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UWBW posted:One questionable thing we had to do was wash certain cutting boards down with bleach. I have no idea if that was sanitary, but we had to wipe them down with bleach, let them sit for about 15 minutes, then wash it all off. I was only food prep, not a cook, so I never had to use them myself, but it always seemed really weird that we'd use bleach on something that people basically eat off of.
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Jan 30, 2016 02:46
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 19:16 |
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Slightly related- When I was a kid (ages 12-17) my step brother and I cleaned a bar after hours. It was awesome, we would get drunk and party, and the work only took 20 minutes. The pay was absolute poo poo, but that isn't the important part of the story. As many of you may know, drunk people in public restrooms are foul, particularly the ladies. My boss wouldn't always spring for gloves, so when we had to do gross poo poo like pull blood soaked tampons from the ceiling, we used spare kitchen utensils like long tongs or whatever was handy for the task of pulling out urinal cakes or what not. We never put the utensils back where they could be used by the kitchen crew, instead leaving them with the cleaning poo poo and a note to never use them for food again. My cheap ads boss ran them through sanitizer and put them back in the kitchen rotation. I get that the cleaning process should get rid of any contaminates, but it just gave me the willies, considering that have the staff were borderline retarded, using, and/or incompetent. My brother and I ended up throwing the utensils out and making due with whatever poo poo we had
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Jan 30, 2016 09:37
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ChaosArgate posted:It's called being lazy. My girlfriend's family is lazy to the point where the tiny trash can in the kitchen is often stuffed to the brim, dishes are stacked way the hell up and fruit peels are all over the place because it's easier to leave them on a table or a windowsill than to throw them into the garbage. They just tell themselves that it's alright because the flies are a sign of freshness or something even though it's gross as poo poo. My girlfriend and I at least make vinegar traps in the summers, that helps things a little. cut ties, it doesn't get any better without serious disciplining or training.
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Jan 30, 2016 12:19
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discipline you're gf
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Jan 30, 2016 22:45
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Every single thing in every restaurant in existence has been cleaned with bleach at least once. You're giving some restaurants the benefit of the doubt here.
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Jan 30, 2016 23:00
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Skaw posted:You're giving some restaurants the benefit of the doubt here. Not entirely. Sometimes "hey Dishy McWashesthings go clean that in 1/3 of the time it takes to actually do it and make it spotless" happens and the bleach comes pouring out. Yes I know a great many restaurants are gross and rarely clean but other times, you know, the health inspector is coming by tomorrow. But, you know, cleaning it properly actually costs money because you have to give people extra hours but gently caress it we have a power washer and some bleach it's good enough.
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Jan 30, 2016 23:35
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Well boys and girls, it's time for a good old fashioned poop story! I was working as a busser/barback at a poorly ran restaurant in downtown Palm Beach when around comes the Palm Beach Boat Show. This shithole happens to be inside the area they fence off so the rush to end all rushes lands like a loving nuke and the place, which is dead every other day of the year, is completely unprepared to deal with the volume. So while all three of the managers and the owners are in the kitchen driving everyone insane, one of the servers comes to me and says that one of her tables has informed her that the bathroom is "a little messy." We take a look and my God, there is poo poo everywhere, even thrown up onto the ceiling in a way that is has fallen off down into the light fixtures. So we tell one of the managers, he tells me to clean it up, and I tell him there is no way in hell I will be going back in there. Next thing I see is him leading the dishwasher back there to show him what he will be doing for the next hour or so. He has to show him because the dishwasher doesn't speak English. Which means he can't ask where he would find anything to use to clean up the shitastrophe, so he goes with what he knows. The dishwashing supplies. Fast forward a little and I walk into the kitchen to see the dishwasher back in his spot, washing dishes with a brown sponge and a bucket of brown rags and that is when I decided I would not like to work at that place any more.
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Jan 31, 2016 00:53
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Uh, do you know what bleach is? I heard that if you eat oily foods on a dish cleaned with bleach that it will ignite in your stomach killing you instantly.
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Jan 31, 2016 00:59
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This is true. I once spent three hours cleaning our dining room after an English tourist complained about the dirty silverware before ordering beer battered fish and chips. Pity, she was a great tipper.
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Jan 31, 2016 01:34
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I work at Starbucks, which is not really a great place for horror stories. Since we use tons of whipping cream and thick mocha and caramel and my old store's manager was an idiot, the grease trap tended to get full pretty fast, back up into our drains, and cause a horrible smell until it got taken care of. It was also directly behind the door, and we had a few very lucky baristas who narrowly avoided falling into it when it was opened for cleaning. I left that store about a year ago, but a couple months ago the manager of my current store got a call. Apparently, one of the supervisors at my previous store hadn't been paying attention and had fallen into the grease trap up to his armpits. He wasn't hurt but I can't imagine how long it took the poor bastard's skin to stop reeking of rotten milk.
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Jan 31, 2016 22:52
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That is a very deep grease trap.  Guess I'm only used to the grease traps under stoves and stuff though.
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Feb 1, 2016 00:37
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I had (and still do to a degree) serious mental health and self esteem issues after a suicide attempt a few years ago. I went back to working in a food department at a popular retail location I had left about a year prior, and things got bad when I started drinking in my car before every shift, and during my breaks etc. I would routinely drink so much that I had to piss constantly and I ended up just pissing my pants multiple times during my shift. A few times I did it withing arm's reach of my coworkers, and I'm not sure if they just were oblivious or pretended to not notice it. Sometimes I would discreetly urinate in the hand washing sink that was positioned at just the right angle that if I stood right up against it nobody could see what I was up to. It helped that I wore a long apron so often I'd just piss, wash my hands then with my gross pants still unbuckled/down I would cover myself with the apron and wait on customers like everything was just goddamn fine. Sometimes I would get creative and aim for the various drains on the floor or under the soft drink dispenser hook ups. A few times I would get severely frustrated and bang my head or fist against a hard surface and get bloodied up pretty well. I covered it up from everyone except for one time when a customer noticed my hand covered in blood and pointed it out to me. I washed my hands and put on a few bandages and he still ordered food, it was weird. Looking back on that time is highly surreal, but Ive been sober for about two years now and I've made a lot of progress in working on my self esteem. I'm glad I never actually did anything directly to someone's food but I still have trouble forgiving myself for being so disgusting and letting it go on for as long as it did. I don't think food service is in my employment future.
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Feb 2, 2016 07:40
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ServoMST3K posted:I had (and still do to a degree) serious mental health and self esteem issues after a suicide attempt a few years ago. I went back to working in a food department at a popular retail location I had left about a year prior, and things got bad when I started drinking in my car before every shift, and during my breaks etc. I would routinely drink so much that I had to piss constantly and I ended up just pissing my pants multiple times during my shift. A few times I did it withing arm's reach of my coworkers, and I'm not sure if they just were oblivious or pretended to not notice it. Sometimes I would discreetly urinate in the hand washing sink that was positioned at just the right angle that if I stood right up against it nobody could see what I was up to. It helped that I wore a long apron so often I'd just piss, wash my hands then with my gross pants still unbuckled/down I would cover myself with the apron and wait on customers like everything was just goddamn fine. Sometimes I would get creative and aim for the various drains on the floor or under the soft drink dispenser hook ups. 
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Feb 2, 2016 18:17
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ServoMST3K posted:I had (and still do to a degree) serious mental health and self esteem issues after a suicide attempt a few years ago. I went back to working in a food department at a popular retail location I had left about a year prior, and things got bad when I started drinking in my car before every shift, and during my breaks etc. I would routinely drink so much that I had to piss constantly and I ended up just pissing my pants multiple times during my shift. A few times I did it withing arm's reach of my coworkers, and I'm not sure if they just were oblivious or pretended to not notice it. Sometimes I would discreetly urinate in the hand washing sink that was positioned at just the right angle that if I stood right up against it nobody could see what I was up to. It helped that I wore a long apron so often I'd just piss, wash my hands then with my gross pants still unbuckled/down I would cover myself with the apron and wait on customers like everything was just goddamn fine. Sometimes I would get creative and aim for the various drains on the floor or under the soft drink dispenser hook ups. Horton?!
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Feb 3, 2016 00:18
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ServoMST3K posted:I had (and still do to a degree) serious mental health and self esteem issues after a suicide attempt a few years ago. I went back to working in a food department at a popular retail location I had left about a year prior, and things got bad when I started drinking in my car before every shift, and during my breaks etc. I would routinely drink so much that I had to piss constantly and I ended up just pissing my pants multiple times during my shift. A few times I did it withing arm's reach of my coworkers, and I'm not sure if they just were oblivious or pretended to not notice it. Sometimes I would discreetly urinate in the hand washing sink that was positioned at just the right angle that if I stood right up against it nobody could see what I was up to. It helped that I wore a long apron so often I'd just piss, wash my hands then with my gross pants still unbuckled/down I would cover myself with the apron and wait on customers like everything was just goddamn fine. Sometimes I would get creative and aim for the various drains on the floor or under the soft drink dispenser hook ups.  ...Please get help. This pains me to read, I sincerely hope you can find peace in your life. I mean it. 
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Feb 3, 2016 10:21
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I once worked three days in a row on a godawful graduation weekend, sleeping in the kitchen on one of the nights. I after I hit that weird "energetic day 3" point of lack of sleep, I crashed hard. I don't remember why I stuck my hand in the deep fryer on Sunday night, but I did. I'm fairly sure it was that I was conflating it with my parents' old sauna, which I liked to dip my hands into as a kid. It wasn't a serious burn. I was just in a lot of pain for a few days, but they did send me home, and I quit not long after. I worked at a restaurant in town where they didn't pay overtime, which meant that everyone obviously worked overtime. A high school-age Russian/Ukrainian kid who worked in the kitchen started bugging them and bugging them about it, and eventually threatened to report the owners to the authorities. Apparently they were unfamiliar with the "neighborhood" where he grew up in, because they fired him, and within a few days, someone came in and smashed everything made of glass and fired off about a thousand paintballs at the wall. I ended up meeting him a few years later, and bought all of my weed from him. Plan Z has a new favorite as of 22:04 on Feb 3, 2016 |
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Feb 3, 2016 10:35
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ServoMST3K posted:two years that's a pretty hosed up story but congratulations 
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Feb 3, 2016 10:42
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I'm doing much better currently, thanks for your replies. I have had a few different jobs since then, they didn't last amazingly long but I managed to stay sober, not fantasize about alcohol and not piss myself on the job. However little progress that counts for is still way better than where I was in late 2013. I just wish I had more funny lighthearted stories about serving food and waiting on customers, but honestly it was fairly vanilla most of the time.
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Feb 3, 2016 23:29
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Yeah, holy crap, I'm glad you reigned that in. Please tell me you found a sympathetic doc that didn't give you a colossal load of poo poo for letting things get so far out of hand? They can be pretty grumpy when it comes to substance abuse, even if you're sincerely trying to get your act together. Kudos for getting things sorted, and yeah, maybe stay out of kitchens for a while 
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Feb 4, 2016 00:27
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I laughed at first, but it's good that the professional chef now has a section right in the front about not doing drugs and drinking all the time.
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Feb 4, 2016 23:06
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Plan Z posted:I once worked three days in a row on a godawful graduation weekend, sleeping in the kitchen on one of the nights. I after I hit that weird "energetic day 3" point of lack of sleep, I crashed hard. I don't remember why I stuck my hand in the deep fryer on Sunday night, but I did. I'm fairly sure it was that I was conflating it with my parents' old sauna, which I liked to dip my hands into as a kid. It wasn't a serious burn. I was just in a lot of pain for a few days, but they did send me home, and I quit not long after. This second story pleased me. Ignoring labor laws, firing someone to silence them, and immediate vigilante comeuppance. Delicious.
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Feb 5, 2016 18:22
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Remembered one from my burger king days. There was a horrible stink coming from the soda machine. Customers were complaining that the soda tasted kinda skanky too. I was told to clean the soda fountains for the dining room and the drive thru. This was the old kind of machine. There were black plastic covers over the nozzles where the soda came out. I had never been asked to clean them and neither had anyone else apparently because when I pulled off the first cover I was greeted by a solid cake of coke syrup teeming with maggots. They were falling out of the plastic around the nozzle. Every single nozzle was the same and god knows how long they were like that. I was dry heaving the whole time I was scraping caked on soda syrup and maggots off of that soda machine. And that isn't even the worst horror I saw at that burger king.
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Jun 11, 2016 09:57
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That's the kind of cleanup where you just buy a new one, goddamn.
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Jun 11, 2016 14:19
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They weren't buying new anything at that particular burger king. We were using a drive thru intercom that was most certainly the one that was installed when the place was built in the 70's. Tin cans and string would probably have been better than that poo poo. most of the equipment in the kitchen was from the same era. Another nugget of joy I encountered there was the day I was asked to clean the mop closet. I'm guessing years had gone by since the last thorough cleaning. The corners of the floor weren't so much corners as they were rounded off packed in wedges of ancient grease and filth. I took a putty knife and started to scrape away and unlocked a pocket of liquid putrescence so unbelievably horrible that I cannot summon the words to describe it. I've smelled animal corpses that may as well have been daffodils compared to the smell of that poo poo. I did my duty and cleaned it up but there was much dry heaving involed. That place was my first job as a teenager, almost 20 years ago. I'm sure most fast food joints are held to a higher standard these days.
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Jun 11, 2016 15:20
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I used to work at McDonalds when I was in high school. It was a typical poo poo job, but I was pretty good on grill and normally as relegated to being the only person on grill and assembly since we didn't hire too many people. It was actually pretty well run, but I do have some horror stories. The first is Ranita. Ranita was a grade or so lower than me, and below 16 so she could only work register. The problem is, she was bad at it and her till would frequently be short. Well, it was eventually discovered that she was just taking money from the till and using it to buy her employee meal so she was immediately fired. Unfortunately, she and her parents turned around and threatened to sue due to having mild Aspergers or something and saying that that is why she was taking the money since noone told her that she couldn't do that. She still works there today and apparently they still have an issue with missing money from time to time. The second was an rear end in a top hat names Sammy. Sammy was an employee who just kind of slacked off. Normally I wouldn't mind, but like I said, I normally would be running grill and assembly by myself. Anyway, one day I am working, it's slow so my meat reserves are down to a tray of meat. Sammy is walking through my area on his way to get a drink when a drive through order for 60 double cheeseburgers "for a party" pops up on the order screen. (As an aside, if you need a large amount of burgers, please call ahead and give warning) Anyway, Sammy puts his arm around my shoulder and says "boy, that's going to suck for you" before immediately backhanding me in the balls. (he felt that sack tapping people was the epitome of humor) Needless to say, that wasn't fun. Finally, while our store was pretty clean, there was one thing that was pretty gross, and that was the garbage. We had a small room off of the main cook area where we got deliveries and where the C02 and coat rack was. It was also the only door that we could take garbage out through. Because of being busy, the bags of garbage would start piling up throughout the day unless someone was able to take them out. (normally me, which I didn't mind doing because it was a nice break from the kitchen) Anyway, these bags were nasty, especially because of the Iced Coffee's. They would leak everywhere, and had a kind of sour, fast food smell. (Years later I was walking by trash processing facility and was sickened to realize that the reason I was suddenly hungry for a quarter pounder was because of the smell of all of the trash causing a scent based memory.) Anyway, so we had this mound of leaking, greasy garbage piled up in this side room. Now, remember how I said we also used the room for deliveries? Well, we got our buns in large orders of pallets stacked on top of each other. The buns were shrink wrapped on these pallets, but if you thought that there was any care to not have these nasty garbage bags leaning against our stacks of buns you are sadly mistaken. The garbage was just thrown in there, and there was actually a rag we had to wipe off the plastic wrap before opening the new bun pallet. (though some people wouldn't even do that) Also, while we were "encouraged" to wash our hands after taking out the trash, not everyone did, and if a bag burst on you and covered your uniform in garbage juice, you were expected to keep cooking food in said uniform and "just change your apron, and hang out your uniform so it can dry tonight."
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Jun 11, 2016 16:11
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The uniform situation at the burger King I worked at sucked too. They issued one uniform. A pair of dark blue pants and a purple shirt. At the time I was living in a cheap rear end efficiency apartment and could only do laundry about once a week. By the end of the week that poo poo was so caked in grease that water would just bead up and run off of it like a raincoat. Everybody that worked there was pretty much in the same situation. We all looked like poo poo.
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Jun 11, 2016 19:01
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Last place I worked, there was a walk-in cooler that was installed without a seal along the bottom. I pointed out multiple times that it needed a seal of some sort, and that it was disgusting that things could get under there. Namely, mop water. Apparently, the restaurant used to be a gift shop, and the backroom was remodeled to be a kitchen but nobody ever raked the floor. The floor was large flat tiles, with a drain in the middle. No liquids flowed towards the drain, though; it all flooded against the cooler door and eventually went underneath the cooler itself. After a few months of nobody doing anything about this, I'm mopping in the back. We have to take a big squeegee and direct the water to the drain. I'm doing this, and notice that when water gushes under and back out of the space under the cooler, hundreds of tiny little pin-worm thingies come out with it. I tell my manager this, and I tell them again each time I see it happen. Finally, a seal gets put on it. If you're thinking they removed the cooler, professionally cleaned and sanitized, and then properly installed the cooler with a seal, you're not thinking like a business owner. This motherfucker came in with a strip of rubber weatherproofing strip and some gorilla glue, slapped it up, and called it ship-shape. I was not enthused, and started looking for another job. And found one, and got out. And cut ties with everyone there. And flew to the moon and brought back a moon-flan but it collapsed under Earth's gravity
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Jun 11, 2016 20:51
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 19:16 |
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When this first happened I thought it was pretty bad, but upon reading some of the worse horror stories in the thread I am really not sure. I work in a party store, most of our sales are beer, or wine or liqour, but we also sell some grocery items, and have a kitchen. We have a back room where we store all of our recyclables in big plastic bags until our distributors pick them up. The back room is pretty loving gross, because no customers will ever see it, and the owners constantly short staff. The floor is black, except in the places where I manage to find time to mop it. Our new chef thought it was the perfect place for kitchen prep, and would store boxes of produce (mostly potatoes and onions) directly on that gross rear end floor, right next to and below the full bags of aluminum cans, dripping with stale beer. We had signs proclaiming we only took clean bottles and cans, but it was never enforced, the recyclables would frequently be covered in dust, filled with old cigarettes, swarmed by flies, or my favorite, filled with mucous. I had to yell at the new chef, and the owner before they stopped doing that. Pretty sure I didn't overreact. It's also nice to frequently find food stored next to cleaning chemicals in this "chef's" work area.
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Jun 14, 2016 04:58
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