Once, about a million and a half years ago, I wore a funky maroon visor and worked at McDonald’s. If you were passing through my town toward the end of 1995, hi! That was my pre-Hubs, pre-Piglets, pre-cavernous stretch marks self who served you. I probably fluffed your order. I did that alot. I’m sorry.
When plans to build a McDonald’s in my small rural town first surfaced, it was huge news. It was going to be built on the main highway through town and a Maccas in town meant two things. First, more folks stopping on their way through to Other Places and second, a licence to print money for the franchise owners. KFC had already paved the way a couple of years prior to even bigger fanfare but Maccas was advertising for junior crew members. Being of newly employable age, I signed up. As did every other teenager in town. In an area as small as ours, there weren’t all that many jobs going for young people and there was precious little else to do, so we all rejoiced, flattened our cowlicks (not that I’d know anything about that of course) and turned up for orientation. Training meant a few Sundays of work experience at the next nearest McD’s two-and-a-half hours away. Deciding how rural you are by your proximity to a McDonald’s restaurant is totally a legitimate measurement, by the way.
Now let me just say this. Working at McDonald’s looked all shiny and new and wonderful at first, kind of like that feeling you got as a kid when staring at the Ultimate Toy of the Universe in the toy store window. You think it’s going to be fantastic, then when you get it home and rip the packaging off, you realise its not all that its cracked up to be. It didn’t take long for the novelty of a paying job to wear off.
For starters, the veritable avalanche of teenagers on the books usually meant that shifts were limited. Because I was still at school I was even more restricted, as my parents and I came to an arrangement which included no late nights, and weekend work only at a pinch. I needed to study, they told me. Pfft! I didn’t need school, I was earning REAL money! Here’s why that idea went down the toilet.
I was lucky to get one three hour shift per fortnight. I was paid $4.94 per hour (low in Australia at the time - casual rate juniors at other jobs might have gotten $10+ per hour). Let me add that up for you. $4.94 x 3 = about ¾ of a CD. And there were no iPods back then. I know, I find it shocking myself. One of life’s greatest disappointments was working for a month (a whopping 2 shifts) to buy some rockin’ tunes only to find out you hated all but 2 songs on the disc.
However, I perservered, as did most of the other frustrated teens. We were all aching to make Manager, which rumour had it you could achieve with 12 months of continuous indebted servitude sunny-side-up employment. Those guys (most of whom were only a year or two older than the rest of us) had it made. They wore a plain blue shirt instead of the maroon pinstripe monstrosities the regular crew members were forced to wear, and they only had to wear their visors when they were actually serving, which was almost never. Most of the time they marched around looking important and carrying the key that would ‘unlock’ the police discount feature on the register. Oh, the power! Oh, the intrigue! Oh, to never have to do ‘the pit’ (toilet cleaning duty) ever again! Managers were guaranteed at least three shifts a week and - gasp! - a payrise to $8.72 an hour. Can you imagine? One whole CD a week? And if you wound up not liking it, you could just buy another the following week!
(And yes, I really did measure income in possible-CD-buying-ability. To be honest, I still do it now, LOL)
I never made it to Manager. After five or six months and the grand total of perhaps a dozen shifts, I quit to concentrate on 12th grade at the insistence of my parents. Years passed, I met Hubs (who incidentally had lived in this same town for two years during this same time frame and we’d never ‘met’, though it was highly likely I served him), we moved, had babies. But we still have family in the area, so every couple of years we find ourselves back at this same Mickey Dee’s counter, this time ordering an expensive family meal including Happy Meals instead of the ol’ half price employee food (ah, to have the metabolism of a 15 year old again…sigh). We listen to the kids argue over who gets the Roadrunner and who gets the Coyote. Someone usually pokes someone else in the eye with a straw. And we’re the family - every shift has one - who manages to spill a drink with a ’spread zone’ large enough to require a crew member to come out with a mop and bucket. But every now and then I’ll catch the eye of an employee - thank goodness the poor dears moved to navy uniforms! - and smile in sympathy. And when our order gets mixed up and we end up without our barbecue sauce - clearly an integral part of any McDonald’s experience - I choose to ignore the infraction. Because I’m totally gracious like that :P
Talented Hubby just shakes his head. What would he know?
He was just a KFC boy.
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