Title: You Want Fries with That? A White-collar Burnout Experiences Life at Minimum Wage
Author: Prioleau Alexander
Genre: Memoir
We have all had moments, or even days, when we hate our jobs. When the last thing we want to do is get out of bed and go into the office. Many of us have had long stretches—weeks, months, or even years, in jobs that we find soul-destroying…but we choose to stay.
In You Want Fries with That?, Prioleau Alexander makes a different choice, leaving a job in the marketing and advertising industry to become, in turn, a Pizza Guy, Ice Cream Scooper Dude, unskilled laborer at a construction site, med tech in an emergency room, fast-food cashier, and trail boss on a tourist wagon trail trip. During that time, he also failed to obtain employment at a big-box store, which is a great chapter on its own (though not a great experience, as I can attest to, having briefly worked in a big-box store myself).
There are several things I like about this particular memoir, starting with the writing. It’s practically invisible to the reader, in that the author’s voice comes across without tripping over roadside literary devices. I also like the effort that Alexander has put into researching topics such as the origins of pizza, ice cream, big-box stores, burgers, and cowboys, and although those sections are fairly short, they manage to get across a lot of information without being academic. Also, in those sections (and throughout the book) fictionalized and semi-fictionalized conversations inserted into the narrative are used to get the feel of a situation across to great effect. My personal favorite is in the cowboy section, and is intended to give the reader an idea of the psyche and options of the men who became cowboys:
Confederate Veteran: I got no land, no money. This sucks.
Freed Slave: Big deal, dude. Before i was freed, my family was sold off to another master.
Mexican: Oh, boo-hoo. My entire country was stolen.
Indian: You want bad? My country was stolen, my entire family was slaughtered, my language doesn’t even have a word for money, and now they’re after me.
The author also takes the time to look at each of these jobs from a more detached perspective, which is how we learn that pizza drivers can and often do lose money at there jobs because of franchise business practices, low tips, and high gas prices (Hint: tip the pizza driver at least $5, more if you live more than a few miles from the pizza place). We find out that no one who isn’t a doctor or police officer should ever know what goes on in a hospital emergency room. Most of us probably already know that, but after reading this book, I know a just enough of the why to know that I really don’t want to know any more. And his descriptions of various customer types and the absurdity of “corporate communications” is funny in the sad way that the truth so often is.
Most of all, however, I like the fact that no matter what situation Alexander found himself in, he took responsibility for the decisions that got him there. And he also makes it very clear that many of the people who end up doing low-wage jobs for their entire lives are simply the ones who weren’t quite as fortunate early in life as the rest of us. “Life happened to me in my early forties,” he writes, referring to walking away from his white-collar job and the consequences thereof. “But…what if life had happened to me at age twelve? Or eighteen?” Sobering questions, indeed, and ones we should ask ourselves when we’re doing that internal calculus of whether it’s worth getting out of bed and going into the office.