CRITIQUE ME PLEASE

"Original or Extra Crispy?"
At 11:37 I punched out, pulled my hat off, and pinned my nametag to it. I walked out into the lobby and stood with the rest of the night crew waiting for our manager to give us the okay to leave. Finally, we heard the familiar beeps of the alarm being set and with the yell of "ONE DOOR" we were gone. I got to my car and slid off my black slip resistant shoes, wondering to myself if they could still be considered slip resistant since grease now coated them and the tops had become separate from the sole. Pulling on my pink chucks I got into my car and headed home. Just one night finished in what would be two years wasted at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
At sixteen years old in a small Podunk town like Cedar Springs, MI there aren't many occupational choices. You've got your McDonalds, Burger King, or KFC. You could always baby-sit but with a car to pay off and insurance to pay, a secure job and weekly paycheck are really the only way to go. I put applications in at all the restaurants. KFC called back first and offered me a job almost immediately. When you are sixteen $5.25 an hour plus $5 per A on your report sounds great, especially when you don't have a car and the place is in walking distance. I was sold on KFC after my interview, and so for the next two years I would be a pawn in the game of fast food. If only I had known how not great it would be.
At Kentucky Fried Chicken, like most jobs, you have a required uniform. Theirs consisted of a polo shirt, black pants, a hat, and black slip resistant shoes. Everything was provided except for the shoes. The first day I went to work they gave me my uniform. I took it into the bathroom to change into and it was disgusting. The hat was caked with flour from the chicken breading; the pants were about two sizes too small and bleached stained. At night when I took the pants off I had bruises around my waist where the pants had cut into me. As if those two articles weren't disgusting enough the shirt was bleached stained, way too big, had holes all over it, and smelled. I'm pretty sure that the person who wore it before me did not wash it when they quit. I groaned my way into the pants and thanked God that the shirt was large enough to cover the fact that the pants were so tight. Grimacing, I took a chance and pulled the hat onto my hair and headed back to do my new job.
Looking all but fabulous in my uniform I headed into the kitchen. It was the walk of a working girl. The first day went well, but as the next two years at KFC passed I learned ridiculous and disgusting policies of the Colonel's place. At the end of the night all unused chicken was de-boned, we took off the skin and bones and shredded the old chicken to be put into chicken potpies and chicken noodle soups. The day I saw an employee take a bite of the chicken and then put it into the de-boning pile was the day I stopped eating anything that went with de-boned chicken. The KFC also had an A&W section that we served. Our biggest selling item off that menu was root beer floats. One day as I making a customer a root beer float someone came up behind me and said, "You know that you can only put one scoop of ice cream in that right?" I was so shocked because ice cream is the big reason to get a root beer float. How can you can call it a root beer float if there is only one small scoop in the cup? Many times I was written up for putting too much ice cream in the root beer floats. Another really ridiculous policy at KFC was that customers had to pay for water. We had a water tap on the pop machine but we weren't allowed to use it. Our owner would buy bottled water for $1.99 a case at Save-A-Lot and then we sold it for $1.10 per bottle. Not very many of the employees agreed with this policy and more than a few times I could hear the girls on drive-thru giving the customers free water and asking them to call the complaint hotline to try and get the rule changed. Eventually, we got free water but then customers could only get it in a small cup and only one cup per person in the car or in the store. The worst policy or at least the one that concerned me the most was about the schedule. You had to have requests for days off in on the Tuesday of the week before. That is pretty good except that they wouldn't post the schedule until Sunday of that week. I could never make plans until the last minute and I was actually scheduled for my graduation day. Luckily someone was willing to take my shift for me.
The rules wouldn't have been so bad if we didn't have such asinine managers. Our management at KFC was horrendous. The assistant managers were nice enough but then they would turn around and tell everyone everything that you confided in them. I used to make things up and tell them to see how fast it would get back to me. I was pregnant about three times before they caught on. They would take food and eat and tell us that we could have some, but if we took it they would go tell Mindy, our store manager. The worst thing about our assistant managers is that they were all potheads. At the beginning and end of every shift they would "take out the trash". One particularly hard night on drive-thru no one would help me. I was trying to take orders, money, and prepare the food all by myself. My assistant manager came up to me while I was in the middle of an order and asked me what was wrong?
"I don't know," I said coating every word with sarcasm, "it doesn't have anything to do with me trying to do a three person job by myself." Later on I got a write up for being disrespectful. I wondered as I was signing the write up how anyone can be like that and think that they deserve my respect.
Then there was Mindy. She enforced all rules at all times. There was no messing around on Mindy's watch. She may be the biggest hypocrite I've ever met. Mindy would sit in the office all day long eating food that she had taken and not paid for. She would call in three hours before her shift started and ask whoever answered the phone to punch her in, or hours after she left she would call and ask us to punch her out because she was always forgetting to. Even though she was only in the store maybe thirty-five hours a week she was getting paid for forty-six hour weeks. Many times Mindy's family or friends would come into the store and when they did she would go sit in the lobby with them and eat, then when they left she would go with them. She would just leave the store for hours, not telling anyone where she was going and not bothering to find someone to serve as manager in her absence.
A store can run without management, but without customers it is nothing. With all the stupid policies and crazy management it's no wonder to me that we had some unruly customers. One girl wanted diet Pepsi but I handed her Mountain Dew on accident and she threw it at me. There were always the customers that had something small wrong and they were okay. I have no problem putting fresh fries down for someone who is willing to wait and be nice about it. Many times the cooks or grill people would slack on the job and we would run out of chicken, burgers, or fries. Fries took two and a half minutes to cook so that wasn't a huge deal, at least for everyone. Our store closed at ten on the weekends and on one Friday night at 9:55 a girl came through with her boyfriend. I told her through the speaker that we would have to cook fries and that it would be about two minutes. She said okay and pulled around. Two minutes later when I handed her the food she started yelling at me about the wait. Calmly, I asked her why she ordered fries after I told her that there would be a wait. She asked to speak to a manager and luckily the one she talked to was really cool about it and told me that next time I would just have to apologize for the wait. Normally I would have done just that, except when people are throwing f-bombs at you the last thing you do is apologize.
You may ask, if the job was so horrible why would you stay there for two years? It was a job. I got paid every other Monday, when my report card came out I would take it to work and they would give me five dollars for every A. I liked most of the people I worked with, just not the managers. After I got my car, it was only a five minute drive from my house. There were a few good things about the job, there were just a lot of bad things too.
At the end of my two years when I put in my two weeks words were had. The store manager called me lazy and ungrateful. Imagine giving your time and energy to a store for two years and then having them call you lazy. I just shook it off. What do I have to worry about? I've got my whole life left and I will never work there or in any fast food restaurant again. I can say proudly that I served my time in the industry. It was the worse job I ever had and probably the worst one that I ever will have but at least it's in the past.

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