I expected there to be a backlash against what people did to food. Since that hasn’t happened, I think you’re right. I’m not moving it back, though. 
My first job was at a hotel/restaurant. Nice enough that the visting pro football teams would stay there in Brookfield/Milw when they played the Packers. We’d do big banquets, they all get served the same food, and we’d have to prepare it all at once, real fast.
So they’d gather up a few people and form an assemblyline. One guy puts on the meat, the next the peas, …One time they grab me, a dishwasher. I had to put on the twice-baked potato with a flat rectangular spatula. After about 100 of them I simply miss, and it goes striaght to the kitchen floor–face down. The chef looks at it, looks at someone else and says how many extras do we have. The guy says none. He bends down, picks it up, turns it over, brushes the dirt off it and sets it on the plate. I was only 16, and felt so bad.
I think it ws the Cincinnati Bengals there that day.
::snicker:: Shh! No one correct her!
I worked in restaurants for 8 years (from age 13 to age 21), starting out washing dishes in a restaurant, then cooking in a different restaurant, then delivering pizzas for a local chain.
The worst I ever saw was a guy (manager, in fact) spit in someone’s salad because they were incredibly rude.
The worst I ever did was shake up someone’s 2-liter soda right before handing it to him in his own home because he called me a loser for NO reason.
I know now that that was immature of me but what he did was incredibly immature too and he was probably close to 3 times my age (I think I was 17 at the time.)
I worked in a fast food restaurant as manager about 20 years ago. We had some asshole come through the drive-thru being really shitty. So, I spat in his soda.
The girl working the window just looked at me, shook her head, threw them out and made new ones.
Most of the time though I would just tell jerks to leave. But yes, I confess, he almost got the spit.
Sometimes we would do things to coworkers like extra pickles or tomatoes, but that is the only incident that I know about in my seven years of restaurant experience.
And, I now make it a point not to be an asshole in the drive thru :).
Are you kidding? I would much rather sit and have hot soup cool off then eat, than eat someone’s spit. Don’t you check the temperature of your food before you take a big bite? The only reason you would get burned is if you just dive in without checking.
I’ve worked in a fair number of restaurants and never personally seen anything truly gross. Heard lots of stories about “this one guy who worked at this one place this one time and he…”
The worst I’ve personally seen is at my first restaurant. If the cook was busy and accidently flipped your burger onto the floor, she’d just pick it up, wipe it off and put it back on the grill.
I worked at a steak joint for awhile though, and you’d be surprised (or maybe not) at the number of customers who like to try the same old scheme.
Order a $25 steak, eat 3/4 of it, then proclaim that it’s disgusting and intolerable and inedible and totally not what you ordered.
Look, you’re not fooling anybody. We know this scam. We might just tell you “too bad, you ate 3/4 of it.” Or, if you’re a really big jerk, we might cave in and give you a new steak.
Personally, I wouldn’t eat it if I were you, unless you’re not squeamish about what kinds of protein are on your steak besides beef.
But like I say, I haven’t personally witnessed anything really gross.
During the late 60’s, my grandpa had a friend who was an airline stewardess. She told him once that a passenger had been very rude and making sexual comments towards her, so before she served him his sandwich, she took both pieces of bread and wiped them on the underside of the seat in the latrine. Don’t know what became of that guy.
Wow. I expected a lot more stories of malice in this thread. I worked in the food service industry for about 7 years, give or take.
The worst place I worked was a Burger King. Mind you, I never committed any of these atrocities myself.
I saw other employees spit in food on occasion (you think the “cop burger” scene in Super Troopers is an urban legend?).
Regularly, if someone asked for “no onions/pickles etc” and they were a real ass about it (ie, “make damn sure there are no onions!”) a guy might put a tiny piece of whatever it was they didn’t want under the burger patty where few people would check.
The worst thing I ever saw was my manager putting laxative in a guys burger. He had a little vial of that super-laxative stuff you see advertised, and was itching for a chance to use it. One night, right before we were about to close, a customer came thorugh the drive-through and ordered a Big King Supreme burger. If you’ve been to BK, you know this has a nasty orange sauce on it. The manager added a few drops of the laxative to the sauce on the guy’s burger, since he had the audacity to order something as we were trying to close the place down for the night. The guy happened to be a regular customer, and every time he came after that, he ordered a burger but always ordered it without that sauce.
Food being picked up off the floor was also common if someone was in a hurry.
Another thing which wasn’t done out of malice but was pretty bad was the shake machine. This machine is supposed to be cleaned out at least once a day. At my BK, it was rarely cleaned more than once every 2 weeks. Anyone stupid enough to order a shake would be in the bathroom about 10 minutes later. The health department kept trying to catch us by randomly showing up and taking samples from it, but luckily for Burger King they always managed to show up a day or so after it had been cleaned.
How about this in reverse?
I knew of some guys that ran a pizza joint that their parents owned. The kids were assholes and spread some nasty vile rumors about a girl I was friends with. It was a nice clean place, just assholes running it.
I was driving a delivery truck at the time and once when I was in their walk in cooler I turned the thermostat way up. The next day I had to go back with a huge order and they were bitching because everything spoiled from the heat overnight.
I worked in many fast food restaurants as a teen. The only one I can think of doing anything awful like the above stories was Skippers - those pieces of fish took like five minutes apiece to fry, we were supposed to get the orders out ASAP and once or twice I witnessed the fry cook accidentally drop a piece, immediately pick it up, inspect it to make sure it was okay, and then send it on its way to be served. I’m sure it was fine, the floor was cleaned several times a day. I was a cashier at this point and did not participate in any of those events.
One thing I did do that was kind of underhanded was at Arby’s, we had one rather snarky woman who would come through and order the child’s meal for her daughter, and ream us up and down about how the fries had to absolutely positively be FRESH!!! God help you if those fries weren’t fresh!!! She expected you to drop a whole new batch of fries, in the middle of a lunch rush with about 20 cars behind her who then had to wait because her daughter refused to eat fries that had sat out for more than 30 seconds. So once I took the fries that were already out (had only been there for about 1-2 minutes) and dunked them real quick back in the oil to make them hot again, rather than wait the whole time for another batch.
She noticed. :mad:
Of course, this might make him think you think he’s cute 
Am I missing something? How is it audacious to order food from a restaurant that is open for business?
I worked at Imo’s Pizza for 3 years in high school and when I’m home for breaks I pick up hours. I never saw anyone do anything gross. If someone was a jerk we would just make their order messily (really fast and not putting a lot of toppings etc, nothing dirty, basically just skeeting them and not putting any effort into making their order look nice). We’re just ignorant assholes and talk shit on everyone we don’t like. And when someone is ignorant on the phone, we are just as rude back. Everyone that works there is either in high school or some stage of getting a college education, we’re not dumb. And there is this one guy that always flat-out stares at all the girls and I started staring right back, or using a newspaper or magazine to cover the other girls, acting like I am reading it. And he moves! Man he is creepy…
But yeah, no dropping food then using it, spitting in food or anything.
I’ve worked in bars/restaurants for ten years and, like others have said, I’ve seen plenty of carelessness, laziness and poor hygiene but only one case of actual malice.
Two women and a small, horribly-behaved toddler came into the restaurant and generally made nuisances of themselves. Rude, demanding, obnoxious, fill-in-the-blank, etc…
They had finished their meal and paid and the tip was on the table. It was pocket chage adding up to less than a dollar.
They decided they wanted sopapillas. (It was a Mexican food restaurant.) They counted out more pocket change for the exact amount of the sopapillas. (I don’t know if this is redundant, but for those who don’t know what sopapillas are, they’re basically fried tortillas dusted with sugar and cinmamon.)
Their long-suffering waiter brought them out and the toddler promptly picked up the basket of sopapillas and threw it on the floor.
The women demanded that their waiter bring them fresh sopapillas, for free. Since it was “an accident” and little Junior “didn’t know what he was doing!”
So their waiter swept the sopapillas up off the floor, took them into the back, waited about two minutes, and brought the exact same sopapillas back out to the women.
This is the only incident I’ve ever witnessed wherein somebody purposely fucked with somebody’s food and/or drink.
It’s not. I was being sarcastic.
Oo, I forgot about this. I had to clean the shake machine a few times, and the curdled shit that came out of the tanks was enough to keep me away from fast food shakes for the rest of my life. A manager also said that after a cleaning, the employees might want to wait a few days before drinking shakes “so the excess lubricant [vaseline type stuff used on the moving parts] has a chance to work its way out of there.”
One more thing, although it has nothing to do with food: If you love your children, don’t let them play in the ball pit.
Remind me NEVER to use your bathroom.
:eek:
Put crushed red pepper flakes between the sauce and the cheese, he will love you or die from it :D.
4 years of pizza here, saw a couple drops get boxed up and sent out, and several people who would order things like combinations minus the pepperoni and loudly proclaim its because of the poor quality pepperoni we use. Amazingly enough a few slices invariably ended up under the cheese.
The worst thing we did was a relatively common combination of leftover take out orders that never got picked up and people stumbling in stoned 10 min before closing.
I think all of them were highly impressed with the speed of our service. :eek:
Once the asst. manager literally took the order 2 larges, took the guys money, then handed him 2 large pizzas out of the warmer as quickly as it took to reach down and grab them. One was over 3 hours old, neither were topped with what the customer ordered. No sane sober person would have thought for a second that those pizzas were their order, but they merrily tottered out with them.
Nooooo!!!
I drag my twins ANYPLACE where they can play & burn off some energy (we’re living in a micro-apt at the moment). Ball pits, toddler rooms, slides, you name it.
What’s the story??