I work at Penn Station. It’s a sad existence, slinging cheesesteaks at what seems like the most unappreciative and most unhealthy customer base to ever have existed. It’s been three years since I started working there, and everyday I feel a little more abused by the populace of Blue Ash.I close up the store almost every night I work. Because of school, I’ve cut back my hours substantially, but I still close two or three nights a week. Every night I close, we get at least 10 people in the door between 9:30 and 10 o’clock, our last half hour there. Most of those people that come in never even say thank you.
I don’t blame them, though; it’s late, and most people that come in are just getting off work and feel just as abused as I do. There are, however, exceptions.
I had a customer once who called in for a take out order at 9:45, fifteen minutes before we closed. He was harsh and ungrateful on the phone, arguing with me about why I needed his phone number for the order.
I don’t spit in people’s food or anything; I’m very strongly against anything like that, but while I was making his food, images of that Ryan Reynolds movie, “Waiting,” were running through my head.
When he got to the store, his entire family followed him in. He paid for his order, and they all sat down to eat in the store. There’s a reason it’s called a take-out order. Usually when you say you want to order take-out, you take it out of the store. This is because it’s a take-out order. Get my drift here?
We couldn’t finish up until they left, and because of them, we ended up leaving there about 40 minutes later than usual.
Fast food employees, however they may not seem like it sometimes, are people, too. If you’re talking to your friends, you don’t respond to their questions with grunts and condescending stares. If you go to visit a friends’ house and it’s obvious they’re in the middle of something or about to go to sleep, don’t impose yourself on them, or if you have to, make it quick and don’t be a jerk. This all seems like common sense, but apparently it doesn’t apply to fast food employees.
Although we do get a kick out of insulting almost all our customers behind their backs and after they leave, it’s a big pain cleaning up after them in the middle of the night. So it gets nasty late at night as my coworkers and I banter back and forth about how our customers are morons and jerks, or in some extreme cases we chastise people as serial killers, hobos and sexually impotent, for the fun of it.
The kind of offensive slander that one would hear in the back room of a Penn Station would make Bob Saget blush.