Are you at least a manager at the McDonald's
STORY TIME
I was. I was for two years. however, when I was first promoted, I didn't drive, so the franchisee owner offered to stump up the cash for my lessons, a car and insurance right away because she needed a manager at a different store. So I took the offer, and went to the other store.
Thing is, i'd never worked at that store before, and was brand new to the world of management. so, i walk in and try to start managing things, and the crew there didn't want to know. it was a smaller store and the crew were all in the same little clique and because I wasn't one of them, it went really badly.
So I'm moved to a much bigger store which I had only worked at a couple of times to cover their crew parties. The problem there was that it was incredibly busy all the time. One of the busiest drive thrus in the country, and you needed to have an intricate knowledge of the store (busiest times, where to position people etc) to be able to manage it effectively. Intricate knowledge that is only gained by rising through the ranks there, not somewhere else. So that went even worse.
So eventually i'm moved back to my original store, but by this time i'm exhausted and have no enthusiasm.
The overarching problem was that the operations consultant thought I was going to go to these other places and march in the big man and start throwing my weight around as if i'm the best. And as is true in any workplace, if you do that, you're going to be marginalized. so i tried to play it low key but then everyone thinks you're a pushover. i didn't know how to billy-goating play it, i was a brand new 19 year old manager in alien territory.
And did i'm mention that the store manager at my first store was an incredible prick? well, she was/is. she's off billy-goating up another store now thank billy-goat, but she didn't help matters once i got back to my first store. I ended up writing a very long email to her boss detailing carefully how bad she was and i ended up being demoted. though that reads as an invitation to advise me that was a bad idea and i'm zany, it isn't and i'm not. something had to be done. I'm not trying to sound like some sort of martyr, but someone had to be done.
anyway, i kept the management pay rate and fell into working more behind the scenes where i had to talk to fewer people. i was 19 when I was first promoted, and had been at three different stores and demoted again by the time I was 21. I'm 25(almost) now, and the average age of the majority of the crew is still 16/17 and I can't stand to hear the billy-goating gossip and bulldoo doo they talk about.
about the only thing that keeps me going now is that because i'm so much older than almost everyone else and don't ever talk to them, i have a much quieter life. Also, i know more than everyone else, so even some of the manager who were promoted as young as I was who are equally as clueless as I was, come to me when they having problems.
So yeah, there is a brief history of the last eight years of my life.