Looking back, a strangely high percentage of my employment decisions were made because of girls. (Jobs v. Life)

Seriously, has it been more than a year since I last wrote an installment in this series? The Magic Foam Dice Of Skee-Ball Prizes* is a fickle master, I suppose.  But it's time once again to revisit all the jobs I've had in my life.  Having worked my way through paperboy, McDonald's, and Dishwasher at a country club, it's time to move on to something far more sophisticated:

Dishwasher at a Denny's!

*This is how I choose what I will write about on a given day: I roll a foam die that Mr Bunches got with his Skee-Ball winnings, and the number that comes up helps determine what I will work on that day.  There's about four more steps after that but I thought I'd at least explain the reference.


The country club where I'd been employed for about 2-3 weeks had closed for the winter, leading to the obvious question:

Why was it open until New Year's Eve in the first place?

The country club, which is a thing that amazingly exists in modern America ("modern" meaning 1980s America in this case but I know for a fact they still exist because one of my partners at work belongs to one, and we went to lunch there once for a meeting and I had a grilled cheese that had tomato on it, as well, and it was delicious, which I guess is one reason that country clubs still exist: to teach us new, delicious ways to grill cheese.  "Grilling Cheese For Rich People." Sounds like a winner of a cookbook, doesn't it?)

Where was I? Oh, yeah: The country club, which still exists, is one of the most anachronistic, most annoying things that it turns out people do, and that is in an astonishingly long list of things that people do that I find anachronistic and/or annoying. (That's mostly and and very little or in that last choice).

Whether country clubs are something that needs to be a thing (they don't) is for another essay another time (although I just answered it).  Whether it makes sense for a country club to be open only until New Year's Eve and not after that until spring is another matter entirely.  Another, also stupid, matter, but another matter.  The country club where I got my start in dishwashing was open from spring, sometime, until New Year's Eve, and then closed for several months.  The reason for this, I was told, was that "members don't use it in the winter," which doesn't make sense on like fourteen different levels.

First of all, "don't use it in the winter" means they don't use it for November and December, which I will go to my grave saying are parts of winter.  Well, December, anyway.  The year, to me, breaks down this way:

Spring: March, April, May.
Summer: June, July, August.
Fall: September, October, November up until Thanksgiving.
Winter: post-Thanksgiving November, December, January, and February.

I get really irritated when I hear meteorologists say "BLAH BLAH BLAH winter starts at 5:15 p.m. December 21" because scientific winter is about as relevant to life as the magnetic north pole is to Christmas, which is to say not at all.

Imagine if in regular conversation I said

"Yeah, so these guys went on an expedition to the North Pole,"

and you said "Wow, that would take a lot of training and outfitting and possibly swimming if that half-read headline I remember about maybe the North Pole melting was accurate, and also wasn't there a picture of a polar bear swimming on Huffington Post?"

And I said "What? Oh, no, they went to the MAGNETIC north pole, which is near Ellesmere Island in northern Canada but is actually moving towards Russia at approximately 35 miles per year, which is a huge victory for communism, if you think about it, in that in the future all our compasses will point towards the Kremlin,"

and you said "But Russia isn't communist anymore,"

at which point we'd be off on a tangent, and let's get back to the point here: "Winter" means "when it is cold and dark outside," and to say "Winter" includes 2/3 of March but only 1/3 of December is just stupid.

Also, to say that patrons of a country club don't use it in 'the winter' is stupid, again because you keep it open for November and December, so does their attendance drop off remarkably in January? How did you find that out? Did you used to be open in January? Or do you just assume that? And why don't they use the club in the winter? I get that they don't play tennis or golf in the winter because snow but they don't use the restaurant? At all? Do they only use other restaurants seasonally, as well? The members had to pay to eat at the restaurant (and to use the course; the membership fees only entitled them to be among the limited group of people who could opt to pay for those services, another stupid thing about country clubs, you are paying for the right to pay for stuff, while simultaneously excluding others from paying for those things.)

So for all the dumb reasons they had, the country club closed in the winter and left me to try to find work at a place where people based their spending decisions on something other than whether the food tasted right when there was snow on the ground, and that led me to the Denny's that was about 15 miles from our house.

By this point, I could find jobs that were farther away because by this point, I had my own car.  It was my first car EVER and I bought it for $200 from a guy my Uncle Mark knew, I think? I remember that my Uncle Mark was involved in helping me decide to buy the car but I don't remember if he just went with me to look at it or if he knew the guy, but either way, this car was a beaut.

It was some sort of Datsun, I believe, and it was a shade of brown that only existed in the 1970s and 1980s, a flat brown that appeared to be made of clay rather than paint on metal.  The car had two snow tires instead of regular tires on the back, and that, too, is something that it's hard to believe ever existed or still exists: snow tires, like country clubs, seem like they are a thing that should belong only to the past.

The really cool thing about that car is that it didn't actually require keys to start it; there was some sort of quirk in the wiring or potential explosive hazard or something that allow the car to start if you just turned the ignition, with or without a key.  This made it easy for me to begin my life as a driver by immediately reassigning that part of my brain which otherwise would be responsible for remembering where my keys were to other duty, and for 28 glorious years I have been completely, utterly, unaware of where my keys are at any given moment.  (Even as I write this, I am using the spare set of keys for my current car, the real key having been misplaced some six weeks ago.  You would think I would be more careful about the sole key I have for this car, but you would think that only if you knew nothing about me. I've lost the spare key twice already, and this is I figure entirely because when I was sixteen I owned a car that didn't need a key, so I never evolved to know how to protect my keys.  I'm like a plesiosaur, if plesiosaurs had used keys but not been able to remember where they were, and you can't prove that they didn't, because the fossil record is incomplete.)

Armed with a car, I was no longer dependent on my dad to drive me to and from jobs, which was good because he wouldn't have been pleased about having to drive me 15 miles to Denny's instead of just 5 to McDonald's or the country club, and I would've been in for a lot of lectures about how it is irresponsible to get fired from a job just to go to a party, and my counterargument ("but there were girls there") would likely not have won me points.

I can't, looking back, remember anything about the actual process of getting hired at Denny's. I don't remember the manager or the interviewer or even specifically whether I was hired solely as a dishwasher or as a busboy/dishwasher.  What I remember most is that I was trained by a guy whose name I think was Dave, and Dave had the sort of sandy, greasy-ish already-thinning blond hair and moustache that would mark him as a bad influence of an extremely minor sort in any teen comedy.  Dave would have been the guy who was (like me) not popular, but who did stuff that could be popular: Dave's character would have had a room that he kept a padlock on, and a mom who was not around much, and Dave's character probably would have smoked pot, which my character would have resisted in the movie.

THAT is all I remember about Dave.  And more or less all I remember about working at Denny's, a job that almost completely failed to make an impact on me.  I recall that I had to wear a white shirt, and I had to wear an apron.  And there were these brown tubs of dishes at various 'stations' around the restaurant that I had to go to pick up and wash.  I don't remember actually setting or clearing tables, but it's almost certain that was part of my job.

What I remember, and why I say I was a dishwasher there, was the dishwasher room.  I remember that like I was just in it this morning.  It had yellow walls of the institutional yellow color that fills hospitals and high schools and municipal buildings: a yellow that's so pale it barely registers as yellow, but it's definitely not white, either.

In the yellow room there was a big metal table where you set the brown tubs, and a roller-slide where you would take large, 3x3 plastic trays and stack all the dishes into them before sliding them into the industrial-strength dishwasher that had a slide-down door.  You'd fill a rack, slide it to the right and slam the door down and hear the spray nozzles kick in while you filled the next rack, and then lift the door and slide them down again, pushing the rack out.

I loved that whole thing.  This was way better than scrubbing pots and pans in the back room at the country club and using their miniscule dishwasher (let alone way way WAY better than depooping shrimp on New Year's Eve).  I loved seeing how little food people actually finished (even if the idea of touching food people had touched was gross) and I loved scraping it off and I loved hearing the dishes slide in and clank under the sprays, but most of all what I loved was the way the dishes came out the other end in 2 minutes, clean and hot. Those dishes gleamed, and it took literally no effort on my part to get them that clean.

I was raised hand-washing dishes.  I want to say that when I was a kid we had a dishwasher for a while but I bet that's a memory I invented.  What I remember is that we had to handwash dishes for all the relevant portions of my life, and with a family of five (and then six) and this being the 1970s and 1980s, there were a LOT of dishes.  Nothing back then was pre-made and there weren't delivery restaurants and the frozen foods you could get weren't these "one-dish" pasta 'creations' and things that make up all our meals today.  Back then a simple dinner would require seemingly hundreds of dishes, plates, pots, pans, etc.  And we had to handwash them all, and my mom's rule was not just that those dishes had to gleam, but that dishes had to be washed in hot water.

Hot is probably not a strong enough word.  If the water didn't more or less scorch your hands, it was not hot enough.  If you could stick your hands in it for long without grimacing in pain, it was not hot enough.  Those dishes needed to be sterile.  And I was the one who washed the dishes most nights (by choice: I liked washing better than drying because drying you had to put them away, too.)

So I had a lifetime of hands with red, raw knuckles from using a dobie pad -- that was what my mom called that little sponge with the netting to help scrub, a dobie pad, which apparently is an actual brand name for it, having just googled it -- to get everything clean in water so hot it would sterilize surgical instruments, and it was work.

Compared to that, dishwashing at Denny's was a breeze.  It was my first brush with the future, as I like to think of it, my first brush with how machines and technology could make life superamazing. In getting a job at Denny's, I went from a life where dishes only got clean if you actually felt physical pain in the process, to a life where dishes got clean by sitting in a box for two minutes, clean the way my mom would have liked them, sparkling and hot.

Then I would have to quit Denny's three months later -- because girls.  Or at least girl.  (That is called foreshadowing.  See you in 15 months.)

The Dishwasher, 2 (Jobs v. Life)

Comic comes from Natalie Dee.

Jobs v Life is essays about all the jobs I've had, in chronological order.  So far there's been paperboy,  and McDonald's... click here for an explanation and table of contents.


When I left off telling about my job a a dishwasher at Chenequa Country Club -- the third job I ever had in my life -- I was here, talking about

cruising, which as I realize it has nothing at all to do with Chenequa Country Club but you're stuck with the me that's stuck on this story, and cruising it is.  Cruising was something we did about every three weeks, driving around on Highway 100, smoking and pretending we were cool and not bored and seeing girls and wondering what it would be like to talk to them, and cruising was Godawfulboring right up until the one night it was not, the last night we ever went cruising, and what made cruising not boring that night was that on that one night, instead of just cruising around, stopping at the stoplights, getting some food, and then going home, on that one night, instead, things took a wild, random turn for the bizarrely worse when at a stoplight, a guy got out of a car and ran over to our car and reached in through the front, open, passenger-seat window and grabbed my friend Fred and began punching him as hard and fast in the face as he could.

That is how one of the rare nights on which something happened began: we'd been cruising, on Highway 100, and then that took place, and we all began yelling.

I have to make a correction to the story, though, as since last time I have realized that it was not Fred who was being punched, it was my friend Bob.

Bob and Fred were best friends, both on the track team, both lived near each other for a while, and they hung out together.  I was a hanger-on to their duo, and that continued with both Bob and Fred working as waiters at Chenequa Country Club before I began as a dishwasher there.  The fact that we would all work together made it seem to me like it might be kind of cool to work there only it wasn't at all.

Bob was in the passenger seat, as I recall, and I was in the back seat behind the driver, with the driver being my older brother Bill, and Bob in the front passenger seat. 

I realized, after last time, that I was wrong on the placement of that front-seat passenger because it was only after going back and re-reading it to be being this segment that I remembered the critical factor, which was how this whole thing had started, which was that Fred, who was prone to doing things like this, had flipped off the guys in the other car.

We didn't know that as Bill started driving, doing so as soon as he could, which was both almost immediately and a lot longer than you want it to be when you are under attack, and while we waited for the light to change and the cars in front of us to move Bob was trying to roll up the window while also being punched in the face and finally we were moving, trying to get out of the stop-and-go cruising traffic on Highway 100 and away from the guys who were suddenly chasing us.

We didn't know why they had attacked Bob, or us, or whether they'd meant to attack just Bob or what was going on at all; all we knew was that we were being chased, and it was for real.  We got off of Highway 100 and into the side streets that ran through all the subdivisions and small strip malls around West Allis and Brookfield, Wisconsin, and in the dark of that night we were being pursued by an unknown number of guys in a car for no apparent reason, and they were not giving up.

As we drove, we were all shouting instructions to Bill about what to do and where to go; I suppose we were trying to lose them, but we weren't doing a very effective job of it, because when you actually go through something like that, it's way harder to lose someone than you immediately think, even in a bunch of residential streets.  Or maybe especially in a bunch of residential streets, where there are stop lights and other cars and it's not all that late and so while you are driving to save your life you also are driving, at least a little, somewhat responsibly, in that Bill would pause or at least slow down for stop signs, something they never do in the movies.

This went on for about forty years, or ten minutes, depending on whether you want to know how it felt or how long it actually took.  For about 10 minutes or so we sped as much as we could through quiet residential streets, with these guys after us, and it was during that time that Fred confessed that he had flipped the guys off at the stoplight, prompting us all to start yelling at him about why he would do that, while he yelled back his defense, being that he didn't know and he thought it would be funny.

I thought these guys were going to kill us.

I had only been in, at that point, about three fights in my entire life, if you don't count constantly fighting with my brothers which I don't because when we fought we had rules, like You can't hit each other in the face (a rule my older brother Bill would, not long after this event, break, along with my nose, when he punched me in the face when I wasn't even looking at him, resulting in a life-long bend in my nose), so when we fought as brothers, even those times we picked up weapons, which was sometimes, we almost never did any real harm to each other.

The three fights I had been in were two of the usual kinds of fights, in grade school, where nothing much happens.  One had been against Mark Hanley, a kid whose parents were friends with my parents, but who I never cared much for.  I don't remember why I fought Mark Hanley, other than that I didn't much care for him and I had (have, but it's easier to control at age 43 than at age 10 or 12) a terrible temper.  The fight with Mark Hanley took place on a baseball diamond and involved only a few punches and maybe some wrestling.  I don't remember it well but I remember that I didn't get badly hurt at all and neither did he, and Mark and I after that remained wary acquaintances until high school where I never recall talking to him ever again.  Maybe he moved.

Another fight was with Dean Larsen, in 5th grade, and I got in trouble for it, because Dean Larsen was making fun of me wearing glasses and an eye patch.  When I think back about Dean Larsen, I remember him as being taller and stronger than everyone in the 5th grade, and the rumor was that he'd been held back, but even if he had been held back, it couldn't account for how I remember Dean, because I remember him as being grown-up sized, double my height, and that can't be, right?  I'm sure I've inflated how large he was to make up for how badly that fight went, when I charged Dean Larsen for making fun of me and tried to punch him and he easily got me in a headlock and tackled me and pulled my glasses off and gave me a facewash until a teacher broke it up and I got sent to the principal's office for starting a fight.

After 5th grade, in our district, everyone changed schools and went to junior high for 6th-8th grades at Hartland North, and I don't recall seeing Dean there, so maybe I've completely blanked him from my mind after that.

The only other fight was one I got into when I was about 17; my uncle, Mark, was staying with us at the time, as my grandmother had recently died and Mark was only about 20 years old.  Mark and I had gone out on one Friday night to a "teen bar," where we could shoot pool and dance and smoke and he could meet girls and I could hope to meet girls, and there was a guy there who was picking a fight with me and finally I said I would fight him, although I can't imagine what I was thinking when I agreed to that.

I left, with Mark, and he left, with his friends, and a bunch of people who knew what was going on left, too, and we met on the sidewalk outside the teen bar, which was called "Jellybeans," and which held a weekly lip-synch contest where once I had come in second by doing a lipsynch to Adam Ant's Strip.

(I did not strip all the way down; I had a pair of shorts under my jeans.)

(You didn't get any prizes for being second, though.)

Outside, me and this guy faced each other, about three inches apart, each daring the other to hit first.  We had a belief, back then, that if you hit first you could be arrested, whereas if you hit second you could never be in trouble at all.   I know now that that rule is not exactly accurate, but that's what we thought back then, so many fights started the way this one did:

Him:  Go ahead.  Hit me.

Me:  No.  You hit me.  [I was desperately praying that he would not hit me because by then I had calmed down and realized that there wasn't any chance, really, that I would come out of this in any shape I wanted to be in.]

OTHERS:  Hit him.

This went on for a few minutes, until this happened:

Him:  Hit me.

ME:  HITS HIM AS HARD AS I CAN SQUARELY ON THE NOSE, WATCHING BLOOD SPURT AND HIM STAGGER BACK.

You probably think you can guess what happened next, and if you guessed "I turned around and said to my uncle, Did you see that? I hit him!" only to turn back and get pasted in the face myself and fall to the ground," you guessed correctly.

Two punches, one from each, and I was down, but that fight was not over because he kicked me, again and again, forcing me to cover my face because he was trying to kick it, and I stood up only to have him trip me and knock me down again and start kicking me and I got up again only to have him punch me in the head and I went down again and he started kicking me again...

...I have to point out that as I understood the Rules of Fights, one does not kick.  This really seemed unfair to me.  Also, painful.

...and after a few minutes of that, my uncle somehow pulled me out and kind of pulled rank -- he was a year or two older than everyone else -- and it stopped and they left and he helped me get into the car and we drove home, leaving me to wonder to this day why he waited until the third round of kicks to stop the bout.

All of that is to say that while I had been in a few fights in my life, they had never gone well, and in the most serious one, I am pretty sure I'd have been hospitalized by Kick Guy if not for my uncle finally deciding to help me out of that one, and thus, as we drove through neighborhood after neighborhood and could not shake these guys, I was 100% positive that I was going to die this way, so I was quietly awaiting my fate when we hatched a desperate plan.

We had, in the car with us, a bottle of Schnapps.

Don't judge us.  I know that teenage drinking is kind of wrong and that drinking and driving is wrong, but first off, Bill was driving and he was not drinking, and secondly, this was back roundabout in 1988 and while drinking and driving is always wrong and I get that -- I was mowed into by a drunk driver a few years later and broke my neck -- back then drinking and driving was wrong on the level of, say, jaywalking, or not shoveling your driveway.  Here is an actual thing that happened to me when I was 20:

We had been at a party, and we had been drinking, as we were wont to do at parties.  Around about 1 or 2 a.m. when we ran out of alcohol and the party wound down and the people like me who did not have girlfriends to make out with had to go home because everyone was making out with their girlfriends started leaving, we had to decide who was going to drive.

I was chosen to drive on the basis of having had the least to drink: our choices were Fred, who could barely stand up, Bob, who could stand up but not much more, and me, plus my younger brother Matt who also, I believe, was stoned. 

So I got the car keys and the responsibility of driving, and I drove carefully and did pretty well for the five or so miles home, a trip that involved going through downtown Hartland and within a block or two of the police station before hitting the long straight road that led to our subdivision.

We were on that road, and apparently I was speeding, because I got pulled over by the local cop who knew us the best, Officer Begin (his name was pronounced Bay-gen, in case you are wondering, which you probably weren't.  If you weren't, I apologize for wasting your time, but it seemed more important when I wrote it that you know how to pronounce his name even though, I assure you, the pronunciation of his name does not factor into this story at all.)

Officer Begin pulled me over just one block away from the street I lived on, and our house was only three blocks up that street, so we were 1/3 of a mile from home when I got pulled over, and this is how seriously drinking and driving was not taken back then: I wasn't worried about drinking and driving, I was worried about underage drinking, and speeding.

Officer Begin came up to the car and looked us over.  He knew me, and he knew our family, mostly because of Bill, who was constantly in low-grade trouble, and sometimes in middle- or high-grade trouble.

"Where you going, Briane?" he asked me quietly.

I mumbled something about going home, aware that I was kind of slurring my words.

"You tired?" Officer Begin asked.

Fred, in the backseat, was laughing and paying no attention to the fact that the cop was asking me questions.  I agreed I was tired.

"Have you been drinking tonight?" the cop asked all of us.

We all assured him that we had not, all except Fred, who was laughing about something else now.

Officer Begin sighed and said to me: "Just go straight home, okay?"

And he walked back to his car and turned off the lights and left.  We drove home.

So we had a bottle of Schnapps in the car with us, because that was what kids did then, and our plan, as we tried to shake the guys who were chasing us, was this:  We would throw that bottle at their car.

We didn't know what it would do, to throw the bottle at them.  It was pretty much the only thing we could think to do because we were 20 miles from home and lost in the subdivisions and needed to end this and get on the freeway and go home but we didn't want them following us to our houses, so as we rounded a corner and the car gained on us, these guys who had been chasing us now for about 20 minutes, Bob leaned out the window and held up  the bottle of Schnapps -- it was one of those heavy, thick flask-sized bottles, built like a glass brick -- and he threw it.

We heard the bottle smash against their car, and out the back window we could see that he'd hit the front of the car and hit it good, and what happened next was the only reason that plan worked.

The driver of the other car stopped his car cold, slamming on the brakes, and opened his door, and began running after us! 

We had been about 20 yards away when Bob threw the bottle and this guy gets out and starts running after us, and we all realized immediately that this was it, this was our break, and began hollering for Bill to floor it and he did, taking off like a shot as the guy continued to try to chase us on foot for nearly a block but we of course left him behind, and Bill took a turn and another turn and then he was alone in an area we didn't recognize.

"Turn off the headlights," we told him, and he did that.  We assumed the guy had gotten back into his car and was looking for us, but we were far enough ahead, we figured, that we could continue to sneak around, and that was what we did for about 15 more minutes, driving as quickly as we could with our lights off, all of us silent; the feeling was like in one of those submarine movies where the entire crew sits motionless, sweating, in the green glow, waiting to see if they have been discovered.

We weren't.  We made it out of that neighborhood, got our bearings, and got on the highway, and headed home.  We took backroads through our town to make sure nobody was following us, because we were smart that way.

And only that way.


 
PS: I realize that this has nothing whatsoever to do with dishwashing.  Next time I will talk about the actual job, but maybe the point is that work, jobs, have so little to do with what life is all about that I cannot directly think about a job like dishwashing, and so instead my brain gets redirected to the good parts.

The Dishwasher, 1 (Jobs v. Life)

Jobs v Life is essays about all the jobs I've had, in chronological order.  So far there's been paperboy,  and McDonald's... click here for an explanation and table of contents.

They say never to mix family and business, and I learned that at the age of seventeen or so when I got fired from McDonald's because my Dad wouldn't cover (lie) for me so I could go to a party.

Only I didn't learn it fast enough, because I then relied on my brother to get me in to a second job, working at Chenequa Country Club as a dishwasher.

Chenequa Country Club was, I suppose, a pretty swanky place.  Or maybe not.  I never saw much more of it than the back room, the kitchen, and, on New Year's Eve, the empty ballroom where we sat smoking and pretending we were having fun when what we were really doing was calling 867-5309 on the country club's phone to see what would happen.

(Nothing happened.)

(Nothing Happened could be the title of a series of essays about my social life as a teenager, and especially Friday nights.  It would be difficult to imagine a less eventful series of nights in the life of a teenager.  Many people probably look back nostalgically on their teenage years and think about the wild, fun times they had.  I am not one of those people.  Many of the Friday nights I spent as a teenager were so boring that to describe them as "uneventful" would be an overstatement.  That was largely preferable to the eventful Friday nights, though, as the nights on which things did happen were terrifying, such as the night we had decided to go cruising on Highway 100 and ended up nearly getting killed.

Here is what happened: 

We went cruising.

"Cruising" should not be a thing.  "Cruising" is just driving around, but not even that.  Cruising is the exact automotive equivalent of boating in that it is driving around but doing so in such a way that there is zero chance of anything significant happen.

You may guess from that sentence that I'm not a fan of boating.  I'm not.  Boating is dumb.  You get into a boat, and you go drive around in circles.  It's like NASCAR for Dummies, only a little more pointless than that phrase implies.

The only thing stupider than boating is cruising, in which you drive your car up and down a stretch of straight road, very slowly,  in a traffic jam of other kids doing the exact same thing.  This is supposed to be fun, and also a social opportunity, and I don't see how either of those two words could ever actually apply to cruising.

From time to time, around where we grew up, there would be a concerted effort on the part of West Allis, where we went cruising, to crack down on the practice.  We "cruised" on Highway 100 in West Allis because it was long and straight and had fast food restaurants on it and was near all the suburbs where we, as privileged white kids, could feel like we were badass (because we were cruising) without feeling scared for our actual safety (because were were not in Milwaukee where there were minorities.)

After all, nothing says badass like a group of kids with spiky hair sitting in a 1968 Impala listening to The Cure play Lovecats while they drive for the 11th time past a Burger King restaurant.

The point is, West Allis would constantly try to crack down on the cruising by ticketing people or posting cops out there or changing the traffic lights or something dumb, and the fact that our parents said "Don't you go cruising on Highway 100" and that it was kind of illegal made it somewhat more alluring than hanging out yet another night at the Attic West teen bar, dancing to The Cure's "Lovecats."  All West Allis/Parents had to do was not care, and we'd have given it up, but the slightly-illicit air of cruising made it sometimes a thing to do, because we were stupid and bored.

"Stupid And Bored" could be the title for a series of posts about suburban kids.

The intent of cruising was not to somehow recreate the halcyon days of the 1950s, as they were shown in the halcyon days of the 1970s in movies like American Graffiti, which I've never seen but which I think involves cruising.  This was 1986 and we didn't care about olden days like the 1950s or the 1970s; we hadn't even started yet listening to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, me and my friends.  We were purely 80s kids, with our New Wave bands and Generra shirts and feathered hair, and we wouldn't start getting into 70s stuff until a few years later when my dwindling band of high school friends was absorbed into my little brother Matt's social circle as a result of my dropping out of college for a while.

But that was not until 1988 and 1989; this was 1986 and we sometimes went cruising, ostensibly to "pick up chicks," i.e., meet women, and we really did call them "chicks" but not in an ironic or hip way; we called them chicks because we were, in a word, losers and thought it was cool to call girls, "chicks."

I'm not sure why we thought cruising would be any better for us to meet chicks than the other things we tried to do to meet them (go to teen bars, try to find parties to go to, ... and that was about it.)  But I guess it couldn't have been any worse at getting us to meet them. 

At 17, I was not so great at meeting the ladies.  Which was probably good, because if there was anything I was worse at than meeting women it would have been interacting with them, so it probably was good that I never had very many girlfriends.  As I think back now, I believe that at 17, when I was a junior in high school, my total number of actual, real, "girlfriends," who would qualify for that title under a reasonable definition of the word, was...

one.

Her name was Kris and I'd met her at McDonald's, where she worked for a while, and we went on, as I recall, three dates (although I'm not entirely sure it was that many) including going to her homecoming dance, an occasion for which I believe I took her to a fancy restaurant across the street from a gas station in Waukesha.  It was a German restaurant.  I can't remember the name, but it's still there, none the worse for the wear.

I had gone on dates with other girls, too, but most of them were one-offs and didn't lead to anything that would be considered a relationship, or even anything that would be considered a second date.

So cruising was as good an idea to meet women as any -- because when I did meet women, I was not so successful at talking to them, and then, as things (rarely) progressed down the line from talking to them to asking them out to successfully taking them on a date to successfully getting a second date, my success rate went way down.

Lately, I have been working, in my imagination, on the idea that everything we do is simply a subset of everything we could do, and that a version of us is constantly doing every single thing we could be, and so as I sit here typing this, there is a version of me that instead of getting up to post on his blog, got up and got in the car and took the boys for breakfast and is even now eating a delicious pancake, and there is a version of me that instead of doing that got up and said "let's leave the boys with a sitter" and he and Alternate Sweetie are spending a day together at the Terrace, reading and talking and eating ice cream, and there is a version of me, even, that got up and said "Screw it! Today is the day we finally just up and go for it!" and that version of me put almost all his stuff for sale on eBay, took his savings out, and bought four plane tickets headed for a small Caribbean island nation, where they will land later today and start making a new life for themselves in a place where it never snows and the water is crystal-clear and they can wear floral-print shirts on the beach every day of their lives.

Since Caribbean Me exists, I assume that Ladykiller Teen Me also exists, somewhere, and I sometimes wonder what he is like, in his alternate universe, where he successfully asked out that one cheerleader that danced with him when he was a freshman and she was a sophomore -- she danced with Ladykiller Me and "Real" Me, alike, but only Ladykiller Me asked her out on a date after that because Real Me was too shy to make a second request of the cheerleader, and I wonder if Ladykiller Me is happy -- he would have dated a lot of girls, probably, and maybe been more popular in high school, but would he have ended up where I did, anyway, meeting Sweetie and falling head-over-heels in love, so head-over-heels that it was hard for him to admit, or even understand, at first how much he loved this beautiful woman who was so nice, too? Or would Ladykiller Me have married someone else, or be so blase about women by that time that he took for granted the interest Sweetie paid him when they first met?

I don't want to be Ladykiller Me; if we are the stories we tell ourselves, I have no desire to change my previous chapters because I like how the plot of this life is shaping up, but I wouldn't mind having a big quantum reunion at the Higgs Boson Bar and meeting all those me's.  We could probably get "I'm The Version That Actually Followed Through On All Those Ideas You Had Me" to foot the bill.  He's got the money.

Anyway, cruising, which as I realize it has nothing at all to do with Chenequa Country Club but you're stuck with the me that's stuck on this story, and cruising it is.  Cruising was something we did about every three weeks, driving around on Highway 100, smoking and pretending we were cool and not bored and seeing girls and wondering what it would be like to talk to them, and cruising was Godawfulboring right up until the one night it was not, the last night we ever went cruising, and what made cruising not boring that night was that on that one night, instead of just cruising around, stopping at the stoplights, getting some food, and then going home, on that one night, instead, things took a wild, random turn for the bizarrely worse when at a stoplight, a guy got out of a car and ran over to our car and reached in through the front, open, passenger-seat window and grabbed my friend Fred and began punching him as hard and fast in the face as he could.

Oh, and:

)

McDonald's 6: Jobs v. Life

Jobs v. Life is an examination of every job I've ever had, in order. We're on only the SECOND job: My time at McDonald's, which, when last we left, was about to come to an end.

I was not a popular guy in high school.

*Waits for gasps of surprise, shocked looks, gets none.*

Most people, I think, weren't popular in high school -- they couldn't be, right? If most people were popular than popular wouldn't mean anything.

But I never really had a chance, the way I see it: I was fat for my childhood, the kind of fat that ranges from "sort of pudgy" to "actually pretty big."

Fatness alone didn't make one not popular, though: Don O'Handley was fat, and short, and he had freckles, which really should have made him not popular (No offense to people who had freckles, but, well, it's true)* but he was a popular guy.

*It's true only about people who had so many freckles that they blended in to become one big freckle. Which was everybody who had freckles. Nobody, in real life, ever has, say, three freckles, except that kid who played Tom Sawyer in the movie I think I remember seeing as a kid, and who then went on to play that rich kid on the show where he had a sister, and I think a butler. Maybe his name was Jody. But the point is, if you have freckles, you have lots of freckles. Also, the point is that it kind of seems like nobody has freckles anymore, at least to me. Freckles, as a thing, seems to have gone out of style, like white socks with two, or three, colored stripes on them pulled up nearly to our knees.

I also wore glasses, but not the cool kind of glasses. I wore the kind of glasses that began with me, as a third-grader and then fourth-grader, having to wear an eye patch, but not the cool kind of eye patch like Sally got to wear when she had what I have:

That kind of eye patch wasn't used when I had an eye patch; doctors instead preferred to use a flesh-colored, band-aid style eye patch that fit over the eye perfectly and makes one look like a cyclops from more than 3' away.

That, too, probably wasn't the sole reason I wasn't a cool kid, because some of the cool kids had glasses, although none of them had only one eye for a while, thanks very much, doctors.

No, the reason I wasn't a cool kid was that... I wasn't a cool kid. There's no way to say it otherwise. Some people are cool and some people are not. Think of The Fonz, which a guy named Andy Kemp did a lot in fifth and sixth grades.

Andy Kemp loved The Fonz, which I suppose is about the right timing for him to love The Fonz, because Happy Days started airing in 1974, and I was in 5th and 6th grades with Andy Kemp in 1980 and 1981.

The Fonz wore leather jackets and t-shirts and gave the thumbs-up and said Heyyyyyyy and rode motorcycles, all of which people think made him cool. But it didn't. Think: You've seen people who wear leather jackets and t-shirts, or who ride motorcycles, and how many of them are cool? Speaking as someone who lived in Milwaukee when they had that Harley-Fest in the 1990s, I can tell you that approximately 0% of motorcycle riders are cool and approximately 1,000,000% of them will cut you off as you're walking to your job at the theater and also rev their engines at 3 a.m. near your apartment so you can't sleep.

No, The Fonz was cool because The Fonz was cool, and so whatever he did was cool, even jumping that shark, which people tried to make uncool and it's become synonymous with becoming uncool but let's face it: Fonzie jumping that shark was cool too.

So is the name Fonzie.

This is all going somewhere.

I hope.

Anyway, Andy Kemp loved The Fonz and so Andy Kemp, as a fifth and sixth grader and probably even older except that I'm pretty sure I stopped being talked to by Andy Kemp after sixth grade, would emulate The Fonz. Literally. He stuck up his thumbs and he said Heyyyyyy like The Fonz and he wore white t-shirts and he even seemed to try to style his hair like The Fonz, only more feathered, and otherwise made himself look ridiculous, except that Andy Kemp was cool and so when he did it, it was cool.

Had I put on a white t-shirt and stuck my thumbs up and said Heyyyyy people would have (rightly) laughed at me. Because I was not cool.

So here's where this is all going: I got fired from McDonald's because I was not cool but I desperately wanted to be cool even though I had no shot of ever being cool in my life. I didn't know that then; I know it now, and I tell my kids the truth, the truth being: If you're not cool, you never will be, and then people like Oldest Daughter go off and be cool anyway, surprising me because somehow they turned out cool and then I feel a little rejected all over again.

(I suspect that Sweetie was cool in high school, although it doesn't seem like she was and she denies it. She was elected to something or other: Homecoming Queen, or Butter Queen, or some sort of Queen, and she was a cheerleader, I think, and also she tells this story about having to wear a swimsuit in a talent contest that she's a little hazy on the details but which I secretly think might have been a Miss Teen America show or something like that. That might explain how Oldest turned out to be cool, and The Boy, I think, was cool, too. Middle doesn't seem to have been cool but that may be because she was cool but didn't care about it because Middle is a driven person and doesn't much care what people around her think, which may be part of being cool, as I care all too much about what people think, even though I say I don't.)

My firing, in short, came about because society has complex rules for determining who is in and who is out and some people are able to understand and work within those rules, and some people-- like me -- are aware that the rules exist but that's it; we can't determine how to work within them and also spent a lot of time reading comic books.

And also it came about because there was a party, and we thought we could get in, "we" being me, and my friends Fred, and Bob, and "Flan."

Fred, Bob, "Flan" and my friend Eric, a guy who got straight As and graduated I think second in our class and went on to be very successful as far as I could tell from trying to find out about him on Facebook before I got kicked off of Facebook for being too social -- comprised my basis social group, and somehow, that weekend, we had gotten invited, kind of, to a party. I say "kind of" because that was how these things worked; there weren't formal invites, after all. If you were able to find out about the party from someone who was going to the party, you were able to go to the party, too, and if you went to the party and brought with you a couple of people who weren't completely unacceptable, they, too, might go to the party.

So how we were getting into this party was this: Bob was dating a girl named Stephanie, from Oconomowoc, and Stephanie was friends with someone who was having a party, which meant that somehow, Bob was clearly invited to the party.**

**Side note: We were not from Oconomowoc. We were from Hartland, which even I knew made us better than the people from Oconomowoc. No matter what rung of the social ladder we occupied in Hartland [very low and somewhat off to one side, in my case] we were above every single person from Oconomowoc, because they were from Oconomowoc. The only thing worse than being from Oconomowoc, from our perspective, was being from Pewaukee.***

***That was the kind of social stratification that existed when I was a kid and a teen, and may still well exist now, although if it does I pay it no real attention not because I'm better than that but because my circle of friends now consists of (a) people I work with and who I do not therefore want to socialize with (b) my kids and Sweetie, and (c) a law school friend I talk to by phone once a year and (d) two friends of Sweetie's that I get to be friends with by default. So I don't know where I fit in the social order nowadays [probably very low, and still somewhat off to the side], and I'm sure I'm a bitter disappointment to my parents, who were vigilant about enforcing social standing, vigilant to a degree which would have gratified and embarrassed Charlotte Bronte. In my parent's world, social standing depended on a complex mixture of "how good your lawn was," "what city you lived in" "what street in that city you lived on" "whether you parked your car on the driveway or inside the garage like a civilized human being" "how often your kids fought and whether they could be overheard by the neighbors fighting in the yard about dumb stuff because what will the neighbors think" and, most importantly, "whether you put your Christmas tree in front of the window where everyone could see it," that last being an unforgivable social sin.

The only problem with going to this party, a legitimate party where we would be legitimately invited sort of and there would be legitimate friends of Stephanie's who might kind of like Bob's friends, was that I had to work at McDonald's, and my friends, selfishly, did not want to wait until 10:30 p.m. or so to go to the party that started at 8:30 or so, and my Dad, selfishly, did not want to let me drive our car, which at that time was a brand-new Pontiac Gran Prix with t-tops that we would sometime take off and put in the trunk and drive around in pseudo-convertible style.

I was in a bind, clearly, as the forces of evil/nature/something or other conspired against me to make me... work... when clearly my life would be better spent drinking too-foamy beer from a poorly-tapped keg in the kitchen of a house owned by someone who didn't know any better than to live and raise their kids in Oconomowoc and so deserved having teenagers getting drunk in her house and hopefully making out with one of Stephanie's friends.

So I asked my dad, again, whether I could use the car to go to work and then go out that night, but my dad, who valued that car far more highly than he valued the likelihood that Stephanie had a friend who was hot and would like pudgy guys who read science fiction, said no, so I tried a different tactic:

"Can you call me in sick to work?" I asked him.

You can see, in that question, that I had, through 16 years of living, learned little to nothing about life and in particular about my dad, who got up every day at 5:00 a.m. to drive to work, work being actual work at that time, driving a truck and delivering soda to various grocery stores.

My dad absolutely refused to do that, pointing out to me that I was not sick and that he would not let me call in sick because I wasn't sick, and also that it was important to go to work because something or other, I don't know.

Proving that even smart kids like me are stupid, I said:

"But there's a party I want to go to and Bob and Fred and Flan won't wait for me to get off work to drive me out there," and I didn't finish the sentence because there was no place to go after that, given that my dad interrupted with another speech about the importance of blah blah blah.

Looking back, now, I'm pretty sure Dad was talking about how important it is to develop good work habits and/or whether or not I made a commitment to my job and/or how they were counting on me, and it's 99% likely that somewhere in there was the phrase "never amount to much" if I didn't do whatever it was I was supposed to do, but let's examine the facts:

A. A party existed that I could go to.

B. Competing with that party was my "job" at "McDonald's."

C. Was I going to be working at McDonald's all my life?

D. No, clearly not, especially given that

E. I agreed with my Dad on everything he said and then went upstairs and used the phone in his and my Mom's room to call my boss at McDonald's and tell him that I was too sick to come in to work that night and couldn't make it in and I was really very sick and also I couldn't make it in, and then I called Bob and told him to come pick me up at McDonald's and then I went back downstairs and got my McDonald's uniform and had my dad drive me to work, where I had him drop me off at the driveway leading to the McDonald's instead of right at the store adn then I pretended to walk towards the restaurant until he left, and then I went and hung out at the end of the driveway to the McDonald's where my boss couldn't see me until Bob picked me up and we went to the party.

Regretfully, none of Stephanie's friends were into guys like me, because teenage girls were largely not into guys like me, which meant I spent that Friday night much like I've spent every Friday night for most of my teens and twenties: avoiding responsibility while standing sort of near a group of people roughly my age and pretending I was a part of that group.

That particular Friday night was somewhat different, though, in that when I got home, around midnight, the party having ended when the poorly-tapped keg stopped giving out even foam, my Dad was still awake and said to me:

"How was work?"

I shrugged and acted nonchalant, even though I wasn't really sure what nonchalant meant, and said: "It was fine."

He nodded and I started to go up to bed, and he called after me:

"Your boss called. Wanted to know how you were feeling."

Standing on our stairway, I paused, and said cautiously:

"What'd you tell him?"

My dad waited just a second or two and said:

"I told him you were at a party, so you must be feeling fine."

Epilogue:

I was scheduled to work at 11 a.m. the next day. My dad drove me to work, and I walked inside, already dressed in my uniform and trying to act, again, nonchalant.

My boss was there in the tiny office he used off to the right of the grill where breakfasts were made.

"Hey," I said, looking for my time card and pretending this was just an ordinary day.

He looked at me and said "You don't think you still have a job here, do you?"

I said: "I thought I did."

He said: "You don't. Turn in your uniform when you get your check Friday. Make sure it's washed."

So I went back outside, being careful not to look at anyone except Terry, the crew chief, who shook his head at me and turned away.

When I went outside, my dad wasn't there anymore, and I had to go back inside and ask to use the office phone to call my dad for a ride home.

McDonald's, 5 (Jobs v. Life)

Here's the previous installment in this series.


It's been nearly four months since I last wrote a Jobs v. Life, but that alone would not have made me put in another entry in what originally was more of a regular feature here. Instead, what prompted me to write this latest installment -- the thrilling story of how I came to be fired from my first "real" job ever, at McDonald's -- was a combination of factors that boils down to this:

1. Sweetie and Mr Bunches are both asleep, taking naps this afternoon.
2. Mr F is largely minding himself on his swing.
3. I am listening to Florence + The Machine's only good song, Kiss With A Fist, and it's making me feel energetic, and
4. Last night, on the "Knit Top" date I took Sweetie on, we walked through the Memorial Union on campus, enjoying what I liked to call a "college night out only with money," and while she ate her ice cream cone I noticed a flier for a memoir-writing class one could take that would answer some questions many budding memoirists have, questions the flier said included "What if I can't remember anything?" and "What if what I write makes someone I know angry?"

I don't care about either of those questions, really. I just started thinking how this blog is both sort of an instant memoir and also a real memoir in the sense that I not only write about things I'm doing now (or more or less now) but also about things that happened a long time ago, and then I started thinking about how I'd not written one of the memoir-ish entries in a long time, and then I listened to Kiss With A Fist a second time, and now I can tell you the

Strange But True Story About How I Got Fired From My Job At McDonald's For Lying And Calling In Sick (But It Was Mostly My Dad's Fault For Not Covering For Me)(And Also It's Not Really Strange.)

As I've noted many times, I'm not what you'd call a really good worker. I mean, I am, now, but now I get paid a really kind of amazing amount of money to do what I do, and also what I do is largely something that only a few other people in my state do, period, so it's pretty easy to be really good at what you do when there's so little competition.

But back then, when I was 16, I was not a good worker, at all, not even by the standards that apply to 16-year-olds, which I'm sure are pretty minimal standards. I don't know; I don't employ any 16-year-olds, and the last time there were 16-year-olds in our house was when The Boy was 16 nearly 4 years ago, and by the time The Boy was 16, I'd more or less given up on imposing standards at all, and had settled for just hoping that he'd not make things worse deliberately, a phase of my parenting that was marked by my decision to simply shut the door to his room rather than make him clean it up -- a decision in turn which has led to his room still not being cleaned up, nearly six months after he moved out of the house, and honestly I'm at a loss for how I can make him clean his room now, when I haven't imposed that particular rule in a half-decade, and he has his own apartment, an apartment I've never been to and which I likely will not go to, ever, because I've seen what's left of his room and can't imagine how much worse it will be when there is nobody around to make The Boy do even the simplest chores.

I can't imagine how bad his apartment is, in that my imagination fails me -- but I can, in the lizard part of my brain where elemental fear is processed, know that his apartment is so unkempt and dirty, it must be so terrible, that I never want to go there.

But I digress. Being related to someone who left behind a room that smells, powerfully, of onions, for some mystifying reason, will do that to me.

As a 16 year old McDonald's employee, I hit my high point when I had progressed to the "grill" station, being the guy in charge of standing over 10-30 frozen meat patties as they cooked for predetermined times, flipping them when a light told me to flip them, putting them on the buns that also cooked for a predetermined time, and then putting the toppings on in predetermined amounts, in the order I had been trained to do it. McDonald's then did not refer to the grill station as "cooks," and that's likely because there was no cooking involved. The crew chief, up near where the food was kept under heat lamps, would yell "10 ham, 10 cheese" and I would take out 20 frozen patties, place them on the grill and hit a button. I would then put 20 buns into the toaster.

When a beep went off, I would sear the burgers, pressing them with what looked like a large metal mushroom with a flat top; holding it by what would be the mushroom stem, I'd press the flat-top onto the meat for a few seconds, hearing it sizzle.

Then the buns were ready, and I'd take them out and put them on a metal table by the condiments. First ketchup, then mustard, each in a dispenser that required no judgment: I'd press a tab, and the exact right amount of ketchup and mustard would be spritzed onto the buns. (If, back then, you got too much mustard or ketchup on your burger, it was done deliberately, an act of sabotage. Or boredom. Or not laziness.)

Then a beeper would go off, and I would turn and flip all the burgers. I'd take a pinch of diced onions and sprinkle a few onto each burger. That step was the only step that required any judgment whatsoever, allowed for any discretion: There was no dispenser for onions, no predetermined amount to place on the patties. I was the Lord of the Onions: I could put only 1 or 2 on your burger, or a handful. I could lump them in the center or spread them around. The decision was entirely mine.

That is not a lot of job fulfillment.

The timer would beep again and the burgers were scooped up, slid onto the buns, and the bottoms of the buns were placed on them. (All McDonald burgers, then, began their life upside down, rounded buns supporting the rest of the sandwich; they were not righted until the crew chief wrapped them and slid them under the heat lamp.)

That's what I would do, 3 hours at a time, 15-20 hours a week. Shifts back then were rarely more than 3 or 4 hours; sometimes on the weekend people would work a double, 6 or 8 hours. Almost everyone who worked at my McDonald's -- on Highway 83 in Delafield -- was a teenager, high school kids supervised by people who seemed like grownups but who I now realize were probably 25, maybe 30.

In between cooking, we cleaned. We were not supposed to stand around. We mopped and wiped down and stocked up and on one memorable Saturday, I spent three hours --

THREE HOURS

-- putting labels on the McDLT boxes. Remember those? They were a 1980s innovation in sandwichry: The cold side stayed cold and the hot side stayed hot, and the specially prepared styrofoam boxes made sure of that:




Those boxes didn't originally come with the logos preprinted on them; when the McDLT hit Highway 83, the boxes were plain white and there were rolls of stickers that had to be placed on them, and that was my job, one Saturday afternoon in what I remember as summer, but it may not have been, because when I think back on being 15 and 16, I remember it pretty much as always being summer, which of course can't be true because I've lived in Wisconsin all my life, and Wisconsin has very little summer, period, in any given year. But there you go: Even though nowadays I suffer through 10 months of cold weather and a June in which the temperature Thursday night was 59 degrees, my memory has made it so that when I was a kid, the weather was beautiful. I bet, when I'm 70, I'll look back on this summer, the 59-degree-Thursday-summer, and remember it as being Hawaii-esque.

As you would guess, the job of "McDLT Sticker-Onner" does not fall on someone the manager holds in high esteem, although I only now realized that; back then, I just thought "Excellent. I do not have to work the grill, or the fry station."

I didn't want to work the grill, because that was work and also when you worked grill you stood by the crew chief, and the crew chief was usually Terry, a portly red-haired guy with almost-Marty-Feldman-esque eyes who was really nice but who also really took Time to lean, time to clean seriously and would have us be cleaning in between steps of cooking burgers, which is really just ridiculous because, sure, if I'm not cooking burgers, yeah, I've got time to clean, but when I'm cooking burgers, when they're on the grill, I'm clearly already doing something, even if all I'm doing is waiting for the next beep to tell me what to do next, so what Terry was really saying was do two things at once, which is obviously not something I want to do.

I didn't want to work fries because that's for new people or losers, and I wasn't new, and there's a pecking order, even at McDonald's, and getting stuck on fries when you're not new is like being demoted, with people looking at you and smirking and saying "Got stuck working fries, huh?" if they're people like my friend Brian Drifka, or if they're the girl I thought was hot, like Jenny Strieter, looking at you with sad eyes that seem to say "Working on fries? That's another reason I'll never go out with you."

She never did go out with me, either, but it's really her loss. Plus, Sweetie is hotter than Jenny Strieter ever could have been.

So that Saturday, which was not the Saturday I got fired (I got fired on a Friday, technically speaking), I got put on "McDLT Stickering" duty, and that was fine with me because it kept me away from Terry but did not (theoretically) create further impediments to my impressing Jenny Strieter, and also because pretty much everything you do at McDonald's is mindless repetitive labor but this mindless repetitive labor did not involve grease burns, so it was not a bad job. I stood near the back of the grill area...

... you may wonder why I stood, when there is no need to stand if you are putting stickers on a box. I wondered it, too, and was going to sit on the boxes of McDLT containers and stickers while I did it, but as soon as I sat down, leaning, really, to begin stickering, the manager appeared and said "Let's not be sitting around" and moved through the grill area briskly, and so I had to stand and sticker the boxes, because sitting is not very McDonald's, I guess.

... and began putting stickers on the boxes, which was not as easy as it sounds.

(I should point out that the stickering, too, had nothing to do with my getting fired. This is all just a sidebar, really, and if you're aware of how long this post has been, you're probably starting to think Man, he's not going to get to the firing part, and that's probably right. Let's put our heads down and muscle through, though.)

The stickers were supposed to be as straight as possible; remember, this is a class act McDonald's was running here. Not just anyone was going to be buying a sandwich with the lettuce still cold and crispy while the burger was warm and juicy. These were going to be hoi polloi, as far as McDonald's was concerned, and the manager instructed me to keep the stickers as straight and centered as possible.

He really did -- giving me four examples. Before I'd begun, he'd taken me and shown me the boxes and the stickers and told me what he needed me to do (and I hadn't even realized, then, just how expendable I was, that I could be given a job like this to do) and he'd then taken the stickers and put them on the box to show me, taking the cold side sticker off its roll and putting it on, carefully (and yet still quickly) and making sure it was centered, and then taking the hot side sticker off its roll and doing the same.

"See?" he asked me (and I didn't realize what his opinion of me was, that he thought I needed instructing on sticking labels to a box), and as he asked me, he did a second one. "See how it goes?" he said again.

"Yep," I said, and I did, but he did a third one to make sure.

"Just like this," he said, holding it up in case I hadn't been able to clearly see the first two. He held it long enough that I eventually took it, and looked at it.

"Okay," I said, as he did a fourth and then patted my shoulder. "Go to it," he said, and set the last one he'd done in front of me, like an example, which it probably was. Looking back on that episode, which I remember clear as day, it's pretty obvious to me that he thought this was a mentally taxing job for me. (Or maybe he thought it was physically taxing; I was pretty fat, then, which was probably far more of a reason Jenny Strieter said I was "just a friend" than the fries thing.)

So I began stickering the boxes.

I should explain something that probably is abundantly obvious to anyone who knows me and/or reads this blog: I get bored pretty easily, and also I don't necessarily think things should be done the way things are done.

Here's an example: My job, when I was a kid, was mowing the lawn, and lawns were a big deal in our neighborhood. Your lawn was your calling card to the world, or at least the world you cared about, which meant "your neighbors." My parents, and most people in our subdivision, cared for their lawns incessantly: they mowed and raked and sprayed and did something called thatching; I'm not sure what thatching is, but it required a special machine that you rented from the True Value Hardware store up by Skateworld and it took all day and all the kids and it was kind of like raking, only harder, and nobody but Dad and sometimes Bill got to use the thatcher, which looked like a lawnmower but wasn't.

One of the worst things you could do was mess up our lawn; we weren't, for example, supposed to walk across the front lawn. (There were lots of spaces my parents had that were not to be used, at all: our front yard was not for walking on or playing; our living room certainly was not for living in. The dining room table was dined on one time per year, on New Year's Eve, and even then it was hidden under leathery covers that were stored, 364 days a year, under my parents' bed and hauled out only on that night, to cover the table lest we wreck it by using it as a table. We could look at that table, or we could eat on it, but we could not do both at the same time.)(And we weren't really supposed to look at the table, either.)

My parents' rules about mowing the lawn were this: mow back and forth, in straight lines, until you are done. That was very important: straight lines. Back and forth. Lines parallel to the road.

But that was not just important; it was also boring. So I'd jazz it up a little, make mowing the lawn more fun for me.

One week, I mowed diagonally, starting in the corner near the Barquists' house and zigzagging my way up to the garden where the Poisonous Rhubarb bush grew. Another week, I mowed vertically, up and down the small slope of the backyard, instead of across and back. Each of those times, my dad looked out at my work and did not say anything, silently regretting that he'd raised a kid who could so heedlessly destroy all that thatching with a non-parallel mowing job.

The final straw was the week I mowed in a spiral: I stared up the right hand side of the yard, the Barquists' side, and the went across the back by the fence, and then down the left-hand side that bordered the Wizners' yard, and then across the back of our house. On Lap 2, I slid inside a little and repeated that, each loop getting smaller and smaller until I was in the middle of our yard, by the birch tree that had been second base in Whiffle Ball games when we were younger. I kept at it even when the final loops were just feet across and I could have been done; I was a perfectionist in that regard and did not cut corners.

When I was done, there was a spiral pattern in our yard, one that could be clearly seen and which I thought looked great. I was up in my room, reading comic books and occasionally looking out at the yard (which from the second story clearly sported a rectangular-ish spiral) when my dad got home from work.

"Briane," he called, and I went downstairs. He was standing at the bay window in our family room and looking out at the birch tree.

"What?" I asked him.

There was a pause. Then he said "Just... mow the lawn in straight lines, please."

In retrospect, that's probably one of the many reasons he hung me out to dry and got me fired from McDonald's, something that did because I would not have been fired if he'd just covered for me.

When I was stickering the McDLT boxes, then, I got bored doing them all perfect-y (which I was not, in fact, doing and not, in fact, even trying to do) and started getting creative with them.

As creative as you can with two stickers and a styrofoam box. Some stickers I offset a little, putting the left sticker way to the left and the right way to the left. Or I put them both way left, or both way right. I took chances and put a few upside down, so that you'd have to read "Cold Side" and then spin the box around to read "Hot Side" or whatever they said. Some of them, I put slanted or cross-wise.

I didn't do that on all of them; just enough to keep me entertained.

As entertained as you can be with two stickers and a styrofoam box.

My artistry didn't go undiscovered. Every so often, I had to take a stack of boxes to Terry so that he could package the McDLTs, and he found one that had the stickers put on crosswise, corners not matching up with corners of the box, and he brought it back to me.

"Messed this one up," he said, and showed it to me. "Careful," he added, and threw it away.

I'm not sure, as I look back on it, whether he was being funny, or tactful, or if he thought I really might not have realized how badly I'd screwed that one up.

A few minutes later, he brought back two of them. "These are no good," he said. "Be more careful. We don't want to waste these."

He may not have wanted to waste them, but the use of the we was misguided. I didn't care. I did, though, have two more hours of this ahead of me and continued, occasionally, doing what I thought of as creative stickering, until the manager himself came back to me with a couple of examples, examples that I only now realize that Terry must have stockpiled as proof, to take them to the manager to show what, exactly was going on, making a case against me while I unwittingly continued stickering away.

"You can't do them like this," he said. "It's wasteful." There was no pretending that maybe it had been a mistake; I wondered if the couple he was showing me were the only ones that Terry had given him or if, in the office, there was a box of them, to be saved until my next review and used to deny me even the nickel raise I'd gotten the last time.

"Okay," I said. I didn't apologize. I just kept on stickering and watching the clock, and a few times I deliberately displaced the stickers but not so much that you'd think I was doing it on purpose. That wasn't creativity anymore. It was rebellion. I'd show them, by putting stickers a few millimeters off center or just slightly crooked. I'd bring this corporation to its knees, one shoddy sticker at a time. That'd teach them to tell me what I could or could not do with these McDLT boxes.

In other words, how dare they expect me to do my extremely simple makework job correctly or with a concern for how the company looked. (But it would be about 26 years before I got that message.)

I also wondered who cared? I imagined, as I stickered my way through two more hours, people getting their boxes, and coming back up to the counter (where Jenny was working), complaining that their McDLT, yes, it was fine, but the box -- the sticker was displaced, and what are they supposed to do, look at this Picasso-esque box while they ate their hot-and-cold sandwich? Because they couldn't do that. It was ridiculous, and could they get their money back and they'd just go to Burger King (which also was a ridiculous notion, because back then, in 1985, good people just did not go to Burger King. McDonald's was, as fast food places go, respectable, while Burger King was the place your drunk uncle always stopped at on the way to Thanksgiving dinner, showing up at Grandma's house a little glassy-eyed already and still eating their onion rings as he walked through the door. We never got to go to Burger King, which, to this day, I view as being a little disreputable.)

So it wasn't like people would actually go anywhere else. They'd have to eat their McDLT, and who looked at the packaging, anyway?

Those were the thoughts that occupied my time as I stickered away what was the second last Saturday I ever worked at McDonald's.

But I see I'm out of time and I'll have to finish up this story some other day.



Click here to go to Jobs v. Life's table of contents, where you can read about all the jobs I've ever had, in order, and in what is turning out to be excruciating detail.

Jobs V. Life

Life is what happens when you're not working.
-- Me.

Jobs vs. Life is my attempt to explore and explain that quote. I've always believed that life happens around work... but there's no denying that a big part of life is made up of work. I've been working since I was 13, and I'll probably work until I'm 70, or more. Hours and hours, days and days, years and years, of doing things that I'd rather not have been doing. What'd I get out of it? We'll see, as I review each and every job I've ever had and what I think about it at this point of my life?

Job One: The Paperboy:

The Paperboy, Part 1

The Paperboy, Part 2.

The Paperboy, Part 3.

The Paperboy, Part 4.

The Paperboy, Part 5.

The Paperboy, Part 6.

Job 2: McDonald's.

McDonald's, Part One.

McDonald's, Part Two.

McDonald's, Part Three.

McDonald's, part Four.

McDonald's, part Five.

McDonald's, part Six.

Job 3: Dishwasher.

The Dishwasher, One. 

The Dishwasher, Two. 

The Dishwasher, Three.

Job 4: Denny's.

 

Like what you read here? Check out my book of essays:

Thinking The Lions, and 117* Other Ways To Look At Life (*Give Or Take)


Buy it here.