Oh, my god! Thank you so much for your post! I worked at McDonald’s for just under a year because it was the only job I could get (small town, I had no connections, and other jobs are for people who have connections). At the same time, I was also teaching belly dance and training to become a certified yoga teacher (eventually I taught at a local community college and the local university).

I was really okay with it, I suppose, until one night, as I worked front counter, a student in my dance class came through my line. She looked at me with pity (a white girl in her twenties, in contrast to my Mexican girl in MY twenties), and said to me, “Oh my god, you had to take a second job, you don’t make enough money teaching?” as if she were saying, “Oh, my god, you’re going to waste away here?”

I became so self-conscious, and I don’t think she went back to class.

And the reason I was working at McDonald’s is that I still needed a day job, since I was only teaching ONE class at the university at the time, and that made me only $25 a week.

I lived with my freeloading boyfriend, who I supported on my McDonald’s wage, along with myself.

And eventually, I quit because one of the workers started harassing me (a maintenance person who had a history of sexually harassing female coworkers, but whose daughter was a manager, so I knew I had to leave because he wouldn’t), and the managers — predictably — did nothing to address the situation.

I worked with single moms, college students, white people, black people, Mexican people, older people, young people, people in their mid-thirties, people new to the job and people who’d been there for years.

I never realized how diverse the workforce in McDonald’s was until your essay pointed it out. And I also never realized that people who work at McDonald’s are thought of as “dumb” because they’re mostly minorities and non-native speakers of English.

That makes so much sense, and in a pretty significant way, it rearranges how I think of the crew I worked with and how I think of myself for having worked there.

Thank you.