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1987. I’m a manager at Wendy’s in Ann Arbor. These are the beginning of the boom days for fast food. We have more business than we can staff for. Everyday is a fight for survival to fend off the massing hordes at our doors. In these days of chaos, the franchise owner decides to put up lighted glowboards in the restaurants. On these glowboards we, the store managers, are to use special fluorescent erasable markers to list daily specials – you know, to give the place that homey Andy Griffith feel. Right. Can we please just live in the world as it is? Not the way we’d like it to be?

I hated these boards with the same intensity I hate those pictures of us they had to put up for everyone to look at (Like I really cared as the quote beneath my floating head said). By the second day I was out of ideas. I mean, we serve burgers, fries, and drinks. How many different specials can you come up with here? Where other store managers seemed to be able to play the game, I could not. My boss would come in time and again to find the glowboard pulsing in an incandescent smear of some poorly erased message. Picking up on my cynicism, some of the crew began using the board for personal messages to each other. “Ask Dewey why he always has a roll of quarters in his pocket!” I had to be careful.

Somewhere in all this Wendy’s went with a new kid meal toy – Furskins (collect all six!). Furskins were stuffed hillbilly bears about nine inches long. They were huge. We couldn’t get them in the kid meal box. Wendy’s always seemed to struggle in the kid meal toy department. In my seething irritation about the glowboards, I decided to do a Furskin combo – Furskin, Fries, & Drink. The price I put up was the total price you’d pay if you bought the items separately. I didn’t care. Nobody would buy one. I just wanted something on the board to satisfy the rule.

I forgot about the board. A few weeks later I was up on the line shoveling some fries when Vicki taps me on the shoulder. “Doug, this guy wants a Furskin Combo.” I looked past her at the man at the register. He didn’t look like an idiot. I looked at Vicki with an expression that begged her to just deal with it and leave me alone. Instead, “What should I do?” she asks which really meant, “You deal with it.”

“Give him one,” I said. Vicki rung the guy up, collected the money and put the fries and drink on the tray. Now the moment of truth. I came up to the counter and slowly pulled out a Furskin. It seemed to take forever to lift it up on the tray, as though I was wrestling a CPR Dummy to the counter. I gently laid it on the tray and looked the guy right in the eyes daring him to protest.

His eyes got very big. “What’s that!” he snapped.

“It’s a Furskin,” I answered in a tone that let him know what I was really saying was “You’re an idiot.” It’s one of my few good defensive moves.

“Oh!” He softened his tone. “I thought it was a sandwich.”

And there ya go. What kind of a person would order food with the words “fur” and “skin” in the name? It’s fun to poke fun at “burger flippers”, but you should see what they have to deal with from their side of the counter.

It’s a common stereotype that fast food workers don’t have much going for them. Listen, they’re human – humans beaten over the head with silly statements like, “No. I told you before. Shake the salt over the fries side to side, not front to back. You’re going to lose a point for that.”

I love these people. They are in an impossible situation. They have to complete an order every thirty seconds during rush while being attentive to an operating manual as thick as the Bible. No kidding. I mean really, the Bible covers like all of eternity. The Wendy’s Ops Manual is just as thick and covers burgers and fries. Give me a break. Better yet, next time you’re ordering at the register, give them a break. They’re not stupid. They’re just trying to remember the right rule for whatever you asked. They don’t want to lose a point.

I’ve kind of gone the opposite way here in the shop. I don’t have an ops manual. There are no inspections. There are certain things in drink and food preparation that we all have to do the same way for sake of consistency. But I constantly drive the point home to the staff that they have to think, use their own reasoning. Common Sense is our ops manual. I try to get these kids to think rather than just wait to be told. It makes things easier for me and hopefully it kind of sets a groundwork for them to think rather than settle for being told the rest of their lives.