There's something very democratic about the Maccas run. It's the one restaurant in town that has had almost everyone as a customer at one time or another.
And, perhaps more than any other in town, the Maccas on the corner of King and Steel streets in Newcastle takes all sorts and has seen - for better or worse - the bones and viscera of the city.
The water lapped at the door the morning the Pasha Bulker ran aground on Nobbys in 2007. Ann Bower had been asked to go and work at the Broadmeadow restaurant that morning. She had slept through the storm overnight but remembers getting to work at 4am for a truck delivery and turning on the TV in the break room.
"I woke up in the morning and heard all the commotion on the radio," she said. "We turned on the TV, and we were gobsmacked - we just thought 'bloody hell' - it had never happened before."
She was working at the Charlestown Maccas in 1989 when the earthquake shook the city to its core. She was in Charlestown Square with her husband and god-children when all the lights suddenly went down.
"My husband and I had gotten married the year before," she said. "All of a sudden, the lights went all black ... we thought it was a bomb scare or something like that - we had no idea what it was."
Ms Bower has spent the last 42 years in the Maccas uniform, first at Charlestown in 1982, then Broadmeadow before she finally came over to King Street in 2008. She's seen 28 managers come and go, has helped kids in their first jobs after school, and has made more cups of coffee than it's possible to count.
(How many a day? Who knows - the number is too large to count. And Ann doesn't drink coffee. She prefers English Breakfast).
She knows her regulars, has made life-long friends on the job, and has been working under the golden arches for some of Newcastle's most formative moments. She remembers when Maccas had counter service and McCafe was a cafe in the front of the store (she remembers the day she and a colleague decided to trial this new idea of making the coffee on the barista for the drive-through customers - 'just to see how it went' - it went off).
She remembers the night Supercars champion Scott McLaughlin came in after winning the Newcastle 500 in 2019. McLaughlin famously described that night as a "self-inflicted" celebration during that dusty Monday morning press conference.
"They came in and were drinking out of the cup," Ann remembers. "The store manager was on that night and (McLaughlin) asked for nuggets. We filled the cup up - that was one of the wildest things."
(In case anyone is curious, the Supercars championship cup can hold about 40 regulation-sized McNuggets.)
Ann was 17, just out of school, and wondering which way her career would go when she started at the Broadmeadow restaurant. In those days, the training at Maccas was infamously rigorous (ask anyone who hires in hospitality, and they will tell you a Maccas listing on a resume is a quick way to find a new employee), but more importantly, it was casual work that suited Ann's first love - her commitment to her horses in pony club and showjumping.
Marriage and children followed. Ann remembers returning to work when her daughter was three weeks old. Her husband was working a seven-day roster then.
"He would go to work, and I'd be coming home. We'd pass the baby over," she said. "It was hard, but we did it. We managed."
That's how Ann approaches a lot of things - she calls it her "old school" approach. Her day starts sometime just after midnight. She is in the car by about 1.10am to get to work by 2am. She mops the floors, rotates the stock and prepares for any deliveries, and by 4am she's working the coffee machines, then it's "go, go, go".
"Everybody says I'm mad, but I'm old school," she said, "If you start at 2am, by 6am I've done half my day."
When it's break time, she sits down with her cup of tea, maybe a crumpet she had brought from home, and might add some salad or, in the morning, some bacon. There have been a few more colourful custom orders, of course: chips and ice cream, a few who liked a sundae cup full of pickles, and another lady who liked her toasted sandwich with dipping mustard on the side.
"I still have regulars today who came in when I started in 2008," Ann said.
As the camera shutter rattled off for the photos, one of the workers cleaning the windows in the restaurant stopped and smiled.
"It's Ann today," he said. "Lady Ann tomorrow."
She brushes off the joke but says she wouldn't trade the job she's had for over four decades. "You just do it," she said, "Ride the wave - you ride the wave up and down, and then you go again."
