Nightmares

Working in a fast food joint, you get inured to a lot of things. Smells, for instance; in highschool I breezed through chemistry classes that made other people physically pass out from the stink. Going to the dump doesn't bother me. Neither does the smell of rotting corpses (I live in an area with a lot of possums, and hey, they've gotta die some time--often they land on our lawn, and guess who cleans 'em up.) I'm kind of inured to oil, too, for that matter. I'm still picky about having wet or oily substances on my face, but on my hands, my clothes, my food--doesn't bother me at all. This is a survival mechanism; most fast food restaurants will dump food that doesn't get sold within about 10 minutes of being made, so there's a nigh-constantly full bin of scraps, and anyone who's ever walked within five metres of a deep frier can tell you all about the oil.

However, I am now deeply, accutely disturbed by wild rats, and often have nightmares involving them. And it's not just because I've watched Willard far too many times.

Every place that sells food has rats. It's a fact of life. Rats learn that there's an easy meal when unsold stock gets thrown out, and often grow bold enough to try sneaking into cupboards and freezers. That's part of the reason rats disturb me; seeing ten or twelve frozen corpses being pulled out of the freezer when the rats made their one and only doomed attempt at nesting in their is the stuff of nightmares for me. Rest assured that all the food they managed to eat before they carked it was summarily disposed of.

The other reason is that we used to have rats living under the deep frier we used to cook chips in. We didn't mind having them there as long as they didn't come out when there were customers around--they saved us the trouble of having to clean up the chips that fell under the machine occasionally, and they were a great way to scare the trainees. However--and you're going to want to stop reading NOW if you're easily squicked--there was one incident that managed to almost make me puke on the job, where the other delightful aspects of fast food preparation had failed.

The easily squicked should stop reading now. Seriously. This was not pleasant.

Hell, if you're only moderately squicked but eat fast food a lot, you might want to stop reading now. This put me off my food for a long time.

Are all the squickable people gone now?

Okay.

...god, this is squicking me just trying to think how to write about it.

So one night, about eight o'clock, I'm on shift. There's a lull in the customers, thank god. It's just me, two other girls on the counter, two guys in the kitchen, and the manager, who's currently setting up tills for the next shift. I go to do something with the deep frier (exactly what is escaping my memory at the moment,) and notice a particularly large, chubby-looking rat sitting on top of the fry cover.

I start talking to it while doing whatever I'm doing with the deep frier, as you do.

"Hey, little guy. How's life? You look oilier than I feeeeeeHOLY SHIT." The 'holy shit' was because this rat had just taken a suicide leap off the fry cover and into a vat of boiling oil.

In the end, I was splattered with oil and had to end my shift early to perform minor first aid on myself, we had to shut down the deep frier and replace all the oil, and the rat's corpse was thrown out. But the worst part--the absolute worst part of the night--was that the stupid fucking rodent didn't die straight away. It was swimming and thrashing around in the oil for a good five minutes. We couldn't get it out because it was spraying up enough oil to seriously damage someone. It looked like a giant, slightly fuzzy chicken nugget with feet. Thrashing in the oil. The oil in which we cook food. Excuse me while I throw up a little bit.

Now, for the fast food job I put up with a lot. It was the only place highschoolers in my area could really find reliable employment. I was abused, sexually harassed, and even memorably assaulted by customers at that store... but the rat did it. I went home that night and had nightmares about that damn rat. I quit that job two days later and spent some time seriously considering drug trafficking as an acceptable alternative to returning to the fast food field.