CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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The Great Taco Bell Rebellion

Thursday, June 01, 2006

this entry brought to you by nine inch nails, "no, you don't"


My first job, perhaps predictably, was at Taco Bell. I worked as the front-end cashier, and if there was a good thing I could say about my job it's that they never even taught me how to make the food. There were people there who did not want to work the register, which was fine with me. I didn't want to make the food.

But I hated that job. Hated it. Suicidal hated it. And I only worked there for three months. Imagine what I would have been like if I'd been there any longer.

I walked home from work nearly every day and I would just stew in self-hatred, working myself into a self-hating lather. One day I'd walked into the apartment complex from work and a little boy, who had been playing, ran up to me. "Wow!" he exclaimed. "You work at Taco Bell!"

I smiled warmly at him.

"That's so cool!" he said.

I kind of shrugged.

"When I get older, I want to work at Taco Bell!"

A spark of rebellion went off in me. I took off my Taco Bell hat and put it on the kid's head.

"Now when you get old enough, you'll have a head start," I said. I was so proud of myself. Fuck Taco Bell. Fuck my Taco Bell hat. It was this symbolic gesture. I didn't care if my hat was gone. What were they going to do? Fuck 'em. I was my own person. They didn't own me. Didn't have the right to force me to wear a shitty, demeaning hat. I wasn't giving a kid a hat - I was being defiant. I was showing The Man what I thought of his hat and his symbolic ownership of me.

"Gee, thanks!" the kid said ecstatically and went running off to show his mother who had been sitting on a lawn chair outside, keeping an eye on him. I watched him as he went running off, swelling with pride.

His mom took the hat off his head. "Honey, I think he needs that," she said, and then approached me. "Excuse me, sir? Won't you need this?"

I hesitated. I didn't want it. I didn't need it. Fuck Taco Bell. Fuck The Man. But what was I supposed to do? I couldn't quit, at least not without a another job lined up -- I needed the money. And they could send me home for not being in dress code. How long would it take them to order a new one? I knew for a fact that we didn't have any hats in the back room. And then I had this image of my boss yelling at me for no hat and sending me home without pay.

And so like a shmuck I took my hat back and said weakly, "Yeah, yeah I guess I do." And with that my rebellion, my sticking it to the man, was deftly killed. And it wasn't just killed it was pathetically put out of its misery. My pride got on its knees and cried, whining to be killed, and this mother unhesitantly put a gun to its head and squeezed.

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with love from CRS @ 11:33 PM 

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