Tommy Boyd

Working at Chick-fil-A in high school could have been an absolute disaster. My quiet, sarcastic, and admittedly lazy personality do not exactly combine to create the stereotypical Chick-fil-A cashier, who is widely known to be enthusiastic and very personable. Looking back, however, I am able to see just how influential the job was in shaping who I am today as well as whom I hope to be in the future. I choose to believe that every trash run, order taken, table cleaned, and customer complaining to me about something I had absolutely no control over allowed me to grow in ways that would have been impossible otherwise. It was something that had to be experienced firsthand. Working was perfect for me because I was able to reap all the benefits the job provided for my character while simultaneously enjoying the low expectations of working in the fast food industry. It was the perfect safety net for me to enjoy before I entered the lifestyle of high expectations and complete accountability that is so evident in college. I spent most of the two years working up front on the cash registers and talking with a seemingly endless amount of customers, however my favorite times were undoubtedly spent in the kitchen making fries. I soon realized this was because I was always around the same kitchen staff. I often thrive when I get to spend time with a smaller amount of people that I know, even if it takes me a while to warm up to them. I like to compare my time spent there to my favorite show, The Office, in the sense that the people I worked with were undoubtedly strange, but the sense of community is something I hope to take with me and recreate wherever I go.