25. In order to get promoted at McDonald’s, there is no need to invent an original sandwich and defend it.

24. You are guaranteed a meal at McDonald’s.

23. McDonald’s has more people of color in top positions.

22. Once you submit an order to a customer, either the customer tells you what is wrong immediately or that is it. You don’t spend 100 hours making a quarter pounder, submit it to your co-workers to be peer reviewed, only to be told months later that it is too cold.

21. If you quit McDonald’s, no one will guilt trip you by calling you a sellout; rather they will praise you.

20. You don’t have to spend extra hours taking home meals made by trainees that are assigned to you, tasting, and grading them.

19. When a guest manager arrives, you don’t have to stick around to have overcooked food with him in the basement.

18. If there is no funding for your job for the next year, they will simply tell you to go home.

17. You don’t have to request grants to buy a cash register or French-fry machine.

16. Nobody ever got fired based on a low volume of articles in the McDonald’s employee newsletter.

15. You just tell customers what food is on their trays. You don’t have to write an abstract stating what is being served, then list the ingredients in great detail, so that anyone can replicate what is being served. As a matter of fact, if you went into detail how to replicate food being served at McDonald’s, you might get a visit from an intellectual property lawyer.

14. If you want to relocate, there are McDonald’s in every part of the country, not a few tenure track fry cook openings listed in a Chronicle.

13. At McDonald’s you don’t go to a nightly seminar, waiting for everyone else to stop asking questions.

12. At McDonald’s, you don’t have to serve on the employee evaluation committee if you don’t want to.

11. In the unlikely event that you are called to an out of state convention, McDonald’s will pay your total cost of travel.

10. To feed people weird chemicals In graduate school, you need to get an IRB approval; at McDonald’s, you just do it.

9. At McDonald’s you get to meet people of all ages, ranging from seniors who are getting their 50-cent coffees to children in the playground.

8. Switching shifts is not taken personally, the way switching advisors is — when really both are the same thing, trying to find a better fit between your needs and the needs of the program or franchise.

7. No line worker at McDonald’s ever pretends that their work has more social significance than it really does.

6. At McDonald’s there is a minimum wage.

5. In a few states, McDonald’s is actually required to pay you a living wage.

4. Federal law requires McDonald’s to pay you for every hour you work. If they made you take work home and did not pay you, they would be in hot water.

3. At McDonald’s there’s no need to wait for the year’s budget to get something, if a national commercial takes off and your franchise succeeds, maybe you can get a raise before your four month period is up.

2. No one walks up to you and says, “You are so lucky to take summers off’,” when you really can’t.

1. There is a real distinction between on the job and off the job. Once quitting time comes, you are truly done.