-old male. I work at a pretty big grocery store that sells beer. The catch, however, is that you need a smart serve and must be at least eighteen years old to sell beer.

Most of the time, customers don’t realize this and don’t read the sign to see which lane sells beer and when I tell them this, they either put up a bit of resistance or just move to another line.

It’s about 11 AM on a Sunday morning shift when a father and his daughter who looks to be around four or five years old come into my lane. I don’t realize that they have beer since they have a large cart full of items.

The father acts kind, asking me how I am, and I begin to scan his items. However, I get to the beer and kindly tell him that I cannot scan the beer because I’m not of age and don’t have a smart serve.

This leads to the father getting a little annoyed and after much pushback, makes me call somebody who does have a smart serve to override his beer because his having that six-pack of blue ribbon is just so important.

Somebody comes to override the beer and tells him politely that he should watch out for the beer lane sign next time because the company could get in trouble for a minor selling alcohol.

I kid you not, this guy freaks out and begins to yell, dropping the f-bomb on multiple occasions, going on about how they shouldn’t hire people under eighteen if it will, and all of this other ridiculous crap. All in front of his FOUR-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER.

He then proceeds to call the manager, complaining to him, and then once I finish scanning him out, he grabs the receipt right out of my hand and tells me to go f*** myself.

The manager ended up talking to me after, commending me for the way I handled the situation and we laughed about it.

My aunt was a stereotypical wild child as a teenager. She partied, drank, and even made explosives and blew up random junk with her friends. Neither of her siblings ever did anything like that, so she drove my grandparents up the wall.

One night, my aunt was getting ready for a party and decided to wear a skimpy crop top and low-rise pants that were popular at the time. She went downstairs to leave, only to be met with my grandfather, who just about blew a gasket when he saw what she was wearing.

Grandfather: “No. Absolutely not. Go put a different shirt on.”

She huffed and puffed but went back upstairs and came down with a different, sufficiently modest shirt. My grandfather didn’t look up from his newspaper.

Grandfather: “Take the shirt out of your purse, [Aunt].”

She yanked the crop top out of her purse and slammed it down on the kitchen table before leaving to go to the party. My aunt is now a nurse and mother of three, and she and my grandfather both laugh at this story, though she still says she doesn’t know how he could’ve known that the crop top was in her purse.

I have always been interested in electronics and did a lot of reading and studying on my own, and I was very good at buying things at swap meets and repairing them and reselling them as a teen. For my first real paying job, a friend of my mom knew a guy who ran a place that supplied answering machines to businesses. They were new tech back then. She said he was desperate for someone who could fix them as he had ones with issues spilling over the shelves, so I went to see him.

It was an interesting meeting — a middle-aged businessman and me. I was fifteen or so. We kind of eyed each other.

Owner: “Can you fix these machines?”

I was pretty sure I could, and when he pulled out the service manuals for them, he had a couple that were based on the same base, and I was quite sure.

Owner: “What do you want to be paid an hour?”

Me: “I get $3 an hour for watching the kid next door on occasion, so… $3 an hour?”

He pondered that for a minute and made me an offer I could not refuse: $10 cash for each one I fixed. I quickly agreed, and I agreed to stop by after school the next day with my tools to dig in.

The next day, I showed up, and he took me to the back. Sure enough, he had a couple of big sets of industrial shelves overflowing with the things. I started pulling them off and looking at them. He gave me a smile and drifted off and left me to it.

I quickly discovered this guy had no tech skills whatsoever. None. Nada. Most of them had a brainlessly simple problem. The outgoing message was kept on a big loose loop of tape with a metallic splice at the end/beginning that went past two posts; this told the thing the tape had gone all the way around and to stop and turn on the cassette recorder for the incoming message. The splices and the posts got dirty and did not make good contact, so the tape would just go on forever.

About three minutes with some alcohol and a Q-tip cleaning those parts as well as the other things in the tape path not only had them going again but sounding like new. I cleaned the front panels up with some spray cleaner and hit the wooden cases with some wood cleaner, and they would look like new. I spent more time carefully coiling up the power cords than repairing them, but when I was done, they looked and sounded like new.

The owner came back to check on me a couple of hours later.

Owner: “I just came to see if you’re going to be able to crank one out for me tonight.”

I pointed to a pile of five or so.

Me: “Check those out.”

His eyes just about popped out of his head.

I got nearly ten done a night for a while. It did slow down a bit once I got the easy ones knocked out, but I just kept picking the low-hanging fruit, learning more and more about them, and getting deeper and deeper into them. He also had units coming in all the time, so I did still have some easy ones mixed in with the bunch.

I thought he was going to soil himself when we settled up at the end of the first week; I had spent like three afternoons there and gotten nearly thirty of them fixed. It was a really good payday. He was not super happy with our agreement, but he had proposed it, and he had someone who was kicking a** getting them fixed, so he was cornered into honoring it. It was not lost on him that he could have been paying me like $12 a night and I would have been happy with that, but he thought he would get the better of me.

My first official job was bagging groceries at a local grocery store. The management was bad, the hours were okay, and the pay was minimum wage; I suppose it was just your typical job for most high school kids.

A lot of the staff for cashiers and baggers were high school kids. We were given the bottom-of-the-totem-pole jobs — running carts, bagging, and cleaning — and if you were sixteen or older, you got to do cashier work, too.

We were overused and underpaid, and some of the teenage staff took advantage of their knowledge of the store for some five-finger discounts. I can’t say I was helpful on either end because I never spoke up against those that did it, but I never helped them, either. This behavior went on for the last eight to ten months or so that I worked there.

I, along with a handful of other high schoolers, ended up quitting and going on to different jobs at the same time.

About a month after I quit, I stopped into [Grocery Store] to pick up some candy. As I was walking through, I passed my friend who had worked there but quit when I did. He (sixteen years old) was there with his younger brother (thirteen) and sister (fifteen). I headed back toward the candy aisle, browsed for a bit, picked out some stuff, and just kind of wandered for a few minutes and said hi to a couple of folks I used to work with.

I made my way to the front of the store, and I saw my friend and his siblings off to the side, near the front office. My friend was nearly in tears and was freaking out, and his siblings were crying. I walked over to him quickly.

Me: “What happened?!”

Friend: “[Floor Manager] caught us stealing. Now the store is trying to decide what they want to do about it.”

I didn’t stay to see the outcome, but I would later hear from him about it.

My friend was one of the high schoolers who would steal things, and since he did it so much and never got caught while he worked there, he decided to show his brother and sister how to do it. I guess his cockiness got the best of him because he got caught and was now facing consequences.

In the end, his parents were called to the store. My friend had to pay for everything they tried to steal that day, and then he and his siblings were banned from the store forever. Cops would not be involved as long as they don’t come back to the store.

He was also grounded for three months, and his parents forced him to donate his free time to their church, where he had to do janitorial work under the supervision of the pastor and the head janitor. So, when he wasn’t at school or his current job, he was at the church donating his time.