Why would anyone do that?
2019-08-18 Comments
One time during the summer holidays, I worked for KFC. They were located in a very busy branch in London's West End (on the wealthier end of Oxford Street). As you can imagine, the job entailed a lot of manual labour and dealing with the public. So in my first week, I got trained on the tills. This included taking, making up the orders and upselling with portion sizes and suggesting extra bits the customer didn't ask for in their original order. Does this sound familiar? "would you like fries with that?" or "Would you like a drink with your order?" or "for an extra 50p you could get the next size up?"
Being on the tills was quite intense because there was a steady flow of customers and was manic when peak dining hit. The time would fly by and before I knew it, the shift would be over. Apart from the tills we had to do a rotation of tasks. Funnily enough, I was never rostered in the kitchen. I think the supervisor put all the people that weren't fluent in English there and those of us that could speak it well were put on tasks that were public facing.
I'm not sure how they communicated, but I guess there was a form of universal sign language or shouting at the trainees until they got the message. During break one time, I heard about one of the Spanish girls being told off because whenever she got some Mayonnaise on her finger whilst making up the burgers, she would lick it off. She kept forgetting herself and did it a few times. In the end she was put on clean up duty within the kitchen. I think the only improvement in English the cooks would have become fluent in, were the items from the menu and what the different parts of the chicken were called.
In the fourth week I was in the main restaurant side of things. The work was mundane and time went quite slowly. The first few days were fine, I got into the routine of doing things. There were some moments of amusement as there was a huge flow of tourists and even a sprinkle of celebrities. Also, there was a fair amount of people coming up to me asking the usual questions (where the toilets were, where certain landmarks were, could they have more ketchup, and so forth). Then about the fourth or fifth day into my being in the main restaurant, the time came round again to take the mop and bucket to clean the floor. My first visit was to the men's toilets. They were a bit smelly but other than that relatively clean.
After the men's toilet, I emptied the bucket to get some fresh water and headed into the ladies. I pushed open the end cubicle door first. I began to mop in there when I noticed something dark and long in the top left corner, lurking in the shadows like an evil force, waiting to pounce when you least expect it. No, no, no, it can't be, are my eyes playing tricks on me? Have I been working too much or maybe inhaled some of the cleaning chemicals? It's a massive poo log! You'd have mistaken it as a result of something that was left by a Sumo wrestler after having gorged himself at a buffet.
I could tell it was a fresh one because the heat haze above it was distorting the pattern of the tiles. Forget that, I thought. Through the waves of hot air mirage steaming from the piece of excrement, I could visualise snapshots of my past merging together to show me all the bad choices I made in my life. Within that split second I managed to re-evaluate every single decision I ever made and arrived at one conclusion: There aren't that many moments in life when you can just drop everything on the spot from where you stand, turn around, walk out and never come back. But this was definitely that moment!
I stepped back, still dazed and closed the door behind me, I definitely wasn't paid enough for this. Plus, which dirty woman would do that? Not to mention, HOW in the world could she have done that? It was down the back corner of the toilet. HOW did she miss the bowl??? I've heard people mention how women's toilets are dirtier than men's but never experienced it until that instant. Even up until today I still feel those burning questions could use some answers. This, as benign and unimportant as it might seem, definitely feels like a defining moment for who I am today. I just won't take poo from anyone.