A Different Kind Of Bean-Counter

(I work at a fast food restaurant chain that was involved in a scandal involving their pinto beans back in 2011, when they revealed they weren’t vegan. Since 2013, though, they’ve been completely vegan. So, that’s three years that our beans have been vegan. The pinto beans are in front of the black beans (which have always been vegan), so while we try our best to avoid it, sometimes a few beans or the juice from the pinto beans will fall into the black beans. Nine times out of  ten, no one, even the vegans who ask us to change our gloves to serve them, care. But this one customer…)

Girl: “Do you have fresh black beans? I can’t have the ones behind the pinto beans.”

Me: “Uh, sure, I think they just put some in the back.” *I glance back, and there are beans, but they’re nowhere near needing to be changed* “Do you have an allergy?”

Girl: *pause* “Yeah.”

Me: *gets her fresh beans, passes her order down the line, goes about my day without thinking about it, though she does give me the stink eye*

(A few weeks pass without any incident, until she comes back and does the same thing, asking for fresh beans. This time, we don’t have any readily available, so we have to hold up the line waiting for the grill to make her fresh beans. She takes this opportunity to give me “suggestions” on something I have no control over.)

Girl: “You really should keep the black beans behind the pinto beans so people who can’t have pinto beans can still have the black beans.”

Me: “Um, well, we’ve never had anyone else say they were allergic to the pinto beans, so I suppose there’s an equal likelihood that this could happen the other way around for someone allergic to the black beans…”

(I serve her new beans as I try to piece together her logic for saying this. We get people with common allergies like gluten all the time, but never someone allergic to pinto beans.)

Girl: “Well, I’m not allergic, but I’m vegan, so I can’t have the pinto beans.”

Me: *pause* “Our pinto beans are completely vegan.”

Girl: “No, I know they aren’t. I know you guys use meat in your pinto beans.”

(By this point, I’m totally taken aback by this girl. Not only did she lie about having an allergy, which is something our restaurant takes extremely seriously, she’s now claiming we’re lying about what’s in our beans, or we just don’t know. She continues down the line, and gets to cash, asking for a manager. She gives him the same spiel she gave me about putting our pinto beans behind our black beans.)

Manager: “That’s set by corporate. There’s really nothing we can do about that, but our pinto beans are vegan.”

(The girl continues to insist that they aren’t, so I chime in again.)

Me: “We can show you the recipe cards if you want, so you can see exactly what’s in them.”

Girl: “Fine.”

(My manager goes off to get the recipe cards, which takes a while, and the girl goes to sit and eat her meal. He comes back, and I point out where she’s sitting. I watch the exchange, and she brushes him off in less than a minute.)

Me: “What happened?”

Manager: “She insisted she didn’t want to see them.”

Me: “What? So not only does she not believe us when we say they’re vegan, she’s going to go on insisting they have meat and keep demanding fresh beans?”

(My manager shrugged, I rolled my eyes, continuing to be baffled by the contradictory stupidity of humanity, and continued to serve customers. She stayed away for more time than I’d seen her away before, but when she came back, she ordered black beans with no noticeable commotion. Maybe she just didn’t want to be proved wrong.)