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S.E. Hinton got it right way back in 1967 in her book, The Outsiders. In it, she describes the social divisions of a group of teenagers growing up in Oklahoma. It's a story that has been around as long as American high schools: socs vs. greasers, jocks vs. burnouts, preps vs. goths. Kids who shop at Abercrombie vs. kids who shop at Hot Topic? Maybe so.

Recently, two teenagers in San Francisco's Bay Area decided to test these social divisions by applying for jobs. Shannon Nichols, normally Abercrombie-clad, gave herself a goth make-over and marched over to the mall with her pal Sarah Adams, who was dressed as a typical Abercrombie teen. (You can read the full article Inside Bay Area website.)

When she asked for a job application at the A&F store, goth Nichols says she was barely acknowledged. "When it was my turn, [the cashier] actually turned to the man behind me and asked if she could help him. He told her that I was first."

Over at Hot Topic, preppy Adams fared slightly better. While the cashier there was confused at the job application request, she was a little nicer to Adams.

S.E. Hinton's socs and greasers may have been swallowed up by history, but clearly the same social divisions live on. What kinds of social divisions exist at your high school? Is it unfair to judge others based on their appearance—at work, or anywhere else?

Photos copyright © Inside Bay Area.

Hamburgers are $0.19. A large cup of coffee is $0.10. The daily special—spaghetti and meatballs—is $0.99, and on Sundays senior citizens eat for free all day. These aren't menu prices from fifty years ago—I actually had a ten-cent cup of coffee this weekend, when I spent a few days in my hometown. My town, situated in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, was a booming coal and coke town in the early 1900s and was devastated when the industry moved on. The mansions and grand storefronts along the main street are vacant and crumbling now, shadows of the town's better days.

The ten-cent coffee comes from a small restaurant in the mountains, part of a grocery store—I use the term loosely—that's famous for its rock-bottom prices. The Wall Street Journal once reported on the almost nonexistent overhead that allows the prices to stay so low. Taking advantage of those rock-bottom prices means agreeing to certain conditions: dirt or cement floors; low, leaky ceilings; food not on shelves but in the cardboard boxes it's delivered in; a parking lot so scarred with potholes it looks like a lunar landscape. There are a deli and a bakery, even a drug store. And, of course, that incredible restaurant, where dinner for four people gets you a handful of change from a five-dollar bill.

For me, this store is part of the local fabric, part of the lore of home, one of many details I can use to paint a vivid picture when someone in New York asks me where I'm from. But for many people in my town, this store means the difference between having food and not having it, or not having enough. Everyone knows to stay away the day Social Security checks are delivered—the store is mobbed.

Unbelievably, the store is closing this summer. Moving, to be more accurate—to a clean, large space in a nearly-abandoned shopping mall nearby. The low ceilings, the torn boxes—gone. The restaurant—gone. The reason: Wal-Mart is coming. Drawn to towns like mine, with low income and high unemployment, Wal-Mart is moving in, set to decimate the local color of yet another small community. The store has decided it can't compete in its present form and is bowing to the changes the owners believe it needs to survive.

The store will still exist, but in name only, and I probably won't go back when I visit home again. For me, the loss is quirky, even sentimental, just one less story I'll have to tell at parties. Maybe the locals will be happy with the change—Wal-Mart brings jobs, etc., etc., etc., or so they say. Ten-cent coffee seems, perhaps, like a small thing to lose. But I don't think it is.

If you're at all like me, you consider selling your body to be a last resort. Turns out plenty of people have turned to selling their bodies gleefully and legally—and in some cases, for big money. Chalk up this latest trend to the Internet, that boundless information superhighway, made famous for enabling everything from instant messaging to sending dog poop to people you hate. Now the web has made it possible to offer up your body as advertising space, an opportunity some people have taken to outrageous extremes.

Most of the recent press attention to the growing market of "human advertising space" has focused on Courtney Van Dunk, a senior at the College of New Jersey. After attending a class about alternative advertising, Courtney decided to offer up her abdomen for a summer's worth of Jersey Shore-based advertising—for a fee, she'd sport a temporary tattoo bearing a company's logo and cruise the boardwalk in a bikini, showing off her sponsor. Turns out the winning bid topped $11,000, and ever since, Courtney's ended up sounding like a rock star in all kinds of media coverage. "I did not expect to be so warmly welcomed in the international community," Van Dunk's quoted saying in this local New Jersey article. (Courtney's "product.")

Other considerably less attractive body advertising entrepreneurs have been in the game far longer than Courtney. Take Andrew Fischer, aka "The Forehead Guy." Andrew made headlines worldwide and landed on Good Morning America early this year after he offered up his forehead on eBay to a corporate sponsor for 30 days. Online casino GoldenPalace.com plunked down $37,000 for the right to splash its URL on Fischer's face. (Proof here.)

Not to be outdone by Fischer and his HumanAdSpace.com website, New Yorker Joe Tamargo launched LivingAdSpace.com, a site on which he sells space on his body, with one major twist: his ad spots are permanent tattoos. But despite his promise of lifelong service, Joe hasn't commanded nearly the sums seen by Courtney Van Dunk and the Forehead Guy. Joe's take for permanently etching the logo of SaveMartha.com onto his forearm? Five hundred and ten bucks.

Critics of Joe and his fellow human billboards say they all just need to get a life. At the very least, I'd say they need to get a job.

They come in flavors like Kauai Kolada, Twista Lime, Mocha Taboo, and Midnight Berry. A new kind of bubblegum, or candy, or the latest coffee concoction at Starbucks, right?

Wrong.

These four flavors—along with others like Winter MochaMint and Caribbean Chill—are the names of cigarette flavors created by tobacco giants R.J. Reynolds and Brown & Williamson.

As a result of the Master Settlement Agreement of 1988, tobacco manufacturers agreed to stop directly marketing cigarettes to young people. But their unveiling earlier this year of a group of candy-flavored smokes is surely a step in the opposite direction. These so-called "sweet indulgences" of flavor are only part of the appeal: cigarette giants Kool and Camel use advertisements featuring bright colors, scantily-clad women, and hip-hop icons.

Any why not? Tobacco companies know their marketing works: the majority of U.S. kids who smoke prefer the three most advertised brands, while only half of all adults smoke those brands. Yet the generation of kids currently in their teens and early twenties—sometimes called "Generation Y" or "echo-boomers" by the people struggling to market to them—are often deemed media-savvy, information-saturated, and, crucially, wary of advertising.

What's the truth? Can young people see right through the claims of products aimed at them—like flavored cigarettes—and avoid them? Should they be free to make their own choices, no matter how dangerous?

Whether for cash or for cred, summer jobs are a reality for most high school and college students. But for every life-changing, inspiring summer spent teaching Eskimos how to knit bikinis out of palm fronds, there are always summers spent serving coffee to fanny-packed tourists, flipping burgers, or pulling screaming brats out of the kiddie pool. Here, the SparkNotes staff shares some of its summer job stories. We hope you'll share yours in the comments.

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years at high school, before I was legally able to work in New York state, I secured a job that sounded almost too good to be true: I was promised ten dollars an hour off the books to help a friend-of-a-friend's mother with her children's-party planning business. My new boss, Barbara, picked me up at home one oppressively hot June afternoon. Next to me in the backseat of the car was an enormous black plastic garbage bag filled with something soft and smushy. It stuck to the side of my leg when I slid into the car. Eventually I asked my new boss what she was carting around back there, half-joking about the mafia and bodies sleeping with the fishes.

"That's your costume," Barbara said matter-of-factly.

Costume? It was eighty-seven degrees outside, I was sweating, and I started to sweat some more. I dug my index finger into the black plastic bag until a bit of purple-colored fur poked through. Purple fur could mean only one thing: Barney, that sing-songy, perpetually congested, dinosaurish monster. Mortified, I racked my brain for an escape plan, and briefly considered tossing myself out the car door and onto the broiling asphalt, but just then we pulled up at a house with balloons tied to the mailbox. Party time had arrived.

Once inside the house, I was ushered off into a bathroom, along with the black plastic bag. The kids were corralled in the back yard, eagerly anticipating the arrival of their favorite fey reptile, me. Barbara had told me that it would be hot inside the costume—in fact, she recommended that I strip down to my underwear before putting the thing on. I stepped into the purple fur, shoeless and pantless, trying desperately not to think of others who had sweated there before me. Barney's oversized head stared up at me from where I'd placed it on the toilet bowl lid. I wondered whether I could just leave it there and walk out of the bathroom headless, forever scarring those overstimulated five-year-olds.

Finally, clumsily, I emerged from the bathroom, and walked out the back door like any normal, purple-costume-wearing fourteen-year-old. The kids went berserk, gripping my fur in their grubby little mitts. I could barely see out of the translucent gray material that was to be my periscope—the inside of Barney's mouth—and I was terrified to think that I might fall over and be smothered by thirty five-year-olds consumed with Barney bloodlust. After about fifteen minutes, Barbara stopped the tape recorder, and the loop of "I Love You, You Love Me" finally came to an end. The pink-cheeked mother of the birthday boy pressed a five dollar bill into my hand and gestured toward the house. I was free to go.

Back in my room at home that night, I thought about what I'd buy with my freshly-earned fifteen dollars. Next weekend's assignment—the Bert half of Bert and Ernie—wasn't looking so bad afterall.

After my first year of college, I had quietly decided to become a rock star. As my roommates looked for summer jobs in banking and related fields, I started writing to record companies, thinking somehow a summer internship at one might set me on the path to musical greatness. I was mostly wrong, but not entirely, as I ended up having one of the best summers of my life.

After weeks of hearing nothing from anyone, I received a voice mail left by a woman with a British accent. Turns out she was really British and calling from the real London—from Polygram Records in London. Somehow my resume had made its way there, and they ended up offering me a ten-week internship at the Island Records recording studio in west London.

As I soon learned, some of Island Records' biggest names had recorded in the studio where I worked that summer—everyone from U2 to Bob Marley. My title was technically "Assistant Recording Engineer," but mostly I got tea and crumpets for wannabe grunge rockers—it was the mid 1990s—and I loved it. In the end, my summer internship contributed nothing to my resume and had absolutely no impact on the career I've pursued since. But it was a great time in a great place. Maybe those are the only summer internships truly worth pursuing.

My most horrible job experience was working as a development assistant at 20th Century Fox. It wasn't actually a summer job—it was a real job, a paid job, a post-grad-school job job. Lured by the glitter of Hollywood and the promise of a career making comedy blockbusters, I'd abandoned my perfectly sane editorial position to read scripts for a producing and directing team. Only I didn't read scripts: I fetched double-non-fat-no-foam-extra-hot-cappuccinos; I was yelled at for asking über-producer Paula Weinstein how to spell her name; I dialed calls and patched them through to my boss while he drove his Mercedes home to Malibu and I sat in a deserted office at ten p.m. on a Friday night.

Once, I spent a whole morning hunting down a Power Ranger figure for my boss' son, a bratty five-year-old who had accidentally slammed his thumb in a trailer door on the movie set and needed this expensive toy as consolation. Only I purchased the wrong toy and, as a result, I was called several unprintable names. (Apparently, I should have bought the entire Power Rangers line, just to cover my bases.) When I complained about the incident to a coworker, she told me that I should be grateful. Her former boss threw shoes at her.

I knew the end had come one afternoon when my boss' wife called. As soon as I heard her voice, I realized that I had forgotten to tell him that she had called earlier in the day. Panicked, I ran to the bathroom and hid. I hid in a bathroom stall. I was twenty-seven years old. Suddenly, it seemed so pointless. I was smart, educated, experienced. I didn't need to endure this crap. The next week, my old boss, a boring editorial type, called to tell me a job had opened up. Would I consider coming back to publishing?

I've never looked back.

When I was in high school, I held the typical bad summer jobs. I told slippery little sunburned kids "stop running," "stop splashing," and "no chicken fights" as a country club lifeguard. I wickedly cut all of my fingers simultaneously on a piece of sheet metal as a flunkie for an air conditioning contractor. And I ruined far too many shirts, shoes, and pairs of pants as a housepainter. But my least favorite summer job (which, paradoxically, I held the longest) was making fried dough out of an A-frame trailer at firemen's field days, outdoor concerts, and local fairs across upstate New York. The sweltering, humid, ninety-degree days were bad enough without having to be hunched over a four-foot-long vat of boiling oil and floating dough logs. Twelve hour days standing over molten oil also proved extremely bad for my already-splotchy teenage complexion. Of course, this combination of oil stains, second-degree burns, and zits zits zits ensured that I always felt uncomfortable around the attractive ladies who worked the front of the truck. Don't ask us for powdered sugar 'cause we only use granulated. Don't look too carefully or you might see the dead mosquitos that flew into the overhead light, met a fiery death, and plummeted into the waiting stack of dough. And don't even get me started about the times I had to work out of a ten-foot-tall fiberglass lemon. It was so sticky.

For a summer in college, I waitressed at a country club in my hometown. The job was excruciatingly boring—I was always given the lunch shifts, and getting even one table was rare. I spent long afternoons folding hundreds of linen napkins into fans and flowers that would be used for weddings, baby showers, and "golf outings." I was a college student and had moved away from the town, both of which automatically made me an outsider, so I had plenty of time to overhear conversations and witness, from a distance, milestones in the other kitchen employees' lives. One such milestone involved a pair of twins, both unmarried, both longtime dishwashers. One had a baby and named him Mario. The other, not to be left out, had one too, and named him Jarimir. The twins were extraordinarily pleased with themselves and this display of their Pittsburgh Penguins loyalty. When I returned to the country club the next summer, the twins were gone. They'd quit and formed their own housecleaning business, calling themselves the Tidy Twins.

At this same place, during large parties, we would make only decaf coffee—the reason isn't really clear to me. I had to offer both—"Regular or decaf?"—while knowing it was a blatant deception. "Give me the high octane stuff," someone would say gruffly, and I'd pour the decaf. "Got a long ride home—need to stay awake." More decaf. Somehow, this job managed to be equal parts boring and bizarre.

The summer after sophomore year my engineering professor invited me to research in his lab. I was assigned the task of building a prototype of a small, electromagnetic "rocker," an array of which would produce lift on airplane wings.

First, I had to make a long series of calculations to determine how to build the device. Because the physics and mathematics were beyond anything I had thus far encountered, a graduate student was assigned to bring me up to speed—until it became clear he viewed his tutoring sessions as a free opportunity to hit on me. The intense, solitary days I spent in the library teaching myself were just how I envisioned research would be.

The bulk of my summer, though, I spent ingloriously in the machine shop, milling small chunks of iron into even smaller parts. I stood for hour after hour, day after day, doing nothing but dripping oil to lubricate the working surfaces, watching the precise details of each part slowly emerge according to the programming instructions I fed to the mill. Oil mixed with powdered iron flew everywhere, coating my face and arms and hands with a black sludge I could remove only with industrial-strength soap that turned my skin raw. I was never, however, able to clean the sludge from underneath my fingernails. Even after cutting my nails painfully short, the sludge somehow still squeezed under them, and no amount of scrubbing could remove it. In desperation I even tried wearing latex gloves, which proved quite successful until the head of the machine shop caught me, pointed to the sign forbidding them, and threatened to ban me from his shop if he ever caught me wearing them again.

By the end of the summer I miraculously produced a fully working model to present to the Army officials who oversaw the lab's funding. As I shook the hands of officers, professors, and students after my presentation, I cringed inwardly, hoping no one would notice my ruined hands and fingers, the other result of my cushy research job.

When I was in college, I was led to believe that internships were the only way to get ahead in life. So the summer after my freshman year, I got one at a small theater company. I had never heard of the group before (I found them on Google) and I had no idea what my job would entail, but I was excited about beginning my thrilling life in the theat-uh.

When I arrived on my first day, the company "office" turned out to be the artistic director's apartment. Walking through the place, I noticed that there sure was a lot of circus memorabilia around...which is when I realized I had ended up working at a clown theater. I was stunned, but I stuck it out for two whole days—long enough to learn how to juggle scarves (badly), and to thoroughly humiliate myself at a tumbling class designed for seven- to nine-year-olds (I was told that cartwheeling was a crucial skill I needed in order to adequately fulfill my intern duties). The last straw, though, was the afternoon I spent proofreading a manuscript the director had written about "clown therapy"—a topic I found so disturbing, I made up a family emergency and hightailed it back to the summer camp I'd taught at the previous year. I'm still embarrassed by how unprofessionally I handled the situation, but then I visualize a sad clown leading an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and I get over it.

I've had some crazy summer jobs in my life. In no particular order, I have been a camp counselor, a street performer/torch juggler, a babysitter for three temporarily insane brothers, a house painter, a warehouse sweeper, a law firm "runner," a pro shop cashier, and a boat marina attendant. However, by far, the strangest summer job I ever had was working on the grounds crew at a golf course in Florida.

I know, it may not sound like that crazy a job, but believe me, it was the strangest summer of my life. The requirements for working on the grounds crew at a golf course in Florida basically include: a pulse and a big hat to protect your head from the sun. That's it. So you can imagine the characters that would show up to work every day. Those of you who have seen the movie Caddyshack will have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. I worked with one guy who had no front teeth and refused to wear dentures. He was forty-five. Apparently he had "dropped a boat on his face," which caused his front teeth to turn black before falling out. Another guy suddenly stopped showing up for work one day. We didn't see him for weeks until we finally found out that he had been arrested on an outstanding warrant and was thrown in jail in Alabama. A third guy would hang around the course until nightfall and then wade barefoot through the snake- and alligator-infested swamps around the course looking for golf balls. Another guy refused to drink water during the day, despite temperatures regularly in the low 100s, as he felt he was proving that he was tougher than anyone else on the crew. He would also throw rocks at alligators and taunt them. Cutting the grass on the greens, tees, and fairways seemed of secondary importance to hearing the stories of my fellow coworkers. To this day I still can't figure out how you can drop a boat on your face.