I Deserved a Break Today...

...so I got up and got away to McDonald's. I used to eat at McDonald's for breakfast quite a bit. I like the sausage burritos, even though they are about the worst thing for me in the world. But last night I couldn't sleep at all. It was too humid even with our air conditioner and ceiling fan running on high. Every time I woke up, I was in a deep sweat. When I finally got up at 5:00 instead of 4:30, I only had 15 minutes to work out even if I pushed my departure time another 15 minutes back. I thought about just skipping it, but that way lies quitting. So I got on my bike, rode really hard for 15 minutes, and hoped for the best. The way I see it, any exercise is better than the none I was going to get if I skipped it.

My rear end was still dragging when I left for work, so I decided to stop at McDonald's to get a cup of coffee. I typically avoid that much caffeine, but it was either that or collapse before noon. I stopped at the McDonald's that used to drive me batty back when I was going there all the time. They couldn't get my order right to save their own lives. I swore every time they screwed up the order that I would never go there again. But I always did. And they always screwed the order up. I hadn't gone to that particular place in a loooong time.

Today, I ordered my former usual, the sausage burrito meal with coffee. Guess what? No hash browns. To tell the truth, I didn't need the hash browns. I know what's in them and I really didn't need them. But good grief, they messed up my order the one time I go there in a year? I was getting my hash browns.

On my way to school for the last two days, I was thinking to myself, if you can't even do good work at McDonald's, what on earth can you do? It made me think of a car wash that our baseball team had when I was a kid to raise money for uniforms. My grandfather and my father taught me how to wash a car. And believe me, if I missed a spot I heard about it and fixed it. When my friends did a sloppy job I was there to fix it. If my dad had heard from a townsperson that they had gotten a lousy car wash from something I was involved with, I knew I'd hear about that too. So while other guys came and went from the car wash, I stayed the whole time to make sure the cars were getting completely clean and that nothing was missed. That kind of work ethic is missing today. Even with mundane activities like washing a car or filling a bag at McDonald's, there should still be pride in doing the job right. This may sound curmudgeonly, but this is something about which previous generations were absolutely right.