A little while ago I made a few videos giving kind of a blunt-trauma lampooning of the Amazing Digitial Circus – which, if you haven’t seen, is a cartoon made unintentionally to entertain content mills on Youtube. Like all criticism, my own required significantly less effort than the cartoon I was whinging at, and it also does not really matter because without the original cartoon I was targeting, my criticism would be irrelevant. Still, even the merest attempt at quality in today’s internet is considered a precious rarity, so there were some assertions that I shouldn’t be attacking sacred cows. Or… endangered cows, as it were. It’s as much a wildlife protection thing as it is anything.

However, I will say this about it: so far almost every major Youtube thing since 2010 that has gotten as much attention as the Digital Circus turned out to be embroiled in a tornado of horrific scandals, so in time I’m sure I’ll be vindicated. I don’t know exactly what Gooseworx has done, but soon the curtains will be drawn back on her horrible misdeeds and I’ll regret to be forgiven. Will it be some kind of pooping scandal like Youtube’s Blippy? Will it be filming a dead body, like whichever Paul brother did that? I’m aware that Mr. Beast has suffered some kind of comeuppance for acts more severe than the crime of being Mr. Beast, which I feel like should have been a condemning enough miscalculation to start with. Whatever it is, at some point we’re just going to get numb to these things because it seems to happen so often.

If I had to guess, it’s going to turn out that a huge portion of Digital Circus’s audience is small kids, and then some parents somewhere are going to find out about the vore, and then once that’s on Fox News, oh god, there will have been vore on Fox News. See, this is the advantage of traditional media, is that they could put shows in a specific time slot and expect that they’d be watched by the demographic they were aiming for instead of having an AI decide that little Margaret, a tender four years old, should watch Mickey and Minnie Mouse explore each other’s bodies.

I have a son myself, and as a rule, I don’t let him watch Youtube unless I am there watching it with him, because I made a living on Youtube for quite a while, and I know exactly what the asshole suits who centralized society to be controlled by an ad-bot are okay with. And speaking of corporations with low standards, this actually brings me to the central topic of this essay: Digital Circus made an episode about working at McDonald’s.

Apparently Gooseworx slaved at a McDonald’s for five years, and that kind of resonates with me, because I suffered through a CVS Pharmacy for that same length of time. The episode itself was sort of focused on Gangle, a character whose gimmick is that they’re a white mask on strings, and it was about how the mask that represents their emotions is actually a metaphor for a mask that hides their emotions. That’s so earth-shaking it probably registered on the Richter scale and killed a few people in Japan, but that’s not what I found interesting about the show.

What I liked about it was just how bland the McDonald’s atmosphere felt. And that’s not a dig, although it may sound like one. In spite of having a colorful cast of weirdos who show up to the register, they all fundamentally just order things off the menu and then move on. The most outlandish customer they deal with is basically a woman with too many kids who has a hard time keeping track of what’s in front of her, which is honestly kind of a common occurrence, and for me, was just one customer among many suffering through that. It’s part of the business – people have lives, and they bring them into the store.

The person I remembered more was a woman who used to come in with every coupon ever fabricated by man’s unworthy hands. She was memorable because she turned every check-out into a series of litigations, and I realized at some point she probably should have had one of our employees on retainer because it was a full-time job unto itself to go through an entire book of expiry dates, pricing limits, and two-for-one conditional arguments. Or rather, I guess we were the company’s agents, so we should have been paid more by them, but naturally that would never happen. Still, even with her, I was mostly amazed at how she was able to shoplift from our store every Friday, and we were still obligated to tell her “thanks, come again.” She’d walk out with a flat screen TV, twenty frozen pizzas, four lawn chairs, three boxes of tissues, and a bottle of Tylenol, but have only paid ten dollars – most of which coming from the Tylenol. It was amazing; that lady was a coupon sorceress.

What I sometimes find a little cynical about most shows is that they’ll depict the customers as the bad guys. And I do get it, because any time a show is about working in retail, one of the main focuses of the job is working with customers. Naturally, a show, especially a comedy, will hyperbolize that challenge and make it into something huge, bombastic, and hopefully funny, but the truth is: when I worked at CVS, I never felt that the customers were my greatest roadblock.

In fact, I was sometimes the guy they’d call if a customer was a big problem. Because I worked in the pharmacy itself, we often had to deal with insurance problems and other corporate catches that were legitimately hostile to everyone. The customers were mad, I’d be mad, the doctors would be mad, but none of us had control over any of it. The reason why I’d get called to handle it is because, I like to think, I’m an okay entertainer. I’d chat with the customer, explain the problem as best as I could in a way that held their interest while I punched away at the computer, and by the time I was done telling them what had happened, the problem would usually be close to resolved. I’d do this more than once, and sometimes customers would ask for me specifically in the future.

Customers are not the enemy. You have things to do, they have things to do. A customer doesn’t know what it takes to get their insurance to shut up and pay for the drugs, but they also don’t know what it takes to make an animation. They don’t know what it takes to figure out a really good set for a comedy routine. As a performer, you don’t go up and berate the audience for not appreciating the work that went into your set – that’d be insane and would get you jeered off the stage.

Hecklers are a thing and – okay, look. The point I’m trying to make is that in Digital Circus, Gangle wants to be a webcomic artist, and she’s sad she isn’t getting to do that. However, if your passion is more to do with entertaining people directly, that ability actually isn’t wasted in a retail setting. If you can talk to people and know how to use their time in a way that doesn’t feel wasteful, while hiding all the technical bull-crap behind the curtains, that’s the essence of a good performance. Customers really appreciate that, and they were usually the ones who provided me with validation for the work.

What I noticed, that really got me thinking this much about the whole episode, is that the show doesn’t depict customers as the foremost foe. It presents boredom as the main challenge. Tedium. Jax keeps checking the clock, but the shift just isn’t over. He’s not allowed to have any fun or be in control of himself until this is done, but it won’t end. He can’t even lean on the tables, because he’s reminded he should be cleaning if he’s got down time.

There’s nothing very serious going on. Nobody is making any big problems, and although Ragatha is passed out, face-down in the sauce because every store has that one employee, they’re still generally meeting their quotas, and it’s fine. Even if they weren’t meeting their quotas, they would only need to keep doing the same repetitive thing, but faster.

In the pharmacy, we counted a lot of pills. We counted by fives. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. We counted while taking phone calls. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. We counted in between grabbing new bottles or putting old ones away. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. We counted out thousands of pills per day, and the next day we’d come in and count thousands more.

I worked at one of the district’s busiest stores, and I know that because sometimes I’d pick up extra hours by floating at other locations. I’d come in like a grizzled mercenary teaching a town of helpless peasants how to fight. On the phone with a customer, on hold with the insurance on another line, counting out pills while waiting for the customer in the drive-thru to finish signing their name on a sheet of paper. I used to show up to smaller stores and conquer their work que like I was Rome taking over Carthage, and the only way to sate my thirst was to see nothing left alive on the screen. Yet even as busy as I could get, the repetition could still make it feel boring.

So honestly, I have a bit of respect for Gooseworx for depicting boredom as the worst thing about the job. They say they worked at a McDonald’s for five years, and I absolutely believe it, because once you’ve really mastered what retail work has to offer, fairly that is one of the worst things about it. It’s not the customers. If that lady with all the kids came in every single day, that’s just alright, because occasionally you can talk to regulars, and sometimes they’ve got interesting things going on. But I don’t think boredom is the worst thing about retail work.

At CVS, after I was done counting and all the que was cleared, corporate had the belief that we shouldn’t spend that time cleaning. Cleaning is important, but it doesn’t do anything for the stock margins. Instead, they gave us a list of customers who hadn’t picked up their prescriptions lately, and they made us call them. Can those of you at home guess why a guy who was picking up cancer medication every month might suddenly stop picking up their meds? This was a really depressing thing corporate made us do.

But corporate was always like that. Their choices never seemed to have anything to do with the dignity of their staff, nor with the satisfaction of the customers. In fact, one of the tricks I’ll never forgive is that they’d set these quotas for our store. If we kept up and met those quotas all year, we were promised bonuses, or something – I can’t remember anymore what we were supposed to get, because we never got them. Instead, every time we met the quota for a month, it seemed that corporate would cut our hours so we were a little more short-staffed until, finally, we just couldn’t meet the quota. That way we got no bonuses, and no down time on the job.

Our pharmacist in charge realized the scam as it was happening, but we couldn’t do anything about it, because failing the quota also came with a bunch of punishments. They’d force the managers into meetings about productivity, wasting their time, and I think the employees would have to suffer through a bunch of insipid training modules – though again, I can’t recall exactly because it’s been a while and corporate frequently wasted our time in general. Regardless of what we wanted, however, there was eventually just no way to avoid the punishments, and we had to deal with it.

You’d think this would be bad because it drove experienced employees to quit – It’s one of the reasons I quit. But the company actually liked that experienced staff was leaving, since experienced staff gets paid slightly higher wages, and if the company can pay lower wages, then that results in an upward trend in the stock margins. Worst of all, there was nowhere else you could go, because it seemed that every pharmacy was doing this, and the best thing you could do was work at a slower store where the pressure wasn’t quite as bad.

So that’s why this episode really got me thinking. I’ve never worked in fast food, so I have to wonder if it’s as bad as pharmacy was, or if maybe Gooseworx was lucky enough to have been at a slower location, where boredom really is the biggest problem. For me, my greatest enemy while working in retail was the company itself, no matter how much I wished that weren’t the case.

If I’d written that episode, I think I would have had Caine appear out of thin air at random intervals, delivering from on high random, seemingly impossible tasks, such as “call dead customers and convince them to return to the store!” Then, when they went out of business, he’d give them all an A+ score, because the way he was measuring success was by dividing income by costs. It’d turn out that, once you scuttle the business, you have zero cost, and if you use limits to estimate the results of dividing by zero, the outcome is infinity. It’d be a very “AI” thing to do and also rage-inducingly in touch with how modern companies seem to think.

I would also try to make it a bit clearer why Gangle threw herself into traffic, because I don’t really understand that scene and it seems like a bit of a pain in the ass to try to work out the metaphor.