Work Stories #1: "Playing With Food"

Seeing as I spend 20 hours or so a week at work, a large amount of stories generate from me being there, some are funny, some make me cringe when I remember them, and the rest make me laugh. This particular story comes from my first few weeks at my job.

I'm a teenager, so naturally I work at a retail job since I'm poor and couldn't get a job with a family friend sitting on my ass texting all day. I work at Panera Bread. For those who don't know, its a 'fast casual' restaurant, meaning fast food, but slightly higher class then your average restaurant. We specialize in bread, but we sell more soup, sandwiches and salads than anything. We also sell coffee and coffee drinks, and this story involves our 'Frozen' drinks, which is a blended coffee drink with whip cream, pretty much identical to a Frap.

I was in training, and it was my second or third week on the job, and at Panera, that means you still know nothing at all (cause there is so much to know). I was assigned to train 'Barista', meaning coffee drinks, and seeing as it was September, people were still buying cold drinks. Now, this one particularly large lady ordered a 'Frozen Mocha', which I proceeded to make. However, it was my third one ever, and I was staring at the chart that we have taped to the wall right by the blenders, trying to figure out how to make the damn drink again.

According to the chart, a Frozen Mocha involves this:
1 cup ice
Base mix
3 pumps choclate
Blend
whip cream top
choclate sauce topping

This means that first you fill the cup up to the top with ice from the ice bin under the counter, using the scoop to keep the ice level with the top of the cup, then take the pitcher of base mix (a solution of 'mediterranian blend, whatever the fuck that is, and 7 half and halfs into a giant container) and fill it to the top of the panera logo on the cup. Then you dump that into a container made for the blender, and push on the choclate sauce pump 3 times into the blender container, which is a feat in itself since the damn pumps take so much pressure just to force them down once. Then you put it into the blender, press 'setting 3', which you use for every different blended drink (all four of them). Then you hit the container against the counter twice, if you even hope to start to get the mixture out of the container. After using a careful technique of putting the container at a precise angle as to have the mixture flow out in the cup and not all over the counter and your hand, you finally have 1/2 of the drink completed.

Now here is where the story continues: my trainer (who actually was not a trainer) and my manager (Carlos, who I will talk about later) were watching me as I fumbled through the making of the drink, laughing all the while instead of helping me. Now here comes the hard part of the Frozen drinks: the whip cream. Unless the can of whip cream being used is freshly opened, you are garunteed to get half-assed whip cream that makes the drink look like shit, and there is also a technique for spreading the whip cream that they purposefully omitted from my training to play a prank on me. So when I went to put the whip cream on the drink, I managed to only get half of the drink covered in whip cream, and it was lopsided as well. My trainer Vince and manager Carlos were laughing with me after viewing my epic failure, as I attempted to move the whip cream over with the nozzle of the can.

That was where I went wrong.

The lady began to yell at me these words exactly, which I will never forget in my entire life:

'Who do you think you are, playing with MY food? Now you can make it again. You should know better.' she barked.

Me, not being used to being barked at by angry customers, quickly turned around from her angry face and muttered 'YOU know better.'

To this day I do not know if she heard me or not. All i know is Vince went 'Oohh...' and took some steps back. Sam, the person at the register, said she was distracting the lady saying I was new and offering her free cookies and shit, so I don't know if she heard or not. I went into the back and stayed there for 30 minutes, red-faced, with my face in my palms.