The usual tale… I graduated from college with a BA in psychology, and instantly my parents told me that I had to get a job. It was January, and for some reason nobody was hiring. I tried everywhere. I thought about the places that I might want to work: and oddly enough a thought came to mind. I ate most of my food at McDonald’s, and I often went there to study, and the manager knows me…so why not? I was a shoo-in because I spoke Spanish too, and most of the workers there spoke Spanish. I went into this job with a positive attitude and outlook, and it turned out being the best job I’ve ever had.

Mcdonald’s had always been associated as a “happy place”. My dad took my sister and I there every morning for breakfast when my mom was out of town. I loved those Styrofoam plates with the eggs, sausage and hashbrown combo. My mouth watered for the taste every morning. And I can’t forget the little orange juice that was covered with a nice strip of foil, that I always looked forward to ripping off.

So, that was it. I went down to MD and I recognized everyone as usual, but this time I wasn’t just getting the nuggets and the coke. I was filling out an application, social security card out and everything. I finished it very quickly and handed it over to Mo, short for Muhammad, and he said “When can you start?” I said right away. He told me to come back an hour later and to have the uniform on that he had just given me.
I came back and all of the sudden things just seemed so complicated. You know how you think a job is so easy until you actually try to do it yourself? This was the lesson I was learning. I had thought a million times to myself how easy it would be to work here, but by the end of the day I had completely been defeated. I now have the utmost respect for fast-food workers, and realize that they are doing a difficult job too. It is not easy to peel out 5 fish sandwiches, 2 double cheeseburgers, 5 Cokes, and a sundae with ease, grace, and a large beaming smile. It wasn’t no cakewalk.


They quickly began training me, and the whole notion of this being an easy job was dispelled. I gained a huge amount of respect for my coworkers because it was difficult for me to learn this stuff. Especially when on fry duty… it is a delicate balance between salted, and preserved with salt. I could never get it right, so they took me off fry duty and put me at the cash registers. These were not the type of registers that you see at the grocery store where you can just scan away, there was a button for every menu item. If the customer wanted to “Large up” he had to press another button. And when people substituted items in the meal I got so frustrated.

I decided I was going to do something I was good at. So I decided to make fun of myself. I asked Mo, my manger if he had a costume I could wear. I would have done anything not to mess with what was going on behind the counter. He came back with a “fry suit”
. Immediately I looked at it and thought to myself, “Kim , this is the last moment of dignity you will ever have.” But I was a glutton for punishment so I put it on. Everybody was looking at me weird and started calling me “chica loca” (the crazy girl in Spanish.) But I spoke Spanish too so I knew that they were talking about me. I put the carton over my head which was a large red shaped box that went down to my ankles. My head stood out of a small hole, and above me were large yellow fries coming out of my head. But these were wilty fries, they fell down on my head. So, I ran out into the street and started doing my schtick up and down the busiest road in the city. Kids were screaming for there moms to go around again so they could take pictures of me. One man even paid me to try on the fry suit. I was a big hit, and tons of people started going through the drive-thru. I felt proud.

Back behind the counter, things were more difficult. But I learned my way around the obstacles. Everybody was Hispanic that worked there, except for me, the blonde white girl. The great part was that they accepted me as the “chica loca.” I was never made to feel in the minority. When it was time for lunch I ordered the usual big n’tasy, small fries, and a coke. My manger bought it for me every day because I never had any money on me.

One day they asked me to clean the toilet and I was like, “me? Me? Are you sure you want me to do it?” Oh yeah, they were sure. I put three pairs of gloves on in case any hypodermic needles pierced my hands. I went to the bathrooms, setting out on a mission that I had to complete, and grabbed a bottle of bleach and some window cleaner. I did the whole affair with my feet, I never once touched anything with my hands. Standing on those toilets I began to laugh at myself, the irony of the situation that I was a college graduate cleaning off toilets in McDonald’s. But I didn’t mind, at least I had a job.

I quickly adoptecd the slogan “I’m Lovin it’” but said it in Spanish so everyone could understand me. When things got really messed up or shit was going bad I always said “Me encanta” and we all would laugh together. This was a straight-forward job, no 7 managers breathing down your neck, HR bitches trying to get you fired, no back-stabbing coworkers. I was truly ‘Lovin It’. When I showed up for work one day I realized that it was no longer a job, it was truly a hobby of mine now. Our usual clientele consisted of hobos, prostitues, and drug-dealers since I was in a bad part of town, to say the least.
These people were so curious to me, and they often would have no money to buy anything. Mo gave them free fries, free coffee, and other things because he had a heart. This made the job all the more interesting, but sometimes I had to kick people out. Now when I drove past Mcdonald’s I will always see those glowing golden arches as a place of happiness. A fun place. A great place to work and I’m still friends with my coworkers.

After I got the fry machine, the ice cream machine, the soda machine, etc., we moved onto the cash registers. I despised those cash registers and I tried to stay away from them. Everything has it’s own button, and you must memorize where it is and if the customer wants to “Large Up” there is a button for that, replacement items had to be dealt with, and the ever impossible task of counting back change.

Our clientele consisted of mainly hobos, prostitutes, and other upstanding citizens that walked the streets of Burnside, the street that goes forever and splits the city from south to north. Behind the vinyl table where all orders were taken and cash registers stood upright waiting to take your order, there was a vast midst of grease permeating the whole kitchen. To the left was a fry maker. A silver basin filled with some sort of monstrosity they call oil, and pans of fresh Idaho cut potato slivers were dunked in, one by one, one after the other. After the fries were timed, and cooked to the pre-set time, they moved over to the heat lamp where a whopping amount of salt was poured all over them until the salt glowed and gleamed like snow crystals on yellow skis. Then there was the take-out window. A small area where one would sit and multi-task taking orders and ringing things up on those cash registers and hurriedly picking up brightly colored bags with advertisements and throwing in burger after burger after fry, after fry. I thought once that maybe they should come up with the “megawatt fries”, what a great name, now that they had gotten rid of the SUPERSIZE, after the documentary scared the shit out of everyone and their mother. The floors always gleamed their reddish-orangish color of Mc Donald’s flavor. They were swept and mopped so frequently there was never a speck of dust. I was usually the one doing all the mopping of those floors because I was never good at anything else. The ice cream machine was a beauty. The chocolate frozen yogurt never worked so only the vanilla would come squirting out all liquidy and nasty. So you had to give it a test run and put it in a trash cup before you really poured it for the customers. The ice cream machine gleamed next to the bins of different candies that could be mixed with the ice cream for the McFlurry’s. The most coveted item on the menu.

2. There were all Hispanic people that worked at MickeyD’s, except for me, the token and lone white girl. I did the job of three Hispanics because I could actually speak English and Spanish. Those cash registers really rattled me though because it wasn’t like the supermarket where you could just scan an item, oh no, you had to remember exactly where the button was located for every single item. Then, if they wanted to change something you had to void, or make larger, or do whatever you had to do to keep a smile on the customer’s face. I was good at that, while I lost face, because I bumbled and struggled over these machines. I immediately got put on “fry duty.” When I had fry duty I slowly walked, cowardly, towards the vat of grease. When I dumped out some fries from a huge container with a little opening on the bottom into the silver baskets, and put it in the oil, a huge whaft of grease would singe my face and penetrate every single pore I had. I could actually taste the fries and the grease without eating them. I could feel the pimples forming on my face, as they actually did. I would go home and take a 40 minute shower and scrub my face, still not to my satisfaction. As I had to wear a hat as well for my uniform the grease and the sweat from my face were trapped all around my hairline and I began to break out profusely. Red lumps formed on my face like little gopher holes on my parent’s lawn when I was a child. There was no cure other than to refuse to do fry duty. So I did.


One day I was feeling a little bored and I asked if they had any sort of costume. I should never have asked. I thought to myself that this was the last moment of integrity that I still had left. But I was a glutton for making fun of myself, so hey what did I care? My manager Mo came out with a FRY SUIT. It consisted of a large red box that covered your whole body, a hole for your embarrassed face to look out of, and large yellow fries teetering over your head and swaying in the wind. My fries were wilted and soggy, they always seemed to flop over.

Nothing stopped me from going out onto Burnside and walking up and down the street in this Fry Costume. Kids in minivans made their mothers drive around twice just to take pictures of me. I must have looked pretty funny, but ya know what? I was having so much fun! It was freeing losing my pride and integrity. And hey, at least I had a job. That’s what I wanted to say to the two homeless people that passed me and when I asked “hey how is your day going?” they replied to me “A lot better than yours apparently,” and then they walked off laughing. It was just a minor setback for me, because I knew they were on welfare, while I was at least earning minimum wage.
Somehow during all of this, I began to like the fact that I was working here. I no longer cared about my high school friends who saw me there and went and made fun of me. There was nothing to make fun of. This was a serious job and I took it with the utmost of confidence and good attitude. I began to have fun. I think I realized that the irony of me working there wasn’t such a big deal anymore because if I thought about it, the rest of my friends didn’t even have a job. They were “too good” for all of the jobs that were available to them, and hey at least I was employed.

The turning moment for me was when I was asked to clean the bathrooms. I took this duty ever so seriously. I put on three pairs of gloves, took the special spray for the bathroom, the deodorant spray, and a large bottle of bleach. I immediately went in there and started throwing a bleach mixture on the floor. I managed to spray everything like a thin coat of snow had piled up in the bathroom. I did the whole operation with my feet. No hands involved, I actually thought I might “get something.” But the moment that I stood on that toilet, moving my feet around to clean it, and precariously balancing on top of it, I realized how funny this was, and how fun it was. I now felt like a regular person,whereas I had been mainly sheltered my whole life. I was spoiled rotten and was never even forced to do chores. I thought I wasn’t born for manual labor and such, but this job really taught me a lesson: I was just like anyone else. I realized how many people were doing the same job as me and didn’t complain once. It was work, and work is not always fun. My dad says they don’t call it “work” for no reason. He was right.

I started laughing at myself, at how funny the situation was, but I did a great job cleaning that bathroom that day. I was sooo good at cleaning the bathroom that they actually became inclined to only ask me to clean the bathroom. And I have to admit I was not altogether unhappy about that. I took this duty on with full strength and did the best job that I could.

When I first came to work there I saw some videos that they showed me, some training videos where everyone was smiling behind the counter and all the customers were delighted to be there, and I kind of got a cynical feeling about how fake it was. I thought of their quote “I’m lovin’ it” and started to think that it was all a big hoax. But then I suddenly turned into the beaming blonde girl with a freshly laundered outfit on and I became the people in the video. I made friends with all of my coworkers, and I loved the job. There was no bullshit to this job, no stab-you-in-the-back HR bitches, no talk-behind-your-back coworkers, no 7 different managers all breathing down your neck everyday. IT was all real. These people were real people, and I realized that I was just like any of them. All of us were in it together, and they stressed teamwork.

Hands down, still today if asked “what was your favorite job ever?” I would immediately tell them it was McDonald’s. Now I’m not saying this just to be over the top and funny. It actually was… everybody was happy, humble, and real. Nobody really fought, and if they did, it was over in about 10 seconds. Nobody held grudges, it was like being in the army or the marines, you were forced to make friends with these people, but there was no forcing on my side. Everybody welcomed me with open arms, we were one big happy McDonald’s crew, just like on the commercials. So, if you ever want to make fun of a person that rolls tacos, puts pickles on cheeseburgers, or salts your fries, thing again. These people are people too and they deserve just as much respect. I gained their respect, and they gained mine, it was a happy, happy time.