The doctor prescribed tranquilisers. I had gone into the surgery with a severe stomach ache, but I was stressed, not suicidal. He looked at me with contempt and resentment. He was wearing a dirty yellow shirt that made him look seedy and somewhat depraved, like he might have a job on the side as a porn actor.

“I don’t think it’s that serious a problem,” I said.

I thought it might have had something to do with having newly returned to London. I was living in a bed-sit the size and shape of a ship’s cabin, kitchen included, and was unemployed. I was twenty-six years old with a degree in history from Cambridge University.

“Oh,” the doctor replied looking at me from behind his hazy glasses, “you can buy Gaviscon off the shelf in Boots. That will ease the symptoms.”

I bought two packets of tablets from the nearby shiny Boots store halfway up Queensway on the way to Kensington Gardens and they quickly fixed me. There were sixty tablets and I only needed four before the pain went away.

Two days later I was in the underground to work. It was six in the morning. I was beginning a new job on the early shift at McDonald’s in The Haymarket, London W1.

I have had some pretty lame ideas in my time, and this was definitely one of them. I was interested in writing, and the idea was for me to work in McDonald’s long enough to write a dramatic script about life in a fast food chain. I had Robert De Niro and Arnold Schwarzenegger pencilled in for the lead roles.

It was closed when I arrived, and it took a while of tapping on the large full-length window to get anyone’s attention. I was allowed in, barely acknowledged by the manager, and sent upstairs to the office. I sat in the office for ten minutes before anyone else came in. A poster exhorted me to put in ninety-nine per cent effort for every one per cent inspiration. It’s good advice but seemed sinister in a McDonald’s poster. I took it to mean that if I didn’t toe their line I’d end up a nobody.

I was given a clean but limp rouge uniform that smelled of stale food. When I say limp, I mean the drain-pipe trousers had no shape or buoyancy to them. They hung off me in the way I imagine a prison uniform would, but with Ms all over it instead of arrows.

My first job was to make the egg patties for the Bacon and Sausage Egg McMuffins. I found it unexpectedly difficult. I had to churn out tens of little egg turds, every few minutes it seemed, but I couldn’t get the consistency of my egg mix right and couldn’t produce them in a uniform shape or pattern. Some customers received extra large and some extra small bits of egg that day. When breakfast was finished, I was put on dressing burgers and zapping them in a microwave. I couldn’t get the hang of that either. I was supposed to put the salad on, zap them, and then add mayo. I was told if you put the sauce on too early you could poison people. In the rush of lunchtime I kept forgetting the order but no one came back to complain.

Before I left for the day, I was sent out front of the counter to mop up. It was quite humiliating, bumbling around people’s feet as they waited to order and getting water on their shoes. I dreaded someone I knew coming in and seeing me. Halfway through I had to go back behind the counter to refill my bucket. As I struggled with the code on the door a pretty girl I hadn’t noticed earlier was coming in the opposite direction with a tray of food heading upstairs to the staff area for a break. I smiled at her and she told me to piss off.

I was in Vienna last weekend and on Sunday visited the Sigmund Freud Museum on Berggasse. I bought a Sigmund Freud action figure in the shop there. I am reluctant now, sitting on my couch in my living room in Dublin, to leave it in its plastic casing. I have spent approximately ten of the last seventeen years since I worked in McDonald’s in therapy. The doll is a Christmas present for my father-in-law in Scotland but I would like to take it out and play with it.

I have seen two therapists, a woman in London for free, courtesy of the NHS, and a man in Dublin for much, much longer, whom I paid for myself. The first was attached to my local doctors’ surgery in Westbourne Grove. Sinead O’Connor lived next door with her son Jake in a fine big house. I saw her sometimes when I was going in or leaving the therapist’s, and she always said hello. I saw the lady therapist quite briefly and intermittently. She once asked me if I had a role model, and I told her I most admired Dostoevsky. She smiled and asked if that was who I wanted to be. I said, I guess so. She was about fifteen years older than me and I fancied her. I was unemployed and would spend a lot of time wandering around the busy neighbourhood streets during the day with its screeching cars. I used to see her occasionally and she’d smile at me. I thought she was interested.

I began seeing the male therapist ten and a half years ago but had a break for twenty months up until recently, when I began to feel quite unwell. I think I’ve learned a lot, even though for approximately the last seven or eight years I’ve found it disconcerting how often he stifles a yawn when I speak. When I began seeing him I drank excessively and mostly alone. We examined first what I liked about drinking. I said it helped me to enjoy vivid fantasies about what I might do in the future. He said that maybe if I gave up drinking I might find time to actually do some of those things.

I never got the hang of the burger griddle at McDonald’s and constantly burned myself. I hated the whole place. I worked with a crazy blonde Danish guy for part of the time and he loved it. He tried to help me get on but I think his idea was that the burns on your hands and arms were something to be proud of, like war wounds. Eventually they had me working on the periphery, mopping upstairs, cleaning the toilets every hour and doing odd jobs like hauling ice through Picadilly Circus, packed with tourists, to the Leicester Square branch. It was obvious to everyone at McDonald’s that I didn’t fit in. Some of the pretty young female customers would smile at me indulgently. One day I discovered a hardcore gay men’s magazine in the gents. It disgusted and slightly fascinated me. I remember picking it up with another magazine as though to touch it would infect me, then I buried it deep in my bag of rubbish.

I heard that my brother Danny asked my Dad what the hell a guy with a Cambridge degree was doing working at McDonald’s. My Dad told him research. When my Mum told me about it, I decided my Dad and I were on the same wavelength, realising that an unconventional approach to things was better than doing the obvious.

I’ve always had a deep dread of ending up like everyone else. I figured that if I made rational moves toward becoming a success in anything, like getting to know the right people and honing my ability to re-package the latest consensus in a new way, I would betray the tragedy of my earlier life. I wanted to turn my tragedy into gold instead and in the process shift the world on its axis. I felt instinctively that my Dad shared the same desire for originality and change, just not with the same level of ambition.

The end came for me after about five weeks. I was rostered again on an early shift and arrived for work at seven a.m. I went to check my assignments for the day and couldn’t find my name anywhere. It took me another ten minutes to locate a manager to find out what was going on, but when I did he casually told me it had been a mistake, to go home and come back to work in the afternoon. I went home but came straight back with my uniform in a plastic carrier bag and left it on the manager’s desk without a note or a word.

I had been signing-on the whole time I was at McDonald’s, so my income support continued uninterrupted. Straight after I quit I bought a coffee and went to the cinema in Picadilly Circus.

Joe McCarthy lives in Dublin