Adam Selzer: King of the Wild Frontier - Remembrance of Jobs Past

I just at ate a Fuddruckers. The place will always have a soft spot in my heart for being the first place I ever saw Super Mario Brothers (at one in Minnesota), but I mostly remember it as one of the worst places I ever worked.

In my sophomore year of high school, I worked at the one that had recently opened in Snellville, Georgia. I was a GSR (Guest Service Relations, a fancy way of saying waiter), a job so useless at that place that it no longer exists. People order, pay for, and pick up food at the counter, so I was really just there so people had someone to complain to. I'd go up to tables and say "I'm Adam, and I'll be your server. If you need anything, let me know," at which point they'd pretty generally say "anything? how about a million dollars?" or "You're Adam? Then where's Eve?" My stock answer to the last one was "she evolved."

I was only there a couple of months, but I was amazed at how vividly it all came back tonight - the one I went to tonight was laid out EXACTLY like that the one I worked at. It even smelled exactly the same. The decorations were different, and they weren't playing that one MoTown tape with only five songs on it over and over again, but it was the same place. Even the prices seemed the same, though in those days I thought five dollars was an awful lot to pay for a hamburger.

It would have been a decent job, except for two things:

1 - The managers. Of the three, one of them was stupid and anal retentive, and the other two were just stupid. They all hated each other's guts and fought a lot. I had to watch one of them, because she was always trying to short me when reporting my hours into the computer. She was twice my age, but rumor had it that she had a crush on me. She did tend to button and unbutton the top button of my shirt a lot. Another was under the impression that his work at Fuddruckers was going to change the world - he talked about this a lot, though he never specified how it was supposed to work. Another was responsible for letting the place run out of both french fries and onion rings pretty regularly, and was largely responsible for the ridiculous understaffing. On my second day, I was doing what was normally the work of at least 3 people. The process of closing the place was known to last into the wee small hours of the night.

2 - the other employees. Just about everyone else there was a part of the marching band at the rival high school, and didn't take kindly to the fact that I wasn't. Some of them started having friends come in to harass me - one I particularly remember was a white guy who thought he was a real gangsta, answered to the name of Boat Show, and expected to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, one of the other GSRs apparently WAS a real gangsta - he stole other people's tips openly and was known to respond violently when girls objected to him grabbing their butts in the kitchen. The managers were afraid to fire him.

One of the other employees decided that he thought I was gay and began chasing me around with knives and stuff. He got his friends in on it, too. Finally, I laid down the law to the manager: fire the jerk now, or I quit. They wouldn't fire him outright, so I quickly found a job at another restaurant. The manager laughed when I told him this. "You're working THERE?" he asked. "They're a franchise! WE'RE a corporation!." Zing!

As I walked out of the place on my last day, a couple of the guys who enjoyed harrassing me stepped outside to shout "get outta here, ya queer."

I shan't repeat what I happily shouted back (it was pret-ty obscene), but I went off on a long,long string of other jobs, and I don't think I ever saw any of the other guys who worked there again.

But every little bit came rushing back to me tonight. Which booths were the smoking section. Which table had the gunk on it that we never could get rid of. Where the helium machine was. How I used to get so hungry that I'd have to steal a handful of pickles out of the cooler - we NEVER got meal breaks. Like many restaurants at which I've worked, the only way to get a break was to need to smoke a cigarette. By law, if you can take a break to smoke, you can take a break for just about any reason you like, but in Georgia, they can also fire you for any reason they like. If they want to let you take a smoke break but fire you for a meditation break, they can.

But, from a long vantage point, the memories were sort of pleasant - and nice ones to get when I'm finishing off the revisions for "Pirates of the Retail Wasteland."

And man, was that a good burger.