What Working in Fast Food Taught Me

   

     I worked in fast food. It was horrible. Now when I drunkenly order food in busy and badly lit restaurants at 4am I am overly apologetic to the staff, constantly tell them to take their time, and continually reassure them that I know EXACTLY how much they hate me.


Managers are insane

     People who take management roles in fast food chains are basically invincible. Where I worked they regularly did 80 hour weeks out of compliant necessity, because they knew their job stability relied on a head office checking the numbers and saying they did alright that day. They know that their staff are inconsistent and often new, so they come in when they're not scheduled to just to make sure everything is done properly, and if it's not, then they'll stay late and do it themselves. I have an incredibly vivid memory of one manager checking that the kitchen staff had cleaned for the close properly, dropping to the floor, and with his face on the tiles, he reached his hand underneath the oven, and jumped up defiantly brandishing a chicken nugget at them screaming 'What is this?!'.


It is basically impossible to get rid of incompetent staff

     Unless they seriously injure someone or commit a criminal offence it is very hard to get rid of staff. Obviously this is because of unfair dismissal laws and procedures which are a great thing because it means you can't lose your job over nothing, but when it means you can't get rid of awful, rude or lazy staff it's not so great. Laziness and general incompetence are hard to quantify as incidents that can be logged and actually used to dismiss someone, so spare a thought for the rest of the staff next time you are amazed/annnoyed/astounded at a fast food workers incompetence, they are probably all hoping he sets fire to the coffee machine so they can get rid of him.


People think £5.05 an hour is sufficient enough that they can treat you like shit

     On one occasion an incredibly drunk man was ordering and thought that being the cheeky chap he obviously considered himself to be, it would be absolutely hilarious to change his order every time I was about to put it through the till. I actually would have been fine with the mind-changing if hadn't been for the fact that once you had put something into the till, you had to get a manager to use his card if you wanted to change it, so it wasn't just a case of me pressing 'cancel'. I started off very smiley and polite, but by the tenth time he purposefully changed his mind with a smirk on his face I lost my patience and - wait for it - sighed. God forbid. A heavy, tired, sick of mc-smiling sigh. I may as well have thrown his food at him for how he reacted. He massively kicked off and had to be calmed down by both his friend and the manager because he was so angrily offended at the audacity of my reaction of sighing after 10 minutes of him winding me up at one o'clock in the morning. Why do I have to keep smiling and nodding at someone who is trying to make my life more difficult for me? Because you get paid so you have to be a representative of the company and do everything for the customer, I hear you scream. No. £5.05 an hour is not an adequate price to be belittled and still expected to smile back.


People will do anything for a Big Mac

     During the lull between about 9-11pm I would start cleaning some of the machines to make my close a little bit quicker, but this would mean stepping back from the tills while I did so. I was never far, only ever 3 steps away, but that didn't stop people. One night I was bent down cleaning the bottom of the drinks machine when I noticed someone coming behind the counter. Realising it wasn't another staff member, I stood up and saw a guy gleefully reaching for a burger off the hot plate. A bit confused and shocked I stepped forward and was about to say something (I don't know exactly what), when a manager appeared on the other side of the hot plate, and as the thief was about to take a bite of his loot, PUNCHED it out of his hand.


You can make people's lives better with the tiniest things

     There was a terribly incompetent girl who worked on the tills with me, absolutely lovely but always making mistakes. One night at the time when we'd get a lot of drunk people coming in on their way home from the pub, one guy politely asked for this girl by name. I tentatively told him she wasn't working that night, and him and his friends all seemed disappointed in a good natured way. They didn't seem to know her, just really eager to be served by her. The manager was stood behind me and, overhearing this, said "Why are you asking for her? She's awful". The guy who seemed to be the head of the group smiled and said "That's why she's the best. You just never know what you're gonna get". If we were all a little bit more like that man, who consistently paid for food he would unwrap and be surprised by, if we enjoyed the spontaneity of what we might experience instead of demanding a guarantee of what we ordered, the world would get better I think. And even if it didn't on a grand scale, it might make a fast food workers' shift a little nicer, and she might smile when she walks home at 2am with a McFlurry in one hand, and her keys ready to stab muggers in the other.

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