the fast food sandwich preparer

many of us who grew up in the US
have entered the work force through learning how
to be a concubine for corporate america
through the fast food industry---
be it
mcdonald’s or
burger king
or
wendy’s---
we have stood behind the counter
and served people who should definitely not be stuffing their
acne covered fat faces with
more
oil, grease, salt, sugar, cholesterol &
carbs
to
increase their
physique.

still,
first world gluttons will do as
first world gluttons do,
&
at 16 and full of sarcasm & angst
being lodged between a sandwich board and two
deep fat fryers
for eight hours a day for both your
weekend days
(so you never actually get to sleep in any days during the week)
can be a way to earn a little bit of cash
legally
if you are so inclined.

as you are standing in front of the counter,
reading the lunch menu & looking for the
price of the medium strawberry shake that you want to buy,
a busload of canadians or japanese tourists bustles in---
the spokesperson from the group makes his or her way to the
front of the line,
and your manager
(lazy piece of crap that he is),
gets up from reading the newspaper out in the dining room,
to pretend for the next forty minutes or so
that s/he is at the helm
of their ship.

you stand over the steam drawer,
where after the burgers come rolling through the
broiler
(after being frozen and kept in the walk-in cooler),
they are kept until they are used for the sandwiches.

there are times that the burgers are supposed to be kept in
the drawers, just like there are on every piece of
foodstuff in the
joint---
but who pays attention to them?

and you are supposed to skim the surface of the
deep fat fryer’s hot grease to filter out the pieces of
burnt disgustingness which has been floating there
for hours,
but who does?

when you employ kids that just don’t care,
who have no need for a work ethic,
to clean the sanitary napkins out of the woman’s
bathroom
you have a bathroom
which never gets the sanitary napkins
cleaned out.

on one fine day,
when a busload of people comes in
you find yourself with steam in your face
gazing down into the burgers that look like
brown sludge floating on a city street grate,
just about to wash down the drain---
and you may find your manager
(in her/his one act of real managing that day)
assigning you the task of breaking in the new kid.

the new kid has had a job before
but fell through some kind of crack
which led him to this place
and though you want to play him the violin
and converse about all his trials & tribulations
you are too indifferent
in order to even
inquire.

instead, you do your best to how him the ropes---
the correct way to feed the frozen plates
(burgers)
into the broiler
which then spits them out all sludgy on the other side---
you are supposed to squeeze out the fat with the spatula and then
drop them into the steam drawer.

so the new kid goes about the task
and within an hour is bored out of their
mind.

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

chaos comes when the tourist buses flood in
and the manager throwing a fit starts buzzing round the place
fleetingly shouting out orders at anyone in their
path---
so the training veteran instructs the new kid on the
block,
to begin the
burger producing revolution.

with one worker on the broiler,
transforming as many frozen sub-beef frisbees to their
warmer form & catching them when they shoot out the front,
dropping em’ in the steam drawer,
& the other worker at the sandwich-making station,
belting out whopper after whopper,
the two alone
pump out close to 50 whoppers in a very short bit of time---
the veteran knows that whoppers not eaten will be
waste---
& waste makes the worthless sloth of a manager look
bad---
it also pisses them off in the moment---
two beautiful birds killed with one
stone.

in no time at all,
the panic switch that had been pressed in order to deal
with the tourist bus attack,
has been lifted,
and the management wonderboy,
he wanders round the kitchen scoping out the
disaster which inevitably comes when you start randomly yelling at your
workers
in the attempt to sell as much fast food crap as you can,
when all morning you haven’t been prepped enough
& you certainly weren’t ready for an afternoon
rush.

our idiot in question finally sees the work of our two
sandwich workers,
and he eyes them both whose heads are still to the grindstone,
churning away at producing more whoppers than ever recorded in
a burger king
hour---
STOP MAKING WHOPPERS!
he yells at them,
and the two workers smile at one another & subsequently
oblige.

as the pretty faced cashiers up front start throwing away all the
burger waste that had been piled on in the waiting racks,
the manager tells the two sandwich-making revolutionaries to go
on break,
to try and get them as far as he can from the job that they were doing---
a win-win for our
sandwich makers.

the next day the newbie doesn’t show,
either they didn’t care for being treated like old sludge fries from the
deep fat fryer,
or they couldn’t take the boredom---
you never can tell
what makes one not want to subject themselves to
fast-food employment in america
but all signs point to
good
reasons.