the fast food sandwich preparer

see note for reviewers.

many of us who grew up in the US

have entered the work force through learning how

to be a concubine for corporate america

through the fast food industry---

be it

mcdonald’s or

burger king

or

wendy’s---

we have stood behind the counter

and served people who should definitely not be stuffing their

acne covered fat faces with

more

oil, grease, salt, sugar, cholesterol &

carbs

to

increase their

physique.

 

still,

first world gluttons will do as

first world gluttons do,

&

at 16 and full of sarcasm & angst

being lodged between a sandwich board and two

deep fat fryers

for eight hours a day for both your

weekend days

(so you never actually get to sleep in any days during the week)

can be a way to earn a little bit of cash

legally

if you are so inclined. 

 

as you are standing in front of the counter,

reading the lunch menu & looking for the

price of the medium strawberry shake that you want to buy,

a busload of canadians or japanese tourists bustles in---

the spokesperson from the group makes his or her way to the

front of the line,

and your manager

(lazy piece of crap that he is),

gets up from reading the newspaper out in the dining room,

to pretend for the next forty minutes or so

that s/he is at the helm

of their ship.

 

you stand over the steam drawer,

where after the burgers come rolling through the

broiler

(after being frozen and kept in the walk-in cooler),

they are kept until they are used for the sandwiches.

 

there are times that the burgers are supposed to be kept in

the drawers, just like there are on every piece of

foodstuff in the

joint---

but who pays attention to them?

 

and you are supposed to skim the surface of the

deep fat fryer’s hot grease to filter out the pieces of

burnt disgustingness which has been floating there

for hours,

but who does?

 

when you employ kids that just don’t care,

who have no need for a work ethic,

to clean the sanitary napkins out of the woman’s

bathroom

you have a bathroom

which never gets the sanitary napkins

cleaned out.

 

on one fine day,

when a busload of people comes in

you find yourself with steam in your face

gazing down into the burgers that look like

brown sludge floating on a city street grate,

just about to wash down the drain---

and you may find your manager

(in her/his one act of real managing that day)

assigning you the task of breaking in the new kid.

 

the new kid has had a job before

but fell through some kind of crack

which led him to this place

and though you want to play him the violin

and converse about all his trials & tribulations

you are too indifferent

in order to even

inquire.

 

instead, you do your best to how him the ropes---

the correct way to feed the frozen plates

(burgers)

into the broiler

which then spits them out all sludgy on the other side---

you are supposed to squeeze out the fat with the spatula and then

drop them into the steam drawer.

 

so the new kid goes about the task

and within an hour is bored out of their

mind.

 

but alas, all it takes to shake boredom away is a little sprinkle of

chaos.

 

chaos comes when the tourist buses flood in

and the manager throwing a fit starts buzzing round the place

fleetingly shouting out orders at anyone in their

path---

so the training veteran instructs the new kid on the

block,

to begin the

burger producing revolution.

 

with one worker on the broiler,

transforming as many frozen sub-beef frisbees to their

warmer form & catching them when they shoot out the front,

dropping em’ in the steam drawer,

& the other worker at the sandwich-making station,

belting out whopper after whopper,

the two alone

pump out close to 50 whoppers in a very short bit of time---

the veteran knows that whoppers not eaten will be

waste---

& waste makes the worthless sloth of a manager look

bad---

it also pisses them off in the moment---

two beautiful birds killed with one

stone.

 

in no time at all,

the panic switch that had been pressed in order to deal

with the tourist bus attack,

has been lifted,

and the management wonderboy,

he wanders round the kitchen scoping out the

disaster which inevitably comes when you start randomly yelling at your

workers

in the attempt to sell as much fast food crap as you can,

when all morning you haven’t been prepped enough

& you certainly weren’t ready for an afternoon

rush.

 

our idiot in question finally sees the work of our two

sandwich workers,

and he eyes them both whose heads are still to the grindstone,

churning away at producing more whoppers than ever recorded in

a burger king

hour---

STOP MAKING WHOPPERS!

he yells at them,

and the two workers smile at one another & subsequently

oblige.

 

as the pretty faced cashiers up front start throwing away all the

burger waste that had been piled on in the waiting racks,

the manager tells the two sandwich-making revolutionaries to go

on break,

to try and get them as far as he can from the job that they were doing---

a win-win for our

sandwich makers.

 

the next day the newbie doesn’t show,

either they didn’t care for being treated like old sludge fries from the

deep fat fryer,

or they couldn’t take the boredom---

you never can tell

what makes one not want to subject themselves to

fast-food employment in america

but all signs point to

good

reasons.

Author's Note

"Hundreds of millions of people buy fast food every day without giving it much thought, unaware of the subtle and not so subtle ramifications of their purchases. They rarely consider where this food came from, how it was made, what it is doing to the community around them. They just grab their tray off the counter, find a table, take a seat, unwrap the paper and dig in.... They should know what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns. As the old saying goes: You are what you eat.”

-from Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser