THE WRITER MUST EAT -> patreon.com/trn1ty <-
| \ | | blah!
|\ | `\|\ | the rantings and ravings
|/ |(_|| | * of a depraved lunatic
<^>
2023-10-14
: no filter
When I started at Burger King in 2020 I started at a location I would learn was
known for its bigotry, low food quality, and exceptionally shitty workforce.
Though most could be known for this, this Burger King in particular was quite
bad at all of those things and I would come to learn its employees gave zero
shits about even the barest of standards. I would see employees drop bottles of
sauce on the ground and pick them up without cleaning them or even changing
their gloves in the process, contaminating food with floor bacteria. Employees
dropping raw chicken using their gloves and no tongs and continuing to make
sandwiches with the same gloves used to touch raw chicken. Cross contamination
between all raw and cooked food and often between their phones, and the floor,
and the food. After the age of 17 I started eating at restaurants a lot less.
I applied to Burger King as a joke while on call with my Information Technology
class in school in 2020. School during 2020 was, due to the COVID-19 pandemic,
virtual and hosted on-line in Zoom meetings, so on one monitor (a 70Hz NEC
MultiSync) I had Zoom running and on another (a slightly newer, higher-
resolution Acer monitor) I had the Carrols application process. I needed money.
A job - a legitimate job, which I had never had before, nor one where the end
wasn't defined at the start - seemed like an easy solution. I set my
availability to 1700-2000 after school days so I could get 15 hours a week in
three hour spurts, not much but enough to wet my whistle and get a taste for
the work if I wished to continue.
They gave me a call that day maybe, or the day after. I sounded good on the
telephone so I was brought in for an interview. I arrived an hour early and sat
in a nearby parking lot playing Chocolate Doom on my netbook running Debian, I
think, and trying to page through Simulations and Simulacra though it took me a
month to get through the first paragraph because of how dense it is and the
confusing nature of the initial parenthetical statement. But the general
manager who interview me didn't know that, instead he saw a book with a
confusingly worded cover and a high school student who was also attending two
colleges (officially; taking classes at one and dually enrolled in the other)
and a technical school (for Information Technology) and who wanted to learn to
cook. After forty-five minutes of waiting I went into the building, told them I
had an interview, waited twenty minutes (five minutes past when the interview
was set), and interviewed for ten minutes where the manager clarified some
stuff on my application and hired me on the spot. I accepted.
The job was meant to be a temporary job, at least when I accepted. It was close
to Staples where I could apply my IT certifications once I finished them and
then mosey my way onto better jobs while going to college. Then while I was
working there the Staples went out of business and I watched one of my
classmates a year ahead of me quit the computer store nearby because the
management was abusive. So I would have no computer-related job.
My first day, Halloween 2020, a Saturday if I recall correctly, I was sat in
front of a computer after walking across town to the job (this was something
like a ninety minute walk because I was at the time very fat, very out of
shape, and very slow) and spent three hours first filling out my application
and then watching videos explaining the job.
When prompted for my gender I filled out "Prefer not to say" on the computer,
knowing I was a woman but could not safely come out especially in that school
with those parents and knowing those people. I later watched the same manager
get prompted by the computer to answer the question I didn't. He chose Male.
I memorized the cards hanging from the ceiling showing how to build the
sandwiches. The Whopper: mayo, lettuce, tomato, onion, ketchup, pickle. Wrong,
actually; mayo, lettuce, tomato, pickle, ketchup, onion. And later the meat
came before the mayo rather than before the pickle. But this explanation is
best for another time. Yesterday, my last day, a co-worker who was there my
first day that Halloween remembered me standing there trying to memorize the
cards. I was green and wet behind the ears and everything else that applies to
those who are new to what they are doing but think they will not only have fun
but quickly become very good at their job. I did neither.
My first day on the job I was placed in a little-used area of the kitchen and
trained with a classmate from the year behind me on making the Whopper. Grab a
five-inch sesame bun, toast it, take out a paper and place it on the board.
Place the bun, spread mayo on the top bun, add a dusting of lettuce, two
tomatoes, get the patty, four pickles, three rings of ketchup, and three rings
of onion. My turn. The mayo hard a hard time staying on the spatula and I had
to dip the spatula many times to finish spreading it on the bun. The lettuce I
couldn't figure out, I always did too much or too little. Tomatoes, fine, but I
went and grabbed one and placed it, grabbed the other and placed it. Meat,
fine. Pickles, I always grabbed too many or too few, and it took me a moment to
place them. Ketchup I used my forearm to move the bottle rather than the wrist
as I should have. Onions I couldn't grab correctly and it took me a moment to
spread them. My initial time spent making one Whopper was three or four
minutes.
I came in at probably 1500 or so and left at 1800. I can't say for sure but
that's what I would imagine because my first many shifts were three-hour stints
and this would be from a little after I got out of high school to when the
kitchen started to get busy. The person with which I trained left Burger King
maybe a couple months ago.
After proving my ineptitude when it came to the kitchen, but being too socially
awkward to interact with customers, I was put on videos again. The videos
explained simple things about sanitation that even at first were clearly not
accurate to what was happening in the kitchen. I naively assumed this
difference came from my coworkers not knowing the contents of the videos and so
started to mention these differences in hopes we could make food properly and
safely. After a little while these corrections started to be less and less well
received.
I don't remember much of Winter 2020 because I was busy with school, struggling
with my parents - about whom I write very little, because I try not to speak
ill of others - and trying to figure out how to get out of my current and
stifling situation.
My coworkers frequently used slurs of ableist, homophobic, and transphobic
natures. Among them r-----, f-----, and tr---- were common utterances and I
pretended they didn't affect me despite falling into the categories
particularly insulted by all three profanities. It was the heyday of anti-
Capitalist Twitter and the same time period in which I started engaging with
higher level philosophical thingies like gender accelerationism, anarchism,
juche. The time period where I discovered nuances even in things where I didn't
expect them like the DPRK's place within the world. I knew what the "triggered
Liberal" acted like and I knew what the stereotypical tr---- looked like. My
gender identity was expressed only in private among friends with the exception
of losing a bet I knew I couldn't win and wearing a dress in class. However I
was too fat for it and ended up getting stuck in the dress. I've lost 55 pounds
in the years since.
Things came to a head when, one day when I mentioned to a co-worker that they
should use tongs rather than their gloved hands to scoop chicken nuggets into a
bag for a customer, that co-worker started to rant about how slow I was in the
kitchen and how customers didn't need their food made well, they needed it made
fast. I responded with my own soapboxing saying that while my food was made
slowly I was one of few that could actually meet basic standards and that a
sandwich made missing a tomato or pickle or with the wrong amount of ketchup,
or a chicken nugget bag missing a chicken nugget or a fry pod filled with too
few fries couldn't justify even the minimum wait for the food and that making a
customer come back to get correctly made food would take even longer than my
making the food slowly but correct the first time. The assistant manager agreed
with me but admitted that management had been discussing ways to get rid of me
because I took too long in the kitchen and was too adamant about things not
being picked up off the ground and tongs being used.
When, a week later, I mentioned I was thinking about trying another store, they
sent me to the other Burger King location in the town for a 9.5 hour shift, the
longest shift I had worked at that time. When I said I liked it they sent me
for a second shift. That manager said it was great to have me there as one of
their own, and I said that would be cool, wouldn't it, and he looked confused
and asked me if I knew I had been transferred permanently.
2023-10-13
[ 4:36 PM] trinity: this burger king is so funny. it's amazing it functions
[ 4:38 PM] trinity:
ricky: "i say what i want, i have no filter. i dont
care who i offend"
trin: "wow ricky you're so cool for having no self
control"
ricky: "okay, this shit is seriously starting to piss
me off."
**WALKS OUT OUT OF ANGER AT MY JOKE**
[ 4:38 PM] trinity: the assistant manager said holy shit did that really just
happen and this morning told the gm and the gm thought it
was funny as fuck
[ 4:39 PM] [...]: lmfaoo
[ 4:39 PM] [...]: ricky sounds like such a guy
[...]
[10:18 PM] [...]: he got offended
<^>
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