As I’ve stated previously, I grew up in the restaurant business.  My father was a chef, and my mother was a server.  Mom used to be what was called a “beautician” back in the day—she even went to school for it—but at some point, she switched careers for reasons unknown to me.  Anyway, I grew up in kitchens, dining rooms and bars, in everything from fine dining to pizza delivery.  We even owned our own place for a blessedly short period of time.  So, when it came time for me to get my first job as a teenager, restaurants were the obvious choice.

In the past three installments of this little series, I’ve shared stories of some truly heinous shit.  But those incidents by no means constituted the total tonnage of insanity that I’ve witnessed in my time in that godforsaken business.  There were things I didn’t include because I was trying to keep the posts from being too long (a fault that I continue to try and rectify).  Some didn’t get included because they didn’t fit the theme of the post.  Some weren’t included because they were just too fucking weird.  So, this post is a random mishmash of crazy shit for your reading pleasure.  To be clear, these additional stories do not likewise constitute everything I’ve seen, but these are the greatest hits.

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There are some people who simply shouldn’t be allowed outside their homes.  They certainly shouldn’t be allowed to breed.  Here are four classic examples:

A group of mothers with their little terrorists in tow decided that the restaurant where I worked would be their target for destruction that day.  There were…8 of them, I think, and only three of them were adults—and I only use that word in the technical sense.  They asked for two tables to be put together, which in and of itself isn’t a terrible request, but the purpose for this arrangement was so they would have more space to dump all of their shit for entertaining the kiddies.  There were toys, coloring books and crayons, Ziploc bags of fucking cereal, and a random assortment of other crap that may belong in a daycare center but absolutely does not belong in a restaurant.  I’m going to point out right here that I was not the poor sucker who got this living nightmare, but I was in the section right next to it, so their bullshit did have a direct impact on my ability to do my job for the next hour and a half.

Anyway, at no point did these theoretical parents ever come close to actually making their hell spawn behave like something closer to trained animals, much less like actual human beings.  They screamed—God, how they screamed!  They were constantly in motion, crawling under the tables—crawling on top of the fucking tables.  Tearing up sugar packets and scattering them everywhere.  The three women didn’t do a solitary fucking thing about it.  They just chatted up a storm with each other, blissfully not giving a shit about all the chaos and destruction.  Of course, they were also demanding as hell, stayed way longer than was necessary, and stiffed the poor server who was seriously rethinking the choices in her life which brought her to this moment.  It took her a solid 30 minutes, and the help of two bussers, to clean up the wreckage left in the wake of these wastes of human life.  These are the kind of people who think that the world is their babysitter.  That the rest of us should just suck it up and deal with this shit because their perfect little angels are just so goddamned adorable.  They want others to feel some of the inconvenience that they have to deal with—because they’ve actively raised terrible children.  You know what?  Fuck them.

For a brief period—less than a year—I worked for a location of Planet Hollywood.  Holy fuck, what a terrible place.  The food was super expensive—and it sucked.  The dining room was so fucking loud.  They were playing all kinds of shit on huge video screens at top volume, so everyone had to yell at each other.  The design, however, was the worst of any restaurant I’d ever worked.  It was a two-story restaurant, and they deliberately designed it to put the kitchen in between the two floors.  So, no matter what, you were always going to be taking trays full of food up and down stairs.  At least once every single shift I worked, my blood would run cold at the sound of someone losing their footing and an entire table’s worth of food would come crashing down the stairs.  If you were working on the 2^nd floor, then this particular mishap would take place out of sight of the customers because you were walking up or down a stairwell.  But, if you were working on the first floor, then everyone got to see your humiliation because these assholes designed a grand staircase for the servers to go up and down, while carrying anywhere from 20-150 pounds of shit on their shoulder.  I’m not exaggerating either.  This place was set up for large tables and we got a lot of them.  So, we had tons of plate covers to place on the plates that would be set on the first large oval tray—and then we would stack a second large oval tray on top of that and fill it with more plates.  Each tray could hold as many as six full size plates, so that’s a potential of 12, total.  You really had to have your shit together to work at this place, but everybody got their turn dropping a ton of food down the stairs.  Of course, because the place was loaded with either bona fide children or just overgrown children, there would always be the inevitable clapping and whooping to add insult to injury.  When a particular table discovered that it was their food which just hit the floor, however, they stopped clapping in a real hurry.

Anyway, one day I was working the lunch shift with someone who was a real eight ball.  He was a singer in a band and had Big Plans.  I even recorded his band one time—a supremely unpleasant experience which I was glad to never repeat.  Eventually he became a moderately successful artist.  But I digress.  This guy—we’ll call him Luke—got a table that was pretty typical of the people we served at this joint:  rednecks.  Oh my God, we got so many fucking rednecks at this place (at least until the NASCAR Café opened up across the street, which pulled all of the rednecks in, like a moth to a flame—an event for which I thanked God every day afterward).  These people were exactly what you think of, when you think of rednecks.  The father wore a trucker cap and a wife beater t-shirt (an accessory that I think was more literal than ironic), the mother had hair that made her look 6 inches taller, and the two kids looked like something straight out of Deliverance.  It was also clear that Dear Old Dad was a controlling, abusive, prick.  He ordered for everyone at the table.  Nobody else said anything, or even looked up when Luke would speak to them.  One part of the order was the nachos appetizer.  Now, I want to be clear here for anyone who hasn’t been stupid or gullible enough to eat at a Planet Hollywood:  nobody goes there for a great deal on great food.  They go there to spend way too much money on mediocre food while gawking at memorabilia in display cases—most of which are fakes because there’s no way some of the stuff, they had on display would have been allowed to sit there without some major security.  With that understanding, I want to provide you with an image of what the Planet Hollywood nachos were like:  the appetizer consisted of 5 individual chips, each decorated with a few bits of refried beans, ground beef, cheese and pico de gallo.  If I remember correctly, I think the restaurant charged $7 for this delicacy, which in 1990’s money is a lot of cash for some shit that cost maybe a total of $2 to put together.  Anyway, a food runner had brought up the nachos while Luke was dealing with other tables.  So, by the time Luke was able to get back to these people, the dish was completely cleared.  Now, I’m clearing and cleaning a table next to his section at this point, so I am able to witness the following:

Luke:  Wow, you guys really cleaned that up quickly.

Redneck Wife Beater:  That there was the sorriest plate of nachos I’ve ever had.  How the hell is anyone expected to fill up on that?

Luke:  Well, sir, that’s why it’s called an “appetizer.”

Redneck Wife Beater:  Now, listen here, sumbitch.  Where I come from, in Alabama, when I order a plate of nachos, I get a big plate of nachos, not some sorry ass piece of shit like this.

Luke:  Well, sir, don’t you all still hang black people in Alabama?

Have you ever heard something that was so shocking that your instant reaction was to laugh even though it wasn’t funny?  That was the point at which I had to literally clap my hands over my mouth and bolt from the dining room before I busted out in the hysterical fit of laughter which was coming out whether I wanted it to or not.  So, I didn’t get to see what happened immediately after, but I did ask him about it when we both had a minute.  He told me that it just sort of flew out of his mouth before he realized what he was saying (a problem with which I can certainly identify), so once the words were out he said he went through his mental Rolodex (for anyone under 40, just look it up) for all of the places where he would need to be searching for a job after he got fired.

But, curiously enough, Mr. Redneck Wife Beater didn’t complain.  In fact, he didn’t say anything.  They just sort of stared at each other for a short eternity, and then he went back to watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger clip on one of the giant screens.  That was that.

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When I worked for one particular restaurant chain, I would be asked to pinch-hit as a front-of-house manager on occasion, either at my primary location, or at other locations within the metro area.  This was generally a pretty easy gig because most FOH restaurant managers don’t do fuck-all, compared to the servers, bartenders and bussers.  However, I tried to help folks out by helping bus tables, making sure the hosts weren’t double-seating servers, keeping the joint clean and generally trying to avoid being an asshole because I was going to be right back with the rabble the next day.  During one particular management shift at my primary location, we were on about a 45-minute wait for tables.  It was busy as hell.  One of the hostesses walks up to me with a disgusted look on her face, so I knew whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

Me:  What’s up?

Hostess:  You are not going to believe this.

Me:  Try me.  I’ve seen a lot.

Hostess:  The couple at table 104 changed their baby’s diaper on the bench in the lobby while they were waiting for a table.  I told them there was a changing table in the bathroom, but they said, ‘oh, it’s no trouble’, as if I was concerned about their comfort with inflicting the smell of a shit-filled diaper on everyone else.

Me:  Typical, but I believe it.

Hostess:  Oh, I’m not finished.  They eventually got called to their table and I sat them.  On the way back, I noticed that they had left the dirty diaper under the bench.  They stashed it way back there, so I know it was deliberate.

Me:  Un-fucking-believable.

Hostess:  I told you so.

I went into the kitchen, found the longest pair of tongs I could get my hands on, went out to the lobby, picked up the diaper (it was quite full), then walked it over to the couple in question and plopped it down on their table, right between them.

“I believe you forgot something in the lobby.”

They looked properly humiliated, so I left it at that and moved on.

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I’ve mentioned earlier that there are people out there who operate under the assumption that the world is their babysitter.  These people feel zero obligation to make sure their rotten little brats behave in public, rather than act like rabid wolverines on crack.  They just don’t give a shit how miserable they make everyone around them—until, of course, their precious little angel suddenly meets with an accident.

One restaurant I worked at was designed with the bar in the middle and the dining tables surrounding it.  There was a low—maybe 3 ½ foot high—wall between the lobby and the bar.  During a particularly busy dinner shift, we were on a long wait, so the lobby and the bar were pretty full.  The so-called parents of a 4-year-old that likely had enough caffeine and sugar running through his system to kill an elephant was literally running circles around the wall between the lobby and the bar, screaming bloody fucking murder.  This kid was bumping into customers and employees and just kept on going.  The parents, of course, didn’t care and made zero attempt to rein in the little bastard.

My section was in the very front of the restaurant, which would have brought me past the lobby area if I had chosen to go that way.  At one point, while carrying a full oval tray with four dinner plates on it, I did decide to go that way.  I was heading through the bar and, because I was tall enough to see over the wall, I saw the Tasmanian Devil heading right for me.  So, I used my left hand to steady the tray, and I moved closer to the kid’s running path.  He turned the corner, saw nothing but legs right in front of him, cut too hard to the right, lost his footing, and slid face first right into the corner of the brass footrest of the bar.  I kept on going on about my business as if I’d never even noticed.

You could hear the shrieks for miles.

Now, all of a sudden, The Parents of the Year gave a damn about the kid they couldn’t be bothered with for the past 20 minutes.  But, from that point forward, you can bet that their Sweet Angel was basically shackled to them for the rest of the evening—as well he should have been from the start.

Was it an asshole thing to do?  Sure, it was.  Do I care?  No, my friends, I do not.  That kid’s antics—and the parents’ complete lack of give-a-shit—were a recipe for disaster.  I simply conducted the equivalent of a controlled burn to prevent a larger forest fire.

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I’ve worked with some real screwballs during my time in that business.  People who did things that would have instantly gotten them fired if they had worked in any kind of an office setting.  But, the restaurant business is notoriously slow to adopt policies which encourage a work place that looks more like a professional environment and less like the Delta House.

I worked with more than my fair share of gay men in the restaurant business, but the one that really sticks out to me is Johnny.  He was absolutely out of his fucking mind.  He wore a really, really bad blonde toupee, which already made him stand out.  But, holy shit, was he crazy.  He used to sexually harass one of the busboys when that busboy revealed himself to be quite the homophobe.  Johnny would wait until this dude was carrying a tub full of dirty dishes, and then sneak up on him and seductively say, “behind YOU!”  More than once I was sure the busboy would drop the tub and run screaming into the street.

One time, when I was heading to the walk-in cooler in the kitchen, Johnny had been in there shooting whip-its.  He walked out right as I was walking in, with a big glob of whipped cream running down the side of his mouth.  He casually flicked it onto his finger and said to me, “I just got a $100 tip,” and put his finger in his mouth.  I was laughing so hard I couldn’t face any of my tables for 10 minutes.

There was a lot of hazing in the restaurants where I worked.  Most of it was geared towards people either on their first day at the job, or on their last day.  I’d certainly experienced both.  On my first day as a dishwasher at my first restaurant job, I had been working for hours, non-stop (breaks were not something that was done in those days), and I was hot, sweaty and very thirsty.  Around this time, one of the prep cooks asked if I’d like something to drink and I said yes.  He came back with a pitcher of Coke, and I immediately began chugging it.  About 5 seconds later, I was spitting it all over the place.  They had thrown all kinds of shit in there and mixed it up.  I still recall the flavors of Tabasco sauce, salt and pickle juice. 

On my last day at an Italian restaurant where I worked as the baker, we were closing the kitchen down for the night.  I had the hose with the high-powered nozzle that we use to wash all the gunk off the floor, and was down on my hands and knees, spraying under the equipment.  Suddenly, the water shuts off and before I can react, I get a face full of whipped cream pie from the executive chef.  Now, at that point, the chef made a grave miscalculation.  He thought that he could just go out into the dining room, where there were still customers, and that I wouldn’t follow him.  What did I give a shit for?  This was my last day on the job, and I was moving across the country.  You can bet your ass I followed him, with a large cake in my hands.  I chased him all through the dining room and the bar and back into the kitchen.  The customers were at once dumbfounded, amused and horrified.  He was just barely able to slam the door on his office before I had let the cake fly, so it splattered everywhere. 

There’s a lot of sex that takes place in the restaurant business.  Employees are fucking each other, and managers are fucking employees.  It’s not always taking place in the restaurants, but everyone tends to know who’s fucking whom because it’s just a giant cesspool of toxic gossip all the time.

One particular evening, I was closing up with one of the managers.  It was just the two of us in the office and we had finished counting the money and making the deposit.  All that was left was our final walkthrough to make sure everything looked ready for the opening shift the next day.  So, the manager and I are walking around the place, checking this, inspecting that.  We head to the bathrooms to make sure they’re clean and don’t need any toilet paper or soap.  The manager opens the door to the ladies’ room, and…one of the bartenders and one of the servers were fucking each other right there.  She was leaning on the counter, and he was banging away.  How they managed to be so quiet about it is beyond me.  So, as soon as the door opens, both of their faces snap in our direction and everything stops.  The bartender makes an audible “WUH” sound, and we all just sort of stare at each other for a second or two…and then the manager lets the bathroom door close and the two of us go back to the office.  We waited for them to come out, which only took a couple of minutes because they were still mostly dressed, with their respective pants pooled around their respective ankles.  They were both appropriately mortified.  Neither got fired for it because the manager decided it was just too delicious to send them on their way.  Instead, he decided it would be much more fun to mention it to everyone else the next day.  To their credit, both the bartender and the server stuck it out until they broke up and then the bartender left for greener pastures.

These days, if I suddenly lost my job, I would have to be in seriously dire fucking straits to get to the point where I was willing to go back into the restaurant business.  The pay is shit.  The people are animals.  The customers are even worse.  Plus, you get the added bonus of constant pain all over your body, from head to foot, all the fucking time.  I think it took something like a couple of months after my last restaurant job for my body to stop hurting all the time.  Why would I put myself through that again if I can avoid it?  That’s why, when I eat out, I tip a minimum of 25%, I am polite, I am not demanding, and I generally do my best to just stay out of everyone’s way.  I also tend to get excellent service.  The work is difficult enough as it is without the additional hassle of, you know, customers.