Dave Works Late Night

 I was sitting outside the school where I work after dismissal, supervising those students whose parents had not yet made it out to pick up their children from a hard day's learn. A colleague and I were commiserating about other jobs we have had, the ones that did not bring us the kind of awkward satisfaction that this teaching gig does. The jobs we used to hate before we learned to love the stories they provided us. 

I used to work late night at Arby's. The Roast Beef Place. This was before they had "the meats." This was back when diversifying your fast food menu was a potentially dangerous move. That was for other places, like Jack In The Box, with their hamburgers and tacos. My crew and I were responsible for slinging "roast beef" sandwiches of various sizes and condiment combinations at the public. We stayed open on Friday and Saturday nights until they were Saturday and Sunday mornings. We locked the doors at two. 

As it happened, this time just happened to coincide with the hour that most of the local bars shoved their customers back out into the world. And some of those inebriated souls would wash up in our parking lot. The more clever of these were the ones who took it upon themselves to make an early exit from their drinking holes to make sure they had plenty of time to fill their colons with meat before passing out until well after sunrise. The challenge for us, the closing crew, was that we were operating on a very scientific but sometimes flawed formula that told us how much "roast beef" we would need to get us through the night. The compressed loaves that would eventually be sliced thin and loaded onto a variety of buns took hours to cook. The last loaf would usually come out of the oven around nine PM. It was not the closing crew's primary concern to make the food. We would continue to slice and sling, but it was our job to hose the place down and get it sparkly clean for the next day's business. 

This led to a number of interactions like this: "I'd like three Super Roast Beef sandwiches."

"I'm sorry. We're out of roast beef. We can make you a Turkey Deluxe or a Hamchy."

"A Hamchy?"

"Ham and cheese."

"But this is Arby's. You're the roast beef place, right?"

"You're right. But we ran out of roast beef. See, we close in an hour and.."

"You're out of roast beef? This is Arby's!"

And so on. I suppose we could have locked the doors at that point, but we had been filled with stories of the franchise owners, Mike and Cowboy, who liked to make late-night drop-ins to their stores to make sure that things were humming along just like they expected them to be. It also took a certain number of hours to clean and sanitize the shake machine and the meat slicer and hose down the floors and counters and prep the next day's potato cakes. We were hostages. Fast food prisoners. 

On those occasions that the meat didn't run out, things were clean and ready to go for the next day, and the doors were locked, there would be a rapping at the door. Hungry drunk boys pleading for just a Beef 'n' Cheddar before they attempted to drive themselves home. Sometimes they offered us money above and beyond the market price. A few times, I relented, much to the dismay of the rest of the crew who were itching to be off and away on their own late night sojourns. Mostly I would throw up my hands and mouth "I'm sorry," even though I knew they could hear me just as well as I could hear their drunken whining on the other side. But mostly I tried to imagine how anything we had to offer was going to make their condition any more fortunate. 

Which is why getting paid to sit on the retaining wall in front of an elementary school at the end of the day feels like a pretty sweet deal.