Someday I'm going to have my own ideas.

It'll be awesome.

Until then, I'm following suit, with my mom and sister. John, you seem to have a knack for starting viral blogs. Good job. Think of all the tables you can wait with that skill. : ]

Anyway.

As you guys know, I work for McDonald's, and have for the last four years (my four year anniversary was last month, actually, I was hired in Sanford, as a Crew Member on April 4th, 2004, don't ask me why I remember that). I was a Crew Member for four months. A shift manager for close to three years. And now an Assistant Manager.

I do like my job, and pretty much always have. I've met some awesome people, and made good friends through McDonald's.

My job isn't all that thrilling, and I don't necessarily make a difference in anyone's life. However, I go to work everyday, for at least nine hours (usually more, nine is the minimum for Staff), and work. My job changes all the time, which I love. Whether it's product changing, new employees, learning new things to do around the store. I used to be quite handy, back in the day. I could tear apart, clean, and fix numerous pieces of machinery, such as toasters, shake and orange juice machine, an ice machine one (I'll admit, that one ended badly). However, the equipment is incredibly different now, and I don't spend as much time on the floor as I used to.

No more uniforms. Ha ha. I love that. I just wear dress clothes to work everyday.

What my job consists of at this moment (it's changing a lot, because I just got a new boss). I do Crew schedules, which are easy, but not very fun. It's time consuming, and tiring, since I look at a screen for hours at a time. So I drink coffee, it's good. I'm in charge of training, which I love (and where I hope my career is headed, I'd like to train Restaurant Managers at Hamburger University). I do a little bit of hiring, but mostly my boss does that (I used to do 100% of the hiring). I'm in charge of our People Promise Manager, which is a Crew person who sort of acts as a "delegate" to the Crew. She knows all about Crew insurance, policies, and does all orientations of new employees, plus a lot of the training (in big stores, Crew Trainers are usually part of a large group, but we have very few employees). I do all the ordering for the store, and deal with our distributor, and also am in charge of supervising all product deliveries, and the integrity of the product upon delivery (basically, if something doesn't look right coming off the truck, I tell the driver it is to go right back on). I'm also our bilingual manager, meaning I deal with anyone who doesn't speak very much english, which is fine. That's not actually a role, but my new boss doesn't speak much spanish at all (my old boss was married to a mexican man, so she spoke tons of spanish). I'm also in charge of safety and security, and making sure the Crew know how to deal with unsafe situations (we have a lot of crazy homeless). Lastly, I'm in charge of promotions and in-store advertising. Menu boards, those window clings, any signs in the store, if you walk into my McDonald's, I put up and/or approved the location of every single one of those.

There are less fun aspects to my job. My new boss is a bit of a (sorry, mom, no better word for this) bitch. She tends to blame things on me, that aren't my fault. She took away a lot of my job responsibilities I really enjoyed, and put me in charge of the things no one else wants to do (which is fine). She often feels, because I ran the store so long with no one above me, I should be stronger in my role than I am (keep in mind, I went from an overnight Shift Manager to a Restaurant Manager in a matter of months).

There are two kinds of Assistants. 1st and 2nd. I'm a 2nd, only by title. We don't have a 1st Assistant, so I have to sort of step up, and take the role, even though I'm in charge of more than I normally would be, in a regular restaurant.

Upon understanding I was being overwhelmed awhile back, and felt as though people were having a hard time taking me seriously, my Operations Manager (who normally doesn't deal with Restaurant Managers, let alone Assistant Managers) assured me when I come back to the company, after school, he will not put me in a SPOD restaurant (Special Point of Distribution), but a regular, free-standing, high-volume restaurant, so that I actually have the right kind of exposure for an Assistant, and will be better ready to keep moving up.

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