If you are one of the responsible high school students who has chosen to undertake a part-time job, I commend you. However, taking a part-time job in high school tends to present students with weird or uncomfortable encounters. In addition to supplying you with a plethora of stories that will be more funny when you’re retelling them than when you’re actually living them, these encounters build character. They’re life lessons wrapped in strangeness.

Allow me to explain.

Last year, I worked at an ice cream store where a truly unimaginable magnitude of drama went down behind an unassuming, brightly decorated counter.

There was the time I went into the walk-in freezer to collect some pints of ice cream with a coworker, both of us new to the job, only to have the lights shut off and the door locked behind us. As I shivered in the arctic blackness of the freezer, she clawed at the door for a solid three minutes, shrieking a string of profanities and probably anticipating this as the end of her life. It was less than a full minute before our captor, another coworker, pulled open the freezer door, laughing hysterically.

That was my first day working there. Naturally, I was in for quite a ride.

The next three hundred some days working at the ice cream shop included overhearing a story of one employee burning her butt and thighs by sitting on a grill, the same employee buying a $500 bag of weed that turned out to be dirt, another employee getting arrested, then (completely unrelatedly) getting into a fight with yet another employee, which led to the banana split knives being mysteriously confiscated.

Those are only the first few examples to pop into my head. My experience working at the ice cream store opened my eyes to some truly absurd behaviors, but I wouldn’t trade them for normalcy given the opportunity. I don’t think I could have made it through the five hour shifts had my time there been half as bizarre, and I wouldn’t have been exposed to such a random and eclectic group of people.

Now, at my current job, the weird occurrences are different, but still unabashedly present.

The other day, I was sitting placidly at the reception desk when from behind me I heard a gruffly uttered, “Woof!”

It was not a dog. It was a human being. And this was not the first time this particular human being has come up behind me and said, “Woof!” with the sole intention of making me jump.

I’m telling you, you don’t know “weird” until you’ve worked a job in high school.

But the little oddities are simply part of the task and not even a significant part. The rest of our time on the job is mostly spent learning how to reconcile a bank account, learning how to answer a phone with a memorized statement or learning about being dependable.

No matter where I work, I am unfailingly equipped with an arsenal of awkward and utterly bizarre interpersonal experiences. This is not to say I don’t enjoy any aspects of having a job, or that I haven’t gained anything from working those jobs. You have to take the good with the weird, because ultimately, you’re learning either way.

Even if it means being barked at.