I’ve also worked in the food service industry in various positions and standards of restaurant. Worst of the lot was probably a fast-food place I worked as a teenager (Some Like It Hot in Drumcondra for the Dubdopers). I worked 12 hour shifts, 6pm to 6am for less than 2 dollars an hour, in a workspace that was 10 foot by 2 foot. From about 11pm the customers were 90% drunk (Quinns!) and 20% abusive. So don’t come crying to me about how the job sucks.
Never, ever have I seen anyone, even working in the situation mentioned there, tamper with a customers order or give anything less than full and polite service. In the cases where a customer was especially abusive (somone tried to jump over the counter to “get us” on average once a night). We signed up for a job that we knew would be pretty shit conditions and pretty shit pay, simple as that. Fucking with the customers isn’t a perk to make up for it. Good god…
Well, no. I took action. I took the only action that was available to me. I quit the job, without another one to go to, because I refused to work there anymore. I also told every person I knew, directly or indirectly not to eat there and I told them why.
It was to save $$. A customer ordered a chicken burger without mayo. It got sent out with mayo. (Not my table, BTW.) The customer sent it back and apparently was cranky about it. The cooks in the kitchen turfed the chicken burger into the 7 hour old garbage can and started to make a new one. Paul - the person who ran the company - pulled the nasty mayoed, garbage soaked chicken breast out of the garbage can, rinsed it off and sent it back out - he didn’t want to waste the cost of the chicken breast. Had it been my table, I wouldn’t have served it. As it was not, I quit instead. It was, so to speak, the last straw.
While you may know restaraunt dynamics, I’m willing to bet that you don’t know THIS restaraunt’s dynamics…unless…could it be…PAUL is that YOU after all these years?!?!
Yes well I find your assumptions about my negligence and rationalization to be appalling. Additionally, I find you to be an insufferable bore. I also think that your tendancy to pull shit out of your ass and smear it all over perfectly good threads to be reminiscent of a bonobo.
Left one query out: Did you bother to tell the poor sod who got the burger that was dug out of the trash? Well, that is, if you knew him personally of course.
Just wanted to chime in that I’m quite happy I learned something today. Thanks to alice, I now know what a bonobo is and why they are in danger. You learn something new every day here at the SDMB.
Sounds like they had plenty of other problems being ignored. I don’t think you should be blaming alice, she’s clearly just a symptom of a larger problem. Blame the idiots who kept allowing the place to reopen.
Monty get off your freakin’ moral highhorse already.
Alice was a 17 year old kid working in a dive restaurant. Cut her some slack. Not everything in this world is black and white. Most 17 year olds wouldn’t think to call the health authorities for something like this. Most of them wouldn’t have even quit, like Alice did, they’d keep their mouths shut and keep their jobs.
And spooje, your post was simply not true. I’ve never seen anyone tamper with someone’s food just for the hell of it. Have you ever worked in food service?
It’s no high horse, lezlers. How about I piss on your lunch and serve it to you? Nobody has to get the health authorities involved, but I’m willing to bet you’d appreciate whoever saw me do that tell you about it!
Monty, you sure you’re not blaming her just because she’s a convenient target? Given that restaurant’s track record with the BoH, I doubt any reporting on her part would have accomplished anything except win your approval. Maybe she was afraid the BoH would view her as a disgruntled employee but if a whole bunch of employees went to the BoH maybe they’d shut the place down permanently.
Reminds me of a rumor going around here about a local deli. A former employee claims she had been fired for not following the boss’s demands, which had to do with serving a certain soup to “blacks and hispanics”. The soup in which the same employee claimed she found a dead rat. This rumor sounds too much like a case of revenge by a disgruntled employee and I don’t believe a word of it. If I was on the Board of Health and 17-year-old alice reported the chicken breast incident, I’d have trouble believing that, too.
Sometimes, Monty, not everyone is going to deal with a situation the way you would. That doesn’t automatically make that person a useless member of society. From alice’s experience and judgment–which was most likely correct–calling the Board of Health would have resulted in an at most two-day closing; she didn’t have any concrete proof that anything had happened anyway.
What she did do was to quit without another job (a hard thing to do when you’re 17 and haven’t enough experience to realize that those types of jobs are not that hard to come by) and told everyone she knew not to go eat there.
Your solution would be the best one in a perfect world. In her world, she did the best thing she could think of to do. Should she have called the Board of Health anyway? Sure. Why didn’t she? Most likely because she had reason to believe it wouldn’t have done any good. And she was probably right.
Bottom line: what she did took guts and had a real impact, probably more than calling the BoH would have. And maybe, just maybe, she would also call the BoH (in addition to quitting and spreading the word) if she had it to do over again. I seriously doubt that you’d get her to admit that now, though, since you’ve thrown so much vitriol in her face.
Then you’re missing the point of my postings here, skeptic. Quitting was good. NOT TELLING THE POOR CUSTOMER WHO GOT THE CRAP WAS WRONG! It’s the latter stunt that alice is rationalizing away and that takes a complete lack of guts.
I don’t think I’ve misunderstood anything. However, like skeptic_ev, I can understand why alice didn’t report anything.
Is this a backpedal I see? At the very least, you’re jumping to conclusions again. alice hasn’t said anything about not telling that customer about the dirty chicken.
Next question is how many customers had the chicken sandwich? If it wasn’t her table how could she tell the right person that their sandwich had been in the garbage? If he was kicking up a big enough fuss about the mayo that the other waitresses had noticed then maybe, but really you can never tell.
