My problem with the Chinese restaurant broccoli is that it tastes like it was steamed for thirty seconds then soaked in dishwater.

Here's one that drives me insane as a line cook- the afternoon/morning shift people. At every job, these guys consider 40 or 50 people at lunch to be getting blasted. Then, I show up for my 400-predicition night shift with absolutely nothing in stock for the night . So I crank out all of my prep for the evening (while getting the pre-night rush), burn through most of it by the end of the night, then can't leave until 2am because I have to re-stock everything, or the morning/afternoon shifts leaves bitchy, passive-agressive notes everywhere and shit-talk to the day managers behind my back. We recently got a night manager who doesn't stand for it, but the morning cooks are all those 30 year veterans who nod their heads, then don't do it, and shit-talk about the young manager trying to tell them how to do their job.

Setting myself up for another burnout, holy-fuck anxiety attack. Last time I had one of them, I gave one of my sister's ex-boyfriends a bloody nose. Started when I had to quit my last job (they didn't pay me for helping them open, nor cook for them afterwards. Lots of long stories, there), and immediately start up a brand new job. Was offered a semi-supervisor job, and have spent most of it making enemies with a lot of management. I have split off-days, and I spend each of them driving to Jersey to help out relatives. Not to mention a break-up during all of this, and not a single day off to myself. I need to take a trip or jump off-radar for a while, or they're gonna find me in a bell-tower.

Mixed blessing is that my crappy roommate finally got what was coming to him in a story that's more funny than anything, and the FoH manager at the restaurant is a completely awesome lady who's finally glad to have someone on her side at night. She's helping me whip the place into shape after I made some aggressive moves that the owner approved of.

Cameron wrote:

Greg the White wrote: Mixed blessing is that my crappy roommate finally got what was coming to him in a story that's more funny than anything What's the story?

So one morning, he was doing his shitty, passive-aggressive wake-up calls. He woke me up, but I was too tired to do anything. Apparently he went the extra mile with my other (good) roommate, and opened the door. I heard a bunch of a yelling, then a thud, and more yelling. I got up to see a book and some dark spots on the carpet in front of good roommate's door.

I walk to up to see that it's a dabbling blood trail leading up to Chef Paul Prodhomme's fat, smiling face. Apparently, bad roommate (BR) didn't know that GR had let his girlfriend spend the night, and they were having a morning romp. BR walked in, froze hard enough to ignore GR's yells to get out, so GR picked one of his cookbooks off his night stand and wailed it right into BR's nose. I had a prep shift, so BR and I left at around the same time, and I got home first later in the day.

GR ends up getting a phone call from BR's mom. Apparently, while BR was out, he tattled, and his mom still had our contact information. GR put the two of us on speakerphone to tell our side, and how much of a shithead he'd been for the past few months. She seemed to just kind of agree with us about how he'd become a dirty, sleazy slob, until I got to the part about his wake-up calls. She was always a nice lady, who had worked really hard to raise her son by herself, and when she found out about him harassing us about our jobs and work/sleep hours, she apparently gave him the riot act, and he's been timid and willing to actually do his damned chores ever since. I don't like him, but I also don't want to bury him alive in the backyard anymore.

Beach Bum wrote:

I like that he called his mom to deal with it. Hilarious. Even more so that she didn't side with his dumb ass.

He's around 4 years younger than my roommate and I, and straight from the dorms. His mom seems incredibly cool (MILF-y, too), and I think since she made decent money, she was able to hire people to take care of the house, and also spoil him a bit. It definitely snowballed into him being a selfish idiot with no real sense of self. It's hard to hate him sometimes, just because he's only useless due to certain ways in which he was raised, but it's really hard to compromise that in my mind when he's passive-agressively whacking on my door and walking away at 8am (6 hours after I get home from work). GR and I joked to his mom about getting him a dishwashing job to whip him into shape, and she treated it like it was genuinely a good idea.