There’s a picture somewhere in my mom’s house that shows me standing in a black McDonald’s uniform. Well, mostly black. The hat was maroon. But you don’t get to wear all maroon until you’re sixteen. You don’t WEAR maroon at McDonald’s. You EARN maroon. So it was all about black for me for the next few months.
What you can’t see in the picture is that the uniform is made out of something that’s not quite plastic, not quite fabric, and all about discomfort. It’s not even real clothes. But maybe comfort is a distant second to finding some kind of material you can spill an entire grease trap on without it turning into a saturated mess of old burger and egg.
Or maybe they just like the colors.
Either way, any fashion statement you might have made is destroyed by the fact that you’ll be purchasing special No-Slip shoes. The shoes are black, blocky, and look like something that a kid with clubfoot had to wear in school.
And so dressed, I was off to work.
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The first few days were the worst. It makes sense when you consider that your first day, even if you quit that afternoon, is the furthest you will be from quitting.
The entire first day is about trying to figure out what the hell is going on. You’re standing on the line, ready to assemble an Egg McMuffin. The screen lights up and it says SBECH. What the fuck is a SBECH? What is a BEC? What is a SB? None of these are items I’ve ever even heard of in all my years of attending McDonald’s, which are essentially all of my years of life.
To make things worse, you start discovering that McDonald’s offers items that you would never think to order at McDonald’s. B&G hits the screen and Diane sighs. Diane is an older lady who’s been working there a couple years, but makes it seem like it’s been her whole life. She hates putting up with new employees, wears about thirty McDonald’s pins on her hat, and talks a lot about the fact that KFC has made an offer for her to work there for eight bucks an hour. On the plus, she swung things to get her daughter a job. Her daughter is medium-hot and is one of three female employees who insist on wearing tight black pants, the kind that you see every restaurant hostess wearing. That can help time pass during a shift.
Diane slogs to the back where she dips a ladle into what I can only describe as a cauldron. She slops a load of grey mush on top of a biscuit that’s ripped in half.
B&G. Biscuits and Gravy.
There are a couple other weird ones to learn about. Cajun Chicken. The Cajun chicken is sort of like the regular chicken sandwich, but it’s redder and gets its own sauce. I don’t recommend getting the Cajun chicken unless you can be fairly sure that at least ten have been ordered in the previous day. The Cajun sauce gun doesn’t get changed out too often.
Pancakes are available all day. It’s a huge pain in the ass, and I don’t recommend doing it at the same McDonald’s more than once. But it’s an option.
The register is its own set of problems. McDonald’s is famous for having pictures on its registers instead of numbers. Any idiot can punch the picture of the thing they want. It’s true. But that screen can’t possibly hold all the options on the initial interface. What you end up with is nested windows, each button opening another Russian Nesting Doll of fast food. And god knows where some of the shit’s going to be. Where is an All-American Meal? Senior Coffee? Happy meal toy purchased without Happy Meal?
There was this one moment, maybe two days in, when the lines were cleared out, nobody was standing waiting, and I turned my back on the lobby and leaned on the counter. One of the managers, Mark, who always wore a tie and mustache, laughed. He said, This is funny. And I heard one of the classic work phrases that would haunt me the rest of my life:
Time to lean is time to clean.
There are so many other perfectly good rhymes they could have used. Time to lean is time to preen. Time to rest is always best. Take five, maybe stay alive by not jamming your head in the fryer. Or bee hive.
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“Put down extra Filet. It’s raining.”
Filet O’ Fish is probably the strangest phenomenon in the whole of the place. The thing is, it’s not a big mover. Churchy people will eat it on Fridays, but otherwise you don’t move a lot of Filet. Fish filet is another one to avoid unless you have reason to believe they’ve been selling big over the last day or so. Mayonnaise, Cajun Sauce, Big Mac Sauce, and Tartar Sauce are all shot onto buns with modified caulking guns. If you come into the back and smell a rotting something, odds are it’s the Tartar Sauce cartridge, which probably hasn’t been changed in a week.
But if you’re into filet, there’s a silver lining. For some reason, filet really moves on cloudy days. Even more if it actually rains. Don’t ask me to explain it. It’s you people eating them, not me. I wouldn’t eat that shit with YOUR mouth.
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Here, for information purposes, is a listing and description of some of the different types of customers you will find at your local McDonald’s:
Builders: There are 99-cent value burgers that we’re all familiar with. But Builders push things to the limit. “I’ll have a double cheeseburger. Add tomato, add bacon, add extra cheese, add…” These motherfuckers are the reason you have to pay per topping when you order pizza. It’s all thanks to them and their plan of, “Could you make a burger and on top of it another entire burger in its own wrapper.” Assholes.
the Collector: Once in a while the McDonald’s gets an idea. For example, putting Inspector Gadget toys in the Happy Meals. But what if, instead of eight separate toys, there were eight toys that all form together to make a really great toy?
This is sort of what they did, but instead of eight toys morphing into one awesome toy, they made it so that eight pieces of garbage vaguely attached to create something that would allow you to throw it in the garbage in one fell swoop while your son is gone at a sleepover.
Great business plan, especially when you don’t have to deal with the collectors, usually a mom, who insists on knowing when the next toy is coming out, why you’re going in a particular order, and so on. This often goes pretty far. From time to time you would pick up the phone and hear a hassled voice on the other end. “Hey, this is 8th ave. Do you guys have any number 5s left?”
I understand this is frustrating as a parent, but please understand that I am (barely) trained to put bread and meat on a wrapper, let alone mentally divine a schedule for the release of shitty toys.
Plus, Inspector Gadget is dogshit.
Freshies: These are the people who always want to know if it’s fresh. Sometimes they come up with clever ruses to make sure it is, like asking for fries with no salt, which they have learned means cooking up a brand new batch. It’s not that big of a deal, but you are one ballsy motherfucker if you ask for fries without salt and then ask for salt packets when you get to the drive-up window.
And it’s McDonald’s. So no, it’s not fresh.
Filet-No-Mustards: Just about every workplace has something like this going on. If you are an attractive woman, maybe you’ve caught onto something like this. In our case, it was the Filet-No-Mustard system.
Say a pretty girl drives up to the window to pay. She hands over some money, and I make a quick adjustment to her order. I type in Filet-Grill-No-Mustard. Now, my fellow employees in the back know damn well that a Filet does not come with mustard. Never has, never will. So when they see this order, they know a pretty girl is pulling up to the second window in moments.
Most times, things are civil, but sometimes it turns into a brief shouting match to determine who is handing the bag out the window, especially if the person standing at the second window already happens to be a girl herself and doesn’t really appreciate five greasy guys standing behind her when she hands the bag through the window.
So if you’re ever in line at McDonald’s and hear someone shout into the back, “I’m still waiting on that FILET NO MUSTARD, take it as a compliment. If at all possible. The job is pretty boring, so seeing even a marginally attractive person really helps.
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Something you find out pretty fast is that just about everybody working at McDonald’s is on the way out.
“Yeah, man. I’m starting at AIMS in the fall, so then I’ll be out of here.”
“My uncle is going to get me on with his landscaping company.”
“KFC is offering eight-fifty, and I’m of a mind to take it if things don’t shape up around here.”
There was one great quitting in my time.
The meat patties, after being cooked, are dumped into these plastic trays and slid home into warmers. When you go to make a burger, you pull the eye-height drawer out spatula up a patty. At any given time there are probably somewhere around eighty patties in the warmers.
During the lunch rush, a guy threw down his spatula and started grabbing at trays. He pulled out tray after tray and dumped them on the floor, letting the meat and grease spill around our shoes.
And he quit.
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Some duties were good. And some were not so good.
A good duty was pulling the expired Apple Pies. First, it means making pies, which is one of the easier jobs. Then, you have to box them and use the price gun to put a date on each one. It’s kind of the same shit work you’re always doing, but at least you don’t have to hurry. Then, you pull the old pies and put the fresh ones in. You walk away knowing you’ve done a good job. Oh, and when you get to the dumpster, because you always take the Apple Pies straight to the dumpster rather than dumping them inside, you jam about three Apple Pies into your mouth as you toss the rest away, one at a time to make sure it takes a good while.
Most times a bad duty is something you earn mouthing off to somebody you shouldn’t have mouthed off to. There was a guy, Tamac, who did a lot of mouthing off. He ended up with a lot of crap work.
One afternoon his job was cleaning out the inside of the playplace. That meant climbing into hot plastic tubes, cooking like long neon ovens, and dousing every surface with bleach. Then, after a humiliating trip down the slide, climbing back in with a hose to rinse the whole thing out.
He spent most of the rest of the day with pink covering his skin and drinking cups on cups of water. He didn’t puke like the last guy, so that was something.
Another good duty was making a stock list. Making a stock list meant printing out a little extra receipt paper and opening the cabinets around the registers to make sure we had enough of everything. Extra cups, extra lids, extra fry boxes, extra straws, extra sauces.
Making stock lists was a Phyllis job. Phyllis was one of the old people who worked at this particular McDonald’s. She worked the same shift five days a week, and somewhere between one and three in the afternoon you had better damn well stay away from Phyllis unless you are interested in filling a stock list. Because making a stock list is easy duty, but filling it teeters over into bad duty land.
I read once that when building stairs, even an eight-inch miscalculation, even putting one stair just an eighth-of-an-inch too high or low can cause someone to go flinging down the rest of the steps. Something about human rhythms makes us masters of the stairs, but the second we get into funhouse territory we just can’t cope.
What we’re learning here is that stairs can become treacherous with just a little something wrong.
So you can easily imagine the challenge of walking down a staircase that’s narrow, dark, and covered by greased tile. The more you walk on it, the more grease you track down with you. Because you might not know it, but you are always covered in grease when you work at a McDonald’s. No matter how you try to avoid it, you are soaked. Imagine being in a room bordered and lined with ovens, and on each oven is cooking a pound of bacon. The grease turns into a fine mist that settles on every surface. And anyone who has ever greased up a TV remote on pizza night knows that it’s impossible to remove grease from anything without using flame.
Filling the stock list is easy enough once you get downstairs. Walk past the breakroom. You’ll see it there on the right. It’s the room surrounded by chainlink fencing, lit up by a light bulb in a wire cage that protects the bulb in case…a game of dodgeball breaks out(?)
Nothing like a cement floor, chainlink wall, and naked lightbulb to make you feel relaxed and recharged.
Collecting the items is where the real challenge comes in. You, my friend, have a choice to make.
Choose Your Own McDonaldLand Adventure:
Do you…
A. Decide to trust Phyllis’ math and get exactly what she says? (If so, turn to page 128 where you end up jamming 8 sleeves of medium cups in a cabinet before resigning yourself to taking another sleeve down the goddamn stairs, unless you feel confident that you can shove it in one of the big lobby garbage cans without anyone noticing.)
B. Decide that Phyllis doesn’t have a great track record and almost always overshoots the restocking needs? (If so, turn to page 127 where you end up having enough room for one more set of Super Size lids, a fact that Phyllis asks you about over and over, telling you that it doesn’t make sense to go all the way downstairs and not fill everything you need.)
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On one afternoon we got the call.
200 Big N’ Tasty Extra Value Meals. Large Size. With Coke.
There was a banking convention downtown, and they decided to have spontaneous McDonald’s catering for the afternoon.
We got to work.
200 Big N’ Tasty Sandwiches meant 200 slabs of ¼ lb/ meat, 200 tomato slices, 200 lettuce leaves, 200 shots of mayonnaise, 200 shots of ketchup, and 200 sprinklings of chopped onion. Oh, and 400 pickles.
On hand at any one time, we don’t have 200 anything. So we had people pulling up more B&T boxes, refilling ketchup, recharging mayonnaise guns, grilling meat, and jamming the whole thing into huge cardboard boxes.
As we were working, everyone in the back couldn’t help but wonder what kind of low-rent convention was having 200 McDonald’s meals made up without any notice. Especially when you consider that just making the order was going to take a solid 20 minutes, which means that the fries and burgers at the bottom of the boxes were going to be long cold, and the cokes flat. And how they planned to transport 200 cokes was their problem as we only had trays that held four at a time. Only 50 trays needed, I suppose…
After a mad rush, slapping patties on buns, filling cokes, shoveling ice, we did it. 200 B&T Extra Value Meals. We waited with pride. It sucked, but at least we did it. Everyone had something to say when someone asked, How was work?
We waited for the bankers to show up. Maybe some of us would help carry the food out to the armored car they would use to transport this valuable cargo. Maybe they would give us a really nice tip. If nothing else, maybe a shitty plaque to hang in the breakroom.
They never came.
The manager called the number he was given over and over, but it rang and rang and rang and rang.
Either the number was fake or the people on the other side were laughing too hard to pick it up.
It was officially over when the managers started offering Big N’ Tasty Extra Value Meals, already made, to every customer who came to the register. At slight discount, of course.
The offer was also made to employees, but our normal 40% discount did not apply.
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