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12 Problems All Fast Food Workers Understand

From Cosmopolitan

1. All the little things customers do mid-order can make the entire process slow down. Like when you’re asking if they want a drink, but they decide to respond to a text in the middle of the order. Or when you hold out your hand to take their card or cash, but they put it on the counter in front of you instead. And if they do pay with cash, when they pay for their entire order with change, which you have to count out.

2. You’re working drive-through and can’t hear the customer with all the background noise in their car. Have you ever tried to hear what someone is saying over the sound of music playing, engines revving, people laughing and talking, or kids crying? And even if they’re the reason you can’t hear, not your headset, customers will still get annoyed when you ask them to repeat themselves multiple times.

3. Sometimes people come up to the register and have no idea what they want. You’re always going to get someone who comes up to the cash register and asks for a “burger” when there are six different types of burgers on the menu. Or someone will be standing in front of you completely unsure of what they want to order. It’s really stressful for you because the person you’re trying to help can get irritated when you keep asking them questions, and the people behind them in line are annoyed that you’re taking so long to complete an order.

4. You consider yourself lucky if customers don’t leave behind half-eaten meals, napkins, and sauce on the table. It seems like some customers forget - or just don’t care - that you’re not a waiter and they’re supposed to clear their own meal. Wiping off crumbs and clearing away a few napkins is fine, but finding half a burrito smeared on the table is really frustrating.

5. When things are slow, your manager will ask you to clean the restaurant, which usually includes the bathroom. You go into the bathroom and find paper towels outside of the trash can, toilet paper everywhere, or much, much worse: used pads and tampons on the ground, clogged toilets, pee or poop on or outside of the toilet, and even random things like underwear in the trash can.

6. Extremely large or group orders are one of the worst things that can happen during a shift. If you’ve ever had a tour bus or school group decide to stop at your restaurant, you know how chaotic this is. The dinner rush is stressful on its own but having an additional 50 people all at once is hard to keep up with. Someone might accidentally take someone else’s meal, one sandwich might get sent back for having onions, and there will be a few angry customers who weren’t expecting to deal with such a long wait for their food. Basically, no one is happy.

7. You definitely smell like the food you cook, even after you’ve left work. If you go somewhere after your shift and don’t get the chance to shower, you probably feel a little self-conscious that your hair smells like fries, fried chicken, or taco meat, depending where you work. But even when you get the chance to wash away burger grease smell from your clothes and skin, your car will probably smell like the place you work no matter how much air freshener you use.

8. People will tell you that you’re out of sauce, ketchup, or a certain drink at the most inconvenient times. You’ll be in the middle of a transaction, and a customer will come up to the counter to tell you that you’re out of forks or hot sauce. Even if they’re trying to help, there isn’t much you can do in that moment when you’re in the middle of helping someone else.

9. “I can’t, I have work” is a common refrain on weekend nights and holidays. Most fast-food places are open on holidays and until late, if not all night. That means you probably have to work on a Friday night when all your friends are out having fun, work a night shift and be too tired to do anything the next day, or miss out on a family holiday tradition because you have to work.

10. Some customers want their meals free if one easily fixable thing is wrong with something. Even when you offer to remake the burger you accidentally put ketchup on, you’ll get people who insist on talking to your manager to complain about the service and hope they can get their entire meal free.

11. A drive-through customer coming inside is never a good sign. It usually has to do with a messed-up order, and even if you weren’t the one that prepared the food or took their order, the customer still might take their frustration out on you.

12. When people find out you work in food service, the reaction isn’t always nice. There’s sometimes an attitude from people that the only reason you’re working in food service is because you don’t have any other options or that what you’re doing takes no skill. But you have to be able to pay attention to detail, work efficiently in fast-paced environments, and remain patient in frustrating situations. Regardless of others’ opinions, you know that working in food service - either as a part-time job or full-time career - isn’t easy, and not everyone could handle it.

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