Chapter Ten
Clarity walked past the large entrance sign of the building in Boynton, which said 'Ollie Burger University', OBU. Below that, another sign said 'Mclannan's training center'. Cora, a woman clothed in traditional Mclannan's green and yellow short sleeved shirt, welcomed her. A life-size statue of Ollie the clown made with stucco, or plaster, seated on the same bench at the counter next to the clerk, was placing its arm behind the woman, to keep her company. The eyes of the statue looked up, indicating to Clarity that she had to look up at the basic 'Ollie facts' and 'Ollie Menu' sheets. The life-size statue was articulated like a puppet. She felt kind of dependent on Ollie, because the clown had a veneer of social legitimacy, it was to some extent more legitimate in society than her. It was not a healthy relationship, for the statue did not provide her with a way to leave Miami, without going to jail, or told her a way to avoid officer Gomes either.
The teleoperator from Malibu grabbed a company fact sheet on the counter. The sheet indicated the basic motto of the franchise, 'something is cooking', and the fact that Ollie the clown was named the official mascot from the beginning of the company years earlier. The sheet listed the various aspects of the business, which made it unique, quality, service, and consistent cooking, ie, the idea that a burger had to look like one well done burger every single time. The basic Ollie burger was a well done burger with green pepper and onions. Then, variations were thrown around that, allowing for red pepper, or yellow pepper, to go with the burger. And no, you could not order the burger medium, or rare, the burger had to be well done, or then, no burger. The company was strict on this, for the oven used at Mclannan's was cheaper than other fast food ovens, and cooked the burger very fast. The secret ingredient of the Ollie burger was the type of onion used. Nobody knew exactly who was the provider of the Ollie burger onions.
Over the years, additional menu items had appeared on the basic Ollie burger and fries Ollie menu. The Ollie Pizza, was a failed pita bread item, similar to some kind of pie. Then, there was the Spam wham Ollie pan, a breakfast item cooked with spam oil, rice, and cheese. Mclannan's favored the nutritious breakfast over the light breakfast. A real hand coming from behind the statue of Ollie handed her the official green and yellow uniform of the restaurant company.
"Are you an adult?" Asked Cora.
"I'm twenty five, yes."
"Mclannan's serves alcohol, it's a restaurant for adults. All right, what would you like to do here?"
"Training."
"All right, general cooking, cleaning and handling of location furniture, clown management, deferred compensation scheme for employees? There is a position in Brevard County as clown coordinator, which is available."
"No, I'd like to work in the Manalpan location."
"Well, you can give it a try," said Cora, "that's very difficult."
The articulated stucco arm of Ollie the clown reached around the shoulder of the clerk, offering its sympathy to the lady giving indications to Clarity at the counter. Clarity thanked Cora and followed twenty eight other trainees inside the main training room.
Training lasted several days. The head of training at OBU was Charlie Pan, a guy in his fifties with a mustache brought in from Benihana, who had no clue about making burgers. His specialty was cooking meat on a flaming grill, and then throwing the meat from the grill into the right plate of customers seated around the grill table. But his lack of knowledge regarding burger making, boosted morale of all trainees, and so the company had kept him as a valued asset.
Charlie showed the green and yellow flags of failure that the company used, one for failing the fact sheet theory test, the other for failing the practical test. He reassured everyone by saying no worries. Failure was part of Mclannan's, and it was one of the reasons why eighty percent of all trainees, actually failed the training course. Failure was no problem, though, because Mclannan's employees were known to be expendable. The 'near employees' who failed the training course with flying colors, namely after having been shown the green and yellow flags, were asked to apply for clown related positions at the company, or at other green or yellow logo color companies, such as John Deere or the Yellow pages, or at Hertz. Charlie gave trainees who passed both tests, a bag of fries, to let them know they could become workers at a burger location of the company.
After passing theory, Clarity moved on to the practice rooms, where trainees had to go through three particular exercises, bun recognition, fry safety, and meat cooking and pepper placement preparation. The bun recognition stand allowed trainees to pull out plastic buns as they rolled past them on a conveyor belt, among a variety of items, all made with plastic, such as a plastic bag of fries, separate fries, without the bag, salad leaves, and the traditional ducks of the duck stand. A trainee could not mistake a bun for a burger, or for Ollie the clown. A miniature replica of the clown appeared once in a while on the conveyor belt, to ensure trainees understood it was the mascot, and that it had some limitations. Ollie was a clown, and it could do nothing else outside of that. In particular, it could not think out of the box, whether it was a box of fries, or a box with a burger in it.
The second test was not as picnic-related as bun recognition. Clarity held a bag of fries and began her fry safety test. Fry safety involved eating a fry, to ensure the fry was good, before giving each bag of fries to customers. As long as the fry was good, the other fries would probably be good, no further testing was required, and the customer got the bag. She ate a fry, and the fry was good, so she passed the exam with ease. She moved on to the last test, the pepper placement exam. Surrounded by four other trainees, she was fastest among the four of them, at placing the green pepper on a cooked burger, and at placing the top bun on the pepper over the burger before others did that with some other bun. No green pepper could enter the burger after a green pepper was placed on the meat, and so the trick was to reach for the top bun with one hand, while the other hand was used to lay out the pepper on the burger. It was things like these, which allowed Clarity to move past the training hurdles of Mclannan's.
After several days consisting of bun recognition task variations, like showing a bun with sesame seeds on it with her finger, the official training ended. An assistant of Charlie Pan handed Clarity her diploma of graduation, featuring the classic Ollie Burger, the date, and the signature of Charlie Pan, certifying that Clarity had completed the basic orientation training course, and was granted the Bachelor degree of burgerology. The text said 'Well done! Like the burger. You and the burger made it to one of our centers'. The following day, Clarity queued to see Cora and get her assigned location for work at the burger company.
"You'd like to work in our Manalpan location? That's impossible, nobody works there right off, only our best employees work there. You need the honoris clown degree."
Those were big words. Getting the job of mascot at Mclannan's, was the least straightforward job to get, the least accessible, the least easy. All other degrees came below the clown degree. Clarity insisted to Cora on going to work at Manalpan, and Charlie Pan came out of an 'Ollie facts' class to listen to her plea.
"All right, I am not saying you did not qualify," said Charlie. "You may qualify, but you have to know very few employees work there. Everybody wants to work at Manalpan, because it's a nice area. You'll have to take our Tiffany Lamp test for bright employees. The test comes out of our disliking of Mensa, the elitist, isolationist, self serving organization, which thinks that intelligence actually comes from doing crossword puzzles, sitting around a table, and that no one else but them, are intelligent. They do nothing for the community. We think that anyone can be intelligent, on your own or with others, so we'll provide you with an opportunity to do that."
Charlie led Clarity to a testing room, empty but for a table and chair. The training official took the chair and sat down, leaving Clarity standing. A projector lit up a slide in front of her, depicting Ollie the clown.
"This is the smile endurance test," said Charlie, "two hours, your
smile should be close, but not quite as overt as the smile of Ollie."
"I can do that, I think," said Clarity.
"Hold on, not finished, there is more. The smile can be nice, not arrogant, not excessive, genuine, friendly, humble, easy, pleasant, not fake, smug, then not smug, simply plain, not like Ollie smile, he got his own smile, then look over there at the selfie, and then, smile as though you are back to work, relaxed, focused, ready to work, with the mind set on the burger to cook or the bag of fries to hand out."
Focusing on emulating increasingly minute feature expressions indicated by additional slides of the clown, which got smaller and smaller on-screen, Clarity reached the end of the two hours somewhat comfortably. She'd simply been herself, without actually smiling, thinking she had nothing to do to pass the test, but to look at the clown without any particular intent.
"Not bad, you did all right on this," said Charlie. "We've never seen this kind of smile before here, it's like there's no smile, yet it's not unpleasant. Simply do our logo installation handling procedure, and you can work at Manalpan."
An electrician walked in the room, explaining to Clarity she'd have to go on a ladder to change the light bulb of a Mclannan's logo, atop a tall aluminum column. Dressed in official maintenance gear, a green and yellow lumberjack shirt, oversized jeans and hipster boots, she climbed up a ladder and placed a small rock crystal bulb from a Genoese crystal chandelier inside the casing of the logo. The eighteenth century piece which lit up the logo fetched five hundred dollars and was chosen for no particular reason, but the cost was shaved off employee salaries, and the logo looked good, so it had been approved by the purchase committee, in yet another flawless example of groupthink by the company. It was an operating expense to add a touch of glamour to the logo. Because the light was not advertised, in order to keep workers unaware of the salary scam, nor was it seen by anyone, because it was inside the plastic logo sign, nobody was aware of the glamour of the logo, and customers admired the Ollie burger sign itself. Clarity walked down the ladder and turned on the light switch of the logo. The Ollie burger logo beamed a bright light, and began rotating around the forty foot aluminum column.
"Congratulations," said Charlie, "if you can convince our manager in Manalpan, that you can work there, you got a job there." Clarity felt as though Ollie had led her back to square one, in a game of Ollie employment chess.
"You said I had the job, if I got through these tests."
"Ultimately, our location manager decides," said Charlie, "Blanche, our manager there, is the driving force of all our clean locations."
Clarity took the bus from Boynton to the Manalpan location of Mclannan's. The manager of the luxury location of Mclannan's was a middle aged woman, kind of chubby, named Blanche, a natural companion for Joe Mannen, who was chubby like her. Clarity showed the manager her official burger diploma, and the woman in charge of the restaurant was reluctant to give her work there. The credentials were lacking something, something like the secret ingredient of the Ollie burger that everyone ignored, because no one cared about it. Clarity ignored the provider of onions used in the Ollie burger and so she could not mention that as a valid answer to the location manager. Her answer had to show both interest and dedication to the maker of burgers.
Nonetheless, she was not set aback this time. Expecting the reaction from the manager, Clarity pulled out her honoris clown sheet, and the uniform given to her at the training center, to show that she was ready to work. Once Clarity said that she favored the diet disruption policy of the company, one of the items in the company fact sheet, the manager changed her mind and hired her. Diet disruption suggestions to customers included 'community eating, a community of burgers for each customer,' 'eat five burgers instead of one, one for you, four for the community, actually four for you as well, as a toast to the community, the community is busy right now.' Blanche led Clarity to the ad spot video area of the place, a room with a large camera on a tripod. The manager stood behind the camera and began filming Clarity for one last diet disruption test. Clarity had memorized the sentence she had to say for the camera.
"All right, go ahead," said Blanche. Clarity stepped forward with her right leg, and leaned forward.
"You too, can be chubby," said Clarity. Quite satisfied with the performance, she leaned forward a bit more, and raised her index towards the camera, indicating the genuine intent of the sentence.
"All right, not bad," said Blanche, "it'll do, you'll start with cooking burgers and cash register," said Blanche.
"I want to start in marketing, or procurement, in the information systems area," said Clarity.
"You think you're gonna get to the top right away?"
"I'm a teleoperator, it's my line of business, sort of related to technology."
"I'll have to check with Charlie Pan, to verify that you did everything right at the center. I have to go to the center in two days, to sharpen my burger turnover skills. I'll talk to Charlie. You can sweep the tiles of the floor here, and then cook some burgers, after you wash your hands a few times."
Two days later, while Blanche was out to Ollie Burger University, Clarity befriended the computer systems person of the company, a guy named Desmond. She suggested to him that he should get an Ollie burger before lunch, to experience the quality of life of Manalpan location, with other customers, instead of being isolated in the office. Desmond followed the logic of Clarity and left her inside the information systems area of the company on her own, officially to watch it while Desmond was out. Looking at the security camera which showed Desmond queuing inside the restaurant, Clarity sat down in front of the workstation computer driving the order system of the fifty four locations of Mclannan. Her task was to alter the taste of the Ollie burger, to create a general fiasco similar to the New Coke sales disaster of Coca Cola, when it changed its classic taste to a different New Coke taste. Following the idea of turning sugar to salt, from Mannen and the manual of Cocoanomics, Clarity knew how to do that.