Spectacularly WTF Restaurant Stories, Part 1
In DepthWelcome back to Behind Closed Ovens, where we take a look at the best and strangest stories from inside the food industry. This week, we’ve got week one of two of some of the most spectacularly What The Fuck restaurant stories we’ve ever received. As always, these are real e-mails from real readers.
Sam Layman:
I used to work at Subway as the closer (you know, the guy who gets to work ‘till the shop closes up so gets to deal with all the drunks), and one Friday night I had to train a new guy to close up so he could start working the shifts I didn’t work.
Now, this store closed at 2 AM on Friday and Saturday, so you just missed the bar crowd getting kicked out of all the bars, but you still got your fair share of drunks. Also, due to the location right downtown we got a lot of prostitutes and drug users.
So on this poor guy’s very first shift, I’m teaching him how to make sandwiches, serve customers, run the cash register, and all the prep work that we do to get ready for the next day. The shift went well enough, and after the last customer left the store and we shut off the “OPEN” sign, I told him that now we get to the best part of the night: clean-up. We started by clearing off the sandwich table, wrapping the bread, prepping all the veggies for the next day, the usual…then it came time to mop up and clean the washrooms.
Now, I don’t want to scare the new guy away, so I warn him that I have seen used needles in the washrooms, and not to touch them, just sweep them up with the bucket and toss them in a box to be disposed of. I also warn him that you will occasionally see human feces in places that it shouldn’t be, but that doesn’t happen too often, so he shouldn’t worry about it.
We clean one of the two washrooms, top to bottom, and he agrees that it was pretty easy, mop, wash the walls quickly, clean the toilet/ sink/ mirrors and done…then we move on to the second one. But the door is locked. I tell him it’s usually from someone taking a huge dump or shooting up or bathroom sex and that we should knock before we use the key to open it. We knock, and nothing…knock again, still nothing…so it’s gotta be empty.
Not empty. We open the door to see some guy. Face on the floor. Pants around his ankles. Bare ass sticking up into the air. Just fell off the toilet. The new guy just looks at me with this horrified expression on his face, and when he asks me what to do, I look at him and without even pausing tell him, “Well, I sure as hell ain’t getting paid enough to deal with this…so we call the cops.”
So we call 911, and the operator asks if the guy needs an ambulance, if he was breathing, etc, to which I reply, “I work at a subway, I am neither a doctor nor am I willing to touch him to see if he was in need of any type of assistance.” The cops arrive in under five minutes, come in fully gloved and while we’re busying ourselves with the rest of the store, they get his pants on, get him vertical and get him out the door.
I guess they decided that they would let him go home or wherever it was that he wanted to go, as once he’s out the door (and we have locked it behind them), they try to go back to their cop car, hoping the guy would stagger on his way.
Instead, the drunk guy turns around, walks right back up to the front door, and starts banging on it screaming “BUT I WANT A SANDWICH! I NEED TO GET A SANDWICH!” The cops walk back up, looking pretty pissed off, grab the guy and toss him in the back of the car to be whisked away into the night. Me and the new guy are pretty much on the floor laughing our asses off at this point.
Much to my surprise, the new guy shows up for work the next day with a big grin on his face and says, “Hope tonight is as interesting as last night!”
(Editor’s Note: Subway stories are the best stories. You guys have NO idea how excited I get every time I see “one time I was working at Subway” at the top of a submission. If you’ve submitted a Subway-related story and haven’t yet seen it on here, rest assured that I have it and am saving it for a special occasion)
Isaac Paolaontonio:
I worked at a popular waterfront seafood restaurant on Cape Cod. It was the middle of the day in one of the summer months, so the dining room was packed. There were probably about 15 tables in the dining room, 7 of which were my section, the front of the dining room (i.e., the first seven tables you saw when you walked in). My five-top was sat with what appeared to be a family of tourists from somewhere in East Asia: a mom, dad, grandma, and two small children of about 3 and maybe one. Upon taking their order I realized they spoke no English, which wasn’t too uncommon and wasn’t a problem. We got through the ordering process, which consisted of the dad pointing at appetizers, me nodding and writing them down, and then a few jumbled English words that represented drinks. I went to fill the drink order behind a small wall that housed the server station.
Upon exiting said station, tray of drinks in hand, I turned to face the table and saw a scene I will never forget. The 3 year-old boy was standing on his chair, pants down around his ankles, peeing. Directly into a cup. Grandma is seated next to him holding said cup. In the middle of the full dining room. In a public restaurant. Every single other person in the dining room was dead silent, staring at me, and then at them, and then back to me, and so on. The only action I could muster was to walk over to the table, put down their drinks, and point at the bathroom sign without saying a word. I walked away and did not say another word to them.
Rebecca Taylor: