Ketchup and Angry Sauce

My mother had to go a Pampered Chef party at 11. I had to be at work at 11. Normally I am against dropping me over 30 minutes early, but I support my mom and her desire and need for corn on the cob butters (no, you do not use a traditional butter knife and butter, you place it in this thing and the thing does its thing and butters your corn) or some new chicken beaters. So, I had 30 minutes to kill. Of course, I texted everybody and anybody. Given that it was a Sunday, I knew I could keep the conversation going for more than 30 minutes, as for Burger King is dead on Sunday before 12:30. Wrong. Ten minutes in, Susan comes running to me ranting and raging about how Emily took her phone. That’s the new thing — phone taking. If they catch you texting, they take your phone and put it in the safe. I responded with one word answers to let the conversation die down. Emily was in a bad mood and I refuse to fight with someone over a phone. I do not trust anyone with my Blackberry, and my Blackberry is not sitting in a safe for eight hours.

I went in with an open mind. I wasn’t going to go in with a grudge against the world — despite my hate for Burger King. I greeted everyone, “Good morning, how are you?” – etc. I am nice. I go to the kitchen and put on some gloves. Adrianna took over the main board, so I resumed duties on broiler. Normally, I’d like to think that my nine months of expertise has earned me a rank higher than “BSer” (Broiler Steamer), but, at this point, I’d be happy to sit there and lodge meat into a flaming pit of doom. So be it. Ten, fifteen minutes in, Susan gets thrown on break and Adrianna asks me to empty a ketchup bottle into the dinning room area ketchup machine (you know, the one you pump and fill those little cups with. Yeah, those. In fact, we use those same cups to take Sprite shots.), I tell her that’s the stupidest idea ever and I’ll just throw the ketchup out. She refutes and tells me that I waste too much food. So, what. It’s just money and we make thousands a day. And besides, it’s not like I get a cut of the “Savings Bonus.” The managers’ bonus comes out of this fund. Basically, the less money the individual chain has to spend in ratio to its profits, the more money the managers get. So, they like to use every tomato and use 80% of fries — their theory is: $2 a week per item adds up. That’s $102 a year. Now multiply that by 25 profits. Sure, it saves the money. But when you look at the little $102 figure next to the ~1,500,000 in yearly profits, you shake your head and realize that it’s nothing. But albeit — I’ll use every tomato, save every ounce of ketchup and not give a customer the right amount of fries. (Oh, and you should have saw how they reacted when a bag of chicken fries “ript at the seems” [how they wrote it on the report] as I was carrying it out of the freezer. I was tempted to call the ambulance — Emily was having heart palpation and Issa was having seizures on the floor. However, the cost would have been too high for the company, so I just grabbed Issa’s tongue and told Emily everything will be all right.) Now, since Susan and I are good friends, I figured, as I was squirting the bottled ketchup in the giant steel bowl of ketchup, I will talk to her. She was sitting in the glass part of the dinning room. Basically, it looks onto the road. All incoming patrons (or fat asses, either or) and cars driving by can look in and see. I unscrew the cap and squirt it in. Believe it or not, it’s interesting. It creates a little hole and then files it up, and then overflows.. And then repeats. It’s odd how that works, but it does. (Lesson #1 in Ketchupology.) And Emily just finished admiring the new flower bed (read: overgrown swamp plants) we put at the corner of the lot, below our sign. Emily and Susan are friends, so Emily waves to Susan, Susan waves back. I start to wave. Her face literally went from I-just-got-laid happy to you-are-so-lucky-I-am-not-your-mother. She would have kicked my ass. So, she walks in — which was agonizing, since I was anticipating her screaming. Which ultimately sucks. The screaming, I can deal with. But I just can’t stand waiting for the screaming. It’s like stealing money from a company, at first, you don’t mind it. You love it. But you hate the part where the accounting sector of the business picks up that you spent $5,000 on “Misc. Expenses,” linking a check to a whore house. She politely talks to me — remember, we are in the middle of the glass case and I have a bottle of ketchup in my hand. And, like me, not the best one with confrontation, as for I tend to laugh and not give a crap. She asks me what I am doing. “Doing what Adri wanted me to do. I thought it was stupid, too-” (mind: Well, obviously, you see what I am doing. I’m talking to Susan while doing some heinous and ridiculous task.) She didn’t want to hear it: “Everyone can see you.” Well, duh, Emily. Of course everyone can see me. Just like they can view the whole kitchen, perfectly, when they wait for the food. And, so, what — they’ve seen ketchup before, and due to some recent studies and outbreaks (think the whole Burger King bath tub incident, or even the Pizza Hot homoerotic video), they imagine scandals on a ten times worse scale. But yet, they continue to order our Triple Whoppers with Cheeses.

Emily was mad at me for the rest of the morning. On a few attempts, she personally reminded me to “Behave myself.” I was going to mention how ridiculous it is to have to tell me that, as for I am 16 years old. But then I thought of how that would backfire in my face, because anyone can think of a juvenile and witty response that leaves my head hanging in shame. I smirk and tell her, “Of course.” I kept my phone in my pocket — despite my urge to Twitter about how fat and annoying she is — for the remainder of her time being there. And I was at Nicole’s beck and call. I did some things I would normally never do — like actually doing a Cook Out, changing the trash sans gloves, or washing the dishes. She made it my #1 task to make sure that all dishes were done. And thus I did so. Before leaving, I made sure that my board had an ample supply of meat, and that all surrounding kitchen areas — mainly the dishes and the broiler area — were spotless. Visually, it was gorgeous. Had I had a few more minutes, I would have pulled out the Dazzle and made everything shine.

It’s really amazing how much work (read: crap) goes into keeping Burger King the way it is. The sad part is — it’s still on the bottom of the scale in terms of class. I could only imagine the amount of buttache and work a real classy place requires. I wonder if they have annoying managers, too. They probably don’t, given that the employees are usually not ex-convicts and the place doesn’t need to be ran like a concentration camp. But, I’ll always wonder.