The Angry Czeck

The summer after my first year of college, my angry mom demanded that my brother and I get jobs.

“You’re not sitting on your ass wasting my electricity all summer,” is how she might have put it. I was not unaccustomed to summer labors. I started working for my own cash by the age of ten. My brother and I sold the Titlists and Top Flights we pilfered from the woods surrounding the golf course. Later, I’d mow grass or serve as lifeguard at the swimming pool.

But damn! I had just finished my first year of college finals! I needed to convalesce! My brain was fried! Come on, woman!

“Start filling out job applications,” said Angry Mom. She didn’t care about my brain.

My goal was to create the appearance of looking for a job without actually getting a job. This appearance had to be convincing, because Angry Mom had a kind of sixth sense for exposing bogus theatrics. So off I went, with brother in tow, pseudo-searching for employment.

While my battle plan was to simply appear mentally retarded at job interviews, my brother had hatched a more sophisticated scheme.

“I’m going to get a job at a radio station!” he announced. Such designs were congruent to his college major at the time, so the quest seemed genuine even if chances of gaining such a position was somewhere deep in the negative. What a brilliant strategy! My brother had laid the perfect foundation for a Summer of Sloth.

Me, I was relying solely on my incompetence, which on the surface seemed like sound strategy except that my incompetence was such that even my incompetence was incompetent. Still, I had successfully managed to avoid even a moment of paid labor right up to the ill-fated day when I strolled into the local Burger King.

“Taking Applications Now” read the bold black letters that clung beneath the enormous Burger King logo. I had tried to ignore it, of course, but Angry Mom was too sharp to allow such an opportunity to pass.

“They’re hiring at Burger King. Get in there a fill out an application,” she demanded. “Or I’m going to start charging you for hot water.”

My brother the genius decided to visit the area radio station while I obtained an application. He’d pick me up just as soon as Burger King realized I wasn’t fast food material.

The most disinterested teenager in the entire world handed me the double-sided application, and I retreated to a greasy booth to fill out the boxes. I wasted a golden opportunity by failing to lie about my criminal record (although, in retrospect, I’m not sure if serving a stretch for murder would have mattered much to Burger King). When I was done, I walked up to the counter and handed the application to somebody who looked like a manager, who immediately went to reading it. She had the look of a woman reading the assembly instructions for her new Ikea bookcase.

“Come with me,” she said. So, they wanted to reject me in person, eh? We assumed seats in the same booth I used to fill out the application.

“Says here you’re in college now,” the manager said.

“Yep.”

“Do you have any experience in the fast food industry.”

“Nope.”

“Have you ever run a cash register?”

“Nope.”

“You’re hired.”

All the warmth of a living soul left my body. “What?”

“When can you start? Can you start now? How about now?“

“You’re starting now?” said my brother incredulously.

I nodded miserably. “How did it go at the radio station?”

“They don’t need anybody. Have fun at Burger King.”

He rolled up the car window and sped away.

*

Nobody works at Burger King for the fun.

In the arena of fast food, McDonald’s is king. A distant second is the misleadingly monikered Burger King. They both serve hamburgers, french fries, and some kind of dubious fish sandwich. What separates the two companies are its operational philosophies.

I’m paid the lowest possible amount to serve you.

McDonald’s believes in employee retention. After all, it costs money to constantly train new employees. So they spend a little extra on pay increases and incentives to keep their good employees building Big Macs.

Burger King, on the other hand, believes that employees are as interchangeable as a sesame seed. Pay is kept low and there are no bonuses to be had. When the employee quits, just hire another sucker. How hard is it to make a Whopper anyway?

Not very hard at all. The television commercials make it appear that the meat of a Whopper is sizzled on some kind of grill manned by cowboys. The truth is that a low-functioning teenager simply loads a pile of frozen beef pucks onto a conveyor belt. The belt carries the pucks into a box that broils the burger for two minutes and twenty seconds. What comes out at the other end are dripping circles of cow.

After the burger is broiled, you place one meat circle on the bottom half of a bun, add two twirls of ketchup, one twirl of mustard (inside the ketchup swirl: IMPORTANT!) and finally add the stingiest pinches of lettuce, tomatoes and onions your fingers can afford. Presto! You have a Whopper.

This is not the type of work the engages the mind or fosters creativity. In fact, Burger King would rather that you set yourself on fire than offer anything to the table. You are there to make it their way.

That’s another operational point of difference that Burger King claims over McDonald’s: Have it your way™. It’s true. You can have it your way at Burger King. Once, a man with a great deal of his jaw missing ordered a “RuwWOMeper,” and I made it for him.

It still haunts my dreams.

The problem with Have It Your Way is that a customized order destroys the flow of the kitchen. “No ketchup! How will I know where to put the mustard without the ketchup!?” You can hear an audible groan from the burger assembly station as soon as somebody demands “no tomato.” That leaves the cashier – the poor sonuvabitch who faces the hungry mob – to shout nervously at the kitchen, “Whopper, no tomato! Need it now!”

A cashier who makes that request one too many times might receive a quick-but-efficient beating by the garbage bin after his shift if he’s not careful.

At least the kitchen crew works in anonymity. The cashier is the defacto face of Burger King. If I learned one thing from ringing up sales at Burger King, it is this: If you just got out of prison for buggering children, you are still higher on the totem pole than the schmuck taking your Burger King order. Go ahead and flip out like a dangerous maniac because you didn’t get a straw in your bag. The guy behind the counter earning the minimum wage deserves your rancor. Scream it your way.

One day, a very dusty man wearing a dirty softball uniform walked in with his son and ordered a burger and a drink. “And I want that Last Action Hero cup, too,” he said. He referred to the promotion Burger King had launched that year. If you ordered a value meal, you got a special plastic cup featuring a character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in a movie that was the summer’s biggest bomb.

“I’m sorry, sir, but you have to order the value meal to get the cup.”

“I don’t want a value meal.”

“Then I can’t give you the cup,” I said, because I was a dedicated company man.

What followed was five minutes of some of the saltiest cursing you’ll find this side of the Navy. The man’s son was driven close to tears as I was tied to the pillory of his father’s terrible verbal abuse. I guess I could have given the man his cup. It wasn’t like we had a short supply. In fact, if I were still employed by the King of Burgers, I would have given him the cup. But at that time, I was 19 and the rules said No Value Meal, No Last Action Hero Cup.

**

The co-manager of Burger King didn’t like me.

Believe it or not, I want people to like me. It’s hard to work with somebody who hates your guts. But the co-manager was having none of it. She once called me into her office just to call me “a pretty boy.”

Truthfully, she was kind of right about me being a pretty boy. I’m not a male model, but the guys I worked with were a rough bunch. One colleague kept a number of live snakes in his truck. Another maintained a day job as a custodian of a trailer park.

“Why do you work here?” I asked.

“I need to get away from my wife!” he replied.

Just about everybody who worked the Burger King night shift really needed the money. Me, I needed some spending cash for the family trip to Florida. These guys, on the other hand, were a paycheck short of an eviction notice. The co-manager who hired me – and didn’t hate me – toiled long hours. She needed to make the job work because her husband was dying of cancer. Medicine was expensive.

Transfats and these guys are the source of your heart attack.

None of them were bad guys. Eventually, they even came to like me (excluding a certain co-manager). But it took most of the summer before I earned their respect, and maybe even then they had simply gotten used to me. A guy who returned home each evening shining in burger grease can’t be all bad.

“You smile too much,” grunted the co-manager.

One can easily mistake a grimace for a smile. Still, I tried to maintain a low-grade level of cheer at my post behind the cashier station. The co-manager thought me less-than-genuine and so did many of the kitchen grunts.

“Why don’t you just lay off the ‘charm’ a little?” the co-manager suggested.

One lady went totally ape-shit on me because we didn’t serve ice cream. “What kind of a Burger King doesn’t serve ice cream?” she screamed. She really couldn’t believe that she lived in a world in which a Burger King failed to serve ice cream. She was really jonsing for ice cream. I shrugged. I could make her a milkshake, or she could visit the TCBY across the parking lot. No dice. It was better to scream at the kid making minimum wage.

Maybe that’s how I won over the kitchen grunts. They liked that it was me and not them facing the brute squad every evening. They also liked that I eventually stopped panicking when the BK Whaler without tarter sauce was slow to coming. You want it your way chief, then you gotta wait.

***

If you want to work at Burger King, you had to buy your own pants.

“Black pants,” said the co-manager who hired me. “And black tennis shoes, too.”

Magnanimously, the corporation of Burger King does supply you with one blue shirt to wear. (Want a second shirt? Pay!) Everything else came out of your pocket. So for the first week, it cost you money to work at Burger King.

“Before you get out there,” the co-manager was saying, “you gotta watch these videos.”

Burger King spent top dollar to produce a series of nifty training videos designed to teach the lowest common denominator how to to whip up a bunch of fries without hot-greasing yourself all the way to the emergency room. The best part about the videos was the magical plot.

Each video opened on a deserted island, where two pals find themselves shipwrecked. They sit on the beach, watching beautiful sunset after beautiful sunset, until one finally says, “Hey…tell me again how you guys make those milkshakes at Burger King!” You’ll never write a smoother segue to a 10 minute demonstration of milkshake-making. I’ve tried to top it, but I can’t.

Later, I was given a tour of the freezer and the kitchen facilities. No matter what your official capacity was at Burger King, you were expected to know how to whip up any sandwich without notice. If a customer shot the Whopper-making man, then I was prepared to slide the body aside and take his place.

“Guess which fry I stuck up my butt? Have a nice day.”

The pressure position was the drive-thru. You had to man a register, hand out bags of food, and communicate to customers through arcane speaker technology all at the same time. Because Burger King loves its employees, a digital clock times your performance. If the customer wants to check his/her bag to make sure the apple pie is there, tough. That’s time added to your record.

What you may not know about the drive-thru is that everything you say is clearly audible. When you mutter, “God, that guy is an asshole!” the drive-thru cashier can hear you. This is the guy handling your order. Something to think about.

****

For the first two months of my servitude with Burger King, I overcharged every customer who ordered a value meal.

This was not my clandestine means of screwing people. I simply rang up the order incorrectly. The cashier pad contained a Value Meal code that I was not made aware of. As a result, when somebody ordered a Whopper Meal, I’d just ring up a Whopper, medium fries, and a medium coke.

Of course, it wasn’t management that questioned this unexpected windfall, but an irate customer with enough brain cells to do the math.

“This ain’t no value!” he shouted.

He was right about that. My register always recorded a surplus of cash as a result, which mildly puzzled my managers with every inspection of the ledgers. Had it come up short, I would have absorbed anywhere between 40 to 1000 lashes with a cat-o-nine tails. Finally, somebody let me in on the secret Value Meal cashier combination.

By the end of my tour, I had become a cashier wizard. If I took your order, you could rest assured that you were receiving correct change my friend. Better yet, I was finally beginning to feel some camaraderie with my colleagues.

The all-stars of Burger King work the morning shift. After all, it’s far more inviting to open a fast food joint than to close one down. Plus, aside from the occasional bag of breakfast sandwiches for the office, the orders are much smaller in the morning. If you didn’t have any facial deformities, greeted customers without a death threat, and was never caught spitting in the fry basket, then you were a candidate for the morning crew.

Meanwhile, the night shift is comprised of the anti-social and the physically unappealing. Our customers were the angry, the unruly, and often the inebriated. There was one man who came in around seven every evening. He wore tan pants and a very crisp, white button down shirt. All he ever wanted was coffee.

“I’ll handle this,” said the co-manager. She’d accept his money, then proceed to pour his coffee. But not in a coffee cup. She poured it in a large soft drink cup. He’d wordlessly take the coffee, sit in a corner booth, and drink it in unsettling silence.

“Why does he get such a big cup of coffee,” I asked.

“Somebody once gave him a small cup, and he tossed it in her face,” answered the co-manager.

Also receiving large cups for the price of a small were cops. The night crew liked the police dropping by on a regular basis. The final few customers who arrived before closing time were always the creepiest.

“Why don’t you just gimme all the fries you got in the bin?”

Thing is, we ended up eating a lot of fries ourselves. We weren’t supposed to. An employee discount was something like 30%. But unless you were one of those Burger King managers who enjoyed frequent mutinies, it was wise to simply turn a blind eye to an employee who tossed an occasional BK Big Fish into the grease. I ate a record number of BK Big Fishes that summer.

For most of the crew that worked with me that summer, stolen fries and a leftover Whopper Jr. comprised a significant portion of an unbalanced diet. It wasn’t very healthy, but these weren’t very healthy guys anyway. They lived from one twelve pack of beer to the next. They were good people, but many of their friends were not. My goal was to graduate from college and get a cushy job in an air conditioned office building. There’s was to avoid the repo man for a record number of months.

My last day at Burger King came and went without fanfare. I low-fived some of the guys and promised that I’d keep in touch. I didn’t. But I think of them, like the guy with the snakes. And the man who worked to avoid his wife. Or the big coffee creep. I especially think of the co-manager who couldn’t stand me. What was her problem.

I’m a great looking guy. Deal with it.

If this article as a familiar ring to it, it’s because I wrote it like five years ago. Back then it was entitled Have It The Angry Czeck’s Way, You Hungry Assholes. But back then, The Angry Czeck was a bit loose with its standards, and looking back, well, quite frankly the writing sucks. So I rewrote the damned thing. But if you’re a big fan of HITACWYHA, then be my guest and read it.  – AC

I gleaned some of the McDonald’s/Burger King operational information from The Bathroom Readers Institute, a solid repository of fact.

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1. Have it the Angry Czeck’s Way, you hungry assholes