Smiley Lane McDonald’s Allegedly Robbed by Former Employee

The McDonald’s on Smiley Lane was robbed Saturday. 

At around 8:42 p.m. Saturday, a 6 feet tall black man in dark clothing walked up to the drive-thru. When he got to the pay window, he reached inside and stole money out of the cash register, then ran away in a southbound direction.

General Manager Crystal Garza said she thinks the robber was a former employee. “A random person would not know exactly where the money was located,” she said.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the fast food industry has one of the lowest employee retention rates in the country. The average yearly salary for a fast food worker is around $20,000. 

Garza said that McDonald’s is always hiring, and that the Smiley Lane McDonald’s employee retention rate is “pretty low.”

The robber reportedly walked up to the pay window and reached inside the window, stealing cash straight out of the cash register. Garza said this is the first time the Smiley Lane McDonald’s has been robbed in the past year she’s worked there. The McDonald’s was empty on the night of the robbery, as it is most evenings, Garza said. “Most nights are pretty laid-back. Sometimes we get crazy drunk people, but that’s only usually on the weekends,” she said.Garza said she is not concerned about her safety as a McDonald’s employee. She said that she feels safe working at the Smiley Lane McDonald’s. “There are usually a lot of people working, so I am never actually alone,” she said.Garza works weeknights at the Smiley Lane McDonald’s. She has been a general manager for the past half year. The robber made a purchase, then ran through the drive-thru after stealing the cash.The drive-thru attendant hands a receipt to a customer through the window that was robbed.“It is not a far reach to think that the robber was a former employee,” Garza said. “That’s the problem with the fast-food industry. Employee turnover is really quick, and it makes hiring hard.”

Skills Development Blog

The three skills I feel most confidant in are coming up with pitches, photo taking, and video editing. Although I know that some people really struggle to come up with pitches, this hasn’t ever been an issue for me. I often help my friends in other classes come up with ideas for pitches too because it’s fun for me. One example of this skill was my postcard audio project. My initial pitch fell through, so I had to think of something really quickly, and that same day interviewed a guy from the Bottle Rockets which I think went really well.

I have always enjoyed taking photos but I do feel like I have learned important rules of technique and have further developed my “eye” in this class, which has greatly improved my photography. It is the first class I have taken in photography and I definitely have a new love. One example of this in my work is understanding creative angles. I think that the key to good photojournalism is interesting angles. Good photojournalism has an artistic sense to it. The key to interesting angles and making photojournalism artistic is developing your eye, as Alejandro discussed in class, and I think I am improving in that regard. I think all three of my real person photos were pretty interesting angles, and I definitely feel like my artistic eye was reflected in my photographs, particularly the one of Hannah Steele riding a tricycle. The moment that I saw this I knew I had to take a picture — the disco ball, the symmetry, Hannah’s stoic face.

I feel confidant in video editing because it just feels natural to me. In my head I know exactly how I want things to look, and video editing started to feel intuitive after I learned the basic gist of the editing software. I think I have a pretty good intuitive sense of what looks good, how long someone should be on screen, how and when to fade in and out. One example of this in my work was my first video project, which was my first time ever dealing with video editing software. Although it was kind of daunting to have the hardest section first, I didn’t feel too overwhelmed and actually really enjoyed editing my work. One of the important things I did in that first project was avoiding jump cuts by starting interview audio before actually showing the face of the person talking. Video editing was definitely fun for me.

I would like to improve on using the camera on manual, audio editing, and interviewing. I am not confidant in using the camera on manual. Although I am starting to figure it out, I am nowhere near fully understanding it. It seems tedious, in a way, to focus on understanding how to maneuver the camera when I can just use auto. On one hand, I want to be a cool photographer who understands the camera, but on the other, I know that I can take beautiful pictures on manual with little effort. The only way to improve this skill is to keep going out and taking pictures on manual and essentially forcing myself to learn. I will also look towards my friends who know what they’re doing to help me out.

I need to learn how to edit audio better, and I think that the best way to improve this skill is to take a class through KBIA and listen to podcasts. I think that there were a lot of things I knew intuitively about video and photo because I watch a lot of videos and look at a lot of photos. I don’t, however, listen to a lot of podcasts. This seems to me the best way to develop a type of intuitive understanding of audio.

Interviewing is very hard for me because I am sometimes unexpectedly shy. Sometimes throughout this class I’d be walking up to a source to interview them and would have to walk away because I was so nervous, which is absurd because that’s literally going to be my occupation. I usually find a way to fight through the initial shyness and fall into a type of “reporting mode” where I am capable of talking to anyone, but it often takes a while to get myself into this mode. I think that the key to combatting this is to simply keep doing it. It will get better with time and experience — I will feel more confidant in myself and what I’m saying once I’ve been reporting for a long time. Another way I think I can fight this is to basically follow another journalist around. I feel so awkward and weird when I’m walking around looking to interview people, but if I realize that other people do this too, I think I’ll feel more normal when it’s my time to interview.

 

Real Person Photo

Photo 1: Lisa Sotir is holding her 2-month-old nephew Walter Archambo at his baby shower in Jefferson City. Archambo’s shower was held at his house.

“Walter is the calmest baby I’ve ever seen,” Sotir said.

Photo 2: Carl Williams is selling his handmade crafts at Artlandish Gallery First Friday. Williams and his wife sell their products at Artlandish Gallery both on First Fridays and throughout the month.

Williams said that he makes all of his crafts on his own, and his wife helps him sell.

Photo 3: Absolute Vintage model Fiona Murphy looks in the mirror as she adjusts her earrings. Murphy was modeling in Absolute Vintage’s first official photoshoot on Sunday. Murphy, who’s been featured in numerous photoshoots for various projects, said she loves the camera.

Blog #9 Instructors Skills

Photo 1(template photo): In this photo the ISO is 3200, the aperture is 14 and the shutter speed is 1/100.

 

Photo 2: I overexposed this photo by keeping the ISO at 3200 and the aperture at 14, adjusting the shutter speed from 1/100 to  1/20.

Photo 3: I underexposed this photo by keeping the shutter speed at 1/20 and the aperture at 14, and adjusting the ISO from 3200 to 400.

Photo 4: I overexposed this photo by decreasing the aperture from 13 to 4, keeping the shutter speed at 1/20 and the ISO at 400.

Blog #8 — response to #7

Seth’s Story

Mary’s Story

I compared Seth’s story and Mary’s story. Seth’s story was about the damage from the fires that have recently been burning through Santa Rose in California, and Mary’s was about what it’s like to live in the Russian border. I think that the photo story Seth found was better because it conveyed exactly what the story was trying to tell. There were side by side photos of buildings and the landscape before and after the fire damage. Although some of the first photos weren’t very high quality, the whole story all-together was totally striking and well formatted.

There were a few issues with Mary’s story in my opinion. Although it was fascinating to read, the pictures did not strike me. Some were good but most were quite boring. And maybe that’s fine, because photojournalism should mirror life — life in towns on the Russian border is gray and perhaps kind of boring. But I think the photographers could have done a better job finding interesting things to photograph. A lot of the pictures were boring but necessary; for example, pictures of the actual border and remnants of the various relics of Russia’s military past. These photos could have been made more interesting. I also wanted to see more life. The word “life” was in the title so I thought I would be seeing more about the everyday life of people on the border, which would make a really interesting story, but this story seemed to be more about the border than the life on the border.

I also did not like the way the photos were dispersed throughout the story. Although I understand why they were broken up by descriptive text, I think it would have been more effective to put them into a photo album. This is a story focused on comparison, and I think it would’ve been easier to compare the photos if they were in an album format.

The photos from Seth’s article worked on their own to tell a story. The photos from Mary’s article did not. The articles were telling different stories, of course, but I think Seth’s hit the nail on the head and Mary’s didn’t tell the story it could have.

NPR Style Project

The MU Improv team is one of the most popular comedy teams at the University of Missouri. In today’s current political climate, humor is never in short supply, and the same can be said for the campus improv team. Members talk about what makes this comedy organization special.

 

 

Blog #7

NYT photo sequence

Becoming a Steelworker Liberated Her: Then Her Job Moved to Mexico

This New York Times article features a woman named Shannon Mulcahy. She is a former steel worker at a factory called Rexnord in Indiana. In October 2016 the factory announced that it was leaving Indiana and moving to Mexico.

The photo sequence in this article is brilliant. It hit home with me in a very personal way; I grew up in a small town, called New Haven, very similar to the one described, and with people just like Mulcahey. There is one factory in my town that employs the majority of the population. If the factory were to move to Mexico it would truly devastate New Haven’s economy and citizens. Mulcahy’s story is a familiar and difficult one. With automation such as Amazon’s threatening to take over the tasks of the modern factory worker, millions of American workers are going to be devastated in the name of innovation. Economics says that with innovation comes replication; new, different jobs will somehow become available at some point. But this is an ongoing process that requires an adjustment period that is going to hurt factory workers.

The photo sequence tells the story of the nuances of Shannon Mulcahey’s life. This is a deliberate choice made by the photographer. When an article comes out stating that Rexnord is moving to Mexico and 300 workers will lose their jobs, we understand that it’s a bad thing, but humans can’t really digest facts this vast. Numbers are numbers; large and abstract. If we want to understand the gravity of this move, we need to understand the story of someone experiencing it.

The first picture shows Mulcahey’s calloused, wrinkled hands holding her granddaughter’s feet. Her nail polish is chipping. Her hands are large and rough but the photo is tender. By not immediately showing Mulcahey’s face, the audience wants more.

The next photo is of Mulcahey in front of her house with her granddaughter on her lap. Her son feeds his daughter. This picture establishes a sense of place and alludes to Mulcahey’s position in both of their lives — as a helper, a nurturer.

The next picture shows protest ads at the United Steelworkers Local 1999 in Indianapolis. The signs are protesting Rexnold’s move to Mexico, reading “Hey Rexnold, make it here in America!” and “Fighting for American jobs.” The photo is dark around the edges and has a nice color scheme. It gives background and makes sense of Mulcahey’s situation in a broader view.

The next is a picture of the factory. The most important part of this photo is the American flag in front of the building, which really adds to the relative feeling of injustice featured in the story.

The photo set goes on the highlight important parts of Mulcahey’s life — her dealing with her granddaughter, who has a rare chromosomal disorder; her with her daughter, who got many scholarships when she graduated high school to attend Purdue University; her coworkers at Rexnold; her at a job fair. My favorite ones, though, are the very normal ones that depict Mulcahey’s everyday life; shopping at the grocery store, driving to work, and putting on makeup in the car. Mulcahey is fully vulnerable and humanized. Once the story is finished, readers feel like they know her.

Each photo serves its own important function, and they work together very nicely to convey a feeling impossible to express in words. The photographer did an excellent job of portraying the life of an individual factory worker.

Blog 6

Frontier Psychiatrist by the Avalanches

“Frontier Psychiatrist” was created in 2000 by an Australian band called the Avalanches. It’s a bizarre song created from multiple different samples of music and sound through a method literally called “sampling.” These samples include the sounds of a whinnying horse, dialogue from the sketch “Frontier Psychiatrist” by Wayne and Schuster, a scratched record, and a booming chorus of trumpets and violins.

The lyrics are entirely nonsensical, but more or less discuss the story of a boy named Dexter who has been deemed “criminally insane” and “psychosomatic”, which has warranted his expulsion from his entire school system. This can be gleaned from the first stanza of lyrics, but then the song goes haywire and turns into a jumbled mess of weird pronouncements like “You’re a nut/ you’re crazy in the coconut”, “He was white as a sheet/ and he also made false teeth”, “And milk! Rectangles, to an optometrist, the man with the golden eyeball.”

The Avalanches haven’t come out with any type of statement about the song’s meaning, but it seems that it’s more or less portraying what it’s like to be inside the mind of a person with a psychosomatic disorder,a disorder that involves both the mind “psyche” and the body “soma.” The video is as strange as the song, which creates a type of psychosomatic experience in itself — the bizarre music coupled with the weird lyrics creates a discombobulating effect that leaves people wondering what the hell just happened. The madness happening in the video is creating the madness flowing into the listeners ears — mind + body.  It’s an interesting thing, because a song could tell the story of the victim of a psychosomatic disorder, but “Frontier Psychiatrist” seems to instead show the experience.

Audio Postcard – Brian Henneman, Bottle Rockets

Brian Henneman is the frontman, lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter of the St. Louis band the Bottle Rockets. Henneman talks after his show at the Roots n Blues music festival about “making it” as a band in the rapidly changing music industry.

 

 

Blog #4

http://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2016/04/19/vietnam-girls-saved-at-border-cfp-field-pkg.cnn

Police saved Vietnamese girls being transported over the border of China and Vietnam to be sold into sex slavery, and this video report by CNN tells their story.

The use of video and sources were incredibly important to this story for two reasons. First, we hear about sex trafficking in Asia frequently; we are aware of its existence and know it’s a bad thing, but as Americans I think it is hard to conceptualize something of this nature. As a general population we have no idea what’s going on in Asia and what normal life is like in Vietnam. Taking video of the villages and homes these girls come from is essential to understanding — or attempting to understand — that sex slavery in Asia happens to people’s daughters. Video humanizes the issue and helps put faces to this overarching idea of “sex trafficking in Asia” which we can’t really begin to actually understand as an idea as a Westernized population.

Along with the importance of video, the sources were incredibly important. The reporter talked to five of the victims of the crime, concealing their identities because of age. She also talked to the mother of one of the victims, a member of the prevention department, and an outreach worker.

The mother, who spoke to the reporter outside her home, worked very well as a source because, as mentioned before, sex slavery in Asia happens to people’s daughters. No mother wants her daughter to be sold into human trafficking, and by putting us into the mind of the mother of a victim and listening to her tell her story, we as viewers begin to reach some understanding.

The girls themselves were very important sources as well. One shot featured the girls, the reporter, and the outreach worker sitting in a room together. The girls all spoke in Vietnamese and the outreach worker translated for them. Seeing the girls is important because they further humanize the situation and verify the statements of the outreach worker. We understand as viewers that she’s saying things that directly happened to the girls because we can see them talking to her.

The prevention worker gives context to the situation and helps viewers understand a broader view of sex trafficking prevention. I think he was chosen as a source to address how the girls are being rescued and the role of the police in the process. He also discussed the role of China in the story from a regulatory perspective, which wasn’t something the victims could have provided.

The reporter talked to a victim at the end of the story who showed her around her home with her younger siblings, which reinforced the idea of humanity the story is trying to appeal to. Dressed like a Westerner and speaking English, the girl could be anyone’s daughter. She was extremely important to give the story a face.

I believe all the sources were reliable, but I wanted to hear more from the prevention worker about the role China is playing in this human trafficking. We get the story in Vietnam, but I was left wanting to know more about the rescue process in China or on the border.