Interview at Happy Burger
by Daniel Tarker
“What’s happiness?”
That’s the first question the manager of Happy Burger asked me during our interview. She looked too elegant to be a manager of a fast-food restaurant with her short, auburn hair and perfectly pressed, blue pants suit. And her office seemed too clean and minimalist to be any type of restaurant manager’s office — fast food, Michelin-rated, or otherwise. Not that I really knew anything about the offices of restaurant managers. This would have been my first restaurant job, but I felt sure most restaurant managers did not sit behind glass desks with 200-inch monitors mounted on the wall behind them.
My palms started to sweat. This happens to different parts of my body when I get nervous. I didn’t know how to answer her question. This wasn’t like any of the questions I’d practiced answering with my mother on the drive over to the Happy Burger corporate offices. I was prepared to answer why I wanted the job. Highlight my strengths and sugar-coat my weaknesses. But I wasn’t prepared to delve into esoteric questions about happiness. I wasn’t even sure I’d experienced happiness before.
So, I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Happiness is when you feel good. It’s like when you’re free of anxiety after taking your morning dose of Prozac.”
Listening to my improvised words tumble from my mouth made me feel proud. It struck me as a clear and self-evident answer.
But the manager just nodded and jotted something down on her notepad with a ballpoint pen. Her expression was perfectly ambiguous. I couldn’t tell if she loved or hated my answer. I wondered if the corporate office trained their managers to master the art of using a resting ambiguous face to keep applicants off-kilter.
“All right, Kathy. Have you ever eaten a Happy Burger?” she asked.
OK. This question I knew how to answer.
“Well, I really appreciate Happy Burger’s commitment to sustainability and equity—”
“No. I didn’t ask why you wanted to work at Happy Burger,” the manager interrupted. “I asked if you had ever eaten a Happy Burger.”
I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to be rude either.
“Yes,” I said. “I love Happy Burgers. They’re my favourites.” And for good measure, I added their slogan. “They’re America’s burgers.”
“Oh, really? Which Happy Burger is your favourite?”
“The Smart Burger.”
“The Smart Burger is not a Happy Burger.”
“What do you mean, it’s not a Happy Burger? It’s on the Happy Burger menu.”
“It’s a Smart Burger. It’s not made of real beef. Happy Burgers are made with authentic, grass-fed beef.”
“But Happy Burger still sells Smart Burgers.”
“Smart burgers are made by a different company. We just sell them as an alternative for people with dietary restrictions,” she said, her ambiguous expression and tone replaced by a frustrated expression and tone. “They are not flavoured with the happiness of grass-fed cows.”
“Oh,” I said.
“The cows are also massaged with rare oils.”
“All right.”
“And sung to by Celtic Druids as they’re being slaughtered.”
“Well, I’ve never eaten a Happy Burger. I’m a vegetarian.”
“You’re a vegetarian and you want to work at a hamburger restaurant?”
“I need money.”
“So, what you said before about wanting to work here because of our sustainability and equity policies wasn’t true?”
“No,” I said. “It’s all true. I admire your sustainability and equity policies and I also need money.”
The manager nodded. Her ambiguous expression returned. She jotted down some more notes with her ballpoint pen while I took a deep breath and hoped the next question was easier. I really needed this job. I’d failed all my community college courses last quarter and now, my parents were refusing to pay tuition. If I didn’t hustle up some money soon, I wouldn’t be able to register, which meant my parents would start charging me rent money, which would require me to get two jobs, which would really suck.
“Do we have permission to scan your brain?” the manager asked.
“Scan my brain?”
“Yes,” she said, pulling some contraption from her desk drawer and setting it between us. It looked like one of those wire scalp-massagers, except the ends glowed red and blue like Christmas-tree lights. “This cognitive interpreter will help us determine if you’re responding truthfully.”
“Do you think I’ve been lying?”
“We’ve already established you’ve been lying.”
“We have?”
“You said you’d eaten a Happy Burger, but you’ve clearly never eaten a Happy Burger.”
“Isn’t that a matter of interpretation? I thought the Smart Burgers were a type of Happy Burger.”
“Are you saying that you really didn’t know the difference?”
“They’re on the same menu at the same restaurant.”
“They’re made by an entirely different company. Everybody knows that. We just sell them to keep the tofu people satisfied.”
The way the manager said “tofu people” didn’t sound derogatory, even though the words seemed derogatory. The neutrality of her voice confused me. I felt sweat start to form on the back of my neck.
The manager slid the cognitive interpreter closer to me.
“We have a wholesome brand at Happy Burger. It requires that we have a staff that is beyond reproach,” she said. “We need to make sure all of our employees are pure of mind.”
It didn’t seem like I had much of a choice, so I picked up the cognitive interpreter and slid it over my head. Its metallic tentacles brushed through my hair, scratching my scalp, which produced a tingly feeling, like when I watch ASMR videos on YouTube. The manager lifted her phone and seemed to open an application that I assumed shared the data the cognitive interpreter was picking up from my brain waves.
“Do you want to do a test?” the manager asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“You're lying,” she said.
“What?”
“You don’t want to test the cognitive interpreter.”
“Wait. I thought we were testing this first. Don’t we need to set a baseline for when I’m lying or telling the truth?”
“We’ve been developing this technology for decades. It doesn’t need testing.”
“So, why ask if I want to test it?”
“To test my hypothesis.”
“So, this is still a test?”
“A different kind of test. Not a baseline test. A hypothesis test.”
“And what was your hypothesis?”
“You’re a liar.”
“I am not a liar.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“Have you ever participated in a wet T-shirt contest?”
“What does that have to do with—”
“Have you ever participated—”
“No!”
“Liar.”
“But I’ve never—”
The manager touched a button on her phone and an image of a younger version of me appeared on the 200-inch screen behind her. It looked like it was from a social media post from several years ago. I’d gone to Florida on a family vacation that happened to coincide with spring break. I made friends with some college kids at a bonfire on the beach and they shared some of their rum punch with me. The next thing I knew, I was posing with a group of other girls in wet T-shirts for a surfer dude named Derek who broadcast our pics all over the internet. He eventually got attacked by a shark and lost his leg, which I always relished as karmic justice — even though I have this know-it-all-friend who insists on chiming in on the comments section of my posts that I’m not interpreting the concept of karma correctly. I should really unfriend her. She’s never been sympathetic to any of my traumatic experiences.
“So, this isn’t you,” the manager said.
Well, it wasn’t me now, I reasoned.
“No,” I said. “That’s not me.”
“Our facial recognition algorithm is infallible. It says the face of the girl in the centre of the picture belongs to you.”
“Well, drunk me. From years ago.”
“Are you saying you turn into a different person when you drink?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Not me,” the manager said, taking notes with her ballpoint pen. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t drink.”
“But that was years ago. My brain wasn’t fully formed yet. And I don’t drink any more. So, technically, that person in the picture is not me.”
“That’s not what the cognitive interpreter says.”
“What does the cognitive interpreter say?”
“It says you're making up a narrative to cover up a lie.”
“Well—”
Honestly, that was a hard one to counter.
At this point, the manager set down her ballpoint pen and looked at me with the most ambiguous expression I have ever seen. The ambiguity of it felt so unsettling, my ass started sweating — which always makes it itch — so I started to shift about in my chair to scratch it and to keep my underwear from clinging to my butt. I’m sure this behaviour only added to the stellar impression I was making on the manager and all the devices that were monitoring me.
“Don’t answer the next question with words,” the manager said.
“How will I answer it, then?”
“Your mind will answer it.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“Don’t worry. It will.”
“But, what if…?”
“Silence!”
The manager’s voice was definitely not as ambiguous as her face. It was firm and direct. So, I closed my mouth and clasped my hands together on my lap. No matter what she said, I wouldn’t respond with my mouth or my brain. I’d show this totalitarian fast-food manager that she couldn’t crack my mind.
“This is a scenario question,” she said. “You will have only two options to respond. Do you understand the rules?”
I didn’t say anything. I tried to think of a blank canvas.
I could hear the manager look at her app.
“Good,” she said.
Damn it, I thought, intensifying my focus on my imaginary, blank canvas.
“Here is the scenario,” she continued.
As she spoke, I tried to keep my focus on the blank canvas as if it were some kind of quiet and empty void. But no matter how hard I tried to keep it blank, each word she said splashed colours and textures on the canvas like little dabs of paint that began to expand and blend and morph into concrete images as her words accumulated.
“You are working in the busy kitchen of one of our Happy Burger stores. It’s very busy and there are seemingly endless lines of people at the front counter and drive-through. And this has been going on for hours. No sign of it slowing down. Everyone is exhausted, and you notice a colleague at the French Fry stand coming up with an innovative way to fry more French Fries and distribute them into containers to satisfy the unrelenting demand for them. You know the employee is violating a Happy Burger policy with what he is doing, but he is helping the team find some relief for the insatiable desire that our customers understandably have for our French Fries. The question: Do you report the colleague to a manager for violating policy, or do you ignore what he did, since it seemed to make the lines disappear?”
I focused on my imaginary canvas and tried to smear all the colours together to form a thick and gooey blackness that must surely be impenetrable to the Manager’s cognitive interpreter.
“That’s it,” the Manager said. “I think we are done with this interview.”
“Oh, OK,” I said.
“You may go.”
“Did I get the job?” I foolishly asked, removing the cognitive interpreter from my head.
“I don’t think you’re Happy Burger material,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“You’re too resistant to happiness.”
“But I want to be happy. I really do.”
“Belonging is happiness.”
“I want to belong.”
“That means following the rules.”
“I can follow rules. I really can.”
“That’s not what the cognitive interpreter says.”
“Please. I want to be happy. I do. I need to be happy.”
The manager folded her hands in front of her on the desk and looked into my eyes. We sat like this for what felt like more than a minute. I made sure not to turn away, no matter how much her ambiguous expression made me nervous.
“Well, I guess we can always reprogram you,” the manager finally said. “Slip on that cognitive interpreter again.”
And I did. That's the last thing I remember.
That’s the first question the manager of Happy Burger asked me during our interview. She looked too elegant to be a manager of a fast-food restaurant with her short, auburn hair and perfectly pressed, blue pants suit. And her office seemed too clean and minimalist to be any type of restaurant manager’s office — fast food, Michelin-rated, or otherwise. Not that I really knew anything about the offices of restaurant managers. This would have been my first restaurant job, but I felt sure most restaurant managers did not sit behind glass desks with 200-inch monitors mounted on the wall behind them.
My palms started to sweat. This happens to different parts of my body when I get nervous. I didn’t know how to answer her question. This wasn’t like any of the questions I’d practiced answering with my mother on the drive over to the Happy Burger corporate offices. I was prepared to answer why I wanted the job. Highlight my strengths and sugar-coat my weaknesses. But I wasn’t prepared to delve into esoteric questions about happiness. I wasn’t even sure I’d experienced happiness before.
So, I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Happiness is when you feel good. It’s like when you’re free of anxiety after taking your morning dose of Prozac.”
Listening to my improvised words tumble from my mouth made me feel proud. It struck me as a clear and self-evident answer.
But the manager just nodded and jotted something down on her notepad with a ballpoint pen. Her expression was perfectly ambiguous. I couldn’t tell if she loved or hated my answer. I wondered if the corporate office trained their managers to master the art of using a resting ambiguous face to keep applicants off-kilter.
“All right, Kathy. Have you ever eaten a Happy Burger?” she asked.
OK. This question I knew how to answer.
“Well, I really appreciate Happy Burger’s commitment to sustainability and equity—”
“No. I didn’t ask why you wanted to work at Happy Burger,” the manager interrupted. “I asked if you had ever eaten a Happy Burger.”
I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to be rude either.
“Yes,” I said. “I love Happy Burgers. They’re my favourites.” And for good measure, I added their slogan. “They’re America’s burgers.”
“Oh, really? Which Happy Burger is your favourite?”
“The Smart Burger.”
“The Smart Burger is not a Happy Burger.”
“What do you mean, it’s not a Happy Burger? It’s on the Happy Burger menu.”
“It’s a Smart Burger. It’s not made of real beef. Happy Burgers are made with authentic, grass-fed beef.”
“But Happy Burger still sells Smart Burgers.”
“Smart burgers are made by a different company. We just sell them as an alternative for people with dietary restrictions,” she said, her ambiguous expression and tone replaced by a frustrated expression and tone. “They are not flavoured with the happiness of grass-fed cows.”
“Oh,” I said.
“The cows are also massaged with rare oils.”
“All right.”
“And sung to by Celtic Druids as they’re being slaughtered.”
“Well, I’ve never eaten a Happy Burger. I’m a vegetarian.”
“You’re a vegetarian and you want to work at a hamburger restaurant?”
“I need money.”
“So, what you said before about wanting to work here because of our sustainability and equity policies wasn’t true?”
“No,” I said. “It’s all true. I admire your sustainability and equity policies and I also need money.”
The manager nodded. Her ambiguous expression returned. She jotted down some more notes with her ballpoint pen while I took a deep breath and hoped the next question was easier. I really needed this job. I’d failed all my community college courses last quarter and now, my parents were refusing to pay tuition. If I didn’t hustle up some money soon, I wouldn’t be able to register, which meant my parents would start charging me rent money, which would require me to get two jobs, which would really suck.
“Do we have permission to scan your brain?” the manager asked.
“Scan my brain?”
“Yes,” she said, pulling some contraption from her desk drawer and setting it between us. It looked like one of those wire scalp-massagers, except the ends glowed red and blue like Christmas-tree lights. “This cognitive interpreter will help us determine if you’re responding truthfully.”
“Do you think I’ve been lying?”
“We’ve already established you’ve been lying.”
“We have?”
“You said you’d eaten a Happy Burger, but you’ve clearly never eaten a Happy Burger.”
“Isn’t that a matter of interpretation? I thought the Smart Burgers were a type of Happy Burger.”
“Are you saying that you really didn’t know the difference?”
“They’re on the same menu at the same restaurant.”
“They’re made by an entirely different company. Everybody knows that. We just sell them to keep the tofu people satisfied.”
The way the manager said “tofu people” didn’t sound derogatory, even though the words seemed derogatory. The neutrality of her voice confused me. I felt sweat start to form on the back of my neck.
The manager slid the cognitive interpreter closer to me.
“We have a wholesome brand at Happy Burger. It requires that we have a staff that is beyond reproach,” she said. “We need to make sure all of our employees are pure of mind.”
It didn’t seem like I had much of a choice, so I picked up the cognitive interpreter and slid it over my head. Its metallic tentacles brushed through my hair, scratching my scalp, which produced a tingly feeling, like when I watch ASMR videos on YouTube. The manager lifted her phone and seemed to open an application that I assumed shared the data the cognitive interpreter was picking up from my brain waves.
“Do you want to do a test?” the manager asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“You're lying,” she said.
“What?”
“You don’t want to test the cognitive interpreter.”
“Wait. I thought we were testing this first. Don’t we need to set a baseline for when I’m lying or telling the truth?”
“We’ve been developing this technology for decades. It doesn’t need testing.”
“So, why ask if I want to test it?”
“To test my hypothesis.”
“So, this is still a test?”
“A different kind of test. Not a baseline test. A hypothesis test.”
“And what was your hypothesis?”
“You’re a liar.”
“I am not a liar.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“Have you ever participated in a wet T-shirt contest?”
“What does that have to do with—”
“Have you ever participated—”
“No!”
“Liar.”
“But I’ve never—”
The manager touched a button on her phone and an image of a younger version of me appeared on the 200-inch screen behind her. It looked like it was from a social media post from several years ago. I’d gone to Florida on a family vacation that happened to coincide with spring break. I made friends with some college kids at a bonfire on the beach and they shared some of their rum punch with me. The next thing I knew, I was posing with a group of other girls in wet T-shirts for a surfer dude named Derek who broadcast our pics all over the internet. He eventually got attacked by a shark and lost his leg, which I always relished as karmic justice — even though I have this know-it-all-friend who insists on chiming in on the comments section of my posts that I’m not interpreting the concept of karma correctly. I should really unfriend her. She’s never been sympathetic to any of my traumatic experiences.
“So, this isn’t you,” the manager said.
Well, it wasn’t me now, I reasoned.
“No,” I said. “That’s not me.”
“Our facial recognition algorithm is infallible. It says the face of the girl in the centre of the picture belongs to you.”
“Well, drunk me. From years ago.”
“Are you saying you turn into a different person when you drink?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Not me,” the manager said, taking notes with her ballpoint pen. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t drink.”
“But that was years ago. My brain wasn’t fully formed yet. And I don’t drink any more. So, technically, that person in the picture is not me.”
“That’s not what the cognitive interpreter says.”
“What does the cognitive interpreter say?”
“It says you're making up a narrative to cover up a lie.”
“Well—”
Honestly, that was a hard one to counter.
At this point, the manager set down her ballpoint pen and looked at me with the most ambiguous expression I have ever seen. The ambiguity of it felt so unsettling, my ass started sweating — which always makes it itch — so I started to shift about in my chair to scratch it and to keep my underwear from clinging to my butt. I’m sure this behaviour only added to the stellar impression I was making on the manager and all the devices that were monitoring me.
“Don’t answer the next question with words,” the manager said.
“How will I answer it, then?”
“Your mind will answer it.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“Don’t worry. It will.”
“But, what if…?”
“Silence!”
The manager’s voice was definitely not as ambiguous as her face. It was firm and direct. So, I closed my mouth and clasped my hands together on my lap. No matter what she said, I wouldn’t respond with my mouth or my brain. I’d show this totalitarian fast-food manager that she couldn’t crack my mind.
“This is a scenario question,” she said. “You will have only two options to respond. Do you understand the rules?”
I didn’t say anything. I tried to think of a blank canvas.
I could hear the manager look at her app.
“Good,” she said.
Damn it, I thought, intensifying my focus on my imaginary, blank canvas.
“Here is the scenario,” she continued.
As she spoke, I tried to keep my focus on the blank canvas as if it were some kind of quiet and empty void. But no matter how hard I tried to keep it blank, each word she said splashed colours and textures on the canvas like little dabs of paint that began to expand and blend and morph into concrete images as her words accumulated.
“You are working in the busy kitchen of one of our Happy Burger stores. It’s very busy and there are seemingly endless lines of people at the front counter and drive-through. And this has been going on for hours. No sign of it slowing down. Everyone is exhausted, and you notice a colleague at the French Fry stand coming up with an innovative way to fry more French Fries and distribute them into containers to satisfy the unrelenting demand for them. You know the employee is violating a Happy Burger policy with what he is doing, but he is helping the team find some relief for the insatiable desire that our customers understandably have for our French Fries. The question: Do you report the colleague to a manager for violating policy, or do you ignore what he did, since it seemed to make the lines disappear?”
I focused on my imaginary canvas and tried to smear all the colours together to form a thick and gooey blackness that must surely be impenetrable to the Manager’s cognitive interpreter.
“That’s it,” the Manager said. “I think we are done with this interview.”
“Oh, OK,” I said.
“You may go.”
“Did I get the job?” I foolishly asked, removing the cognitive interpreter from my head.
“I don’t think you’re Happy Burger material,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“You’re too resistant to happiness.”
“But I want to be happy. I really do.”
“Belonging is happiness.”
“I want to belong.”
“That means following the rules.”
“I can follow rules. I really can.”
“That’s not what the cognitive interpreter says.”
“Please. I want to be happy. I do. I need to be happy.”
The manager folded her hands in front of her on the desk and looked into my eyes. We sat like this for what felt like more than a minute. I made sure not to turn away, no matter how much her ambiguous expression made me nervous.
“Well, I guess we can always reprogram you,” the manager finally said. “Slip on that cognitive interpreter again.”
And I did. That's the last thing I remember.