It's easy to get shocked and grossed out by it, feel the gag reflex kick in, in tandem with your skin crawling and your stomach turning. News last week that two idiots working for Dominos Pizza in North Carolina had videotaped themselves doing unsanitary things to food (sneezing and passing gas on sandwiches, stuffing cheese up their noses) and presumably serving it to customers sent shock waves through the country for a short period of time. The man and woman were brainless enough to post their shenanigans on YouTube, where the video was watched by thousands of disgusted viewers. More than one viewer apparently recognized the workers and the store where this was going on, and so started the media storm. Within a few hours, Kristy Lynn Hammonds, 31, and Michael Anthony Setzer, 32, found themselves fired from their jobs and in jail, facing state felony charges of serving contaminated food.
Released on bail, the two individuals have apologized and stated that their behavior was merely a prank to kill time and that the food in question was never served to anyone. The incident has become a nightmare for the Dominos corporation. For all pizza places really, particularly ones featuring take-out only. Such establishments already face a constant uphill battle distancing themselves from the image held by many that two greasy-haired cretins farting, blowing snot and giggling stupidly for the results are potential management material in places like this. Factor in their take-out operation...where you don't dine in, you don't sit down, soak in the vibe of the place and have a waitress bring you food and drinks and angle for tips with her bright smile; you just pick up your food up and leave with little or no communication...and it's easy to see why a video like this would make people shudder (if not vomit), and leave Dominos scrambling for damage control. The world we live in, where not only do we read and/or hear about what happened, but get to actually see the video, which doubtless will never be removed from the Internet completely, makes the damage seem almost irreparable.
Whether we're dining out or cooking for ourselves and each other, little constitutes more primal an experience than our consumption of food. Men employ their skills in the kitchen as a prelude to amorous advances (er...cook for their date), because it is a subtle, emotionally intimate thing to do. Not so intimate when we eat out, of course, but nevertheless the same principle applies. We, as human beings, feed and are fed, and most of our social interaction centers around food. We like it this way. We don't want to think of this phenomenon being tainted, either literally or metaphorically; we don't like to be reminded of the fact that whenever we go out to eat, whether picking up pizza and chicken wings for the big game, a Friday fish fry, trying hibachi for the first time, or at some chef extraordinaire's four star with the family to celebrate someone's graduation or gammy and gamp's 50th wedding anniversary, we take our culinary lives in our hands. Particularly at fast food places, but even at nicer restaurants...the potential for something to happen - two line cooks secretly spitting in the ranch sauce as a joke, or, potentially, something worse - is there.
It's an unsettling thought, yet most of us know how to grudgingly live with that potential. We get rattled when videos like this surface and remind us of how vulnerable we all are.
However, having lingered in and out of the (mostly fast) food service industry for almost 20 years now, having held every position possible amongst its minimum wage ranks, from dishwasher and delivery driver in the old days to manager and part-owner in recent years, I must say, in defense of those who do this work, whether making a career out of it or just earning a few bucks to have on the weekends, that I have never seen this type of behavior in any place I have worked.
I've never met an employee who would do something so awful. I've known plenty of bad employees, the kind who are never going to make sanitation their highest priority, maybe don't wash their hands as often as they should, or inadvertently sneeze or scratch themselves and then must be told to wash their hands, but never anyone who would derive so self-indulgent a laugh from acting at the expense of someone's right to clean, sanitary food.
I would be mindful, always, of your experience in any restaurant. But not paranoid. Dominos is scrambling to cover its bases, but they are right in the statement they issued. These two idiots DON'T represent the "the hard work performed by the 125,000 men and women working for Domino's."
Or any restaurant I have ever worked in.
