(Originally guest posted here.)

Lately, I’ve found myself complaining a lot about my job. Words like “understaffed” and “overworked” have been rolling off my tongue. However, when I find myself ruminating a little too much, I just whisper a sentence to myself to make it all seem sunny again.

“At least it’s not KFC.”

Yes, KFC, home of the grinning Colonel, greasy thick-skinned poultry, and my very first full-time job.

In a small town, decent jobs are hard to come by. Small businesses tend to rely on word of mouth, rather than the persistent showers of resumes, leaving only the chain businesses to hire those of us without such prestigious connections. Despite being a nearly decade long vegetarian at the time, the lack of options outside of the local wood mill began wearing me down, and I found myself being interviewed at a table-with-chair-attached at the local mall, stating such lies as “I think the fast food industry is a good fit for me because I love working with people in a fast paced environment.”

I can say, without a doubt, that my summer was one of the most dreadful of my life.

So, I present to you all, the Top 10 reasons your job is better than KFC:

1. You don’t have to wear a polyester uniform several sizes too big for you because your store is too cheap to carry anything other than a men’s large. Fitting with this, your pants aren’t so tapered that you can barely squeeze your feet through the holes, and have to bunch the several inches of extra fabric around your ankles. Did I mention that polyester doesn’t breathe? At all?

2. Your friends won’t be constantly making bad jokes about how you can never get the smell of chicken off you, or call you the Colonel’s Concubine (although they do get creativity points on that one).

3. Your always-blemish-free skin won’t suddenly develop zits from simply being in the midst of the greasy air (remember, I didn’t eat any of our wares).

4. You won’t have to deal with the PETA/militant vegetarian crowd telling you that you are horrible person for working for a company that is oppressive to animals (I believe, in fact, that my paltry minimum wage was pretty damn oppressive, too). You also won’t feel the need to debunk stupid rumours like the one that the company abbreviated their name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC because what it was serving could no longer be legally declared chicken.

5. Two words– Twoonie Tuesday. Cheap chicken = huge line-ups of people wanting inhumane amounts of chicken for ridiculously cheap = hell on earth. People are serious about their budget poultry.

6. You won’t have to work with half the staff needed because everyone quits within two weeks of starting. You also won’t have an owner (who never once sets foot in the store) who sees that the franchise still technically runs with half the required staff (if you consider no days off and line-ups out of the store at all times “technically running”), and thus is reluctant to recruit more workers. I was incredibly jealous every time I set foot into McDonald’s– they operated like a well-oiled machine, with their workers at all their separate stations, while we ran about like proverbial headless chickens cooking, packaging, serving, cleaning.

7. As you likely work in a place with over 50% of its recommend staff, you also won’t have to ignore labour laws for the good of the franchise and work 15 days in a row, with every day off in the horizon being snatched away from you when yet another person calls in sick. I also guarantee that nothing but the food industry uses the dreaded split shift– because, yes, I do want to have a two hour break in the middle of my day to waste at the mall because you don’t want to have to pay me overtime to work 10 hours.

8. Your boss won’t be a 23-year old woman who alternates between bitter than she was shipped to a small town to take over a struggling KFC to overly dedicated to the philosophy of the Colonel. As such, you won’t have a boss who hates you for having a life and who shouts “You told me in your interview that you were flexible!” when you try to turn down an extra shift on your only day off in two weeks.

9. You won’t be subject to grease induced accidents, such as a clumsy coworker tripping and spilling an entire bucket of grease over the freshly cleaned kitchen floor, or spilling a pail of burning hot gravy over your right hand and having to just stick it in a paper cup full of ice and keep working.

10. The general public will treat you like a human being. The lame boys who hang out in the mall won’t mock you as you drag the garbage cart by them. Housewives won’t yell at you because of how long the hot wings take. Old men won’t grumble when you don’t have a fresh pot of coffee on at 3pm. You don’t need to smile while having random accusation about how you are in charge of every bad decision about the restaurant- from pricing to the menu to decor- thrown at you in shrill tones.

Honestly, I think you can tell a lot about people by how they treat those in the service industry– I get a kick out of the elitism I experienced while working there, as though I was a lesser human being because I had to work hard for my money. Still, it did sting a lot more at the time. Now, I just have fantasies about going back for a day, only to pull out my business card after being mistreated by some middle manager type, and inform him that I am actually completing my dissertation on the negative correlation between treatment of fast food workers and penis size.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 12:41 am and is filed under Princess sayz, audience participation required!, going back in time, playing professional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.