All work and no play

I constantly hear people talk about working long hours and not taking any vacations for so-and-so years. They wear it like a badge of honor. I was one of those people, too.

But now it has got me thinking – is that something to be proud of? I worked my ass off for over 30 years at various managerial levels for McDonald’s. I would stay later and come in earlier if asked (even when I wasn’t asked). Where did that get me?

There was about a two-year span when I was much younger, and newly promoted, that I was part of the best management team I ever worked with. As you might expect, turnover among managers is constant at any McDonald's. It may come as a shock to many of you, but McDonald’s is not a job that many choose to make a career. It is a job to get a teenager started in the work force or, usually, an act of desperation on an adult’s part to help pay the bills. Nothing wrong with that.

Times were different back when I started out. Yes, there was turnover, but not nearly as much as there is now. Before, you could probably work with a core of workers for three, four, five years. Nowadays, I would have been lucky to have had maybe eight or ten employees last a year.

Back to that time I was part of my favorite management team. I would say it was around 1993 and I would have been in my early 20’s. Christine was my store manager. Charlie was the first assistant. The store was so crazy, busy that it had two second assistants, Judy and me. All four of us were like family. Actually, Judy was married to one of my closest cousins and Charlie was dating, and would eventually marry, a more distant cousin of mine.

Charlie would go on to become my best friend. He would die in a car crash in 2011.

Even though Charlie and Judy were my actual family, it was McDonald’s that brought us together. We would hang out outside of work when I don’t think we would have done so if we didn’t work together. We would go over each other’s houses. And, to relate it to this story, we would help each other out at work. Christine, in her role as store manager, would work day shifts, exclusively. We were often short staffed, which would be a theme for most of my career.

There were several times that Charlie and I would look at the employee schedule for the following day and notice that Christine was short-staffed for lunch. The owner was always on our case for controlling labor costs so he had no problem with us working shorthanded all the time. The higher the sales per man hour (total sales dollars divided by how many employee hours used), the better for him. But it sucked for us.

So, yeah, the point of my story is that Charlie and I would often go in and work off-the-clock (have to keep that labor cost low) for a couple of hours helping Christine during the lunch rush. We didn’t think twice about it or bitch about not getting paid. We’d get a free meal out of it and that was good enough.

What I did hope to get out of it was the respect and appreciation from my supervisors (and owner). For the most part, back then, I did. I got bigger and more frequent raises than my counterparts. I'd also sometimes get Patriots' tickets, pre-Brady.

I definitely received gratitude from Christine. It didn’t hurt that she was attractive and there seemed to be some chemistry and potential for us hooking up at some point in the very near future. She was about five years older than me and going through a divorce. We spent many hours at the local pub, sitting at the bar, having beers.

The closest we came to hooking up was around this time when she had an extra ticket for Hawaii. The ticket was supposed to be for her and her soon-to-be ex-husband. As she was crying one day, she lifted her head from the bar, wiped the tears from her eyes, and looked at me and asked, “Hey, why don’t you come with me to Hawaii?”

I was a chicken shit and, after a lot of nervous pondering, I said no. I know, I know. There in a nutshell is part of my social anxiety. I was always afraid of getting out of my comfort level, my little cocoon. Here I had a blond, gorgeous, vivacious older woman asking me to go to Hawaii alone with her and I said … no. We are still friends to this day. She has been married two more times since. Do I regret saying no? Hell yeah.

Speaking of mental issues, not only am I a chicken shit, but I lose my focus and get side-tracked a lot. Back to the topic at hand. Working hard while not getting paid became a theme of my career. I figure McDonald’s probably owes me about a year of wages for time I put in off the clock. And that may be conservative.

I made the mistake of going salary around 1994. Don’t ever go salary, people! You get paid a set sum of money based on working 40 hours per week. It doesn’t matter if you work 30 hours or 50 hours in a week. You get paid the same amount. It never changes. 

In the beginning I thought that was cool. I worked a lot of night shifts back then so we would frequently get the store closed down and cleaned up in about a half hour less than our allotted time. According to my math, I would be getting paid based on 40 hours for working 37, maybe 36, hours per week. They were getting screwed, I thought.

Fast forward twenty-five years and there were probably a handful of times I worked under 40 hours in a week. There were plenty of times I worked more than 40. I would say, and I am not lying, over a thousand times I worked more than 45 hours in a week. I got screwed! And for a very long time! Talk about being short-sighted thinking, in the beginning, that I was getting the better end of the deal.

Once I smartened up, I refused repeated attempts by my supervisors to promote me to store manager. Somewhere along the line, the title of store manager changed to General Manager. I’m not even sure when it happened. I guess it must have sounded more impressive… and the words were capitalized.

I was happy being a first assistant, essentially the VP, second in command. I was dumb enough to work as many hours as I did, but I was smart enough to know that becoming a General Manager would involve even more time and effort. It wouldn’t, necessarily, require more time and effort, but I knew me. It would consume my life.

So I was smart enough to know that. Until I wasn’t. Around 2015, I succumbed to the pressure applied to me by my supervisor, Donald. Donald had taken a liking to me (what was not to like?). He was also setting his sights on buying some of the owner’s fourteen stores. He pitched to me that the owner wasn’t going to be around forever and that he, Donald, was hoping to buy some of the more profitable stores from him when the time came for him to sell off. He wanted me to play a large role once he started his own franchise. His exact words were, “You either choose to grow with me now, or I have to move on and leave you behind.” Tough sell. I shook Donald's hand and became a General Manager.

I was right about my life being consumed with the job if I became GM. Since I struggled those first few months, out of frustration, I put in even more time and effort to improving.

Once I got settled into my role, the owner dropped the bombshell that he was retiring and selling his restaurants. This was the guy I had worked for for my entire adult life – encompassing 25 years. All of us GMs were in shock. We knew the day would come, but had no clue it was imminent. 

On the bright side, all of us thought, Donald would be taking over. Then the owner dropped the second and bigger bombshell, the new owner of the franchise was on his way and we would be meeting him in about fifteen minutes. Donald was sitting right next to the owner. This didn’t make sense.

As I looked around the board room table, one by one I noticed everyone of the other thirteen GMs realizing that Donald had been screwed over and was not taking over the company. We were getting an outsider.

To make a long story short, there was some drama and back stabbing that ensued in the following weeks. Our old owner, Lou, sold his fourteen stores to this other owner – we’ll call him “Tex” because he was from Texas – under the supposed promise that Tex would buy all fourteen stores and promise not to sell off any, therefore keeping all of us together. That was nice, but it was a lie. Or was it?

A couple of weeks later, I get a phone call from Donald telling me to be prepared for news to break that Tex had sold off half the stores he bought from Lou. Did Tex lie to Lou? Or did Lou lie to us? Either way, our family of GMs – many of us had worked together for over twenty years – were permanently split.

Personally, I felt betrayed by Donald. It wasn't his fault. I know he probably got screwed over as well. The realization began hitting me that, now, here I was working in a role that I never wanted, and I was going to be doing it for someone I didn't know and that I had no history with. I felt like all my hard work the last twenty-five years was for nothing. These new owners didn’t know me. To them, I was a new hire. I was a name on a piece of paper. Actually, I was told that there was no guarantee that I would be kept on by these new (newer?) owners. I would have to interview to keep my job. By the way, my restaurant was one of those Tex sold to that “someone else” – we’ll call him “Vito” since he was Italian (just like Lou).

To get back to the topic of this story, I did keep my position and I worked even harder and put in more time to try and impress these new owners (Vito was the official owner, but his two sons really ran the company). I was starting from scratch.

I did well, I thought. Vito had a total of eighteen restaurants and my restaurant was always in the top third in all profit categories every month. Often, I was in the top three.

Fast forward to my taking time out of work, and I never got a phone call or text asking how I was doing during my 12-week family leave. The day after my family leave expired and I told them I had a doctor’s note saying I still wasn’t ready to return to work, I received a letter via registered mail (not a phone call, or a face-to-face meeting, or even a text) saying they were no longer obligated to hold my position and that I was being let go.

It is two years later and I have never heard anything from them. Not a “How are you doing?” Nada. That is fine by me. They are one of the main reasons that my head is screwed up now. I busted my ass for thirty years to be treated like that, and to have it end like that? It messed my head up. I always thought hard work should be rewarded. If nothing else, you should be appreciated.

Since I left, I found out two of my acquaintances from work died. The first was my immediate supervisor for my final year with Vito. I dealt with this supervisor every day (and night – constant texts) for my last year at McDonald’s. About two months after I was terminated, he died while taking a shower. It was on a Saturday, so I presume he had just finished working a nine- or ten-hour shift. Saturdays were, typically, our busiest and most stressful days and it was rare to leave on time.

The thought that his last day on this earth was spent working a stressful nine-hour shift inside a McDonald’s just blew my mind. There is no one in their right mind who would want to spend their last day on earth like that.

About six months later I get a phone call from Christine – yes, that same Christine who asked me to go to Hawaii with her decades earlier. She was now a supervisor at one of Tex’s restaurants. She had just heard that I was no longer working for McDonald’s and she wanted to know how I was doing. Here I had a supervisor from another franchise calling me to ask if I was okay, but none of Vito’s cronies ever did. For the record, Donald called me the same week as Christine. I found that odd. Maybe a bulletin went out that week or something.

Anyway, as Christine and I were talking, I mentioned another GM, Kurt, who was being absolutely shit on by these new owners. I felt so bad for how he was being treated. Christine and I both knew Kurt for about twenty years. He would often make some bad managerial decisions. He may not have been the best GM ever, but he was one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. He was dedicated to his job. He would ride his bike twenty miles each way – no matter the weather – to work every day. His parents died in a car crash when he was younger so he had a fear of driving.

Christine interrupted me, “You know Kurt died, right?” Uh, no. She told me he was found dead about six months earlier, shortly before my supervisor died in the shower. Kurt hadn’t shown up for work one day. That was never like him. Despite the fact that he biked to work, he would always show up about an hour before his shift. Police were called to check on him and he was found dead in his apartment. He lived alone and was never married. He had no kids.

Again, I felt horrible. Here was a guy who worked at least fifty hours every week and would come in whenever he was asked.  He rode his bike to work every day and never, ever called out. Yet, I would hear supervisors and owners make fun of the way he smelled. The guy just rode his bike an hour to help cover a shift for you dickheads!

My supervisor was 55 when he died. Kurt was 54. I am now 52. There is little doubt I was going down the very same track as those two. I still might. But it got me thinking why do we compliment people on being such hard workers? We compliment people for going into work early and leaving late. We compliment people for skipping family functions in order to be at that big meeting. We even compliment athletes for missing the birth of their child in order to play a big game. Blood, sweat, and tears, baby!

But why? Isn’t life meant to be lived, not worked? We work all our lives to someday, maybe, reach retirement age and kick back and enjoy life. Why do we wait until then? There is no guarantee we will make it to retirement age. How often do you hear of people dying days or months after they retire? And we will say, in a complimentary fashion, "Oh, poor Barbara just didn't know what to do with herself without having to go to work everyday." Bullshit! Work is what shortened Barbara's life.

And if we do make it to retirement age, our bodies will most likely be so beat up from working our whole lives that we can’t enjoy life as much as we would like to. It absolutely kills me that my mother worked her entire life under horrible conditions in a factory. When she got home she had to cook dinner, wash laundry, do dishes, and take care of her kids. When the time came to retire and kick back, she immediately began to show symptoms of Lewy Body Dementia. Her memory was, eventually, wiped clean and she couldn't remember how to do simple functions like pick up food from a plate and put it in her mouth.

I understand we need to work to contribute to society. Someone has to farm our food, fix our cars, build our houses, treat us when we are sick, pick up our garbage, etc., etc. I fully understand that. But at the same time, work should never consume your life. A therapist once told me, “You never hear of someone on their deathbed saying, ‘I wish I would have worked more in my life.’” No, it is always I wish I could have seen the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls or … Hawaii.