Re: post-work quirks
Posted: Wed 16 Sep, 2020, 1:38 am
LilFluff wrote: ↑Mon 14 Sep, 2020, 10:48 pmIt's the only food service job I ever held so I can't compare to your regular restaurant but this job instilled a good appreciation for sanitation (good thing too, because on the 100 point scale used locally, we'd get a stern warning at 95% and a fix in days or be shut down warning at 90% which is far stricter than regular places got scored).
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I got another post-work quirk from the same job. I've never been able to look at strawberries the same way since working there. I would occasionally get pulled over to help the cooks sort through the shipments of strawberries trim or toss depending on the condition. As one person put it to me about a decade ago, strawberries start going bad the moment you pick them. Ever since I've just haven't had the desire to eat stuff made with real strawberries. Maybe if you've got suppliers that are closer to you or have your own plants. But stuff that's been picked and shipped about, ugh, no.
Then after getting a job in the vicinity of tech support I went from reading tech support jokes and going, "Right, someone asked about how to find the 'Any Key', right, haha." to basically assuming any tech support joke is, or is based on, a true story unless told otherwise. The stuff I've run into. Ugh. The stuff I've run into. Look, when you have to deal with tech support? It's probably not personal. Unless you are one of Those Users. It's just we've run into too many of Those Users for too many categories of such.
Oh gosh yeah. The restaurant job I had regularly scored higher than 90, and that low was only because we usually kept a "dark corner" that we didn't clean because if you get too many 100s on your cleanliness rating or whatever, it starts to look suspicious. Boss didn't want to get hounded with like 3 different- words, c'mon kat- assessors? within a span of two weeks, lol. But a lot of restaurants aren't as clean as you'd expect! In my area you can get as low as a 70 before you get a shut-down, and (bugs)
Spoiler
you can have an actual infestation in your kitchen but so long as nothing's directly noticeable on cooking surfaces or in the dining area, you're usually not going to get dinged as much as you'd expect.
Mine didn't deal with fruit, but I've gotten like that with peppers and onions. I *know* how to pick out good ones or bad ones at the market now, and I am very strict about how long we keep them without using them, moreso than with other veggies.
And yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, I've had similar with retail. I've had everything from people getting mad that we're sold out of toys two days before Christmas to people not believing that our website (for a national chain!!!!!!) could *possibly* be out of sync from an individual store's inventory.