Tweet
Haven't been posting as much as I intended to since I finally joined the site. Turns out that one of the advantages of working graveyard at TBGSITW, as I've been doing lately, means less contact with some of the stranger members of our clientele.
That was not the case at my last job. For several years I was a manager at a 24-hour Jack in the Box, and for two of those years I worked graveyard. At the time, if you wanted hot food to go after midnight, just about the only options in town were us, Denny's, and 7-Eleven, and so, especially on the weekends, the time period from about 1:30 AM to 4 AM was wall-to-wall drunks wandering out of the bars at last call, staggering into their vehicles, and shouting to themselves, "Eyyyyyyyyyy, lezz ged some JAGGINDABAHZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!"
This is one of the more memorable occasions where a customer's drunkenness got the better of their common sense. It was a Saturday night in 2005, around 3:30 in the morning, and the drive-thru was packed. (Thankfully we closed the lobby at midnight.) I was running the shift from the grill, with one employee on the drive-thru and another on the fryer.
SC pulls in and orders three ultimate cheeseburger combos, each with a different special order on the burger. When the drive-thru girl asks if that'll be all, he says that last time he came through he ordered the same thing and it had all been wrong, so the manager said he could have these combos for free. DT girl tells him to pull up to the window and asks me if I can verify that.
At this time, we had a very strict system for replacing orders - if someone calls in saying they have a bad order, the manager logs it in a book in the office and we tell them to bring their receipt on their next visit for a replacement. I check the book - no log entry for three ultimate cheeseburgers. When he gets to the window (and we can all tell at this point that he is very drunk indeed), DT girl asks him if he has a receipt - no dice. She tells him we can't give him that much food free of charge with no receipt and no verification and he demands to speak to a manager. I come up and ask him when all this occurred (some of the shift managers tended to slack when it came to logging complaints.) He says it happened forty-five minutes ago.
Red flag. I was here 45 minutes ago and so were my fellow crew. None of us remember such an order, we received no phone call, and in fact it's so recent that I can cycle back through the recent orders on the monitor and see that there's no such order. For that matter, his is the first order for three ultimate cheeseburgers on my entire shift (I tended to remember big orders like that because we cooked all the hamburger patties to order on graveyard, and cooking that many at once was a bitch.) I tell him flat-out that we haven't taken any orders like that and I can't replace his order.
That's when SC drops the other shoe, and declares; "I'm not leaving until you give me what I want!" He then turns off his engine and makes a production of sitting there and waiting for $20 worth of free food.
After giving him fair warning, I in turn make a big production of standing in front of the window, cordless phone in hand, while I dial police dispatch and tell them I have an inebriated man blocking the drive-thru lane at my restaurant, such that the customers behind him can't even leave the lane, and demanding free food, and that he had refused instructions to leave.
The nice thing about being the only place in town open at that hour is that it took the cops all of about three minutes to arrive, approach the man's vehicle, and order him to pull forward into the parking lot. They ended up arresting him not only for DUI and for trespassing (which it became after I told him to leave and he said no), but that he was additionally driving on a suspended license. His car remained sitting in the fire lane of our parking lot until the middle of the following afternoon when a tow truck took it away.
He never did get those cheeseburgers, either.
Bonus WTF: We're a drive-thru, not a bar
Another one from my Jack in the Box days. Customer pulls into the drive-thru at about 7 PM on a Saturday night and already sounds a little too drunk for his own good.
Cust.: "Can I have a Strawberry Jack?"
Me: "...Excuse me?"
Cust: "A Strawberry Jack!"
Me: "Do you mean a Sourdough Jack, sir?"
Cust: "No! The real ice cream Strawberry Jack!"
Me: "A strawberry shake?"
Cust: "Uhh... yeah."
I spent the rest of the night pondering his sanity and craving some sort of frozen concoction of strawberries and Tennessee whiskey.
That was not the case at my last job. For several years I was a manager at a 24-hour Jack in the Box, and for two of those years I worked graveyard. At the time, if you wanted hot food to go after midnight, just about the only options in town were us, Denny's, and 7-Eleven, and so, especially on the weekends, the time period from about 1:30 AM to 4 AM was wall-to-wall drunks wandering out of the bars at last call, staggering into their vehicles, and shouting to themselves, "Eyyyyyyyyyy, lezz ged some JAGGINDABAHZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!"
This is one of the more memorable occasions where a customer's drunkenness got the better of their common sense. It was a Saturday night in 2005, around 3:30 in the morning, and the drive-thru was packed. (Thankfully we closed the lobby at midnight.) I was running the shift from the grill, with one employee on the drive-thru and another on the fryer.
SC pulls in and orders three ultimate cheeseburger combos, each with a different special order on the burger. When the drive-thru girl asks if that'll be all, he says that last time he came through he ordered the same thing and it had all been wrong, so the manager said he could have these combos for free. DT girl tells him to pull up to the window and asks me if I can verify that.
At this time, we had a very strict system for replacing orders - if someone calls in saying they have a bad order, the manager logs it in a book in the office and we tell them to bring their receipt on their next visit for a replacement. I check the book - no log entry for three ultimate cheeseburgers. When he gets to the window (and we can all tell at this point that he is very drunk indeed), DT girl asks him if he has a receipt - no dice. She tells him we can't give him that much food free of charge with no receipt and no verification and he demands to speak to a manager. I come up and ask him when all this occurred (some of the shift managers tended to slack when it came to logging complaints.) He says it happened forty-five minutes ago.
Red flag. I was here 45 minutes ago and so were my fellow crew. None of us remember such an order, we received no phone call, and in fact it's so recent that I can cycle back through the recent orders on the monitor and see that there's no such order. For that matter, his is the first order for three ultimate cheeseburgers on my entire shift (I tended to remember big orders like that because we cooked all the hamburger patties to order on graveyard, and cooking that many at once was a bitch.) I tell him flat-out that we haven't taken any orders like that and I can't replace his order.
That's when SC drops the other shoe, and declares; "I'm not leaving until you give me what I want!" He then turns off his engine and makes a production of sitting there and waiting for $20 worth of free food.
After giving him fair warning, I in turn make a big production of standing in front of the window, cordless phone in hand, while I dial police dispatch and tell them I have an inebriated man blocking the drive-thru lane at my restaurant, such that the customers behind him can't even leave the lane, and demanding free food, and that he had refused instructions to leave.
The nice thing about being the only place in town open at that hour is that it took the cops all of about three minutes to arrive, approach the man's vehicle, and order him to pull forward into the parking lot. They ended up arresting him not only for DUI and for trespassing (which it became after I told him to leave and he said no), but that he was additionally driving on a suspended license. His car remained sitting in the fire lane of our parking lot until the middle of the following afternoon when a tow truck took it away.
He never did get those cheeseburgers, either.
Bonus WTF: We're a drive-thru, not a bar
Another one from my Jack in the Box days. Customer pulls into the drive-thru at about 7 PM on a Saturday night and already sounds a little too drunk for his own good.
Cust.: "Can I have a Strawberry Jack?"
Me: "...Excuse me?"
Cust: "A Strawberry Jack!"
Me: "Do you mean a Sourdough Jack, sir?"
Cust: "No! The real ice cream Strawberry Jack!"
Me: "A strawberry shake?"
Cust: "Uhh... yeah."
I spent the rest of the night pondering his sanity and craving some sort of frozen concoction of strawberries and Tennessee whiskey.
- for getting a dunk driver off the street. 
Comment