Sixty-two applications. That’s not a typo. Over the course of a year, I had sent my name, my number, my email, and whatever scraps of experience I could dress up into something respectable to what felt like every business with a “Now Hiring” sign or ad in Baltimore. Grocery stores, clothing outlets, fast food restaurants–I’d call myself indiscriminate. Desperation has a way of making you open-minded. So when Wingstop called back, I didn’t let the fact that I’d never been a particularly big fan of the place slow me down. It wasn’t about the food. It wasn’t even really about the job either. It was about the principle, which is the word I use when I mean money.

The restaurant itself was modest in the way most fast food places are modest: functional, forgettable, smelling exactly like you’d expect- fried chicken and some blend of spices that hits you before you even get to open the door fully. The main area was small enough that I half-wondered if the space could have been a cookie shop and they’d just left the bones. A woman in her twenties or thirties greeted me at the front. She was moving like she had somewhere more important to be, cutting quick paths between the counter and kitchen even though it wasn’t rush hour. Before I could say much, she handed me a cup and told me I could grab whatever drink I wanted from the fountain before heading to the back.

Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Sprite, Fanta. I stood there longer than I should have. Fanta is my personal favorite, but I was in a professional setting, so I compromised with lemonade and told myself I made a mature choice. The backroom was where things got interesting.

Seven of us. A pair of twins- boy and girl, maybe nineteen- sitting close enough that they might have been sharing the same nervous energy. A woman who looked like she carried herself with the authority of someone’s grandmother, but she was the kind of person who reminds you of a Tyler Perry character, except without the grey wig. A woman with a curly pixie cut who kept clicking her pen. An old man, maybe late fifties, who looked like he’d been through things that made a Wingstop interview look like a coffee break. And then there was the guy who looked like Nick Cannon had a long-lost cousin with an afro, same energy, same jawline, same charisma radiating off him before he’d say a word.

We were all handed forms. Name, contact information, and availability. Standard. Each person was being pulled one at a time to interview while the rest of us waited and scratched our pens across paper.

I noticed I was the youngest one there. The old man–whom I’ll call Joe because if I had to guess, he looked like one–noticed too.

“First time?” he asked.

“Yep. Was I being obvious?”

“A little,” he said, smiling in a way that was more kind than it was condescending.

I asked him the question back, trying to play it off as a joke. He laughed and waved it off like it was nothing. Then the Nick Cannon lookalike leaned in and said, “Don’t sweat it, son. It’s all a process.” He said it with the kind of quick, light energy you’d expect from Kevin Hart delivering a pep talk: punchy, genuine, over in two seconds. It didn’t stop me from thinking ‘process of elimination’.

And then, despite myself, I started talking. We all did. Joe started most of the conversation.

It turned out the male twin and I had the same taste in music: classic rock. AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, KISS. He said his sister drags him to whatever concert happens, and he’d never look back. The woman with the pixie cut was an aspiring nurse. The Madea woman was between jobs and entirely unbothered by that fact. The Nick Cannon guy was working two jobs and looking for a third. Joe said he was "semi-professional" in baseball.

It was Joe who got quiet for a second, looked around at all of us, and said, almost to himself: “I made every mistake I could’ve made when I was young. The only thing I can tell you is don’t look back at ‘em long- look back just long enough to learn, then keep moving.” Nobody responded right away. The kind of silence that follows something true.

I had walked in thinking of these people as competition. Seven seats, probably one or two openings- basic math. But somewhere between the lemonade and Joe’s wisdom, I stopped calculating and just started being in the room. These were people with rent due, with plans, with varying degrees of tiredness showing around their eyes. The same math that made them my competition also made them my company.

Maybe that’s just the world we’d been handed. A world that trains you, early and often, to keep your eyes on your own paper- to treat every room you walk into as a zero-sum game where someone else winning means you losing. We were all there because we needed something, and the system that put us in that room together was the same one that made us strangers to each other in the first place. The competition wasn’t something we invented. It was something we inherited. And yet, without really deciding to, we’d quietly opted out of it- not by ignoring the stakes, but by choosing to be people first and applicants second. 

Eventually, the women from the front called my name. We sat across from each other at a small table in the kitchen. She asked me the standard questions: name, age, what I like to do outside of work, where I see myself in the future, and what school I went to. I told her. When I mentioned the school I went to, her face shifted- not dramatically, just a small brightening.

“My niece goes there,” she said. “You know her?”

I turned the name over in my head. It sounded familiar in the vague way that a lot of names do when you’ve been in the same building for a few years. I knew she was a senior. I couldn’t place a face. But the name rang a bell; I told her it sounded familiar and left it at that. Internally, though, I filed this away in a file that could only be described as a jackpot: her niece and I went to the same school, which apparently meant I  was legitimate, respectable, a known quantity. It was the closest thing to a reference I’d ever accidentally produced.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t perfectly truthful across the board. When she asked if I had prior customer service experience or something similar, I said I had some. I didn’t. I had a vague recollection of helping my grandmother run some sort of booth at a fundraiser, which I decided at the time would count, even if it was over three years ago. She also asked if I was comfortable working holidays, and I said absolutely, which was true in the sense that I was comfortable with the idea of it, if not yet fully tested in reality.

She thanked me, said they’d be in touch, and shook my hand. A few days later, they called. They said I got it, and they’ll be in touch to help me get started. They never called again after that.

I never worked a single shift at that Wingstop. Whatever “you’re hired” meant to them, I didn’t mean the same thing it meant to me. When I think about it now, I wish I hadn’t thought too bitterly about it. What I think about instead is the backroom- Joe’s professionalism and his one sentence about mistakes, the twins and their unexpected good taste in music, the Nick Cannon guy who was already working two jobs and still showed up with good energy. I walked in that day, braced for competition, and found something closer to companionship. Not the sentimental kind- nobody exchanged numbers, nobody made promises. Just the ordinary kind that forms when people sit in the same room with the same low-stakes anxiety and decide to make it a little easier for each other.