My first job was fast food too. Except for the pay, the grease, the unpredictable and strict hours, and the cleaning of bathrooms, I'd love to take a job like that up again.
There's stress, but it ends at the end of the breakfast/lunch/dinner rush, not a constant low-grade stress over the whole day and often lingering into the night from unfinished JIRA tickets.
Then there's mostly chatting and hanging out with interesting people, either kids with dreams or adults with off-the-beaten-path lives (not an endless stream of white collar adults who only have stories about how they went to a bbq or just had another kid) while cleaning or prepping food, helping a customer here and there. Some customers were assholes but they'd be gone a few minutes later and you'd go back to other things. And because it's a public facility sometimes my friends would stop by just to say hi and shoot the shit for a few minutes.
And I was much healthier then too, despite working fast food. Mainly because I spent my day moving instead of being stuck in a chair.
I also worked a retail, a warehouse, and a factory job. The retail job was even better because you didn't have to deal with the grease or cleaning bathrooms, and the customers were somewhat nicer. If it paid remotely near what I make now I'd probably switch to that tomorrow.
Factory job was probably the toughest. More isolating, no A/C in the summer, more constant stress, more physically demanding, mandatory 10 hour days for weeks sometimes, and there was an incident where a drunk forklift driver almost knocked a tower of heavy steel racks on top of me. I quit the next week.
There's stress, but it ends at the end of the breakfast/lunch/dinner rush, not a constant low-grade stress over the whole day and often lingering into the night from unfinished JIRA tickets.
Then there's mostly chatting and hanging out with interesting people, either kids with dreams or adults with off-the-beaten-path lives (not an endless stream of white collar adults who only have stories about how they went to a bbq or just had another kid) while cleaning or prepping food, helping a customer here and there. Some customers were assholes but they'd be gone a few minutes later and you'd go back to other things. And because it's a public facility sometimes my friends would stop by just to say hi and shoot the shit for a few minutes.
And I was much healthier then too, despite working fast food. Mainly because I spent my day moving instead of being stuck in a chair.
I also worked a retail, a warehouse, and a factory job. The retail job was even better because you didn't have to deal with the grease or cleaning bathrooms, and the customers were somewhat nicer. If it paid remotely near what I make now I'd probably switch to that tomorrow.
Factory job was probably the toughest. More isolating, no A/C in the summer, more constant stress, more physically demanding, mandatory 10 hour days for weeks sometimes, and there was an incident where a drunk forklift driver almost knocked a tower of heavy steel racks on top of me. I quit the next week.