Fondest memory of high school McDonald’s stint: watching all four of the managers—Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, and Valium Boy, fall all over themselves in an obsequious clusterfuck when Ray Kroc walked through the door completely unexpectedly.
I worked at McDonald’s in high school, and convinced all of my friends to apply. This is when my best friend and I learned that we should never, ever work or live together under any circumstances.
Day shift always sucked, night shifts tended to be pretty fun. I just remember totally crushing on this guy who went to a neighboring school, and he was crushing back and we were all intense and sharing each other’s shitty fiction. He was obsessed with Radiohead and vampires.
I think I had like twenty crushes there, come to think of it.
My favorite was working the closing shift at Jimmy John’s when I was an undergrad at University of Michigan. We closed at 3am. We usually got the bar rush around 1am, which was really annoying, but it was slow for the rest of the night. My manager was a guy my age, and we usually worked alone together shooting the shit for hours. We also had a wicked digital music collection and were allowed to blast it at night. It was working at JJs I discovered Rush.
I’ve worked in a lot of restaurants. Without question, Jimmy John’s is the cleanest, most efficient place I’ve ever worked. It is operated with military precision. They actually have random checks where corporate dudes will show up and measure the width of the cucumbers and make sure all the mayonnaise jars are facing the same direction. Then they time your sandwich making capabilities with a stopwatch and if you take longer than 30 seconds, you get points off. No shit.
I worked at a Jack in the Box back in the early 70’s, it was the first one in Tacoma, Washington. The only time we really screwed around with someone was a cop that wanted his food for free or he would claim he would pull us over and give us tickets when we got off work. We would sell him stuff at a discount to make him happy. One day at a gag shop, I found some phony rubber cheese. I bought it and a few nights later Officer Cheapskate showed up wanting free food. We gave him a free Bonus Jack and he left. 5 minutes later he came racing back to the restaurant, lights were flashing and the siren was blaring.
The shift manager went to the counter and took the brunt of the cop’s anger. Me and another employee were hiding in the back laughing our asses off. The manager heard us laughing and this got him laughing too. The cop decided getting angry wasn’t working and he started laughing with us. We gave him a couple free burgers and he quit bugging us for free food.
On a couple occasions I would have customers come through the drive through and give me a bunch of crap. Whoops, sorry I dropped your drink in your lap.
Other dastardly deeds included pinholes in the bottom of drink cups and the sides of straws, pack the cup full of ice so the customer got less soda, a little extra salt on the fries and extra condiments on burgers.
Ah yes, the hijinks. We had codes for illicit activites. If you were ‘‘sweeping the back alley,’’ you were smoking a cigarette.
If you were ‘‘shoveling the back alley’’, you were smoking… well, it was a college town. 
Small world; I worked there too. I lied about my age and got hired when I was 14.
Worked there a little over two years until a “friend” of mine stole from the register and managed to convince the manager I’d done it. And I was the one who convinced the manager to hire the little shit in the first place.
Every night I worked close I would head home with a big-ass box filled with chicken, cinnamon rolls, and sides. I fed my (rather poor) family pretty well out of that place. The rule was, you could take home anything that wasn’t sold by close, so just prior to close the cook would “accidentally” throw a whole bunch of chicken in the fryer and, surprise, there was a bunch left over. Everyone in my family got all the chicken they could stand; made me feel like a real provider. You weren’t supposed to take the cinnamon rolls home, and the manager would keep an eye on them, so I had to build up a stash of rolls a little at a time during the day, then hide them in the bottom of the box under the chicken to take them home.
I really liked the chicken sandwiches, but you weren’t supposed to eat them, so a couple of times a day, when the manager wasn’t looking, I’d grab one off the rack and shovel it down. I could go through a chicken sandwich faster than anyone would believe possible, like those guys in the hot dog eating contests.
Reading what I wrote, my stories basically come down to how much food I stole from that place; despite that I turned out pretty well, though you should see my office supplies collection
Did anyone ever order extra biscuits?
I worked at McDonald’s when I was in high school.
I usually worked from breakfast into the early afternoon.
So, how would that work? Was the stuff rock hard when it came out of the machine.
That happened to me. Worked night shift at Tim Horton’s and we were allowed to keep tips and the lady who trained me would rarely let me work drive thru and when she left she had about $40 in cash. (She told me she got that much in tips, and once shared it with me!)
It wasn’t until after she quit that the lightbulb went on. She quit because she didn’t get a raise, though she’d gotten her raise before her review and once she quit I got maybe $3-4 in tips a night at the drive thru. The owner’s daughter confirmed that everyone knew she was stealing and she had since she had started there 7 years earlier but her father wouldn’t fire the lady.
She supplemented her income to the tune of about $72000. An extra ten grand a year tax free off the top? Not bad.
That was an interesting job in general. All the drunks and the characters that would come in. Had to call the cops a few times. Seven years down the road and I can STILL remember some regular’s orders (even my Dad’s! :p)
My small home town in Oklahoma had a “Dairy Kream” (the DK as we called it).
It was the closest we had to fast food. It was burgers/fries/soft server place like Diary Queen.
I worked there as a french fry maker. Not a FF Fryer, a FF “Maker.” In other words, since we served fresh made fries, someone had to sit in the back and peel potatoes, and cut them into fries one-potato-at-a-time.
Horrible job. I had a paring knife with the tip broken off (thank God). I would remove a batch off potatoes from the automatic potato peeler. Side note, a potato peeler machine is really kind of cool. It was like a rotating drum, like a washing machine except with bumpy course sand-paper like sides. The potatoes would roll around in there and would get get ‘peeled’ by the rough edges.
Anyway, after I removed the potatoes from the peeler, my job was to use the broken tipped paring knife to cut the bad spots out of a potato, then using a wall mounted french fry cutter, slice the potato into fires, where it would drop into a bucket of water below.
Here’s where the fun begins. Since this is all about speed, I would never set the knife down after cutting the bad spots out of the potatoes. Cut the bad spots out (knife in right hand), lift the lever (knife in right hand), put the potato in the cutter (potato in left hand). Slam handle down to cut potatoes through dull potato blades.
Yep, in my typical clumsiness, I lift the potato handle, and the knife somehow manages to cut right into my nostril. As I said above, the knife had a broken tip. Thank GOD for that! Blood was everywhere. You would have thought I’d severed an artery or something. My first thought? “Oh crap, I’ve ruined this batch of fries, and now I’m going to have to do them all over again.”
The closest I ever came was the coffee/iced/mixed drinks stand at the movie theatre. Basically, we served things like coffee coolatas, iced drinks, and stuff like that. We had a tiny little area and all of the drinks were really expensive. So we kept bumping into each other all of the time and everyone complained about the price - hell, I couldn’t afford any of them! And we were supposed to wear slacks + nice shoes, but by the end of a busy day the floor would be sticky from spilled drinks or whatnot. It was disgusting.
I hated it.
Worked at Wendy’s back in college. I was the Prep Coordinator, which meant I stayed in the back and:
[ul][li]Washed pots and pans[/li][li]maintained the walk-in fridge[/li][li]hand-breaded chicken breasts and cooked them in the Henny Penny pressure fryer[/li][li]Made chili[/li][li]wrapped and baked the baked potatoes[/li][li]Made sure there were enough sliced tomatoes, lettuce, burger patties, etc. and brought them up to the front line as needed[/ul][/li]I didn’t really fraternize much with the front-line employees, and could be curmudgeonly when someone invaded my domain.
As I mentioned, I was in college while I worked there. I was taking a Philosophy class one semester, and at the final class (there was no exam), the prof said that since we were no longer his students, it would be his pleasure to have us join him at Booche’s, a local watering hole, that night. We all figured he was kidding. By sheer chance, I walked past Booche’s that evening on my way to somewhere else and saw the prof sitting all alone inside, looking sad. On the spur of the moment I abandoned whatever my other plans had been and joined him. Drunken philosophers are FUN, something I should have remembered from Monty Python. Anyway…
MANY beers later, I staggered past my Wendy’s and decided to go in for some chow. I told the girl at the front counter to make me a chicken sandwich with two pieces of chicken on it. Nervously, she said she didn’t think she was supposed to do that, whereupon I loudly and drunkenly declared, “LISTEN. I am the goddamned PREP COORDINATOR, and if I want a double goddamned chicken SANDWICH, then you will goddamned well MAKE me one. And while you’re at it, have Jason grill me some onions on the goddamned grill!” No doubt reasoning that it would be easier to just make me the sandwich and get rid of me, this poor girl knuckled under. I reeled on home with my sammich, ate it, and passed out.
The next day, my vicious hangover and I ouched our way to the laundromat to wash my Wendy’s uniforms, and who should be there washing HER uniforms but the counter girl I’d browbeat the night before? cringe I went up and apologized, and she ultimately became my absolute best friend (other than Mrs. Chef, of course).
My favorite memory from working at Subway, was a foreign girl (some variety of middle eastern, but I don’t know exactly which country). She spoke english quite well, but she didn’t know what pickles were called. I told her they were pickles, and she thought that was hilarious. “Pickles?! They’re called pickles?!” I’m not sure if “pickle” means something funny in her native language, or if she just thought it was a silly-sounding word.
I also worked at Domino’s for a few months. Part of our delivery area was pretty low-income. At least once a night one of us would show up for a delivery, and the customer would be like “I didn’t order that. It must have been a prank. But since you have to throw it away anyway I’ll take it off of your hands for a buck.” :rolleyes: We never took them up on their “generous” offers. Oddly enough, though, no one was ever robbed.
Trust me, it’s WORSE at non-fast-food places.
A “buddy” of mine worked as a cook and delivery driver for a diner in a college town–anyone who’s a Penn State alum knows exactly the place. I will not eat anything that comes out of their kitchen–at the time they were working there (2001-2002ish) the kitchen had electrical problems (so not all the lights worked) and… no running hot water.
Personally, I was just a grill cook for a downtown cheesesteak place in State College. The owner was a cheapskate but we’d snitch lunches and dinners all the time. Due to his cheapskateness, he had our bathroom (located in the kitchen area) installed with one of those annoying speaker-equipped bathroom ads in frames like you see in bars occasionally. Not so bad when you’re drunk, annoying as hell if you have to hear it every time you take a leak on a 12-hour shift. Myself and one of the other closers would take turns kicking the shit out of that thing until it stopped talking, then blaming the damage on the drunks who’d all rush our place at 2:30AM.
Best moment? It’s a football game day. We have a line out the door, because for some reason our hole-in-the-wall one-register sandwich shop is a big deal to some alumni. This gray-haired fellow in a PSU sweatshirt comes up to the counter, looks over the sandwich prep area that has about a hundred sandwich orders clipped up, and says “Hey, how long to get a reuben?”
Me, from the grill: “About an hour and a half, it’s a long line.”
The guy smiles, reaches into his wallet, and ostentatiously crams a pair of $100s into the tip jar: “Hey, how long to get a reuben?”, he says.
He got his reuben in five minutes.
I worked at Wendy’s and McDonald’s. Most of my memories center around customers being complete dicks.
Women with small children were the worst. Black men of any age were the nicest. I got to where I could look at a customer walking in and tell whether or not they were gonna be a pain in the ass.
I also remember a Canadian lady coming into McDonald’s to order something. She was speaking English, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying.
I worked for a couple summers at a Duchess restuarant, which is a chain similar to Wendys that AFAIK is only found in Connecticut. It wasn’t a bad job as far as those jobs go. The managers were never a problem and in fact when I came back the following summer, my manager didn’t have a spot but hooked me up with another Duchess in the next town (about the same commute away).
The staff was about a third Mexican workers, another third was uneducated working class adult types and the rest high school and college kids, mostly from my school or the surrounding towns.
One of my shady buddies worked in his uncle’s liquor store across the street so you can imagine what went on when I had to go out and “sweep the parking lot”.
You could always get some late night food for free.
Really the only downside was working Friday or Saturday nights since the first place I worked was a popular hangout for kids in my high school. Not that it was embarassing or anything since everyone had a shit-job somewhere. I’d just rather be out having fun than watching my classmates having fun…doing nothing in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant.
The second place I worked was a lot better. It was in a big stripmall, not isolated by itself. It was newer and a lot cleaner. Most of my shifts were daytime so I didn’t have to deal with drunks and weirdos using the restaurant as a staging area.
I worked at a Hungry Jack’s (Australian analogue to Burger King) in my first year of university.
It was a hot, crappy job and also totally, painfully legit. No free food for anyone, no late-night fryer experimentation, nearly everyone was 18 or over (the inner city location probably made it inconvenient for high schoolers, plus the owner had a personal policy against hiring anyone under 16), all food safety regulations followed to the letter, everything taken apart and cleaned at the end of each night. On the other hand, we were incredibly efficient and kicked ass when it came to profits/mystery shopper evaluations/speed of service/you name it. The customers were doubtlessly the cocksuckingest bunch of shitheads and crazies I’ve ever dealt with. I came up with a theory that people are assholes when they’re hungry. I don’t miss the job, but I do miss never having any good stories about work anymore.
Edit: This job was also where I developed a deep and abiding hatred of immigrants and old people. Fortunately, it faded once I didn’t have to work there anymore.