We spoke to the chairs-and-umbrellas guy at the Outer Banks

Summer seasonal positions are as plentiful as they are varied. They range from serving lattes in a little tourist trap coffee shop all the way up to working aboard sailing vessels in the Caribbean.

It can be hard to sort through all of this variety to find the job that best suits your specific skills and personality. Some jobs won’t be particularly physically demanding, but they may end up draining you emotionally and mentally to the point of no return.

Chairs and umbrellas is the exact opposite of this. It is not a job for those with faint hearts or weak wills. You will be forced to rise at an hour previously unknown to human beings, travel to the soon-to-be most populated stretch of beach on planet earth and destroy your back muscles as you rock umbrella after umbrella into the sand in a configuration so difficult to solve that Socrates himself would seriously struggle.

Yet even as your body is slowly broken, you will find yourself falling in love with the very things that are causing all of your pain. Something very similar to Stockholm syndrome rapidly begins to set in within the first week of summer.

I interviewed one of my coworkers who has been particularly afflicted by this condition. I asked Little Joe what it was specifically that he liked so much about working chairs and umbrellas.

“I love chairs, but I don’t really like umbrellas,” was his only response. He is so far down the chair and umbrella rabbit hole that he can no longer form a coherent thought about whether or not he really likes what he is doing. But who can really blame him?

A typical day for Little Joe involves waking up at the crack of dawn, scrambling to set up hundreds of chairs and umbrellas in a very specific preconceived order, and then hours of sitting on the beach answering to patrons beck and call as they command him to move an umbrella or to set up five more chairs for their arriving second cousins.

Then, after fielding this abuse for the better part of the day, Little Joe must then take down all of these hundreds of chairs and umbrellas and stack them into a little box ready for their next day of shielding tourists from the sun.

Despite how rough his job sounds, Little Joe honestly loves doing it. He claims he wouldn’t trade it for anything, and it’s probably only partially due to the slow brainwashing that has started to control him. There are some definite benefits to the job.

For one, your job is mostly composed of a pretty grueling work out. By the end of the summer, you’re going to end up in fantastic shape. Even better, when you’re not working out on the job, instead you’re sitting on the beach and chilling out with your friends.

Most of your job is everyone else’s vacation. Even though it is going to drive you a little crazy, and you’re going to end up having an inexplicable infatuation with either chairs or umbrellas (from what I can tell it’s impossible to be in love with both at the same time), you’re going to be hard-pressed to find a better summer job.