Night Shift

Patrick

Patrick is a mid-40 year old geek with an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a master's degree in Information Systems. Nothing he says here has anything to do with the official position of his employer or any other institution.

Related Post Roulette

7 Responses

  1. DensityDuck says:

    I worked in the not-the-regular-cafeteria but not-branded fast-food place as well (for one season, and then they brought in franchises and fired all the students so I went over to the rec center to work as a janitor.)

    The thing that always bugged me the most was the french fries, where students would come in and look at a rack full of fries and stand waiting there until we made fresh ones and then grab those out of our hands with an attitude of disgust at having had to stand there waiting.

    The other thing I remember was one time we ran out of special wrappers for the chicken sandwiches, so the solution was to wrap them inside-out and use a marker to mark on the wrapper that it was different. We got bored of drawing X’s and started drawing smiley faces, and then got bored of that and started drawing other things, and then students started complaining about frowny faces and giant eyeballs on their food and we got hollered at.Report

  2. Jaybird says:

    One of my buds worked at Domino’s back in 1993 or 1994. He told us stories about what his manager wanted him/his team to have done during the shift. While the point of the story our bud was telling us was that his manager was really funny (“I don’t care if you make it or drive over to a sister store and steal it!”), the point of the story that I gleaned was that his manager referred to pizza as “product”.

    “It’s Friday night, we’re going to move a lot of product!” “Wednesday is a slow product night but we still have to move it!”

    My bud kept trying to tell stories about how you could get away with a mere rinse of the knife between pizzas EXCEPT WHEN THERE WERE ANCHOVIES and how awful anchovies were when it came to pizza because you had to fully wash the knife, end to end, when you cut up an anchovy pizza and I kept interrupting when he mentioned that his manager referred to “product”.

    And it was in that conversation that I first understood what Marx was saying.Report

  3. Pinky says:

    I worked for one of the larger pizza chains for a while. I’ll say this: a lot of my friends who worked at conventional fast-food places would never eat fast food again after seeing their employers’ kitchens. I never saw anything that concerned me, and I’m kind of a freak about that stuff.Report

  4. Great piece! I’ve worked in food service a lot over the years and it really resonated with me.

    My most frustrating place of employment was also servicing college kids. Just like you describe, management wanted us to always have food on hand because we’d often get late runs and turning customers away cost business, but unlike you describe, they had a different business model – they’d rather see the food thrown into the trash than allow anyone to eat it. We weren’t even allowed to take it home ourselves. So it put us in the unenviable position of either getting in trouble for running out of food, or getting in trouble for throwing too much away. And since we were all making minimum wage, it sure hurt throwing away thousands of dollars of perfectly good food every day.Report