Customers should understand that they can’t always be right!

This girl shares how a customer at her restaurant made unusual requests and how she taught them a lesson by complying!

Check out the full story.

..But you still have 17 seconds left on your timer!!

I’m not exactly proud of this one because I can kind of see where the customer came from, but I think those of you who have dealt with condescending customers before can appreciate it for what it was.

She explains how the job works…

So I supervised a mom n pop restaurant for several years that dealt specifically with Shrimp and Fish. Outside of cleaning and prepping the stuff, the main deal was cooking it in several big ol’ fryers.

It’s involved work, but it’s not hard work.

Just stick the basket of food in the fryer and set a timer for 3 minutes, and when it comes out just bag it up and give it to the customer.

This is where it gets interesting…

Easy work, though it gets a bit complicated on let’s say a busy day like a Friday, where we’d do anywhere between $1-1.3k during the 6 hour shift, or maybe $1.5-1.7k if it was really busy.

See, that’s a normal busy Friday.

When it’s Lent season, business would boom significantly, like we’d do $5-7k during the Friday shifts. So yeah, BUSY.

She knows she can’t lose too much time with prepping!

When it’s that busy, you can’t exactly rely on timers as much, because there’s so much food going in and out of the fryers, the temperature fluctuates, so you got to eyeball it.

I’ll have food burning at 2.5 minutes, or some food taking up to 4 minutes to “look right”.

So here’s where the malicious compliance comes in: During a lent Friday night dinner rush, we’ll get 100’s of people coming into a shop that’s probably smaller than a middle-class living room, I’m talking like the waiting area on the other side of the counter was probably 20ft by 7ft, so it can get pretty cramped.

UH OH…

I have my register person taking orders and making bags, and pushing them along the line while my weigh table people can weigh out the food so I can start cooking them.

When the order is done I’ll shove it in a bag and yell either the name or the order and someone in the crowd will come grab it and be on their way. It’s a very intimate setup.

So I got a counter full of about 20+ bags, each bag with a different order, and this one bag gets to me and it said “Cook shrimp an extra minute” or something to that affect.

That’s INSANE!

Now like I said, the fryers cook funny when there’s that much food going in and out, so using my “years of shrimp frying experience”, I extrapolate in my head what the food should look like if cooked for that long under normal conditions, and cook it until it looks like that.

I pull the food up, and I hear an “Ahem” from behind me, and I look, and this lady apparently followed her bag down the line, waited for me to drop the food, and set her own timer.

She said with a weird “gotcha” attitude while looking at her own timer, “Yeah, you need to cook that for an extra 45 seconds”.

She did what the customer asked!

At this point her food was already looking too done, but she interrupted my flow and gave me an attitude, so I blurted out “OH, OK” and set a timer for 45 seconds and put it on the counter.

I bagged some other people’s food, and I hear the lady behind me again, apparently with a little less teeth to her words this time “Oh, I think it’s done now…” and I grab my timer that had I set right in front of her, looked at it, and yelled, with an equally condescending weird “gotcha” attitude, “Oh, but you still have 17 seconds left!” and smacked it down and waited until timer went off.

Things got tense!

17 seconds can feel like a long time in those kinds of situations.

Finally the timer went off, I grabbed her food, it looked burnt; I bagged it up and gave it to her and said “Here you go, miss! Enjoy the rest of your day!”.

She muttered a thank you and walked off, and my coworkers and customers had a little laugh about it. Never got a complaint.

She’s dicey about the situation!

Now don’t get me wrong, I get it; As a customer I can be finicky sometimes too, but the problem was I WAS honoring her request, but in a way she didn’t understand because there’s a bunch of variables at play that only an experienced fryer cook would get.

I feel bad, but at the same time, I don’t appreciate anyone giving me an attitude, and I’ve never been a “customer is always right” kind of person anyways.

YIKES! That’s one funny story!

Why wouldn’t the customer request something nicely?

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user knows the customer got what they deserved!

This user shares how working in a restaurant is like!

This user knows we should just let people do their job!

This user knows the customer needs to understand some dynamics!

This user understands how fryers work!

Someone’s being really compliant here!

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.