Imagine spending a minimum of four hours on your feet, beads of sweat slowly and annoyingly dripping down your forehead as you hurry back and forth between a grill and a salad unit. You’re flipping meats and layering cheeses and condiments as quickly as you can while an impatient businessman on his lunch break hovers at the sneeze guard with a hawk's eye on your every move. When you finally give him his sandwich with a peppy “Here you go, sir!” you get nothing in return except a hasty hand snatching the hot food from yours. By the end of the day, you’ll have served over a hundred customers, you’ll be covered in a sticky layer of grease and sweat, and you’ll wonder how you can survive another shift.

Welcome to fast food, folks.

For three years, I worked as a team member at a New England sub shop chain. I cooked, cleaned, ran the register, prepped food, opened and closed, and did just about anything asked of me. It was the most grueling job I’ve had in my life, and probably the most physically tasking one I ever will have—with any luck. Most of the time, I came home with aching feet, a sore back, and an extreme need for a shower, but no matter what, I always came home with stories.

Working in fast food, you learn a lot about people. The location I worked for was a convenient stop for all walks of life: business people, families, school sports teams, road-trippers, truckers, and seniors. If there’s anything that draws a herd of different people together, it’s food, and D’Angelo Grilled Sandwiches knew how to make some mean subs.

However, even stronger of a link between people than the dreaded “hangry” effect, is this simple human fact: people just want to be listened to.

And I’ve listened to them all. To the businessman that has been taking orders all day from an agitated boss and just wants someone to take an order from him. To the old woman who only comes out once a week to have lunch at our shop and wants to talk about her husband who passed away. To the regular that repeats the same stories every day because he got into a car accident a few years ago that destroyed his short-term memory. To the Russian couple that didn’t speak a lick of English, but who appreciated my attempts at universal sign language so they could still place an order.

All of these are real people I have listened to as they peered over the counter and watched me make their sandwich. Sometimes I would take my time picking out the ingredients from the salad unit as they talked, allowing the time to fill up with the words they’d waited so long for someone to acknowledge.

Fast food can be a thankless job. Most times, people forget the ones making their food aren’t just slaves at their service. We put up with insults and complaints aimed at our intelligence, speed, age, race, and gender. We witness a microcosm of society walk into our restaurant every day, and we listen to every single member of it.

All I can hope is that by the time I hand them their order, each heartfelt “thank you” is for something more than just the sandwich I’ve made.