A post by ricepad in the Restaurant Pet Peeves thread made me wonder.
I’ve never worked in food service myself, but I have always assumed that if I made an ass of myself in a restaurant, I was putting myself at high risk of chowing down on a loogie.
So…has anyone out there ever actually spit, or put some other gross substance, in a customer’s food? (Of course, if you did it and don’t want to admit it, you can always hide behind the old “I had a friend who did this once…”)
Yes, when I was 16. I really hated that job. We had to make food for our boss. We all spit in it when she went to her office. I wouldn’t do it now, but I am older. If you go to a place that has tons of teenagers working there then be real nice.
Back in my teens I worked as a busboy at a local steak restaurant. One night a drunken-old-fart pinched one of the waitresses in the behind. She was upset and consequently, the old guy’s meal got special attention.
It was winter time, people going in/out tracked some muddy,slushy,snow into the kitchen, and…
My brother worked in a fast food joint. They used to serve breakfast until 10:30 and it never failed that at 10:29 they would have someone come through the drive-thru wanting biscuts and gravy after they had already put everything away. My brother told me that they would fix the biscuts and gravy for the person and they would spit in it beforehand. They also had a 3 second rule. If you dropped something on the floor, a hamburger, a bun, pickles, etc., if you picked it up off the floor within 3 seconds you could still use it. They counted awfully slow too.
I have 2, neither was me. Honest. In fact one was a high school acquantance and one was a guy I worked with. The HS guy swizzled his… well… “member” in a customers coke, evidently he had some sort of beef with the guy.
I worked in fast food as a student and the boss of the grill cooks used to spit on the hamburger grill sometimes after starting up in the morning to see if it was hot enough. If his spit sizzled the grill was ready for burgers.
In my year as a formal waiter in a country club, I never saw anyone purposefully tamper with food. I think it’s a felony to do so. Of course, there were plenty of other unpleasant things that went on in the kitchen that would put anyone off their food, but that’s all OT, right?
Never made any personal additions to food, but I did drop the boss’s lobster on the floor once. Guess I was in a hurry because he had already come into kitchen once asking why the hell his dinner wasn’t ready yet (the restaurant was packed).
Naturally, I picked it up, dusted it off and served it.
Never spit in anyone’s food while waitress, but have dropped things occasionally and “dusted them off” as Myron V. indicates. Once, when my ex-boyfriend was being a real jerk at a concert we went to in high school, he handed me his beer to hold, and a hocked a real nasty goober into it. He did drink - I watched him! I feel a bit bad about that now, but he was pretty much into those things anyway - into the band GWAR and stuff.
Never done it.
Never seen it done.
Never heard anyone boast about doing it.
Never worked anyplace where it wouldn’t have been grounds for immediate dismissal.
Never seen food that was dropped re-served.
Perhaps I’ve just worked in a better class of restaurant (never did fast food).
That said, what we occasionally did to each others food, though not gross, was pretty funny.
The best I ever saw was when the chef, battered and fried a bar rag, so it looked (I swear) just like the schnitzel the place was famous for. The bartender ordered it for lunch, in a sandwich - surprise. We laughed our asses off, of course, he didn’t eat it, just bit into it. It was a very convincing illusion.
When I worked fast food, I’ve never spit in it, but I have dropped it, and still served it. I’ve had many urges to spit in it, but there really wasn’t a place to do it without being noticed by either the customers and/or co-workers.
The only place to do it without being seen is the restroom, but it’d look kind of funny walking in there with a hamburger.
I work at Burger King and while the people and I have been sorely tempted to we never actually did.
Although the shift leader was in drive thru once and we were doin that god awful pokemon promotion, and we ran out of toys so there was this one pissed off customer. He tried to explain to him that we ran out and theres nothing we could do, but the customer proceeded to cuss him out anyways so after about 5 minutes of verbal abuse he threatened to drag him out of his car and kick the livin shit out of him. He never was allowed to run the drive thru. And the manager comendated him.
I worked in a ‘family owned’ restaraunt for about three years, and one time, I PRETENDED to spit in my sister’s food, and I nearly got fired.
Then there was the time we were bored, so I fried up a piece of bread and coated it with pickles and ketchup and dared everyone to eat it. The owner of the restaraunt chipped in a dollar for anyone who ate some of it, so we finally divided it up into pieces and each ate a piece. It was bad.
I know someone who worked in an ice cream factory. His job was to pack the ice cream cartons into cases for shipping, so he wasn’t around it before it was in its container. He swears he never did any of this stuff, that it was the other guys that worked there…I don’t know. I do know that the chocolate ice cream was shit in more than once, and a lot of the ice cream had additions of each and every bodily fluid you could think of. I can’t remember the name of the company, but I do know it had to be a local Brooklyn brand. This was also about 10 years ago, so all of the guys have since moved on to bigger and better things.
Rose
I had a friend who swore up and down that a fellow co-worker of his got fired from Burger King because he added some of his ejaculate into the mayonaisse, but after reading the Urban Legend web site, I came (so to speak) to find out that my friend was just kidding.
Anyway, I only worked in the fast food service for about six weeks and never witnessed anybody adding any bodily fluids to the food, although I did witness people dropping food on the floor and picking it back up and serving it.
