I worked at Subway for a year.
It’s different from most fast food places, as the majority of the time, I worked alone… I would be the only one in the restaurant except at dinner time. I was the weekend closer.
It wasn’t a good job, but it could have been worse. I tend to be exceptionally quick at finding “shortcuts”. My first night closing by myself took an hour and a half. Within a month, provided all the dishes were done, I could be out in 15 minutes. By the time I left, 5 minutes was enough. I was good at my job. “Irreplaceable” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first one that comes to mind.
The job was pretty easy, when the customers weren’t assholes. A trained monkey could have done most of my work (and probably have done a quicker and more sanitary job than my coworkers). If a customer wasn’t in, and I didn’t have too much work to do (mainly clean the breadpans, prepare the occasional topping or clean the store) I’d generally sit in the back with a laptop playing Red Alert.
As far as co-workers went, most of the time I worked there, I was the only male on staff (also I was the only one who was known to be straight… The others were either openly bisexual or questionable… It was an odd experience) I had 2 other people there who were competent, including the management… And both of them ended up being my friends. The first one (hired at the same time as me) was great, our personalities were quite compatible and we hit it off immediately… I later dated her house-mate (and former girlfriend) whom I had met at one of my coworker’s parties years before (before we worked together/knew each other, he brother was a friend of a friend). The other one had worked there for a significant amount of time before my arrival, and was quite intelligent (and attractive). Out of a staff of about 10, those were the only two I could count on. Luckily, we all had a good sense of humour and quickly banded together to become a plague on the rest of the staff. Basically, we ran the place… The only thing one of us didn’t do was ordering supplies, as we would take care of scheduling and the other management duties.
The rest of the staff really weren’t my biggest fans. Apparently, I scared them. A lot. I’m not a small guy, and when I worked there, I would grow extremely frustrated, sometimes coming pretty close to ‘exploding’… Generally, I’d just start adding more and more expletives to my speech and muttering under my breath. Really, I’m a gentle guy. I’d never harm any other person… The most I’d do would be to go kick the cardboard boxes (they needed to be collapsed anyway). But that really put ‘the fear’ in to them. Normally, I’d make sure that ‘the fear’ wouldn’t develop, but it worked very heavily in my favour, (the co-workers would actually work hard if they knew I had a shift that night, so as to not anger me)
Customers were really the main ‘issue’. We were expected that when a customer walks through the door, we should have their sub prepared and paid for within 2 minutes (pretty difficult, but possible… Much easier when you’re working with others) But the problem wasn’t our speed… Not many customers know what they want on their subs… And it only got worse when they were intoxicated.
Drunks and stoned customers were my ‘specialty’. Like I said, I’m not a small guy, and generally, if there was a customer we didn’t like, I’d be the one to deal with them. I wasn’t opposed to kicking people out of “my” store, but I had other was of dealing with them. My favourite method of getting people out of my store was playing certain kinds of music - We were allowed to play whatever we wanted, provided it was “radio friendly” - My favourite was bird calls. I’d find recordings that have bird calls edited in to them… You should see the terror on a coke-head’s face when he hears an eagle inside a Subway. My other favourite thing to do involved cutting open lettuce bag… In my own special way. You see, lettuce came shredded in a clear plastic bag, and to open it you’d cut off the top and pour it in to the bin, really nothing strange at all… Unless you grabbed it by the top, as if it were the hair on someone’s head, and use your knife to slice it open, as if you were slitting someone’s neck… All while staring a customer in the eye, with a smirk. Good times.
90% of the stuff I did should have got me fired. A good example would be myself and the other good coworkers having “cucumber fights”, which often involved throwing cucumber slices at customers. Free food to people we liked, insults to people we didn’t… Basically the general way we treated customers… My first customer complaint (one of two ever recieved) was for “Applying meat aggressively”… I shit you not.
I guess that’s the only advantage of being surrounded by incompetents, nobody’s ever going to fire you, provided you still do your work.
Basically, despite the fact that I had a highly enjoyable reign of terror, I vowed to never work in food service ever again. It really made me realize how much I hate the general public, and pretty much removed whatever faith I had left in humanity.
The third place was the freaking pits. The managers treated us like losers, the customers treated us like scum, and no one had any pride or motivation that I could tell. I think the turning point for me might have been when the night custodian hung himself out in the dumpster area and we had customers coming through the drive through ordering breakfast and saying ‘I think there’s a body on your back fence, by the way.’