If I Touch You, I'll Sue!

July 1, 2008

Fryer (shrunk).jpg

This will take a minute, but stick with me.

Let’s say you currently work at Burger King, where, for much of this year, you dutifully manned a deep-fryer. You have a lot of experience with the fryer. From 2001 until 2005, you worked at McDonalds, where you did little more than a so-so job; nothing fancy, but you got it done. Then, from 2005 through 2007, you moved from McDonald’s to Wendy’s, then over to the Chic-fil-a at the mall. Nobody complained about you too much, but, again, you were a mediocre fry-boy, at best. Finally, at the beginning of this year, you were asked to leave Chic-fil-a, and that's how you landed at Burger King. Home of the Whopper.

And now, wouldn’t you know it, you suck. For some reason, your timing is all off. Sometimes the fries are undercooked; sometimes they’re burned to a crisp. The manager kept giving you a shift, but you created such a mess virtually every time out of the gate, a different guy had to keep coming in to try to salvage the situation.

It’s gotten embarrassing. What little skill you had at the deep fryer is now pretty much gone, and, frankly, the people who spend their hard-earned money at Burger King are beginning to wonder why they keep you on the schedule. So now they’ve demoted you to the cleanup crew. Not as exciting as being The Fry-Boy, but, hey, it’s a job.

So, a few days ago, you’re eating lunch in the employee break room, and your district manager walks in to say he’d like to speak to you in his office. “What about?” you mutter, and he yells a little bit, telling you he wants you in that damn office right now because he needs to talk to you! You don’t like his tone of voice, so you drop your burger, stand up, grab him around the neck, and throw him to the floor. When he tries to get up, you knock him back down again, and the other employees have to drag you off of him. When asked if you regret what you've done, you say, “If there’s any regret, I just wish they had just let me alone.”

The next day, you get fired.

So what’s the next step in this dispiriting little scenario? As you might expect, your union files a grievance saying that the district manager has absolutely no right to fire you, and they expect you to be put back on the schedule, but pronto. And Burger King better pay you full wages for the rest of the year, or else.

                                                ***

Chacon (shrunk).jpg

If you’re thinking “WHAAAAT?” you’re right. However, there’s no place for real life in professional sports, and this is exactly what happened to Houston Astros pitcher, Shawn Chacon, aka “The Fry-Boy.” The district manager is played by Astros' General Manager, Ed Wade. The union is the Major League Baseball Players Association. McDonald’s, Wendy's, and Chic-fil-a are the Rockies, the Yankees, and the Pirates, although I’m sure Yankee fans think their team should be McDonald’s. But I’m keeping it this way.

After wandering around with the aforementioned teams as a starting pitcher of utterly moderate success, Chacon ended up with a $2-million deal to attempt to throw strikes for the Astros this year. But he’s been botching the job, going 3-5 so far, while appearing in 15 games. The Astros and their fans had finally seen enough a week or so ago, so he was sent to work out of the bullpen. You don’t get a pay cut when they do this, by the way. You just don’t get to stand on the mound during the National Anthem.

Chacon - quite obviously - was unhappy with his exciting new assignment, and decided to assault the guy who’s in charge of seeing to it that he gets paid $2-million this year…which, if you’re bad at math, is a million dollars more than $1-million, and somewhere around two million more than you make. He actually performed this common sense-ectomy in the players' break room, while everyone was eating.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with all this. A million bucks doesn’t go as far as it used to, and people who bitch-slap their employers have never gotten particularly far. Maybe Chacon could use some of that money to buy his own deep fryer, and get down to makin' food fast.

The fryer pictured at the top of this article is a Dean SM5020G, and it retails for $7,042. Chacon will likely make under $2-million a year while operating it, unless the waitresses share their tips.

Paul Tatara

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