The Five Commandments Of Food Service

Hair Guy - Gettin' Biblical!

I’ve been working at Carl’s for nearly four weeks now, and I’ve learned quite a bit in that time. I’ve learned that our marionberry milkshake is really just a blackberry milkshake, I’ve learned that Reuben sandwiches are disgusting to look at but a pseudo religious experience to eat, and I’ve learned that Carl’s seems to have been built over an ancient Native American burial ground for jerks, because poltergeists make all of our customers act like complete asshats.

Or there is the other, more terrifying option: Maybe these people, these Royal Asshats, are humans just like you and I, save for the fact that we bathe on occasion. If that is so, then it seems that a whole lot of people have lost track of common sense and human decency, both of which are pretty handy when it comes to living in a civilized society and ordering the occasional pastrami burger. If what I’ve seen at Carl’s is at all indicative of what the rest of you have been up to when you’re dining out, humanity is in deep ca-ca. Therefore, in order to reform the asshats and generally make my working environment more pleasant, I’m going to take a page from God’s book (The Bible) and present you with The Five Commandments Of Fast Food.

V – THOU SHALT NOT GET ALL UP IN MY KOOL-AID
The other day I was delivering two milkshakes to a husband and wife with two small children. They had also ordered two Soft-Serv cones for their kids, but seeing as I was inconsiderate enough to only have two hands, I’d left the cones back in the kitchen and was delivering the milkshakes first.

“Where are they!?” The woman demanded as I set the milkshakes down.

“Excuse me?”

“The little Licky-Cones! For my kids!”

She had no sooner uttered the words ‘Licky Cones’ than I truly realized the depths of my hatred for everything on Earth. It’s one thing to make sure that the server has remembered your entire order; it’s another thing to start interrogating him the second he arrives as though he’s trying to starve your kids to death, and to do so using a phrase so egregiously wrong as ‘Licky Cone’. There is no such thing anywhere in the world as a Licky Cone, nor will there ever be so long as I have any say in the matter. If you want to make sure your kid gets his ice cream cone, don’t call it a Licky Cone, call it an ice cream cone, because that’s what it is. This commandment could just as easily be “THOU SHALT CALL THINGS WHAT THEY ARE”. Licky Cones. I wish I was kidding.

IV – THOU SHALT EITHER TRIM THINE FINGERNAILS OR PROCURE ROBOT HANDS; EITHER ONE IS COOL WITH ME
Once I’ve made the milkshake I have to take it out to the person who ordered it and hand it to them. Regrettably, this means human physical contact, but I try to manage as best I can. However, you, as the customer, can do a lot to make the experience more pleasant for both of us.

The best example of this is Rob, one of our daily customers. Every day he comes in and orders a small chocolate milkshake, and every day he has long, yellow fingernails. You know the mutant in X Men 2 who had the Wolverine-style blades that came out of her fingertips? Well, imagine if instead of being hot and awesome, she was old and male and creepy, and every day you had to risk getting touched by those brittle, amber shaded keratin blades of his. The result is me standing there and smiling nervously as I try to touch as little of the cup as possible while Rob “Yellownail” McGee wraps his leathery, blistery, oh-so-yellowy hands around the delicacy I worked so hard to create. It’s arguably one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen, and I once visited a hobby shop on “Free RPG Day”.

If you’ve got really long, gross fingernails, please trim them before you come in to collect your food from me. If you don’t want to part with your nails but you still want your food, just send your army of trained rats in to pick it up for you. If you’re too sentimental about your yellowed, rotting fingernails to cut them, then I’m sure you’re the sort of person who would have an army of rats on hand.

III – THOU SHALT GRAB YOUR FOOD WHEN I SAY ITS NAME
When you order a whole lot of food in a giant party of, say, eight or more, you can expect that your server is going to come out with all your food on a tray. And he’s probably going to set the tray down on the table and start saying the names of all the food items on that tray. That’s your cue to grab your food; if he points to the grilled cheese sandwich and says, “Grilled cheese sandwich”, he isn’t playing a rousing game of “Spot the Sandwich”, he’s telling you that you should pick up your grilled cheese sandwich. The server is in a hurry, because he needs to take that tray back to the kitchen because he has a lot of other food to prepare and other creepy customers to not touch.

This doesn’t seem to be so clear to the people at Carl’s. I’ll set the tray down and stand there saying the names of the food on it, and the people will just sit there looking at me, smiling intently, evidently believing that they’re eating at Benihana and this is all part of the show; they assume my special trick is saying the name of the food they’re about to eat. This would be fine if they tipped me for my performance, or at least clapped afterwards, but instead we just wind up staring at each other, and that tray isn’t getting cleared off, so I wind up saying all the names again, and the show just really doesn’t stand up to repeat performances.

II – THOU SHALT CLEARLY DISPLAY YOUR NUMBER
When you go to Carl’s and decide to eat in our dining room as opposed to clogging your arteries at home, the cashier gives you a little plastic square with a number on it. Let’s just clarify that interaction: The plastic square isn’t a gift. It’s not some sort of incentive so you’ll say, “Hey, kids, let’s go to Carl’s and eat in their dining room – we’ll get one of the plastic squares!” No, no, that’s not it at all; I’m afraid you misunderstand the deeper purpose of the plastic square.

The plastic square with the number on it corresponds to your order number, so that when the server picks up your food from the kitchen, he or she will know that order number 17 goes to table number 17. It’s one of the few truly brilliant systems in common use that doesn’t rely on vacuum tubes or midget boxing, and it would work just fine if you bunch of idiots could stop treating your plastic square like it’s a brand new Game Boy.

I’ll be walking through the dining room, precariously balancing baskets full of hamburgers with fried eggs on them (no joke) and steak sandwiches with pizza for bread (joke), the whole while looking for Table 17. I’m kind of in a hurry to offload my fatty payload, as you would be if you were only one misstep away from the most deliciously unhealthy accident in your soon to be short life. However, I have to make multiple passes through the dining room, because I can’t for the life of me find a Table 17. Finally, I have to resort to going from one table to the next to ask each party if their table is Table 17, interrupting everyone’s dinner like some sort of telemarketer trying to give away free cholesterol. After receiving terse negative answers from several people, I’ll stumble upon Table 17 – it’s the table full of morons, one of whom is idly flipping the plastic square with “17” written on it around in his hands, as opposed to displaying it somewhere where the person in charge of bringing him food can see it.

There is no great mystery to the plastic square – it’s not a puzzle or a challenge, it’s a square with a number on it. Just leave it alone and it will do its job. It does not need your help. In fact, you’re only making things worse. In a perfect world, there would be no customers at Carl’s: Just hundreds and hundreds of plastic squares. Food would be delivered swiftly and efficiently, and bugger all if nobody ate it – that’s not my problem. I just deliver the food to its designated square.

I – PLAY NICE
Every day I catch a real attitude off the people I’m serving. I don’t get a “Thank you” for preparing and delivering their milkshakes, they leave their trash all over the dining room without making the slightest effort to pick it up, and they make a point of bitching at us if they feel that we aren’t treating them properly.

Here’s a wise piece of advice I learned that I think we all ought to live by, in both our fast food and non-fast food related endeavors: No one should be a cock to a stranger, ever!

It’s surprisingly easy to not be a cock to servers in restaurants – all you have to do is show a little gratitude and a little respect. If you can’t muster that much, just keep in mind that we control your food before it gets to you, and who knows how much of that strawberry banana hot fudge Oreo milkshake you’ll drink before you realize there’s a lock of my hair in it?

Truman Capps will smash this Word document and stick the pieces in an Arc of some sort if he finds you all worshipping a golden calf in a few months’ time.