Very cool Nate . . . there are times I have wanted to do that in my past jobs but didn't. There are many sitautions/confrontations I wish I could do over again . . . glad you got this one right. I hope that lady learns a little something from that exchange and starts treating others with some respect. Probably not, but at least you got out what you wanted to say . . .
Funny post, Nate. Reminded me of the first job I ever had. I wrote a short story about it some years ago, and it made me just re-read it. It's pretty long, but I'll post it here: “You work mostly from the neck down, but you learn." Lance looked up at me from his stool. I'd been sitting there for an hour reading the paper, waiting for my flight to Chicago. "Couldn't sit down when there was nothing to do." He also worked at McDonalds fifteen years ago. I agreed. "They really have a system, don't they?" "Yeah, but I created my own little space there. I was floor manager for a year and a half before I realized that Big Ron didn't know his shit as well as everybody thought." I looked up from my gin and tonic. "Yeah?" I asked. "Well, I figured out that if you reverse the order of the burger toppings, you could whip them out a little faster." "You changed the order of your regs?" I was incredulous. "How long did this—this heresy go on?" "Yeah, it is kind of funny how hallowed the ritual of condiments is. Always bun-mustard-ketchup-recons-pickle centrally placed. Then cheese/meat, then heel. Well, if you shift things around, you can move a little faster on it. I'd lay out a bunch of buns on the counter so they're ready, slap the cheese down, then the condiments. You could let them just sit there for half an hour like that, because the cheese creates a protective layer to keep the catchup from soaking into the bread. Man, I could move those burgers faster' n any man you ever worked with." Lance looked a little smug, and I might even venture to say slightly nostalgic. "People complain?" "It surprised me, but once in a while they did. They'd actually notice the order was off. They'd say it tasted kind of funny. But then I'd just whip one out for them the right way and they'd be ok with it. You know, I heard a rumor that I always wonder about. They say the McDonalds cheeseburger is the most highly engineered food product of the twentieth century." I ordered another round for me and my new salesman friend from Des Moines. "Yeah?" "Well, people theorize that they had these food engineers design the size and thickness of bun and meat (factoring in that pickle size is a constant), and used a long sequence of blind studies to determine precise allocation of condiments that maximize consumer gratification. More than that, their selection of ingredients is far from an accident. They have engineered the cheeseburger to be the ultimate in utter blandness." "Why? Seems to me the percentages are better in making something that tastes good." "WRONG. They tried that, but what they found was that strong flavor actually is a long-term detriment to cheeseburger enjoyment. If the flavor is too distinctive, you'll only eat it once a month. Now something bland--there are times I eat McDonalds two or three times in a week. "They designed these suckers so that the bun flavor balances out the meat flavor, the mustard balances out the ketchup, pickle balances out the reconstituted onion. You think the special sauce is a big deal? They spent a lot more time figuring out their burger than they did slapping together some mayonnaise, a little relish, ketchup, MSG, and yellow food dye number five." I could see his point. "How long you work there?" "Three years," Lance replied. "Only job I could get to put me through a couple years of community college. How much time did you serve?" I looked at him a little sheepishly. "Just two months." "Two months, huh? What happened?" "Well, it all started with this asshole Darmady. I'd been working the grill the whole time. I kind of liked it, other than the constant coat of grease, closing it up at midnight, and all that other shit. I liked having the system down. Getting the burgers out the door as fast as possible. Felt good to move so fast all the time when we got mobbed after a school football game. "Thing is, we got this call one day just as I was showing up for work. The Store Manager was working that day. He comes frantically running up to everybody. I mean really gets in people's faces. No personal space at all. I figured somebody had raided one of the tills or something. Or maybe they found out about the stack of patties I'd swiped the week before." (Lance grinned at me. He'd done it too.) "But this grease-coated, pimply, overweight tub of goo was actually all worked up over some clown named Darmady." "Who's Darmady?" Lanced asked. "That's what I wanted to know. Well, somebody pointed out to me that Joe Darmady was the name digitally scribbled on my paycheck, and the paycheck of every other poor slob who worked a McDonalds franchise in Boise. He might have been Ronald-Fuckin'-Messiah for all the way everybody was getting worked up." "Gotta watch it when the big names come around," Lance smiled. "So," I continued, "at first I just ran my grill business as usual. But Marty, the manager, came running back and would look me in the eye at least once ever fifteen minutes. 'Darmady can come at any time. He's supposed to be here at three, but you never know.' "Then Marty's voice got really low. He really stared right into my eyes, deep into me for any sign of weakness. 'I'll try to warn you when he gets here. He's going to be coming through drive through--at least that's his usual pattern. He may have his kids with him. Two of them. Twins. But just make everything perfect all day, ok? Let's not take any chances.' "I nodded. He didn't seem satisfied. 'Look, a lot is riding on this. Get it right, ok?' "I said ok. I tried to look as sincere as he did. Maybe I even was." I paused and sipped my drink. Lance glanced at his watch. "So did you do it right? Pass the big test?" "Well, the funny thing is that I was still in junior high. Nobody liked me much at school. The acne was getting even worse from the fry vats. More than that, everything was handed to me in my little suburb. I didn't know what deadlines really meant. Didn't give a fuck about anybody. Hell, I was just working the job so I'd have some gas money when I finally got a car. Work was mostly for fun. It wasn't really a job so much as labor tourism. "At first I was fascinated by making the perfect burger. Could I shake through my fingers the ideal amount of recon onion? Is that pickle really worthy? Would Darmady notice if the ketchup smeared a little too far to the left? "But after working on burgers for an hour without Darmady showing up, I started getting impatient for the test, then even annoyed. After all, it's a fucking cheeseburger, for chrissakes, not a Vishnu shrine. Let Darmady eat what I've been schlepping out to everybody else every day. Democratic fast food. "The thing was Marty kept coming back to look at me, and whenever I got a little errant in the design he would get this really worried look on his face, and you could tell he wanted to say something, but how the hell could you yell at a kid for mustard a quarter inch off? "So come on," Lance urged impatiently. "What happened? I gotta go get to my plane." "Well, the dreaded news came in. Marty had a spotter with a headset outside hiding behind the dumpster. Word was that Darmady was in line for his order in a white 1988 Dodge Caravan. Twins were present. "Marty yanked the headset off the girl at the window. He rushed the other customers through the drive through until he heard Darmady's drawl. Then I suppose Marty groveled a lot. But I couldn't hear because the order came back and I was working that bastard. "Four cheeseburgers, two small fries, one large fry, a couple of Cokes and a Sprite. The fries and drinks were somebody else's problem, thanks to the Henry Ford-inspired division of labor that McDonalds perfected. Four cheeseburgers. Four cheese burgers that were more than cheeseburgers--my job was to realize utter uniformity of perfection in the four burgers, to reach into the very core of my training and two months of experience and draw on it all to achieve the ideal, and do it quickly. Darmady didn't want to wait. "I fried eight burgers, so I'd have a few to trash if anything went bad. I carefully inserted the eight buns and heels in the bun toaster, and anxiously hovered over those all-important patties of meat. I lightly salted them, just as I was taught, then pulled them from out of the clamshell grill and carefully placed them on the heels. Two patties weren't perfectly centered on their heels, so I immediately earmarked them in my mind for waste. Everything else looked good so far. "I hovered the mustard dispenser precisely over the buns at the prescribed three finger widths of distance from bun, careful that the mustard released cleanly and in even patterns. I applied ketchup in a similar manner. Then recons, then the perfectly round and intact pickles that I had set aside earlier for this all-important task. I closed the burgers together and then closely surveyed my work. "Two burgers were clearly sub par. The bun toaster had lightly mashed down the edge of one bun, and another was dripping a bit of ketchup off of one side, despite my best efforts. I re-centered the meat patties on the other two that had slightly erred, and took one last look. Then I reached for the yellow plastic-like burger wrap paper. "I neatly wrapped the first two burgers. The third I picked up with my hand and the doubt in the back of my mind started to creep forward. I centered it in its wrap and bundled it up. Then I placed the fourth burger on the center of the final wrapper. "I took a deep breath and stared at it. It was truly perfect. All my care had paid off. Ronald himself could not find a flaw in my creation. As Darmady sat in his Dodge Caravan outside, already evaluating his subjects, I stared at that burger. What did it all really mean? How had my short life come to this point? Why did I care? "I picked up that final burger with both hands and held it at eye level. I turned it around in my hands, feeling the warm soft bun lightly squish under my fingers. Then I performed the ultimate act of heresy. "There was no point in hanging around after that. I took off my apron, threw my hat into the waste bin where all the stale burgers went, and walked out the door without talking to anybody. I went home." "What the hell?" Lance asked, impatient. "You just split? Didn't even hang around to see if the manager got good marks for your work?" "No," I answered. "I don't know what happened after that to this day. I have often imagined it though. Darmady and his twins pull away in the Caravan and are driving down Broadway. He unwraps one of his burgers from one of his stores as he has countless times before. He holds the burger in his hands as he drives, not looking down. But something doesn't feel right to his years of grease tyranny. It's off-kilter somehow. So he glances down, and beholds the perfect cheeseburger, perfect in all but one way. "There's a single bite already taken out of it." Lance was appalled. "HOLY JESUS. That is so disgusting. Do you realize how unhygienic that is? What if one of the kids ate it? Jesus." He picked up his bags and stood up from the bar, shaking his head. "I can't believe it. What the hell. You...." He grabbed his drink, drained it, then turned around and went to go find his flight. 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What the fuck is your problem dude? All you do is go around the board patrolling what people say, and correcting their mistakes. Step away from the fucking computer and take a break or something dude. I remember you jumping on DaRizzle for not instantly responding in his thread after the Laker game. Jesus christ dude, you realize some people do have lives right? They don't just post in a thread and click refresh until someone else responds so you can post again.
Haha, that is my favorite part. Good for you. Something just clicks, and you think, "Fuck it." And you walk out. It is a great feeling.
It doesn't seem like it was a good job anyways, so it's not that big of a deal. I would have been fed-up too. The real question is why you got married so young, and to someone older than you. Gotta be chasing those 18 year olds, right?
haha, I have a younger sister who was born in 1989 it is really weird to think about dating someone who was born in the nineties. Which, as of 2008 any 18 year old would have been born in 1990. Just think about that.
Quoted from the article "5 Ways 'Common Sense' Lies To You Everyday" from Cracked.com I figure it might apply to your story.
That is why customer service jobs are the worst. If you ever last long in a customer service position, you have to be one of those people who just keeps a cheesy grin on your face and works to make the customer happy no matter what the situation.
