Summer 1990, the summer before I started at CSU Sacramento,
At the time it was the only BK in Vacaville. It’s the one on Monte Vista Ave., atop “Hamburger Hill,” with McDonald’s next door, Wendy’s and Rax (now Arby’s) and Long John Silver’s (now gone) across the street. Vacaville was still small, and largely undeveloped, and the bus system sucked. (And still does.) I didn’t drive, so it meant pedaling my bicycle over unlit, poorly-paved strips of asphalt in the middle of nowhere (all of which was developed into Factory Outlets and strip malls in the ’90s), at 4:30 a.m., to open BK for breakfast at 5.
It wasn’t a fun job. The reason the help wanted ad constantly ran, was because of the huge turnover. The reason for the huge turnover was the managers. They were impatient, unfriendly, discouraging, unforgiving people. The manager certainly seemed friendly in my interview, but she was as harsh as the rest. We employees were treated like mentally deficient convicts by just about every manager. There were two exceptions: One who was nice to everyone, and one whose good side I had got on by volunteering to cover a second shift (but she was awful to everyone else, including me at first). The rest, including the boss, was just mean.
So you wanted to do a rotten job, just to get back at ’em. By “rotten job” I don’t mean do anything horrible to the food, like take a dump in the fryer. It wasn’t like Clerks, where the customers were the problem. The way this particular BK worked, the customers were handled by the managers and cashiers, and the cashiers were the younger employees, who could be trusted (under direct supervision) to handle money. The older workers, who weren’t so directly supervised, handled the burning-hot broilers, fryers, steam trays, griddles, microwaves, and food. We didn’t deal with the customers. We only dealt with the managers. We had nothing against the customers, but man alive, did we want to get the managers back. If it annoyed a manager, and we could get away with it, we’d do it. Which didn’t help their attitude towards us any. So it became this huge, horrible spiral of hurt and angst and fury and revenge and reciprocity.
Most of us spoke Spanish. (Me, not so fluently, but enough to get by.) The managers were all white and monolingual. So when we talked about them, we did so in Spanish; both behind their backs and right in front of them. I’m not sure whether they realized that’s why everyone spoke Spanish in the kitchen—including me, the pasty white Anglo college student who kept fumbling his verb tenses. It wasn’t because we couldn’t speak English. To do the job, you had to.
Maybe some of them caught on. This one particular manager was really paranoid about it. And a bit racist. Whenever he heard Spanish, his usual response was, “Speak English! We’re in America, goddamnit! America! ENGLISH! Why does it look and sound like
“’Cause this used to be Mexico,“ I pointed out. "That’s why the town is called Vacaville, the county’s called Solano, the state’s called California… Spanish names. You getting the idea?”
“It’s not Mexico now,” he pointed out. “It’s America. We speak English. The King’s English.”
“King’s English?” I said.
“Yes!” he said, as if I had finally realized where he was coming from, and hadn’t just been given an evil idea. “The King’s English.”
“Verily I will, m’lord,” I said.
I grew up Fundamentalist, with plenty of King James Version style prayers. And later Shakespeare, and of course plenty of Monty Python. I was no stranger to the King’s English. “An thou wilt pardon me, I shalt perform mine office forthwith, and hie me to the privy, to unclog it thereupon.”
He didn’t understand that any better than he did Spanish. But my coworkers immediately recognized the exasperated look on his face. It meant there was now a whole new way to antagonize him. Most of us were high school students, and Shakespeare is inflicted on everyone in ninth through twelfth grade. Where ordinarily this would bore them to tears, they now found a use for all the out-of-date language. It probably improved their grades in English overall. So they dug through their Shakespeare, learned a bit, and we all inflicted it on the manager.
Whenever the Spanish would drive him to shout, “Speak
So that’s the inside joke behind today’s “Mr. Squish” strip.
Once the school year started, my carless commute from Vacaville to Sacramento made it impossible to work most weekdays. My first-semester school week looked like yea:
- Monday. Three buses to school: The Citylink bus from Vacaville to Davis, the Yolobus from Davis to Sacramento, and the Regional Transit bus from downtown to Sac State. Took two and a half hours. (Yes that’s nuts. I did a lot of reading.) That evening we produced the Tuesday edition of the Hornet, so I worked on that, usually till 1 or 2 a.m., then crashed on the editor-in-chief’s couch.
- Tuesday. I had only one class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Tuesday was largely my free day: I did homework, knocked around campus, then caught a ride home with a church friend who had a Tuesday/Thursday schedule.
- Wednesday. Again, three buses to school; three buses home. If I missed the bus home, it meant taking the Greyhound.
- Thursday. Ride to Sac State with my church friend. Evening, we produced the Friday edition of the Hornet, so crashing on the couch again.
- Friday. Classes. Then three buses home.
I could’ve worked at BK on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, but most of its business was on weekends anyway. So I did weekends. Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sundays after church.
There was a BK on campus, so the Sac State students assumed I was making a joke about that restaurant. I seriously doubt any Middle English classes were taught there (which isn’t the same as Shakespearean English, but I didn’t know that at the time). It was an inside joke. I found it funny; I made a strip of it.
About three weeks after this strip ran, I caught a vicious cold and tried to call in sick. The boss wouldn’t hear of it. I was on the schedule. So I went to work… on the line, infecting burgers. I gave her my two weeks’ notice that very weekend. I swore I’d never work in food service ever again. That is, until I started running the Arbor Café at my church, but that’s another story.
I’m still surprised calculus students didn’t complain about the comment, “It’s as useless as calculus.” (That was my own little joke about the business calculus classes inflicted upon me… as well as a jab to those students who think nothing is as important as their own field of study.) Considering how sensitive college students are about everything, you’d think I’d have caught hell for it. But I got nothing. Maybe calculus students are just more mature than other students.