It might not surprise you to hear this, but on the days when I’m not out writing stunning list articles and apparently easy-to-plagiarise pieces about clothes buying, I have a day job. It’s hard exactly to define what my job title is exactly, but if I had to lie guess, it would go something along the lines of ‘Front-of-House and Aesthetics Maintenance Associate’. Where you ask? I don’t want to name names because you’ll get all jealous and stuff, but it’s a popular hospitality company. Perks? Sure, tons of them; erm….oh goddamnit.
Fine, I work in fast food. But you know what? My job could be a hell of a lot worse by the looks of it. At least, at my workplace…
#3: My Colleagues Don’t ‘Take Advantage’ of the Facilities
If any of you have ever worked in a place that sells food, you’ll no doubt know someone who has chowed down on something they shouldn’t have whilst working. It’s natural that if you’re surrounded by food all day, you’ll feel hungry, and let’s face it, a couple of fries going missing isn’t going to single-handedly bankrupt the company is it?
“Oops”
But then again, there’s also that special breed of employee who doesn’t just push the envelope, so much as tie it to the windshield of a burning car and drive it kamikaze-style off a cliff. But, it’s a fast food restaurant, you may ask; how you possibly do anything worse than steal food? Answer: take a bubble bath inside the sinks used to wash all of the dirty cooking equipment from that day.
That’s what a group of teens working at a KFC in Anderson, California did in 2008 to relax themselves after a hard day of selling chicken to students, the elderly, and the unemployed. The three girls, who made this 1000% more disgusting by bringing bikinis and thereby revealed this to a pre-planned bout of stupidity, were caught out after pictures of the event were published on MySpace. By one of the girls in question.
Well, I suppose if nothing else, that proves that there’s definitely something wrong with California. I mean, it’s not like any- HOLY JESUS CHRIST, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!
But Instead I Have To Deal With…
Child. Queue. Projectile Vomiting. Mop and Bucket. Incidentally, after this incident, I needed a bath, yet because I have over two working brain cells, I decided to wait until I got home for this.
Picture Unrelated
#2: We Might Slack Off, But At Least We’re Clever About It
Be under no illusions: I’m awesome at my job. Sure, the management haven’t said anything to me about my impressive performance, but I can see it in their eyes. Looking at me like I’m a champion, with a small tinge of anger that no-one else there can ever measure up to the god-like figure that is me, I am the goddamn personification of the lyrics to ‘Eye of the Tiger’.
I guess this is me at work. Or something like that. It’s not made clear.
Still though, you know what they say, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. Everyone needs to relax and take their eye off the ball once in a while, especially at a place where you’re constantly surrounded by knives, hot surfaces, and boiling fat. Well, at least that would explain why, at a McDonalds in Ottawa, Illinois, a seventeen year-old employee hid a bag of weed, a pipe and a lighter within a Happy Meal box. Which was then given by another imbecilic employee to a seven year-old girl.
Bah-dah-dah-dah-dah!
Luckily, this was in America, and not Britain, so the girl didn’t know what to do with the stuff. According to police reports, the items apparently found their way into the box after the (now fired) employee put them in there for safe keeping, an act which unintentionally also resulted in the bodies of the men responsible for the invention of pockets, backpacks, and lockers spin in their graves. If nothing else, if this guy ever gets into more serious crimes, we’ll know where to look for the evidence.
But Instead I Have To Deal With…
Customers like the old man who, after I read back his entire order to him, turned into Sgt Hartman from ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and started to question me in-depth about where I came from, what I was doing here, and most curiously, whether I was a gay Jew. Although I did get him to supersize all of his drinks and fries, so I guess you win some, you lose some.
#1: Cleaning Happens. Always.
You have literally no idea how much cleaning takes place in a restaurant like ours. I’m not saying this is a bad thing of course; I mean, if I ate somewhere, I’d sure as hell want the fry station and burger-making area to be so sterile, you could safely stage a goddamn heart transplant in there. In fact, if the store management ever produced a table of priorities for us staff members, I could safely say that ‘cleaning’ would be at the top, with ‘serving customers’ and ‘making food’ somewhere near the bottom. Oh, that reminds me; I forgot to ask at the start, but if you’re a musophobic, you probably don’t want to read this entry. It’s going to get a bit hairy for you guys now.
Not the right ‘Muse’, although they are pretty damn hairy
On the polar opposite end of our ‘cleaning : filthy armageddon’ scale though, comes this delightful KFC/ Taco Bell restaurant from Manhattan, New York. Normally, I’d be waxing lyrical about the problems with the place and its staff using numerous convoluted metaphors and liberal use of the word ‘goddamn’. However, I think a video might suffice on this occasion.
But Instead I Have To Deal With…
There was a spider once in the staff room. No, seriously, it was like *this* big. Actually, you know what? I’m not even sorry I don’t have a story that compares against this. Do you really want me to top a biblical plague of rats?
…
…
Seriously though, it was huge. It could probably have eaten an entire car eventually, had I not engaged it in an epic swordfight above a bubbling vat of boiling oil and, totally, not flushed it down the toilet like a squealing little girl.
Aw. Here’s a cute wittle bunny rabbit.
Because screw spiders right in their stupid faces.
