I flipped burgers at McDonald’s – and discovered the joys of insubordination
There was, I discovered on obtaining a holiday job at McDonald’s before embarking on A-levels, an immediate benefit and a simultaneous disbenefit. The benefit was that on joining and becoming a “crew member” you were given – free of charge – a uniform. The disbenefit was that, on each shift, you had to wear it. The trousers were capacious, the top deep blue and white with a stripy pattern. This, according to HR magazine , was Ronald McD’s attempt to utilise “primary colours and pin stripes, in line with the tailored feel of the powersuit.” But even with the boat-shaped hat that made you look like one of the Tracy family in Thunderbirds, there really wasn’t much power in that outfit. And it wasn’t much of a suit. No wonder people dressed at work or arrived in outsized overcoats.
I learned several things quickly. One was that in work as in life, there is a role for everyone: the key is how to find it. I did shifts deep-frying FiletO-Fishes and frozen fries in enormous wire baskets. And I learned the hurried synchronicity required to make sure there was always sufficient fodder, and the adaptability to accommodate customers who jolted a system rooted in homogeneity by ordering bespoke.
I did hot and gruelling shifts cooking the burgers required for hamburgers, cheeseburgers and Big Macs.
A few of those was enough. The man frying the regular burgers, and it was usually a burly, manly man, was like the stoker shovelling coal into the furnace of a steam engine fast enough to reach Manchester by sundown. It all seemed very Victorian: and to be honest, I was never very good at it. The proof was a shift spent cooking Quarter Pounders, which were thicker and needed searing on either side to cook them in the middle. One day I forgot and watched as eight unseared Quarter Pounders – each minus a hefty bite – were returned by queasy, irate customers. Presumably they stopped by en route to A&E.
From such days and such occurrences, I learned that it’s best to match one’s specific talents to every shared endeavour. It helped that I was raised in a family where chores were non-negotiable, especially for me, the youngest member. Clean the windows, hoover up, wash down the paintwork and skirting boards, wipe down the kitchen cupboards. These were the sort of things that had to be done before the weekend was my own. And so applying the fact that I had always worked to buy the things I wanted – starting with a paper round at 12 which morphed into a job with a chain of newsagents – and that I had no inherent fear of a mop or broom, I gravitated towards the shifts spent keeping tables and the restaurant clean and clearing the nearby streets of McDonald’s litter.
Trash collection was a local authority stipulation and a top priority. Clean restaurants, meanwhile, reflected the company mantra: incanted, and reinforced in the exams we took to obtain shiny star-studded crew hierarchy badges: “quality, service, cleanliness”.
It was within this structure that I quickly realised that so long as the visible objectives were achieved: no one much cared where I was or what I did or how I did it. This served me well. I wrote the Guardian Diary for seven years and the modus operandi was much the same.
Others at McD’s found a measure of autonomy but, as ever, some pushed the envelope further than it was meant to go. One crew member, bin liner in hand, famously departed on trash collection and was missing long enough for her absence to become an issue. She was found, bag in hand, emerging from the cinema.
As underlings in an operation of strict rules and hierarchy, we enjoyed such acts of insubordination. Senior bosses seemed benign, but middle managers, the NCOs, could be disagreeable types with more power than they knew how to handle or deserved. Discomfiting them became a pastime, and one sure way to do that, as the 1970s came to a close, was to utter a sentence, a little too loudly, containing the word “union”. McDonald’s did not like unions. And we enjoyed the camaraderie that can make even harsh and stressful working environments tolerable.
I learned something about right and wrong there, and perhaps a little about
interventionism. Working the tills, I gleaned that it was unspoken practice to give police officers free food, on the basis that if there was trouble in the restaurant, they would quickly come to the aid of beleaguered staff. But despite the close proximity of a station and the ubiquity of police patrols, the response was always wanting. In the aftermath of one such failure, having filled several bags of burgers, fries and apple pies for the officer dispatched to collect them, I smiled a unknowing smile and said: “That will be £15.50”, and watched a perplexed figure return to the van outside to collect the cash from his colleagues.
And for quite a while afterwards, I learned how to watch my back.