A movie theater, a bookstore and a McDonald’s all epitomize the concept of dreadful employment. Unfortunately, these jobs have, at one time, or another been my places of employment.
If you’re like me, and you were pushed head-first into the real world shortly after high school, then you ended up applying for various jobs and agreed to take whatever meager, low-paying, tedious employment that was offered to you. (I think I was making more money as a teenager living with my parents by simply being their son.) Back in those days, I was still full of dreams and ambitions before the weight of the world would crush my spirit.
McDonald’s wasn’t so bad. Besides the rude customers, the awful food, the burns suffered on the grill, the minimum wage and lack of benefits, it was actually OK, I guess. I was there for quite a while. When I started working there, a lot of my friends from high school were also at this job and shared the misery with me.
At McDonald’s you’re over-worked, underpaid and definitely under appreciated. One time I had gotten a mere 5 cent raise instead of a quarter raise that I deserved. Apparently, one of the biggest corporations on the planet can’t afford to give their employees decent wages. I threatened to quit. Eventually, I got my raise.
I had been asked to become an assistant manager. I would have done it. But at McDonald’s, it’s not that hard to be a manager. If you speak English, you’re already ahead of the game. I turned it down. It wasn’t for me.
The last thing I wanted was to work at the same job for the rest of my life, hating my job and my life for the next 40 years, Al Bundy-style.
After I’d quit, I found out that one of my fellow co-workers was on death row for reasons unknown to me. (And he was actually employee of the month one time.)
Working at a movie theater isn’t as glamorous as you might think. The satisfaction of getting free movie passes quickly disappears. You’ll learn to detest the smell of popcorn. It may be the only job where at 20 years old, you may be the oldest person working there. For college guys, it’s a place for major jailbait.These kids wouldn’t listen to a single word anybody would ever tell them. It would be closing time, you’d tell them to help sweep up popcorn and they just look at you like you’re a moron for asking such a thing.
I also learned that people really like jalapenos on their nachos, and if we ever ran out, that would be grounds for a riot to ensue. On such an occasion, this one guy asked me about the lack of jalapenos as though it were my fault. “Dude, where’s the yahlahpennios? Come on, you’re Mexican, you could be appreciate some good yahlahpennios.” I was dumbstruck. I didn’t even know how to respond to that.
At the movie theater, people were constantly being hired, fired, written up, suspended or just flat-out quitting. I myself was fired five times. Yes, that’s right, five times. They called me “The Legend.” Even after I had left, people were still talking about me. “What? You can’t get fired five times.” “Oh yeah, Fernando did.” Those firings were all undeserved and each time I came back. One of those times, I was rehired merely because they needed people to work opening weekend of “Pirates of the Caribbean.” I was let go on Monday, and then rehired later on. But once management is trying to get rid of you, you know it’s time to leave.
The gig at the bookstore is at least a step up. It’s a middle-class, yuppie company. The customers are much nicer and it’s not so stressful. But I still find moments that can exasperate me. First and foremost, do people just do whatever Oprah tells them to do? It seems that Oprah’s book of the month dictates what people will be reading. I can’t believe how many times I’ve had to hear customers say, “Do you have this book? It was on Oprah today.” You should read Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” because it’s a literary masterpiece, not because Oprah told you to. And another thing, people just assume that we have every book or piece of literature that has ever been written since the beginning of time. Case in point with a customer: “Well, sir, we can order the book for you.” “No, that doesn’t help me on my break.” It seems that this jerk was on his lunch break and didn’t want to be troubled by simply agreeing to have the book delivered to the store in a couple of days and pick it up later on.
The idiosyncrasies are rampant at any job, even this one. Recently, an older man had asked me where the bathroom was. At the same time, he demanded that I’d give him the newspaper without charge. “Uh, no. You just want to take it to the bathroom and read it for free while you take a dump.” Now, I didn’t say that, I was just thinking it. I refused to give him the paper.
The point is that a job is just that, a job. As crummy as it might seem, you should at least try to do it well. That is precisely why we are in college, to earn degrees that will spare us the misery of toiling away at a horrible jobs until retirement. For the meantime, enjoy the good times, but also strive for something better.
Fernando Romero is a junior journalism major.
