Unfiltered Story #325668

Not long after I turned 17, I had my only two restaurant jobs. One was at a — now defunct — Farrell’s which was, at the time, owned by Marriott Corp. All the rules were in place including time for breaks, meals at discount, etc. Everything was by the book and management well-trained. After some months, I quit for benign reasons.

A couple months later, I took another restaurant job. It was a locally owned Chinese restaurant. Everything was flipped from the corporate entity. No breaks. We got fed for free, but it was a single community meal after work. The food was good, but lack of choice was weird. I worked as a dish washer and seeing the back-side of the restaurant was bizarre. Except for waitstaff and the other dishwasher and me, everyone was either Chinese or Hispanic (who didn’t speak English). One old Chinese lady sat for hours on end cracking eggs into 5-gallon buckets. It was all hectic and hot.

On my 4th day working there, which was on my second weekend, one of the waiters decided that my fellow dish washer had flirted with one of the waitresses who happened to be his girlfriend. He attempted to start a physical fight with the sink counter between the two of them. It was chaos and I just tried to stay out of the way.

The next thing I knew was a loud “kablang!” as a 3 foot ladle, wielded by a 6’5″ Chinese chef, came down on the counter between the combatants. In broken English and waving his weapon of choice he ordered everyone back to work.

In the end, it was too much stress. I quit that night. Second shortest job I ever held.