McDonald's Adventures: Sounds

Entirely befitting a vegetarian, I was trained to work the grill on my first day at McDonald's. I watched a twenty-minute slideshow and was entirely prepared for it. There has been only a single difficulty: warning tones. A reasonable approximation of the Jaws theme counts down the final five seconds before meat can be pulled from the grill. There is a bass line when the oven timer has found zero. There is a beep when a new order arrives on the monitor. There is drone when the timer is complete for McDonald's proprietary microwave, the Q-oven. When meat has been in the heating cabinet longer than thirty minutes, there is another tone. The most annoying and high-pitched tweets are reserved for fried products ready to be pulled, one for fried meats and one for fried potatoes.

Several times these sounds have terrified me into believing the fire alarm had activated. Yesterday a fellow crew member assured me this would never happen. There is no fire alarm. They once set an English muffin on fire in the toaster and filled the kitchen with smoke and there was no alarm. I am a mote concerned.