You Want Fries With That: A White-Collar Burnout Experiences Life at Minimum Wage by Prioleau Alexander07/01/2009Location : Cleveland, OH
Auburn University is probably best known for its football team. While that is nice, they count among their alumni author Tim Dorsey, who writes some of the most twisted, hilarious, and entertaining books concerning a serial killer running around the state of Florida. Another writer has emerged from Auburn, Prioleau Alexander, and his first novel is You Want Fries With That: A White-Collar Burnout Experiences Life at Minimum Wage, a novel as twisted and hilarious as the best Dorsey. But while Dorsey works the fiction aisle with success, this novel is an extremely fun non-fiction book.
Contents:
Acknowledgements
Prologue: White Collar, Short Leash
The Pizza Man Cometh
We All Scream, Eventually
Why the Roofer Wants to Kick Your Ass
Good Things Come in Big Boxes
10 ccs of Sanity, Stat . . .
You Want Fries With That?
Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys
Epilogue
At age forty-one, Prioleau Alexander left a highly lucrative job in advertising and marketing. While thinking about all of things that his wife needed him to do, Alexander decided that he needed a job to get out of the house. But he didn't want to get back into advertising and marketing. With no other skills, he decides that minimum wage jobs give him the best opportunity for employment and to stay out of management. Each chapter begins with a little history of the position, provided by Google searches. How much ice cream, pizza, or hamburgers does the average American consume in a year? How did the Bog Box stores get started? Through the magic of Google, Alexander provides you with those answers. And then he launches into his job hunting and interview processes. Finally, we experience him scooping ice cream, delivering pizza, working a construction site as a laborer, and more. All delivered with keen insight, pithy commentary, and, quite often, a large dose of humor.
The premise, alone, lends itself to hilarious shenanigans; a 41 year old attempts to find work at a minimum wage job. Imagine such a person walking into a fast-food restaurant and asking the person behind the counter for an application. Or walking into a local ice cream store. You get the idea. One chapter that really hit home for me, and provided the most laughs, is the dealing with the Big Box stores. I was assisting my son with a job search when we rolled into a well known Big Box. Sitting at the job kiosk, I had similar thoughts as Alexander as we slogged through 30-some pages of on-line employment application. And the results for my son were the same as for Alexander; No job offer. In addition to the actual job search and work, Alexander provides some keen insight into the people that work at minimum wage jobs. Though rife with humor, there are areas where he shows the human side of these jobs. They are not heavy handed, but do lend a nice balance to the comedy. Further, you may actually regard the person behind the counter in a new light. His Epilogue wraps the book up nicely; I think that Alexander has found what he was looking for. An excellent novel from a first time writer; it moves quickly, is edited very well, and leaves the reader looking forward to another book from this excellent writer.
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