Do you remember when you had your first summer job? Maybe you wanted to save up money for a car, or you got the job to gain some work experience. Either way, you knew your summer would be busy, so you told your friends you'd be working but you'd hang out with them the first chance you got.

Flash forward to present day, and the memory of that summer job feels like a nightmare.

Some kids got lucky and worked for their parents in cushy offices, filing papers or sealing envelopes while sipping on overpriced coffee. Others took on hard labor, pushing lawn mowers through fields of untamed and uncut grass in the blistering heat.

No matter which version of a job you had, there was that job, that one summer job that forever changed your view on work, that made your summer miserable. For some, it was the mistake of working for summer camps, thinking that they could handle the sugar high of elementary school children. Or, it was the job that didn't pay all too well, but it was so close to home you could walk, so you stuck through with it until you couldn't take it anymore.

The one that pushed me to the edge was the summer I worked at a roller skating rink. I thought it would be cool, since roller skating was still kind of cool and the music would at least be great. What I didn't know was that we would have at least five summer camps coming in each and every day, with at least 200 kids of all ages running around.

The first week was the adjustment period. I'd go through the regular routine of selling tickets and roller skate upgrades and candies, and I'd clean up around the dining area and whatnot.

Then my summer job became the job from hell.

We hosted birthday parties on weekends, and weekend sessions ran differently from weekday sessions. We only had half an hour between sessions on Saturdays to completely clean the rink, re-stock, rearrange the mountains of skates in the skate room, close out checks for birthday parties, and politely but urgently usher out remaining parents and kids for the next session.

I never understood the need to be rude or disrespectful to anyone, let alone a poor high school kid working a summer job. A lot of parents would get up in our faces because something didn't go as they wanted it, or their kid wanted more skating time. I was 16 at the time. I had no idea how to handle an angry parent without crying.

My managers weren't the best lot either. One of them, who we shall call Robert, made working at the rink even more miserable than it needed to be.

Next to my register in the ticket sales room, was a plastic-type window. It annoyed me to death anytime a kid would run up to the window and knock on it, as if I was an animal in a glass tank. So I put up a sign that read, "Please don't tap on the glass. It makes us nervous" with a doodle of a goldfish. Well, Robert didn't like that too much, and stormed into the room and began questioning my authority on who I was to put up signs like that and why I thought it would be okay.

He also favored some of the other employees more than others, so their treatment was obviously less harsh. Some of them were basically running the rink themselves as "shift leaders," and they would be the ones to check us out at the end of a long day. Robert didn't care for most of us, except his precious little protégé, who we'll call Tommy.

Tommy was one of the people that skated around the rink and made sure everyone was okay. He basically was paid to skate around all day. So Tommy would skate all day and he would flirt with any girl he saw at the rink, even in front of Robert. But, since they were tight, it was all okay.

During the week, when all the summer camps were present, it was always madness. There would be kids trying to pay for candy bars ($1.25 a pop) with a dime and six pennies. Kids would be sitting in the middle of the lobby area, crying for no apparent reason. Camp counselors didn't seem to have a grip on anything that was happening, not that they really cared.

At the end of every work day, I would tell myself that it was just for the summer, and it would be over soon. That summer would be the longest summer of my life, and the sounds of screaming children cracked out on sugar sticks would forever echo in my head, but it taught me a valuable life lesson- never work at a skating rink.

Summer jobs are the only bad part about summer, and I feel for anyone who has experienced a bad summer job. The time will come when we can have a day off and actually enjoy our summer, but until then, we've got to keep working and keep pushing until the very end. If you've never had a summer job, or claim to have never had a "bad summer job," consider yourself lucky.