Blog #42 - I loathe McDonalds

      I have had two jobs in my time. One was utterly fantastic, the other is the bane of my existence. Working at the pool was my first job. I got it as a summer job to help me pay for band activities. It was incredibly fun. No, I was not a lifeguard, I was a concession person. The sun, the cheerful people, and the lax managers really made for a good time. Best of all, I only had to be active for 15 minutes of every hour. Because of the downtime, I started bringing a book, and could get upwards of 300 pages done in a single work day. Sometimes I would finish my book, and become incredibly bored. Due to my lack of desire to socialize with my coworkers, I basically asked the managers for odd jobs to keep myself occupied. Due to this, I became known as a hard worker, and the managers always praised my work ethic.

      My other job is at McDonald’s I work there simply to pay for gas and books until I move to Columbus next year. McDonald’s is the worst place I could ever imagine, and continuously frustrates me. I work night shifts, which seems like it would be devoid of customers. This isn't true, mostly due to the fact that we are in the middle of a pentagram of five bars. These bars supply us with a steady flow of customers throughout the entire night. Despite the number of customers, I am the only person in the back of the store. That's right, I am only person cooking food and preparing sandwiches. Sometimes, we can beat dinner shift in the number of orders served, and I'll be the only person doing it all. Worse than that, I also am the person in charge of doing all the dishes (there are a lot due to the dinner-breakfast change), the sweeping/mopping, and various other cleaning duties. If another shift is unable to finish all their dishes or duties in time, they simply leave it for me to do, because third shift is apparently “lazy, and don't work much anyway.” So even on nights where I constantly have two dozen sandwiches to be made onscreen, I still have to fit all that into the night or I get written up.

      McDonald’s wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for my coworkers. I always figured that most of them would be poor college kids like me who were just holding a spot there to pay for various things until they could settle in somewhere better. I was wrong, some people only have enough skills to make careers at McDonald’s My coworkers who work windows don't have nearly the workload I do, and sit around and talk while I try to rush to get my job done. While they could easily be helping me, they would rather spend time socializing, and I have often been forced by a manager to add her (only female managers) duties onto mine so she could go call a friend on the phone. Most of my coworkers are so bored that they follow conspiracy theories to keep themselves interested. Just last night I had a coworker try and show me definitive evidence that Obama is a Muslim Kenyan anti-Christ twin-brother-of-Osama-bin-Laden. Another was trying to tell me exactly why Lil Wayne is the current leader of the Illuminati. While they may somehow be right, I have a hard time finding any credibility in most conspiracy theories.  For this reason, I spend all my time with headphones in, and my two weeks notice is going to be turned in next Saturday.