I used to work at McDonalds (I know). Opening usually involved me at the front counter with a headset on so I could do drive-through orders and handle making coffee / putting orders together / taking money at the front from the little old people that came in at the crack of dawn every morning. We would also have a manager who was there to be important and one person in the kitchen. We’re a small rural town so usually this is fine but we were on kind of a major highway so sometimes it would get busy out of nowhere.
Depending on the manager the amount of help we had would vary wildly. One morning we got super busy and I started cracking under the pressure. I’m a fantastic multi-tasker but my drive-through line was backing up since I was trying to juggle them and all the walk-in folks from my front registers and when it gets packed…well, it’s fun. I glance around trying to find my manager for help. I see him on one of our cameras – he’s outside smoking a cigarette around the side of the building. Mind you, this is like his third trip out to smoke this morning. I’m absolutely dying trying to get caught up. Customers are being passive aggressive saying they will come behind the counter and get their own coffee and stuff. I have people yelling at me in my headset from the drive through. I end up having to remove the headset just to try to get the frontline sorted. I start making progress with the front but I basically had to sacrifice the drive-through customers for two minutes.
Apparently the cars outside start yelling at my manager and interrupt his smoke break so he comes in, sees me with my headset off and goes berserk. He’s like “WHOS TAKING THE DRIVE-THRU ORDERS?” I’m in the middle of trying to get a fresh pot of coffee going so I sort of auto-respond “No one. Hang on.” as I continue to dash around behind our counter to grab a fruit & yogurt parfait for an order. He basically gets in my way and starts giving me shit. Loudly, talking to me like I’m a dog. I point to the camera and yell, loudly enough to disrupt the entire inside of the restaurant. “I’m these two registers, first window, second window, and I’m bagging. I’m like FOUR PEOPLE and you’re out behind the building not doing SHIT!”
His eyes go wide. I can tell he knows I’m holding on by my last thread. He’s sighs. And he’s like “You’re in a ton of trouble but we can talk about this later.” No. Fuck him. I’m done. I’m all riled up from random customers yelling at me. I toss him the headset. “You want to give me shit for not being able to run like four stations with no support? Run five. I’ll watch.” I remove my name badge.
He went to say something to me. I turn away, facing the one girl working in the kitchen who is watching this all play out. I remember telling her “I’m so sorry.” and then I dropped my name badge, toss my hat on the counter, grab a water cup, put on (and zip) my jacket so my uniform is covered up. I go to the drink fountain, fill my water cup, and then I go sit on the far side of the seating area and watch him go down in flames. He ends up ALSO taking off the headset and picking up the phone so he can spam call the whole workforce one by one trying to call for help. It’s like 5AM so no one is going to accept a call from their work number. About ten minutes into his struggle he ends up very loudly pleading with me to come back from behind the counter. I can’t even see him on the other side of the sea of people swarming the counter at this point.
I call back “I need a smoke first!” and I go outside.
i made this beautiful graph to display the facts: sitting on things that were designed for sitting is boring. i very rarely sit on chairs other than for meals, and i almost never sit on them “properly”. chairs are for losers
you ever just sit and realise u can’t remember 80% of your childhood? like … what happened? who am i ..?
Many people in the comments are saying “trauma”, but this is actually a very normal occurrence. It’s called Childhood Amnesia, and it’s a process which, as the brain reorganizes itself for cognitive thought that is developed in late childhood, it changes the Accessibility of those memories during recall. Many childhood memories are available to the person, but they will not be remembered during regular recall activity, you have to “trick” your brain into remembering with different tactics.
This is because there are two parts to memories – their encoding and their recall. The encoding determines their availability, their recall determines their accessibility. The reason why trauma memory and childhood amnesia are different is in this distinction. Trauma memory is often encoded differently, bypassing to the limbic system where it is stored as intrinsic memory. It can’t be recalled because it was never encoded. Childhood amnesia, however, seems to indicate that the memories are encoded, but we lose access to them as we age. This is most likely due to the development of brain structures that fundamentally change our encoding and recall of memory as we get older.
This is an important distinction, because trauma memory is “stored in the body”, i.e. you get triggers that send your body into a cascade of uncontrollable feelings, sensations and reactions. Whereas childhood memories won’t generally do that, they are just recalled at odd times with odd associations.
said it before and I’ll say it again: you can’t shock tactic someone into not having an addiction. this goes for all addictions, but in this instance im talking about tobacco smoking.
there’s serious and undeniable socioeconomic factors to smoking. this is by no means a pro smoking post, but here’s what a cigarette can do:
lower anxiety (as a quick fix)
stop you feeling hungry/as hungry
help with some physical pain
gives you something to stim with
that’s just a short list.
bearing that in mind, consider why stats reveal there’s a significantly higher population of ~minorities and poor/working class people who smoke. why might the fraught single mom want to side step her hunger? why might the guy on a zero hours contract want to be less anxious?
linking or doling out “advice” that uses shock tactics/graphic imagery/terrible woeful stories is not effective. it serves merely to validate your own superiority and/or martyr complex.
you care about addicts? look to your own community. does it have accessible resources to help people quit? centres that offer financial help to people wanting stop smoking aids? therapy and financial help for the reasons they may smoke in the first place?
not smoking is very obviously better than smoking, as all smokers know. y’all need to stop acting like we’re weak willed dumbasses and you’re the angel with the voice of reason and the tumblr.com link.
invest and campaign for addiction help instead of going out of your way to go after individuals for cheap validation. help us help ourselves.
My hip new communications theory is actually that millennial/gen z/internet native humor is so weird and abstract because of the sheer amount of words we’re exposed to daily. we’ve heard a lot of words in a lot of different orders so if you wanna get a reaction out of us you usually gotta put words in an order we haven’t seen before
So like normally structured jokes aren’t as funny anymore but “lemon lime spine” is a one-hit K.O.
paul rudd: [an actor who has played many different roles through his career, and now even plays a superhero that will likely be his most recognized character]
ben wyatt’s voice in the back of my head, softly whispering:
Midnight Caffeine 