i could have DIED!

okay, so there are other important things i need to blog about, but this one is serious, dang it.

you already know how much i love my new job.  like, tons and tons.  and one of the fun perks is that the boss often buys us breakfast or lunch, which is fabulous, right?  food is definitely the fast track to my heart.  

this morning, one of the guys handed me a warm, foil-wrapped package.  i said "ooh, what's this?" thinking it was a breakfast burrito, and he said "it's a surprise!" grinned, and took off on some errands.  i usually set it aside till later, because the last thing i want is to have a mouth full of grub and then a customer walks in.  awkward.  but my co-worker, rock-ell2, said "it's a breakfast sandwich from corner bakery.  try to eat it while the eggs are still warm."  

so i did.  i took a few bites, munched happily, and on about the fourth bite, i chomped down on something really hard.  i thought maybe it was a bone of some sort (which was really stupid, considering there wasn't any meat in there), but i spit everything out into my hand and when i riffled through to figure out what it was, this is what i found:

 

surprise, indeed.  i flipped out.  "OHMYGODIFOUNDAFREAKINGRAZORINMYSANDWICH!" i shrieked to rock-ell2.  i washed it off, we looked at it for a few seconds, and then i showed it to the boss.  she immediately picked up the phone to call corner bakery.  

and apparently, they were less than sympathetic.  when she explained the situation to the manager on duty, he calmly said "oh, it must be from our tomato dicer."  and he said it with no hesitation - as if it had happened before.  mothereffer.  she asked him what he planned to do about it, and all she got was "oh, well, we'll just have to throw those eggs out."

all i could think of was, what if it'd been a little kid who might not have known to spit it out and swallowed it instead?  that shit could've torn up their insides and killed somebody!  as we were talking about it, one of our regular customers walked in with her little girl.  the boss filled her in on what had happened, and she flipped the fuck out (almost more than i did):  "we go there for breakfast every sunday!  we're never going there again.  they need to be shut down!"  

boss still had a sack full of about 3 or 4 more sandwiches, and she packed 'em up and hopped in the car to take them back and demand a full refund.  after she left, the customer called back and suggested that we report the incident to the health department.  i decided to call as soon as my shift ended, but no more than an hour later, i answered a phone call from our health inspector.  turns out she'd taken matters into her own hands and called them herself.  heh.  he asked me a few questions and then informed me that he was sending a representative over to talk to us.

about 15 minutes later, he showed up.  and as we started talking, boss walked in.  she'd spoken to the manager (or, more accurately, bitched his ass out in front of a restaurant full of customers), who had replaced the blade for the defective tomato dicer.  she asked him if it was just the one blade missing, and he pulled the thing out of the trash, showed it to her, and said "oh, no, there's a whole row missing."  

um, there were about twelve freaking blades per row on there.  what. the. fuck.

supposedly, he'd checked the dicer first thing that morning, and it was fine.  so there are eleven other people out there who might have swallowed a freaking razor blade.  awesome.

and he still didn't understand why she was so pissed off at him.  "ma'am, we threw the eggs out and sent the person who handled it home for the day.  those are already extreme measures.  what else do you want me to do?"

unbelievable.  so, for my local peeps out there, a warning:  DO NOT EAT AT CORNER BAKERY ON LAKE AVENUE IN PASADENA.  

i'm thankful that i didn't get hurt, but man, i'm really effing pissed off.  not that it happened - yeah, it was bad and super negligent on their part, but the worst of it is that manager's cavalier attitude towards it all.  even the health inspector said that it was a big deal - although he couldn't shut 'em down.  all he could do was go over there and give them a warning or some lame shit like that.

with their corporate office in texas, it's too late to call and tell them how much that store manager sucks.  but you better believe i'm on the phone first thing tomorrow.  hmph.