Tales from the Underpaid: The Break Room
Most of the underpaid jobs that I’ve held had been in the state of California, which mandates paid breaks and unpaid mealtimes for anyone who punches a clock. The break room beckons.
Fifteen minutes isn’t long enough to go anywhere, except for when I worked in a big retail pad and there was something grab-and-go right next door. For the most part, fifteens are when I would get to go to the bathroom, smoke (I don’t smoke, but it’s nice to go outside and flirt with the smokers), guzzle a Coke, and contemplate my existence. Meal breaks are long enough to wander; hit a drive through or even go home when I was close enough. Sometimes the break room was not where I wanted to be.
Food service jobs hardly ever have a designated break room. When I worked at the pizza place, I often took my break in the walk-in freezer. Sitting on a five gallon bucket of shredded mozzarella cheese, I’d slip a naughty hand into the box of frozen cheesecake slices and cram one into my mouth, steam billowing out of my nostrils as I made quick work of it.
Boston Market had a manager’s office (forbidden) and no other enclosed space, so I took my smoke breaks out by the dumpster (classic place to stand around and look shifty in an apron) and my meal breaks in the dining room. You’ve seen this; you walk into a fast food place and you see a kid with bad skin hunched over a two-top, making a discounted meal disappear in wolfing, worried bites. I was that kid, desperately trying to not make eye contact with a customer whose requests I could not refuse, though I was off the clock. Sweaty under my polo shirt and reeking of rotisserie chicken marinade, I would put away a pot pie as fast as I could safely swallow it, shoveling with one hand so I could churn through a paperback novel with the other.
That was not my favorite job.
Home Depot and Lowe’s both had standard-issue break rooms. The building for that type of retail is called big-box, because they’re hollow structures of cinder block that we would fill with racks and stacks like a maze. In some stores the break room was up front and others it was at the back, but each had cafeteria tables, lockers, a fridge and a microwave. At every big box retailer where I have worked, there has been a problem of food thievery. Sometimes it led to terminations, other times to an emergency pantry of cup noodles. One of those solutions addresses the underlying problem.
Both of my big box home improvement retailer jobs put me in a population of overwhelmingly conservative people (again I say unto you: California. It’s not what you think.) who traded Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter books during their breaks and talked about the day laborers haunting the parking lot as though they were a threat to national security. I remember one lunch period when I listened to a woman moan and wail for forty minutes that her seventeen-year-old daughter couldn’t possibly know she was gay. I sat not speaking until I hit my limit. And then.
“Brenda, how old were you when she was born?”
Brenda, looking at me, lost. “Nineteen? I was already married, thank you very much.”
“So you knew that you were straight, right?”
Slow dawning comprehension.
“And you and your husband were high school sweethearts? So you knew what you wanted, even before that.”
A long slow trip through the mind of a conservative woman, who must measure her own experience against the propaganda she’s decided is true. A silent prayer in my head for the queer children of people like her. People like me.
“You know,” Brenda said. “A tongue does feel mighty good, too.”
I made it five years at Lowe’s and another five at Home Depot. In both cases, I stopped taking my meals in the break room.
These days, I tell my coworkers on Teams that I’m walking away from my machine to grab a sandwich, or to drop off my laundry. Going to college meant that I’d never punch a clock again, and between the changes I made and the pandemic that changed work for a lot of us, I never have to see the inside of a break room (unless I need to use the restroom at a grocery store.)
But sometimes I think fondly of crashing out behind the wheel of a Honda accord, surrounded by empty burrito wrappers and counting down the end of my lunch against the setting sun and a three-CD changer. And I still prefer my cheesecake cold and stolen.
(Various, the break room is eternal, 1996-2012)