Many years ago I spent a summer waitressing at a famous, venerable, olde Boston restaurant. (We're talking 50 years ago. I don't kid around with the words "many years.") I will not name names here, as the restaurant remains in business, and I suspect - or at least fervently hope - that it is not the rathole it was during the Summer of 1970.
As a city dweller, I had, of course, seen rats. But not quite up close and personal, and never in the workplace.
At Ye Olde, if you looked closely, you could see ratholes all over the place: beneath the tables, in the halls, throughout the kitchen. And late in the evening, when the patrons had left and the "girls" were left with the clean up, out they'd come, marauding in their little packs.
Our closing up chores were simple and few: filling the salt and pepper shakers, sweeping food bits off the tables and chairs (onto the floor, where the real cleaning crew would see to them), and "coffee-ing" the tables. Coffee-ing degreased Ye Olde's wooden tables. It entailed pouring boiling hot coffee onto the tabletop and wiping it off with a napkin.
Anyway, the informal house rule was that, if you actually saw rats running the table, you could leave things for the lunch shift to take care of when they clocked in late the next morning. But the managers frowned on this practice, so we were encouraged to introduce our cleanup by hurling large, heavy soup spoons at the ratholes. When the rats heard the noise, they tended to bide their time. If one of the bolder rats decided to rear his ugly head, the night manager - either Mr. M. or Mr. L. - would swing into action, get out the house sidearm, and shoot at the rathole.
Occasionally, if there were only a few lingering diners, a rat would show up on the floor. It was a firing offense to scream when you saw a rat if there were customers around. I once had to stifle a scream when a rat ran over my toes as I was crossing into the main dining room from the side room that housed the service bar.
On a memorable occasion, a dish-boy known as The Animal reached into a sink to unplug it, and pulled out a drowned rat by the tail. So, yeah, if I were to tell you that you looked like a drowned rat, I know whereof I speak.
As far as I know, no one - patron or worker - was bitten while I was working at Ye Olde. Not so lucky were the four employees in a NYC Chipotle who were munched on by the "massive rodents" that have been plaguing the restaurant.
The besieged fast-casual Mexican joint on Broadway near West 169th Street in Washington Heights closed to customers indefinitely late last month, but only after rats chewed through the wiring of a computer system that handled orders, two employees told The Post.
In the meantime, those workers are still going into the store to clean, in an effort to keep the vermin at bay.
They say they’ve killed dozens of the rodents by stomping on them, smacking them with broom handles, dropping boxes on them and various other medieval methods of extermination. (Source: NY Post - where else?)
Oh. My. God. At least I never had to stomp a rat to death, or stickball one with a broom handle. And all this for what I'm pretty sure is minimum wage.
“It really started to take a toll on us,” said Melvin Paulino, a three-year veteran at the store who was bitten by a rat last Friday while cleaning. “We’re all scared, it’s pretty common that some of my co-workers will just start screaming out of the blue and we don’t know what’s happening. “It’s pure chaos every time a rat appears.”
It was bad enough running across the odd rat at Ye Olde - or having the odd rat running across you. I can't imaging if they were there in hordes, accompanied by screaming employees.
The rat problem at Chipotle (which, by the way, is still listed as having an "A" health rating from the city) began late last summer, when workers started finding bites taken out of avocados, holes in bags of rice.
The rats started to grow fat, multiply, become more assertive. Then they started attacking the employees. Even worse - from the Chipotle perspective anyway - they gnawed through wiring, crippling the electronic ordering system.
Anyway, the restaurant is closed for deep cleaning and location repairs. That, presumably, means figuring out where the rats are coming in from and plugging the holes. And/or doing whatever they need to do to keep them from swimming in through the plumbing.
Sure makes me happy I'm no longer playing the restaurant game.
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