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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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Soul Reaver posted:What exactly were the 'somethings'? Anything particularly creative? Nah, it was the regular stuff. Pretty much what you'd expect. Well except jizz.
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Jul 9, 2015 01:53
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Firstborn posted:I've worked a lot of food service, and the job sucks. I'm working food service right now. If you are the kind of dick head who wants to spit in someone's hamburger or whatever, gently caress you. My pay is low as gently caress and the job is miserable, but we also serve $1 hamburgers to poor people that have their own problems. Wiping your crusty dick on someone's mcdouble for whatever reason just means you are a jackass. You're right. No seriously, you're absolutely right and this is why I personally never messed with food as much as I wanted to. It doesn't excuse it. It isn't justification. But it's the reason it happens and one thing I really, really hope is that people take away from stories like these silly little lessons like "don't yell at the food staff" or "maybe supporting policy that hates raising the minimum wage is a bad idea." I'm pretty sure less stuff like this would happen if people working food service didn't have such awful lives. Maybe if they were better paid and abused less they'd quit rubbing their dicks on the fries all the time because they care that little. Not all food service people are going to mess with the food and probably most of them won't ever. But let's be honest, all food service employees have been seriously tempted to.
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Jul 9, 2015 14:35
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jabby posted:It is a very pathetic, passive aggressive form of revenge since the target suffers no ill effect and doesn't actually know any revenge has taken place. The only result is some kind of sense of self-satisfaction and a slightly greasy rear end in a top hat. When you get negative satisfaction from your job you have to even it out somehow. Ever wondered why restaurant employees do so many drugs and gently caress so much?
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Jul 12, 2015 01:41
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Blisters are your body's built-in band-aid system. Leave 'em be.
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Jul 14, 2015 04:09
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jabby posted:Wouldn't a knife be a more reasonable choice for inch thick slices rather than eyeballing it on a rotating blade? That would take way longer and not be perfect so of course you had to use the slicer.
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Jul 15, 2015 22:42
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berenzen posted:Don't you still have laws about unsafe work environments? Up here in canada you have to refuse working in an unsafe work environment unless you want OHS to come down on your head. You say that like those laws are ever enforced. Restaurants get inspected like once a year and they know ahead of time so the rest of the year the places are filthy and unsafe. Plus if the place gets shut down you're out of a job so reporting anything is to risky. There are also anti-retaliation laws but good luck actually getting them enforced. That stuff can lead to legal battles and Dishguy #37 who works for minimum wage can't afford a lawyer and probably doesn't know his rights. This is America, drat it. We value freedom here more than human lives.
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Jul 16, 2015 21:52
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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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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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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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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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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:Seafood and tuna setups getting old in the coolers and having their dates changed when nobody's looking because EEEEWWW MAKING THOSE MAKES YOUR HANDS SMELL FISHY SOMEONE ELSE WILL DO IT TOMORROW, and lazy employees not FIFOing when they refill the bain containers. That and restaurant managers tend to hammer into you that shrink should be reduced at all costs. Never waste anything, ever, even if it means something is so old it might kill somebody. GOTTA STAY FAI posted:Goddrat One thing people running restaurants just have to kind of accept is that a thoroughly ridiculous amount of sex happens in the restaurant world. Your employees are going to all be loving each other and there isn't a drat thing you could do about it.
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Aug 26, 2015 18:41
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rndmnmbr posted:To be fair, misted oil is hard to clean, especially if given enough time to polymerize. My go-to cleaning solution was full strength butyl degreaser and Scotch-brite pads, and I'm pretty sure lye is healthier than butyl degreaser. Besides, so long as you wipe everything down afterwards, it shouldn't be a problem. Especially on food surfaces, because they're getting scrubbed with plenty of water on a regular basis, and bleached thoroughly, right? No. That isn't right. Some restaurants only clean things properly when they know the health inspector is coming. edit: Oh who am I kidding that's "most" or maybe even "all."
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Aug 27, 2015 16:44
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Dynastocles posted:I was reading "Down And Out in Paris and London" by George Orwell, and his description of working in a hotel restaurant matches almost exactly the experiences of everyone posting here. In the 1930s. And eighty years later my friends and family who've worked in restaurants say the same things happen. Upscale places are much nicer because they rely heavily on the staff actually giving a poo poo. The kind of places where they put out paper placemats are owned by people who only care about getting as many asses into the seats as possible, getting them out as fast as possible, and selling as much volume as possible. It's the difference there that matters; in a place that is fancy you're expected to hang around for over an hour and relax. High volume places you're told to get the food in front of the people as fast as possible so they can eat as soon as possible and free up the table. The people that own the places are highly likely to be sociopaths that care only about how much money the store vomits out at the end of the day and that number is absolutely never big enough. Chain restaurants are the worst, really. They're heavily industrialized and view the people working there as nothing more than cogs in the machine. It's exploitive as all hell so they tend to attract people who are desperate for work. In a lot of cases this is also why drugs are rampant. The places will rarely, if ever, test for drugs and people that use drugs a lot are going to gravitate toward places that don't test. Of course this also turns into a way for low-end drug dealers to get a legit source of income to cover their activities/find new customers. In other cases it's teenagers that get hired because they want money for cigarettes and booze but then stay because they can't find work anywhere else and for some reason aren't going to college. Of course a lot of the part timers are, in fact, college students who are probably also doing drugs, not caring much about the job, and probably tired from studying for a bajillion credits. Low-end places are just a perfect shitstorm of terrible in every way imaginable. They won't get better because they can't.
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Sep 2, 2015 07:05
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Radio Help posted:I got laid off once when a quarter of the restaurant burned down due to an electrical fire, but that's just about the only situation I can think of where you'll actually get laid off in the US instead of getting straight up fired (if you're in a right-to-work state like me), or at least ghosted off the schedule. Generally speaking the food service policy is to make the person's job so lovely that they quit themselves. It passes the blame and is very different from firing. I think there are some legal reasons too related to unemployment and whatnot. It's also literally impossible for somebody to try to sue or report it or whatever if they quit. Typically people will be cut to one day a week and left there until they leave. If they stay anyway it isn't like you're losing much. It's really, really hard to get fired from food service. You basically have to be caught stealing from the store or actively try to get fired. I remember seeing a girl just plain not show up for half her shifts last for two months.
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Sep 16, 2015 00:59
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cash crab posted:I wonder what kind of a Dickensian supervillian you have to be to douse uneaten food in soda because of the possibility that someone might actually consume said food. I actually saw people come in to the restaurant pretty regularly who would intentionally waste food while there, overspend, and tip like rear end because they knew the staff was all poor and would see them doing it. You have no idea how badly some people just want to feel superior. They'll seriously be wasteful and blow money for no other reason than because they can and you can't.
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Oct 11, 2015 18:10
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Probably the most spiteful thing I ever saw when I worked in restaurant land was somebody promise the server a $20 tip if they gave good service. And, well, they did give a $20 tip but they also covered it in syrup, flattened it on the table, then glued the paper place mat down over the $20 with more syrup. All told they ended up plastering half a bottle of cheap, sugary syrup over the bill. The table took for loving ever to get completely clean.
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Oct 12, 2015 00:28
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Speaking of people with medical issues being complete idiots back before smoking was banned in restaurants people on oxygen tanks would sit in the smoking section and smoke. Aside from the obvious "this is literally killing you right now as we speak why are you still doing it" crap they were often people whose lungs were so hosed up they had to have the nose pipe in attached to their oxygen tanks at all times. They literally could not survive without oxygen tanks. So they have these little tubes full of oxygen attached to their faces that lead to a metal tank full of oxygen. Which would become shrapnel if the IN FACT ACTUALLY VERY EXPLOSIVE oxygen ever got enough fire to all burn. It was actually against fire code to allow that but if we actually told somebody "no you cannot take your actual loving bomb into the place where there is fire" they'd lose their minds and make the kind of phone call that gets people fired. I was happier about that going away than smoking itself, to be honest. I know the chances of it actually happening aren't exactly huge but they are non-zero, which is why the oxygen tank truck has a huge NO SMOKING YOU DUMB gently caress sign on the side of it. Oxygen is extremely flammable. Do not gently caress with oxygen.
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Oct 13, 2015 06:58
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Nuebot posted:Lately a lot of people are bringing animals into restaurants and it's kind of gross. "Oh don't mind my pug, it's a service animal!" then they just let their dog roam around on a relatively uncontrolled leash and the staff obviously want to say something, but can't because if they do they'll probably lose their job for starting poo poo with someone who has a "service dog". I mean I know you can get actual pugs and poo poo as service dogs for things other than being blind. But I dunno, when you're showing a complete lack of respect for anyone else in the vicinity it starts to seem like you're just bullshitting because you don't want to tie your dog up outside. Companion animals have been getting prescribed (is that the word to use?) to people that have issues with depression or loneliness. It actually works, especially in cases where apartments will not allow pets. I actually have met at least a dozen people whose doctor wrote a note that amounted to "this person gets a cat, gently caress you." The one place I worked at actually had regular customer with a service parrot that sat on her shoulder the whole time she was in the store. Dogs can also be trained to detect seizures or impending psychological meltdowns. I met a person who actually has major freakouts if in a crowd too long but can't always remind herself to leave a crowd so she has a dog that looks for the signs and then tugs on her leash and is all "time to go, kid." It's amazing what kinds of things service animals can actually do. But yeah..."I have a service animal" is no justification for "I just let my dog wander around wherever he wants in public what's the big deal?" Well...it's a huge deal. If your dog wanders over and loves all over some friendly-looking person who is also allergic to dogs, well, good for you your negligence just ruined some random person's dining experience. Places can't legally tell people to not bring their service animals of course but people really do need to control the things.
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Oct 13, 2015 14:30
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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:Yeah, there's a pretty clear line between "companion animal" and "service animal." Companion animals are generally not allowed in businesses, but service animals are. That, of course, doesn't stop shitheads from lying in order to be allowed to bring their dog into the pub or whatever. "Yeah, this pitbull, you know, the one with the 'collar' that is actually a chain with a decorative padlock dangling from it? He's my service animal. I'ma come in and eat 25-cent wings and drink a few beers while he runs around pissing on everything" Yeah that's where it gets problematic. People can lie their faces off about it and no business wants to be That Place that ends up plastered all over the news for being jerks and denying service animals. Even if it's blatantly obvious and well-known that the person is lying you're still at risk of some news establishment that cares more about ratings than truth (well that's all of them now, isn't it?) refusing to shut up about that place that refused a service animal.
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Oct 13, 2015 16:45
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cash crab posted:When I started this thread, I was honestly expecting stories like, "one time the line cook threw up on himself" but naturally you guys have to go ahead and out-do yourselves. Ever wondered why people who work retail or food service for long time become bitter, cynical, jaded shells of their former selves? Well, if you did you can quit wondering. Trust me it doesn't take long until even horrifying work injuries just make you go "welp."
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Oct 22, 2015 00:50
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The Pell posted:Ive never worked food service before, so Im pretty naive when it comes to commercial kitchen stuff. Lets just say that OSHA was currently sitting in your kitchen so you need to follow all safety rules. What are you supposed to do in that situation? Just stop selling fried stuff for a day? I worked between restaurants, retail, and convenience stores for ten years without seeing OSHA once, ever. The restaurant was supposed to be food inspected more than once a year. We saw them twice, ever, and the second time they walked in the front, looked at the counter, walked into the server area, checked some things off on their clipboards, and left. At the time there was a piece of liver one of the cooks had chucked into the bottom shelf of some storage a year before still just kind of hanging out there. It never got cleaned up. Ever. The liver went away when the shelf got replaced. Also, in the restaurant world, you do not ever do anything that prevents you from selling food. Ever. I cut my thumb to the bone and serving was still going on while I bled everywhere. I went home eventually and it bled for about a day before it finally quit. And no of course I didn't take it to the hospital, that costs money! Most places solve that problem by having more than one fryer. Late at night, when you only actually need one of them, you fry in one and clean the other. We also had this neat little cart/pump thing that you could open the bottom of the fryer into. Of course occasionally it splattered everywhere anyway, left a trail of grease that nobody could ever clean up toward the back door, and we had a huge metal drum that we pumped it into that smelled like death but at least we weren't spilling hot oil on ourselves. One day, thanks to that horrifying streak of grease, one of the girls slipped and fell while carrying the knives back to prep. We all froze thinking "oh gently caress oh god oh no she's going to loving die." By some miracle she didn't even get a scratch anywhere on her. She was just as surprised as we were. No, the knives didn't get rewashed and as soon as we realized she was fine it took nanoseconds for everybody to go back into a food making frenzy. Oh, and in case you were wondering, there were four kitchen knives but there was supposed to be eight to avoid cross-contamination. One was for chicken when we actually remembered. The rest were just for like...whatever. We also had fancy color-coded cutting boards that were individually only meant to be used for certain things to avoid cross-contamination. Only 1/3 of them were clean at any given time so of course they were never, ever used that way.
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Oct 28, 2015 06:58
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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. Every single thing in every restaurant in existence has been cleaned with bleach at least once.
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Jan 30, 2016 00:03
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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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