Posted on 01/17/2007 7:19:47 AM PST by T-Bird45
As White House chief of staff for almost 5 1/2 years, I faced many significant management challenges. The incoming tasks never seemed to let up and expectations always seemed to exceed realization. I described the job as drinking from a fire hydrant or working a fast-food counter during a lunch-hour rush that never ends.
I knew something about life behind the fast-food counter. My first experience was in high school in Brockton, Mass., at the hamburger restaurant Kemps of America, where a meal of a burger, fries and a drink cost about 35 cents. While at the University of South Carolina, to support a wife and growing family, I worked at McDonald's in Columbia. At 85 cents an hour, I clocked as many as 50 hours a week and could eat all I wanted during 10-minute breaks. I did time at the grill, the fry vat and the counter. I loved the counter job. It was well before computers calculated the tab, so I enjoyed the challenge of adding up the bill before it could be punched on the cash-register buttons. It wasn't long before I became a shift leader and then the night manager. Boy, did I learn how to manage!
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That does look like an interesting book. Biggest lesson I took out of my time in fastfood is the real meaning of job stress. Now that I sit at a desk in air conditioning without 100 customers in the lobby ready to complain about any minor misstep I know that no deadline I face can legitimately be called stress.
As a manager at a fast food restaurant for the past 16 years, I've seen most of these managerial styles. I can honestly say I don't know of any instance where the manager gave lap dances to favored employees.
Food service work is a great place to learn a first job. At a minimum one learns management of tasks in a hurried environment. Started as a dishwasher and then cook in a non chain seafood restaurant while in HS. The skills I learned for managing many items at once in a broiler, deep fryer, oven, etc were helpful in college. As a freshman in quantitative chem lab, I could manage 5 simultaneous experiments where others struggled to do 3. My accuracy and precision outpaced the class by a huge margin.
My daughter worked at McD's during high school mostly doing drive up. She would often come home with stories about customers who demanded a certain number of pickles, that the meat and bun be served separately, that the sesame seeds be removed from the bun because they were allergic and my favorite ...during one of the 2 burgers for a buck sales the customer who ordered 30 burgers, assuring her they were not all for him...when he drove up to the window it was rather obvious from his massive obesity that they were.
Agreed since that is where I started in a regular payroll type of job (first job was a paper route). My son and daughter both have had this experience and it is now my son's management job after getting a degree in hotel/restaurant management. My daughter is currently in college but works part-time at the IHOP and makes pretty good tips for a college town. On football Homecoming Weekend, she made over $200 in tips in one shift.
I personaly think the best thing that comes from these types of jobs is the understanding that the customer is the one that pays the bills and calls the shots. This serves anyone in future positions.
Having worked at McDonalds during high school, and in a $600,000+ a week kitchen for a national chain for 3.5 years during college, I can tell you that nearly all job skills (customer satisfaction, first impressions, deadlines, co-worker relationships, departmental cooperation, taking care of the lower level employees, efficiency, cross training, etc...) can be and are learned "flipping burgers".
A rare (perhaps nonexistent?) skill nowadays.
Even today, I'm still amazed at the people who think managing a fast food store is for losers or those who can't obtain gainfull employment elsewhere.
:O)
P
LOL!
When I received my .40c an hour raise at the Western Steer I bought a newer car. Thats 16.00 bucks a week. The value of money is greatly appreciated when you must work for it.
Stress? You should work a day or two as a correctional officer. Those damn convicts make me so mad sometimes I feel like I'm gonna stroke out.
I used to do the same thing in the concession stand. The cash register would freak if you entered numbers too quickly. So I just did it in my head
Yeah. It's strange how the higher you go, the easier work becomes. It angers me the way people treat clerks who are busting their butts for $7/hour.
Yowzah!
A month of working as a busboy gave me all the incentive I needed to stay in college for five years.
Corrections would definitely be a high stress job. Any job where there's a serious chance of you dieing is top of the list for stressful jobs, same with any job where there's a good chance any screwup by you could result in somebody's death. The stress in fastfood mostly comes from the pace, I remember one brutal day when we wound up seriously understaffed and an unexpected surge of people came in, in the grill there was me and one other guy (luckily one I had trained, more luckily one of the ones I was proud to have trained) and we had a 600 customer hour. Not as stressful as corrections to be sure, but 2 people cranking out food for 10 people every minute is a rough way to earn five and a half bucks.
I did the food service industry, and what it tought me the most was, go get an education and bust your ass so that you, nor your children will ever have to do that again....
Nothing against those whos career it is, but it definately was not for me.
Answering to managers who honestly I wouldn't have trusted to answer the phones at a complaint department, regional supervisors who were 10 years removed from actually working the floor trolloping in edicting bad practices and layout changes...
The last straw for me was when I was ordered to continue to use a defective oil filtration machine, that had already shocked me twice. Wasn't good enough I was one of only a 2 people in the place that could and would do the job in the first place.
I will admit I learned a lot, and did everything in the place at one point or another, but the biggest lesson I learned was I don't EVER EVER EVER want to again work in an industry where the majority of your staff are teenagers... and I was a teenager at the time.
Hard work has never bothered me, micromanagement ALWAYS has.... tell me what needs done, then just get the hell out of my way and let me do it.
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