What jobs have you had?

When people ask what jobs I’ve had, I never know where to begin.

Technically, these were only my summer jobs. Unofficially, they were an education in human nature, tax evasion, counterfeit goods, workplace paranoia, and the curious ways adults justify exploiting teenagers.

I grew up by Lake Balaton, Hungary’s favourite holiday destination. Summers were absolute madness. Tourists poured in, businesses made their money for the year, and cheap student labour was in high demand. Illegal student labour was even cheaper.

By the age of thirteen, I had already entered the workforce.

My first job was washing dishes in an ice cream parlour. I was thirteen, despite fourteen being the legal minimum age for employment at the time. The solution was simple: if anyone asked, I was Aunt Eta’s niece.

If I heard the words “Five o’clock!” shouted from the front, I was to run.

That was apparently the warning signal that labour inspectors had arrived.

They never did.

The wages were miserable, but the real problem was spending entire days standing in a tiny, dark kitchen scrubbing endless piles of dishes. In an attempt to keep me from quitting, they offered a special employee benefit: I could finish off the tubs of ice cream when they were nearly empty.

I enthusiastically accepted.

The resulting stomach ache was spectacular.

Shortly afterwards, I resigned.

My next challenge was the famous Huray Market in Balatonfüred.

Imagine forty degrees Celsius. Now imagine standing under plastic sheets all day, turning forty into what felt like fifty. From late June until the end of August, with only Sundays off.

Oddly enough, I didn’t hate it.

The other sellers were good company, and for the first time I felt part of a community. I sold jewellery with counterfeit branding that Western tourists couldn’t buy fast enough. Here I was Aunt Anna’s niece.

Once again, I had a cover story.

The counterfeit goods brought a new problem: customs officers.

If customs appeared anywhere near the market, the news travelled at lightning speed. Stalls were dismantled, stock vanished, and innocent-looking tables appeared almost instantly.

Tax inspectors were another matter entirely.

We were only supposed to give receipts to people who looked like tax inspectors.

The problem was that tax inspectors knew this.

They became extremely good at not looking like tax inspectors.

Naturally, I got it wrong.

My boss received a fine and spent weeks reminding me that it was entirely my fault.

I was fourteen.

By the end of the summer I was so exhausted that my parents once had to break down the front door of the house after I fell asleep and failed to respond to repeated knocking, doorbells, and increasingly desperate attempts to wake me.

They decided I was done.

The following summer I chose what I thought would be a safer option: a fashion boutique.

The owner was a wealthy older woman who ran the shop mostly for her own entertainment. There were no counterfeit goods, no customs officers, and no frantic stall evacuations.

There was, however, boredom.

Excruciating boredom.

Entire afternoons were spent moving clothes from one rail to another for no obvious reason. Meanwhile, the owner repeated the same stories every day about how beautiful she had been in her youth, how much she regretted marrying a rich older man, and how she had wasted the best years of her life.

Every story ended the same way.

“You won’t make the same mistake, will you?”

I kept nodding, but I could not care less about her regrets.

I was fifteen.

While she entertained me with her life lessons, her equally elderly second husband entertained himself by making inappropriate comments whenever she wasn’t around.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one.

The owner of the neighbouring shop, a middle-aged man who used to have connections to the mafia and was generally known as a dodgy character, also developed an interest in me. Looking back, it is astonishing how little anyone tried to hide these intentions. He openly stated that he wanted to pursue me before I turned sixteen.

I don’t even know what the law was in Hungary in the late 1990s.

I do know that the culture largely looked away.

At first, I secretly enjoyed the attention. It made me feel grown up. Like a woman rather than a child.

Thankfully, my parents realised what was happening before anything could really happen, and stepped in. They sat me down, gave me a very direct reality check, and persuaded me to leave.

Looking back, I am grateful I did not become a mafia child bride.

My final teenage summer job lasted three years.

I worked behind the bar of a small arcade in a campsite by the lake.

The schedule was brutal: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., then 4 p.m. until 11 p.m. Every day. No days off.

My grandparents lived about three kilometres uphill from the campsite. Every morning I cycled down. During the afternoon break I cycled back up. Then down again. Then back up at night.

Combined with standing all day behind the bar, I developed excellent leg muscles.

The job sold itself through atmosphere rather than working conditions.

The Danish and Dutch tourists were friendly. I made friends from all over Europe. Summer evenings buzzed with energy and possibility.

The owners, however, were awful.

They were an older couple obsessed with the idea that their staff might steal from them.

From time to time they would deliberately leave banknotes lying around to see whether anyone took them.

They also had a habit of declaring that money was missing from the till, creating a huge drama, accusing everyone indirectly, and then eventually finding the missing cash in their own purse or pocket.

The girl before me was sacked for stealing, and they did it right in front of me.

After three summers of witnessing these performances, I became increasingly convinced that theft wasn’t the issue.

Paranoia was.

Even then I couldn’t understand why they didn’t simply install a camera.

It would have saved all of us a great deal of stress.

Perhaps they enjoyed the drama.

I certainly didn’t.

By the end, they had messed with my head so thoroughly that I sometimes doubted my own memory and judgment. I promised myself I would never again work in a job where I was responsible for handling money.

That was my last summer job.

By then I was tired.

Not physically tired, although there was plenty of that.

I was tired of spending every summer watching other teenagers enjoy their freedom while I stood behind counters in forty-degree heat earning peanuts. Tired of being manipulated by adults. Tired of being treated as disposable labour.

I realised something important.

Life is short.

There is more to it than peanuts.

So for the next few summers I refused to work. Even if it meant having almost no money at all.

And unlike many of my teenage employment decisions, that is one I have never regretted.