Working at McDonald's

The worst and most normal job I ever had

One in eight Americans work at McDonald's when they are students. McDonald's is the world's second-largest private employer. Like the current Democratic Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris and many others, I worked at McDonald’s.

When I got my drivers license I was off. The navy blue Buick LeSabre that had been my dad’s was now mine. Simply by virtue of being the oldest sibling, I got the car, having turned sixteen first. This meant driving around my sisters, regular trips to my girlfriend’s house, to band practice and to part-time jobs that included a year on the grill at McDonald’s and a summer at The Ohio Renaissance Festival. In Ohio in the 90’s, driving was everything.

Yet, I started working at McDonald’s even before I could drive. My mom believed that any job was a good job for a fifteen year old and she was probably right. When construction began on a new McDonald’s — a McDonald’s that would be a mere ten minute drive from my growing farm town of Trenton Ohio — my mom helped me apply. I got the job and she drove me to another McDonald’s every day for training for several weeks before the grand opening of the one near Trenton.

The McDonald’s near Trenton opened at Engle’s corner with little fanfare. It was a McDonald’s and people knew what to expect. As for the location, to this day I’m not sure what Engle’s corner is. It’s not big enough to be a town, really. It’s just an intersection of state routes, and where the old Ohio Eerie canal meets up with a trailer park. That corner permanently smells like sewage owing to a sewage treatment plant on the main road into Trenton Ohio. For better or worse, to this day, the smell of sewage reminds me of going home, and McDonald’s. A few hundred yards from the local wastewater treatment plant may not be the most ideal place to prepare or eat McDonald’s food but really, is there such a place?

And so I began the worst job of my life and I was very bad at it. I know this because of the two round boys.

The two very round boys who also worked at McDonald’s were identical twins. Tom and Tim were unflappable and so unlike me. My goal for every day I worked at McDonalds was essentially to do and achieve as little as possible. I did not set this intention consciously, it’s just that I guess had a lot of other more interesting things going on in my head and for the life of me I could not force myself to become invested in the work. When there were no customers, I could stumble around the kitchen and half-assedly clean while writing lyrics to rock songs and singing in my mind. Or, I’d fantasize about what I could possibly say to appear cool when one of my friends rolled through the drive thru while I was working the window. It was even more embarrasing when a friend came into the restaurant and caught a glimpse of me in the kitchen. Sometimes I could give my friends free food. But mostly it was too risky. I didn’t want to lose my job even though I loathed it. Those boys, Tom and Tim however, simply relished the opportunity to serve and beamed with pride with every cheeseburger they made.

Cars piling up in the drive-thru was for the boys an exciting opportunity to prove their chops. A messy floor was a challenge to solve. For the twins, each task, from placing the lettuce just so to serving the perfect ice cream cone was an achievement. They were consistently employees of the month and today, I imagine and hope, they are running a chain of fast food restaurants somewhere, their still-gleaming smiles a testament to the virtues of a simple life of service and hard work.

But as for me, I had a suspicion that I was not cut out for the job. I strongly disliked nearly every moment of it. It “built character” for sure, and also some scars on my hands — I always had small burn marks on my knuckles from when they occasionally touched the top griddle. I smelled like oil. My skin and hair was greasy. After about a year of working at McDonald’s when my second raise put me at $8.25 an hour I quit. Honestly, until the moment I quit I hadn’t really even realized I could quit. I started to see the job as just something you had to do. Fortunately, after quitting I found other more fulfilling work including a stint at a chemistry lab at a community college, the wax hands booth at the Ohio Renaissance Festival, a Philosophy tutor, a guitar teacher. Eventually, I made a living writing and performing rock songs. Now, as a visual artist and art professor I can say definitely that McDonald’s was the worst job I ever had.

On the rare occasion I eat at McDonald’s today, I think of the people who might be in there making the food. Perhaps, some person may or may not have burn marks on their knuckles. Perhaps, inside that cinderblock kitchen is a person who has fully committed themselves to the speedy and thorough preparation of fast food like Tom and Tim. Or, maybe the person who is haphazardly applying the glob of tartar sauce to my Filet-O-Fish™ sandwhich is some skinny distracted aspiring rocker kid like I was.

How to end this? I don’t know man. It’s McDonald’s. It’s not that important. and yet it’s so important given that millions of people work there and eat it every day. Working at McDonald’s made me grateful, more compassionate but also more resolute to find another way to sustain myself. I love the cheap and weird hot fudge sundae as much as the next American. But it’s also terrible food. It’s great food that we love. It’s awful for us. It’s an awful job, people love the job. I don’t know. This is McDonald’s, full of paradoxes. Is there anything more American?