So I was working Window for a while, and I guess I got to be "Pretty Good." I liked to have fun with the customers, and there were several regulars from the surrounding mall stores that came in quite often.

I think my favorite spill was one day when the "Super Size" soda had just been introduced (this was an immense amount of soda at the time, when 7-11 had just come out with something like a 64oz monster... the trend at the time, I guess). I remember placing the tremendous container on this tray at one end so that, had the thoughtful customer been concentrating, the proper amount of torque could have been applied to support its tremendous weight. Not the case. This was particularly distressing for the woman standing in the line next to him, wearing the white business suit, who suddenly found herself wondering whether Coca Cola (tm) would come out, and how much the necessarily-large drycleaning effort would cost. If I recall correctly, the fiasco that was the Window Crew came to a complete halt for several seconds when this all came down.

I noticed one time that if I pressed the Cash Tend button on the lower left hand side of the register in a certain way, the till drawer would pop open. My naive assessment was that a short somewhere was causing this to occur, and I thought nothing of it.

The main store manager, Kathy (Michelle's boss... I tried to steer clear of her, since she was sort of a fascist, from what I could tell), informed me one day that new employment laws recently passed would require that each employee provide proof of right to work in the US. If you'll recall, I had lied about my age, since those under 16 would be forced to endure nothing but Lobby duty until that great point of maturation. I would have none of that, nor would my buddy Adam. But not having to provide anything but a straight face when asked for a birthday was easy. This new twist would require falsifying documents, to be sure.

I saw Adam working in the grill area the next day, and as I walked to the crew break room, I mentioned to him my concern over this new requirement. He shrugged it off initially, which lead me to believe he forgot how old he really was. I reminded him that one of the only forms of identification we had at that young age was a birth certificate. The frightened look of revelation came over his face, but I assured him that clever use of a photocopier would save us. And it did. The worst faked birth certificate in the world, but they barely looked at it. It was then that I knew that I was dealing with a highly-moral management team. Face it, they needed as many employees as possible, and there just weren't enough desperate people out there that had reached the age of 16, much less who could produce reasonably-real citizenship documentation.

Eventually, that fateful day came when I was thrust into the high paced world that was The Grill. I was giddy as I found that placing the iron-like meat pucks on the grill in rapid succession was actually quite therapeutic, and there was nary a customer around to complain to me. And I had a chance now to work with Adam and John (the three of us would eventually become quite a team, capable of maintaining the proper food levels at all times with only the three of us working, even on the busiest days), so my work days were fun. Granted, I was taught how to prepare food by people who I would not eat food from, but it was still fun.

I was particularly distressed one day, though, when, while working Window, I was asked to refill a pickle container from the pickle repository (which amounted to a green bucket that, when first opened, contained something like 2000 pickle slices in pickle juice), using my bare hands. Now, I asked, "Uh, shouldn't I wash my hands or something?" I received a quizzical look, and a comment about the lack of time for such frivolity. Hmmmm.

So I was working The Grill by March, which meant that as summer approached, I would be able to work wherever I wanted (within reason) when I started putting in my 40 hour work weeks. This was very important, because, for some reason, a few of us got a real kick out of working off the clock, with the happy manager on duty repaying our efforts with food (yummy!). This was all illegal, but hey, we were all in high school, so no one knew any better.

While working Grill, I had a chance to interact with people as a team more (the Window environment was much more competitive, since each register was checked each hour for throughput, while the grill team as a whole was never really measured) and this made work fun. I found myself enjoying the comradery, and not minding the stench of the grease trap or the sometimes-thick coating of grease that barely came off in the shower and the end of the longer evenings at work. Looking back, it was pretty crappy, but at the time, it was the most fun I could ever imagine having.

We always stole Chicken McNuggets from the McNugget warmer, and I found empirically that nuggets left sitting for precisely 10 minutes were sufficiently-drained and yet sufficiently-hot so that they tasted great, with "Oriental Dressing" from the McSalad fridge. We also ate french fries all the time, and scarfed an occasional burger or fish filet from time to time. But the real prize came when McDonald's began making cookies in the same oven that they made breakfast biscuits in. They arrive in the store as clumps of Pillsbury-like cookie dough, frozen. Perfect. All we had to do was visit the freezer from time to time, snag a cookie dough clump or two, and place them into our apron front, such that it was sitting right above where the apron string was tied resting between the apron and the uniform shirt. Oh, this placed it mere inches from the grill, which, if memory serves, was always at a comfortable 450 degrees. You can imagine the rest.

Sometime before this, I started Closing. Since this McDonald's was in a mall, the closing hours were really great, and I found that I could even close on weekdays occasionally. Much like working in the grill area, I learned that it was these times when the team players made themselves known, and I soon found closing to be the highlight of the workday. We learned very quickly that some of the managers would allow a free-for-all dive on the bin contents before it was "Wasted," (A practice that involved carefully marking a count of each product remaining, and then dutiful disposal! What a waste! Literally!) and then there was always as much soda as one's growing gut could store. Pig Heaven!

But once I was working in The Grill, I began closing the grill area, and that proved to be even more fun, since it seemed very mechanical and very mature. There was more to it than just sweeping up, since it involved some disassembly of parts, as well as careful planning, since there were times when only sections of the grill area were shut down, in what was called Pre-Close. Anyway, the already-teamed grill people worked well together at this time to, which made for a fun evening, sometimes broken up by a random MacSauce attack (the thousand island dressing placed on a Big Mac was dispensed from something not unlike a caulking gun) or perhaps experiments into the effects of hot hot oil on pickles, ketchup, onions, or even roaches.

My personal favorite, and one that usually gets a rather emotional response, is my story of a particular grill closure that I was performing one night. After completely scraping all of the burger remains from the grill surface, we would scrape them clean with some sort of super grease cutter and a grill screen, which was an incredibly abrasive rectangular sheet placed under a special handle device and dragged over the surface of the grill for what seemed like hours (unless one slipped off the handle, which put the hand on the grill surface directly, immediately interrupting any boredom that had built up to that point) until it was completely clean. Warm water was then poured over the grill surface (which was pretty cool, but sent stinky steam everywhere) and a layer of shortening (from the ample supplies for the french fry friers) was rubbed onto the surface. Anyway, when I had finished about half of the grill with that final greasy coating, I found a pretty sizable roach zipping along on the floor. I captured him, and dropped him feet-first onto my slick grill surface, which was now warming back up through maybe-300 degrees to its 425 degree set point. I'm sure it was a completely reflex response, and that the roach did not fully comprehend the events that were taking place, much less the pain and certain doom, but it actually jumped up onto its "toes" and started running. Along the longest path to any grill edge, which proved to be too long. A small explosion followed, and I scraped all of the roach remains off of the grill surface, along with some shorting, and cleaned the whole thing again (that last part usually calms the disgusted listener).

That was about as gross as I got. I never dropped any food and then served it, and I never spit in anything. Adam never did either, as far as he told me, but he did catch a hamburger on his shoe one time, which he then placed back onto the grill for the necessary sterilization (yeah, right) before sending it out to the customer. Actually, almost all of the people I worked with had a certain amount of respect for that sort of thing, and since everyone was pretty accomplished, it was usually quicker to just start over than to try to be sneaky, deceptive, and then guilty.