The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Fast Food Manager

So, you want to be "lovin' it" for the next four decades or so, kid? You're the one who always looks so happy there in the drive thru... oh, really? Well, your parents will stop weeping about this idea in a month or two--after all, they've got to be proud of that older sister of yours. Feature dancer at the downtown show bar... Tell her that it's embarassing when she waves to her old teachers from onstage, er--I mean, the shop teachers told me she does that sometimes; I wouldn't know myself.

Anyway--back to your future managing the golden arches. First of all, they'll probably test your IQ and your personality to make sure you're smart and ambitious enough to staff the restaurant and do the promotional stuff, but not so gifted as to want to put a gun in your mouth after a couple years. No doubt you'll work your way up locally as first a shift manager, and then assistant, and then one day it will be your turn to don the golden name tag.

Don't expect it to be easy. Once you're past 20, girls don't see dating someone like you as a great catch--you might understand there's good things ahead if you're loyal to the corporation, but they see you as a loser they'd be ashamed to bring to a thanksgiving dinner and have sit at a table with their sister's husbands who all have more impressive careers.

Ironically, at the same time as you strike out at the bar every time they ask you what you do for a living, you'll have 16 year old girls offering you 5 minutes of paradise in the stock room for a pathetic promotion to the drive-thru window, so you'll have to be careful to cover your backside, since even if you behave, the rejected ones can still say something happened. To be safe you'll put the guy who's been there longest on the window job--with only his pathetic dreams of rock stardom to hold onto, it's already clear to all the other staff that he's a "lifer". Still, even though you duck the sexual harassment complaint by that little maneuver, you'll still end up in the headlines when it turns out mister rock star is dealing drugs to the cars that pull up each night.

Head office cringes at the bad publicity and quickly gets you out of town--you're given the management responsibilities for a new outlet in a small town a couple hundred miles away. It wouldn't be big enough to have a franchise if it weren't for all the traffic that goes through on the main highway through the center of town. You get to hire the entire staff, which is harder than back in the city since there's a much smaller pool of candidates, but soon you've got a full crew, even if there's a number of sibling teams who bicker constantly until you figure out not to schedule their shifts together.

The small town realities hit you quickly. You realize after the fiasco at your last restaurant that you have to make this one work, but there's some resistance in town--especially from "Mom and Pop's", the local cafe that's been in operation for almost 20 years. Some people make it almost a moral issue to patronize the older establishment and boycott yours, seeing as you represent all that is evil with corporate globalization. Nonetheless, some of those same people have no problem coming to you with cap in hand every time some charity or team needs sponsoring--they expect you to have the bottomless pockets of a huge multinational corporation, and think you mean and stingy when you have to turn some of them away.

It gets even more uncomfortable when "Mom and Pop's" daughter is sent to the city, ostensibly for treatment for a serious eating disorder. They make no secret of the fact that the treatment is expensive and their income reduced with the arrival of your fast food place. You can't avoid contributing substantially to her treatment fund, even though you receive little or no credit for doing so.

A few months later you're visiting relatives back in the city and you find out your niece rooms in the same dorm with the "poor anorexic", and she laughs at your questions about the girl's condition. Apparently the whole thing was a scam and the girl has used the "treatment money" to buy a car. Still, you realize you'd best not say anything back in town, and you bite your tongue every time some old dear prattles on about "that poor girl".

It's only a few months later when "Mom" is apparently diagnosed with some mysterious tumor, and she also is the recipient of local business largesse, and once again you're hit for a major contribution. Your niece tells you the mother had a nice visit in the city, using that cash to take all the dorm girls out for an expensive dinner, and showing them her purchases from a couple of days' shopping at a variety of exclusive shops.

This time you've had enough, and when "Pop" comes around with a group from the local chamber of commerce collecting for a scholarship for his "dyslexic" son, you explode, and scream forth all your accusations, only to find yourself punched by a local town councilman who calls you a variety of disgusting names, and then leads the group to the local newspaper where an exposé on your wicked heartlessness is quickly added to the front page of the next day's edition.

Within days parents have forced most of your employees to quit, and the head office damage control team shows up and gives you a choice--quit outright and forget about the pension you've been depending on, or take a transfer to Beirut, which they assure you is much more peaceful than it used to be.

You think about it for a while and realize you have no marketable skills and no money to go to college, so you accept the offer. You work well as the second in command at the Beirut outlet until you are mistakenly kidnapped by terrorists--you look strikingly like the Belgian ambassador--and they kill you in disgust when they discover their error.

Your pension is sent back to the small town you fled and dumped into yet another fund to help pay for Mom and Pop's irish setter's treatment for canine depression. Nobody notices.