“Excuse me, can I take you out to dinner sometime?”
“I’m sorry, I have a boyfriend.”
“Do you like your boyfriend?”
“Yes, I love my boyfriend!”
“That’s too bad, you’re damn sexy too.”
Days at Dunkin weren’t always like this, these were rare occasions of not so terrible flirting. In my one year and three months’ anniversary of working at Dunkin Donuts, my thoughts on fast food jobs are still the same: this is terrible! Customers can suck sometimes and on a range from vacuum cleaner to black hole, it all just depends on the times they walk into the store. Like all new recently employed youngsters, I had the energy of a million light bulbs raging through me with all the hope and possibility of being able to afford the great life style of a girl who loves books and all things fandom.
I spent all summer ecstatic about how great it was to be able to go to work and then just come home and leave work problems where they belonged, no homework, hoorah! But I also spent many mornings resenting the fact that I had to be up by 4am, and I was just not ready to talk to anyone that early in the morning. The first couple of weeks, months really, I felt really lonely, getting used to the fact that I wasn’t as fast as everyone else yet, that I didn’t know all the things everyone else knew, so I kept to myself.
It was like this all summer, until I started school and began working only Sunday mornings. It was probably one of the best decisions I have ever made, even though I still hate it, I made a close friend who made getting up on Sundays very worth it. Our friendship blossomed slowly, but it hit us all at once when they tried to get her to work the drive-thru while I kept working the front register. Which everyone then realized was an epic fail because we kept meeting in the middle until she slowly made her way back to the front register, and we have been inseparable since then.
Working at Dunkin has taken me by surprise not only because I did not realize how stressful the job could be, but because of how it made me realize that I didn’t want to be stuck working that job for the rest of my life. That single day of the week served the purpose of a refresher and a reminder that I needed to keep my focus and I needed to set bigger and better goals for myself. I woke up every Sunday at 4:30am thinking “I gotta work harder at school, so that this won’t be the rest of my life.” Having a part time job and being a full time student is one of the hardest things life has put me through so far, but it has taught me to appreciate what I have and it has given me one of my closest friends. So when I look back at working and being a student I will always be grateful for this experience.
