ok, this is more of a page than a line, but this is from the second draft of the first book i ever wrote that will probably never be finished.
warning: dirty words be lurking
[FONT="]"May I take your order?" I ask, not because I care but because it's my job.[/FONT]
[FONT="]"Hold on, I'm still trying to decide what I want," croaks the old bag who looks like Bea Arthur with dyed blonde hair while she rubs the strands of white hair on her chin. She is wearing all this gaudy jewelry. Not tasteful jewel encrusted precious metals that people with old money like the Hiltons would wear, but the chunky, bad taste jewelry that a woman who lived in a trailer park all her life and just won the lottery would drape over herself. If people don't know what they want to order, then why do they stand in line? The people waiting behind her are ghosts. She is the only person in her world. She's so important that everyone's pleasure is to wait on her highness, or is it her heinous. This is why I hate working in Marietta. Every day there are dozens of women just like her who come into the Arby's where I work. At least half the customers are nothing but a bunch of rich snobs who think I owe them something. The other half is rednecks. In two weeks though, I'm graduating high school and leaving this place to go to college. In fact, my departure from this job is so close that I can fake a smile as I take this old bag's order, and so on and so on. Minutes tick away as she reads the twenty items on the menu, sounding out each syllable in her head. Come on, you can do it. Now the question becomes: Will she place her order before I punch out? The Kmart perfume that Bea Arthur bathed in makes my lungs shrink. I think she's wearing eau de defiled toilette. I pull my shirt over my nose to block the foul scent of the stench orbiting her neck. If she were a cartoon, there would be green stink lines coming out of the collar of her shirt. She’s starting to open her mouth, exposing yellow teeth like old British people have, so I better look at her.[/FONT]
[FONT="]"How big are your thirteen inch subs?" Bea Arthur asks.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Is she serious? I have to look at my pants to make sure that she isn't pulling my leg. I live in a town that still has dirt roads, so it's obvious that I know many stupid people but this woman just raised the bar on stupidity. Did she ride here on the short bus? Thirteen inches, that's how big it is lady. One more inch than a foot. What does she want me to do, pull a yardstick out of my ass and show her the thirteen inch mark. I hope, even though I know it's not true, that she is from some foreign country that’s on the metric system. This empty woman must be married to a rich man because she doesn't have the brain to earn or the body to compel men to buy all the extra-large jewelry she's wearing.[/FONT]
[FONT="]"It's about this big," I say with my hands only apart twelve inches just to mess with her. She started placing her order so I guess she didn't notice the missing inch. And what does she order? Not a thirteen-inch sub, of course. Apparently she was just making small talk with me. Maybe she wanted a glimpse into the glamorous world of fast food. I want to slap some sense into her, but I only have a few hours of work left. I am pretty sure if I started slapping the customers that I would get fired, but that isn't deterring me. The beauty of a minimum wage job is that you don't have to give a shit about anything. If you get fired it's no big deal. It's not like you could get paid any less, unless you were a social worker. I'm such a slacker that even after months of working here, I still don't even know how to ring up the food, if you call what this place serves food. You could give me the same order ten times and I guarantee that all ten times I'd come up with a different total. It's not because I'm stupid, but because I just find the job more demeaning if I have to put in any type of effort. It's my little bit of revenge on this place for eating my free time. The only reason that I work this bullshit after school job is to get my stepfather off my back. Somehow he associates my free time with the decline of western civilization. During my last day of work here, I'm going to come in completely drunk and puke in a customer's mouth when she asks me, "How big are your thirteen inch subs?" Then, I'm going to whip out my cock and say, "This is thirteen inches you old bag!" I'm going to tell the manager, this guy who still wears a mustache, to go fuck himself and just walk out. Who wears a mustache in the 90's? Tight assed fast food lifetime employees, that's who. Screw him. It's funny when Mr. Mustache tries to tell me how to be the model employee who gets his picture framed on the wall with some engraving on the bottom. I can't believe he can't see how much I don't care. It's etched in the lines on my face. That guy is such a failure. His whole career is managing a fast food restaurant. The sad part is that he is probably the biggest success in his family. I can just picture Mr. Mustache's mom bragging on the phone to all her friends about how successful her son is, a manager of the best damn fast food place that she has ever eaten at and clean, too. Working at these types of places is a job for a high school, or maybe even a college, student. Mr. Mustache is pushing forty. How can he look in the mirror each morning and resist slashing his wrists?[/FONT]
