Welcome to A Rob Blog, home of the Rob Blog, can I take your order? If you don’t recognise this bastardised opening sentence, you’ve obviously never seen the film Good Burger (or maybe you’ve just suppressed it?). For children of the 90s like myself, Good Burger was an absolute must-see.
Quick sidebar: do you have to have been born in the 90s to be a child of the 90s? I was actually born in 1988, but given I don’t remember much pop culture from when I was two or under, 90s pop culture is what I deem to be from my childhood…
Anyway, for most kids back then, Kenan & Kel was basically the biggest show on TV. So when the two titular stars released a movie about working in a fast food restaurant, it was a big deal. I still remember seeing it in the cinema. And then – because it was a Nickelodeon movie – it would be on Nickelodeon during practically every subsequent school holiday.
I’m sure that the film is likely objectively bad. But it was an important part of my childhood and it ties in nicely with what I’m talking about today. During my late teens, I worked at a McDonald’s. I’m going to tell you about my time there. Let’s bah-bah-bah-bah-baaaah begin.
The idea of working really appealed to me when I was younger. I don’t really know why. Perhaps I thought it was something grown ups did, so when I got my first job I’d be a grown up too. Perhaps it was the independence I thought would come with my own revenue stream. Either way, my suspicions on how great work life would be was confirmed when I did my school’s work experience program when I was around 14/15.
I worked in the office of a London hotel and those two weeks really opened my eyes. For one thing, I quickly decided that work was better than school (to be fair, I still think that). Looking back, I don’t know what the purpose of that hotel office was. I’m sure they served a specific function, but I can’t remember what it was. All I did was menial office admin work: photocopying, filing, organising. Real boring stuff. I loved it.
For though the work was monotonous, it gave me two things. One, I felt useful. It may sound like a silly thing to say, but did you ever feel useful at school? I know I didn’t. Two, it gave me great insight into the sort of camaraderie that can exist between colleagues.
Anyway, my next taste of work was as a Christmas temp at Argos. I was supposed to work there for a month, but ended up doing four months instead. It was fine, as far as jobs go. Pretty straightforward: a ticket with an item number came through to the warehouse at the back of the store, you’d go to the aisle listed on the ticket, grab the item and bring it to the front of house.
On leaving that job, I found myself with no work. I applied for jobs in shops all around where I lived, with no joy. After a few months of rejection, I finally bit the bullet and did what I never thought I would: I applied for jobs at fast food restaurants.
Thankfully (?) my local McDonald’s invited me down for an interview. I don’t mean to be disparaging to myself or other McDonald’s employees past or present, but it wasn’t exactly a tough interview. If you could string a couple of sentences together and wasn’t an obvious maniac, you basically got hired.
Although the interview wasn’t too taxing, there was on crucial question that defined my entire time there: do you want to work on the tills or in the kitchen? This was a no-brainer for me; working the tills was much more appealing.
It was a slice of luck that I started when I did, as a couple of months later saw the store manager change. The new manager had a (sexist?) policy of putting all male staff in the kitchen and all female staff on the tills. Even though he threatened to get me trained up on the kitchen processes, I basically worked front of house for my whole run. Although I preferred front of house, the one drawback was having to deal with customers.
I’m sure most customers were probably nice. But they’re not the ones I remember. It’s a bit like when you get home after driving for a while and you’re convinced that nobody else on the road knows how to drive. It’s not that every driver is bad. It’s just that the safe drivers don’t stick in your mind. Whereas the ones who cut you up, or the ones that tailgate you, or the ones who change direction without indicating, are memorable.
Some customers were just terrible at ordering McDonald’s. They’d say something like, “Can I have a Big Mac please?”. I, doing my best up-selling, then ask, “Is that a meal?”. They say no. Cool, I’ll just press the Big Mac button on the till. They then say, “Can I also get a medium fries and a diet coke please?” A BIG MAC WITH FRIES AND A DRINK IS A MEAL!!!
You might be thinking what the big deal is. The problem was that if I then added the fries and the drink separately, the total cost came to more than what a Big Mac meal should cost. So I’d have to remove the Big Mac from the till and add a Big Mac meal. The issue with that is that us lowly staff members didn’t have the power to remove items from an order on the till. So we had to call a manager over. There would always be at least one manager per shift but, being a manager, they would often be busy doing something else. And while you’re trying to flag them down, your queue is getting longer and longer. And all because a customer didn’t actually know what they wanted.
Worse than the clueless customers were the ones who very much knew what they wanted, in specific detail. The fussy ones. To be fair, some maybe had food intolerances that meant they had to have their food a certain way. But the majority were just picky.
“Can I have a McChicken sandwich with no mayo?”. “Can I have a quarter pounder with no gherkins?”. “Can I have fries without salt?” Fries without salt was the worse one. Because McDonald’s fries come with salt as standard, it meant you had to cook up a brand new batch, regardless of how many fries you already had ready to go. They took three minutes to cook. In the meantime, in the fry station, you had to move all the salty fries to one side, wipe down the now-empty side to remove as much salt as possible, then lay down some tray liners. All so that when the new fries come out of the vat, you have an unsalted surface to put them on.
Pro Tip: Though the staff may hate you for it, the best way to guarantee fresh food is to ask for it with a modification.
It was difficult enough dealing with niche food orders, but it was all the more trying when the customer then moaned about how long they had to wait for their order. You have to take the rough with the smooth; yes, your food will be fresh, but your wait time will also be longer.
The worst customers though were the rude ones. You had the typical rudeness of just not saying please or thank you. But worse than that were the ones who looked down on you. They’d have the attitude of, “You work in McDonald’s, which basically makes you scum, and I will treat you as terribly as I want.”
When I first started, I just swallowed it; the customer is always right and all that. Plus, I sort of needed that job and didn’t want to jeopardise it by arguing with a customer. But after a few months of seeing and receiving some horrendous verbal abuse by customers, I decided enough was enough. I was still perfectly pleasant to the nice customers, but I no longer tolerated the rude ones.
The rude ones would receive similarly rude behaviour from me. Whether that was putting their food on the counter (instead of handing it to them as was protocol) or feigning deafness when they asked for sauces, any petty little thing I could do to even the score, I would do. Including arguing with some and nearly getting into physical fights with others. I never got in trouble for it. The managers, better than anyone, knew what pricks some customers could be.
In some ways, it’s not surprising that some people look down on those who work in McDonald’s. You hear derogatory remarks about it often: “You need a good education so you can get a good job; you don’t want to end up flipping burgers for a living.” Being a so called “burger flipper” is seen as some sort of failure.
Another quick sidebar: It amuses me how much focus is put on the burger flipping aspect, for two reasons:
1. There is so much more to the job than that. If that’s all it was, the job would be a piece of cake. Or a piece of burger…
2. They don’t even flip burgers in McDonald’s; they have a pull down grill that cooks both sides of the patty at the same time. A bit like those George Foreman grills that were all the rage about 20 years ago, except massive.
It is these sorts of views that made me reluctant to work there in the first place. I’d get so embarrassed if someone I knew came in while I was on shift. You might think that I’d be embarrassed if people I knew came into anywhere I worked, but my next part-time job was in a bar and I never minded it there. I thought working in a bar was cool (rightly or wrongly). There was nothing cool about working in McDonald’s, hence the embarrassment.
So much so, in fact, that I’ve avoided talking about it for years. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never lied about it. If someone asked me at the time what I did for a living, I told them. But I never volunteered the information, even years after I left. It was always a fear of mine that people who didn’t know would somehow find out. Why I thought that would be a problem, I don’t know. I guess it was to do with my image. Seems rather silly now.
McDonald’s feels like a lifetime ago now. Given I’m 34, and I started there when I was 17, I suppose technically I’d have to say half a lifetime ago. And the further removed I get from it, the less embarrassed I feel about it all, and the bad moments are harder to remember. What I remember most of all are the good times. There were some really cracking people there and we did have lots of laughs. Maybe it wasn’t the best place to work, but my colleagues were great.
I guess that’s the value of time; it allows you to look back through rose-tinted glasses to a certain extent. I think the whole experience – good and bad – helped shape me into the person I am today. Who knows how my life might be different now if I hadn’t worked in McDonald’s? Thankfully, my life has turned out pretty darn good. I have to say… I’m loving it.
Thanks once again for reading, it is very much appreciated. For football fans, I hope you’re all as excited as I am to have the season up and running again. I love this time of year. All the hope and optimism, before it invariably gets dashed a few months down the line… anyway, take care and I’ll catch you next time. Oh, have a nice day.
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Brooklyn Nine-Nine – TV – 9/10
I finally got around to watching the last ever season of B99, and I wasn’t disappointed. Though I hadn’t forgotten about George Floyd, I hadn’t given much thought to how the show would handle the situation. Ultimately, I was proud of the storylines B99 touched upon based around police reform and racial profiling. It would have been easy to swerve these areas and just focus on the wacky hijinks that occur in the precinct, but they confronted the elephant in the room head on.
And I shouldn’t have been surprised. Brooklyn Nine-Nine has never been afraid to tackle serious, important storylines. Aided by the fact that they have one of the most diverse casts on TV, B99 has never dodged crucial issues.
The most remarkable thing about it though is just how fun it remains throughout. It takes real skill to deal with serious plot points and still be hilariously funny. It’s just so silly! And I don’t say that pejoratively. It’s silly in the best way. If you’re looking for a comedy, look no further. NINE-NINE!
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