I worked in food service from the time I was 13 until the time I was 21. I started at the concession stand at the local suburban kid's ballfields (under the table for seven dollars a day), moved up to various fast food and/or general concessions booths at the hockey/concert arena downtown (where I had the privilege of dating the guy who skated around in the giant pizza costume), and then finally traded in those event/seasonal jobs for a steadier, more legal-type gig at the multiplex concession stand. I started that last one when I was sixteen or so and was promoted a year later. I loved it when I first started. I mean, hey, free movies and I got to work with tons of kids my age! But in hindsight, that job was pretty bad.
The work was physically hard for slightly handicapped Palabra, but I was a supervisor, so when we were in a crunch, I could delegate the harder physical tasks (like changing the syrup boxes) in order to save time. Plus, young Palabra was a cutie, so the male ushers were practically falling all over themselves to help me. Nevertheless, by the time I was 21, the physical stuff really grated. The hours were a drag, too. Evenings, weekends, and holidays are the busiest times, so any kind of social life had to be conducted at weird hours or planned two weeks in advance. For a long time, my schedule looked like this: come in Tuesday evening and clean all the crud nobody else cleans, battling the fruit-fly infested yogurt machine, the rat-infested ice cream freezer motor, the grease traps in the restaurant, the huge parking lot (sometimes, you'd get extra lucky and find used condoms), and the fruit punch dispenser with an icky layer of dead flies floating on top; come in Thursday and take inventory, weigh all the candy, pre-pop endless bags of popcorn, and (in the fall) field calls from angry parents wanting to know why their kids' shifts have been cut; then come in and close Friday, work a sixteen hour double shift on Saturday, and open on Sunday. Holidays were especially grueling, as we'd all work 50+ fast-paced, horrible hours per week with annoying dressed-up freaks calling me a hobbit or making crude light saber jokes. We'd also all get sick, but calling in sick on a holiday was a no-no and a fireable offense. Every year, I lost my voice for at least a week and had to give orders by gesturing emphatically, which is even less effective than it sounds and left my staff thinking I was yelling at them. One Christmas Day, the only way I could make it through my shift was to take in a bottle of DayQuill and just get drunk off of it. Also, every Christmas without fail, at least one crusty old man would seek out the youngest, most vulnerable-looking girl on my staff and insult her work performance until she cried. Because it appears that making little girls cry on Christmas is like a sport for some people. Bastards. Mixed into all of these good times were getting burns during 12-hour popping shifts, having a thief come in and steal from one of my employees, fielding cranky customer complaints, and trying to manage teenage goof-offs who don't seem to understand that A.) Singing and dancing while in uniform and on the floor is not acceptable in a customer service environment; B.) Break schedules are there for a reason; when you're late coming back from your break, that pushes everyone else off track and forces me to shave time off my break in order to compensate... so yes, I will write you up; and C.) If I ask you to clean something during down-time, but then customers arrive, you must quit cleaning said thing and return to your cash register in order to help the customers. I had a lot of great times with a lot of great people, but the work was really hard and dirty and thankless. By the time I left, I was just glad to have escaped.
So yeah, in hindsight: it was like the Doublemeat Palace, only I wasn't Buffy; I was that brainwashed manager guy. Or maybe I was like a Buffy/manager hybrid, because at least I can say I had handsome, leather-trenchcoat-wearing men pick me up from work for a good time (not on my breaks, though, or on theater property, cuz... eww. See above re: sanitation issues. Dirty, icky Buffy and her ooky dumpster sex! Bleck!).