Anita's Notebook

Back when I was a teenager I worked for a local fast food joint and I noticed almost right away that even though I gave the same service as my adult co-workers I tended to get more bad treatment from customers due to my age.

To make things worse I was the shift manager so all complaints that couldn’t be solved by a regular employee were routed to me. I quickly became adept at always maintaining an extra polite demeanor even under the worst of treatment.

Some people were just having bad days (holidays and at the height of Alaskan cabin fever season were the worst times of year for this) and they felt like it was the natural thing to do to take their crappy day out on a lowly teenage fast food worker.

Maybe it eased their stress to feel superior or maybe they just needed some sort of outlet for their frustrations, either way I knew better than to get flustered or frustrated under pressure.

This extra polite demeanor that I had to keep up did have a silver lining though, it lead to a lot of funny situations. One of them popped into my head last night and became the inspiration for this post, here it is:

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So it was dinner rush in the middle of winter. That meant grumpy people in cars lined up around the building and grumpy people in a line to the door inside the building. Here in Alaska there’s barely any daylight during certain times of the winter and this was one of them, it was dark outside and gloomy inside which just made people feel extra sour.

I understood this and was working the front counter trying to be as accommodating as possible under the circumstances. Suddenly I realize that the drive through has completely come to a halt. ‘What’s up?’, I wonder while rushing around to put orders together.

Apparently there’s a lady at the drive-through window who’s demanding to see a menu. She had just realized that she needed to order more things but she doesn’t know what exactly, apparently she needs a menu so she can sit with the others in her car and talk it over all leisurely like. Never mind the million people stuck behind her while this all would be happening, she’s already at the window so she’s not in a hurry now.

The exasperated employee at the window says he’s sorry but they don’t have menus available because it’s assumed you’ll look at the board by the microphone where you order. The woman grows more upset and strangely even starts to take a tone of blaming him for her not knowing what else to order.

At this point I realize that even though it will slow down the front counter I have to go over there and talk to this highly agitated lady before the people in the cars behind her form a lynch mob. I walk over but as I’m walking up to the window she speeds off without taking any food.

‘Oookay’, I thought to myself, ‘well that’s the end of that I guess’. No, no it wasn’t.

Back at the front counter I’m doing my best to catch up on putting fries, hamburgers, and sodas, fries, hamburgers, and sodas, and on and on up on the trays whizzing by me when a woman steps in front of all the other customers and demands my attention. It’s her. There’s something about this lady, she just knows how to grind things to a halt.

‘Yes Ma’am?’ I say, bracing myself for a tirade but trying not to show any apprehension. Some mean customers can smell fear you know lol.

She starts in on on how she needs a menu, demands a menu, to take back out to her car so that they can all decide what extra items to order.

Looking at the menu board she is now standing in front of is not enough (and for some reason the people in the car just can’t come inside), she needs something on paper and she needs it now. ‘What am I supposed to do without a paper menu??’ she says loudly and with finality, she’s digging in and not going to move until she gets a menu.

The customers in line start to shift their weight impatiently and look at the lady with quick sideways glances, the first stirrings of a hungry lynch mob.

‘Well…I think we might have something around here.’ I say digging through a pile of papers under a side counter.

While cleaning up one day I had come across a menu for the seeing impaired, it was paper and had extra large print in case some elderly person needed to go sit down with it and then we could bring the order out to them. That scenario had never happened though and so the paper was shuffled from one neglected spot to another.

A minute or so of awkward silence passed and I was starting to formulate a plan B to appease this lady but I finally find it…a paper menu. Hallelujah.

‘Here you go Ma’am.’ I say while handing the menu to her over the counter, ‘It’s got extra large print but otherwise it’s a normal basic menu.’

She takes the menu from me, looks down at it for a second, and then looks up at me with a certain triumphant look like she had caught me doing something bad. She looked at me like I was the one ruining her day (or her life or whatever) and I was about to get my just desserts. Revenge. I braced myself.

‘Uh!’she said loudly and with disgust,‘THIS is a braille menu, I can’t read braille! Tell me just how am I supposed to read this huh?’ And with that last part she made a big show of flinging the paper down on the counter towards me and it twirled toward where I stood. It was her deadly paper ninja star that would put an end to my obviously malicious efforts to trick her with a braille menu.

She stood there with a half smirk and waited for me to…what? Grovel? Crumble? I can’t be 100% sure of what was in her mind but I can tell you that her body language and face told me that she was suddenly feeling a lot better, this dysfunctional fast food restaurant theater was a weird sort of release of stress for her.

I gotta admit, at this point I was feeling pretty embarrassed. I looked down at the paper on the counter and saw that yes it was indeed a braille menu. I could feel all the impatient eyes of the crowd in front of me staring too, now what? I could have sworn that it was a large print menu and I thought I had just seen the letters on it a second ago, how could I make such a mistake? Then I remembered.

I reached down, picked up the paper, and calmly flipped it over.

There on the other side was the large print menu. I had handed the paper to her a bit sideways and she must have turned it braille side up. ‘There you go Ma’am’, I said and pushed the paper towards her on the counter.

I made a point of showing no affect at all, lest I might accidentally give her something to latch on to for a tirade. All I wanted her to do was to take this paper menu out to her car so her and her associates could decide on what cheeseburgers and chicken nugget combos to get without inflicting more hassle on other customers.

What she actually did surprised me. She made a half disgusted half surprised noise like ‘Ugh!’, turned around, and stormed off never to be seen again! Lmao!

I can laugh about it now but at the time I was so surprised that I just stood there. Some of the customers in line laughed and someone off to the left did a slow clap.

What’s more, a few minutes later after the line was moving again while I was handing one customer a tray of food he leaned over to me and whispered ‘Good job!’ and smiled. Haha, well it was definitely nice to hear that after such a grueling exchange with a lady who obviously had a lot more problems going on than finding a paper menu.

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I’m sure everyone who’s worked in fast food has a whole collection of these kinds of horror stories, though I bet not all of them end in such a hilarious way :D.