Worst. Restaurant. Ever.

My restaurant is a horrible place to work. Now I don't want to sound like a whiner, but we're talking about stuff beyond the stress of serving. I believe that someday someone will show up and say “Wow, you're still working here? We were just messing with you this whole time. You stayed after the wood chip in the pasta incident? Seriously? And even when that lady found a glove in her salad? No kidding. Well, you can go home now because we were just seeing how much a waitress would put up with. Apparently, it's anything.” Yep, I wish I was making those gems up, but they're real, and really only the frosting on the crap cake that is my job.

Everything at my restaurant is broken. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little, but you get the idea. Usually things do eventually get fixed, but we're talking months of waiting. We're also always out of stuff, but I'll save that for another entry. Having a crappy job and being blatantly denied the things you need to do your job well is kind of a slap in the face. This is probably the most poorly run restaurant I have ever worked in, and that's including the one where my general manager was a meth addict.

Allow me to further vent my frustrations. About a year ago, our ice cream freezer broke. There was talk of fixing it, and we waited patiently for months. During this time, if we needed ice cream, we had to go all the way to the walk-in freezer in the back of house and either stand there in sub-zero temperatures trying to scoop ice cream, or drag the 25 pound container up the the front of house and scoop there, only to have to return it to the walk-in so it wouldn't melt all over the counter. Meanwhile, the management has given up on fixing the freezer and has tried to pry the thing out of the counter. They fail miserably, leaving the freezer itself in the counter and the rim pried off so that there is unvarnished, splintering wood all around it. Can you say health code violation? It stays in this state for another two months or so, until we finally get a used freezer from another store in the chain. The new freezer sits on the floor in the dessert area for another two months before it is finally placed in it's loving home in the counter. Rejoice! For there shall be frozen ice cream in the front of house! ...For about another three months. The used one has now broken and it looks like the cycle shall continue for another year. And just in time for summer! Whoohoo!

If the management let that happen, I'm sure that you can imagine the state that the less essential things get into. Our fountain tap for Mountain Dew has been broken for over a year. Finally the management says we're just not going to have Mountain Dew anymore. That's fine, but it's still on our menu, so I'm constantly having to tell people we don't have it. Ironically, we did just get a new juice machine. The old one was fine, they just changed to a new brand (because it's cheaper, I'm sure). The new juice machine always thinks it's out of concentrate so you have to constantly open and close it, reset it, etc. These are just a couple of the treats I enjoy on a day to day basis.

Thinking about all this, I'm reminded of my first restaurant job. We had milkshakes there, something that my current restaurant is blessedly without. If you're not familiar, restaurant grade milkshake machines have a long pipe-like spindle which you push into the ice cream/milk mixture, and a tab that you use the edge of your metal milkshake mixing cup to push up. This makes the machine go on. In theory, you push your cup up onto the machine and it rests on a tiny ledge, mixing away until it is at a perfect consistency at which point you skip gracefully over at the exact right moment and pull it off the machine. This never happens of course; when you check back you either have milk, or a seemingly undisturbed scoop of ice cream in your cup. You have to stand there, holding the little tab up with your finger and kind of grinding away at the ice cream with the spindle until it's ready. Now if that doesn't sound like enough fun, our little tabs started going missing. People would take them out to clean them and they would disappear. We had three mixers and three tabs to begin with, then only two, and finally just one. During a rush there would be like ten shake cups waiting in line for their turn on the spindle. Management claimed they were ordering more tabs, but we waited and waited. Weeks pass. Finally, during a graveyard shift when I was all alone, I took the last tab and threw it on top of the cooler next to the milkshake machine. It was a shining moment for me. The next night we had three new tabs. Go figure.

I guess what I should learn from that is if I want stuff that isn't broken, I need to render it completely unusable, and opposed to the partially unusable state it's in now. I wonder if that shake tab is still on top of that cooler....

-Penny