Life Lessons from Dairy Queen
Pressed against the highway, the ice cream shop was a glass square building with a sliding window where ice cream was handed off in exchange for cash and only cash. There was one option for ice cream, a vanilla that oozed from the loud machines. But the vanilla was then accessorized with anything from chocolate that had been thinned out with corn syrup to a gooey marshmallow cream. The combinations went from tasty to icky sweet. From nuts, to sprinkles to whipped cream.
On hot Florida evenings, customers lined up out front to order their favorites, it was almost impossible to hear them with the highway noise behind them. Some of them ate their treats on the cement picnic tables, most of them crawled back to their cars.
A big favorite was the peanut buster parfait: the layered fudge, nuts and ice cream was such a goopy mixture. But the hardest product to master was the chocolate dipped cone: the vanilla ice cream would plummet into the vat of waxy chocolate, making a tremendous mess. And the most annoying to make was the Blizzard; a super thick shake that took a specific knack to blend.
Dairy Queen was indeed where I started out my career, under the neon lights. Wearing a white cotton tshirt with Great Shakes printed on the front; the ideal advertising for a wild teenager.
Next to the window, was a cash register that had been engineered well before the invention of computers. It was there that I learned to add, all the numbers in my head. A shake was $110, a cone .55 cents. The machine didn’t do the math. It only tracked the total money for the evening and held the cash for giving back the change.
The front room was almost a facade; tricking customers into believing the place was clean enough to serve food. Where as the back room, the place where bugs slithered off to hide, was quite the opposite: refrigerators cotained boxes of the milky substance that was converted into the creamy ice cream, big steel sinks housed dingy cleaning equipment including a mop that never dried out and always smelled like a mixture of mold and bleach, and a red cloth sofa stashed an impressive collection of Hustler magazines — the property of the manager, an overweight balding man named Pat who lacked any ambition to make the place better.
What did I learn from my first real job besides how to make banana splits and add numbers in my head? That prostitutes, the ones who worked the streets in front of the store always wanted water after they were dropped off, along with the keys to bathrooms. That the men who picked up the prostitutes were often so normal that they were boring. (Including my neighbor who was a failed stock broker.). That people who were stoned would eat any bizarre combination as long as it had nuts on the top. And that you should never trust teenagers with your business.
Dairy Queen motivated me to go to college. I never wanted to join the ranks of the prostitutes who asked for water. Or the ranks of our dear manager Pat who seemed content with his red sofa and the Hustler magazines. I wanted so much more than a glass square building with a stream of customers demanding peanut buster parfaits and chocolate dipped cones.
