Fear of Frying

Most of us have had at least one of them in our lives—the crappy, teenage right-of passage job. When you’re just starting out in the working world and you’ve nothing to put on your resume, typically you find yourself working in the grocery, food service, or retail industries. On the plus side it’s a start, you’ve gotten your foot in the door to the work force and you’re making some money. On the down side you’re usually making minimum wage to be treated like crap by management and customers alike because, as we all know, minimum wage employees do not need to be treated with anything resembling respect or courtesy.

For myself, I spent some time working at a Burger King. It was something of a family tradition, my father managing a store up in New York, so I guess he thought I’d like to get into the family “business.” About a month after we moved to the town I still call home, I came home from school to get the worst news I could possibly hear: my father had spoken to the manager of the Burger King around the corner and I had an interview with her the next day. Dammit! It’s bad enough when one of your parents intervenes in a job situation, but fast food was not where I wanted to work. The prior two summers I had done volunteer work at a hospital and had demonstrated an ability to work well in a medical environment. Certainly I could do better than Burger King.

But with my immediate goal in mind of earning some money to buy a car, I begrudgingly headed off to what passed as an interview. At a fast food restaurant, an interview generally consists of three questions: Do you have a criminal record? Do you have any contagious diseases? Can you start tomorrow? I answered no to all three, needing a couple of days before I could start work. It’s been many, many years later and not only do I remember that first night, but as I started on the last day of the pay period, I still have my first pay statement from that single nights work.

It may be the same at most fast food restaurants, but at Burger King you started off working the broiler, the entry-level position in an entry-level job. In terms of the overall workforce, you’re a single-celled bacterium; life does not get any lower. The main difference is that bacterium do not wear an unsightly polyester uniform that, while offering some protection against grease splatter, are hotter than Hell—something very helpful in an environment where you’re grilling burgers. Over time, if you don’t quit after the first week, you can move up into other exciting tasks, such as working “the board,” where the hamburgers are prepared, the friers, and taking on the daunting task of preparing “specialty” sandwiches, like the chicken and fish sandwiches. The elite few with an IQ over 78 get to work the front counter and drive-thru taking orders and doing “push-out” (in essence putting the orders on a tray or in a bag to be given to a customer). The career dead-enders made it all the way to manager.

Working at Burger King is exactly what you’d expect from such an experience—it sucked. There were times it sucked more than normal. During the fall, Friday nights would almost always be exceptionally busy with local high school football games. Saturdays would be even worse, especially in a college town where, as the joke from Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman states, we have a large football stadium with a college attached. Not only was the place busy, but you also had to deal with the drunken fans who had returned to town to honor their alma mater by vomiting all over it. After a few times experiencing a typical fast food homegame Saturday, you begin hoping for a comet to hit the Earth and eliminate all mankind.

And then there are other interesting situations you cope with working in the fast food industry. I recall one evening a woman came to the front counter with a smile on her face, and starts off with a “Hi” in a soft tone that could only mean trouble. “My son just lost his cookies on your table,” she said, her smile never leaving her face. Just when you thought your minimum-wage, dead end job couldn’t get any worse, cleaning up some five year old’s vomitus off a table gets thrown in to remind you that you haven’t hit the bottom of the barrel just yet. The poor sod who got assigned the task of “clean up on aisle five!” headed off to the dining room with a cardboard box and a trash can. Many years later, thinking about this scenario, it brings a laugh and a smile to my face, though I’m sure the guy who had to clean it up would not agree with me. Then there was the time a couple tried to use Arby’s coupons at the store. I’m sure their ears are still burning from our laughter as they realized their mistake and made a hasty departure. I won’t go into detail how some drunken girl soiled the women’s room one night. All I will say is that the manager that night, a guy named Tony, took a peek in, said “Oh my God!,” and grabbed the hose to wash down the walls.

Perhaps one of the most memorable evenings came one Saturday night after we had locked up the dining room. On the weekends the dining room would close at 11 p.m. while the drive thru stayed open until midnight (the cheap owner’s version/excuse of a “late night drive thru”). My friend Mitch and I were assigned to work until close this particular evening, and it was not at all an unusual practice for us to send the person who clocked out at 11 to make a “beer run” to a neighboring wine and spirits store (long since torn down, now the site of an Eckerds—not a change for the better in my opinion). Though we had almost an hour to work, Mitch and I started drinking at 11:10 that night. About 11:40 one of our co-workers, William (not me), and six of his friends walked up to the drive thru window for Cokes for which to mix their bourbon. William was wearing white tennis shorts, which gave the impression he was in his underwear. Mitch, who loved to drink and was definitely feeling the effects of his love by this time, yells, “I can do better than that!” and proceeds to drop his pants right there at the window. Oddly enough, Mitch gave his two week notice not too long afterwards but the owner instructed the manager that it was okay if he didn’t work out those two weeks. To this day I can’t go to a drive thru without wondering if the person at the window is wearing pants.

The perks of working at Burger King were few and far between, and the people I worked with and I found ways of dealing with the monotony of working in the food service industry. Once our store started serving breakfast, we found a novel use for the small tubs of maple syrup. We would pour about three of them onto the asphalt outside the drive thru window, stick an inflated BK balloon in it, and place a sign in the window, “Hit Balloon, Win Prize.” No matter how far out of the way we put the balloon, people would try to hit it. The winners would get a FREE Burger King crown, which was met with the reaction one would expect when they were hoping for free food instead. And did you know that when you stack eight to ten packets of ketchup just outside a drive thru window they make a collective pop like running over glass when a car tire crushes them all at once?

The sign in front of the store was a source of fun and creativity. The store I worked at was originally in a locale where a Papa John’s Pizza is located now. When it was at that location the store’s sign was located by the road and was on the ground where it was very easy to get to. Those of us who had to close the store at night would take turns coming up with new phrases for the sign using only the letters already on the sign. The all-time best was done by my friend Gus one night when he changed, “Now at our mall store: Breakfast” to “Now at our mall store: Fat Breasts.” Two years after I started working at BK we moved next door to a new building, where the sign was located much higher on the road sign pole.

The last summer I worked at Burger King was perhaps the best. My friend Brett had been hired a few months before and we both shared similar interests. Food that had set out too long was thrown into the waste bucket, of which we actually had to document the contents for inventory adjustments. But once we had done that, Brett and I would sometimes subject the wasted food to “blast tests.” We found that four firecrackers would be enough to blow apart the typical Whopper sandwich. One evening a few of us (including the manager) climbed up onto the roof of the building and proceeded to launch bottle rockets at the line of cars in line at the Wendy’s next door.

Working in a fast food establishment is not a pleasant experience, to say the least. Most places live up to the “it’s a nice place but I wouldn’t want to live there” mentality. But at least it’s taught me to be nice to the folks serving your food; even minimum wage workers deserve some respect.