Three Lessons I'd Like to Teach The World, Part III

To recap, the first two, in essence, were that happiness, like any other emotion, is a choice; and that you should always think for yourself, drawing wherever possible on verifiable fact to do so.

The third can be summed up in the oft-quoted, and just-as-oft-ignored, maxim "work to live, don't live to work".

My first job was picking apples at Cornell's Fruit Farm, which used to be just outside London, Ontario. It seems to be out of business now: no doubt kids ride their bikes and play road hockey (who am I kidding?...ride their couches and play NHL 2K6) where, not all that long ago, apple trees grew by the seeming millions. My best friend Tim and I worked all the same shifts, and usually our shifts would degenerate into all out apple wars.
There was only one rule in these sometimes bloody affairs: ammo came off the ground, not out of a tree. I'd pick up a fallen apple, calculate how best to get it over two rows and down the line of trees, and let fly. Unbeknownst to me, Tim would creep around from where he'd been thirty seconds ago and sidearm a Granny Smith at me from behind. That was, of course, my cue to bring out the dirty bombs: rotten apples that almost, but not quite, fell apart in my hand. Get hit with one of those babies and you'd know it: the stench alone would gag a skunk.
God, those were the days.
Along came Mary Brown's Fried Chicken..."best legs in town!" I worked cash there, and I lasted about a month before I was quired. Ever been quired? That's when your boss comes up to you and says "hey, bud, you have a choice. I'm going to ask you to quit. If you say no, I'll tell you to quit."
Then came that place...you know, the Place. The Place Where Everybody Has To Work At Some Point In Their Lives. I speak, of course, of McDonald's. I started there in September of 1986, making the princely wage of $3.55 an hour. I still remember the first cheque I got that cleared a hundred bucks. I thought I was rich.
For a while there it was touch and go. If you've never worked at Mickey Dees, don't poo-poo it: the job is not as easy as you might think. In fact, it used to get downright hairy some days, demanding a combination of intense focus and lightning reflexes, neither of which I had at the age of 14. The prospect of getting fired from McDonald's , of all places, caused me to develop just enough focus and at least a few reflexes: they kept me on.
Eventually, I got good enough to train others. But I was still prone to spectacular accidents...none of which ever got me fired (or 'quired') because they were often so goddamned funny. Herewith are two of them.
One day, some asshole left the sear tool on the grill. I won't say just which asshole it was, because it was almost certainly this asshole. Anyway, as I was saying, the metal sear tool was sitting on the metal grill, and the metal grill was heated to a temperature of 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Get the picture?
I didn't.
Yup, without thinking--who wants to think? Not thinking's so much more fun!--I reached down and grasped the tool with my bare right hand.
Not for long.
I managed to pick the thing up--throw it up, actually, in one spasmodic jerk--and it sailed over my head and across the kitchen. I started to turn around, and I'm pretty sure I yelled something articulate such as "YAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!" at the top of my lungs. Before I could complete my turn, there was the chunkle sound of the sear shattering the clock on the wall behind me, followed by the sizzling splash of the sear falling into a vat of hot oil and Chicken McNuggets. That was followed by some very un-McDonalds-like cursing from the shift manager, who had just been roundly spattered with the oil.
Hey, who would can me when I provided entertainment like that?
Or then there was the day the bigwigs came through on an annual inspection. As one of the best employees there (no modesty in my family, I have it all, ha-ha) they saw fit to schedule me that day. They weren't aware that I am a walking embodiment of Murphy's Law. In fact, I firmly believe that Murphy was an optimist. Even if something can't go wrong, it will...around me. Some days, anyway.
This day.
For those who would rather walk the sewers than see the workings of a McDonald's kitchen, let me give you a quick tour of one, circa 1990 or so. Things have changed radically since--McDonalds uses microwaves now, although they'd really prefer it if you called them 'Q-ing ovens...the 'Q' stands for 'Quality', of course. But this is the kitchen I spent the first half of my McD's career in: You had your grills. Behind them, you had the 'dressing table', where the buns were arranged on trays and the toppings were put on; toasters flanked the table on both sides, one for Quarter Pounder buns and one for Big Mac and hamburger buns. On the other side of those dressing tables were your vats--great for throwing hot sear tools into, but also useful to cook McChicken patties, Filet-O-Fish patties, pies, and McNuggets. There were more dressing tables on either side, holding cabinets for Chicken McNuggets below and a filet steamer and extra toaster at hand.
Okay, now put me in there making Filet-O-Fishes. These are probably the simplest sandwich on the menu to prepare: one squirt sauce out of something that looks like a giant caulking gun, one fish patty, and one half slice of cheese, all between steamed buns.
The bigwigs were just rounding the corner when my filet sauce gun slipped out of my hands somehow. It did a lazy somersault in midair and landed on its handle, which depressed and shot a large dollop of gooey tartar sauce five feet straight up into my face. The shift manager at the time (whom I eventually followed to 7-Eleven) took one look at my splooged countenance and shook her head slowly, back and forth. 'That's Ken', she thought.
Now look. If you take a thousand filet sauce guns and drop them, you MIGHT recreate that scenario once. Maybe. If you're me, I bet it'd happen slightly more often, say once in every three attempts. Put Very Important People around me and the chances of a money shot rise towards an effective one hundred percent.
We used to have so much fun at McDonald's before the Q-ing ovens came in. I don't know whether it was radiation or just some bad vibe those things gave off, but in late 1990 the morale at our location went right down the crapper. I started to hear all kinds of people bemoaning their awful luck to be paid for doing a job. I couldn't go an hour without hearing somebody whine "I wanna go home!"
"Well, go home, then," I'd say. "Just don't bother coming back." Funny, they never left after I said that. I guess they didn't wanna go home that bad.
At McDonald's I learned two things: one, it's absolutely amazing how much you can get done in a minute if you're organized; and two, it's the people that make any job bearable. I was on good terms with probably eight different guys on grill, and I had secret crushes on, well, pretty much all the window girls. It made it pretty easy to go to work.
After McD's came a stint in a variety store run by my mother. I learned only one thing of value there: don't work for your mother. She went out of the way to make sure there was no favouritism shown, so I got all the shit jobs.
Then I went off to university, was hired on at the local McDonald's, lasted a bit over a year there, and left for 7-Eleven. After five hellish years in that job, I transferred stores, away from the student ghetto, only to have my new store close on me within six months. That put me out of a job for the first time, and I kept looking lower and lower down the food chain until I discovered market research. The woman who interviewed me for that job eventually married me...so I'm one of the few who can truly claim to have worked both for my mother and for my wife.
I was back at my old 7-11 when I married; I left that not long after for my present job...and finally, for the first time, I have the word 'Manager' in my unofficial title.
That's my resume in a nutshell. Nary a well-paying job in sight. In fact, none of my jobs have been particularly rewarding in and of themselves, until this one.

But I don't mind, because what I do isn't who I am.

Ask me who I am, and my job title won't be among the first hundred words I say in response. The job is just for money...if I could get money some other way, such as, for instance, by growing it, I certainly would. But this job works fine for me, until I find that money tree. I get along well with my bosses and co-workers. I feel like I'm an integral part of the team. The work itself is secondary.

In this, I really believe I've got it right and much of the world doesn't. So many people work themselves into a frenzy at jobs they can't stand, clocking up the overtime, ignoring family and friends, and rushing around like kamikaze pilots. All for what? Prestige? Power? Prestige is a state of mind, and power is largely an illusion. Money? Work in retail any length of time and you'll see money for what it really is: bits of metal and pieces of paper.

Don't live to work. Work to live.