Tales from fast food Hell
With the school year starting and thousands
of students flooding into London, there's
going to be some stiff competition battling
over the few available jobs. After months of
searching, you might abandon your hope of
landing that dream job, become desperate, and
start applying anywhere…including fast food
restaurants. Before jumping on that ship, let
me paint you a picture of what it's like to work
in the greasy underbelly of the fast food world.
The Training
Working in the exciting world of fast food was my very first job and for some reason the one I held onto the longest. I started when I was 15, excited to be working at my very first job and making my own money. This feeling quickly faded.
The interview is where your future manager decides where your unique skills could best be utilized. If you can speak a couple of English words and can push buttons without having a total mental breakdown, she'll stick you on front counter to take orders. If you can't manage that, you'll get stuck on grill. I faked my way to front counter.
The training at fast food places is so in depth and precise, you could swear they were trusting you with transporting plutonium through a minefield of puppies. I soon realized that the less important job you have, the more training you'll receive.
I remember my manager telling me that people often don't get this right the first time, while showing me in detail on how to use the very complicated broom. That's right, they teach you how to sweep properly, because someone in the past screwed it up so badly that now it must be included in training, and there are helpful training books and guides posted everywhere in case you forget the proper procedure.
Everything was done a certain way, from table cleaning to pickle placement on the burgers. (Pickles are friends, not lovers. They shouldn't touch.) It was a well-oiled machine run by the oily teenagers working there.
The Customers
Working the front counter of a fast food restaurant for even just one week will quickly acquaint you with the “regulars.” These people come in every single day and get the exact same order, rain or shine. Most often, they are retired people who hobble into the store to enjoy our sub-par coffee and stale muffins. They would sit there from morning to night, getting refill after refill like it was their day job, and for some of them, I guess it sort of was. The problem was that they acted like they had diplomatic immunity; it didn't matter if the line of customers was going out the door, they would happily butt in front and expect to be served.
However bad the “olds” were, they weren't as bad as the immobile blobs who actually ordered food. When the same people come in every day and got a triple-bypass burger, large fries and a chocolate shake, you just want to sit them down and tell them to get help. You were basically working a double job: one as fast food worker and one as the Grim Reaper, handing customers their slow death on a plastic tray.
The Co-Workers
If you're ever wondering how the hell people can work at these places day after day for low pay, long hours and verbal abuse by customers, the answer is drugs — everyone is on drugs. People are so baked in these places that most of the store's profits come from the employees eating on breaks. It didn't matter if it was the morning, afternoon or graveyard shift, groups of people young and old go out beside the dumpsters and smoke up to handle making hamburgers and fake smiling at customers' stupid faces for eight hours.
You soon realize that at these places, safety protocol and cleanliness get thrown out the window when the restaurant is busy — that's when serving the customers their food and getting them out of the restaurant is the number one objective. Managers often turned a blind eye when it got busy and it changed from a restaurant into a free-for-all. Drop a chicken nugget on the floor? Dust it off and hand it out. Sneeze while making a burger? Snot adds extra protein. Drop a spatula inside the ice cream machine? Say it's a new promotional flavour. As long as the customer didn't see, everything was fair game. To quote Henry Winkler in The Water Boy, “What momma don't know can't hurt her.”
Every fast-food place always has one manager who just takes his job way too seriously. He feels entitled to boss you around and make your job a living hell because he wears a different coloured shirt and makes $1.40 an hour more than you. My manager, let's call her “Rochelle,” was a lifer. (Lifer: (noun) A person who works at a low-level job for so long that it becomes their entire life.) Rochelle would constantly make me stay late after my shift was over to scrub down the fry machine or mop the entire lobby floor. When she was feeling particularly evil, she would send me into the play area to clean up old pee and God knows what else out of the slides with nothing but a rag and a spray bottle. I don't know how children so small can hold so much liquid.
The Stench
You never really do get that stink off of you. Even as I'mwriting this, I can smell the grease of the fries and hamburgers lingering on my grease-stained skin. It wasn't just my work uniform that stunk no matter how hard I washed it; the stink seeped onto any clothes I brought into the store. I thought my backpack and school clothes would be safe, but that five second walk through the kitchen to the break room was enough for the stink to latch onto the fibres forever. My children's children will inherit this smell; it sunk into my DNA and forever makes the Dunster lineage a bunch of greasy fry-smelling people. Sorry, kids, good luck with that one.
The Great Escape
After a good four years, I decided it was time for me to grow up and get a real job. I handed in my two-week notice when I was 19 years old. This was because I wanted to work somewhere full-time and make more money, but mostly because some of the new employees they hired were young enough to not know who Vanilla Ice was. I had a nightmare of turning into that creepy guy who still works there and goes on in the break room telling stories when a hamburger cost a nickel and you'd bring your best girl here for a date before hitting up the quarry to skinny-dip.
My advice is: stay in school and work hard at it so you don't end up being a lifer. If you do end up on that path, remember become a manager get all the free food in the world and to splurge on yourself and buy some good weed from the kids behind the dumpster.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.
The Training
Working in the exciting world of fast food was my very first job and for some reason the one I held onto the longest. I started when I was 15, excited to be working at my very first job and making my own money. This feeling quickly faded.
The interview is where your future manager decides where your unique skills could best be utilized. If you can speak a couple of English words and can push buttons without having a total mental breakdown, she'll stick you on front counter to take orders. If you can't manage that, you'll get stuck on grill. I faked my way to front counter.
The training at fast food places is so in depth and precise, you could swear they were trusting you with transporting plutonium through a minefield of puppies. I soon realized that the less important job you have, the more training you'll receive.
I remember my manager telling me that people often don't get this right the first time, while showing me in detail on how to use the very complicated broom. That's right, they teach you how to sweep properly, because someone in the past screwed it up so badly that now it must be included in training, and there are helpful training books and guides posted everywhere in case you forget the proper procedure.
Everything was done a certain way, from table cleaning to pickle placement on the burgers. (Pickles are friends, not lovers. They shouldn't touch.) It was a well-oiled machine run by the oily teenagers working there.
The Customers
Working the front counter of a fast food restaurant for even just one week will quickly acquaint you with the “regulars.” These people come in every single day and get the exact same order, rain or shine. Most often, they are retired people who hobble into the store to enjoy our sub-par coffee and stale muffins. They would sit there from morning to night, getting refill after refill like it was their day job, and for some of them, I guess it sort of was. The problem was that they acted like they had diplomatic immunity; it didn't matter if the line of customers was going out the door, they would happily butt in front and expect to be served.
However bad the “olds” were, they weren't as bad as the immobile blobs who actually ordered food. When the same people come in every day and got a triple-bypass burger, large fries and a chocolate shake, you just want to sit them down and tell them to get help. You were basically working a double job: one as fast food worker and one as the Grim Reaper, handing customers their slow death on a plastic tray.
The Co-Workers
If you're ever wondering how the hell people can work at these places day after day for low pay, long hours and verbal abuse by customers, the answer is drugs — everyone is on drugs. People are so baked in these places that most of the store's profits come from the employees eating on breaks. It didn't matter if it was the morning, afternoon or graveyard shift, groups of people young and old go out beside the dumpsters and smoke up to handle making hamburgers and fake smiling at customers' stupid faces for eight hours.
You soon realize that at these places, safety protocol and cleanliness get thrown out the window when the restaurant is busy — that's when serving the customers their food and getting them out of the restaurant is the number one objective. Managers often turned a blind eye when it got busy and it changed from a restaurant into a free-for-all. Drop a chicken nugget on the floor? Dust it off and hand it out. Sneeze while making a burger? Snot adds extra protein. Drop a spatula inside the ice cream machine? Say it's a new promotional flavour. As long as the customer didn't see, everything was fair game. To quote Henry Winkler in The Water Boy, “What momma don't know can't hurt her.”
Every fast-food place always has one manager who just takes his job way too seriously. He feels entitled to boss you around and make your job a living hell because he wears a different coloured shirt and makes $1.40 an hour more than you. My manager, let's call her “Rochelle,” was a lifer. (Lifer: (noun) A person who works at a low-level job for so long that it becomes their entire life.) Rochelle would constantly make me stay late after my shift was over to scrub down the fry machine or mop the entire lobby floor. When she was feeling particularly evil, she would send me into the play area to clean up old pee and God knows what else out of the slides with nothing but a rag and a spray bottle. I don't know how children so small can hold so much liquid.
The Stench
You never really do get that stink off of you. Even as I'mwriting this, I can smell the grease of the fries and hamburgers lingering on my grease-stained skin. It wasn't just my work uniform that stunk no matter how hard I washed it; the stink seeped onto any clothes I brought into the store. I thought my backpack and school clothes would be safe, but that five second walk through the kitchen to the break room was enough for the stink to latch onto the fibres forever. My children's children will inherit this smell; it sunk into my DNA and forever makes the Dunster lineage a bunch of greasy fry-smelling people. Sorry, kids, good luck with that one.
The Great Escape
After a good four years, I decided it was time for me to grow up and get a real job. I handed in my two-week notice when I was 19 years old. This was because I wanted to work somewhere full-time and make more money, but mostly because some of the new employees they hired were young enough to not know who Vanilla Ice was. I had a nightmare of turning into that creepy guy who still works there and goes on in the break room telling stories when a hamburger cost a nickel and you'd bring your best girl here for a date before hitting up the quarry to skinny-dip.
My advice is: stay in school and work hard at it so you don't end up being a lifer. If you do end up on that path, remember become a manager get all the free food in the world and to splurge on yourself and buy some good weed from the kids behind the dumpster.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.
