How hard can it be?

‘Three cups of tea and some jobs please!’ I asked with feigned enthusiasm, my head thick with the gunk of post alcohol excess. I tried a smile, hoping that it would help. It didn’t.
From behind the counter the teenager stared at me, his expression initially blank as he attempted to compute my order. Slowly, at a speed similar to the rising of a winter’s sun, something then began to register across his face: bemusement.
A dim light flickered in his eyes and his mouth twisted slightly on one side moments before he turned to scan the menu on the board behind him. Turning back towards my friends and I, he pensively bit his bottom lip. His expression now registered a deep concentration; one battling utter confusion and bewilderment. For a second time he turned to scan the board. I looked at my friends beside me, both of whom turned their heads towards me, shrugged their shoulders and raised their eyebrows, simultaneously opening the palms of their hands at their sides as if welcoming some kind of impending doom. They weren’t far off. Moments later the teenager again turned to face us. The expression of confusion remained for just a fraction of a second longer before it disappeared altogether and returned to its default state. With eyes seemingly devoid of hope he asked, ‘Would you like fries with that?’
A couple of friends and I had decided to spend our summer holiday away from university and working in Blackpool. It was as good an idea as any other.
We chose Blackpool because we each had other friends there and on the day of our arrival we found ourselves a place to live: a squalid bed-sit next to the football ground. It was a vile place, a bit like living in a skip only considerably less-civilised, and for a moment I thought about changing my name to Grover (from Sesame Street). The moment soon passed and so I didn’t.
Understandably, the rent was very cheap but we were students. We were broke and in urgent need of cash. To get some of it we needed jobs. Spectacularly hung-over from a night’s free boozing in Blackpool Tower (courtesy of a friend employed behind one of its bars) we went for an early lunch in McDonalds. We left with three offers of employment and our tea. I had some chicken nuggets, too.
At first, for reasons impossible to recall and irrelevant anyway, we were told that we couldn’t begin our jobs for another week. Our financial situations were all particularly dire and so, because I was feeling a little more resourceful than the others I asked whether there was anything else that we could do in the meantime to get some cash. Foolishly, the manager told us that there was. He told us that he had some painting and decorating for us. I was quite apprehensive about that.
It must be recognised at this point that I’m not particularly adept at home improvements, let alone business ones. I’ve never so much as put a piece of self-assembly furniture together without either discovering at least one leftover bolt on the floor (and said item later collapsing into a heap of disappointment at half-four in the morning), or myself in a state of recovery from a momentary bout of fury-induced amnesia having smashed a shelving unit into a million pieces because I’ve not read the Pidgin-English instructions. I’ve barely zero hours of experience painting and decorating and I can’t recall ever taking a roller in-hand or, as would soon become rather obvious, operating an industrial belt-sander to ready some fire doors for repainting. That said, we agreed to the jobs immediately and while my two friends were handed some brushes and pointed in the direction of the staff room, I was handed the industrial belt-sander and pointed in the direction of the fire doors.
Now, in experienced hands such a device can make light work of preparing each of the huge, rather expensive fire doors for a re-paint. Since mine weren’t in any way experienced however, I’d simply thought: hey, how hard can it be? And carried on regardless. It was, as it turned out, very.
I simply couldn’t get used to the sensitivity of the trigger of the device which, despite my caution would launch the machine, with me in-tow, up the entire length of the door, gouging out a rather unsightly chunk of MDF in the process. No matter: eight hours later and I was standing back and admiring five of the restaurant’s fire doors, each of varying thickness, hanging pitifully throughout the corridor while a burgundy-faced manager stood dumbstruck with what appeared to be smoke billowing out of his ears.
Possibly, it was his own stupidity at asking me to do the job in the first place that was the reason I wasn’t immediately fired. As for him, it was certainly going to be a while before he would get anywhere near to redeeming himself for the eleven thousand pounds that he’d taken the best part of an hour to explain to me that they were going to cost the company to replace. I was then rota’d on to the counter and to asking ‘Would you like fries with that?’ Not altogether surprisingly, I didn’t last much longer as an employee of McDonalds.
Despite my efforts to be as professional as possible I quickly got the impression that the manager wasn’t my greatest fan. This became apparent when he discovered that I’d given away about a hundred free cheeseburgers because I’d failed to check the closing date on the vouchers. It was an oversight that I learned only when he yelled something particularly morale-destroying at me across the restaurant. Realising then that there was no way that I was ever going to get my five stars of professionalism to wear on my silly red shirt I handed in my notice and got myself a job crippling the faintly-famous at Blackpool Pleasure Beach instead.