Aaron and the Eggs

Over at Aces Full, James was recounting a story about an old prat of a coworker and this tool's idea of a clever joke. I reflected on how the situation would have been handled had he and I been working together at that place. After all, in the past when he and I worked together, we were generally merciless with the arrogant. The whole exchange reminded me of the summer that he, Bull, and I were working at McDonald's together...

One of our fellow crew mates was a fifteen year old named Aaron. He felt cool because he was one of the first fifteens to be allowed to work a regular job under the revised child labor laws. And he got to work at McDonald's. It was a pretty playful environment and we all spent lots of time ragging on each other. He wasn't quite as good at it as we were, particularly when we tag teamed. After one particularly harsh exchange, he vowed revenge. Playful teenage revenge, but revenge nonetheless. Aaron concocted a couple of clever jokes to play on us. He tied my jacket in knots and dropped a rotten tomato in James' hat. Like I said. Clever.

We decided we had to show him what clever truly was. A couple of weeks before, we had played a little egg prank on one of our weekend breakfast shift buddies. We had carefully drained the egg out of a whole tray of eggs. We didn't waste it. We scrambled it and set it aside in the walk-in. Then we carefully put all the eggs back with the open side down and watched the fun as our foil tried to fill the requested order for a dozen McMuffins. There are around sixty-four eggs per tray. James had also taken to writing messages like "Help!" and "Let me out!" on uncracked eggs. So, we were in an egg frame of mind.

Our egg draining technique was well honed by this point. So, we made short work of twenty or so eggs and hid them where Aaron would not notice them. We left all but two empty. Then we waited. Aaron went on break at a fairly slow part of the morning. James was on biscuit detail and I was supposed to be setting things up so we were ready to switch to lunch at change over. Both of us had legitimate reasons to be in the stock room. We might even have had legitimate reasons to be in the door of the break room. But we didn't. We stepped into the door eggs held high and spares cradled in our aprons. Aaron saw us. We paused for effect. "Yeah. Like you guys are gonna throw eggs at me. Psssh." That was our cue. We let fly and he ducked down trying to get under the built-into-the-floor McDonald's table. He got pelted with empty eggs and gradually began to realize he had been had. He sat up. "Ha ha," he said. And stood up to show he was no longer afraid. By this time we had unloaded all but two of our eggs. He stuck out his chest to make a better target. After all, what was the big deal about being hit with empty eggs. We grinned back at him. I let mine go. He barely had enough time to register the shock of being hit with a water filled egg when James' hit him and he disappeared in a cloud of biscuit flour. Biscuit flour and water makes a nasty mess on ones apron. We beat a hasty retreat laughing all the way.

The best part was that the manager on duty thought it was funny. He just asked that we take some time when the rush died down to clean up the egg shells, flour, and water. Ok, that wasn't the best part. The look on Aaron's face as he realized we'd set him up was the best part. Not getting in trouble was a nice bonus.

Categories: Humor, Stories