Work part time for McDonald’s Japan and join the ranks of housewives, students, and Y-san: the saddest person you’ll ever meet.
The brief but tragic story of Y-san appeared on a want-ad for the McCrew at the Akabane Station east exit McDonald’s in Tokyo. On it are several examples of part time shifts held by employees in order to show that McDonald’s offers hours for all kinds of lifestyles.
Among them are college students who work after school or on weekends and even a housewife who comes in for the 10:00 to 1:00 shift while the kids are in school. But right off the bat we are given the schedule of Y-san, an “employed person.”
The caption reads:
Employed Person Y-san
After finishing work at other job
6 hours a day (between 10:00 pm and 6:00 am)
3 days a week
Not a whole lot of information but just enough to give you a pretty bleak impression of what it’s like to be Y-san. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that Y-san manages to work only a five-day work week and is fortunate to get off at around 7:00 pm. He then has to go and pull a six-hour shift at McDonald’s giving him about two hours to sleep in this fairly optimistic scenario.
The only way I can imagine this possibly being a good situation is if Y-san works for a pharmaceutical company that’s in the final stages of testing a drug which allows people to not have to sleep. As a result, he has a lot of extra time on his hands and the best job available overnight was McDonald’s.
It’s a long shot, I know. Here’s what other people thought of it:
“Maybe he only works two hours at his regular job?”
“That’s dark.”
“When does he sleep?”
“I think sleep is more valuable than the few thousand yen he’ll make.”
“It’s a work combo!”
“That still leaves four nights open…slacker.”
“Looks like Mrs. Y has it pretty rough too.”
That last comment mentions the final square in the ad about a Housewife also called “Y-san” who works an 11:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. shift once a week after her husband comes back from work. We can easily tell the two Y-sans aren’t related because the one references her husband “coming home from work” — something the other Y-san clearly never does.
Lest you think this was just some poorly conceived example of a hypothetical McDonald’s worker, the fine print at the bottom of the ad states that these “examples are actually from people who work at the Akabane Station east exit location.” So if you happen to be there one late evening and see a man whose soul looks utterly crushed, try to go easy on him and for the love of god don’t ask him for a free smile.
Source: Twitter/@tunakorokkedayo via Hamusoku (Japanese)