When customers don’t get the food or drinks they like to consume on a regular basis, there are bound to be some problems.

A cafeteria worker wrote the story below and talked about what happened when they were given directions by their boss that they knew were gonna backfire, but they had to do it anyway.

Read on and find out what went down.

Corporate knows what customers like.

“I work in food service, catering to a large cafeteria.

One of my responsibilities is to replace the giant boxes of soda concentrate which are hooked up to the dispensers in another room. Whenever the BokaBola or MesaMoisture runs low, I have to hook up a new box of the stuff so that the customers can have their delicious empty calories.

They know what they’re doing…

I’ve done this for long enough to know exactly which concentrates run out the fastest- our chief offender is MaidAid Lemonade, one of a very few non-carbonated beverages that gets mixed with water at a much higher concentration than other drinks (resulting in this sugary mess that could give hummingbirds diabetes).

It’s noteworthy that we actually had two kinds of drink dispensers- one kept in a large inline row that you’ve probably seen in every fast food place ever, and several standalone dispensers for our more specialty drinks.

About a year back, the Manager decided to swap out one of our drink mixes that was going out of stock (Whipton Spleen Tea) for a new product, which meant that we had to take down and rebrand one of our standalone dispensers for this new zero-calorie health drink- Yobei Tastyberry Healthwater.

That was fine and all, but trouble was on the horizon- see, the drink was a hit, as it was almost unique among all the available drinks in that it didn’t contain 700 calories in a glass, and thus there were a significant fraction of our customers who enjoyed taking shots of the nearly-flavorless Healthwater, which got the attention of Corporate.

See, Corporate was always looking for ways to cut costs. It’s what Corporate does. So, they decided, in their infinite wisdom, to swap out one of our heavy-duty inline dispenser slots for this new craze Tastyberry Healthwater.

This, despite the fact that we already had a perfectly functional standalone dispenser, and that we would need to swap out one of our high-volume products for this ‘Healthwater’ stuff.

This was getting complicated.

But the problems didn’t end there- we had very few inline dispensers that would mix their concentrate with water as opposed to carbonated soda. And carbonated soda is bitter.

So if you replaced one of the soda boxes with Healthwater concentrate, what you’d get is a bubbly cup of bad-tasting disappointment with a faint hint of whatever the hell Tastyberry is supposed to be.

So, Manager thought about it long and hard, and decided that the only thing to do was to swap out our MaidAid Lemonade with Yobei Tastyberry Healthwater.

I believed this to be monumentally dumb.

They tried to tell them!

I repeatedly told Manager this, but he wouldn’t have it. It was a command from Corporate, and Corporate knows what customers like. Corporate must be obeyed. So swap the Lemonade out for the Tastyberry Healthwater, and forget about my objections.

So I did, and I watched the chaos unfold.

The first step, of course, was flushing the line of Lemonade to make room for the Healthwater. This involved hours of me being paid to make circuits between the dining hall and the concentrate storage room, slowly siphoning out every bit of the Lemonade.

And those lines are not designed to change on a dime- the only reason they stop dispensing product when the bags run out is because the suction can’t pull the product out of the rigid tubes we use to transport the product from the concentrate room to the dispenser.

This was a long process.

There are gallons of that stuff hiding in the tubing. It takes a LOT of time to flush it all out. And once the lines were replaced, I then had to flush out all of the AIR, which would have sprayed our customers with a vaguely sugary shotgun of fluids being squirted out of the dispenser like a malfunctioning sprinkler.

All of which I was getting paid for, thank you very much.

Next up was the truly delightful detail of mix ratios. See, our little standalone dispensers had adjustable levels for the amount of concentrate as opposed to water, and the Tastyberry Healthwater stuff was a ratio of about 95% water to 5% concentrate.

But the Lemonade dispenser was an inline dispenser with a set ratio- which was more like 70% water to 30% concentrate, which was, to reiterate, the HIGHEST ratio of concentrate to water out of every dispenser we had.

So all the Healthwater stuff was coming out in this overflavored stream that was… not actually all that bad, in my opinion, but to anyone who disliked the taste of artificial sweetener, it was overpowering.

And finally, there was the crippling problem of stock.

See, Corporate, in their infinite wisdom, figured that despite putting the Healthwater on the inline dispensers, we probably wouldn’t need all that much more of the stuff.

So they kept delivering it to us in the same quantities as we’d been getting before. Every week, we’d get a 3-gallon box of concentrate to replace what had been chewed through. But here’s the clincher. Our MaidAid Lemonade concentrate comes in TWO boxes… of 5 gallons each. On an inline dispenser with six times the concentration of the standalone dispenser. Oh, and we didn’t have the money to rebrand the standalone dispenser, so it was taken down.

What a mess!

Which meant that every week, we would be completely out of Tastyberry Lifewater within a day of restocking… but we’d also get two more giant boxes of Lemonade concentrate that we had to put in storage, but couldn’t actually use.

It was glorious watching customer after customer lodge complaints with management that A: We didn’t have their favorite drink, B: the new drink tasted funny, and C: There was never any of the new drink in stock.

This went on for two months, until we had such a collection of Lemonade concentrate that we literally didn’t have anywhere else to store it. Oh, and apparently, Corporate had been running dry on the Tastyberry Healthwater stuff, too, because we stopped getting it in our weekly shipments about a month in.

Everyone knew this was a bad idea.

To say it was a complete farce does not do it justice. We were getting daily commentary about the stupidity of our selection.

I finally asked Manager if we should switch back to just serving our Lemonade. He reluctantly said yes. But we also didn’t have time to flush the lines. So I was instructed to just place the lemonade concentrate in there, and let the lines self-flush.

For weeks, we served this weird hybrid of Lemonade and Tastyberry Healthwater stuff until it was completely flushed out of the lines. I, personally, thought it was delicious.”

Reddit users spoke up.

This person shared a story.

Another individual had a lot to say.

And this Reddit user chimed in.

Sometimes, the folks on the corporate end of a business have no idea what’s going on.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.