(I wrote about my time working at McDonald’s in my Monday article, so I thought for this fiction Friday I would write a nonfiction account of my time there)

I’m not the audience for this place. This play place. I crawl through tight tunnels not meant for my five foot ten frame. I’m barely through the first tube, trying to figure out how to bend my body so that I can get through when I see a small child coming the other way. I wonder if he’s a holdover from when I put the sign up that I needed to work in here. Either way, I can’t have him here while I clean up.

“Hey buddy, I need you to get out of here,” I tell him.

“Why?” he responds.

“Because I need to work in here. There’s a mess that I need to clean up. You should head out of here because it’s yucky in here.”

The kid thankfully crawls away and out of the play place. I keep crawling through the multicolored tubes. I’m nearly at the mess that I, years later, would find out later you need a hazmat license to clean up.

It’s then that I hear someone shrieking at me. It sounds like a dental drill. I’m so close and now she’s banging on the tubes. Getting up here was bad enough, crawling back out is worse. I finally flop out and this woman gets up in my face.

I remember what this woman looks like but I’m not going to describe because it doesn’t matter what she looks like. Imagine a Karen and you’ll have a rough estimate. I’ll never forget her red face.

“Why isn’t my child allowed in the play place? He wants to play, why won’t you let him play?!” she screams at me.

“Because there’s a mess in there, ma’am,” I deadpan.

“Then why isn’t someone cleaning it up!?”

There was a time when my sister and I worked with her friend, who said that when the two of us get yelled at, we are clearly disassociating. Our minds are elsewhere. Not today though, I felt the rage burst its way up through me. But I need to keep this job because it would be far too depressing to get fired from McDonald’s.

“I’ll get right on that, ma’am,” I say.

I crawl my way back up into the play place. I clean up the poop and spray everything down. I crawl my way back out and throw away the towel I used. I would quit like three months later because I found out you could work at CVS at the age of sixteen. I got yelled at a lot more at CVS. I eventually got used to it though I never liked it.

Oh, by the way, especially in the post pandemic world, don’t let your kids in the ball pit. We never bothered to clean that and I doubt anyone else did either. Those places are disease and germ pits.