MY FIRST JOB
four writers reminisce on the
first thing they did to earn a buck.
By
Sam
Prendergast
On my first day as a crew
member at a certain ‘family
restaurant’, my manager took
me into the staff room to give
me a lecture about smiling. He
sandwiched the criticism between
compliments. “I like your ratio
of soft drink to ice. Your shirt is
very clean.” But ultimately, unless
I learnt to serve with a smile, I
was on a fast track to the kitchen,
otherwise known as the inferior
space of dirty meat bits and
teenage boys too grotty to be seen
by customers. By the end of the
shift, my jaw hurt from grinning,
but I’d secured my place at the
counter to spend my time making
hot fudge sundaes and avoiding the
smell of long-frozen beef.
Most first jobs are pretty
disappointing, but I’d secretly
been dreaming of a career in fast
food ever since my first encounter
with a Happy Meal. It wasn’t really
about the food, or the plastic-
wrapped toys. For me, the appeal
of a behind-the-counter lifestyle
was all about the rules. If you’re
going to leave your business in
the hands of two adults and a
bunch of ridiculous teenagers,
then apparently you’ve got to
make things very, very regulated.
There were buzzers and guidelines
for every restaurant process,
because god forbid anyone’s chips be
anything less than extremely salty.
Once you’d learnt to cope with the
endless sound of screeching alarms
telling you to pull ‘fish’ fillets
from the fryer, you could fall into
a relaxing kind of dream state.
My co-workers and I would dance
around each other with hands
full of soft drinks, as though we
were literal extensions of the
restaurant’s machinery.I was 16 when I began my fast
food career, and in the midst of
teenage angst, all the certainty was
refreshing. No, I didn’t know “what
I wanted to do” with my life, but at
work no one cared, so long as I could
put a burger in a bag, fold the top
neatly, and deliver it (with a smile)
to the front counter before customer
number 10 turned into a raging
dickhead. If it hadn’t been for the
customers, the whole job would
have been fine. I liked tipping
hash browns into their little paper
sleeping bags and organising thumb-
sized cartons of hot and sour sauce
into orderly rows. But the people
who actually ate the food were an
unwelcome interruption, especially
because I worked in an inner-city
store that stayed open 24 hours.On Friday and Saturday nights,
the store became a halfway point
for hordes of people who had 10minutes to grab a cheeseburger
before their train arrived. As a
very dweeby teenager who enjoyed
orderly lines and quiet solitude,
big crowds of hungry, drunken
humans were my literal nightmare.
Every night someone would jump
over the counter and run away
with one of the restaurant’s many
unnecessary items, usually the
empty straw holder, while we
scrambled to refill fry trays.
Behind the counter, in the bowels
of the restaurant, everything would
fall apart. I’ve never understood
people who return “overcooked”
$2 cheeseburgers at 3am as though
the second incarnation is going to
be substantially better, but trust
me, it’s a thing.By the time I was ready to leave my
fast food life for a substantially less
interesting office job, I’d started
to consider myself an industry pro.
Drunks and teenage boys no longer
fazed me. I could put together
pretty much any meal deal with my
eyes closed. And I’d discovered the
quiet joys of stocktake, which is
frankly my one true calling in life.
On my last day at the ‘restaurant’,
I taught a new crew member how
to mop the floors and empty the
bins in line with store policy. She
laughed when I showed her the
flow chart for filling and draining
the mop bucket, and I returned her
laughter with a forced grin, then
pointed her back to the sign as
I muttered, “But seriously.”writers’ piece