Get a Job (Da-da-da-da, da-di-da-di-da-da)

Every time someone tells me about the fabulous summer experiences their high school and college-aged kids are having -   high-falutin, résumé building internships where they're involved in strategic planning for GE; heart-warming, character building weeks spent planting yams in Nigeria; life-broadening, passport building trips to Machu Pichu - I think to myself: What????? Don't kids actually get crappy jobs anymore.

Well, according to a Boston Globe article by Marcella Bombardieri, some kids still do - and, interestingly, colleges are starting to look favorably on it during the application process.

Bombardieri wrote about some local kids with the kinds of job we held in days of yore - jobs like ice cream scooper and school janitor - and came up with a startling statistic:

Only 49 percent of American teenagers ages 16 to 19 were working -- or even seeking a job -- last month, down from 60 percent in June 2000, according to the US Labor Department.

Which would more than account for the estimate given by Lee Coffin, Tufts University's dean of undergrad admissions, that "only about a quarter of Tufts applicants these days have ever held down a steady job."

Coffin for one likes to see a job-job on a kid's applications.

"When we read an [application] folder with work experience we usually comment on it in a very favorable way. If he works 20 hours a week at Stop & Shop, we'll say, 'That's really refreshing and old-fashioned. Good for him.' "

Almost everyone I know had a few truly crappy jobs along the way. Most of us put in at least one summer stint working in a factory or something equally mind-numbing and dreadful. This was, of course, in the days when unskilled, minimum wage factory jobs were plentiful. I spent one summer polishing combat boots in a shoe factory. While I was polishing combat boots, my friend Marie was working in a gun factory. She was not, however, making guns, which was a higher-skilled job than you'd get for the summer. She worked in the office, but you could say that in those days before our consciousnesses were raised, we were doing our Rosie-the-Riverter bit for the Vietnam War. While I was making those combat boots - regular old your-mother-wears-combat boots for the U.S. Army, and paratroop boots for the Vietnamese army (boy, those guys had small feet) - Marie's company was making M-16's.

I had other friends who worked in plastics factories, pie factories, sausage factories.

If we didn't work in factories - and most of us didn't for more than one summer - we worked as waitresses or busboys. As lifeguards. As book shelvers in the library. Doing construction. Bagging groceries. Moving furniture. Working retail. Showing kids in the park how to make gimp lanyards.

If I'm remembering this correctly, one of my cousin's worked one summer as a garbage man. (Despite, or perhaps because of, this job, he went on to become an extremely successful business executive.)

What we learned from our less-than-exciting summer jobs was how to show up. How to deal with strange bosses. How to get along with strange colleagues. How to deal with life's little challenges without mom and dad being around. We also learned just how much fun it is to have however small and temporary a measure of financial independence. Sure, we had to save some of our meager pay "for college", but the rest we got to spend. And we found out the pleasure of nobody being able to tell you you couldn't buy that record album, book, or sweater, because no one could tell you what to do with your own damned money.

In Bombardieri's article, she does talk to a couple of kids at a Tufts interested-student event who haven't figured out the beauty of work.

One kid interviewed, who's father is a Hollywood producer, had to work for one and a half weeks as an office assistant for her father. Maybe it was working for her father, but this kid just didn't find work to her liking.

"I'd wake up and think, 'Oh gosh, not again,' " she said.

A week and a half.

Good luck to you, honey.

Maybe you'll be able to afford to be someone like Paris Hilton.

But if you do end up having to work-work, no matter how carefully you pick your career and your jobs, there'll no doubt be days when you wake up and say, 'Oh, gosh, not again.'

And that, my young friend, is plain and simple a fact of work life. The trick is making sure you find work where the 'not again' days are more than evened out by the 'good day at work' days.

Trust me. Unless you're the world's worst job-picker, you'll have plenty of those.