Dorky Dad
| What I won't do for $12 an hour |
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| Written by Dorky Dad | ||||||
| Friday, 18 April 2008 | ||||||
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I just graduated from high school. It was the summer and I still worked at the aforementioned McDonald's. But it had two problems: It didn't pay me well enough and the managers wouldn't let me have that mullet I so desperately wanted. So I was an eager listener when one of my slacker friends called with an idea:  What do you mean I smell? Then the bell rang. A group of guys quickly poured into the lobby from a side door looking like antagonists in a bad horror movie: Each wore an apron, goggles, thick gloves and a coating of blood. Animal blood. I had gathered by this point that the job involved meat packing. I had no idea it involved actually killing the animals. Don't get me wrong. I love meat. But I don't like thinking that the slab of ribs I'm biting into once protected the innards of a living, breathing animal, and farming is so productive in modern times that I'm afforded the luxury of choosing from many other, non-animal-killing lines of work. I'll just live in sweet, sweet denial. Yet the job paid $12 an hour. And I wanted that mullet. So I didn't walk out. I filled out my application and went home. I had a late night that night and went to bed. The phone woke me up in the morning. It was that disinterested receptionist. But this time she was decidedly interested. Desperate, I'd say. "Can you come into work today? Two people who were supposed to be in didn't show up." (Apparently, those two people were my two friends.) I might have thought about it had it been later in the day, say the afternoon ($12 an hour ... mullet). But this was eight-o-clock in the morning and I'm a natural-born night-owl. I didn't like waking up, especially to a phone call asking me to ruin my morning off. The fire department could have been on the other line yelling that my house was in flames and I would have groused and complained before flattening my singed hair with my hand and slowly crawling out the nearby window. So my answer was easy. "Not this morning," I said, "Can I ..." *Click.* She hung up. I'll do anything for $12 an hour ... except wake up. And as I thought about it, I was thankful for obvious reasons, not the least of which was my ability to get a few hours more sleep. That night I went back to McDonald's. Let somebody else kill the animals, I said. I'll just cook them. Even if I do have to cut my hair short.
           
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I've had a lot of jobs in my life, many of them ugly. I cleaned air conditioners over a summer, which turned my snot gray. I worked an amazing five years at McDonald's -- five years! -- where I learned that the gun used to place a gob of tartar sauce on a bun had better distance when turned toward a co-worker than did the Big Mac sauce gun.| < Prev | Next > |
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