62: McDonald's

Hands down, all-time worst job ever

jep

Jun 15, 2022

The Surrounding Circumstances

My parents announced their decision to split up during the months of this terrible job. I know this because I have a strange memory: I was walking to work, cuz Sarnia transit was brutal and slow, and was waiting at the busiest intersection on the route for the light to turn green. Suddenly, a stranger touched me on the arm. I startled, and they asked me if I needed a hand. “Sorry - it’s just - you’ve been standing here for, like, ten minutes,” they explained. The light had turned red to green to red to green a bunch of times, and I’d just been standing there, tuned completely out. I was embarrassed, and kind of shocked. Where had I been?

Embarrassment was the main emotion I felt during this divorce period. I was 16, so embarrassment was on the main menu at all times: it is perhaps the primary adolescent emotion. I didn’t tell anyone at school - just waited for the summer break. I internalized all that stress, and over a few months developed a speech impediment (that lasted just long enough to include my first week at a new school), and stomach cramps that went on for years. I just didn’t know how to process or discuss what was happening.

It was a huge summer in my life. This family drama/trauma was interrupted by my befriending a good group of friends whose importance at that age cannot be overstated, and we enjoyed a two-month love affair of walking to the beach every day and listening to Howard Jones and The Cure. My heart broke when I left Sarnia to go live with my mom and sisters in London.

All of that period could make a nice, maudlin YA novel. I’ll stick with the JOBS I HAVE HAD theme, though, and pick up next time with my second round of Little Caesars Pizza in London, Ontario.

Howard Jones

Howard Jones was of his era, so hard: he played alone, controlling a circle of synths. His sidekick was a mime who did interpretive dance while Howard sang and hit triggers. His lyrics were actually my first exposures to Buddhism - the truest of religions, which I will still never join. It was his song “Hide and Seek” that gave me one of my best-liked existential explanations: an infinite Being would still have one limitation - the lack of limitations. That Being might choose to incarnate with the limitations of human life, because that would be fun. We are the universe, divided into limited beings, here to observe existence and experience limitations. I use this idea in my life by accepting as fact that I chose to be here. Which is a good counterbalance to the petulant but fair objection that exists within me as well: “I did not ask to be born.” We might have.

HoJo's appearance was as important as his sound, and his sound is deeply synthetic. I’ve listened recently to see how it stood up, and I can’t even decide. I’m not sure. Once I dug it, once I hated it. His songs are an artifact of my life, like, say, Journey’s songs. I could stand to hear them about once every ten years.

The Cure

The Cure have surprised me by never going away. They’re a better and stronger act than Howard Jones, for sure, but I would not have predicted that they - and Depeche Mode - would live to become the Beatles and Stones of '80s synth pop, existing for decades. But they did. My own interest in The Cure stops at the singles and one incredible album, The Head on the Door. That 1986 summer, we were playing Staring At The Sea, a mid-career compilation.