Collegiate Times

JAMIE MARTYN/COLLEGIATE TIMES

He said: Selling french fries can be an eye-opening experience

As a youth in summertime, I formed gills.

I had an affair with the neighborhood pool, and chlorine was my cologne (the ladies weren’t interested).

I shredded my back slipping off diving boards, choked violently as the exhausted shark among minnows and admired the leg hair of older high school dudes.

In retrospect, it was an awkward three months each year, but I cherished it no less.

Then I left middle school, sprouted a few curlies on my own calves and pursued my first job. And sometimes, indeed, it’s all about who you know. My brother was a lifeguard at the same pool, and his solid reputation enhanced mypitiful resume as my only other previous experiences had been mowing senior citizens’ lawns and pet sitting.

I was hired, but not to sit under an umbrella and whistle at hooligans.

“Hey! Don’t throw the torpedo toward the pregnant woman.”

Instead my role was as a pseudo-chef in the full-service snack bar. Our menu boasted everything from Firecracker popsicles to the devastating “Big Beef,” a double-stack of burger patties with unlimited toppings.

I guess we didn’t abide by the myth of waiting 30-minutes after meals to swim. We actively encouraged nausea. It wasn’t surprising to see the waters abandoned because of a fresh lunchtime lily pad.

The food was magnetic despite being shamelessly mediocre. The pretzels, for example, were far from gourmet and salting them involved a spray bottle of water. Still, when the doors opened at 10 a.m., some moms would beeline for the chicken salad, steering their infant’s stroller through the screened door like a battering ram. The pool was also base camp for young babysitters who rang up three (or more) receipts each day for garbage disposal tykes.

And those wailing kids helped snap my love for that place like a twig. Yet the core of the disdain was behind the counter.

The kitchen was a brutal environment. Four or five workers slithered by each other in a long space hardly wider than a school-bus aisle. Crackling deep fryers and a torching grill made the already soggy outdoors seem refreshing in comparison. Thankfully, the only mandatory attire was a T-shirt emblazoned with the company logo. Still, the color choice was out of our hands — gray. What a great decision by the boss since the employees operate in a sauna.

Customers likely memorized our sweat patterns; we looked like we ran through lawn sprinklers between sandwich orders.

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A version of this article appeared in the Apr 2 issue of the Collegiate Times.