Regularly A-Salted

I work as a carhop at a fast food restaurant. A regular older couple loves their tater tots. The man has some sort of condition where he can’t have too much salt in his diet. The problem here lies in the fact that these tots come premade with salt.

I watch the couple pull up, and the manager immediately says:

Manager: “Oh, there’s the tot couple.”

My manager pulls two fresh orders of tots directly from the bag in the freezer (not even from the prep frozen area) and puts them in the basket in anticipation.

The woman customer orders the meals.

Customer: “No salt on the tots. He can’t have salt on the tots. Make sure they don’t serve us salt on the tots. They have to make them fresh, so they don’t get salt on them.”

Every time, she says it that many times, in a variety of ways. I watch the manager drop the tots into the fryer, pull them up however many minutes later, and put them directly from the basket into the bags. Of course, they send the tots back in twenty seconds after getting them.

Customer: “These tots clearly have salt on them. They need to be unsalted!”

And it never failed that they would send the tots back once, if not twice, every time, claiming, “They definitely added salt to these.” We had explained to them ad nauseam that we literally couldn’t take the salt out because they mixed the salt in with the potato to make the tots, but we always wound up wasting so many tater tots on them.

I think it was once a week or once every couple of weeks that they came in.