After years of asserting and believing that I was too good to ever work at a Burger King, I now do. I've worked there for three months now, in fact. Such is working life in Chillicothe when you're not down with the factory workers or the good ol' boys. Running a drivethru is very strange-I sort of recommend it to anyone who eats fast food, so that they can actually understand what's going on. Most people seem at least a little bewildered by the process, somehow. I know I once was.
One of my jobs is to provide a (very) brief show of sunshine in Chillicotheans' otherwise-dreary lives as they wait for their crappy Burger King food-while also speeding them through the line in order to make our "serving time" scores look impressive to the corporate people. A few people really are depressed by this town and have little more outlet in their daily lives than talking to the drivethru workers. Most of them just want their food. My role is to be a smooth, expediting cog in the machine of their Burger King visit, being friendly and just a slight bit urgent in my speedy service in order to get them to drive up and make way for other cars or other tasks for me.
I guess you could call me a bad worker. I refuse to be the cog. (Oh, such rebellion.) I hail each and every person who rolls through with my eyes, my attention, and my genuine interest. I turn the drivethru into an actual human interaction, which is completely against the job description. I find out what their hopes are for the day, I wish them luck, I tell them tales of working here or the latest local news, I listen to their stories of the moment. I aim directly to get them to look at me as a human instead of a service machine, which many aren't used to doing at restaurants.
Or... at least, I try... When I tell my friends that I elicit real smiles from people, they tell me they were probably just giving me their drivethru faces. I think they don't get it. When you show people a lively element of humanity, they respond to it. If I'm joking around and dancing and having an inexplicably good time, people react to it. If I display a genuine interest in them, it grabs their attention. And if I get used to doing all of these things in a certain way, they become robotic as a matter of habit. Sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?
Running back drivethru gets boring if you can't create your own entertainment. When my attention starts dragging, I come up with experiments to run on my unsuspecting customers. I play with different approaches and farewells. I find that, "Have a good one," draws a warm response around here, even if it's totally removed from my personal dialect. Sometimes I speak in a sweet voice, sometimes a deep, loud, alpha-male voice, sometimes in my disinterested monotone, if I'm not watching it. (I do hate that mindless "service" voice that infects us all.) I talk about the hated weather with them sometimes, but I turn the subject elsewhere. When their change is a few pennies, I say something like, "Don't spend it all in one place," to draw a dumb grin, which is still better than boredom.
Sometimes I try on accents to alleviate the monotony. When I step into the role of an imaginary British person, I don't get looked down at as much. It doesn't draw their attention as much as you'd think it would in this quasi-hick town; the exotic causes many to avert their eyes around here. Because my face is tan and 'teutonic' (and with a defined jaw and cheekbones), I fancy that I can even pull off wilder accents around here. I've done Indian and Russian accents, never receiving a skeptical glance. Hell, I've even been put on by drivethru customers-one of them claimed to be Australian and "g'day"ed me. I did it back to the next car that pulled through. Breaking the monotony of corporate franchise life is invaluable to all involved, if you ask me.
All the while, I get yelled at for my drivethru times. Speed is of the essence, they exclaim. It's only the store manager talking; she has a handle, but she's not particularly good-however, she won an award for her store's times once, and she's clutching onto that for dear life. It could mean a promotion for her, or something. I might care about that if she wasn't so unpleasant to talk to... too bad I refuse to make random people feel uncomfortably rushed just for her sake. [Note: some customers genuinely aren't interested, and I do speed their change out to them so that they can head on out.] I refuse to turn into one of our front drivethru people who blurrily drone, "Hi'djou liketotrya largesizevalumeal." No question mark-just a big wall of fake speech designed to get the person ordering. This is where all the bad fastfood stereotypes come from; Jesus, don't they know? Can't they hear themselves? Don't they not want to be that? I guess I'm not very good at dividing my "professional" (ha) side from myself.
Aside from all of that, I'm doing something dangerous: I won't be returning to school this fall. I am, however, going to
Burning Man in a few weeks, I think-$600, maybe. That's maybe two fulltime weeks of work at my rate, now that I think about it. That's worth it.
Anyway, I figure that going to my regional campus is equivalent to throwing money away at this point. I'm a sophomore now, and at least half of my classes have been total wastes of money. How in-debt do I want to go for the sake of attaining this pie-in-the-sky goal called "a college education" which will magically make my life easier? I don't see it. I think I need to work hard on my own, at least, and need to explore the country and the world a lot more before I start carving myself into any area. Burning Man is an exploration, at the least; I intend to learn from a lot of people taking unconventional career paths, because my whole being is nothing if not unconventional, no matter what walk of life we're talking about.