Don't need much sense to be a manager

Yesterday was not a great day. Recently the managers have taken to wearing the headsets that we wear in drive thru, so that they can hear the orders as they are being given. You have the production manager, the manager that usually ends up running, and the floor manager all wearing headsets. Problem? We only have 5 batteries, so 3 managers wearing headsets + 2 people on headsets taking orders at both speakers at peak time= batteries not being charged at all. So, of course, all of the batteries save one dies, and the one battery is barely hanging on. We had to go to another mcd in order to get a headset battery that may or may not have been working in order to be able to continue to take orders.

Now we also get to couple that craziness with the fact that from 7 am to 7 pm they're doing a March Madness, basically another way to speed our asses up so that we can "win" some contest. Thing is, there's little to no benefit for the crew people to perform better.. as far as I'm aware there's no cash bonus for winning. There's possibly some sort of party or something, but honestly, most people don't really want to try to go out of their way to attend a work party. It's just another scheme cooked up because January-April are the slowest months of the year in terms of business, and the idea is that if you know a place is fast then you'll go back again and again.

Honestly? I'm not overly concerned with speed myself. While it's nice to get in and get out, it's even nicer to have decent food, at least in my book. Honestly, right now I only get mcd food because it's free during my shift.. I wouldn't go out of my way to get it otherwise even at work. Well, I take that back.. there's right now the sweet chili sauce that I like, but that's temporary, just during the Olympics, and it goes away once the Winter Olympics end.

Sometimes it gets to a point where I dread going to work, because I see all sorts of stupid on a daily basis and it kills me. Like our store manager telling one person to clean the drive thru windows, and then another person coming along 5 minutes later, given the same chore. When I tell her they were already done, she goes and does them anyway, and manages to fuck them up with all sorts of streaks that weren't there when the first person came along and did them. There is the damn logic in anything anymore? Even the logic in something as simple as "Don't bring up 4 sleeves of ONE type of lid, just don't" goes above and beyond some people's heads, as I managed to uncover 4 open sleeves of domed lids.. we don't need that many! People get lazy and just open one after another, rather than trying to actually finish the one that's already open. It's almost enough for a nervous breakdown.

Thanks for the insult!

The other day I was in back booth taking orders and money. A woman drives up to the window, pays, and then asks:

"So, how do you all keep track of the cars?" I explain to her our system involving the cameras hooked up to each speaker so that we take a picture of the car as the order is being taken. The woman is silent for a moment, and then says, "Oh, I just thought it was because you were smart."

WTF?

I stammered out how we usually end up having to do a bit more guesswork at night when there's usually only one ordertaker, but if I had had a couple more seconds, I might have gotten really really pissed actually at her. And worst of all, the dumb idiot didn't even realize that she was insulting, she figured it to be a joke.

Smokers are selfish

That's the best conclusion I have for them. I have been hating them as of late in drive thru because most of the time, they fail to be aware of where their smoke is blowing, and usually that is right in my face.

I'm pretty sensitive to smoke in general, and I'm particularly resentful of smokers. They force me to stay home from events due to their habit, seem to take far more "breaks", and oftentimes worsen the health conditions of not only themselves but the people around them. Hell, my own mother is a life long smoker, and this is despite the fact that she has emphysema and uses a FUCKING OXYGEN TANK. How bad does it have to get for some people?

So yeah, I try to hide behind the windows, but the smoke is sometimes so bad that it gets in and causes coughing fits. And the customer is perfectly oblivious to their poisonous habit seeping in causing perfectly healthy people like me to have to suffer.

I also must note how annoyed and pissed I continue to be at my coworkers.. those who are blind to me having to work so hard around them, those who do things like put dirty unrinsed dishes in my sink causing me to have to drain the water and redo it because the water turned nasty, those who do things like use the mop for lobby in the grill area, which will now mean that unless the mop is carefully rinsed off (probably not) that now the lobby area will have a skin of grease on it. How hard is it to do some of these things the right way... just SOME of them? I mean, hell, just today I had to stop someone from using the brush that's designed to clean out the egg rings that we use to make the eggs for the mcmuffins.. she was about to use them for dishes. And that was because she just saw a brush and didn't know what else it could be used for. Makes me not want to eat eggs at my mcds.

I *really* want to see a car accident at work

The other day I was in drive thru presenting (handing food out). This woman approaches the window and goes on about how she almost got hit by the other person and how impatient other people and how dangerous our merge area was. I'm about to hand her her food when she insists that that isn't her order... which means that in the scheme of orders on the screen, the person behind her was the one who had their order taken first. So basically SHE'S the one who cut ahead of the other person and nearly caused a wreck in our drive thru lane, but because she has illusions of being a perfect driver, it's the other person's fault. *clap clap*

It's this illusion that customers can do no wrong coupled with the fact that they're impatient demanding assholes that makes me hate the place. They're the types who will speed to the drive thru lane because they see it empty, and aren't able to see the other side where we have like 5 cars for food. They're the ones who will ask for ketchup, salt, another bag, a glass of water, a different toy, when they could have asked for most of this shit when they were ordering. I've always said that if you didn't order it when you were ordering your food, you obviously don't care that much about your order. These are the same sorts of people who, when they see change on the ground, will pick it up and try to pay me with muddy, wet change. Is it so much to ask to try to have at least a little sense to consider more than just your fat face?

And yes, I will say they have fat faces, because some of them are also the types who'll buy a big mac meal large sized with extra sauce and cheese and get a diet drink to cancel out the calories. Like that'll help. Or the types who assume we're too incompetent to put their cream and sugar in their coffee, so they'll ask for it all at the window.

And all this hatred for how a customer acts comes around to the fact that I'd love to see the place riddled with a car accident. I would sure as hell note that one of them impatient, and that there are plenty of signs to note that you're about to merge, so be careful!

I strongly dislike our scheduling

I've made points before about how bad the scheduling is.. sometimes people get scheduled for shifts they've already said they can't work, or people get scheduled for stupid hours. I think yesterday's tale kind of takes the cake.

So day before yesterday the store manager is all a-flutter, because she is trying to fill a gap in the schedule. See, someone was scheduled to work the night shift and they weren't supposed to be scheduled because of military duties (I forget what branch he's with). The store manager is going all around trying to ask people to work a few extra hours to cover the shift, and I grudgingly agreed to work 2 extra hours.

I'm aware that the day to be covered, Sunday, was Valentine's Day. I had highly doubted that we would be that busy, since most people want to go to a nice fancy restaurant and not a fast food place, but I digress. I made the necessary calls, and of course got yelled at for putting work above family.

Well, guess what happened? We turned out to be pretty slow, all things considering, and I ended up leaving a half hour after my original shift was due to end anyway! So I not only basically ruin my in-laws plans for going out, but I didn't even get much beyond 30 minutes of paid time!

I suppose I really just wish that there was some good foresight when it comes to the schedule. Yesterday had made me mad to begin with because I was scheduled to come in at 11 am, which meant that I was unable to go to church and see people because there's no way I could drive from church to the in laws and then drive to work and get there on time. I've asked them repeatedly not to do this, but do I get listened to? No! And then I get somewhat insulted when I ask the shift manager how the labor was (meaning whether we had too many people or not) and she assumed that I was just trying to leave early. That was so not the case; I was trying to see if we could get someone else sent home early who was eager to learn something new but was really annoying in his enthusiasm. She got my meaning and the person did get to leave 20 minutes early, but it still felt pretty crappy to have her assume that I wanted to leave an hour and a half before my original shift was due to end.

I know that during the summer things will change somewhat, because we'll be far busier and we'll have more people hired, but in the meantime, I really hate winter and the scheduling that ensues.

We weren't *that* slow during Super Bowl

I worked a closing shift yesterday during the Super Bowl. Not usually my normal shift nowadays, but I did it to cover for a coworker who had had a heart attack recently. Yeah, I suppose I'm a softy.

We were actually fairly busy for it being the Super Bowl, mostly women who didn't want to sit at home watching the Super Bowl, but also people who were getting themselves and their entire party food for the game. Well, I should actually say that it was busy for *me*, not necessarily for the store, because I had a huge pile of dishes and I had to make more sweet tea. I could handle the dishes, even if some of them were from morning shift, but the tea kind of pissed me off. The person who had been in the back booth was a person who, while I like them as a person, as a worker they're kind of meh. The type of person who has fake nails and doesn't want to ruin them, and they also were never taught how to do a single cleaning related thing from her mother because mom is too afraid to have someone else try to clean and get it WRONG.

I stay back there for about 3 hours until I get replaced in order for me to go on my break. And the woman who replaced me managed a feat that I'm still somewhat impressed with. She managed to FALL ASLEEP.... while on the clock. We had about 3 cars wondering WTF was up with their order not being taken, so they drove up to the first window and got to witness her standing in front of the register, weaving back and forth, probably snoring too. I think a manager had to go back there and actually wake her up. That is just really really bad.

And then I got to go up front on counter and deal with the grandmotherly manager. If you don't remember, this is the woman transferred here and gets so boggled and confused by things that she messes up when she runs for drive thru. She had the person on table aggravated because she kept calling back for food that he knew he sent up. And she has a way of talking to employees that makes them feel like they're idiots, which the crew trainers such as myself really resent. Like when she tells me to stock something.. AS I'M STOCKING IT. Anywho, the highlight of her dizziness came at around 10 pm, when someone calls in asking for their schedule, and she tells them we are just SO BUSY and that she couldn't possibly take time out in order to check on it. We were "busy" in that she had two orders in drive thru and I had four orders on counter.. not like we actually had to rush though, thanks to the fact that even though she saw that we had 6 customers total, had decided to only drop down one basket of fries at a time. Typically the rule of thumb is that we drop down one basket per 3 people.. although sometimes more is dropped when, say, they order a bunch of large fries as had happened here. I honestly think she got spoiled to her Walmart mcd, which are typically so slow that they're more like concession stands than actual mcds.

Also got to have a bit of a laugh at a customer today. One of the old customers, who sits in lobby all day, sometimes buys maybe a french fry, otherwise gets free drinks because the store manager lets her and she keeps her ancient cups (seriously, I think some of her cups are like years old), brought her laptop. This thing was SIXTEEN years old, running Windows 95, had 1.27 GB of hard drive space, and was just so old and cute I wanted to just put it in a museum. She was talking about wanting to get a wifi card for it.. yes, she brought it because she'd seen so many of those young people bringing their laptops nowadays, so why not bring hers? (Mcd has finally started offering free wi-fi). I told her that for the amount she would spend on a new wi-fi card, she could spend a bit more and just have a brand new netbook.. or hell, even my Blackberry Curve was more advanced than her POS laptop. And that was probably the highlight of my work day. Well, that and when myself and the third shift manager prank called the grandmotherly manager when he used his phone to send a landline text to the store phone, her face was priceless, like she didn't know whether to be offended or to laugh.

I swear FOR is useless

So I took part in the great FOR yesterday, which was to evaluate lunch and dinner procedures (the one for breakfast is today). Honest, I think that it is stupid. It's supposed to see how procedures are being followed, but when you are working on getting everything right a month before it happens, doing detail cleaning just before the major event, and ordering things right before it happens, as well as having twice the people you'd normally have working for that day and forcing them to stay in their spot cleaning the three feet around them-- well, that's just evaluating best case circumstances. That's like giving parents who are charged with gross neglect 2 weeks in advance to clean everything up and let the bruises heal on their kid. You're not going to see abuse when the inspection comes along, are you? NO!

The worst part about it was the management. They were so on edge with the district manager evaluator and the store owner breathing down their back that orders kept getting wrong and they were going insane. Management was in key positions such as drive thru runner, expediter (the person who makes sure the food is in order), assembler, and etc, and sometimes, they do worse than a brand new employee when they're stressed. I had one manager wish that I could have taken some of those spots instead of the manager that was actually there, because of the fact that I'm able to stay calm due to a lack of caring about the day and its special significance.

I think that it's worsened by the fact that we're graded on a false premise: mainly, that we're like this all the time. We'll probably get at least an 98% on cleanliness.. which isn't that hard when one considers that third shift was closed down two nights in a row so that they could literally scrub everything with a toothbrush (yes, there were toothbrushes brought just for this purpose). I even had the district guy impressed that I was scrubbing dishes with a toothbrush, although this had less to do with me trying to impress him and more to do with the fact that we didn't have any green scrubbie pads laying around. I explained this to him, but of course dude didn't care.

On another note:

I don't get why people fuss at me because I ask so many questions about their meal. "Is that a medium sized meal, or a large?" "Is that with french fries or apple dippers?" "Is that the number two cheeseburger meal or the number ten southern style meal?" They get mad at me for interrupting their reverie and asking questions, like it's so wrong of me to want to make sure I have their order rung up correctly. These are then the same people who will hold up the line and ask for sauces and ketchup and extra napkins and a small water and what not.

My view on it is that I'm giving more of a shit about these people's food than they are. I am also of the view that if you tell the person ALL that you want as you are ordering, it will be significantly faster than waiting til you're at a window to do so. To me, someone who fails to tell me that they want ketchup packets when they're ordering their food, instead waiting until they get to a window, is someone who doesn't care about their order, and therefore loses my respect as someone to care about. If you don't care about your food, don't bitch at the person who does care about it more than you do! In the end, I'm just the one ringing up the order-- you're the one who is eating it.