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If you've ever worked in the food/restaurant industry, you have probably encountered some really interesting idiots and weirdos. You can also post peripheral industry stuff, like grocery stores, because those are always good. For example, I worked in a bakery a few years ago, and this kid DJ got hired. A few weeks into him working there, this little old woman came in and asked for him to "explain" the bread to her ("what's flax", etc). I was tossing some loaves of bread onto the shelf and went around the corner. He came into the back room shortly after, got his coat, and left. He didn't come back. Later, it was explained to me that her rubber diaper fell off and she asked him to help him pull it back up.
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Jul 7, 2015 05:23
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When I worked in a kitchen a guy I worked with came in drunk pretty frequently and once grabbed two potatoes out of a vat of near-boiling water without reacting. Cool guy.
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Jul 7, 2015 05:32
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I have seen a small town cafe cook wipe his heavily snotty nose with the palm-side of his hand and then flip a burger with that same bare hand on a flat top greasy spoon griddle. Don't eat at small town "cafe" places
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Jul 7, 2015 05:36
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 Best bet is to avoid eating at restaurants, period. My ex worked in a ""upscale"" burger place where the owner would drop patties onto the floor, pick them back up and throw them back on the grill. Also, different bakery: My boss used to routinely come in at night and make new labels for cakes I'd made and redate them so they could stay out longer. She was fired for baking massive amounts of cookies and hoarding them in the back, and making the "sell-by" date from when they were put out, not when they were made, so some of them were months old by the time they went out onto the shelf. This was at a Safeway, by the way.
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Jul 7, 2015 05:41
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I sneezed in the frozen yogurt I stirred whatever bugs were on the froyo in the hopper I sneezed on the other side of the sneeze guard
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Jul 7, 2015 11:46
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Back when I used to briefly work at the fruit stocker position at my supermarket job I had as a teenager. Some really old woman with a chronic cough just kept on coughing all over the peaches she happened to be near at the time. Not even bothering to cover her mouth or turn away from the produce. Wash your vegetables and fruits at home, for the love of god.
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Jul 7, 2015 12:36
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In high school I worked behind the counter of a busy bakery. One day, an old guy brought back a bread roll, saying he'd found a nail inside. I thought he meant fingernail, gave my sincerest apologies and prepared to fetch the manager. Nope! He opened up the roll to reveal a two inch long steel nail the breadth of my little finger. Edit: I'm not sure which one would have been worse.
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Jul 7, 2015 12:58
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I worked in a chain steakhouse for a number of years, both in the kitchen and then as a server, and while there was the usual gross things like lots of floor food being served, someone not washing their hands properly, etc..., two people in particular stand out for being especially stupid and/or gross. First guy was Matt. Matt was the grossest little man I ever met in my life. He worked on the line. Initially, he was in the "salad/fry" position, which as you can guess, was the person responsible for all the salads and fried foods (it also included apps and desserts.) His level of not-washing was above and beyond anything I have ever seen. He would take raw chicken strips with his bare hands, dunk them in the buttermilk, then the flour, then drop them in the fryer. When they were done, he'd take his raw chicken, buttermilk, and flour covered hands to pick them out and place them on the plate. Why wash his hands? They'd just get dirty again! Nevermind the fact that we had gloves we were supposed to use, and why wouldn't you want to use them for something like that? He'd only rinse them off (and yes, just rinse, no soap) when a server would finally complain that there was flour on their salad or something. He was eventually transferred to the grill because at least there he'd (in theory) be using tongs and spatulas to touch the cooked food. Even there, he would be as gross as can be. If he had to put a bunch of chicken on the grill, he'd open the drawer, just grab a massive handful with both hands, hold it up to his chest so he didn't drop any (no apron, either, just a t-shirt) then drop it on the grill. He'd "clean" his hands by wiping them on the front and back of his shirt. And the grill guy also had to slice the prime rib, which meant touching food that was to be served with his gross chicken hands. No lie, we did have an outbreak of either salmonella or e. coli (can't remember which) traced back to cross-contamination at our restaurant (I think like 3 people got sick?). Oddly enough, out of all the possible sources, it was the blue cheese bin. But again, he'd grab the cheese with gross chicken hands, put it on burgers or steaks, and they'd only be under the broiler for 30 seconds or so, not enough to kill bacteria. He was also one of the biggest alcoholics I've ever seen. His usual MO after his shift was over was to walk to the gas station down the street, and buy anywhere from 2 - 4 forties of Old English. He'd crack the first one open in the car of whoever was giving him a ride home that night (if they let him,) and it would be finished by the time he was home (10-15 minute drive.) The other ones would be done while sitting in his apartment, and then he'd usually head out to the bar around the corner from his place. God help you if you offered him a ride. He had a couple people that were his regular rides, but if they weren't working he'd beg for anyone to give him a ride, promising to pay you back (in this case, paying you back meant buying you a 40.) Your car would stink for DAYS. He showered once every few days...if you've ever worked in a restaurant, especially the kitchen, you understand how insanely disgusting this is. I had one night, one that I didn't shower right when I got home because our hot water was out because we didn't pay the oil bill, and I ended up having to throw out that set of sheets because the grease and meat smell would not wash out. That smell was his life. He "combated" this by just dousing himself in Patchouli after every shift, sometimes in the car of whoever was offering the ride, so add that to the list of fun smells your can endured. Along with whatever pack of smokes he could get for cheap. He would always have "the shakes" at work. How he never cut a finger off while using a knife I'll never know.
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Jul 7, 2015 14:02
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I've been serving for almost a year now. Our kitchen doesn't really allow unsanitary bullshit to happen because our two kitchen managers are thorough in training and oversight, but good god our store has a drug problem. I haven't met a person there who doesn't smoke weed, which I don't mind at all, but there are a few that take it to the "next level" and it interferes with their work. A server I'll call Meg is known for her heroin addiction. She will show up back on the schedule every 4 weeks or so, work a full shift, then get sent home during her second or third shift for nodding off while taking orders, while waiting for food, while bussing tables, etc. Yet Meg ends up back on the schedule every month or so.... somehow. We had ticket times approaching an hour a couple weeks ago, so when I went back to see what was going on I noticed the kitchen was three guys short, and even with a manager back there on the line our service was at a crawl. It's like 7pm so I ask why they are short; one of the kitchen boys sold crack to another behind the store, but it didn't "weigh" so he chokeslammed him into the dumpster. So the two crackheads and one witness were pulled from the line to help police determine a) who assaulted who and b) where all of this crack in the alley came from. A guy I'll call Dave had the sole job of running food from the kitchen window to the server, or straight to the table if the server was busy. He was super proud of his John Stamos Full House Era hairstyle, and would run his hands through his greasy rear end hair all day. He was also a speed junkie, so he was constantly sweating like he was running a marathon, meaning no matter how sanitary that food came out of the kitchen it's all being handled with the greasiest hands I've ever had the displeasure of seeing. Getting Dave to wash his hands wasn't an issue, but literally seconds after he finished he would run his hands through his hair and leave greasy handprints everywhere. One day he went on a smoke break and didn't come back. Nobody was sad.
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Jul 7, 2015 14:30
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Sic Semper Goon posted:Wash your vegetables and fruits at home, for the love of god. Seconding this. I manage produce in a grocery store, and while I do my absolute best to make sure everything is clean and sparkling when it goes onto the shelf all bets are off when it comes to the general public. Sneezing, coughing, picking things up, sniffing them, then putting them back, dropping fruit on the muddy mats and setting it back on the shelf, sticking their arms elbow-deep into the apples to find that one perfect apple nestled right at the bottom. Urgh. I also knew somebody who worked at Subway and was told not to change gloves between handling the meat and handling the vegetables, because it goes faster that way. Cross-contamination is a myth, don't you know. I don't eat at Subway anymore. Same friend also worked at a small-town ice cream shop that also sold burgers and hot dogs. Said burgers would be regularly left uncooked on a countertop by one co-worker in 40 degree C heat (around 100+ F) in a building with no air conditioning for hours at a time. When asked about it the other employee said not to bother her. When my friend put them in the goddamn freezer because holy poo poo the co-worker got mad at her for it. She also chain-smoked like a fiend while at work and would go right back to handling raw meat without washing her hands afterward. My friend liked the job, and everyone else there was good to work with and followed basic food safety. She just told me to run away if I ever saw that particular woman working the till. EDIT: vvv WHY JoltSpree has a new favorite as of 17:02 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 15:20
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In a Subway in Calgary, the employees were habitually stacking those metal boats of meat on top of vegetables. In the back. In the employee washroom. Apparently, the slime comes right off if you rinse the meat.
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Jul 7, 2015 16:43
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I used to work at a Hawaiian grill-themed restaurant and the owner had some buddy or family member that was there for the first few months. All he did was sleep on the bags of rice in the back. Then he nearly smacked one of the servers and disappeared after that. My boss told me that he went back to China to visit relatives but I never saw him again. Also there was MSG in the katsu sauce and we never told anyone, but your mileage may vary on that. The not telling people bothered me more than it actually being there. (e: VVV Oh, thought you had to. My bad. VVV) The only thing that really upset me was that the chefs were all undocumented immigrants that were working 60+ hour weeks at like $6.00/hour in 2014. They had to live at a hotel because it was all they could afford and no place would rent to them. 
Electric Lady has a new favorite as of 18:50 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 17:02
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As long as you're not eating bugs or typhoid, stories of unsanitary kitchen practices don't freak me out all that much. Human stomachs are pretty hardy things by necessity, it's not the end of the world if something falls on the floor. One time my spouse did catch a rock in her vegetable lo mein at the local Chinese restaurant, though. And we're not talking like a grain of sand, this was a legit piece of crumbled asphalt like the kind you'd find along a busy roadway. Later on we saw the same place listed in a health code violation watchlist for keeping food too low to the ground, which explains the rock. We got the meal free and never went back there again (we still go there).
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Jul 7, 2015 17:52
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John Quixote posted:Also there was MSG in the katsu sauce and we never told anyone, but your mileage may vary on that. You don't have to label stuff that contains MSG.
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Jul 7, 2015 18:36
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exquisite tea posted:As long as you're not eating bugs or typhoid, stories of unsanitary kitchen practices don't freak me out all that much. Human stomachs are pretty hardy things by necessity, it's not the end of the world if something falls on the floor. One time my spouse did catch a rock in her vegetable lo mein at the local Chinese restaurant, though. And we're not talking like a grain of sand, this was a legit piece of crumbled asphalt like the kind you'd find along a busy roadway. Later on we saw the same place listed in a health code violation watchlist for keeping food too low to the ground, which explains the rock. We got the meal free and never went back there again (we still go there). I have a weak stomach for stuff stories like in this thread but I also find it impossible to ignore them.
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Jul 7, 2015 20:04
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exquisite tea posted:We got the meal free and never went back there again (we still go there).  Do you go back or not?
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Jul 7, 2015 20:06
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JoltSpree posted:
Meat's expensive, bro.  Oh, bread chat: Same bakery as the one with the rubber diaper, we had a lady return a loaf with a mouse in it. Apparently he chewed through the bag and died halfway through trying to finish an entire loaf by himself. What a way to go.
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Jul 7, 2015 20:18
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I used to work at Earls, a fairly big canadian/american restaurant chain. I worked as a dishwasher and part of my job in the mornings was to change the oil in the deep fryers. I wear glasses day to day and I managed to somehow knock my glasses into one of the deep fryers. I remember fishing out the glasses the next day, covered in batter and grease. I don't wear my glasses at work anymore.
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Jul 7, 2015 20:32
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Jmcrofts posted:You don't have to label stuff that contains MSG. It's appreciated for people who are allergic to the stuff. If I eat anything with MSG I get massive headaches and nausea for the rest of the day.
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Jul 7, 2015 20:46
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JoltSpree posted:It's appreciated for people who are allergic to the stuff. If I eat anything which says it contains MSG I get massive headaches and nausea for the rest of the day.
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Jul 7, 2015 20:57
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Christ, I don't even know what story to tell. Way too many years working in kitchens. How about: I was full-on alcoholic, and this was fairly heavily encouraged in the the place I worked at; we were told that you could be as hosed up as you liked, as long as your food was still good. The second you dropped the ball, you were in trouble. We could all handle that, so obviously things got gradually worse and worse as I spiralled into full-on pirate behaviour. We had a assistant manager who'd come into the kitchen, no matter how busy we were, and just demand his staff meal. No please, no thank you, just "cook my dinner now". So I decided gently caress that, if you can't be polite, you'll be eating dirty food. From that point on, every time he didn't ask nicely (so every time), we'd tamper with his food. Including but not limited to: Adding 'bodily fluids', kicking his dinner along the floor, placing parts of his dinner 'inside' our underwear for a while, etc. Bearing in mind how massively drunk we always were, and how much of a FoH/BoH rift existed in this place due to our misbehaviour, there was a hateful amount of invention that went on. The guy literally didn't have a meal that wasn't technically illegal for about a year. The real kicker came when he waltzed into the kitchen one day, totally unaware of what had been going on, and said "guys, my mum's on table X, can you make sure her food's special?", he couldn't understand why we were almost collapsing laughing (we didn't do anything to his mum's dinner, she wasn't a dick). After I stopped working there I had a good hard look at things and realised that I'd been a massive cock almost all of the time I'd worked there. And I don't cook for a living any more (through choice, haha).
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Jul 7, 2015 21:11
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cash crab posted:Oh, bread chat: Same bakery as the one with the rubber diaper, we had a lady return a loaf with a mouse in it. Apparently he chewed through the bag and died halfway through trying to finish an entire loaf by himself. What a way to go. This possum's cousin: 
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Jul 7, 2015 21:14
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I love how he looks both ashamed and surprised. "Oh! You said you'd be home later."
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Jul 7, 2015 22:22
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cash crab posted:I love how he looks both ashamed and surprised. If it makes it better, the possum literally couldn't move to escape because it had eaten so many pastries
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Jul 7, 2015 22:24
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Aesop Poprock posted:If it makes it better, the possum literally couldn't move to escape because it had eaten so many pastries Living the dream. 
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Jul 7, 2015 23:15
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I am that possum also: de la peche posted:dick dinner LMAO. I know it's technically really lovely, but this is still funny. vvv See also: The removal of entire fingers. cash crab has a new favorite as of 00:15 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 23:36
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Watching someone take their palm off on a deli slicer is the worst thing I have ever seen. The guard is there for a reason.
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Jul 7, 2015 23:57
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cash crab posted:In a Subway in Calgary, the employees were habitually stacking those metal boats of meat on top of vegetables. In the back. In the employee washroom. Apparently, the slime comes right off if you rinse the meat. I'm trying to figure out which one you're talking about but invariably I have to assume they all do that. Alot of Subways here are in the worst tucked away locations so I have to assume they just keep poo poo until you can't scrape off the mold anymore.
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Jul 8, 2015 01:12
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JoltSpree posted:It's appreciated for people who are allergic to the stuff. If I eat anything with MSG I get massive headaches and nausea for the rest of the day. So, I guess you never, ever eat fast food because almost all of them use MSG in the recipes.
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Jul 8, 2015 01:48
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Dumb poo poo I did at burger king when I was 17. Nothing was cleaned properly. It was a good day if we broke everything down and drenched it in bleach. The fryers got an oil change maybe twice as often as they should have. The burger broiler never got cleaned. Closest it ever came was when we would feed meat into it so much that it would flare up and just burn all the meat dribblings into a hard charcoaly mess and push it down the grease hole. The bun steamers were filled with what was pretty much hot pond water. As far as deliberately messing with the food, that happened. A lot. Not so much to the people that ordered in the dining room because they could see you making their food. People that were dicks to the girls at the drive-thru window would get the oldest food we had under the heat lights at best. If they were really nasty they'd get "special" stuff that we'd kick around on the floor or just plain spit on. We had really horrible cops in our town that hassled the kids that worked there often. They would get spit tainted coffee and soda every time. Oops, officer friendly got a BK broiler that fell in the mop bucket. I don't feel particularly good about that stuff and I certainly wouldn't do those things now. At the time I was a dumb , frustrated teenager making $4.15 an hour. That was minimum wage at the time. Its more now but I really think we need to pay our food service workers better so they don't feel the need to do those things.
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Jul 8, 2015 04:59
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Story from a friend of mine who worked at A&W about 20 years ago. On slow days in the summer, they'd make a game out of swatting flies that got into the kitchen and would save them up to put them into the burgers when they were cooked. They'd see how many flies they'd collect between orders as a game to pass the time. Their record was 32
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Jul 8, 2015 06:29
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Iron Chef Ramen posted:Watching someone take their palm off on a deli slicer is the worst thing I have ever seen. The guard is there for a reason. Ahhhh that brought back the time I saw one of the kitchen staff slice a neat finger-length slice off the side of her index finger while running a brick of soft Gouda through the slicer.
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Jul 8, 2015 07:41
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:Dumb poo poo I did at burger king when I was 17. Nothing was cleaned properly. It was a good day if we broke everything down and drenched it in bleach. The fryers got an oil change maybe twice as often as they should have. The burger broiler never got cleaned. Closest it ever came was when we would feed meat into it so much that it would flare up and just burn all the meat dribblings into a hard charcoaly mess and push it down the grease hole. The bun steamers were filled with what was pretty much hot pond water. See I had almost convinced myself mentally that "nah, people don't really do that. The fear of consequence or just moral guilt would be enough to prevent that," but then you have to go and reveal that people really are pieces of poo poo sometimes.
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Jul 8, 2015 07:52
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RazorDX posted:See I had almost convinced myself mentally that "nah, people don't really do that. The fear of consequence or just moral guilt would be enough to prevent that," but then you have to go and reveal that people really are pieces of poo poo sometimes. It really depends on the place. High volume super busy places like those near college campus and major commercial centers probably won't bother with any of that stuff, because their biggest concern is getting people in and out as fast as possible. It's also probably down to the workforce. A bunch of teenagers working for minimum wage and treated like poo poo just don't give a gently caress, and who can blame them. Being a huge dick to employees when the place is not busy at all is a pretty surefire way to get your food hosed with. No one will mess with a picky customer who wants it a specific way but if they start to hurl abuse at the staff then gently caress them, they're scum. There's nothing like watching a middle aged man in business casual with a bluetooth earpiece borderline screaming at Subway employees because they can't read his mind and figure out exactly what he wants from his vague instructions. Granted in that situation they can't really gently caress with his food very much, but they'll definitely make sure to figure out a way when he comes back.
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Jul 8, 2015 08:13
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pentyne posted:It really depends on the place. High volume super busy places like those near college campus and major commercial centers probably won't bother with any of that stuff, because their biggest concern is getting people in and out as fast as possible. It's also probably down to the workforce. A bunch of teenagers working for minimum wage and treated like poo poo just don't give a gently caress, and who can blame them. Totally this. I've worked in places where if you tampered with the food, you'd be fired on the spot, no questions asked, but then on the other hand, I've worked in places where monitoring of staff isn't so high, and inch by inch standards slip until you don't know how you've got here, but you're wiping your penis on a steak. The issue is low pay, high hours. People get stressed and stupid, and it doesn't take much for a really bad culture to take over a kitchen. Add to that, someone treating you like you're less than them, and people will get creative. I've met very few chefs that I'd call 'well-adjusted', the industry tends to attract oddballs, which, again, doesn't bode well. It really does pay to be super polite, because you never know what the situation is in the place you're eating. It shouldn't happen, but it does. For the record, I can't remember ever having hosed with a customer's dinner in such horrible ways; I only ever hosed with staff members who were hassling me. I never gave a gently caress what the customer wanted, even if it was needlessly fussy, they're paying their money, they can have what they like. I have seen other chefs get frustrated when customers (often repeat customers, weirdly) are consistently dicks (rude, abusive, 'allergic' to things that are impossible), and so will get messed with. Why would you be rude to people all the time and then come back over and over? Must like the taste of Winner's Sauce I suppose...
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Jul 8, 2015 09:17
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de la peche posted:Totally this. I've worked in places where if you tampered with the food, you'd be fired on the spot, no questions asked, but then on the other hand, I've worked in places where monitoring of staff isn't so high, and inch by inch standards slip until you don't know how you've got here, but you're wiping your penis on a steak. Even the saltiest cooks don't care that much unless it becomes blatantly obvious that a customer is trying to scam a free meal. Example: Ordering a steak one way, eating 1/3 of it then sending it back for not being cooked properly, doing it again, and then saying you refuse to pay because the steaks weren't cooked right. All that does is waste everyone's time. The allergy thing is annoying, especially for gluten free nuts, but most of the time they just tell the customer "we can't prepare this to your specifications" if its something insane like asking for no salt in their soup. 99.9% of the time its easier to placate the customer with a token gesture because they respond really well to preferential treatment. The other 0.1% just loving hate everything in the world and want to throw their weight around by screaming at service workers and treating them like scum. The reason they keep coming back to the same place is they enjoy the feeling of authority they get from berating staff and don't fear/expect reprisals.
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Jul 8, 2015 09:39
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Iron Chef Ramen posted:Watching someone take their palm off on a deli slicer is the worst thing I have ever seen. The guard is there for a reason. A palm isn't something that should "come off"  I lost a teeny-tiny sliver of middle finger to a mandolin slicer a couple of years ago, and I assure you, trying to bandage a wound at the end of one of the most useful fingers of your dominant hand with no help leads to some of the bloodiest slapstick you'll ever experience.
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Jul 8, 2015 12:56
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JoltSpree posted:It's appreciated for people who are allergic to the stuff. If I eat anything with MSG I get massive headaches and nausea for the rest of the day. Katsu sauce usually has MSG in it, though. That's the authentic Japanese junk food taste.
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Jul 8, 2015 14:24
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I spent about 8 years serving or cooking in restaurants ranging from Chili's up to fine dining, and literally never saw a single bit of tainted food go out to customers. No spit, no bodily fluids of any kind, nothing dropped on the floor and sent out. I saw plenty of other awful poo poo though. One time a stoned fry cook dropped his phone in the fryer, which would have been bad enough from the smell of the plastic, and having to take the fyer offline for the night to cool down, drain and super clean it, however... The cook's immediate reaction was to try to catch it before it hit the bottom of the fryer. He plunged his hand in and got about a third of the way through his forearm before he snapped back to reality. He had 3 massive blisters filled with fluid that covered pretty much every inch that was submerged. Before they took him to the hospital, you could watch them jiggle when he moved, like a jell-o mold on a shaking table. At Chili's, we would find the grossest poo poo, including but not limited to: bloody panties, lovely panties, ripped panties, used condoms, bags of weed, spit, and dirty diapers. Chili's was also great for the burnout management. The managers' office had a mirrored glass window so you couldn't see in, unless the light in the liquor closet was on, then you could see perfect back-lit silhouettes. More than once, different managers were caught receiving blowjobs in the office from members of the staff. One manager would always go back into the office right at 9:00pm sharp, to do coke off the top of the safe. The staff were almost all college kids and others in their early 20s, so mutual sexual harassment was completely rampant. A completely accepted game was simply called "the butt game". The POS kiosks were blocked off so customers could only see employees from the neck up while orders were being input, or payments being processed. The Butt Game was simply to walk up behind someone ringing up an order/processing a payment, and grab their rear end, then squeeze as hard as you could to try to make them react enough for customers to see. The recipient won if they finished what they were doing without reacting. 99% of the staff joyfully took part in this game until it was very thoroughly shut down after the Regional Manager saw it during a visit. Ahhhh... Good times.
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Jul 8, 2015 14:25
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 10:11 |
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RazorDX posted:See I had almost convinced myself mentally that "nah, people don't really do that. The fear of consequence or just moral guilt would be enough to prevent that," but then you have to go and reveal that people really are pieces of poo poo sometimes. If you're at least neutral to people working food service they aren't going to mess with your food. That's really all food service workers want. Give us your order, pay for it, eat your crap, and leave. Everybody is happy. When a food service worker fucks something up there are ways to complain that don't involve swearing and yelling. A simple "hey you messed up can you fix it please?" will do it. However if you're consistently an rear end to food service, or even just a massive rear end at the wrong time, your food will get messed with and even with "mess with the food and you go away forever" policies it still happens. Managers can't be everywhere, all the time and any cameras in the back are probably cheap. Customers can't see the whole place and humans are pretty creative. I myself never participated in messing with food but one thing I'll tell you is that I looked the other way and just happened to not notice when some stuff did happen. There were also times even management would just kind of...happen to not be around. Here's the thing I want to drive home; if your food gets messed with you probably earned it. I'm serious. While a few places have poo poo bags that just mess with the food all the time (their service is usually awful for the same reasons the food gets messed with and you probably don't eat there anyway) the general thing is if you aren't lovely to food service people they won't be lovely back. People that are abusive, authoritative pricks that nothing is ever good enough for and demand special treatment all the time are loathed. Maybe they don't deserve dick burgers but they most certainly don't deserve good service or special treatment. Or service at all. One thing that really did always confuse me was when the worst customers came through repeatedly and were awful to deal with consistently. We'd deliberately screw up their orders really, really badly in the hopes they'd go away. Guess it backfired as they got reason to complain. Granted some were just too lazy to cook. Anyway one thing I did see which is kind of a "bastard deserved it" moment in my mind was one time our regional manager came by. The guy was a massive cheapskate. He was a self-absorbed twit that figured his job gave him the right to look down at everybody else and tell them how much they sucked. He was a perfect example of everything that was wrong with corporate culture. He even ran his damned house like a corporation. I only ever met his family once and...yeah they didn't like him much either and his wife had a serious thousand yard stare. Anyway...one day he happened to come in when we were getting absolutely hammered. Restaurants are perpetually short-staffed as it is because nobody wants to pay for more employees but this day was a skeleton crew. The place filled. There were four servers on for a place that had like 90 tables. It was a disaster. Of course we were getting some griping but most people saw how busy we were and didn't complain too much. There was only like three tables that had nobody in them and they weren't getting cleaned because nobody had time. Regional guy was not pleased and demanded "those tables be cleaned immediately." To the hostess. Who had a line 10 deep at the registers. He proceeds to start doing his walk through the place and sees the absolute pandemonium it's in. Rather than do much about it all he does is run through and nit pick about the little things not being done because we had big things to deal with. That and how unclean the place was (yeah you try to keep a place spotless when you have 9 people total to take care of 90 tables). While he's wandering around he comes to the floor and hears a table say to their server "we've been here like ten minutes, what's the problem?" He looks at her and says "You're fired. Get out right now." On the floor. In front of everybody. During a massive rush we already couldn't deal with. Almost everybody there that day took a moment to do something to his food. Including the manager. I was one of two people that didn't but we agreed that it wasn't going to get reported. Trust me, I was very tempted to add my own special flavor to the meal. So yeah, do you think you can be nicer than that guy? If you can be nicer than that guy your food is highly likely to be safe.
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Jul 8, 2015 14:56
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