One of my favourite things about myself is
that I couldn’t get a job at McDonalds.
Really, where do you go from there? I
probably shouldn’t have mentioned that I would rather practice the piano than
serve fries.
As a result the manager said I didn’t seem
committed enough. I had visions of walking down the aisle toward Ronald
McDonald. The groomsmen are out of control, The Hamburglar stealing all of the
Holy bread and that Grimace doing those crazy Grimacey things like……. What does
he do? What is he meant to be? An overweight personality-absent purple lump
doesn’t make me want to order a McFeast. Apparently Grimace lost some weight
recently and became Barney the Dinosaur. Perhaps there’s hope for me yet.
I had actually completely forgotten the
McDonalds rejection until my sister recounted the event to her English friends.
“Peta couldn’t get a job at McDonalds!”
Roars of laughter.
I suppose it is hilarious. I am just not
McDonalds material.
Eventually I scored a job at a discount
store called Bargain Mania. Yes, anything with ‘mania’ in the title has to be a
winner. My boss, Ashok, always manned the till until he needed a toilet break.
“I’m going to convenience”.
It took me a long time to work out that
‘convenience’ was the toilet. For ages I thought he was relieving himself at a
7 Eleven convenience store.
After awhile Ashok started saving me some
of his delicious home-made curries to eat out the back. I enjoyed the back of
the shop. It was like having a break in the trenches before facing the Bargain
Battleground out front. It was probably just as hygienic as a trench, dust
puffs, balancing boxes, rejected reject shop items from a bygone era and a
suspected mutant insect rodent creation lurking about. Once I was caught in a
box avalanche and I was unconscious for an unknown amount of time. Ashok let me
go home after I vomited in the sink.
Whenever a customer would ask for a
particular crappy product I would say,
“I’ll check out the back”. Then I’d just
stand out there for a while until they eventually left. If they remained I
would always return with a completely bent candelabra covered in thick dust.
“Nope, can’t see any, but how about this
thing?” We never did sell that.
Apart from displaying our quality Elvis
themed rugs my favourite section was the ornaments. It was full of dolphin,
butterfly, unicorn and wolf figurines, indeed a plethora of inspiration for
large unemployed lady tattoos. The wolf figurines had two legs and three heads,
and all of the unicorn horns had been snapped off. Ashok would make me
superglue the heads back together and return them to the shelves. I decided to
glue random bits together for my own amusement. My best creation was a Snow
White head on a Bulldog body, a match made in heaven. (Pictured)
Discount stores attract a wonderful array
of people. There were some regulars, lady who looked like she lived in a
beehive and conversed loudly with no one, the man who looked like a pencil and
never bought anything (not even an eraser), and the angry lady with the worst
penciled on eyebrows I’ve ever seen. Maybe she wasn’t even angry but her fake
eyebrows made it seem that way.
One day an old lady came in with a loose
fingernail and wanted me to cut it off for her. I only had giant blunt craft
scissors. Anyway, nailed it.
