Corner-Call

I’m not really a writer, I just play one on TV. In real life, I work at one of those restaurants that claims to be a middle-of-the-road sit-down restaurant with globalized leanings and customer-focused values. We even sold wine and beer, once upon a time.

It’s a fast-food chain. A nicer one, but it’s still a fast food chain. Orders go out in six minutes or less, and if they don’t, well, I’m not high up enough to know what happens if we don’t. So we move fast. And, because the majority of us are teenagers or just-past-teenagers, we don’t have much awareness of the people around us. And because of that, we bump into each other quite a lot.

There’s a blind corner separating the back of the open kitchen from the dishwashing area, which also has a freezer and a whole rack of cleaning supplies and extra plastic dishes. Every other area in the restaurant is open, but this corner is only one person wide. So we all bump into each other.

We keep knives in the back. I personally haven’t seen any accidents in the transport of knives from back to kitchen, but I have to imagine they’ve happened.

So we have a system. When you approach the corner, you yell, “CORNER!” and if you hear someone yell “CORNER!” you get out of the way. And that works. Though, I’ve noticed that the longer a person works at this restaurant, the quieter they get about it. All of the managers, save maybe one, just say “corner,” if they say it at all. Hell, I’ve worked there a year, and while, when I do say it, I yell it, I don’t always say it. And we haven’t been really training new hires to say it like we used to when I started.

So now, I guess, we just have to wait until the inevitable accident happens.

-F