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I think I was about 12 years old at the time and I was in a ponderosa restaurant with my parents. I walked up to the buffet to a container full of spaghetti I saw an employee put in minutes earlier. Looking into the spaghetti I noticed a black cockroach the size of a dime. I don’t think I ate again that day, and no I didn’t tell anyone about it at the time.
I’ve worked in restaurants for over 5 years, and that experience at Ponderosa as a patron was the worst I’ve ever seen. I have never in the workplace seen any of the horror stories of food being picked up off the floor or being served. Frankly I’m quite glad I never worked in any such place with standards so low.
Worst thing I ever did working in food services? I was working at a Boston Market and preparing the chicken for broiling. The chickens are taken out of the box they are shipped in, dipped into a marinade then are stored in the cooler to marinade for a minimum number of hours. I would always take the first chicken out of the box, prop her up then dip her in the marinade last. I think I would imagine that I was torturing the poor chicken forcing her to witness all the other chickens get drowned and have their ribs cracked in my hands. I don’t think that way now, so I’ll just assume I behaved that way because I was a teenager. Anyway, the whole process of taking 40 chickens out of a box dipping in marinade then storing into a large container couldn’t have taken more than 20 minutes. Hopefully that 20 minutes exposure from being packed in ice to sitting out exposed didn’t do much harm.
Strangely enough years later I picked up some chicken for my ex-wife from the same store I previously worked at and she was diagnosed with Salmonella. She had a serous bought with colitis weeks earlier. The doctors were hesitant to say, but that episode nearly killed her.
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