About 13,000 McDonald’s across the country are now using the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine for making their shakes and sundaes. Unlike the machines of yore, these machines are designed to avoid the daily disassembly required by typical ice cream machines.
The problem:
According to McBroken.com, which monitors the operating status of McDonald’s ice cream machines, at any given time 5 to 16 percent of McDonald’s locations aren’t serving ice cream and shakes because the machines are broken, and because they’re designed to be a black box, repairable only by authorized distributors, and if any part isn’t working the whole machine is useless.
I find this rather dispiriting.
During the years I spent managing McDonald’s restaurants, I became an expert at disassembling, cleaning, reassembling, and repairing these machines. It was a task that needed to be done every day, and if you could do it quickly and efficiently, you were invaluable to your restaurant.
I managed eight different restaurants in my time with the company, and at each one, I would use a stopwatch to time my assembly of the machine, establishing a benchmark for others to try to beat. I would post my time on a sticker the back of the machine, and whenever the record was broken, I would make a big deal of the accomplishment.
No one ever beat me. The only person breaking my record times was me.
Not that many didn’t try. The more I taunted my coworkers, the harder they tried. Employees would beg to disassemble, clean, and reassemble the machine, just for a shot at my record. They would offer to stay late just for the opportunity to best my time.
But there were many others who never tried to beat my time, seeing the competition as purposeless and foolish. At one restaurant, a young man named Vance asked me why I was investing so much time in trying to beat my own meaningless record. “You’re going to college,” he said. “Who cares about a stupid shake machine.”
I tried to explain to Vance that setting goals and seeking excellence is never a bad thing. Challenging yourself is good for the soul. Ascending to greatness, even in simple contests like shake machine assembly, can be fulfilling to you and inspiring to others.
I also tried to explain that attempting to complete a task quickly is the opposite of wasting time. I was desperately trying to preserve time.
Vance didn’t buy it. He believed in conserving his energy for only those tasks that would result in tangible rewards.
This strikes me as an excellent way of avoiding excellence in life.
Years later, I would meet people who dreamed of one day writing and publishing novels who refused to begin working on their books until they had a literary agent and maybe even a book contract in hand.
I tried to explain to these would-be authors that the best way to find a literary agent and land a book deal is to write a book, but they disagreed. Like Vance, they refused to expend energy until they were guaranteed a tangible reward.
I strongly suspect that none of those people ever published a book.
You either want to be good at what you’re doing – regardless of what that thing is – or you don’t. You either take pride in all that you do or you don’t.
This is why I find the new Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine so dispiriting. In all my time spent managing McDonald’s restaurants, I was the fastest at assembling shake and ice cream machines. No one ever beat me.
Now that accomplishment is moot. Technology has eliminated the need for someone like me. It has taken something I had mastered and rendered it obsolete.
How annoying.
It’s not that I wanted to step back into the McDonald’s ring and defend my title any time soon, but when you ascend to the top of the mountain, you don’t expect the mountain to one day disappear completely.
Oh well. I’ll try to set a new record for number of multiplication tests I can correct in 10 minutes today.
There’s always another mountain to climb if you’re willing to look.
