Alright here’s something I think you’ll all be angry at: A pretty big burger chain does not care if there is shit water on the floor. It is notorious for being expensive and giving a shit load of fries.
At around 5pm, the three of us working in the front notice a DoorDasher awkwardly stepping over something to leave the restaurant. A puddle coming from the bathroom that has already covered a fifth of the dining room. Our shift lead who we will call Bossman hops the partition between the kitchen and the dining room. Bossman tells me to get the guy doing BoH work and bring two squeegees to get the water out of the restaurant while me and another coworker that I’ll call P make the remaining orders. Keep in mind that BoH and Bossman have stepped in the shit water. They do not want to track it into the kitchen so me and P are stuck making food.
Obviously we need to close the store down. So we call our GM’s boss, who we will call C. C is middle management. In the year that I have worked at this place, I have seen C once. I was called in early one day to help carry a new grill into the restaurant, and C in middle management fashion just sat and watched. So yes. C is useless, and only serves to get in touch with Luigi, C’s boss. Well of course Luigi isn’t picking up the phone, so C’s solution is to just cone off the wet area and continue operations as normal. So now Bossman and BoH are drudging around in the shit water, socks wet. They are turning away customers, and tell people who have ordered online to go through the back door. Finally, Bossman gets the call from Luigi. Apparently, C told Luigi that there was a little water from the toilet on the floor. Bossman sets the record straight; there was a turd on the bathroom floor, it smells rancid, and the water spread 30 feet from wall to wall, and even under the front door before Bossman turned off the water for the toilet.
Luigi tells us to shut the store down. He used the word “close” according to the Bossman. It’s about 5:30 at this point. So we begin a full close. With a team of four. With no pre closing. On slow days like Monday, we have less people to close because less customers come in, which means we can pre-close more. Well we had to start with no pre-closing. Fine. We get about half an hour in, P has cleaned the grill and I’ve filtered all the fry oil and sent back all the dishes to be cleaned by BoH who is not allowed in the kitchen for the rest of the night. I’m sweeping the kitchen floor while Bossman scrubs the lobby for the second time. Then he gets the call.
C asks. “Do you think you’ll be good to re-open at 7:30?” What? Luigi said “CLOSE” and C said that we were reopening. On our slowest day. No, we already started a full close! C claims that after one scrub and thirty minutes, the dining room should be good to go. No… anyone who actually works at a real location would know that sometimes after a scrub there are still puddles in the morning. We don’t want customers to slip and slide here… not to mention that BoH and Bossman’s shoes and socks are still covered in shit water. C says that them two can go home and shower and change (no mileage paid of course). Not to mention the kitchen has been disassembled. We are not doing that again. Me and P talked to BoH and we agreed that once we clean the restaurant we would walk out if they made us re open. Bossman makes several arguments to C and Luigi and I think their boss as well: “I have kids. I have seen them on multiple occasions try to pick stuff off the ground and eat it. What if a baby did that and got E Coli?”
“It’s the recentness of it all; If someone shat on my plate and washed it, I would still not eat off of it.” (It’s the floor but still… who wants to eat where there’s been poop particles)
“None of my employees feel safe about serving food in an area with a potential biohazard” (Truthful. I finally got an 8 hour shift and would have liked to have worked the whole thing but I don’t feel comfortable serving food in an area where LITERAL SHIT PARTICLES HAVE BEEN)
Bossman has a bit of a temper and started working faster during this call. He has a bad back and saw a chiropractor before his shift, which relieved some of that pain. But he threw out his back during the call, and they had to call in another manager from the surrounding area to supervise after this (nice guy.) They gave in and let us close, not like they really had a choice because none of us are pushovers. Bossman went to urgent care, and BoH went home slightly after the replacement manager arrived so he could finally get out of his shit water soaked socks. Us three closed the store and we ended up finishing around 9pm because of how much there was to do and how few workers we had.
I’m curious to see what other people think. I feel like its really immoral to try and get people to eat in a room shit particles have been in just a few hours ago. And the funniest part is, maybe two people came in to try and get something to eat the entire time we were cleaning. It would have been the slowest night we’d had in ages. We probably saved the company money by closing early and they’re probably still pissed. Going to sleep. I have work at 11am.
I usually enjoy my job despite the $15 an hour. But when anyone above the GM gets involved shit just gets awful real quick.