When i was working at McDonalds, I was consistently given the "Walkers" shift. This amounts to accepting a delivery of stock, rotating the stock that's already stored in the freezers and other stock areas, organising it into a logical order, and putting it away neatly. I was given this shift often, because I was apparently quite good at it.
I suppose all that time playing Tetris paid off somehow.
Aside from the usual woes of the delivery, such as management ordering more stock than is physically possible to fit on the shelves while still following legal regulations as far as safe stack heights are concerned, one particular delivery sticks in my mind far more than the others. Though simultaneously, far less as well.
The delivery had been taken, and all the boxes counted up. It turns out that we were missing about four boxes of tatsoi lettuce - the "fancy" (read extra leafy so they can get away with putting less on a burger) lettuce used for the crispy chcken burgers (and the Angus burgers). The delivery driver, Tony, decided that we should check the other stores' orders on the truck. Sometimes the idiots who put the stock on the truck mix the orders up.
I went to assist him in taking a look. The back door on the truck was a strange kind of latch (which I'd seen before on my father's truck), where there was a lever in a holder. Raise the lever and pull it outwards to open the truck door. Unfortunately for me, the lever got stuck in the holder, so I started hitting it, to make it move upwards, and therefore open the door.
With my amazingly bad luck, the lever finally flew upwards. It also flew outwards, straight into my nose, knocking my backwards a few steps, and sending my glasses flying a few meters away. After retrieving my eyes, I realised that my nose was bleeding, quite heavily. I (somehow) calmly acquired some paper towel, and proceeded to sit in the crew room, plugging my nose with it to wait for it to stop.
Then I woke up, on the floor, with a co-worker's crotch in my face. When he realised I was awake, he hurriedly moved (I think... uh hope? that he was simply laying me down properly, but from an awkward angle) to reveal about 12 more faces standing around. My first question was "Why are you teabagging me?", which was quickly followed by "Where am I?"
About 15 minutes later, an ambulance arrived. The lady from the ambo woke me up (I had passed out again, by this point) and tried to move me. I then woke up again, to a lecture along the lines of "If you do that again, I will leave you here". Apparently, I had passed out again, and almost hit her in the face! Apparently, she took this matter personally... because I was totally in control of my actions at this point -.-
Eventually, they got me to the hospital, where I awaited a doctor. Five hours later, I saw a doctor, who determined that I had a mild concussion, and had somehow not broken any bones. If the lever had hit me a little to the right, I would have broken my nose. Left? Cheekbone. up would have been glasses/eyes, and any lower and I would have lost teeth. I was amazingly lucky.
A few days later, I was back on the job - the next shift being taking the delivery again.
A few weeks later, the regional manager took me aside, and blasted me for attempting to help the truck driver. Apparently its not my job to help people who are helping me do my job. Yet another reason why McDonald's is a trap!
And for the record, our lettuce wasn't on the truck.
On one hand, he's (somewhat) right, and it wasn't your job to go looking for lettuce. On the other, it was, given that if something was missing, you were the one who would have gotten it in the neck. Yet another reason why, no matter how desperate one's financial situation is, they should probably not work for McDonalds.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, though, 'McDonaldisation' is coming up remarkably frequently at university, for some odd reason.