Motorway Services, Crap Expensive Food, Snack Sex and a Bright Red Chocolate Starfish

When you work in a private sector job that pays the minimum wage I can guarantee you'll experience the following:

• Crap management;
• Profiteering;
• Boredom;
• Coming up with ways to do as little as possible to get through the day.

The one sector you can see all this is action is the dreaded roadside eateries and motorway services. Last I heard the motorway services industry turned over 2 billion quid a year. When you are exploited, bored and treated like poo by middle management in these places you'll do one of 6 things:

1. Smack the manager in the gob and do a runner;
2. Day dream about ripping off the company;
3. Writing to the press to blow the lid on the poor hygiene and poor customer service;
4. Pretend to be ill to get the day off;
5. Focus your energy on chatting up the ladies;
6. Get in with the inner circle who have regular sex in the store rooms & smoke pot.

So I'm working in one of these places with a guy who has been there for years. I'll call him Fred to protect his identity. Fred does this job full time and he hates the company he works for with a passion. When you see him with the customers he is nice as pie but his hatred stemmed from the way he is treated like a robot and spoken to like a like slave by the management. A few of them were OK but most were people whose only source of importance were holding sway over people like me and Fred. Boy did they enjoy it. You'd be working on the other side of the restaurant and then by Chinese whispers you'd be summoned. Upon arrival they'd ask you to go and get them a cup of tea. Anyway, Fred had watched an episode of Only Fools & Horses that had got him thinking. The one where grandad throws himself down a pub cellar to get compensation. Fred wanted to do something similar to extract compensation from the company. Over the next couple of days the ideas flowed thick and fast.

• Back pain as a result of slipping on the kitchen floor. Non starter because it happened everyday and the company lawyer had a response for every scenario. For some reason the legal eagles had perfected the art of always pinning liability on the employee who had the accident.
  
• Hand in the deep fat fryer as a result of slipping on the floor. Non starter because it was really painful and Fred did not like pain.
  
• Physical assault by the manager. Non starter because we enjoyed the punch ups with the manager in the car park. Also, everyone new the managers where soft and they'd never throw a punch.
  
• Food poisoning. Non starter because we accepted it as an occupational hazard and any investigation by the authorities resulted in more work for us. Namely, painting over the mold and fungus in the food prep areas so they looked clean. The other reason was if you pretended to have the runs you'd get a day off on the sick or more sneaky cigarette time. For a couple of months I was seeing a girl in the fast food joint. You know the period of the relationship when all you do is have sex. One evening I pretended to have the runs, met her in the ambient store room and 15 mins later we were having a smoke.

The final idea was a beaut. There were these two massive filter coffee machines. You had to stand on a stool to put several bags of coffee in the filter bit. Then this overhead pipe filled it with hot water. Sometimes the hot water and used up coffee would splash on you like napalm and cause minor burns. Fred's plan was to simulate a major overspill that would go down his back and burn him. In return for 25% on the compensation my role was to splash hot scalding water on his back and set up the special effects. So the scene was set. We'd set the machine up to over spill, splash hot water on Fred's back then he'd leg it back to the coffee point to flail all over the place in pain. In the kitchen area he bent over the sink and lifted his shirt. I was behind him with a small jug of scalding water to splash on his back. Unfortunately, I got the wrist action wrong. Instead of fling and splash it was more of a twist and pour down the crack between his two bum cheeks. That was the last time Fred ever spoke to me. It was the last time I spoke to him because the story turned into an urban 'Brokeback Mountain' myth where I was caught in an uncompromising position with Fred in a storeroom by the manager on duty. Ouch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTUWVxOD1mM