Working for the weekend: Job 4

I quit working at the grocery store a few weeks before I started college on the other side of the state in Lincoln at the University of Nebraska. I saved half of each paycheck to help pay for college, and I had enough to cover a big chunk of the first year. My parents chipped in the rest. I decided not to find a job that first year, but it didn't seem to make things any easier. While I eventually grew to love Lincoln, my first year and a half of school may have been the most miserable period in my life. I got stuck in a shitty dorm with a roommate I hated, my classes were complete wastes of time, I had nothing to do on the weekends, and I only made one good friend the entire year. I was kind of numb about it, shocked. It seemed like some kind of cruel prank. College was supposed to be right up my alley. I hated high school. I hated living in the small town. I wanted something to finally happen for once. College was where things happened. I would have nothing but exciting, unusual experiences for the next four to five years. I was an idiot. Exciting, unusual experiences weren't even happening to the people on my television. I had been lied to. College was a dreary grind just like everything else. When the year was done, I decided to go back home for the summer instead of staying in Lincoln. Most of my high school friends were coming back to town and I was homesick for my room, my family, and something to do on Friday and Saturday nights. Driving country back roads after finding someone to buy us a case of beer and talking the same shit we did the year before (in a slightly more deflated way) was still superior to sitting in a small white room, wishing I knew some people to hang out with. (My college years got a lot better about halfway through my sophomore year, almost living up to the hype, so it's not such a tragic story. Oh, woe is me. I can't find someone to hang out with. This is worse than ten tsunamis and Vietnam combined.) It turned out to be a pretty decent summer, and would be the last time I hung out with my high school friends for any extended period of time, but I did manage to snag another lousy job.
Job #4, aka Shitty Job #2: A friend of my uncle's bought a Hardee's franchise that was set to open about a month after I got back to town. It would be the first fast food restaurant chain in my hometown's history (there are now two). I let him know I needed a job, and before I knew it, I was working (temporarily, thank God) in the high-stakes world of fast food. Since the store wouldn't open for another month, I spent that first month training at the Hardee's in nearby Scottsbluff and cleaning dust and debris and unloading equipment at the recently built house of greasy burger filth in Bridgeport. I didn't mind the cleaning and unloading, but I hated the training in Scottsbluff. I had to get up at 5 a.m. and carpool 38 miles away with my boss and the two managers, one a likeable middle-aged lady who liked to drink, tell dirty jokes, and listen to classic rock, the other a worthless redneck bitch who was two years older than me and hated me because I was in college. She was already married to another worthless redneck, who apparently told her what to think about everything, judging from her conversation during the drives ("My husband says Rush Limbaugh's about the only one you can trust to get your news," "My husband says there's too many people on welfare and we need to stop supporting other people too lazy to work with our tax dollars," "My husband says we ought to throw all the fags out of this country," "My husband says blah blah ad nauseaum on and on etc.") Once we got to Scottsbluff, it didn't get much better. The owner of the Scottsbluff franchise was into fast food. Big time. He was PASSIONATE about fast food, the way Hank Hill is passionate about propane. He was an extremely short man with dark black hair, glasses, and a mustache, and was something of a philosopher, pontificating on the intangibles and unknowns of the fast food business while gazing wistfully into the distance. I remember one day when we were asking about the lunchtime rush and how much food to prepare in advance, he stroked his chin and looked out the window meaningfully. (I'm not making this up. He actually did this.)
"Well," he said. "Every day the lunch rush is a little different. I've been working in fast food for 23 years and have a pretty good idea about what kind of a crowd to expect at lunchtime. Still, some days we end up with too much food, and other days we don't make enough. If I could figure out exactly how many burgers to make on any given day, I'd be a rich man."
It took a mighty act of God, or maybe just a conscience strained to its breaking point, to keep me from laughing in the poor man's face.
One month later, we were officially open, and I had my duty. I grilled burgers in the kitchen. All day. That's pretty much all I did. It was the best place to be, as far as I was concerned. The people I liked the best (the employees consisted mostly of high school kids and adults fallen on hard times) worked in the kitchen, I didn't have to deal with the public, and no customers could see the grill or more importantly me in my embarrassing, uncomfortable uniform.
Here are some things that sucked about the job:
The uniform: I mentioned this already. It does not need elaboration.
The redneck: I mentioned her already. I forgot to mention her favorite catchphrase, uttered several hundred times a day while she encouraged us to make about a million more burgers than we needed to: "Come on. These people are hungry. They want their food fast." I really hope this woman is dead now.
The Hardee's corporate men: Since our store was brand spankin' new, two corporate representatives of Hardees, Inc. observed and mentored us in the first couple of weeks of business. These guys were a couple of assclowns. One was a chain-smoking, effeminate, Southern dandy whose tongue lolled around in his mouth when he talked and whose head wobbled precariously on his oversized neck when he moved. The other was a chain-smoking, salt and pepper-mustachioed, overly gregarious car salesman type who pretended to be our friend but could barely contain his seething contempt for us, the job, himself, and life.
Getting up at 4 a.m. when you were unlucky enough to pull a breakfast shift: Sucked.
Smelling like grease every day: Sucked as well.
Cleaning the grill: Super-sucked.
The revolting and highly immoral waste of perfectly edible food: They had a rule about how long a burger could sit in the queue, uh, shelf, erm, bin? (What's the word I'm looking for here?) It wasn't very long. We threw away maybe 40-50 sandwiches a day. By the third day, it made me despise myself.

Good things about it:
Seeing the results of my work: I had some raw meat. I grilled it. It was cooked. Results, baby, results.
Making fun of the people working up front: The kitchen staff had contempt for the register staff. We invented a fake gang war, calling ourselves "East Side," and them "West Side." The boss found out and made us stop, saying that though he understood it was a joke, the entire Hardee's organization is a team and divisions between areas are unacceptable.
You know how people see Jesus' image in pancakes, etc.: One night after closing, I was cleaning the grill. I poured the cleaning solution on the hot grill and it formed a perfect likeness of Abraham Lincoln, as seen from the side. Oh my god, that's Honest Abe, I said to myself. A co-worker walked by. "Oh my god, that's Abraham Lincoln!" he shouted. Then the cleaning solution trickled across the grill, ruining the miracle. Nobody believed us. I still wonder what Abe was trying to tell me.
Torturing pickles: The grill was set up in an unusual way. There was a normal grill, which you placed the patty on, but there was also another hot grill surface called a platen that you lowered on top of the grill to cook both sides of the burger at once. One night we were bored and started throwing vegetables in there to see what would happen. Nothing much happened until we tried a pickle. Once the platen was lowered on the pickle, the pickle emitted a high-pitched shrieking noise, similar in tone to a screaming human. Hundreds of pickles lost their lives before the gag got old.
I would have to return to college to find an even more demeaning job, but that's Part 5.