Behind the Counter

I am on the wrong side of the counter.

It's a fast-food joint. I am training. It is presumed I know something. I am pretending to be a transfer who only needs catching up with local procedure. Maybe I'm writing an article on the life of a burger flipper.

Someone is showing me. Here is this, and there is that, and, watch out, it's hot. All this product goes in this cage and this other sits over here. A bell rings. That means that over there is cooling past where it should in relation to this over here.

It's all unrecognizable. What is all this "product"? I can't ask, or they'll realize I don't know. Which is the point of asking, but it means I ain't qualified if I don't know. Dumb is it's own retard.

This is Lifer Slim here. He's telling me about that over there. He's the that over there go-to guy. A lifer is over the age where you are only passing a summer. The kids laugh at them, and the lifers retaliate by making them do stuff. Slim is a nice one, though. You can tell the kids like him. He sits over on the counter out of sight with his lunch. (Brought from home, I note.)

The young girls set the tone. The customers like them and so do the lifers, so the boy kids do too, because the girls generally brighten up the place and everybody smiling is better than everybody not.

So it goes.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to mime acts of others, although it all makes no sense to me.