In the hospitality industry, careless tourists who flippantly harass locals are considered especially heinous. On the vacation island of Martha’s Vineyard, the dedicated service industry employees who deal with these fascinatingly terrible specimens of human beings are members of an elite squad known as the Islanders.

These are our stories.

Growing up on Martha’s Vineyard is a weird experience. The winters are dismal, the public high school is in constant shambles, and everything is comically overpriced. On the other hand, the summers are lively, the sunsets are beautiful, and the opportunities to rake in summer savings are abundant.

However, the summers bring more than sandy days on the beach and big tips. With summer, come tourists and summer people.

Some, I assume, are good people. But after having worked at various retail and country club jobs over the past seven years, I can say with authority that the majority of the Vineyard’s visitors are just inconsiderate enough to get under the skin of us humble hospitality folks.

And who’s to blame them? They’re just trying to make the most out of their vacation! But I don’t know when disobeying traffic laws and violently ignoring the presence of any and all other human beings in one’s own immediate vicinity became the prerequisite for a delightful respite from the monotony of one’s day-to-day life.

For example, if I get body-checked off of the sidewalk into traffic while wearing heels one more time, I think I might actually die because that is an extraordinarily dangerous situation.

Or, if I ask one more person how their day is going only to be met with a vacant stare as the waltz past me and deeper into the store at which I spend eight glorious hours of virtually every day of my life, I might actually start to believe I’m invisible and wild hijinks will be inevitable.

Or, if I see one more vehicle with New York plates throw on its hazard lights as to be able to park apparently anywhere (i.e. the middle of the road, the bike path, in a cross-walk, at a busy intersection), I might just start weeping for humanity, as this will undoubtedly be the symbol that the Purge™ has finally begun.

If I could have one wish, I would wish that the visitors to our little island could revel in the irony of their shrieking over car horns as they're pulling some kind of horrific vehicular maneuver that "I'm on vacation!"

At the end of the day, one of the most frustrating thing about spending a lifetime on the Vineyard is attempting to reconcile the incredible privilege of being able to live in such a beautiful and interesting place with being constantly confronted by barrages of strangers frantically blazing their trail to a perfect vacation.

But all of this can be redeemed by those of us on the Vineyard by remembering that at least we’re not on Nantucket.