Fast Food: The Workers and Customers and Psychological Trauma

So here's to anyone who has ever worked at a fast food restaurant, or has ever eaten at one. We have all been in the later position, and an astonishing 79% of all USA citizens have worked in one at some point in their lives. This will be a rant about bad service, and about bad customers, and about how awful fast food is on all parties involved. So read this post, or don't, that's up to you; but not everything I have to say will be bad. I've got some good experiences to share from my workplace as well as compliments to some very nice customers I've had in the year I've been working fast food. So here goes.

To the customers: BE NICE!
This is a very big thing for the workers. If they are being slow and you had to wait in line for 10 minutes just to get to the register, it may not be the employee's fault. The number of times that computer troubles have caused slow or incorrect orders in the year I've been working at my fast food place is in the triple digits. The person working the register may be new. It could be her first day, and she won't know where the button fro hamburger is or how to change the burger from having mayonnaise to mustard. The customer in front of you may have had a long order or a difficult order with every sandwich customised to have no lettuce and extra onions or light mayo and no ketchup, or no cheese, or pepper jack cheese instead of regular American.

Go easy on the employee. Yes, the customer is always right, but sometimes we have over 200 customers in an hour and trying to make it right and fast for all of them is hard. We get tired, and we are only human, we make mistakes. Please be pleasant to the person you come up to and tell that your order was wrong.

Most fast food workers only get paid minimum wage. In some places that wage is better than others. I'm lucky to be working at a great store that pays $1.25 over the state's minimum. $8.75 per hour is not always enough though, not when considering the psychological trauma that some of the customers heap onto us workers. So don't be the customer that refuses to leave if we give you 2 cents short on your change at the window and cusses at us when we can't open the drawer back up. The girl you did that to, sir, started crying when you finally did leave, and she called in the next day to say she was quitting. She was 16 and it was only her 3rd day at her first real world job. Do you think she will ever again feel confident in herself when starting on a new job later in her life? I hope you are proud of yourself.

To the workers: BE NICE!
We all know, those of us who have been there, that you're tired, and your feet hurt, and you've been running back and forth from the grill to the front for the last 9 hours. The customer who just got mad and told you to go get your manager was probably having a bad day of his own. Meet their eyes anyway, smile anyway. If they go away satisfied that they have had their say, then you did your job correctly, even if you messed up their order.

Getting an attitude after the third school bus full of high school students arrives (yes that does happen) and taking it out on your fellow employees will not make you feel better, and the customers who are polite will only suffer if you project your bad mood onto them after having a bad encounter with someone else. Getting angry and upset happen, making mistakes happens (a lot). Generally it is okay and can be corrected. Just do your best and above all keep a GOOD front if you can't keep a good attitude.

Rant over: here's some nice stuff!
I've worked in the drive-through window, and in the front, and I've worked at scooping ice cream and making shakes, malts and all of the probably 2 dozen sundaes we have. In the last year I've given wrong change, taken wrong orders, spent 8 hours straight up to my elbows in water filled with degreaser that made my skin so chapped I had to buy a new bottle of lotion the very next day, I've had coworkers who had to go get stitches from something on the job and then come back and finish their shift and I've still come out of it with a few good stories. 

You start getting a feel for the customers after awhile. In the drive through you just don't want anyone with kids, but the seniors? They should be the only customers there! They're friendly, they say hello, and don't sit there yelling at their kids for 2 minutes or talking on their phones. They give you their order then greet you when you say hello at the window. Senior citizens are the absolute best drive through customers.

In the dining room, seniors are not so great, but there is a group that stands out as being more polite, friendly, and well behaved there too. Black customers in my store are generally good guests to have. I'm a white college student, I admit, and I work smack dab in the middle of the midwest. We don't get as many racially diverse customers as we could in other places. But our polite and friendly black customers beat out, in my head, the rude high schoolers and parents with young children, the business men and women who tend to act like the employee doesn't exist, and the harried, often rushed seeming Hispanic factory workers that my town has many of.

Thank you, kind customers. We do notice you are nice, and we appreciate it. A special thanks to the one man last month who went through the drive through in a rush did not pay for his meal; you left it for me to get the tab. I was there when you came back four hours later to pay your $23.86 bill. I truly appreciate you returning for that.


Wow that was long! Wasn't quite expecting that, but there it is, now you know much about my private thoughts on the fast food industry. Also, that percentage at the beginning was from a newspaper article I read some time ago. I do not remember what the article's or author's name was, so it may be accurate, but don't try to quote me on it. ;-)

Ladies and Gentlemen ... Welcome to NaNoWriMo!

So NaNo opening day, what a doozy. With some crazy family things going on yesterday, I had to make a trip to my dad's house and didn't get home until about 11 o'clock this morning. Add that to some overdue house chores (no clean dishes in the kitchen: at all) and grocery shopping (yes this was necessary. I have to eat this week.) Anyway, I got to the kick off write in with my handy dandy notebook and wrote a good six pages. I know this equals somewhere around the daily word count goal, but until I type it up I won't have today's official count.

So I thought today would be a good day to talk a little about writing style. Now that term is going to mean something different to readers and writers, or at least have more contexts to a writer. In this case though I mean the method in which the author goes about writing the novel. I like writing in a physical notebook then typing everything up.  I write in purple ink. This was not a conscious decision, it was just that I have several colors of pens and pencils available but I noticed at some point several years ago that, even while everything else didn't seem to have any particular color, my story and novel writing were almost always done in purple.

Some NaNo swag, a postcard (new bookmark!) and stickers from this and a previous year

One thing I started doing during the 2013 NaNo, that I know bothers about anyone I write with in real life meetings is that I gave up on paragraphs. My writing notebook is a solid chunk of purple cursive with the occasional strike through, scribble out, or kanji. Oddly enough there are multiple kanji that have made it into my shorthand. 水　日 　母　父　木　気 and the syllabic と have all made it into common usage in my English writings, along with some English equally useful things such as @ and #.

A solid chunk of purple cursive with no paragraphs

As a parting word: Today in the land of NaNo...
A priest found a drowned man in the flotsam of a shipwreck on the beach. When removing the man for burial he saw that there was a child also caught up in the wreckage. The child was weak, but still breathing.