My boss demands we do things the red lobster way, and it backfires brutally.

This happened several years ago, and I'm forever relieved I don't work in a restaurant anymore.

Solidarity to all the kitchen workers for the endless bull crap you have to deal with.

So at the time, I was working in the kitchen as an assembler. This can be one of the most

clutch positions on the line, as you take all of the food prepared by the other cooks and

organize it into tickets that can be taken out into the dining room. Accordingly, it's often a

bottleneck for food leaving the kitchen. If you have a slow assembler, cooked food dies under the heating

lamps. Grilled salmon dries out, fries become soggy, Linguini Alfredo hardens into concrete,

really horrific crap. It is imperative that food not sit in the window. I was working a

weekday lunch shift, which is normally pretty slow. We must have provoked

the wrath of the restaurant gods on this day, though, because out of nowhere the store got

hit with a tsunami of customers. I could just barely make out the other cooks through the clouds

of shrimp scampy, friar grease, and cheddar bay biscuits flying through the air. I knew the crap blizzard was headed in my

direction and began putting empty plates up in the window with the shape of each ticket that was to leave

the kitchen, a technique I'd learned to help survive bull crap like this. On the other side of the window,

coordinating the servers, was my manager. I shouldn't use his real name, actually. Let's call him

Bob instead. Anyway, you should know that Bob, for a lack of better term, was a real bunt. I've

replaced the first letter of that word. Bob was a bit hyperactive and had an irritating tendency

to micromanage kitchen processes, a problem compounded by his not

knowing how the frick to run a kitchen. When I began putting empty plates in the window so that

incoming interstellicized waves of seafood had something to land on, he stopped me. What are you doing?

Bob asked. I'm putting the plates in their sides in the window because we're about to have

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