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Taking inspiration from ManBoyChef (this is your fault!) here's a thread for all those that worked in the restaurant industry to share their horror stories from work. Bullshit processes, gross cooks, Karen customers, that douchebag boss that thinks sick employees are fine, here's a place to post it all. Prelude; I started working for the golden arches in 1996 as a maintenance guy. Yeah, I was that low rung poo poo kicker that still got paid more than the crew. One of my jobs was taking care of the shake/ice cream machine and the store i worked at invested the time and money to have a dude from Taylor Freezer come out and train me on it. To say it's complicated is simplifying it. Most of these style machines for other store chains get broken down nightly to be cleaned. McD's wanted to avoid the time and labor for that and invested in these machines that go through a heat cycle at night. Every night the machine heats up to kill the bacteria inside the hoppers and cylinders till the 14th night where the machine locks out to force a manual cleaning. This seems to be a difficult process for your average fast food joint. If the mix in the hoppers is too high (less than an inch from the top) it will boil over the sides of the machine to make an ungodly mess. If there's too little in the hoppers (more than 4 inches from the top) the machine doesn't cycle properly and locks out. The poo poo you see on that popular youtube video about these things and the conspiracies in it are bullshit. Yes the machines flash codes when something apeshit goes wrong. Stores have a manual issued to them that explains the codes, but they get tossed or lost over time because these machines last forever. The biggest reasons these machines break are lack of training to take care of them and a press for time because a proper cleaning takes about 4 hours and that's four hours of extra labor costs and downtime. On to the stories; I worked at multiple stores. My old store was the first, new store was the second, and then random stores in the new store's area as I was needed. I came in for a shift at my old store to clean the machine and the night shift usually emptied the machine out, filled it with water and shut it down so it could soak overnight. They did this time too, but forgot to shut the machine off. the heat cycle wasn't an issue, but when it reentered a freeze cycle the water froze inside the cylinders. This forced the blades on the beater to first gouge the gently caress out of the cylinder walls, then twist the beaters up, break the drive shaft, and the pressure finally blew the plastic faces off the machine. On the shake side the syrup hoses were still connected. The hoses linked to gallon cans of syrup stored below that were pressurized by an air pump. When the face blew off it tore the syrup lines open and the tanks emptied out onto the machine and floor. Taylor Freezer got called out and had to replace the cylinders, beaters, replace the drive shaft motors, faces, syrup lines, and the hopper pumps as both had cracked in multiple places. All in all the store lost about $9000 repairing the machine. When I started working the new store the machine was in bad shape. It didn't get cleaned much. More often than not it got tricked into resetting. Basically you dump out the mix, fill it with hot water and let it sit for a certain length of time, the machine resets thinking it did a heat cycle. Dump out the water and let it sit for about 20 minutes to cool off a bit and then the machine full resets thinking it's been cleaned. The hoppers were layered in calcium, the hopper pumps were half plugged and the o-rings were heavily worn. The tubing the feeds mix from the pump into the cylinder was so caked in calcium the machine couldn't pump mix fast enough to refill the cylinders as they were being drawn from. Everywhere the beater didn't touch inside the cylinders was caked in calcium. On a few occasions you'd even get a little crunchy treat in your ice cream when some would happen to break loose. Took me about 10 hours soaking that thing in delimer and scrubbing to get it cleaned. Didn't help that the store had been tossing the o-ring kits that come once a month in the trash and the brush kit specifically and only for the shake machine was being used for cleaning dishes. A few phone calls to Taylor and a few of the other stores, including my old store 50 miles away and I was able to scrounge pieces to make a new o-ring kit and get some new brushes and installed a lock on the brush cabinet. A week later someone had pried the lock off and used the brushes for dishes again. I had two nemeses during my time cleaning that machine at the new store. One was the shift manager in the morning that would always ask me if we had shakes and ice cream while I'd either be holding the beater assembly or have my arm buried in one of the cylinders cleaning. "Why yes, yes we do. This beater assembly? Why I just put the invisible ones in. The machine isn't making noise because I sound proofed it." *under breath* "moron" The other was a Karen that would come in around 9am and demand ice cream. Only on the days I'd be cleaning, of course. She new the schedule. When informed the machine was down for cleaning she'd get in a huff and demand free poo poo. So in response to this after a while we swapped the Mondays the machine would be cleaned. It took her a few, but then she swapped to come in on those days instead. Given that I was professionally trained on cleaning these machines my services became sort of valuable. Only during that moment every two weeks, but still. I started getting called out to other stores in the district to take care of their machines. One of those stores is sort of out and away from heavily populated areas and more of a truck stop/traveler store. As such it was deemed too expensive to hook the store to city water, so they used well water....in Michigan. Everything that used water was fouled. They cranked the syrup up on the drink system to try and cover the after taste which just made the drinks so disgusting you had to go to the store next door to buy a drink to wash down the McD drinks. I eventually got stuck going there for the shake machine and to do cleaning on other equipment like the ice machine that internally was a solid earth brown from all the mineral deposits. My new store had a basement (because it was an old store). Down there was a small room called the maintenance closet where we stored hedge trimmers, weedeaters, tools, spare equipment for the kitchen, etc. It had a door and a padlock, only certain managers and I had the keys. One of the tables in the playplace had been damaged and I put it in the closet till I could fix it. A few nights later I guess they had a rush of kids and needed more tables, so me living 5 minutes away, instead of calling me, they decided to break down the closet door. The lock held, they broke the door and the wood frame off the wall. Then left the table as they saw it was too broke to be used. So the closet could no longer be locked, so everything inside started to disappear. Wonderful. Most stores use these big stainless tanks to hold 75 gallons of Coke syrup because it's more cost effective and just smarter. When my new store installed these the syrup lines were run upstairs by running them through a space behind the circuit breaker panels. The line burst once and emptied the tank on the breakers and somehow didn't burn the store to the ground. What could be safely cleaned was, and for years after whenever it rained outside, because of leaks in the brick work, the circuit breaker wall would bleed Coke. Basement flooded a few times due to sewage backups which were just hell to clean, and would ruin all of the paper stock and crap we stored down there. Had a wash machine for the Well, that's enough from me for now
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Feb 23, 2023 20:02
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i worked at mcdonald’s in NZ for about 3 years in the 90s OP and we had to clean the shake/soft-serve machine every night. we called it the ‘combo’, and not everyone was trained to clean it some dude in another store in my town was cleaning out one of the deep friers and got water in the wrong place and it exploded and hosed him up being that mcdonald’s was almost entirely staffed by 15-19 year olds we used to get up to some real dumb poo poo, like locking people in the walk in freezer or putting on ridiculous racist accents (jamaican for eg) for a whole day if you were working front counter one dude at work got real mad with one of the managers and ended up putting a pigs head at her front door for some reason???
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Feb 23, 2023 20:18
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I was cleaning a fryer at Mr. Hero's and while cycling the oil I hear a loud THUNK and when I checked it was a very dead very crispy mouse that had fallen into the fryer and drowned over night. It sank to the bottom and was cooking all day while I was working. Oops.
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Feb 23, 2023 20:20
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oh yeah and I got that job originally cos my friends mum was the store manager every now and then she’d call me into her office to tell me my cash drawer float was down by some large amount like $200 anyways she got busted a little while later for stealing from McDs to fund a gambling addiction and completely hosed up her life (relationship broke up, lost house etc)
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Feb 23, 2023 20:22
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verbal enema posted:I was cleaning a fryer at Mr. Hero's and while cycling the oil I hear a loud THUNK and when I checked it was a very dead very crispy mouse that had fallen into the fryer and drowned over night. and here I thought all fast food places could be relied upon to be squeaky clean
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Feb 23, 2023 20:52
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chipotle got my online order wrong, it’s missing the fajita veggies
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Feb 23, 2023 20:54
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I worked at a BK in the late 90's and I swear to god, whenever I am driving by a BK and I smell the "flame-broiled" smell, Well, I mean whenever I used to drive by and smell that smell I was reminded of how disgusting the bottoms of our conveyor grills were. Like, congealed, burnt fat and hairs. I said "used to" because its doesn't seem to travel like it did anymore. I heard they changed the cooking process so maybe it's that. those things would run for months without getting cleaned. Also, we had a playground when I started working there and one day we showed up and there was a crew of guys dismantling it. We cried. But it was tears of joy. Having a playground on-site was the worst. Kids would inevitably poo poo and piss inside and you would be forced to hose it down and clean it as best you could. Also, drunk assholes and stoners would sneak in and we'd make sure they understood they were morons for trying to get inside the play area. I heard it was because of a huge lawsuit in California but this was years before that so maybe BK got wise to the lawsuits early on. Greatest part of the job was opening with two employees and the other doesn't show up so you are stuck prepping everything and then the delivery truck shows up and you're hosed because you have a kitchen area full of carts of bread and frozen meat and you need to start the fries oh god PTSD is kicking in... fuckingtest fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Feb 24, 2023 |
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Feb 24, 2023 05:21
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I ran the produce department in a grocery store for a few years in college. It's not really food service but we cut a whole heap of melons and pineapples in the back every day and if you didn't wash the melons our training indicated that you stood the risk of giving a whole bunch of people e. coli and costing the company a billion dollars in settlements. We didn't ever wash the melons, nobody washes the melons. You get e. coli because the people who pick the melons (and the lettuce and everything else) have to poo poo in the field where they're picking, they're not allowed a bathroom or a break.
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Feb 24, 2023 05:36
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one day i was curious and i took an informal poll, i asked everyone 'do you know who hitler was' i accepted more or less any answer that was close enough, if anybody had said 'germany' or 'world war 2' or 'the bad guy' or 'concentration camps' or whatever else that would have been fine The closest response i got was 'that guy who they just found in a hole in iraq, you know' there were several managers who unironically agreed that no matter what my worries were when i walked thru the doors, work would set me free
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Feb 24, 2023 07:04
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whelp
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Feb 24, 2023 07:13
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I worked at a Thai Food place when I was 16 and it was mostly fine. My boss was a huge jacked Thai man who was a member of the Canadian Olympic team for Karate or some other martial art. He was a bit crazy but fun to be around. Was always trying to teach me how to fight in case "a customer needed his rear end whipped." He also provided me with the first cocaine I had ever done in my life, and afterwards he asked me 'so do you get crazy on coke or what' and I said I dunno, this is the first time I've tried it. He was quite shocked! One of the cooks was a big stoner and also a fairly prominent DJ who would always share a joint with me right before I clocked in. And then another a few hours later. Sometimes I got paid to go buy cigarettes for karate boss, he would send me with a note saying "these are for Joe from Thai Food Place". Some days we had a pop up tent downtown, and those were fun. Cramming into a big van with 4 old chain smoking asian men, hundreds of spring rolls, pad thai's and cashew chicken and getting paid to sleep or smoke weed on the way there and back. There was one waiter who always "accidentally" made extra cocktails and handed them out to me and whoever else was working the cash. All in all a pretty fun job for a 16 year old e: just remembered his code for cocaine was 'wonderland tickets' because he didn't want his elderly mom (the owner) to know we were doing drugs. lol
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Feb 24, 2023 07:32
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they used to send a lot of bullshit people to help run our store because we were kind of notorious and they wanted to use us to weed them out that's how I found myself laughing at the guy whose dad used to play golf with the president, he had been tasked with getting us to sign this well being pledge and part of it was that we had to acknowledge we'd get 8 hours of sleep a night I told him, I get off at 10 and I have to come back in at 6, when the gently caress am I supposed to get those 8 hours? he told me to sign the drat form. this was at a union shop where they couldn't even get us labor day off. no consumption is ethical, no matter how badly you want it to be.
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Feb 24, 2023 07:50
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Stalizard posted:they used to send a lot of bullshit people to help run our store because we were kind of notorious and they wanted to use us to weed them out cool cool cool... so... gardens?
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Feb 24, 2023 08:28
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McDonalds is a hell of a face slap when you go from visiting every now and again to when grandma gets chatting to the owner/operator and suddenly you're a candidate for seeing how the sausage really gets made. For 5 and a bit years after school and between jobs after graduation.
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Feb 24, 2023 13:50
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BastardAus posted:McDonalds is a hell of a face slap when you go from visiting every now and again to when grandma gets chatting to the owner/operator and suddenly you're a candidate for seeing how the sausage really gets made. For 5 and a bit years after school and between jobs after graduation. Is this...Is this a confession? Are you ok?
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Feb 24, 2023 14:35
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I don't get it either. The only thing the owners know about the food manufacture is it gets made in a factory, stuffed in boxes and shipped to their store to be tossed on a grill
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Feb 24, 2023 14:46
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Okay so the alone for opening and Truck day seriously made my eye start twitching...thanks for that. I want to start by saying a big thank you to SocketWrench...you are the hero of this thread. First thing: Wendy's. Our store was so poorly performing that I got employee of the month pretty much every month just for doing the bare minimum. I saw so much stuff get stolen from there. They would give you an extra 25 dollars on your last paycheck of the month. Considering this would be pretty contentious with the other employees I would just buy beer for everyone and we would drink it on shift. Never order chili at wendy's. I stand by that. when I was working as a line cook I saw a highly learning disabled woman drop a chicken wing into the oil of the fryer instead of the basket and reach into the oil to grab it. Ambulance had to be called. It was gnarly. I really hope she got some sort of workman's comp. We all hated working with her because she was so inept, but we were all pulling for her because she had such a difficult life. Literally noone advocated for her but us in her life. Any other servers get the evangelical fake twenty dollar bill tip? Turns out the tip is just to read the bible and believe that jesus is king.
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Feb 24, 2023 14:53
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I worked for an "Italian" chain restaurant that made pretty much nothing onsite, it was all brought in ready made. Frozen lasagne, frozen stew, frozen soup. One time we ran out of soup and the dipshit assistant manager went to Tesco and bought a load of cans of Heinz tomato soup - the most recognisable canned soup in the country. We tried to disguise it by tossing in some other ingredients but I'm sure people knew we were selling Heinz tomato soup at 1000% markup
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Feb 24, 2023 15:48
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ManBoyChef posted:Any other servers get the evangelical fake twenty dollar bill tip? Turns out the tip is just to read the bible and believe that jesus is king. Of course. Usually bible study groups or the Sunday afternoon crowd. I would get them from some houses on Halloween as a kid too. Thanks! Never heard of this "Jesus" guy before...
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Feb 24, 2023 16:19
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ManBoyChef posted:Okay so the alone for opening and Truck day seriously made my eye start twitching...thanks for that. i've been to wendy's once and i had the chili. it was 2008. how long do i have left to live?
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Feb 24, 2023 17:06
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'Nother moment at McD's. Back in like i wanna say 1998 they ran some big promotion to encourage people to work harder. You would get tickets for extra work you did and at the end of the month they did a big raffle. Whatever the hot game console of the time was was the grand prize. Other prizes were $50 checks, cases of Coke, free fry card for life, etc. I earned two tickets the whole month because all the stuff they counted as extra work was my normal work. I won a loving pin, a little Ronald "good job" pin. In the trash it went, gently caress you. Both the managers on shift were appalled and couldn't understand why I was bitter about it. Speaking of managers, for some reason I was invited to the manager meetings after a while. I guess it was so they could bounce questions and requests off me. But I'd get to listen to them wax poetic about the awesome job they did and celebrate their monthly bonuses. I suggested they should share some of it with the crews since they were the ones that did the work. Nope. So me being the dick i am, I made it a monthly deal to call the customer complaint number to report some mundane thing like broken ketchup packets on the ground at the drive thru window so they'd lose their bonuses every month.
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Feb 24, 2023 17:50
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SocketWrench posted:
Love this. Sabotage managers like this every chance you get. You will know the ones that are working with you and for you and those that are pissing down on you. When I was an executive chef I learned a valuable lesson. Your job is not only coming up with menus and curating a team...it is also mitigating the worst impulses and abuses against your team by the owners and yes they will try very hard all the time to screw everyone over. Some are worse than others. One time I had an owner at a country club setup a party for 120 people without having a dishwasher and two cooks. all dinners served at the same time. I was one of the cooks. They then had a breakfast the next morning for 50 people with one cook and they didn't want to pay the labor cost needed for him to have the help he needed or the time needed to prepare for that so they basically set him up for failure. This was way before I was burned out on the place...so basically I had other connections from restaurants come in and help and paid them in free drinks and moonlighted some tubes of burger meat and other assorted items to them and then I came back in the morning extra early and prepped for the party so that when the other cook got there he could open the back of house with me and get started. I have a friend that works at applebee's. They no longer have dishwasher's on staff. It is just expected that everyone does dishes so they can cut down on labor. Wonder what happens on busy nights when they run out of silverware or plates and the cooks cannot leave the line and the servers all have full sections?
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Feb 24, 2023 20:10
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Wall Balls posted:i've been to wendy's once and i had the chili. it was 2008. how long do i have left to live? The good news is that humans are actually incredibly resilient I worked in food service as my first job. Customers complained because I would load up their sandwiches with too much stuff It was a lovely “deli” where no one taught me how to do anything. I did figure out how to make delicious fried food by loving around with our deep fryer which I never saw cleaned.
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Feb 24, 2023 20:41
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Stalizard posted:I ran the produce department in a grocery store… I worked in produce for a Kroger’s. I smelled something foul at our box full of watermelons and discovered one at the bottom had fermented and exploded. I told my boss who told me to cover it up with other watermelons for now. Found out he was married to one of the head managers or something
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Feb 24, 2023 20:44
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N. Senada posted:I did this kind of work once. the american way...Im totally standing and saluting in front of my computer right now while my cat holds up two miniature american flags.
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Feb 24, 2023 20:55
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ManBoyChef posted:
Well, the servers of course! That's how it works in my tiny kitchen because this wine bar likes to think it's a restaurant. We have regular, medium scale events where I don't believe my kitchen manager knows what the gently caress she's doing. One bonus: I have a bit of downtime usually, so that's why I'm shitposting now! N. Senada posted:I did this kind of work once. Don't buy frozen food from Meijer. It's usually been sitting out and re-frozen.
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Feb 24, 2023 21:32
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I got a good one. Everyone hates the customer that comes in five mins to close to sit down to eat...especially when it has been a slow night and you have everything pretty much cleaned and put away. This one night I had a couple come in and sit down at the bar 2 mins before close and have a glass of wine. Then they went and sat down at a table and the owner was there and he knew them and made the kitchen cook for them. So this server that was pretty much a total badass goes up to the table. They want to order an appetizer first and then order their entrees when the appetizer comes out. So she gets the appetizer order and puts it in. We are pissed in the kitchen. Giving them knives of fire eyes cos this is an open kitchen and we could see them. So we send the app out. Server goes to table with it and pulls out her book to take order. Lady asks server "Would you have the duck or the filet?" and the server says to her "I wouldn't be hungry this late." poo poo was awesome.
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Feb 24, 2023 23:11
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I worked as a bus boy at a dive bar & restaurant when I was about 14. One night we had 4 drunks come in 10 minutes before close and we had to serve them. For our trouble, they left a quarter in a glass of ice water as a tip and one of them literally puked in a bowl and left it for us. That place sucked and I shouldn't have worked there. The pay was poo poo, and I was only there because I had friends who worked there. Originally my friend's mom worked there as a waitress and she was able to get him hired as a line cook even though he was only 16 at the time. Then he was able to get me and another friend hired on as bus boys. This wasn't all at once or anything, probably over two years. One night, my friend's mom, who in hindsight might've had untreated bipolar disorder for this and other reasons, flipped the gently caress out and started screaming at someone in the middle of a dinner rush and walked off the job, except she took her son the line cook with her. He was one of only two cooks that night, so that was pretty hosed. Then at the end of the night, my other friend and fellow bus boy told the owner, an always-drunk Albanian guy, that he quit too. I didn't want to work there without my friends, so I also quit. Don't feel good about it now, and at the time, I didn't realize how tough that would've been for him to have four people quit in one night. He was a dick though, so...  Like I said, I shouldn't have been there, because it sure wasn't for the money and I didn't apply for another job until I was 16.Later on in college I worked at a coffee shop that also did fancy sandwiches. I got along really great with the owner there. I'm sure if I sat and thought about it, I'd have a ton of stories, but here's the two that come to mind: One day a woman walked right up to my boss and said, "Why is it that every time I eat here, I get diarrhea?" My boss was just baffled, and could only say, "I've never gotten that complaint before!" The lady stormed off. Later on after close, we were talking about it and I was like, "Maybe she's lactose intolerant or something?" My other coffee shop story - we had a regular called the "wet money guy." He'd come in every weekday around 10am, go straight to the men's room, then get in line and order a coffee and give us soaking wet dollar bills. My boss and the girl who worked the register most days had a mini clothesline rigged up over some sinks behind the counter, and they'd hang his money from it to dry it out without any customers seeing it. This went on for months, and then one day, the wet money guy just flipped the gently caress out, "Every day I come in here, and you look at me like I disgust you! I'm sick of it, I'm never coming in here again," and just stormed out. No one ever told him his dollar bills were wet. Maybe someone should've.
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Feb 24, 2023 23:40
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I worked in food service for most of my 20s. I think the funniest I got was a guy took a poo poo so large, the poo poo itself clogged the toilet. I'm talking like a poo poo the size of one of those really big cans of cheese they sell at the supermarket. I didn't even know if was possible to take a poo poo that big. We had to go get a stick from outside to cut the turd into flushable pieces. After that, I don't think anything ever phased me again for being gross. I remember a floor drain clogged and nobody wanted to deal with it so I said fuckit and grabbed the long fryer gloves and just stuck my entire arm into the drain to plunge it. Worked like a charm. When I moved into management it was fun seeing the poo poo other stores had to deal with, especially in certain areas. I got to see security footage of a lady so pissed that her chicken wasn't ready yet that she threw a high chair across the dining room and shattered the display case into pieces. I also got to see footage of the dumbest cook alive who caught a wok full of oil on fire, and instead of doing anything sensible like grabbing a fire extinguisher or turning it off, picked up the flaming wok of oil and dropped it on the ground so that the flaming oil just went everywhere and burned the store down. I can understand panicking and throwing water on an oil fire, but who sees a fire like that and decides to just huck it across the kitchen?
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Feb 25, 2023 01:05
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ManBoyChef posted:Never order chili at wendy's. Until I got extremely violent food poisoning. It started about an hour after eating, I was in the parking lot and felt something coming on and I barely got the door open and absolutely projectile vomited like six feet across the pavement. Then I spent the next 12 hours on my toilet, switching off between sitting and kneeling. Then I took some acid and partied because we're indestructible in our youth. I don't eat the chili anymore, but Wendy's still owns. I have never worked in food service. Looked real lovely compared to retail or even labor.
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Feb 25, 2023 01:16
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Also it was around that same time so I totally feel obligated to mention that the best fast food deal that has ever existed was the 4 for $5 at Arby's. Beef 'n Cheddars for days.
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Feb 25, 2023 01:22
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One time I was working at sonic frying stuff and the guy working the grill kept asking the manager to cover him so he could go to the bathroom. They refused and told him to hold it so he poo poo himself.
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Feb 25, 2023 01:40
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ManBoyChef posted:when I was working as a line cook I saw a highly learning disabled woman drop a chicken wing into the oil of the fryer instead of the basket and reach into the oil to grab it. Ambulance had to be called. It was gnarly. I really hope she got some sort of workman's comp. We all hated working with her because she was so inept, but we were all pulling for her because she had such a difficult life. Literally noone advocated for her but us in her life. there is a 100% chance this woman didn't work directly for wendy's but was contracted out from an adult living home somewhere (who probably kept all the money she earned) so i bet she got jack loving poo poo. i used to deliver for a restaurant in town and holy gently caress if gas was back under $2 gallon (this was back in 2004/2005) and i could live on like $350/week i would take that job again in a heartbeat. i just drove around stoned all night every night and my manager didn't give a crap because i actually showed up for my shift every day. at one point i was working 6 nights a week and i would go to the same houses EVERY night. these people would order $50, $60 worth of food too. haljordan fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 01:45
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It's not quite a restaurant but when I worked at Fred Meyer's we ran out of deodorant, like ALL of it. So my boss gave me about two hundred bucks and told me to go around buy up everything I could find. Then there was the time myself and a coworker had to dump ninety gallons of milk down the drain.
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Feb 25, 2023 01:52
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I work events, I get to watch different caterers fail in all types of ways
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Feb 25, 2023 01:58
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Plan R posted:It's not quite a restaurant but when I worked at Fred Meyer's we ran out of deodorant, like ALL of it. So my boss gave me about two hundred bucks and told me to go around buy up everything I could find. It's okay to be out of a product.
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Feb 25, 2023 02:14
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Jelly posted:I don't understand why you would do this. So you're going around buying deodorant from your competitors that you would either sell at a loss, or the customers go buy it from your competitors because it's cheaper? Nope, it was a flagship store and it must be stocked! We had to work past midnight to face the entire store and make it perfect so some loving executive could spend five minutes looking at a "Bannanna cooling machine" which was a fridge without anything to cool them. So if we ran out of some item I would go to Bartells or what-have-you and buy up their stock so we wouldn't look like the fools we were. e: I had to go up to the Fred Meyer on 175th and Aurora to pick up like six crates of milk and bring them back to our store. At least I could stop for lunch. further eta: This was back in like '98-99. So things weren't quite as dire as they are now. Plan R fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 02:30
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I don't have a lot of food horror stories from my decade in the kitchen trenches. One time we didn't get our eggs in for brunch and the cooks used liquid egg yolk cartons for scrambled eggs. "I bet they taste really good," one of the cooks said. The last chef I worked for was a real dickhead. He knew how to cook, knew how to spend the owners money on overpriced ingredients (let's run a catfish lunch special with catfish flown in from wherever the hell). And he was an rear end to the cooks. Didn't mind me because I was old enough not to argue and didn't threaten him, but I saw him fire 2 or 3 cooks he didn't have to. One kid who worked the grill he fired at the end of the shift when they got into an argument. He came in with his chef coat from his community college logo on it to pick up his last paycheck, maybe he was out interviewing. The chef got it for him, and came back boasting to us. "I asked him if that was the culinary school [logo] he went to, he said yeah. I told him he should ask for his money back." That vindictive little prick finally made me realize I needed to find a career outside of restaurants because this sure as poo poo wasn't going to work.
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Feb 25, 2023 02:39
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My first job ever was McDonald's. The worst thing I remember, other than having a mental breakdown due to the stress of my parents' divorce my senior year of high school while a Karen screamed at me for not having the right Teeny Beanie Babies for her kids' happy meals, was when I volunteered to be in the Hamburglar costume. Corporate sent us Grimace instead. But anything to get off the front line of taking orders. I got in the costume, which had horrible visibility and was very top heavy, managed around the store lobby okay. And then when I was out of sight of the front order area, a group of loving Boy Scouts cornered me, shoved me to the ground, and spent a good few minutes kicking the costume and shaking me like a loving doll. Took the maintenance dude walking around because he realized he hadn't seen me in a while, and the scouts ran off with their leader. To this day I hate the loving Boy Scouts.
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Feb 25, 2023 02:44
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One time when I was a busboy this dude and his family were super pissed about being told they'd have to wait 40 minutes on Mother's day, no reservation. They waited 80 minutes. Their server sat them and I followed her with bread and oil/balsamic mix, and while I was setting it down on the table apologizing to the dude and his wife and wishing her a happy mother's day, the dude stood up, aggressively took off his leather jacket and landed a super hard punch directly on my spine in the middle of my shoulderblades, then sat down like nothing happened. I told everyone what happened and it boiled down to, "shut the gently caress up about it and nobody is going to do anything, those people are going to give a great tip." They gave a $5 tip on $250. edit: ~15-16 years later that dickhead would do this 
MrQwerty fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Feb 25, 2023 |
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Feb 25, 2023 02:45
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