I worked for McDonald's last year for about 7 months, and I must admit, there were some good bits, but on the whole, it was not my cup of tea.

I will touch briefly on the application process. Nowaday, all applications are done online, where you can be a Customer Care Assistant or a Crew Member. You fill in your details, and do a survery, with questions like what would you do if a young mother, with 4 children and lots of bags, came in to buy some food. This is all fairly straightforward and would be hard to fail this test.

About a week later I went for an interview, where I had a tour of the restaurant and told the manager about my availability etc. The next week I went to a welcome meeting where we went through health and safety etc.

Then, a few days later, I had my first shit, and was put onto the chip friers. It had to be one of the worst experiences ever. Constantly hunched over 4 vats of oil and a big tray with massive heated lamps. You are boiling hot and getting splashes of oil on your arms and fingers covered with salt. This was not pleasant, with everyone shouting at you for different sizes of chip portions.

The next shift, I was put onto the grill area. Here, I had to make all the burgers available. This is also an area where you can get many burns, fromm the toasters to the grills. And they're painful. There is also a lot of pressure in this area as people are always wanting burgers, and then you become to hate the annoying people who ask for a burger with no pickles or whatever. Just pick it man!!! That was the most annoying part of the grill side.

The other work area in the kitchen is the chicken side. Here, everything is assembled to order, so someone asking for something with no lettuce or whatever is absolutely fine. Chicken and fish are fried here, and stored in heated trays in a tower to keep it warm until it is sent out to be eaten. McDonalds practice is to only leave things here for 20mins maximum, but in reality, this only happened once in my time working there, when we had an inspection from a regional manager. Fish is the worst for this. If you buy fish fingers or a filet-o-fish, it has probably been sitting there in a heater since 10.30 that morning, but if you are asked to wait for your fish, you should get a freshly fried one.

Then there's the tills and drive thru. The worst job of them all. People treat you like scum (I assure you, not all McDonalds workers are, some of them, like I was, are friendly, nice people, and aren't in McDonalds purely because it is the only job available for them.).

If you ask people what drink they wanted it would appear as if you asking them for a kidney or something by the looks on their faces. Then the amount of people who claimed they had been shortchanged, when they clearly hadn't, because when asked if they wanted to come into the office while we count the till up with what is meant to be there, they would say "forget about it then".

The tills themselves are also rubbish. If you want to void something you need a manager to do it with a swipe card. Reason? Because if normal staff can void items, it becomes extremely easy to steal money. They try To stop this by having uniforms with no pockets too.

At 16, I was paid £4.25 per hour, until October 2008 when it rose it £4.35 after the NMW was increased.

Basically, that is all there is to know really. On the whole, its a nice bunch who I worked with, but I couldn't face the horrible conditions and horrible customers anymore.