Whether you ever stocked grocery stores or landed a position as a lifeguard at the pool, you know how dreadful these jobs can be. While those experiences lead to the person we are today, our memories often carry a fair amount of icy moments too. Although many excited teenagers feel let down when their part-time positions fail to live up to their expectations, they sure make for entertaining stories.

So this recent hashtag challenge was all about the funniest and weirdest #WorstSummerJob stories. To kick the thread off, Jimmy Fallon started by tweeting: "My friend went on a really bad Tinder date one night. She went on a job interview a week later and her date was giving the interview. In both situations, there was no follow-up meeting."

However, it turns out that people over on Twitter definitely had it worse. Some of the responses include real gems such as fighting ducks while trying to clean a small island and watching jars of jam traveling on a conveyor belt for 8 hours straight. If you’re looking for a job right now, these stories can certainly give some food for thought for your future choices.

But however terrible some summer jobs can be, they are often seen as a rite of passage for many kids who set out to learn more about the world and learn some valuable life lessons along the way. According to a blog post on KidsHealth, these temporary gigs have plenty of benefits and can teach people valuable life skills.

First, they provide teens with the opportunity to develop and improve their interviewing skills. And the more jobs they apply for, the better they will get once they seek out to get their one-of-a-kind dream job. Moreover, it can benefit them while trying to get into college as well.

Another skill young adults gain is familiarizing themselves with rejection and getting better at coping with it. "You may not get the first job you interview for," they wrote. "Rejection happens in life and it can be hard to handle. The more we face rejection, the easier it becomes to move forward and bounce back." Then, stepping out of your comfort zone and putting yourself out there leads to learning something new about yourself. So teens who set out to find a new job can learn new skills and discover new interests. "If you need to save money, you may learn that commitment is necessary to reach your goals. If nothing works out? You may decide to start your own business."

And, most importantly, new jobs can help grow stronger as a person, build self-confidence, and make people feel good about themselves. These new skills teens learn during their first job experiences can open new doors for future opportunities and, of course, look great on their résumés.

Young people seem to see the benefits summer jobs can provide because according to Pew Research Center, teen summer employment is on the rise. After facing a drop after Covid-19, many businesses tried to get back on their feet and hired almost a million more teens in 2021 than in the summer of 2020.

As Drew DeSilver, a senior writer at Pew Research Center explained, last summer was the strongest in years for U.S. teenagers seeking work, when more than 6 million teens had a paying job for some part of the summer. "Accommodation and food services, arts and recreation, and manufacturing were among the sectors leading the teen hiring surge," he added.

Luckily, economists are sharing predictions that this year, we should see a strong job market for young adults as well. "If that pans out, it would continue a turnaround from the low-water mark of 2010 and 2011 and suggest that the plunge in teen employment during the first pandemic summer of 2020 was an anomaly."

DeSilver pointed out that in 2020, many places that usually employ teens during the summer either completely shuttered or minimized their operations as much as possible due to the pandemic. This meant that the teenagers who often lack experience and skill in a specific area became a less important source of workers for companies. Although last year, when the world started slightly opening up, many of them were facing labor shortages and practically begging for workers to help them out with the needed tasks.

The 2022 summer job outlook for American teens published by the Drexel University Center for Labor Markets and Policy last month explained that despite the rapid pace of job creation, there were 1.19 million fewer jobs in April 2022 than in February of 2020, a month before the outbreak of COVID-19.

"However, given the unprecedented labor shortage experienced across the U.S., particularly in industries where teens typically work, teens have a higher probability of being hired by employers," the researchers wrote. They predicted that the summer job market for teens this year will be strong, with an employment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds to be 32.8 percent, the highest since 2007.

"Employers suddenly rediscovered teenagers," Alicia Sasser Modestino, a labor economist at Northeastern University, told The New York Times. She explained that while young people from low-income families might have a harder time finding summer work due to there being fewer opportunities where they live, summer youth employment programs can help.

She stressed that teenagers and students should be opportunistic and look for a job that fits their needs by asking for a higher wage, a better schedule, or negotiating their responsibilities. "This summer, you have an opportunity to be choosy," Ms. Modestino said.