A Fast Food Horror Story

I worked for a well-known fast food chain in the United States for a few years, and the store I worked at was wonderful. It was a straining store, and as such, it got a lot of attention from corporate. When I got promoted to assistant manager, I found out that all of the stores did not receive the same amount of love.

I got called in a few weeks after my promotion--it's no secret that, upon taking any sort of managerial position you cease to be human, and instead become a food production automaton. Pay raises, but the per-hour level drops substantially, and anything resembling the word "no" that comes from your mouth results in quick termination. I knew the risks when I took the promotion.

I didn't know that corporate could literally send you to hell.

See, they didn't call me in to work at the training store. They called me in to work on the other side of town. It was short-staffed; that's what they told me. In retrospect, I see that this turn of phrase matched up with the situation about as well as calling the Civil War "a disagreement."

When I walked in the front doors, an employee shouted, "No, fuck you!" at the top of his lungs (with customers in the lobby) and then stormed out.

I asked what was going on. One of the teenage employees told me that the guy had just been accused of stealing money from the front register, at which point the manager of the store PUNCHED her, threw his apron in the fry grease, and then also left.

The store was down to one employee, who asked me if she could go home. What was I going to tell her? She'd just been punched! I advised her to go home, press charges. I then proceeded to close the lock down the lobby. I had no employee list, so I couldn't call anyone but the general manager, and he wasn't picking up his phone. My only option was to either close the store or try to run the drive-through by myself. I wanted to keep my job (because I hadn't really thought about it yet) so I opted to try to run the ship solo.

That's about when I saw the cockroaches. They weren't afraid of me, or of light, or of motion. They had developed sentience, and were concerned that they were eating too much. They were establishing governments.

I closed the store.

And got fired.

I will never work in fast food again.

She deserved it

At the burger hole I worked at during my undergrad years, there was a period where I was the only bilingual worker. This is the period I like to call “Fuck,” because there was an entire staff of Latinos who only spoke Spanish, management who only spoke English, and mixed customer base. If the management needed to communicate anything to the other employees, or vice versa, it had to go through me.

I regret with all of my heart that I did not abuse this power for the sake of hijinks.

Context: I’m a very, very white third generation Russian. I had no business speaking Spanish. The language just sort of happened to me. (Read: I met a cute guy.)

The computers went down after a storm one day, and the sweetest little old lady came in to buy a hamburger. She was the kind of granny that makes you think there’s a card-carrying division of the elderly certified to bake cookies.

She gave me her order, but since the computers were down, I had to shout it back at the guy on grill. Naturally, I shouted in Spanish.

The sweet little granny leans over the counter with a look of deep concern on her face and whispers to me, “You should be making them speak English!”

I must have looked confused (or, more likely, upset) because she decided she needed to start clarifying for several minutes. The racist shit flowing out of her mouth and into my face made my pulse pick up.

Finally, the guy on the grill (it was the closest position to the cash register) asks (in Spanish) if she’s complaining about the food or something, or if she’s just placing a huge order.

At which point I turn to him, put a finger up to stop the bigoted shit from flowing out of the customer’s mouth, and—well—told him exactly what she was saying, albeit in summary. I don’t feel sorry for what happened. Own what you say, right? And if you say something mean-spirited, well, as they say on TV, thems fightin’ words.

Bottom line; I saw what the guy on grill did to her food, and I saw her eat it.

Fired for what now?

One time, at a summer job I had for a fast food joint that, if you live in the U.S., I promise you've been to (or at least driven past), I was the cash register jockey -- handing walkins their food, taking their money, and cleaning up after people when they were finished eating.

A girl comes in, orders an astounding number of chicken nuggets and then goes for her purse to pay me. Except she's not wearing a purse. She's just kind of groping at her side for a while, and she finally tells me she'll be back in a minute; she's got to go outside and get her purse from the car. She had kind of a glazed look on her face, so I figured she was on drugs or something, but I wasn't expecting what came next.

The guys in the back dropped all her chicken nuggets--nine or ten orders--and she came back in with a brown paper sack, which she pours onto the counter. It's a mess of loose change.

But as she dumped it, she fell over herself. Just collapsed like a human rag doll. I freaked out and the manager called an ambulance.

Because I was in school to be a nurse, I had CPR trainining, and my head had time to clear, so I checked her pulse and her breathing--pulse, check. Breathing, nope.

And I start doing the thing where you cover the person's nose and breath into her mouth.

What they don't fucking tell you in CPR training is that if you get someone started breathing again, they can cough and vomit right into your goddamn mouth.

The ambulance guys told me I probably saved her life, and the highly recommended that I go get all kinds of fun testing to make sure that, in reward for getting her lungs working again, I hadn't picked up some kind of nightmarish hell-plague.

Oh, and I got fired the next day, both for "making a scene" in the lobby and for product waste. See, I sent the chicken nuggets with her in the ambulance ride (she regained conciousness and all, but was clearly sick.) but I'd never bothered counting the change she'd dumped onto the counter, which as it turns out, wasn't nearly enough to cover all the chicken nuggets she'd bought.

Moral of the story? If you work in fast food, never do anything nice, ever. People will puke down your throat and then fire you.