This man's open letter explains why you should never criticise a McDonald's worker

Employees in the kitchen of a fast food chain like McDonald's have long been associated with gormless teenagers or people with little ambition in life.

The reality, of course, is very different from this generalisation. And now one man has taken to the internet to defend his occupation from the critics.

About to return to university at the end of the summer, in which he's been doing 50 hour weeks at McDonald's to save up for his education, Mike Waite, who lives near Edinburgh, has seen his passionate post on Facebook shared and liked thousands of time in a few days.

His main point is that you shouldn't judge a person by their plastic name badge and golden arches baseball cap:

There are people becoming pilots, lawyers, designers, architects, and people who are at a point in their life that they will do whatever it takes to look after their family.

I work with people I would aspire to be like, who have strengths in areas I wish I had, who have overcome situations I never could and who have the determination to not fade away on handouts but rather step up and work for their living unlike a huge number of people in this country.

While he acknowledges the pay is not the greatest and that the job, like any other, can be stressful at times, he wouldn't swap his experience there:

Overall please just take your preconceptions and be rid of them because I work with some amazing people, and like many of them McDonalds is not a 'dead-end' of my working life but rather part of the beginning.

So remember his words next time you think about criticising someone in a fast food restaurant... and the fact that they're the ones preparing your burgers.

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