Thread: "I hate this job" - Fast Food Worker

(I sincerely apologize if this has already been posted!)

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... 4b1bd.html

LATEST NEWS

'I hate this job,' says Dallas fast-food worker

Woman offers peek into bleak existence

09:31 PM CST on Sunday, November 26, 2006
New York Times News Service

DALLAS – Off a bleak and empty interchange midway through the Dallas sprawl stands a Burger King. It's past midnight, the rain sizzles on the parking lot blacktop like frying bacon. A young woman is working the lobster shift at the drive-through window. She is overweight and wears pink lipstick.

"Nothing special," she says of herself. "Nothing much."


As other area residents turned in for the night, Gloria Castillo, 22, worked the late shift at a drive-through window off Loop 12 recently.
Gloria Castillo is 22, married, a mother of two, a Latina from the rough side of Dallas. She is on the low side of making it.

The night is busy, and a mustache of perspiration breaks across her lip. She is alone with the fry cook.

The customers are rude tonight, drunk and bellicose. One guy doesn't want to pay for his food, figuring it ought to be free. If he had wanted to rob the place, Castillo says with a tight smile, it would have been easy enough; the window doesn't lock here like it does at the McDonald's.

From the car window, the whole fast-food experience is a numbing routine. Pull up. Order from the billboard. Idle. Pay. Drive away. Fast food has become a $120 billion motorized American experience.

But consider the life inside that window on Loop 12 in West Dallas. There is a woman with children and no health insurance, undereducated, a foot soldier in the army of the working poor. The fry cook sneezes on the meat patties. Cigarettes go half smoked. Cameras spy on the employees. Customers throw their fries and soft drinks sometimes because they think it's funny.

"I hate this job," Castillo says with a smile. "I hate it." It is her third drive-through job. First it was Whataburger. Then McDonald's. Now here. It is becoming a career.

"Burger King pays better," she says. Even so, she's taken a second job: "It's a bar. There's a lot of white guys in there. I go and clean the restrooms. There's three restrooms I clean for $150, and I do it in one hour and 30 minutes. One hour and a half."

Castillo is the daughter of an illegal immigrant who came to America from Honduras by bus 22 years ago, with Castillo gestating inside of her. Her mother lives on a disability check now, and Castillo is the American who sees herself competing with illegal labor, labor that drives down her wage, she says.

"I never worked with white people," she says while putting a cup of soda and ice together. "Everywhere I go and apply, it's always Mexicans, black or Chinese."

She surmises that the entire morning staff at her Burger King is illegal. "I can tell you everyone who works here in the morning works fake papers. No English. Nobody in the morning knows English.

"Somebody takes the order and then we tell them in Spanish."

Ernesto Hernandez, her manager, says he does not know if he employs people who work with false Social Security numbers and that it is not his job to know if the numbers are real. "Call corporate," he says in a thick accent. "They have that information."

Corporate did not return calls.

Whatever the truth of the matter, there's a lot of ethnic friction behind the drive-through glass, Castillo says: "There's a lot of hate."

She hands the soda and a sack of 10 tacos to a guy in a Chevy who looks stoned. He doesn't count his change. He drives away with one hand on the wheel, one in the sack of tacos.

A sign on the window says: "Burgers for breakfast beginning at 8 a.m."

Castillo works from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. She earns $252 a week before taxes. There is no chance of overtime, because the boss doesn't allow it. To make ends meet, she and her husband work split shifts, he at an auto parts place during the day and she at the Burger King at night. And so the children, ages 7 and 8, are alone for a half-hour in the morning, left to wash and dress themselves.

Castillo arrives at her two-bedroom rental house on a tough street at 7. She takes the boys to a McDonald's for breakfast at 7:15 – the same place she used to work – before dropping them off at school at 7:45. A man named Carlos works the window there. They used to work there together.

Every morning, the boys' order is the same: one sausage, egg and cheese biscuit; one bacon biscuit; two hash browns; and two orange juices. Castillo could take free food home from Burger King, but the boys like McDonald's better.

She returns home, sleeps until 2 and collects the boys from school. She cooks them supper prepared from frozen packages, and sometimes they eat it in front of the television. It takes time and money to eat healthy, she says.

At 7 she puts the kids to bed. She spends a few hours with her husband, dresses in her purple polyester uniform with the yellow piping and drives to work. On Saturdays she attends community college, hoping that in a few years she will be a paralegal going to work in a downtown office tower, wearing a pantsuit. She is hoping for $20 an hour and a lunch break.

"Regrets, yes, I got some," she says. She wishes she would have worked harder in school. Not gotten pregnant at 13. Again at 14. She wishes she would have thought about life instead of letting it come at her, one dead end job at a time.

Around 2 a.m. work begins to slow down. This is the unpredictable hour. It could be filled with only the fry cook's music, or it could be the hour that gunmen rob the place and lock them in the freezer. It's happened before, she says. It happens dozens of times a month at fast food restaurants across the country.

Tonight, it's music. Gloria Castillo stares out the open window, allowing the wet air to blow inside. "I got dreams," she says. "I'm a human being."

She looks at the crummy little house across the parking lot with peeling paint. "That would be good too, a little house. I don't want much."

So an offspring of an ilegal alien hates her job.

Hey ... any American Citizens out there who hate their jobs? I haven't heard any complaints. What I hear are American Citizens who want jobs ... and any job will do.

Maybe that's why when we were a Nation of Americans instead of an illegal melting pot of sneaks, liars and thieves ... we were the most successful nation on Earth. We were the most educated. We were the world's largest exporter of everything from consumer products to high-technology items. We were the highest paid workers. We were the nation of opportunity and dreams that could come true for many if not all and for those who didn't make it in that generation knew that the next generation could and more would. We were respected. We were admired. We felt good about ourselves. We had futures. We had better lives and circumstances to hand off to the next generations of Americans.

But that's when America was a Nation of Americans.

Now, we are no longer a Nation of Americans. We are no longer the most educated nation. We are no longer the largest exporter. We no longer lead the world in technology, precision tools or production of anything else. We no longer have the highest paid workers. We no longer have the highest per capita income. We are no longer a nation of success, production, opportunity or achievable dreams. We aren't even a sustainable nation by any measurement.

We are a nation of debt, waste, slippage and failure on every level.

How did this happen?

By the very means anticipated by our Founding Fathers:

Treason.

When a nation of people do nothing to stop a Killer Virus like Treason consuming their nation and all it's stood for before their very eyes from the White House to the Congress to the US Supreme Court, then of course the Virus Wins.

How could it fail?

Actually, her mother was ILLEGAL but she's an anchor baby. She's a defacto American Citizen.

Nice, eh

and the cycle continues.............

.

Castillo is the daughter of an illegal immigrant who came to America from Honduras by bus 22 years ago, with Castillo gestating inside of her. Her mother lives on a disability check now, and Castillo is the American who sees herself competing with illegal labor, labor that drives down her wage, she says.
-------------------------------

Yeah, she is the daughter of an illegal. And she says: and Castillo is the American who sees herself competing with illegal labor, labor that drives down her wage, she says.

So she's an American Citizen, an Anchor Baby, offspring of an illegal alien gestating as her mother crossed the border ... now working at a Burger King ... complaining about the very condition that brought her here.

She and her mother should have been deported 22 years ago.

That would have been in 1984.

That would have been during Ronald Reagan's Presidency.

That would have been before the 1986 Amnesty.

So can we assume the mother was given Amnesty and is technically a de facto American Citizen as well?

Apparently so if she gets a disability check ... that would be social security I presume.

I wonder how old the mother is? Late 30's early 40's?

I wonder how long she's been on disability?

I wonder how much that family has cost American Taxpayers because a pregnant mother from Honduras wasn't deported?

I wonder who paid the medical bills for her pregancy after she got here when Castillo was born?

I wonder how many other costs American Taxpayers underwrote for this family ... already in its third generation in 22 years?

I don't want to know the answer to that. I think I was happier being oblivious to the problem. Yet, here I sit, a really angry person... churning out letters day after day... hoping for a miracle - all because I tuned in to a Lou Dobbs show one day and was forced into reality.

Ahh, those were the days.

Originally Posted by ProtestIllegals

I don't want to know the answer to that. I think I was happier being oblivious to the problem. Yet, here I sit, a really angry person... churning out letters day after day... hoping for a miracle - all because I tuned in to a Lou Dobbs show one day and was forced into reality.

Ahh, those were the days.

I hear ya. My revelation came about 19 months ago as I watched my town fill up with them ... almost overnight and began my journey of understanding why this was happening more than 2000 miles from a border state.

What I learned made me sick.

Castillo is the American who sees herself competing with illegal labor, labor that drives down her wage, she says.

She surmises that the entire morning staff at her Burger King is illegal. "I can tell you everyone who works here in the morning works fake papers. No English. Nobody in the morning knows English.

illegal aliens working with our food, hazardous to our health and it hurts this American Citizens life, like it or not she is a legal citizen and we should welcome those like her to our fight.

Originally Posted by dragons5

[quote:1buc9n2c]Castillo is the American who sees herself competing with illegal labor, labor that drives down her wage, she says.

She surmises that the entire morning staff at her Burger King is illegal. "I can tell you everyone who works here in the morning works fake papers. No English. Nobody in the morning knows English.

illegal aliens working with our food, hazardous to our health and it hurts this American Citizens life, like it or not she is a legal citizen and we should welcome those like her to our fight.

[/quote:1buc9n2c]

Oh sure ... absolutely ... I agree 100%.

Her mom too if she was granted Amnesty in 1986 as I expect she was.

You're right, she is an American but I can't say that I'm happy about the situation. I guess it's a moral battle within myself. I'm not angry with this woman or any other people born here to illegal immigrants but I am angry that they (her parents and other parents like hers) come here illegally to have their children because of what that costs tax payers... in one way or the other.

I can't be mad at this woman because she wasn't born yet and had no control over the situation. It is, however, ironic to me that she is blaming her low wages on illegal workers - just as her parents were here illegally. Aren't her parents a part of the problem that she's claiming to have?

I guess I am confused on my own opinion in this matter.