Dog Days : Tales From the Other Side of the fast-Food Window

I worked at Der Wienerschnitzel for one week during the summer before my freshman year in college. I watched hot dogs cooking on a grill, worked the soda fountain and--being junior man--performed all the necessary sanitary chores. After five days, I was fired.

It wasn’t any kind of culinary passion that drew me to the job. It was a want ad. And coming off half a day of selling vacuum cleaners door to door, something in an indoor air-conditioned line sounded pretty damned good--even at a buck-ninety an hour.

Still, I figure that in those five days, I learned all I want to know about working at a fast-food restaurant. If I remember correctly, my training consisted of the manager--a heavy man, weary under the weight of years of supervising teenage help--guiding me through a loose-leaf binder. The big message seemed to be “Wash Your Hands After Using the Bathroom.”

Then I was handed an apron and a little paper hat (these would shortly become my downfall) and directed to the kitchen.

At that time, drive-thrus were something of a novelty, at least in Albuquerque, so at first there was a kind of thrill to the job. Cars would pull up to a window on one side of the little cinder-block building and give orders. Then they’d pull around to the other side and pick them up.

Theoretically, anyway, the hot dog would be cooked and the garnishes would be applied in the time it took the driver to negotiate the turn. And it seemed to work pretty well, most of the time.

Occasionally, though, we would get a driver who had off-beat requests and that would back everything up. And, Der Wienerschnitzel being about the only eating place in Albuquerque that stayed open past midnight, we got a significant concentration of off-beat requests in our late-night rushes.

There is one I particularly remember. A guy pulls up in a beat-up old Volkswagen bug. In the back seat is a German shepherd wearing a bandanna. The guy orders a hot dog “well-done.” I have never heard of such a thing, but I pick through the dogs on the grill, trying to find the one that looks brownest. I load it up with mustard and relish and, when he appears on the other side, I hand it to him.

“I said well-done,” he says, handing it back.

I put it back on the grill, informing him in my politest fast-food slave voice that it will take a couple of minutes.

“I’ll wait,” he says.

Fortunately, it’s late and there is little traffic, at least for the first two or three minutes. I pull the hot dog again, mustard-and-relish it and hand it back out.

“I said well-done,” he says, handing it back.

By this time, two or three other cars have pulled in behind him, full, by all appearances, of late-night party-goers stopping in for last-minute munchies.

So I try again. Back on the grill it goes. Two or three minutes later I hand it to him and once more he rejects it.

Now I’m really getting a little exasperated, but the dog goes back on the grill yet again. After another two or three minutes, it’s blistering and starting to blacken. I put it on the bun, apply mustard and relish once more and hand it to my customer.

“I said well-done,” he says, handing it back. Now, there are a dozen cars in line and a couple of the drivers are starting to honk.

OK, enough’s enough. I take the hot dog, wipe it clean and dump it in the deep-fat fryer. “It’ll be just another couple of minutes,” I say cheerily. “Thanks for waiting.”

After five minutes in a deep fryer, the only thing that’s left of an already overcooked hot dog is a charred, black, roughly cylindrical cinder.

Into the bun it goes. On go the mustard and relish. And again I hand it out the window.

“That’s perfect,” he says, handing it to the dog in the back seat, which wolfs it down in one bite.

By this time, horns are blaring full-throat and some of the luckier drivers who were late arrivals are already backing out of line. But I have to ask: “If you don’t mind, what the hell was that all about?”

“Simple,” he says. “I hate hot dogs.”

It wasn’t too many days later that the somber-faced manager called me into his office and regretfully informed me that my services were no longer of use to the Der Wienerschnitzel corporation.

Someone, it seems, had noticed me going across the street--in my full DW uniform--to eat lunch at Arby’s.