Working in fast food... experiences?
I'm 19, home from college, working in a fast food restaurant I have for nearly 2 years.
Today, it was extremely busy. I got moved from the front register into drive thru where I had to take orders, pass out food, and make drinks. It was a complete and total sensory overload, and I was placed there in the middle of an order being taken. I got dizzy and started to cry and nearly just shut down. To make matters worse, a coworker is extremely rude to me, treating me like I am a complete idiot. I asked her to help me pass out orders, to which she snottily responded "You take orders. You make drinks. You hand them out the window. I just pack them," which made me even more frazzled. I am not an incompetent worker, I just literally... I don't know.
Does anyone with Asperger's have any similar experiences?
I worked in all positions - drive thru, front counter, the grill, and maintenance - at two different McDonald's over 2.5 years. The managers were generally pr*cks; the one in my 2nd McD's was so authoritative that he belittled everyone. He almost tried to belittle me one day, but I was standing next to the fryers and I kept on glancing at the hot oil. He got the message.
Generally, I've gotten along with my fellow toilers, though. It was always the managers that gave me the most grief.
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I've never worked in fast food or managed employees, but I'd probably let her go if I was. Wrong attitude. Whenever someone's not busy they should be willing to lend someone else a hand to make the operation more efficient and take a load off other workers who are getting overwhelmed. If you're not there to help your coworkers then get lost. Lot of workplaces are like this but that's mediocrity for you, its common.
Generally, I've gotten along with my fellow toilers, though. It was always the managers that gave me the most grief.
Ha! That's using your environment to your advantage! Well done.
Agreed that fellow employees need to help you out- I've been told to "slow down and do it right" on the job before because I was making the others look bad.
I wish I could just collect all the salaries and do it myself sometimes. Sure its extra work but there's no other people to impede you..
Yeah, I've been there. Complete with breakdown mid-workday. Ouch... But you've made it two years. That's more than I ever did, and it shows you've got probably a good deal more skill at this than you give yourself credit for.
I wonder if you could ask for an assignment that's a little simpler. Try to find a repetitive job, one that's tucked away in its own corner, perhaps one that nobody else likes. Talk to your manager, explain that you lost track of everything in all the chaos, ask to get shifted to a different position. The reason I say "take a job nobody else likes" is that it will be easier for you to get into it, and less likely that others will resent you for asking for it. Just make sure that the reason others don't like it is something you can deal with. For example, I used to deliberately take on cleaning bathrooms--I don't get grossed out easily, and I do a thorough job. That's an example of something that most people don't like to do, but that gives me no problems. Or, working in a cafeteria, I asked for the pots-and-pans job, which is physically demanding and also "disgusting" to most people--but also involves less chaos, a smaller work area, and no customer interaction. I don't know if that is possible for you in your restaurant.
One last thing. When you pitch anything to your manager, keep the focus on "How I can be a better worker." You want to do your job well, right? This is your main goal. You can't do your job well if you're in the middle of the hubbub and lose track of where you've put your sanity. On the other hand, you can probably do it very well if you're given a less chaotic, more straightforward assignment.
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If you broke down the tasks, like as a sequence of steps 1-2-3-4, etc., would that help you to stay in an orderly, calm frame of mind?
Also even if you have to fake a smile, doing so will help to keep the happy brain chemicals coursing through your brain and make doing the tasks seem less stressful.
When I was your age, I worked at McDonald's. Except for some of the co-workers and one particular nasty supervisor who'd always take me off of fries and put me to cleaning up the parking lot, I liked the work, even when we had those stupid hurry-up lunch crowd contests. lol And that was when the hourly minimum wage was $2/hour. Bought my first 10-speed bicycle with my low wages.
zombiegirl2010
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I definitely do the tasks no one else likes. I look forward to the end of my shift, where I can take my headset off, and retreat to the back of the store, and wash dishes. I wash the entire sink before I leave. No one else does, typically. I hate coming in to a night shift and seeing that someone has left a dirty sink, or the person who leaves at 8 o' clock (who is on dish duty) leaves the rest of us hanging.
Giving me a step-by-step would definitely help, I think. When it's busy it's just so... hgjnfdgngf. I like the work when it's not busy. Or, if it's busy, we're at least adequately staffed.
Wages have come a long way! I make a smidgen above the minimum (a literal smidgen) and it's still low, especially for my coworkers who will be there for years and years to come! It also helps to think that one day, I'll be a conservation biologist or something. and won't have to worry about corporate stuff (i have to hide my nose stud...) and the general public
I just worked my last day at McDonald's a couple of days ago. Worked there for 8 months. One of the worst times of my life. I was mainly working on front counter which meant I had to talk to customers, look them in the eyes, smile etc. I don't like talking to strangers or look strangers in the eyes and I don't really smile that often. I have a very neutral face. That + all the alarms going off + all the noise everywhere + the heat + people bumping into me all the time = chaos. Overload. I usually managed to work but then when I got home I just shut down. Didn't talk to anyone. Sat in silence. Stared. Those kinds of things. If I worked more than 3 days I week I got absolutely exhausted. People thought I was a bit weird. Especially because of all my routines. But I worked well and I did all my tasks.
Summer 1979. I was 19. Got a job at a bagel joint in Faneuil Hall Market, Boston. Started just in time for the lunch crunch. Lasted 12 minutes, then walked off without a word.
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I worked in a McDonald's for about a month during the summer when I was 16.
The clothing didn't fit, the fabric felt terrible against my skin, and the oil in the air left oil on my skin and it felt unbearable. It was sensory hell. Every day when I left I felt so disgusting that I went home immediately and showered.
The reason I applied for the job was because my mom told me to get a job, not because I wanted or needed money. At the time I hadn't even considered that having money would be a useful thing because I hadn't considered the need for money.
I didn't have a car, and no buses went down the street between my home and the McDonald's, so I had to walk about two miles every day to get to work, then work, and then two miles to get back home. I also didn't have money to buy food, so I would walk two miles to work, work for eight hours(with a mandatory one-hour break halfway through) without having eaten and feeling disgusting and itchy, and then walk two miles back home. It would be almost eleven hours between when I started walking to work and when I walked back into my home.
Most of the time I was only allowed to work the grill, because I was male and they wanted females running the cash registers and not working the grill. Sometimes when there were more males, I did work at the cash register. Two customers did yell at me, and I couldn't handle that well. Both times I completely lost the ability to talk or to think about what they wanted.
On my last day of work, the manager had done the scheduling, whereas the assistant manager normally did the scheduling for that McDonald's. For the next two weeks the manager had scheduled me to work the one day a week that I did the only activity I liked, which was the only day outside of my listed availability. I pointed out to him that I was scheduled to work outside of the days I had listed as being available, and his response was "So you'll work on those two days."
As I walked home on my last day of work I started to feel really sick to my stomach like I really had to go to the restroom, and got to a point where it was hurting so bad that I couldn't walk. I couldn't make it all of the way home so I had to stop at a playground, because there were no businesses or public buildings.
I pulled down my pants and used the restroom, and then had to walk about a mile without having had access to toilet paper, so I walked really slow. I walked inside, took off my clothes, threw them away, and took a shower.
Even now my mom can't understand why I quit that job.
Last edited by matt on 03 Jun 2012, 2:12 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Yeah, I got a job at a donut drive-thru place at a gas station when I was 18 years old. It was a tiny building where one person had to work at cash and make the coffee/slushies, grab the food and cigarettes and give them to the customers while working the cash register. The other person's position was called sandwiches and they would stand at the counter making sandwiches and ordering more pastries from the main donut place.
It was a horrible experience. I was a shaking, panicky mess. I was slow at learning how to use the cash register and I was slow at counting money. I wasn't able to multi-task and make the coffee and get the food so my trainer had to do that while I concentrated on handing out the food to the customers. I have poor math skills and poor fine motor skills so I was slow at counting the money and I was awkward and picking up the coins. It doesn't help when your mind goes blank from anxiety and your hands start shaking. A long line-up of cars were forming because I was so slow so my trainer had to take over for a bit. I quit after one day.
And that folks is why I don't work at customer service and have been traumatized from working at jobs that deal with cash after. I just want to find a job that is slow paced and something that I can handle. Hopefully I excel and being a librarian.
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I worked at a fast food place for two days. I hated it. It made me smell like chicken.
No.
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