I recently obtained a Blizzard (Oreo, plus mint) at a local Dairy Queen, representing the first time I’ve actually eaten anything from a Dairy Queen since I worked there for three years in high school, and I could feel the dried soft serve matting the hair on my forearms once more into a white thicket, madeleine-fashion.
It was a perfectly good fast food job. I don’t have any horrible stories about workplace safety or food standards, which is why I feel comfortable yanking a picture from Dairy Queen’s own Twitter account. But I think there’s something particularly grim about all minimum wage jobs which involve serving people which do not also involve tips, such that your enemy is solely the clock, and he will always outwit you.
Here’s what I learned from my time at Dairy Queen:
1. People like to inject needle drugs in fast food bathrooms that do not have the special lightbulbs that prevent you from seeing your veins clearly.
2. You can make a lot of Blizzards with a bad bag of soft serve before anyone notices, and exactly one cone.
3. If your manager is gone, and you need to decorate a cake for someone, it’s going to look terrible.
4. If you’re very tired and briefly rest your head against the wall, the owner of your individual store will choose this moment to walk in and say “if there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean.”
5. 20% of the time, if you dip a cone in the melty chocolate, you’ll find yourself holding an empty cone and everyone else who gets a dipped cone that day will remark that the texture is slightly off.
6. You can make yourself a Blizzard on your break that, if you actually paid for it like you’re supposed to, would cost $16.75 with all extras factored in.
7. People will threaten you with physical violence for explaining that there is no chocolate in their Reese’s Pieces Blizzard because there is no chocolate in a Reese’s Piece, and they are thinking of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
8. People have a very low bar for threatening people wearing purple aprons and matted forearm hair with physical violence.
Did you have a fast food job? Do you still have a fast food job? Did you eat the food when you worked there? Can you eat that food now? Do you think one day you will be able to?
