Restaurants: Home to Junkies and Seagulls

Why is it that every restaurant has its surplus of junkies and seagulls?

Seriously, I have worked in the restaurant business for over 6 years now (divided evenly between 2 separate restaurants) and I have dealt with numerous fellow employees that suffer from the urge to junk, as well as the urge to eat other people's left-over junk.

Whether it's the alcoholic employee that shows up to work half-in-the-wrapper; breath, a ferocious mixture of dewars and tobacco, or the drug addict junkie that runs up to the bathroom midshift to get his torpid fix, there never seems to be a shortage of sub-human restaurant employees.

Actually, showing up to the restaurant hammered nowadays seems only to be the recreational, acceptable thing to do. What's more radical is to show up to work in a swirl of Oxycontin-induced lethargy (mostly heroine though because it's vastly cheaper), cheeks sunken in with a dermis made tawny and sallow, and bloodshot eyes that roll like bowling balls into the back of one's head.

These people downright disgust me. And what's worse is that their presence in the restaurant creates a viral hot-zone. Yeah, let me share spoons with a crackhead.

How do you spell hadgojsgpad? I'm sorry-- that was supposed to be H-E-P-A-T-I-T-I-S  C.

I mean do you want some junkie handling your food?? Most definitely not!

And did you ever stop to think what happens to your left-overs when you hand them over to the junkies and seagulls (sometimes one in the same)?

Well, all too often I notice, among my travels throughout the kitchen, the junkie-seagull/seagull gnawing away at the detritus of saliva-drizzled crab cakes, scallops, shrimp, steaks, and lobsters.

Now, the sordid human it takes to engage in this type of pigging-out isn't exactly concerned with etiquette--as you can imagine--and so inhales this delicious fare using nothing other than his grimy, filthy fingers.

Mmhmm, finger-lickin' good!

And because they are in such a rush so as to avoid detection by other normal human beings, they skedaddle out of the kitchen rarely ever cleaning those grimy, plague-bearing phalanges.

Keep in mind those are the same fingers that typically garnish your drinks, handle your silverware, and touch your money! Ah, YIKES!!!

Makes you wonder, doesn't it?