Six rays of sunshine...

Here's a brief list of things that I dislike. Some are from the present, some from the past.

1) Fryers.... I hate everything about deep fat fryers. They smell bad. They're dangerous. When I'm in a hurry, as I usually am, oil invariably gets on my skin, or occasionally, my face. And I'd rather burn in hell than clean one. It's a detestable job. After a full shift of kitchen work, the last thing I want to do is clean fryers before I can get the hell out of there.

2) People who are dirty and disorganized... I've worked with these types of cooks at some point or another everywhere I've ever worked. Everything needs to be kept in one specific spot. When something gets pulled out of a drawer or a low-boy cooler, it needs to be put back. Now. If I get crushed at dinner rush and my work space is filled up with all sorts of random items that someone has left out, or I have to search around for shit I need, I'm going to get angry. I used to work a large flat-top with another person. We kept four spatulas on the edge of it. My co-worker would set them down all over the place. I'd drop some food, and go to grab something else, and when I reached for a spat, they'd all be missing. Strewn about the area. This would occur ten times a day, and every time, I would instantly imagine myself stabbing him between the shoulder blades.

3) The chocolate fondue on the desert menu of the first restaurant I ever worked at.... Man that thing was a pain in the ass. I still get pissed off when I think about it. It required several steps and several minutes to construct it. It was by far the most time consuming item on the menu, and no one ever ordered it when I had time to spare. Whenever some table decided to have it, it was always at about quarter to seven on Friday night. As soon as you filled the ticket row, some diabolical suburbanite would request a chocolate fondue. One of the cooks I worked with there once told a regular customer, "You say fondue, but WE say fon-don't".

4) Communicating with servers, sometimes.... I'll be clear on this one. I like the servers. Most of them are great, and I realize that they have a difficult job also. But some of them, well, need to pipe down. If I'm more than 10 tickets deep, and some pissy server decides to come to the window and demand to know the whereabouts of their food, I'm most likely going angrily yell "trabajan". That's the warning. If it happens twice, I'm going to unleash a verbal beating of epic proportions, and for the remainder of our time working together, I will randomly "lose" their tickets, drag ass on their requests for garnish or lemon wedges, and as a general rule do any passive-aggressive thing I can to lower their tip percentage by 2% for the rest of their lives. We can be great partners and help each other out, or if they behave poorly, I can go silently psycho and irritate them 100 times per shift without management ever suspecting that I'm doing it intentionally.

5) Customers who don't order off the menu.... Stop it! The restaurant didn't go to the trouble of creating a menu and spending the money to produce them so that you can whimsically pick seven ingredients from four different entrees and ask to have them served on a croissant. Pick something and order it you picky, spoiled, P.O.S.! And if you've come to a restaurant which is featuring a Friday night special on crab legs, don't request to have them cooked in salted water rather than crab-boil. Just order something else. Or plunge the butter knife into your neck. Either is fine.

6) The "last-minuters".... Yes, I'm talking about those lovely people who wander in the door at 9:50pm on a Tuesday. Upon seeing the empty restaurant and a waitress vacuuming, they inquire "Are you still open?" And when the waitress shuts off the vacuum and responds blandly "Yes, we're open until 10", They smile and say "Oh! Perfect!".

No. Not perfect you morons. Yes, I know we're open until ten. Yes, I know that this is the service industry, and it's a customer oriented business. But you're still a pack of assholes.

Have you ever seen the movie "Waiting"? It's a corny movie, but that scene where the kitchen staff is standing around in a clean kitchen watching the clock tick away the last few minutes is very real. And when you walk in that door, we are infuriated. Not only do we now have to cook your food, we have to re-clean anything that is dirtied also. And none of us, servers included, can leave until your ignorant asses decide to pack up and ship out. You're basically robbing an entire group of 60-90 minutes of their free time. You people are absolutely detestable, and we all hate you.

Peace and love...