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cash crab posted:I wish I had never read this For those of you who wonder why service staff tend to be so jaded and cynical if they've done it for a while it's because of poo poo like this. Working with the public is unbelievably awful and people will go to amazing lengths to spite service workers for extremely petty reasons. I worked at a place where a guy poo poo in the sink in the bathroom because we wouldn't let him take home three boxes of food from the salad bar for free (that is not how salad bars work, people). A woman once tried to have me fired from a convenience store job and made up all sorts of awful things about what I did when I was there because I wouldn't sell her one friend cigarettes. Her friend looked to be about 13 and didn't have any ID (as an aside it really is truly amazing how frequently people who look too young to be buying tobacco turn out to be in their mid-20s with IDs that are in fact perfectly legit) so of course I wasn't going to sell her anything. Then the other woman came in and demanded that I sell her cigarettes for her friend (lol nope) which was totally OK because she was 18. To her credit she did have ID and was like 23 but still...that's pretty much exactly the wrong way to handle that. Apparently she was claiming that I threw food at her and swore at her when really all I did was say "I can't sell you that" and went about my work. A lot of people seriously treat service staff like they aren't even human then complain that the service staff always looks grumpy.
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Jul 19, 2015 01:06
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I guess I'm pretty lucky that the restaurant I worked at didn't have any gross triple-expired deli meat or festering chunks in the drink dispenser stuff. The night shift spent the last few hours of the night cleaning everything. All the kitchen staff cleaned their stations top to bottom, and then we'd team up to mop floors and do the walk-in coolers too. Day staff cleared out anything that was starting to go in the morning before it got crazy. Since I don't have any good material for the thread, how about this walk-in that had mushrooms growing in it. Not just a film of mold, literally fistfuls of mushrooms.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZEF3bniX3s
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Jul 19, 2015 02:18
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p-hop posted:I guess I'm pretty lucky that the restaurant I worked at didn't have any gross triple-expired deli meat or festering chunks in the drink dispenser stuff. The night shift spent the last few hours of the night cleaning everything. All the kitchen staff cleaned their stations top to bottom, and then we'd team up to mop floors and do the walk-in coolers too. Day staff cleared out anything that was starting to go in the morning before it got crazy. I refuse to believe that's real. How is that possible?
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Jul 19, 2015 05:31
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p-hop posted:I guess I'm pretty lucky that the restaurant I worked at didn't have any gross triple-expired deli meat or festering chunks in the drink dispenser stuff. The night shift spent the last few hours of the night cleaning everything. All the kitchen staff cleaned their stations top to bottom, and then we'd team up to mop floors and do the walk-in coolers too. Day staff cleared out anything that was starting to go in the morning before it got crazy. For a split second, I went, "haha, look at those plump happy mushrooms" and then remembered the context. A+ content, but I am also really sad right now.
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Jul 19, 2015 05:41
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Thin Privilege posted:I refuse to believe that's real. How is that possible? Negligence on a grand scale.
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Jul 19, 2015 06:09
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Negligence on a grand scale. I mean biologically, I didn't know mushrooms could grow inside a metal fridge, and not even in cracks, just directly on the metal. It just seems so impossible because I've only ever seen mushrooms in like, nature, outside. Ugh 
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Jul 19, 2015 06:37
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Thin Privilege posted:I mean biologically, I didn't know mushrooms could grow inside a metal fridge, and not even in cracks, just directly on the metal. It just seems so impossible because I've only ever seen mushrooms in like, nature, outside. Ugh Mushrooms can grow basically anywhere there's enough moisture.
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Jul 19, 2015 06:49
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When I was sixteen or so, my brother brought me into the basement to "show me something neat". It was a grapefruit-sized cluster of mushrooms on the floor of his bathroom. To stay on topic, he was a restaurant manager at the time (now he's a prison guard!  )
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Jul 19, 2015 06:52
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Thin Privilege posted:I mean biologically, I didn't know mushrooms could grow inside a metal fridge, and not even in cracks, just directly on the metal. It just seems so impossible because I've only ever seen mushrooms in like, nature, outside. Ugh So that entire wall is probably covered in a thin, moist film of mycelium. That spot where the mushroom is growing is just the most viable spot for it to produce a fruiting body.
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Jul 19, 2015 08:21
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You know who has great restaurant stories? George Orwell.Down and Out in Paris and London posted:Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hotel X, as soon as one penetrated into the service quarters, was revolting. Our cafeterie had year old filth in all the dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to Mario. 'Why kill the poor animals?' he said reproachfully. The others laughed when I wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we were clean where we recognized cleanliness as part of the BOULOT. We scrubbed the tables and polished the brasswork regularly, because we had orders to do that; but we had no orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had no time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties; and as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by being dirty.
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Jul 19, 2015 08:22
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p-hop posted:I guess I'm pretty lucky that the restaurant I worked at didn't have any gross triple-expired deli meat or festering chunks in the drink dispenser stuff. The night shift spent the last few hours of the night cleaning everything. All the kitchen staff cleaned their stations top to bottom, and then we'd team up to mop floors and do the walk-in coolers too. Day staff cleared out anything that was starting to go in the morning before it got crazy. Yeah, I worked at a hospital kitchen, and while the management was annoying at hell about us keeping things clean, holy poo poo hearing some of these stories are making me glad they did. The worst 'horror story' I have is gross, but totally not the worker's fault: our dish-washing machine was letting dirty water accumulate where it shouldn't, and we all had a collective  moment when we realized that there was nasty poo poo lying there.
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Jul 19, 2015 09:09
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My first job was at McD when I was 15. Two I remember specifically were a real fuzzy happy meal plush getting tossed by accident into the deep fryer and I had to spatula out all the fuzz. That was the end of "cleaning" it. A co-worker put all kinds of things in people's food when they were assholes. This includes mop water and his dick. Yes, hand to God, stamped his dick right in a McFlurry with the ice cream dick stamp and all still there as I handed it out the window. A buddy of mine quit his job at a New England pizza chain by putting lobster meat in the vents that they found six months later. Teenagers suck.
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Jul 19, 2015 23:17
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Tim Whatley posted:My first job was at McD when I was 15. Two I remember specifically were a real fuzzy happy meal plush getting tossed by accident into the deep fryer and I had to spatula out all the fuzz. That was the end of "cleaning" it. I think about the dick McFlurry about once a day now.
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Jul 22, 2015 00:45
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cash crab posted:I think about the dick McFlurry about once a day now. 
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Jul 22, 2015 01:13
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ToxicSlurpee posted:For those of you who wonder why service staff tend to be so jaded and cynical if they've done it for a while it's because of poo poo like this. Working with the public is unbelievably awful and people will go to amazing lengths to spite service workers for extremely petty reasons. I worked at a place where a guy poo poo in the sink in the bathroom because we wouldn't let him take home three boxes of food from the salad bar for free (that is not how salad bars work, people). A woman once tried to have me fired from a convenience store job and made up all sorts of awful things about what I did when I was there because I wouldn't sell her one friend cigarettes. Her friend looked to be about 13 and didn't have any ID (as an aside it really is truly amazing how frequently people who look too young to be buying tobacco turn out to be in their mid-20s with IDs that are in fact perfectly legit) so of course I wasn't going to sell her anything. Then the other woman came in and demanded that I sell her cigarettes for her friend (lol nope) which was totally OK because she was 18. To her credit she did have ID and was like 23 but still...that's pretty much exactly the wrong way to handle that. I had very similar problems in the convenience store I worked in about 7 years ago. We'd have high school students come in and attempts to swipe bags of lollies from under your nose because they'd point at the smoke rack and ask can they buy a pack; hoping you'd turn around to see what they are pointing at. I once had a woman (who in all fairness was a regular customer but I hated her because she was always pushy and rude to everyone) send a 5 year old girl in to buy a pack of smokes. I distinctly remember this little girl comming in and saying saying "My auntie says can she please have a packet of Horizon purples." and me saying to the little girl "I'm sorry little one but your auntie needs to buy them herself." I see her walk out the front door, which was directly in front of me, to a car with tinted windows and a chubby arm hanging out the side; she comes back in and goes "My auntie says that she can't get out of the car because she has two babies in the back and can you can see her from here." and points at the car where upon the chubby arm waves at me. I again say to the little girl "I'm sorry, please tell your aunt that if she wants the smokes she needs to come into the shop herself and buy them herself. It is very very illegal for me to sell them to you." So off she toddles. I turn around to clean up some stuff and suddenly I hear something along the lines of "Can you just give me my loving smokes?" so I in a polite but condescending way because gently caress her, I give her the smokes she wants and take her payment while she goes "You can loving see me from in here, I have babies in the car so it's dangerous for me to come out. Why didn't you just take the money and bring them out to me if you're so worried you dickhead?" I had to point out the cameras around the shop to her and then to the big sign saying no one under the age of 18 may purchase smokes and I can ID check anyone at any given time. She mouthed off some more and left. Next day she's back buying pies and poo poo again like nothing happened. Annnnd another time I had some bloke submit a complaint to my boss about me. I just got home from work and my mate who just took over managing the night shift texted me saying some dude just came into complain about the "blonde guy who was working here" and demanded to talk to me or the owner. Apparently I'd sworn at him, refused him service and ignored him when he was at the counter asking for service. My friend described him too me and I realized he was a customer from about an hour before I knocked off who'd come in with his girlfriend, a girl I had known in school. As they were the only customers in the shop I chatted a bit with her while he grabbed some stuff then my random ID check program came up with "CHECK CUSTOMER" (it was just a little counter that my mate and I made in C++ that randomly rolled a d8 every time someone brought smokes and if it came up 8 we asked for ID, it was so we didn't get sloppy when a rush was on). He was obviously annoyed by this because he didn't have his ID on him and when he got all flusted and embarrassed by it in front of his new girl he tried the "Cmon mate do I look like a kid to you, don't be a dick." argument and his girlfriend defended my decision. The complaint was a petty attempt at revenge.
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Jul 22, 2015 01:33
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I work in a newly opened restaurant/bar and thankfully I don't have any food horror stories.. yet. We have a show kitchen so most of the actual cooking gets done where customers and staff can easily see it, although god knows what happens in the back. Nothing that I've seen so far since I go through there when bussing tables sometimes. The worst I've had to deal with there was a drunk guy who came in from a different bar and tried to hit on me while lighting a cigarette inside. Smoking in bars and restaurants is illegal in this state, so I told him to put it out and he tried to accuse me of being racist. After I got him to leave, he snuck back in a while later and my coworker had to escort him out again, but my coworker is a much more patient guy than I am and listened to the drunk dude ranting for 30 minutes. Apparently he was very concerned that we were judging him based on his skin tone and really wanted us to know he was Hindi, and not a filthy Muslim terrorist. He then went on to say how much he wished he was white so he could date white girls, because this one girl he works with is really pretty but she's always a bitch to him.  Last we saw of him, he was getting kicked out of a nice hotel down the street from us. Goonspeed, drunk racist Hindi guy. Same coworker from this story used to work in a grocery store and the worst thing he had to deal with was the time someone emptied 3 or 4 bottles of soy sauce into a freezer full of bagged vegetables for no apparent reason. The worst thing he didn't have to deal with was the fact that no one ever had the refrigerant refilled in the couple years that store had been operating. They just kept silencing the alarm when it went off and eventually it became just one of those background noises nobody pays attention to because that's just how it's always been. Apparently the entire refrigeration system was on the verge of failing in a couple days if it didn't get refilled. No idea how/if that ever got resolved, but I don't shop at that store anymore.
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Jul 22, 2015 02:09
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The manager at the last restaurant I worked at was not entirely dissimilar (edit: to a post I can't see anymore for some reason? Something about awful manager? ee: Ahh, it's from the first page) . He used to bring in his girlfriends to be served (food comped, naturally) while his wife did payroll in the back. His idea for "neighborhood jazz nights" was always a loving nightmare; he'd invite every last one of his lovely friends. One night, two couples ordered appetizers, salads, main courses and like, three bottles of champagne. I think the total came to about $240. Once it came time to settle up, I went to drop off the tab and one guy pulls out a black Mastercard (yes, YES TIP MEEE) and his friend goes, "Oh, I got this." He pulls out a gift certificate, given to him by our manager. He tells me to "keep the change", which I can't, because it's on a gift certificate. About an hour later, I have moved on to working bar when one of the servers complains some guy is trying to basically stick his finger in her butt. I offer to switch with her. I am on hour nine of my shift and haven't eaten yet. This man is very, very drunk. I ask him to put out his cigarette, because we're inside, which he agrees to. Then, he grabs my hand and asks me to dance and I hit him in the face. Not hard or anything. He tipped me about 30%; go figure. Anyway, I quit pretty soon after that.
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Aug 3, 2015 16:19
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p-hop posted:I guess I'm pretty lucky that the restaurant I worked at didn't have any gross triple-expired deli meat or festering chunks in the drink dispenser stuff. The night shift spent the last few hours of the night cleaning everything. All the kitchen staff cleaned their stations top to bottom, and then we'd team up to mop floors and do the walk-in coolers too. Day staff cleared out anything that was starting to go in the morning before it got crazy. Sadly not even the grossest Bar Rescue. That title probably goes to Headhunters.  http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/bar-infested-cockroaches-roach-eggs-feces-carcasses-article-1.1264244The owner's argument in the show for there being bugs everywhere including in the food and drinks was 'There's bugs everywhere. There's bugs all over America!' and 'Our customers don't want it to be clean!'.
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Aug 3, 2015 18:24
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I used to work for a certain New Mexico convenience store chain, and oh, boy, do I have stories... I was loaned out to one store to cover their night shift, since their usual guy (the alcoholic husband of the manager) had just got his fourth DUI that evening. It took me about five minutes after the shift started to hang an out of order sign on the deli case and start changing the ancient as poo poo grease. Burned crunchy bits literally filled the deep fryer over halfway, and the oil was burned to hell and rancid. Turns out, no one had changed the grease in about two months, just kept topping it back up when it got low. Also, the fryer looked like it had never been boiled out, which is a weekly thing. By the time the manager rolled her rear end into the store at 6, that deep fryer shined - and I got bitched out, because the "world famous" burritos didn't look like they were dipped in motor oil "like our customers wanted". And speaking of deli cases, I'm not sure how customers could see the food to order it through the haze of oil baked onto the glass. I would get chewed out regularly for going through half a case of box cutter blades when I scraped out all the oil haze and cleaned the glass. Also, deli cases take special plastic-coated lightbulbs, which you could only get from the maintenance man, who never came around, so basically every deli case had regular lightbulbs from off the shelf in them. That will get the deli case shut down if the health inspectors ever caught it, but none of them ever looked. No one ever cleaned and sanitized the fountain heads, which is supposed to be done nightly. They're always full of black mold. Or broke down the cappuccino machines - I could walk into a store and pull the backsplash and upper spill tray, and scrape moldy cappuccino slime out of them with a putty knife, and I guarantee you could walk into one of them today and do the same thing. If a convenience store has ready-to-eat food, then spoilage is a thing. And management was always bitching about the spoilage being too high, and bitch about the deli case "not looking full". Well, sorry people, you built your store in a town of 2,500 people, the only way you could have both is if everyone in the town ate deli food three times a day and that's just not gonna happen. The more "enterprising" employees would regularly retime the food in the deli case, and when I would start my night shift at 11 I would frequently find food that I had cooked myself at 5 the previous morning, retimed to 10p-2a. Handwashing was a joke, the box of gloves were so old that they were starting to yellow and turn brittle, cashiers smoked in the food prep area (the stores didn't become No Smoking until the past few years, because the owner liked to walk in and chain smoke in the store), boxes of food items would be sitting on the counter thawing all day because people were too lazy to walk the twenty feet to the freezer to put stuff up, you name it. The most egregious crap was that the upper management didn't trust the managers to enter spoiled food into the register system, so it had to be done by an area supervisor, who only stopped by the store once a week. We also weren't trusted to write it down and throw it away (because the upper management was convinced that 100% of their inventory loss was employee theft), so all the spoiled food wound up tossed in a big box in the walk-in to be counted by the area supervisor. By day 6 or so the walk-in reeked of spoiled fried food. There was a hell of a lot more wrong with the stores (and the chain as a whole) than just this, but I don't think the thread covers blatant fraud, manager theft, safety violations out the wazoo, complete nutjobs for both employees and customers, electrical/plumbing/HVAC unpermitted hackjobs, and flagrant emotional abuse of the employees. Let's just say that the owner of the chain was allergic to spending money on anything, and I was ordered more than once to "just make it work and don't spend any money" and leave it at that. e. Okay, one nutjob employee story. The rule was, people on the night shift weren't allowed to go outside the store, but we all did it anyways. So one week, the manager was on vacation and I was trying my best to keep the chaos under control while she was away. I get a call on a Thursday night, around 3 am, that the cashier that night has been mugged. I told him to call 911 and hauled rear end to the store. When I get there, the sheriff's deputy is patching up a torso wound and the ambulance is pulling in. He goes off, and I resign myself to a 12 hour shift. Later that morning, one of the ER nurses comes in, talking about "that cashier with the self-inflicted wound last night". The light bulb goes on in my head, and I asked her what was up. She explained that knife wounds are either going to be shallow and long (slash), or small and deep (stab). His was shallow and small, like a deliberate cut meant to bleed a lot but not do any damage, and he tried to drop a bloody boxcutter in the trashcan in the ER (and then made up a story along the lines of slashing the mugger's face with sick ninja skillz when the deputy called him out on it). She also informed me that he was a frequent flier for self-harm at the ER, that this wasn't the first time the guy had self-harmed to get out of work, and asked me if we had even done a criminal background check on the guy (she said it would be "entertaining"). He wound up quitting a month later, stealing his mom's Xanax prescription and getting busted trying to sell them for weed money, then claiming suicidal impulses during intake. He got a nice little 30-day psych hold for that one. But the fucker still ruined it for everyone, because the management started cracking down on us going outside after that. rndmnmbr has a new favorite as of 07:32 on Aug 21, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 06:58
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 Holy poo poo.
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Aug 21, 2015 17:03
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It doesn't happen very often, but when people effortpost in this thread, it's basically my favorite place on the forums.
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Aug 21, 2015 17:12
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Oh, there's more... Unlike most convenience stores, which get their ice from a vendor, this chain had their employees bag ice. And not a single employee seemed to understand that ice was a food item, and you were supposed to wash your hands and wear gloves. I witnessed more than one employee come to work sick, go back to bag ice with no gloves and unwashed hands, sneeze right in the ice maker, and keep right on bagging ice. Sometimes the ice maker on the fountain would quit, and that meant trucking ice from the back ice maker up and dumping it in the fountain. Every store also had a bucket that would be filled with butyl degreaser and used to scrub oil stains off the parking lot. Too many employees would put the wrong two and two together, grab the degreaser bucket, and use it to haul ice to the fountain. The beer coolers were always set too cold, and beer would freeze. That meant beer would wind up spraying everywhere inside the coolers, which no one ever cleaned. By the time I would get around to it, it meant scrubbing frozen beer syrup out of the cooler, and people, beer syrup stinks. No one ever bothered to check the dairy products for out of dates. I dumped out more than one gallon of milk best described as "chunky". And why did all this stuff happen? Because the stores were all terribly understaffed. It's hard to complete a list of required cleaning tasks when you're the only employee present, and customers keep coming in. And we would beg and plead for the store to hire more people, but that could only be done by the area supervisor, who came around once per week and had more important things to do, like bitch at us for the condition of the store and count a giant box of moldy fried food. I only did this stuff because I was an assistant manager and took the job way too seriously. By the time I quit, even I had stopped caring and just wallowed in the filth like everyone else. It is by far the worst, most soul crushing job I had ever had. E. One more nutjob employee story: The Hutt. The Hutt was my manager, a 50-something, divorced, massively obese Hispanic woman, likely with either strong bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder. You never knew whether you were going to get her on a good day, or if you were going to get a full dose of The Hutt. I handled everything I could, ever there were still some things that required a manager. I used to dread telling her about anything, because that automatically made me the target for her ire, like it was my fault something had broken or one of the other employees had terminally hosed up. She used to hire men almost exclusively, because women "didn't want to work and would quit after a month." Well no poo poo, if I had a fat Mexican bitch insulting me if I was the least bit attractive, and then ignoring and insulting me if a customer (or another employee, we had we few of those too) started sexually harassing me "because they wouldn't do it if you weren't a slut", I would quit too, and likely burn the place down only way out. The company loved The Hutt, though, because she never had inventory or cash problems and could brown-nose with the best of them. After I quit, she had to retire after a bunch of bad blood clots hosed up one of her legs. And I should be ashamed to admit it, but I'm not: I cackled with glee at the news, and hoped one of those clots would break loose and lodge in her blackened and shriveled heart, and finally kill the bitch. I learned two things from the Hutt: how to run a tight and profitable convenience store, and how not to treat my fellow employees. e2. I kan spel gud! rndmnmbr has a new favorite as of 00:53 on Aug 22, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 21:28
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I'm not sure what I enjoy more, the gross stories or the customer/co-worker stories. A friend of mine worked as a prep chef/waitress at a small Turkish restaurant and she has a great story about telling off a customer who always complained and wanted free food. The restaurant owner encouraged her to do it- "Anybody gives you poo poo, you tell them get the gently caress out, baby, because we don't need their loving money." (He called everyone under age twenty-five "baby.") She does an impression of him, and seeing a pretty young woman imitate an older Turkish man swearing with a thick accent is pretty great. I don't really have any stories to tell. I worked for a cheap rundown movie theater where the ice machine was broken for several months and the manager didn't bother sending us out to the supermarket next door when we opened, so all the sodas we served for the first set of movies were warm. After I left I heard that he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend pregnant.
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Aug 22, 2015 00:59
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Phaeoacremonium posted: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. I did this to my own finger once. I was cutting black forest ham though. It didn't hurt when I did it, since the blade was so sharp, but it hurt afterwards like crazy. My manager was so pissed cause I got blood and a good chunk of skin on the ham. I had to spend a full day watching kitchen safety videos and after that any time I needed to use anything sharp I had to wear these massive chainmail gloves and if I needed a knife, I had to sign a form to check it out. Grocery stores reuse chicken like crazy. If a rotisserie whole chicken didn't sell that day, they would cut it in half and throw it in the refrigerated section with some herbs. If it didn't sell that day, they would cut it up into smaller pieces and bread and deep fry it. If it STILL didn't sell, they would chop it up and mix it into salads. That always struck me as kinda gross..
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Aug 22, 2015 03:23
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candywife posted:I did this to my own finger once. I was cutting black forest ham though. It didn't hurt when I did it, since the blade was so sharp, but it hurt afterwards like crazy. My manager was so pissed cause I got blood and a good chunk of skin on the ham.  I miss the little croissant sandwiches they used to make with old chickens. Oh, Safeway, you disgusting, resourceful gently caress.
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Aug 22, 2015 03:29
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cash crab posted:
Oops, I had the feeling I skipped a chicken step somewhere. Also, if the meat STILL hadn't sold and was basically expired, it was shipped off to be made into animal food.
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Aug 22, 2015 03:33
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I still have a few friends in that town, and they've promised to let me know if The Hutt ever dies. Because I'm going to make a special trip to her grave just so I can piss on it. No hyperbole, no exaggeration, I'm literally going to piss on her grave and provide photographic proof. 
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Aug 22, 2015 04:02
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Lord Lambeth posted:Dude I was working with the other day mentioned that a guy at his last work got his arm stuck in a Hobart mixer. I don't know how, since those things are generally pretty idiot proof. The newer ones are, yeah. All the cages, lockouts, and all the other seemingly over-the-top safety precautions are there for a very, very good reason: floor mixers have huge, incredibly high-torque electric motors in them that are capable of absolutely ripping your loving arm off. Due to the sad trajectory of my foodservice career, I've worked around basically every "dangerous" appliance you could possibly imagine (save for that moulder from earlier. gently caress that), and the one that always made me feel the most ill at ease was the mid 70's Hobart D300 floor mixer we had at my last job. Sorta like this one...  (edit: I realized this picture doesn't lend much scale. this thing is maybe 4 feet tall.) This thing was a goddamn gorgeous example of why high-quality old commercial kitchen appliances rule. It was mechanically very simple so it would have been easy to fix it if it ever broke (which it never did, and I bought it from the original owner), was stupidly powerful, and was so thoroughly beat to poo poo that, in person, it looked like a background sprite in Fallout 2. I loved it. However, note how simple the controls are. A three stage toggle for speed and a (hilariously small) on/off switch. I suppose cages were a factory option at the time, but I never could find one. I had one of these running on 2 working on some dough, and, due to an absolutely ridiculous, Rube Goldberg-esq series of events, my prep guy accidentally dropped a decent shallow hotel pan into the bowl. This thing folded it up like nothing happened at all (put a bunch of hugely annoying gashes into the aluminum bowl, though, which was a bitch to try to replace). So yeah, imagine if that was your arm. Or maybe a part of your apron, or the hoodie you were wearing on a particularly cold day. Newer floor mixers are probably some order of magnitude more powerful than the one I had. Having a healthy respect/fear of the appliances you're working with is a great way to keep yourself from getting hurt. edit: I got enough stories of "KITCHEN BADAZZEZ" trying to be Bourdain and sending themselves to the hospital to fill a book. soon enough Radio Help has a new favorite as of 12:40 on Aug 22, 2015 |
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Aug 22, 2015 11:53
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I have a hard time writing in threads like these, because "crazy poo poo" happens all the time in the commercial cooking world. It's part and parcel with the whole job description. everything is hot, all the surfaces are slippery, and you have to move as fast as possible all the time. also you have a sharp-rear end knife in your hand. Honestly, every single cook who has been doing their thing for longer than three years has probably seen some Real poo poo at one point in time or another: hey wow, a guy cut his hand open and now you know what the inside of a hand looks like. homebody is a loving juggernaut tho so he slathers his cut in super glue and double gloves it with some blue 3m masking tape as a blood gasket and gets cheered on by his other hardcore-rear end coworkers and finishes his shift. drat that guy is a loving soldier. then he doesn't go to the hospital because he makes $10/hr (and that's considered fair for his station) and his poo poo never really heals right and he's still bitching about it four years later and for whatever reason still can't completely flex his pinkie finger. but at least he's not in collections for medical bills! wuh-oh, some culinary school new hire was trying really hard to prove his hustle and he tripped over the lip of the floor mat and spilled a half hotel of hot roux on veteran line cook X's whole lower left leg, putting X out of commission for a month or so due to the fact that he got For Real second degree burns because hot roux is the culinary equivalent of napalm. Now it's a few months later and veteran line cook X is drunk at the after-work bar and threatening the well-meaning new hire with a knife because his workmans comp didn't cover poo poo and he has no practical legal recourse because the owners of the brand new restaurant are just as broke as he is. also he couldn't afford a lawyer even if he wanted to. but hey! some new restaurant in the area is hella progressive and wants to be The First New Restaurant to Really Take Care of Its Employees. they do the whole payola thing to make a big deal about it on Eater or whatever the gently caress, and well-meaning social media folks love the fact that they're charging an extra i dunno 10% to all orders to help pay for the hugely-expensive-yet-still-janky group health insurance plan they offer to the full timers. the general manager gets at least five complaints a day from fiftysomethings that demand to have this surcharge removed form their tab. in motherfucking Portland. I'll be the first to admit: I'm jaded as gently caress. the real American food industry horror story isn't "wow a guy did a gross thing" or "this dude totally hurt himself check it dogg," it's the fact that whole loving system completely refuses to take care of the people that exist inside of it. a decent portion of the people making your fancy-rear end steak aren't doing it because it bankrolls their sweet cascaidan black metal band or their crushing cocaine addiction: they're doing it because they really, really want to make you dinner for a living. they like what they do, they are good at it, and all they really get in return is alcoholism and a ten year handicap on whatever they end up doing in their 30s when they finally realize that their youthful idealism got them absolutely nowhere. it isn't even inherently the fault of the business owners, either: the cultural expectation of value nowadays is absurd for the mid-range (read: largest and most potentially profitable in my area) market, and is completely out-of-sync with the reality of owning a small- to medium-sized restaurant. how can you possibly pay your employees what they're worth when a huge portion of your potential net profit is going towards appealing to motherfucking broke gourmands? Radio Help has a new favorite as of 13:59 on Aug 22, 2015 |
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Aug 22, 2015 13:30
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Radio Help posted:They're doing it because they really, really want to make you dinner for a living. they like what they do, they are good at it, and all they really get in return is alcoholism and a ten year handicap on whatever they end up doing in their 30s when they finally realize that their youthful idealism got them absolutely nowhere. Absolutely spot on. I got fairly lucky in that my partner convinced me to go back to school, so I got a degree in Environmental and Public Health, which was accredited by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health. This, coupled with my ten year's industry experience (and a teaching qualification I got), has allowed me to go and train people in food safety (amongst other things), for money that is on a par with people that have built and stayed with a career. I loved cooking for a living, it was awesome, but when you take a long hard look and realise that you're earning little more than you were five years ago, and you're still doing 60 hour weeks (or 20 hours if it's quiet and you can't afford rent that week), that's gotta be time to call it a day. I was terrified when I quit cooking, because I had no other useful qualifications, no other useful experience. All I knew how to do was kitchen related. The idea of this 'ten year handicap' is so true. Realising that you've spent all your time and energy in a field that still treats staff like it's the 1980's is not a good place to be.
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Aug 22, 2015 16:29
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So that's a no on going to culinary school?
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Aug 22, 2015 16:36
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It might be different for you, but so far I've seen one chef who now owns a restaurant, and has a share in a few more, and is quite wealthy. He doesn't do any actual kitchen work any more, except for emergency cover type stuff. On the other hand, I know loads of chefs who are very skilled (more so than the first example), and who still have to work incredibly hard to earn anything like someone in a position of similar responsibility in another industry, with no end in sight until they're too broken to do it any more. I even had an ex-head chef of mine phoning me up asking "How can I do what you do because this is killing me", the guy's late forties and he doesn't have the capacity to keep working 9am till 10pm most days. I realised (in time) that progression in catering, for the majority, actually means way more hours, way more responsibility (you will be the guy covering when no-one else can), and a very small pay increase. Unless you are A) astoundingly lucky or B) astoundingly talented it's probably not worth the investment in your time. Another example: Man I know used to work for Marco Pierre White in London. The guy is a brilliant chef. Due to circumstance, he now works in a busy small town kitchen, and he maybe makes £25,000 a year. He's mid-thirties, and he's been doing it since he was 14. He works split shifts, and, physically, looks like he could die at any given moment. I know your career isn't all about money, but there should be a fairer level of perks/pay/time off or whatever, and this rarely exists. I always recommend every young chef I teach to get the gently caress out and re-train in a building trade or something, you can be 25 and earn £30,000 a year easily, and still get to go home at 5pm and not work weekends.
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Aug 22, 2015 16:57
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The Saddest Rhino posted:ADVENTURES OF ME AS A PART-TIMER IN A UK CINEMA CHAIN The popcorn story happened at the theater I worked at in my youth. Also don't ever get extra butter if it's coming from a pump. They're impossible to clean properly so they have a gigantic build up of grease and other poo poo. My first day working at a chain steakhouse, we had a customer come in with her baby and husband, and as they were leaving, the baby projectile vomited all over the floor right next to a customers table. In the interest of covering our asses, we gave them a free meal. I never noticed any food tampering going on otherwise.
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Aug 23, 2015 00:07
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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 know more people who have gotten food poisoning at Subway than pretty much any other restaurant/restaurant chain. Like, by a huge margin. Hate Fibration has a new favorite as of 21:12 on Aug 24, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 02:53
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Radio Help posted:
I've been out of foodservice for a long time and I still have nightmares about those goddamn things taking my arms off. Yeesh. I love threads like this. I read the stories and find myself nodding along pretty frequently, thinking "yeah, I remember poo poo like that."
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Aug 23, 2015 19:41
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Radio Help posted:The newer ones are, yeah. All the cages, lockouts, and all the other seemingly over-the-top safety precautions are there for a very, very good reason: floor mixers have huge, incredibly high-torque electric motors in them that are capable of absolutely ripping your loving arm off. Due to the sad trajectory of my foodservice career, I've worked around basically every "dangerous" appliance you could possibly imagine (save for that moulder from earlier. gently caress that), and the one that always made me feel the most ill at ease was the mid 70's Hobart D300 floor mixer we had at my last job. Sorta like this one... There is this story of an incident at a chain pizza place that was near where I lived as a kid. Early 70s. A girl in a long sundress was visiting her boyfriend at work, the dress was snagged by a mixer like that. Died from her injuries. It may be apocryphal but it certainly is plausible. I saw the story show up in a couple threads on a Facebook "You might be from Buena Park" or some such groups. I am betting some portion of it is true. Edit for clarity. Heard the story in the 70s, the story lives on decades later on Facebook. Though I will admit that the initial version I heard was her hair was caught. Bogatyr has a new favorite as of 23:45 on Aug 23, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 21:52
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To tell people how incredibly powerful those dough mixers are we have one at the college I go to. We use it to mix clay. It's like 50 years old and still does the job better than like...anything. It does it absolutely effortlessly. Breaks up all the chunks like they aren't even there.
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Aug 23, 2015 22:39
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Breaks up all the arms like they aren't even there. ftfy.
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Aug 24, 2015 17:26
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Hate Fibration posted:I know more people who have gotten food poisoning at Subway than pretty much any other restaurant/restaurant chain. Like, but a huge margin. At the subway I worked at outside Seattle the only time temperatures were checked in the fridge and meatballs were the day before and morning of the subway inspection every 3 months. My manager(a 20 year old who didn't really give a gently caress) would also just change the dates on food instead of tossing it because her boss assumed any food loss was employee theft. Even with all that i still don't see how you could gently caress up bad enough to give someone food poisoning it's all precooked food. Our store wasn't even that busy and the prepped food never stayed in a fridge more than a couple days, 3 max. Except the eggs for the breakfast sandwiches. Pro-tip: if it's a slow shop know that those eggs might have been thawed in the prep cooler for as long as a week.
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Aug 24, 2015 21:08
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Phaeoacremonium posted: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. A woman once returned a can of green beans to the store I worked at because she opened it up and found a grasshopper inside. A whole one. And not one of those little two-inch long ones, either---this thing was almost six and disgusting to look at.
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Aug 24, 2015 21:26
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