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ConfessionCONFESSION DETAIL
True Stories of A Restaurant Worker
Let's suppose we're in a restaurant. And let's suppose you are a customer. This is what you do. You talk loudly on your cell phone. You demand a better table near the window. You complain about the view. You bitch about the guests in the next booth. You and your friends are loud and rude. You demand a lot of service. You are pushy and obnoxious. You call the management to your table in order to complain about the service. You send food back to the kitchen. You order wine and then you send it back. You don't leave a good tip.
And this is what we do.
We gather in the kitchen and tell each other which guests are cool and which guests are a**holes. And we then proceed to take revenge on the a**holes. We pollute them with our worst. Our garbage and our bodily fluids. We recycle the bread in your basket from the previous diner's leftovers. We smoke cheap cigarettes and flick the ashes into the bearnaise sauce. We put your food near the garbage so flies can land on it and defecate. We put your food on the floor. We put hair in our mouths and then put it on your chicken and cover it with sauce and melted cheese. We spit on your plate and then cover it with food. We sneeze on your plate before the food leaves the kitchen.
If you order your steak well done, you are a fool. We go to the freezer and find the nastiest, oldest piece of shoe leather full of gristle and then we blast the f***ing thing until it is a burnt crisp.
If you order eggs with hollandaise sauce, you are risking your life because the sauce is a breeding ground for salmonella, and it is constantly cooling on the speed table. Once the sauce is set out, the breeding begins and there is no way to stop the bacteria from breeding. So if you are enjoying a late brunch on Sunday morning and you order Eggs Hollandaise, you are risking a trip to the emergency room.
If your order meat that is breaded or fried, what you are buying is a piece of meat so disgusting that it cannot be presented without some sort of covering to hide it.
If you drink too much, you can be certain that we jacked your bill up with a round or two of beverages that you never got.
I've done it. I've worked there. And today I am VERY NICE to waiters and food servers. Because I know. And now you know, too.
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Now I am scared to eat in a restaurant. Thanks a lot!
This strikes me as a very mean thing to do. How often does this happen to unsuspecting diners? Is it only something that happens in the lower class restaurants, or does it occur in fine dining establishments, too?
It pays to be nice to your server. I recently sent back a pizza in an upscale restaurant in my neighborhood.
There was a copper wire in the pizza. No fooling, a metal wire. It got caught in my teeth. It was pretty gross, and I nearly gagged, but I decided not to make a big deal out of it because the servers were really sweet and kind. So I called the waiter over to my table and discretely pointed out that there was a wire in the pizza. She took the pizza back. The manager came to our table and apologized profusely and gave us a new pizza and a free desert, too. Dessert was a terrific Tiramisu.
All in all, the friendly approach appears to be the winning approach when it comes to dining in restaurants and living to tell the tale.
I worked in a fancy restaurant. It was hell. The cook was a surly drunk. The waiters were jerks. We did bad things to people.
I regret it. Now, when I eat in a restaurant, I realize how bad it was to spoil the food that people paid for and ate. It was wrong.
this happens more frequently than you might suspect.
When you get a cutlet or a steak, you should always lift it from the plate and peer underneath it. If you see a huge gob of shiny saliva there, you knw that you pissed off your waiter and they took revenge on you.
You people are grossing me out! I like to eat in restaurants. At least, I used to.
Is this true? Yikes.
This is what angry teenagers do. Are you an angry teenager or did you just never grow up? It is your job to serve the people in the restaurant. If you don't like it, find another job. If you can't, then find a way to learn and grow from it, not whither and die inside.
You will likely never see the people in the restaurant again. You are instead extrapolating each individual boorish persons behavior into one imagined collective boorish person or group and then taking revenge on them as if they did these things to you repeatedly and personally. Do not take their boorish behavior personally - they treat everyone like that: their family, their friends, their business colleagues. No one likes them. Don't become those people.
When you take revenge, you become worse then them, because you ARE taking it personally. Is that what you want? At least their actions are obvious and in the open. Yours are angry and passive-aggressive and done in secret. They will eat away at your soul. Rise above it. This should be a learning experience. Instead it is a pointless repetitive lesson in futility.
Wow.
This is the most intense thing I have ever read on PeopleJam.
Are you for real?
As someone that was a bartender in college I can say that I witnessed some interesting things and heard equally compelling stories from others. It's always a good practice to be kind to everyone. Servers and bartenders are there to make a living, not be your doormat and target of abuse because you feel that you are somehow above them.
I worked in restaurants for years. We used to put visine eye drops in peoples water if they pissed us off. It has no taste and will give you a horrible case of diarrhea. I'm always nice to my waiter no matter what, at least until I have my food.
If a place is run by unprofessional people, this can happen. I worked in many places, and only one or two had the potential of this happening - at least on the food end of it.
Drinks - another story. If you're a jerk, you may get regular coffee instead of decaf. Or iced tea mixed in with it. And, maybe the visine bit, too. Passing staff may kick your chair, too.
I would never do these things, but I've worked with people who do. And, yes, they are usually immature people themselves who think the slightest request is being high maintenance.
If a place has been around awhile (over 5 years), you can bet it's fairly safe. Just look out for places where waiters can hide.
Jesus. I eat out 2-3 times a week and am now terrified of food poisoning, bacterial infections, swallowing metal objects, and catching oral herpes from wait staff. I wish I had never stumbled across this topic...Off to the grocery store now. Hope the butcher and baker aren't ex-waiters.
I worked at Pizza Hut as a kid and I remember one particular asshole I worked with who would always randomly hork up a big loogy and spit under the pizza dough in the pan before we started the toppings. I've never eaten there since.
I worked at Arby's after that and we when you were working like 3 nights in a row or something, we'd leave the same shitty potatoes in the heating oven the whole time and the giant can's of that shitty cheese became a science experiment with some nasty ingredients. I've never eaten there since.
Enjoy.