Hot, Fresh, Salty Karma

Our fast food restaurant closes at midnight on Sundays. At around 11:15 pm, we start transitioning to close and to get ready for the delivery we get every Sunday. Then, we play a game of “How many fries do we think we’re going to sell in the last forty-five minutes?” and put the bags of them up front. We know the delivery takes the last hour of our shift like clockwork, and we can’t access the big boxes of french fries during the delivery. Plus, our manager specifically says to not go in the walk-in during the delivery, not that we could anyway tonight.

I’m usually pretty good at guessing, and we had a car pull up who needed two large fries, so I dropped four large fries — half a bag, the last half we had up front — just in case another car pulled up. It did.

Customer: “Hi, I’d like a [burger], large, with fries, and I need those fries fresh.“

Me: “Well, today’s your lucky day because I just dropped some fries right now.”

Customer: “I don’t care about those fries, yo. You’d better make me some new fries, fresh. Don’t give me those fries; make some new ones.”

I could have just as easily given him the fries I had JUST dropped, because they take around three minutes to cook, and he was pulling up JUST as they were finished, but he clearly said he didn’t want those fries, so what’s a cook to do?

Me: “It’s going to be a while for new fries.”

He waited.

I cleaned the ice cream machine, a six-minute job (I’m quick and thorough), right in front of the window.

He honked.

Me: “I sincerely apologize, sir. The fries are inaccessible until the delivery driver can get everything moved. It shouldn’t be that much longer, and then we can drop them. Maybe ten minutes.”

He waited.

I stocked the nugget sauces. I was mindful that I was being watched like a hawk, so I pretended to look off in the middle distance of our restaurant like there was something going on there.

He waited some more.

Finally, my coworker ran up with the box of fries and we tossed them into the fry bin.

All of a sudden, the customer honked more emphatically, and I went to the window.

Customer: *Yelling* “What?! They’re frozen?! I wanted fresh!“

He screeched off into the night, no food in sight.

Then, a police officer — a regular customer here who stops by for his usual every night — pulled the customer over. He gave the fry guy a ticket for aggressive driving — a big no-no with a huge fine here in Arizona — before getting in line to get his freshly-made fries.