A blogger I’ve been following for quite a while, Stephanie Faris, is holding a “group blog” thing. Each Thursday, everyone participating writes on the same topic and links up. Seems like a cool idea (i.e., it saves me the trouble of thinking up a topic), so why the heck not? This week’s topic:

Your First Job

…that paper route you did as a teenager. That horrible fast food work you did in high school. Or the temp job you took in your mom’s office for a summer in college.

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It’s hard to consider my literal first job as an actual first job since I only held it for a couple of weeks. It was at Micky-D’s. Some of it I liked, some I hated with a passion.

It was the summer between my junior and senior years in high school: the traditional time for a first job (i.e. I could drive to/from work on my own). McDonald’s seemed like an easy first step.

I remembered back when I was in cub scouts (in the 1960s) and we took a tour of our local franchise. This is back in the day when the shakes weren’t thinned soft-serve ice-cream. No, they were made like milk shakes–with a shake blender and everything. Way cool. This was also before the 1/4-pounder. Or large fries, come to think of it. And speaking of fries, they even let little ol’ me fill one fry packet. Again, way cool.

Anyway…my experience as a worker for the golden arches didn’t start well. Not at all. I was required to cut my hair.

Now, my hair wasn’t as long as it is now. It covered my ears. The manager wasn’t keen on that. Being the proper teenaged sychophant, I went and got a trim…and swore it was the absolute last time I would ever stoop to this level again. (It’s silly, I know, but we all have our job hang-ups, rational or not.)

I started doing fries and doing condiments. I was fine with that. After a few nights (the manager liked it because I was 17 and could work nights), I was put on grill. Oh…to you more modern McD people: back in the day we didn’t nuke the burgers, we actually cooked them ourselves.

I was happy, for the most part. I liked cooking. Unfortunately, the manager was a putz that went way beyond the hair-length thing. He would just take it as a given that I knew how to do things…like empty grease traps, clean the grill, or even where we dumped the trash. Hello! New guy, here. Needs to be taught stuff.

Still…I’m adaptable. I could deal with that. It was three things, though, that really got me searching for new employment.

1 – The Time Clock. The hour was split into 100 divisions. Who the frak thought this was a good idea? Perhaps it was for the corporate weenies to have an easier time calculating time math, but it was atrocious for trying to know when to clock in and out.

It also didn’t help that the manager would stand next to the clock and make sure you hit the time right on the dot. He wasn’t going to pay you one 1/100th of an hour more than you were due.

2 – The Bun Incident. Even to a teenage Micky-D newbie, I knew that this incident crossed the line. We had a tray of Big Mac buns on the tray, ready to be warmed, when the tray was run into by someone and it dropped on the floor. Our nice and just mopped-but-still-greasy floor. The rule–and it’s a good rule–is to toss out the buns, which I started doing…until guess who stopped me.

At least the manager wiped each bun off with a rag before making us serve them up. Ugh.

3 – The Counter. I’d made it clear: no counter. I was happy to forever be the grill guy, or the fry guy, or whatever. Just don’t make me have to deal with the public.

One of the worst years of my of my working life was the evening I spent at the register having to take and assemble orders for the never-ending stream of customers. I was never so happy to go home from work as I was that day. I never wanted to do that again.

In the wake of those last two incidents, I was out pounding the pavement to find another job. Which I did, very quickly, at a hobby shop, where I spent the next year. Once I’d secured that, I gave my manager two weeks notice…and at the end of the evening, I rescinded that and said I wasn’t coming back. He told me that he wouldn’t give me a recommendation. What did I care? I’d be free! And I’d get to rid myself of the beef-tallow smell that was permeating my being.

And thus ended my very brief, but colorful, career as a polyester-clad minion of the Golden Arches. I do have a few good memories, but mostly I remember the relief of leaving. It’s not that I blame the corporation for that. I blame the corporate tool I was unfortunate enough to work for.