Copyright 1995, Joel Furr (jfurr@furrs.org)

My first job was as a cashier and cook at the Hardee's fast food restaurant in Blacksburg, Virginia. I started work in the summer of 1984, the summer before my senior year of high school.

I applied to work at Hardee's on South Main Street in Blacksburg instead of any of a number of other fast food restaurants I could have applied to because a friend of mine had worked there and assured me that it wasn't intolerable and that some of the management were fairly friendly, as restaurant managers went. Shrugging, I went by and turned in an application; my parents were after me to get a job, and if this place was even marginally less hellish than any given other restaurant in town, why not?

Needless to say, having a pulse and no criminal record, I was hired. I was trained to be a cashier along with six other new employees who'd all been hired that same week. Two weeks later, I was the only one of the seven who was still employed at that Hardee's. Turns out the work and the managers were a damn sight less tolerable than I'd been led to believe, but no matter how hellish the working conditions were and no matter how full of crap the managers were, if I'd quit the job, my parents would have seen to it that my life at home would have been still worse.

We had three types of people at that Hardee's: kids from Blacksburg High School (most of whom had parents who worked or taught at Virginia Tech), students from Virginia Tech, and diehard rednecks from the surrounding Appalachian hills and valleys. I don't use the term 'redneck' in its pejorative sense since my parents, holders of multiple college degrees that they were, were nonetheless from backgrounds in rural Florida and North Carolina that one would have to characterize as somewhat redneck. Instead, I use the term to refer to the indigenous locals, many of whom had limited education and a cultural background that led them to have less of a desire to better themselves than, say, the son of a Ph.D. in nuclear physics might have had.

Two of the three classes of Hardee's employees were almost never considered for positions as "service coordinators" or "assistant managers" or, Heaven forbid, "managers." The high school kids and Virginia Tech students wouldn't make good management employees because they wouldn't stick around -- but if you could forge one of the rednecks into a quality assistant manager, you could keep him or her around for a while.

Consequently, work at Hardee's was made somewhat more arduous that it might have otherwise been because most of the employees had IQs a lot higher than the people giving them orders, and the management employees definitely resented it.

One of my fellow employees when I was first hired was a black cook in his mid-twenties whom I'll refer to as 'J.D.'. He was none too bright and that didn't hurt him much as a cook, but everyone knew he wasn't what you'd call a rocket scientist. When he was just a cook, he was jovial enough and reasonably quick enough with the restaurant banter that would be shouted back and forth through the heat boxes separating the front line from the kitchen. But then, midway through my senior year of high school, J.D. was made a service coordinator and, shortly thereafter, assistant manager.

Life got a little uglier after that point, because to be honest, taking orders regarding work priorities on the front line from someone who'd never worked there and who was pretty damn stupid besides was more than a little trying. Not that I couldn't stand it -- J.D. wasn't always on duty when I worked, and in any case, he was far from the only idiot we had to work under.

I graduated from high school in the spring of 1985, still working at the same Hardee's and still putting up with it for the sake of the money and keeping my parents off my back. That fall, I finally gave my notice as I headed off to the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia -- and on the day when I worked my final shift, I realized that, not counting the managers, I had worked at that Hardee's longer than all but four of my fellow employees. Most people had run afoul of some stupid restaurant rule and been fired, or had simply gotten sick of it and quit. J.D., on the other hand, was flourishing in his management role -- there was definitely a place in the food service world for someone who genuinely did not know or care who the Vice President of the United States was or what the term "word processing" meant.

So I went off to college, secure in the knowledge that I would be spared the responsibility of arising at 5:00 am on Saturdays to put in a breakfast shift at Hardee's with J.D. in the back chanting "push them hash rounds, everyone loves hash rounds" in a monotone.

Three months later, I returned home for Christmas break and, having nothing better to do for the four weeks I was off between Fall and Winter Quarters, I reactivated my position at Hardee's -- and lo and behold, J.D. was no longer working there. I didn't realize this at first since, well, most of my fellow employees that December had not been there when I left in September. But, eventually, I got around to asking where J.D. was -- and was taken into the back, where the entire kitchen crew told me the following story, chiming in on each other if they forgot and left out an important part.

It seems that J.D. had been working the closing shift one night, and it was so slow that he'd actually sent the remaining two cooks home and was closing up the kitchen by himself. Only one cashier was still on duty when the final customer of the night came in: a guy who, as it later turned out, was the manager of the local McDonald's, stopping off for something to eat. J.D. had closed down the grill since it was so slow and since he wanted to be able to leave just as soon as possible once 11:00 came.

The customer ordered a Big Deluxe, and there weren't any Big Deluxes in the heat box -- so rather than turn the grill back on and take a good five minutes getting a burger patty fried, and rather than simply telling the customer that the grill was broken or something, J.D. nodded when the order came in and got to work filling the order. With the grill off, there was only one other place where J.D. could get a cooked burger patty: out of the big plastic garbage can known as the "waste bucket" where we put burgers and sandwiches that'd spent their twenty minutes in the "heat box" without getting sold. These sandwiches were put there for some poor assistant manager to tote up later so an accurate breakdown of sandwiches cooked and sandwiches sold and so forth could be generated. Usually, each day's accumulated unsold sandwiches were counted up after closing or before opening and only then thrown out.

Well, J.D. saw no point that night letting 'em all go to waste, so in full view of the customer (who could see back into the kitchen and who, being the manager of a competing fast food chain, had abstractedly watched what was going on), he fished an unsold Big Deluxe out of the waste bucket, scraped the old lettuce and mayonnaise and cheese and such off the patty, and stuck the patty in the microwave long enough to get it hot again. That done, J.D. slapped the patty on a mayonnaise-smeared bun, added cheese and lettuce and tomato and onion, covered it with the other half of the bun, popped the whole mess in a styrofoam Big Deluxe box, and slid the recycled sandwich into the heat box to be put in the customer's bag.

Horrified at this egregious violation of health regulations, the customer carefully noted down the 800 number posted on the menu board for customer complaints and took his meal and left.

J.D. was met by the store manager when he came in the next day and fired on the spot -- it seems the McDonald's manager had stayed on the phone half the night making sure J.D. never worked in food service again.

That would have been the last we ever heard of J.D. except that J.D. didn't know to stay gone.

Late one night, a couple of weeks before I returned from college for Christmas break, the dinner crew had been going about their business around 9:00 or 10:00 one weeknight. A cook took a garbage can out back to the dumpster and was dumping it when a man wearing a jacket and ski mask, holding a very large knife, stepped out of the shadows and said, quietly, "be cool, man, be cool."

The cook, not slow to recognize the voice and dress of someone he'd worked with for weeks, blinked and said "J.D.??"

J.D., for of course it was him, gestured with the knife as though to say "Who?" and pointed at the back door. The cook led J.D. inside and got the manager, who was likewise greeted by a knife-wielding robber in a ski mask talking in J.D.'s voice and wearing J.D.'s jacket, repeating the phrase "be cool, man, be cool" like a mantra.

The entire kitchen crew recognized J.D., and a few even said "J.D., man, don't do this," but J.D. ignored them and kept right on gesturing with the knife until he finally got around to demanding money. Our Hardee's didn't have much in the way of a safe, and J.D. probably still knew the combination of the safe they did have, so there was little point arguing about whether to give him the money or not. J.D. got his sack of money and shambled off into the night, still muttering darkly at anyone who dared refer to him as "J.D.".

J.D. was on foot, from all accounts, and only lived a mile or so away on Nellie's Cave Road. The police, who'd been called the second J.D. left the restaurant, responded swiftly, and took prompt action. When J.D. arrived home, the cops were sitting in his living room, waiting for him. True to form, his first words when they took his bag of money away from him and divested him of his knife at gunpoint were "how'd you know it was me?"

Sigh.

Through Time and Space with Joel Furr