Inside the factory-like environment of a fast-food kitchen, sodas should be the easiest menu item to serve. At my restaurant, a pair of machines pours them automatically as soon as we enter them into the system. All an employee has to do is snap a lid over the cup rim and lay a straw in the bag.
But the customers at the suburban California McDonald’s I’ve been working at for about a week don’t know that large meals come with medium drinks. In the space of a single shift, I twice make the error of putting the order in unaltered when a customer had really wanted a large drink to go with their large meal. Customers are understandably confused. I’m not allowed to be.
“You did it again!” Tranh, the store manager, shouts with the pickup window still open and the customer within earshot. “We don’t have time!”
I’ll only work at this McDonald’s for six weeks, but every day will be like this.
Most of what I say on the job comes from a script originating in an office in Chicago. Most of my actions are equally regimented. The lunch rush starts at eleven and bleeds into the dinner rush, which continues until 8 p.m. When it’s busy, almost everything I do and say is by design. But despite my preordained speech and movements, I make mistakes.
When I make a mistake, I apologize. “It’s OK,” Olivia, one of the assistant managers, says when I find her outside during a lull in the lunch rush. “Let’s not stress. We’re getting through it.”
I had heard her say that sort of thing before, about stress. It’s the natural thing to say, and yet it bothers me to hear her say it, as if there were anything else to feel, like stress is an emotion to fight back and not a response to conditions beyond our control. It’s like saying…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Alex Park
