The Fast-Food Industry is a Soul-Sucking Monster

I worked in the foodservice industry for over a decade, and I wouldn’t wish Taco Bell on anyone. - By Jason Weiland

I quit high school for good when I was fifteen years old.

Due to my ever-worsening depression and anxiety, and the prospect of changing schools for the tenth time and being held back a year, I left the grounds one day, stubborn and sullen, never to return. I spent my days hiding from the pesky truant officers at the local library, reading massive encyclopedias and learning about forbidden things like sex, evolution, and other religions, which I was never able to do before because I grew up as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I lived a sheltered and strict life and wasn’t supposed to learn these illicit subjects. The library offered me freedom and an education I could never get in school.

After that, a neighborhood grocery store said they had work for me, so it was little trouble for me to get a job. I enjoyed working mostly because I was able to contribute to my poor family, who were struggling at the time.

But we left Minnesota shortly after and headed for Texas, where dad would have a job in yet another bakery. He was a master baker and in high demand. I helped him in the back for a while, hiding out and mostly washing dishes, but there was a chance the police would find out I should have been in school, and I didn’t want my dad to get in hot water. So, at sixteen, I started looking for jobs — and the fast-food places would take anyone — so I answered an ad in the newspaper that said Burger King had immediate openings.

Before long, I was schlepping greasy hamburgers and fries, and suggestive-selling large strawberry milkshakes in the drive-thru at a very high-volume store in Midland, Texas. The pace at which they expected you to work was break-neck and frantic, but I was young, healthy, and had a lot of energy. I also had easy access to as much Coca-Cola and greasy carbs as I wanted, so I worked the ten to twelve-hour days and mandatory overtime without complaint.

Even if I was making a measly $2.33 an hour, all that overtime always ensured that I had a big check (for a sixteen-year-old) after two weeks. But because dad’s MS started making working impossible again and he struggled to pay the bills, I gave everything I made to my family, except for a twenty-dollar bill, in case I needed to take a bus. I never whined or felt sorry for myself, because for all the years Dad and mom worked their asses off, even when they were ill, they never once complained and gave my brother and me everything they could manage and more.

We eventually left Texas and headed back to Louisiana. In Baton Rouge, I was a server at a Pizza Hut, and when we went back to Bunkie, also in Louisiana, I wrangled pizzas again.

We moved around more than most families did, looking for greener grass, and finding jobs for my dad until his health would give out inevitably. Then we would go somewhere else. That was the pattern of my young life, but it was my life, and I didn’t know anything else.

From Louisiana, we headed to Tucson. I worked for years for low wages in a horrible environment at Burger King, I worked countless hours and endless shifts. But when the bosses chose me to help open a new store, they put me on salary so they could push me to work longer hours without earning overtime pay.

By then it was the late 1980s, and I had a wife and a growing family, but I rarely saw them because I was working so much. My life was the restaurant, and even when my mental health kept getting worse, I worked harder so I could support the people waiting for me at home.

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After years of thankless toil and some marital trouble, we split up and I took a break from food and worked as a manager in the furniture rental industry. But a combination of separation from my kids, my worsening mental illness, a penchant for collecting high-capacity firearms, and copious amounts of drugs and alcohol caused me to crash and burn in the most public of ways.

I headed back to Tucson and my troubled marriage and grabbed the only job that would have me. For the next year, I worked at Little Caesars Pizza as an assistant manager, and as the store manager after we moved to Gallup, New Mexico. From there, we moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and I scored a high-paying manager gig at Taco Bell. I say high-paying, but the only people who considered it as such were poor people like me.

The eighty-hour weeks and stressful long shifts pushed me and my mental state to the brink until I crashed again and knew I needed to make some changes.

All those years in fast food took a toll on my physical and mental health until I was a shell of the man I had once been. All those days and nights away from my family were also one of the big reasons my first marriage ended in divorce a few years later.

I couldn’t do it anymore, but I didn’t know anything else, so I set out to change that.

I needed a new career direction, and the only way I knew to learn something new was to go to college. But I had a problem. I wasn’t even a high school graduate. I found out I could still go to college with a GED, so I looked up where to take the tests. I remembered little from school and never got to learn things like Algebra, so I found a study guide at the library and started relearning everything I had ever forgotten and absorbing some new things I had never gotten to in High School.

It took a few weeks, but I was finally ready to take the tests. I was nervous, but confident, and walked out of the building that day knowing I had aced them. They were easy. I found out later that I had placed in the top 2% of the country, and it made me feel better about going to college in my late 20s.

I was on my way!

What I really wanted to do was be a writer, but I listened to the well-meaning people who reminded me I had a family and “Had I forgotten that writers don’t make any money?” I started checking around schools and tech universities and working with computers seemed to be the most promising track I saw.

I signed up, qualified for student loans, and before the day was over, got my badge that said I was in the computer animation program at CAD Institute.

But I still had a problem. I had to work.

Taco Bell was not thrilled about me returning to school and wouldn’t agree to trim my hours back. I was a salaried manager and expected to work as many hours as they needed me, which turned out to be between 60–80 a week.

But I didn’t give up. I‘d planned for my assistant managers to open the store, so I could attend class from 4:00 am to 8:00 am on weekdays.

Every day I showed up on campus at 3:45 am. Then I would leave school at 8:00 a.m., change my clothes, and start my workday at Taco Bell at 8:30 a.m. I often worked until 10:00 p.m., or longer if the unpredictable overnight crew didn’t show up. We were a 24-hour location, so if my people didn’t show up to work, and I couldn’t get anyone else, I worked by myself.

It happened more often than I would have liked.

Somehow, for the next three years, I managed both my job at Taco Bell and college. I don’t remember how I was able to do all the art projects, papers, and extra programming that had to be done and keep myself on the Dean’s List, but I did. I don’t know how I taught myself web design when I saw that my arts degree would do very little to get me a job as an animator. Sadly, I had no artistic talent, but I could build websites.

I don’t know how I managed to support my family as the only breadwinner when I was completely and utterly depressed and anxious all the time. I don’t know how I managed to graduate with honors when life was bleak, and I couldn’t control what was going on in my head anymore.

A few months later, I left the animation program because a bachelor’s degree would have been a waste of time and money. Instead, I took the web design skills I’d taught myself and moved on to a better career.

Taco Bell was the last fast-food place I worked, and it almost killed me. I was a 30-year-old in a 50-year-old body, and my mind was so damaged I would never be the same again.

I did go on to do big things, working my way into a job making $125,000 a year and even starting a web design business with my best friend in Boston, all while holding down that six-figure job.

Then one day I lost everything.

But that is another story.

There is a Lesson Here Somewhere

Even though, for most of my life, it felt like I lived without any control over anything, I took the circumstances I’d been given and made the best of them. Yeah, life handed me the shitty end of the stick often, but I made the decision to keep going forward and never give up.

Contrary to what I’ve written, there were good times in my life. I’ve been a husband twice, and a father five times. I’ve lived all over the United States and ended up halfway around the world living my best life in the Philippines after losing everything and heading into a death spiral. I’ve worked for peanuts and six figures.

Even with the mental illness thrown on top of everything else, I‘ve had moments of extreme bliss and happiness. I’ve grown into a person who knows the importance of family and how to love.

Even if my life has been one big shit sandwich, I found fulfillment.

Keep going. Never give up. Cherish to good times.

I did, even when work was sucking the life from me.