Kicking teenagers out of the store isn't my favorite part of the job, but you wouldn't know that to work with me:

In my younger days, specifically my summer-between-junior-and-senior-year days; my twelve-hours-awake-twelve-hours-asleep days; my walk-four-miles-to-my-friend's-house-to-watch-anime-until-it's-late-enough-for-all-of-us-to-go-to-Shari's-and-drink-soda-for-five-hours days, I recall a moment where a waiter friend of ours had a conundrum.

My friends and I were, as the previous sentence implies, hanging out at Shari's late at night, drinking soda and ordering food as needed. We were, to understate the situation, regulars. Nearly every weeknight, from about 9:30 PM to 2:00 AM, a group of no more than eight but no less than three of us would make the trek and hang out at the restaurant, talking about video games and movies, repeating ridiculous catch-phrases we had created for ourselves, and sarcastically discussing everything we could think of. It was exactly what we would do at our houses, but with free refills.

We had outlasted several rounds of management and waitstaff in our heyday, and at this particular time in our layabout careers we were pretty good friends with most of the employees. One particular night, a friendly, funny, completely insane waiter named Travis was helping us. He seated us, took our drink orders, and came back with a question.

'Guys,' he said, pulling up a chair to the table, 'did you see that group of teenagers by the door?'

Craning our necks out of the booth to see, we implied that, Yes, we did.

'I hate them,' he said. 'They are being rude, and they are being loud, and they are being-'

'Teenagers?' one of us offered.

'Yes! And I hate them!' He sighed. 'And I just wanted to come over here and vent really fast, so thanks.'

'Wanna get rid of them?' I asked as he turned to leave.

He spun on his heel and brought his head down to the table, 'GOD, YES.'

'What you need to do,' I told him, 'is go over to them with a box of crayons. Like the ones you give to small children so they can color their menus.'

'Crayons? Yeah?'

'Crayons. Yeah.'

'Why crayons?'

I smiled. 'Inside of five minutes, those little punks will be throwing their crayons at each other, at other patrons, and at anything that walks by their table. You'll be able to toss them for disorderly conduct.'

He gave them their crayons, and before ten minutes were up, we watched them walking out the door, swearing and glaring the whole way out.

I mention this not because I think it's a great story (though I do), but rather to show that I have, for some time, had a healthy disdain for teenagers. I don't know when it started, but I think it stems from when I was in the eighth grade and I started spending more time with my oldest sister and her friends than with people my own age. She had recently (a few years prior) graduated from high school, and so she was officially a Grown-Up, she and her friends. And the fact that they let me tag along and do things with them, and even laughed at my jokes and listened to what I had to say, made it so that I began to associate myself more with them and their general age group than with my own.

I began to look at teenagers scientifically, as subjects to be studied, rather than as my peers. There were exceptions (I did have some friends through high school), but by and large, I spent my time with people older than myself, and took on their prejudices and opinions. Specifically: Teenagers sucked.

Looking back, no matter how much I tried to distance myself from the general jackassery and solipsism of adolescence, I still succumbed to the impossibility of it all. Just like every teenager. And while my lack of self-awareness during adolescence is a wonderful subject, one that I'm only too happy to go into painful detail about, it is not the purpose of this writing.

The purpose of this writing is to say that I still can't stand 'em. I just wanted to make it clear that my distaste for teenagers started long before I worked in retail.

We had a group of about five of the little worms visit the toy department this evening, and I make no bones about the fact that when I see a group of them I enforce as many rules as possible in the hopes of driving them away from my workcenter. Call it social profiling if you like.

At first I didn't see them; just the evidence of them. Playground balls scattered through the aisles, candy wrappers on the ground, like animal droppings in the wild. Finally, a small Nerf football came flying over an aisle and one of them ran around the corner to catch it.

He saw me and stopped. I showed my lack of enthusiasm plainly on my face. When I am helping or dealing with teenagers in any way, they have already exhausted any benefit of the doubt my virtue of their age. This was clear to the young man who encountered me.

I dropped my arms to my side, raised a disdainful eyebrow at him and asked, simply, 'Really?'

'Umm...' he began, truly testing his vocabulary, 'I guess not.' He picked up the football and walked back to his friends.

I saw them more and more over the next few moments, always limiting their horseplay when they knew I was just around the corner. They seemed to have gotten the hint and so I went about my business.

Moments later, I saw them tossing giant play-balls amongst themselves, bouncing them off shelves, targeting display signs. One of them got a bullseye and a signing display came crashing down.

'You see, guys?' I yelled at them (yes, yelled), coming down the aisle to them, not caring about the other customers watching us. 'This is why we tell you not to play around in the store.' One of them began making a show of cleaning up the mess and I snapped at him to leave it. Another had been zipping through the aisles on a small scooter.

'Is that your scooter?'

'Yeah...'

'Get off it, now. Don't ride it in my store. Is that your basketball?'

'No...'

'Put it back on the shelf. Next time I have to tell you guys to stop doing anything, you're leaving the store. Got it? Stop being stupid.'

'Man, who's being stupid?'

'You guys are. Stop.'

They left minutes later, taking their brilliant futures with them.

I know...I know that someday my son will be a teenager. This is why I spend as much time as I can with him now; because I know that someday I will have to stuff him into a barrel and feed him through a hole in the side for ten years.

And I will miss him. But I know that, someday, he will understand.

Someday.