"Welcome to Wantirna McDonalds..."

I’m a drive thru dude! Yep, that’s right - I’ve been elevated to the level of kings in the go-go world of fast-food service jobs. Well, at least I was yesterday anyway. I’m not sure if it’ll be a permanent thing, but who cares!

It came as somewhat of a surprise. I had an hour left of my 12.00-3.30 shift when the store manager came up to me and asked if I had any plans for the night. I said no (which was a little depressing in itself; not having plans for a Saturday night) and then he asked if I’d be willing to work until - get this - 9:00! Thereby changing my meagre three and half hour shift into a whopping great big nine hour monster of a shift! This seemed like an eternity to me, especially considering that my job at that stage consisted solely of making fries and cleaning stuff, and previously my longest shift had been approximately one third of that length...

I accepted the extended hours with a forced smile, knowing that the store manager of all people was someone I should be trying to impress, and he said “excellent, we’ll get you trained on order-take”. I blinked, and almost asked him to repeat himself, but he was already walking off towards the first drive thru window. I followed along behind him like a good little sheep, and fast-forwarding a little, Tamara gave me the basic training, then after half an hour I started taking orders by myself. I needed to call upon Luke and Jess for help at times, like for when I couldn’t find an item (on the cool touch screen orderer/register thing) or change food so that it was customised the way the customer specified, but besides that I think I did a pretty damn good job for my first time.

It did get tricky with people being rude pricks or prickettes, and some people had very thick accents, but overall there weren’t too many dramas. And it got busy! But I eventually figured out how to multi-task taking orders and payments so that people didn’t have to wait too long. The whole cash-handling thing came surprisingly easily to me, like I’d done it before. Although I guess there’s not that much to it really. :)

One of the best parts about it though was that I didn’t have to go fetch the food; I had Luke or Jess the next window up to do that for me. They had a headset on too, and talking to Luke over the headset was really fun. At my lame suggestion we gave each other codenames – he was Bad Boy because he’d just got his eyebrow pierced, and I was Bambi because that’s what Dr Cox calls the intern JD on the tv show ‘Scrubs’. When it was quiet a lot of pointless chatter ensued. It was good. SO much better than fries.

But as with all good things, there are downsides to the job. My legs got so sore! I was standing for most of the 9 hours that I was working, and when I got home I practically collapsed straight onto my bed, unable to move. Well, that might be a tad dramatic, but my legs really did kill! Another annoying thing was that as I tried to get to sleep I kept hearing the beeping of the fries machine, and the beeping of the sensor telling me that a car was waiting for me to take their order, which made me picture myself saying “Welcome to Wantirna McDonalds. How can I help you today?” I reckon I said that over 100 times easily. Oh and one time I said “Welcome to McTirna Wandonalds” and laughed the rest of the way through my spiel. :)

So maybe the next time you’ll hear my voice it’ll be greeting you in a friendly manner through a speaker thingo, and maybe the next time you’ll see me I’ll be taking money from you and giving you the appropriate change… Who knows? :)

Dale.