My life is a cliché: an outsider escapes a stifling hometown to pursue her dreams and upon returning gains a new, mature perspective as she reassesses her home life in light of her tumultuous year. However, this wholesome cliché is distorted by the inartistic setting of my workplace, an industrial estate McDonald’s, where I have spent most of my summer thus far. Its charm is non-existent, its character unsavoury. Defiantly oxymoronic, it somehow manages to be both sweaty and sterile.

Whilst working there last summer, I daydreamed about the exciting future I was sure awaited me at Cambridge and, once I arrived at university, the tales I had gathered of customers and culinary crimes peppered my small talk in Freshers’ week. Looking back, this seems like a disastrously bad tactic for making friends, given the sordid, sometimes scatological, nature of these stories. However, in need of a job, I once again returned.

“A customer calls me stupid as I fail to understand the mechanics of their complicated order”

Sometimes (a lot of the time) I resent my job. If only I was a STEM student on a faraway internship in some shiny office! On my break I sit outside and stare melancholically at the vistas of the grey industrial estate, gazing wistfully at the neighbouring M&S which would at least provide a more dignified answer to the question of how I spent my summer. But, alas …

One customer calls me stupid, and another rolls their eyes as I fail to understand the mechanics of their complicated order. I think about my degree and life at Cambridge, and how odd it feels not to be perceived as a ‘Cambridge student’ for the first time in weeks. It’s disconcerting, so I indignantly retreat into my (pseudo)academic mind palace of delusion, listing the books I’ve read and mulling over my old supervision topics. Many seem newly applicable and require urgent re-examination – Marx? The Frankfurt School?

My mind continues on this train of thought, jumbling half-remembered, vaguely intellectual terms in an attempt to privately reassert my separation from this world in which I am paid to clean weird stains under furniture and deal with angry customers. I long for Cambridge like it’s a toxic ex, its faults disappearing as I conjure up an idealised facsimile. Ah, its vaulted halls and lofty cloisters, a place where I conversed with people whose names are highlighted in blue on Wikipedia and was perceived as something more than just a name to fill up labour gaps in a schedule. I feel angry and resentful that a year later I am still working this job. The ceaseless passage of time aches, time which I am surely wasting as a lowly cog in this fast-food multinational conglomerate. Perhaps my time at Cambridge was just a dazzling mirage, a transient dream which has faded and returned me to the permanence of my hometown.

“I long for Cambridge like it’s a toxic ex”

Eventually, though, I found comfort in work that is so alien to who I am at Cambridge. I have come to notice, albeit begrudgingly, the folly of tethering my happiness to being a university student. My summer job has contributed to interesting facets of my identity: I can use a bin crusher, I can dis and re-assemble a urinal, and my organisation of the cleaning cupboard is praised on the work group chat as one of unparalleled artisanship. And so, in the unlikeliest of settings, my cathartic narrative arc of maturation and soul-searching took place: I realised that time spent outside of the intellectual hothouse and hyperproductive environment that is Cambridge is still valuable.

I’m warmly attached to my coworkers by the shared feeling that days filled with obnoxious customers and tepid workplace gossip are withstood because we need the money. And yet, obviously, we don’t need the money in quite the same way. In September I will leave again, maybe this time really never to return, while for some this is a job for life. Thanks to far-removed structural forces and tremendous good luck I have “ascended” to elite university study, while the same webs of fate and austerity policies have thrust others into full-time work at McDonald’s.

I still struggle with what the ‘correct’ attitude to have towards my summer job is: a brief interlude between terms? A cliched character-building experience, in which I am forced to view myself as something other than a ‘Cambridge student’? A sobering few weeks in which I fully appreciate my good fortune and add the gory details to otherwise abstracted accounts of inequality and hardship? All these attitudes fail to represent the full experience and feel patronising, almost gloating, reeking with the self-centeredness of a young person interpreting every life event as a teaching moment. Perhaps I’m overthinking it, but, then again, during the 8-hour shifts of mind-numbing tasks, I do need something to think about.