For a lot of college students, quarantine meant that they no longer had school or could go out. A lot of them got laid off from work or didn’t have one, to begin with. When quarantine first began, I didn’t have a job and spent most of my time bored at home doing nothing or homework. Right before quarantine ended though, my old manager called me asking me to come back to work.
I had not worked at Chick-fil-A in almost a year, but after working for about two days I started to get the hang of everything again and was doing fine. Because of COVD-19, there were different procedures we had to follow which made working a lot harder and slower at times. There were many new things which made my job very annoying when I came back.
1. Masks
I’m not saying we shouldn’t wear them because we definitely need to for everyone’s safety, but working at a fast-food restaurant and wearing a mask isn’t it. There have been so many times where I have to run to the back to get a drink of water or I’m just running out of the air because it’s too hot. It makes it harder to hear people so I yell a lot so people can hear me.
2. Gloves
Whenever I would work, I would usually just wear one glove in case I needed to bag food. Now I have to wear two gloves. Wearing two doesn’t seem like much a difference, but you have to change it more often and they rip much faster. Furthermore, they make my hands sweat and when I take them off they end up getting a white powder which I have to be washing off every time and it takes time away from handing customers their food.
3. Using a Tray
When handing out food, we usually just give it to the customer so it goes from our hand to their hand. Now, we hand them their food on a tray so that our hands don’t come in contact with theirs and we won’t have to switch out our gloves.
4. Sauces and Straws
Before we would just put the sauces directly into the bag with the food. Rather now we have to put it in a smaller bag with just sauces so that the food and the sauce containers don’t touch. Similarly, the straws are added to this bag when before we would just hand customers the straw with their drink.
Although everything is a safety precaution, it can get a bit annoying when we are holding on food and we still have to focus on doing that. It can end up making the job seem tedious and boring. But I do like the fact that my job is helping by taking caution toward COVID-19 so that more people in the LA county don’t get sick.