I have a new favourite gesture.

Courtesy of the McDonald’s deputy store manager who, ably, conducts proceedings on a Sunday. It’s a move I’ve seen less than double figures in my life, but have always been impressed by. This practitioner has it etched into her muscle memory. It’s called the “rock, paper, think!”.

Newcomers who walk under the Golden Arches usually assume the newest hire mans the baskets, frying the fries.

It’s actually the second lowest ranking who does.

The newest recruit needs to be kept under the close eye of the commanding officer. And so dawdles about near the tills, neither taking orders nor fulfilling them. The dog walker has this puppy on one of those leashes which you can retract and lock. Except this deputy manager’s release button is broken/she won’t use it, so once the pup has given cause to be reigned in, it’s now a battery pup, caged under a naked lightbulb, for the rest of its life.

The town fryer fits into one of the four buckets common to the second most junior role in any profession:

1. An “up and comer” who wants to progress the “right” way, relying on the skills and guile that got them there, and refusing to sleep their way to the top of the staff rota.
2. A “staying there and staying there” who fries their best, but 1 in 3 shifts tips the chip basket upside down and ends up only shallow frying one layer of chips on the (now upward facing) bottom of the basket as a whole batch sinks to the bottom of the oil and barnacles itself to the base of the fryer. It’s then up to this friar, devoted to the religion of futile effort, to scrub the charred molluscs off the never-stained-more-less steel after their shift.
3. An “able dosser” in the guise of a “staying there and staying there”, who has a chip on their shoulder after toiling away on the tills, having to actually talk to people, before discovering the stayer is being paid the same as them.
   They’re more than capable of running the hot baths like a well oiled machine, but they can’t be seen to.
   Their biggest challenge is making sure the basket tip only happens every 1 in 3 shifts. Improve to 1 in 4 and they’ll be promoted back to the tills, dip to 1 in 2 and they’re back on the retracting leash and having their “free range” sticker peeled off them.
   It’s not as simple as a deliberate tip every third shift because, although the dosser is good, their natural tip rate usually hovers around 1 in 10. So, if unlucky, the dosser could end up as a 2 in 3 jailbird, or worse, as a zero in 3 talk show host.
4. A fryer “who” permeates all of the above three categories, but can’t quite be placed in a particular box with any degree of confidence, even by a regular. They’re called upon when it’s busy, in order to give customers like me something to think about and keep us occupied so we don’t have time to complain about the incredulity of a long wait for cold food.

Today I’m confronted by a textbook up and comer. Well intentioned, eager, but starved of wisdom, both conventional and un.

He’s panicking but trying to put on a brave face.
He’s just run out of large fries packets. The cardboard box equivalent of a metallic Ferrari-red Ferrari inscribed with an unflinching, Lamborghini-yellow “M”.

He flashes around the restaurant, searching high and low for more.
At one point peeling off a loose tile behind the McFlurry machine and discovering the franchise owner’s stash of Happy Meal toys from 2009, which were made too small and recalled after a flurry of children swallowed them. He’s managed to keep hold of some and they’ve since become antique collector’s items. Our earnest, (likely) youngest sibling of three, quickly puts the tile back and glues it down firmly with caramel from the Rolo McFlurry toppings.

The deputy manager is alerted to the situation after a customer explains his special dietary requirement where he can’t eat animals with heads, and asks if he could have the chicken which is running around the kitchen behind her.

The sheriff’s deputy, somehow, gets the chip boy in a headlock and drags him back to his station. She then starts rocking on her heels in front of the deep fryer, left hand on her hip, right still wrapped around her charge’s neck, and bears the serious and intensely focused look of a pole vaulter gearing up to do the most bizarre event of the Olympic games and trying to work out if anyone will care if they get gold.
Bizarre because it predates and combines scaling walls which (rock climbing) didn’t become an Olympic sport until 2020, and jousting which (jousting) isn’t an IOC recognised sport. I imagine the event came about after the Leader of Ancient Greece’s spoiled 9 year old son, forced his father to include his favourite form of execution in the Olympic Games in return for agreeing to crap outside. I know what that feels like…

The deputy manager’s lance was trying to say something. I presumed he was trying to say he couldn’t breathe. She released her hold. Turns out he couldn’t breathe, but that’s not what he said, preferring to use his last breaths to throw his hat in the ring with, “Why don’t we give them a medium fries in the cardboard packets plus a small fries in the little paper ones, instead of the large fries they ordered?”

She smiles and goes to tap him endearingly on the top of the head, pleased he’s had a go, but she ends up touching his severed neck.

As she wipes the blood on his apron, she explains “These lot aren’t trying to make paper planes, these are established supersizers. They paid for cardboard and that’s the only form of transportation they will accept!”

For the first time I question how even she would solve this one. But then my mind was put at ease… she drew forth the gesture.

She’s stopped swaying now. And is stood square on to the fryer, feet just wider than shoulder width, and rooted into the ground as deeply, and as sturdily, as two giant oak trees planted a touch wider than shoulder width apart from each other. All the way up through her trunk she’s a thick, sturdy skyscraper. One that was built before the technology which allows them to sway slightly to survive earthquakes, but has still never met a shake which could fell it, no matter how milky.

Her face is no longer preparing to launch itself over a prison wall with a branch. It’s in the process of creating a look worthy of creating a solution. She’s sucked both her lips inside her mouth. Top lip above her bottom, bottom lip beneath her top. Her canines rest gently on the back of the inhaled lips and clasp them down, leaving only the tiniest of marks. Her mouth, like her body, is locked in place, and no brain power needs to be wasted on fighting nervous tremors.

The stage is set. It’s time for the headline act.

She’d gone hands on hips after her trip to the abattoir so doesn’t have far to travel. She clenches her left hand into a fist. Tight, but blood still flowing. The fist comes up to breast height and left of centre. If she looked down she could see the tops of the middle third of her fingers folded over and fastened down by a reassuring thumb. The back of her fist faces diagonally downwards and towards the golden vats they must save.

As her left side was preparing to punch, her right was gently pushing along a little duckling to help it catch up with its mother. Hand outstretched and palm fully exposed, it slowly sails its way to navel height before stopping, palm up to the ceiling, McDonald’s menu facing down to the floor, and her index finger the part of her hand closest to, and withstanding the heat of, the simmering baths.

Rock and paper ready, it’s time to begin the game.

There are two ways to introduce a game of rock, paper, scissors. One is solo rock and the other is rock and roll of paper.

Solo rockers make a fist and piston up and down, audibly counting to three, and then, quite literally, play their hand. I used to be in this bracket.
For some reason I’d also put my non-playing hand behind my back while doing so. As if to show I wasn’t going to cheat and play two hands, before carefully picking the better weapon and holstering the other, all without my opponent, an arm’s length away and looking straight at me, realising.

But I stopped being a solo rock climber after I reached an age where it started bringing back memories of the gestures my dad would do to other drivers when he got road rage.

From then on, I became a rock and roller.
This is where you pat the bottom of your playing fist into the open palm of your other hand three times. It has the benefit of making a smacking sound which can intimidate your opponent. But it also requires trust from them as your non-playing hand is not behind your back and could therefore morph into any one of the three weapons.

However, rock and roll can be used for brain teasers as well as deciding who gets to sit in the front. It just needs to be adapted slightly.
The cadence of the pendulum needs to be slowed ever so slightly and the bottom of the fist must stay on the palm for a split second longer than a game fist, which muffles the noise into one which awakens and promotes brain activity, rather than a crisp slapping which could induce a fight or flight response.

There is also no reason it need only go on for three beats, although the crossword should be completed by five.

Another term for it, which used to be more common in the Shakespearean age, is the “play the part” gesture.
Often a director of a play would feel willing to commit to the project after having the two leading roles filled, confident they could build the rest of the show around them.
Naturally, the next problem was filling the first supporting role, which was still pivotal, but more of a supporting role than a leading one.
The director hadn’t given as much thought to this one and is temporarily Bamzookied. But then they perform the gesture and it gifts them with the answer.
Rock high, paper low, the director counts themself into a game. By the third thump a lantern has gone off in their head, “You know what… I think I know just the man for the part… Yesss of course. He’d be perfect!”.
Problem solved and the show that must go on, does.

Back in the CharlesIIIisean age, the deputy manager begins to beat her drum. The dull thump reverberates past the kitchen and well into the seating area, turning heads of all persuasions. I’m trying not to be distracted by her performance and I’m looking into the whites of her eyes to see how she’s going to get us out of this mess. I see the lightbulb go off after two but she gives an extra thud so she can check her workings and pins the idea down for a three count. Rocked, papered, thought.

The crowd smiles with relief, she keeps her poker face on like there was never a problem, and he’s lying on the floor without a head.

She releases her incarcerated lips, her nose as relieved as the crowd to have a break from breathing, and, like Poirot, reveals the killer “Give the supersizers a medium fries box, then fill a small fries paper packet, decant it into another medium fries box and give that to them too. Then fold the empty small fries packet into a paper plane and put it in their kid’s Happy Meal”. The circular economy.

The customers whoop and clap in delirium. Even some of the staff members take off their caps off and throw them in the air in celebration.

Eventually the applause finishes. She’s just stopped a skyscraper from collapsing and is due to go on break, when she hears “Have you plucked that chicken yet or do I need to cut your head off too?”