A Slippery Situation

I worked at the Burger Chef on 12-mile and Coolidge in Berkley from the spring of '82 until sometime after it was sold to Hardees's the following year. My time there was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life, slinging burgers and working the drive Thru.

The job was a chain of events, some hilarious, some boring, some terrifying, linked together by grease and teenage hormones.

I started out cooking burgers and "flat chicken" on the big shiny grill. It was very hot and greasy work. Throughout the day we would scrape the grill into large stainless steel containers called "grease traps" on either side.

At the end of the day, one of the jobs of the closers was to empty the grease traps into a huge bucket and carry the mess outside to the grease tank so they could spray it on dirt roads. This was the worse job in the place. The grease traps were hot as hell, and contained a nauseating cocktail of eggs, fat, burnt or aborted hamburgers, and pancake batter. Because of the nasty nature of this job, it would invariably be left until the last possible moment at closing time.

So it happened that one night at 1:00AM, as we were all closed and about to leave for the night, that a coworker and myself drained the muck into the large bucket for carrying. It was especially disgusting this night, with more runny eggs than usual in it and lots of lumps. The bucket was so heavy it required two people to lug it. As my coworker (in front) and I (in back) traversed the freshly mopped floor with the bucket, he suddenly lost his footing and fell. The bucket hit the tile floor hard and spilled its entire contents on my coworker as he flopped on the floor like a fish with a terrified look in his eyes.

He looked up at me with an expression of surprised bewilderment. It had all happened so fast. The grease was pretty hot, and the smell...well, you would just have to experience it to know how bad it was.

All he could say was "Oh, shit! Is it bad?"

I lost it. I started just busting up with uncontrollable laughter. I was powerless against it. You would have done the same thing. He was totally and completely "owned" in every way by this mess. It had saturated his clothes from head to toe. His hair was full of egg and carbon bits. He even got some in his mouth.

It took another hour to clean up the floor again. He was comical - he could hardly stand up because he was so greasy. I laughed the whole time.

I stopped laughing when I remembered I had promised him a ride home.

One day a few months later, "management" (and I use that term very loosely) noticed that I could talk coherently and even string sentences together, and they moved me from the back room to the drive-thru and register. That's where the real fun was....

...but that's another story.