“Fries down!” someone on the front line yelled. And I dropped a basket of fries. Now I had one-and-a-half minutes till the fries were ready, but forty seconds left on my burgers. “I think someone should clean the roof,” I told the manager.
The manager was so blinded by corporate-speak he never saw that I was just taking the piss out of him and the whole system he represented. “I like your enthusiasm,” he said. “But we have to work within the confines of the time allotted.”
“Are you saying cleanliness is not important?” I asked, as if I were about to call Ronald McDonald and report him.
“No, no, I’m not saying that,” he stuttered, narrowly averting disaster. “I am just saying we have to give fast, clean, efficient service to the customers, because this is the strength of McDonald’s.”
He was a company man, who had drunk deeply of the drug-laced Kool-Aid until he finally said, “Now, I love the dear leader.”
The final blow to my McCareer came when I was assembling a Big Mac. Each Big Mac was meant to receive two pickles. The pickles came from a small tray, on the assembly table, and the rule was that you couldn’t refill the tray until every pickle had been used. This is actually a really important health policy, because if you keep adding fresh pickles to old pickles, you don’t know how old the food is, and you may inadvertently poison the customers.
The manager was watching me, as I grabbed two pickles and threw them on the burger. I was about to wrap it up, when he yelled at me. “Don’t you see that one of those pickles is smaller than standard size?” he admonished.
Actually, I had noticed that, but wasn’t sure if it mattered. So, I opened the burger and threw on one more, standard-sized pickle.
“A Big Mac is supposed to receive two, not three pickles,” he shouted. “I think we need to send you back to training.”
Keep in mind, this was my fourth day at work. By ‘training,’ I think he meant the first twenty minutes of the first day. I had already been through Army boot camp. It wasn’t like he was threatening to send me back there, like “Oh, man, training was so grueling! I never want to relive that hell. It was the worst twenty minutes of my life.”
So, the threat was lost on me. What wasn’t lost, however, was the insult to my intelligence. I only put the extra pickle because the first pickle was too small.
So, I removed the substandard pickle and was about to throw it in the trash.
“What are you doing! Don’t ever throw food away,” he yelled. “At McDonald’s, you need to always be thinking about how to earn money. The company is here to make money, and that should be your goal. Always thinking, ‘how can we make more money?’”
“And the company will give some of this money to me?” I asked.
My obvious question hit him like a left jab, and the manager was rocked on his feet. But he regained composure after a standing-eight-count. “Yes, they give the money back to you in the form of a salary.”
“You mean the four-dollars-and-fifty-cents an hour that I get?” I asked.
“Yes, exactly. Where do you think that money comes from? So, you need to think of ways to help the company earn more money.”
“But they’re already paying me four-dollars-and-fifty-cents, without me thinking of anything. What’s in it for me if the company earns more?”
“Pride,” he said.
Ah yes, pride. Every morning, when I put on that uniform I felt pride coursing through every fryer-induced zit on my face. I was representing a long and glorious corporate tradition. And just knowing that our sales were higher than Burger King made me border on arrogance. And, don’t forget, I also got four-dollars-and-fifty-cents, which came out to $3.90 after taxes. And you could almost get a Big Mac meal for that.
“So, what should I do with this small pickle?” I asked, returning to Earth.
“Put it back in the pickle tray.”
I worked around that small pickle, while I made up the rest of the Big Macs. Finally, I reached a point where the only pickle left in the tray was the small one. And of course, more Big Macs were being cooked. This meant I needed to refill the pickle tray. But I wasn’t allowed to throw away the small pickle. I also wasn’t allowed to put it on a burger.
It was like a scene out of Kafka. I had the line workers yelling at me because Big Mac production had fallen behind. But, the manager wouldn’t let me take new pickles till the old ones were used. And,I wasn’t allowed to use the small pickle.
The stress caused by that one undersized pickle was too much for me. I snapped, and walked out. Sadly, I never found out how they resolved the small pickle incident. For all I know, to this day, that particular McDonald’s hasn’t been able to sell any burgers because of a twenty-five year old pickle clogging up the works.
That story ran through my head at the speed of light. When it ended, I heard the Cantonese woman still yelling at the Malay worker. The one plus was that his English was pretty minimal, so he understood the tone, but not the content of her tirade.
I turned to the Cantonese woman and in a stern voice said, “You’re getting twenty Ringit of food for a purchase of seven Ringit. Let it go!” Of course, my statement wasn’t exactly true, because she wasn’t spending seven Ringit. I was. So, why did she even care?
That evening, when Sheung Di and I were driving to our filming location, I recounted the whole story. At the end, I added one more detail that had occurred to me during the intervening several hours, “At no point did she offer me one or any part of the free breakfasts. She never said to me, ‘Here, I’ll pay half of your seven Ringit breakfast, and you let me get the two free breakfasts. In her calculation, I wasn’t entitled to anything. She wanted me to do all of the work but get none of the profit.”
Sheung Di just laughed. “That is what we call the Chinese calculator.”
