Cooking for the Colonel & the King!

Booger and I were recently knocking a few beers back at a local dive and we were reminiscing about our first jobs as teenagers. It turns out Booger worked frying chicken for the Colonel and I worked the broiler cooking meat for the King. We were both laughing about the joys of learning to cook in a fast food restaurant and the great types of people you get to work with… the devoted company-man manger who walked around with his corporate three ring binder doing quality checks, the teenage girl who ran the register and who would been cute if her face would clear up, the mildly retarded man who manned the fish and chicken patty station and who would always yell for an “All Day Count” even though he only had to cook one fish patty, the older single mother who built the burgers and barked out orders to everyone, and the 17 year old fry master who came to work every night saying how much he hated the place but his Dad wouldn’t let him quit. To this day anytime I walk into a fast food place I look for these people and sure enough I can always spot them!

The part that made my discussion with Booger so funny was he told me why he had quit that job and it turns out it was the same reason I had quit the King! It turns out that while it is cool to be a 14 year old “cook” what is not cool is the other duties that go with the responsibility of cooking. It would seem that anytime somebody left a mess in the men’s room the “cook” was pulled off the line to go and clean it! When I say mess I mean the worst kind of un-holy and un-seemly freakin’ mess that anyone can imagine! It wasn’t until I began working for the King that I knew that someone could actually shit in a urinal. Until that point in my life I assumed that a person could only urinate in a urinal. Equally as enlightening but no less frightening was the time I realized that you didn’t always need “ink” to write an inscription on the bathroom wall… other material worked just as well. I won’t even go into what types of evil lurks in the ladies’ room. Besides an occasional used feminine hygiene product that no 14 year old boy is prepared to deal with the ladies’ room was always good for a few used diapers that required proper disposal. Another neat job the “cook” got to do was what I affectionately refer to as dumpster diving! If the dumpster was full and over flowing the manager would send me out to go stand and stomp the top of the dumpster to push all the bags of trash down deep inside the big green box with my feet and occasionally my hands to keep my balance. As I write this I can almost smell the trash as the weight of my feet would rip open bags in the July heat and release the hot putrid air inside! I would then climb out of the dumpster, burning my hands on the sides of the can and retching from the smell of spoiled secret sauce and meat that hung in my clothes. It was after this event that I would return to my duties as “cook”.

Now I realize that someone had to perform these duties… otherwise the whole place would be shut down by the Board of Health but should the “cook” really be the guy to do that?! The person who handles every piece of meat that the place sells… should he be the one washing the word “POOP” written in human excrement off the walls?! Why not have the pimple faced almost-cute girl who handled dirty money all the time do it?! Couldn’t the mildly retarded guy who talked all the time about his Matchbox Car collection and only cooked three things a shift have handled it? Would it have really bothered him? Even the miserable prick who cooked the fries… he was already in a foul mood send him to dumpster dive… why do they gotta wreck my fucking night?! How could management expect Booger or myself to take great pride in our work when we both knew at some point during our shift we were going to hear the manager say; “Big Dirty someone left something witchy in the men’s’ room urinal again go handle it.” How could I have been expected to focus in on cooking the perfect burger or Booger been expected to cook the perfect piece of chicken knowing that moment was no doubt looming over our heads?! The sad thing is… true to my middle class upbringing I actually gave 2 weeks notice for that job and mopped the walls of the men’s room my last night there. There have been many times over the years that while in the middle of a crisis at work I have had to stop and remind myself… It could be worse I could be scooping shit out of a urinal. That job has allowed me to remain level headed even under the most stressful of work circumstances and no doubt Booger is a better man for having gone through it as well.

Tags: chicken patty station, colonel, fast food, feminine hygiene product, first job, frying chicken, ladies room, men's room, poop, scooping shit out of a urinal, the king, urinal