Workin' Hard or Hardly Workin'?

Rose Varner

That day was my first double shift at Sonic: ten hours of fake smiles and a high pitched voice aimed towards complete strangers, except for the occasional familiar face.  I started work at 2 and worked until midnight with a 30 minute break about four hours in. Sonic was a pretty great job and I considered myself lucky to have it. I was a carhop (a.k.a. the chick who brings out the food) so I was allowed to keep all of my tips, plus 5.50 an hour.

                My manager, Meagan, was pretty chill I guess; she let me eat all the food that idiots drove off and left. I’d been working there for about a month: the money was fabulous. The girl’s carhopped and fountain, and the boys cooked.

 The fountainette was the worst job because usually there was one fountain working, making all the drinks: the single item sonic was known for having the best of, so you know there were drink orders right and left. The cooks apparently had a hard job, even though there were usually about 5 of them working at once; however, cooks had the most to clean up at the end of the night because they were not only responsible for the kitchen but the dishes and the floors too.

The ten hours went by pretty smoothly considering it was TEN HOURS. My phone died about two hours into the first shift. I know I shouldn’t even be on my phone, but when business dies down it’s a nice pastime, I went out to one of the cook’s trucks to retrieve a charger he claimed to have. It didn’t work. For the second time, I looked like an idiot to customers by walking across the parking lot. The charger he referred to was a car charger which only worked when the car was on. When I went back inside and worked my butt off for a few more hours, I was invited to go to Taco Bell after work with the fountainette and some of the cooks.

 Five minutes until eleven, I was starting to prepare to leave when my manager asked what I was doing, and then she replied with “But we’re open till midnight”.

                I was scheduled to work my first morning shift the following day, which means that I had to be at sonic at seven o’clock, which means that I will be exhausted. Jonesboro is fifteen minutes away from my house going sixty five M.P.H. and I already said I was going, so stupid, taco-bell-crazed-me still wanted to go to Taco Bell.

                Directly after closing and sweeping the parking lot I went to the car and began to charge my phone. The car charger didn’t work at first which is when I called it some not nice names and it spontaneously began to function normally. I wanted to follow the other people in my car so I could leave early because I was working at the butt crack of dawn like six hours later. Of course, I jammed all the way to Jonesboro, mostly because I jam everywhere, but partially because I was trying to keep myself from falling asleep. It’s like I was so hungry and so tired at the same time that I ALMOST questioned my need for Taco Bell, but then came to my senses and found myself ordering.

                When I finally got home at 1:20 a.m., I threw my trash away, hopped into the shower, hopped out of the shower, climbed into bed, and could not stop thinking about this stupid journal entry that I had to write. So there i was, writing this journal entry at 1:45 in the morning.