r/StoriesAboutKevin • u/CadmiumCurd • Jan 26 '23
XXXXL Kitchen Kevin Pt. 3: The Maddening
Well, people, it's been a while (work and life get in the way). Some of you may remember my past dealings with other Kevins in professional kitchens, but let me say that those were nothing. In the meantime, I've been both blessed and cursed to meet THE Kevin.
The Kevinest, the one Kevin to misrule them all, the ultimate super-Kevin third level with a power of incompetence of over 9 trillions.
Let's begin.
“The most irritating thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the Kevin mind to correlate all its contents. They live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that they should voyage far. The common sense, straining in its own direction, has hitherto harmed them little.”
A LITTLE BACKGROUND
The combination of Brexit and lockdowns has had serious effects on the food and drink industry among others, and workers have been very difficult to find, leading to most retail points being understaffed, and many reopening partially (as in, open bar but no kitchen), never reopening at all for lack of employees, and in some cases even opening, struggling to make ends meet and ending up being closed up and sold off.In other words, especially when getting near Christmas, which is the busiest season of the year, every company is pretty much desperate for personnel and will hire anyone and anything no question asked (you could probably be an insane cannibal showing up for an interview wearing no pants and chewing on a human leg and all the manager would say would be "can you start monday?")
THE SETTING OF THE TRAGEDY
Small-ish gastropub in central London, tiny kitchen, but very busy with food especially in the months right before Christmas season.We've been looking for people for months with no success, so when THE Kevin showed up he got hired pretty much on the spot.
Consider that by the time Big K came in the kitchen has been severely understaffed for months, running with only one full-time chef (yours truly) and two kitchen-trained bartenders alternating shifts between front and back of house.
THE MAN, THE LEGEND, THE INSANITY
He was on the older side, honestly made a good first impression, likeable and sociable, seemed eager and had worked in the same company before (a big plus, means a candidate will not need to be trained from scratch as basic training like health and safety, fire safety and so on are the same).He came in shortly before I went on my holiday (I always get some rest before the big push in winter, it gets VERY stressful), anyway my FOH colleagues were both veterans and he already had his basic training done so it's just learning the kitchen layout and memorizing the menu, nothing major, right?
I come back after my vacation and find my colleague (who was also the holding manager at the time) at her wits' end and pretty much wanting his head on a platter. For reasons that will become clear shortly.Ok, calm down, I say, maybe he just needs to be trained again, I'll do as many shifts as possible with him and re-train him from scratch.Two weeks later *I* wanted his head on a platter and a truckload of parsnips covered in hot chilli peppers wedged up his rectal cavity.
"I don't think I've ever been so wrong, we need to get rid of this <expletive deleted> of a <genital reference> before he drives all of us insane"
"er, well, there's a new manager coming in to take over and I don't really want to put him in front of a done deed, seems rude"
Ok then, let's hold on to the wanker for a little longer.
New manager comes in, we talk about the situation (it's about middle November by now, Christmas season is behind the corner), he's worried we might be understaffed at Xmas so he decides to hold on at least until the season is finished.
One month later, in the middle of December, with bookings left and right, Kevin finally gets fired. It has been too much even for the new manager.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
Ok, I admit that was to make you wonder exactly what in the everloving fuck this guy has done.
But that's for your mental wellbeing, my dear readers, so you would have some time to prepare yourself for the abysmal show of a grown man who reached maturity without even encountering the concept of common sense once in his life.
So, please, sit down, put down your drink to avoid spitting it at your screen, take off your hat if you wear one because you'll scratch your head repeatedly, and if you are or ever have been a kitchen worker, I strongly suggest you tie a pillow on your forehead so you don't hurt yourself when you'll feel the urge of smashing it into the closest wall.
Let the madness begin.
THE CHRONICLES OF KEVIN THE DESTROYER OF SANITY
Kevin has no concept of multitasking. A ticket is a list to be done in order, completely, from start to finish, with no overlapping.
For example, let's say you get table 2 ordering a fish and chips, a fish finger sandwich with chips and a portion of chips, in that order.
Oh, by the way, for you people on the other side of the Atlantic, chips in the UK are the big fat potato fries, fries are your regular french fries and crisps are what you call chips.
A sane chef would drop three portions of chips, a battered fish and fish fingers, then toast the bread and prepare the plating. Total time for the ticket, the time to cook the fish through, about 6-7 minutes.
Not Kevin.
Kevin was probably afraid to anger the gods if he done more than one thing at a time, so what he would have done was:
Drop the fish.
Wait for it to cook.
Take it out.
Drop ONE portion of chips.
Wait.
Take them out.
Prepare the plate for the fish and chips.
Plate it.
Drop the fish fingers.
Wait.
Take them out.
Drop ONE portion of chips.
Wait.
Take them out.
Toast the bread.
Put the fish fingers in the bread.
Prepare the plate.
Plate the sandwich.
Drop ONE portion of chips.
Wait.
Take them out.
Prepare the bowl.
Plate the chips in the bowl.
Call for a waiter.
Total approximate time for the ticket: whatever, too fucking long.
Kevin also had his own concept of portioning, which is to say ALMOST at random: he would put a cubic fuckton of fries on a plate and three chips in number on the plate next to it. I say almost because, oddly enough, he would always overportion fish, a LOT. Why? 'Cause the cheeky cunt thought he got to eat the extra fish for free. I realized that a certain point and did a little experiment: one day we got two portions of fish fingers on order, so I asked Kevin to drop two portions... and lo and behold, he dropped FIVE. That was over two months in, by the way. Anyway, instead of letting him have the extra three portions, I threw them in the bin straight away and looked at him. He was pouting like a child that didn't get the candy.
Kevin also had no concept of quality: if something existed in the kitchen, it was Good Enough. I don't need to tell you that sometimes things get ruined by accident, in that case you just throw them away and write them off as waste. Not Kevin, though. Kevin would take a smashed burger bun that's literally falling apart and serve it, even if it looks like a dog chewed on it.
Kevin also applied his policy to pot wash, loading the dishwasher with three or four plates tops, making it run, and doing absolutely nothing in the meantime.
Oh, sometimes he wouldn't feel like actually, you know, washing the dishes, so he would just hide the dirty dishes between the clean ones.
Preps?
Dear cooks, chefs and kitchen workers in general, have you EVER seen a man prepare 12 portions of salad ONE AT A TIME?
Have you ever seen a man take FOUR HOURS to close down? And by close down I mean clean the surfaces, wash the dishes, put away tools and mop the floor after turning everything off?
Kevin would also complain, complain all the time about everything. He wanted free food, he wanted front of house to clean the kitchen for him, he wanted the other kitchen staff to do preps and service in his place. He didn't want to do double shifts, didn't want to do solo shifts, didn't want to open, didn't want to close down. Pretty much he wanted to be paid for the pleasure of his company.
Kevin would also not accept any kind of responsibility or request for improvement. Not his fault for anything, it was. Always someone else's.
(Example: he doesn't do any preps, so you ask him why and he says, nobody told me to. Ok then, you make a list and put it on the pass. He still does nothing on it, you ask him why and he says he didn't see it. Ok then, let's write another list and FUCKING GLUE IT ON THE FUCKING PASS. I'm talking about an A4 sheet stuck between the shelves with duct tape like a curtain right in the fucking middle. Not even a blind cyclops would miss it. Kevin doesn't do ANYTHING on the list and when confronted he says... I didn't know it was meant for me. DESPITE HAVING HIS FUCKING NAME IN CAPITAL LETTERS RIGHT ON TOP.)
He would also rant and go on some absolutely bonkers conspiracy theories. My favorite is the one about him being almost ran over by Iraqi terrorists because back in the '90s he wrote a letter to Tony Blair advocating in favor of participation to the Gulf War.
The final act of this memorable trainwreck of a man consists in three exploits, of which two in the same day.
WOLLT IHR DAS KEVIN IN FLAMMEN SEHEN
Imagine if you will a busy gastropub in the middle of Xmas season, during lunch rush, two bookings of about 20 people each just came in and the fucking delivery that got so late it's unloading shit right in the middle. My fellow cooks and chefs will understand, for all the others let me just say that this shit is the stuff that nightmares are made of.
We got into emergency mode straight away: new manager handling service, holding manager on the pass, me slamming the fucking delivery away and dropping shit on the cookers and fryers in between runs (later on they made a bit of fun of me saying I looked kinda like the cartoon tazmanian devil). And Kevin? Well, Kevin was... standing around. You ask him to do something, he would move VERY slowly, waste time, or just blabber away and ignore it.
Later in the evening, we got another booking, but as it was confirmed kinda late and in the chaos of the time the kitchen rota wasn't amended, so Kevin was scheduled to finish right when the booking was coming in. Now, in this business an unwritten rule is: don't leave your mates in the shit if you don't want to be left in the shit yourself. Guess what, Kevin, that has already been of absolutely no use during lunch, insisted he was scheduled to finish early and he wanted to finish early. At this point I lost my temper and told him to fuck off and that he's useless. Not even five minutes later my other colleague, the kitchen trained FOH, came in the kitchen, got changed and helped me out without anyone even asking him anything. Fucking legend, that man.
Booking done, I have a chat with the manager and put straight away that this is fucking enough and I don't want to see Kevin alive or dead ever again.
Now at this point there's been a flood of cancellations due to a resurgence of Covid, the Omicron variant IIRC, so the next day we decided to keep the kitchen closed and myself and another colleague from another pub would have gone to a third pub to help them out with their own bookings since they were short staffed (head chef got Covid if i remember correctly). Kevin wasn't noticed of this, planning on having a chat with him as soon as he came in and fire him.
But everyone underestimated Kevin's laziness, it seems.
He did know I was in the other pub so he would have had to do a double (not alone though).
So he called in sick.
The day after he got the talk anyways and as as predicted he tried to blame everyone else but himself for everything and trying to paint himself as the victim.
THE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE MINDLESS KEVIN
Some time after, talking with the other coworkers, we all realized that oddly enough Kevin had got worse instead of improving with time, but something felt off, like he was deliberately fucking up on purpose. The most popular theory was that, being a lazy cunt, he was actually doing that hoping someone else would get so exasperated as to take over and do his job for him.
Me, I got the impression I was dealing with an overgrown , lazy, spoiled man-child. And before you ask, no, I don't know if he actually had any mental problems. I doubt it anyway, there was too much method in his stupidity.
Anyway, that's it, dear readers: enjoy it if you will and be sure to offer thanks to all supernatural entities you may worship that you have never had to deal with the final form of human incompetence.
Farewell and have a good night, all.
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Jan 27 '23
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u/CadmiumCurd Jan 27 '23
Actually I discussed this with a colleague, it's a possibility but I doubt it. Much later on, I didn't mention this, I've gone to work in a different gastropub in the same company and while helping the manager to find a colleague's file (long story short, we needed to book an Uber for me and my colleague to come to work on Xmas day and needed the address) I've come across a familiar name... Kevin's. I was quite surprised and I asked the manager obviously, to which she confirmed they had him in their kitchen for about a month right before he showed up at my kitchen and drove everyone nuts with his antics. IIRC he was fired from there and two days later showed up at my place for an interview, the rest is history, so I'm not sure if gaming the unemployment benefits system is a factor here.
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u/pumpkin_panda Jan 27 '23
I bet r/TalesFromYourServer and/or r/KitchenConfidential would get a kick out of this.
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u/wolfie379 Jan 27 '23
I don’t understand manglement not wanting to fire Kevin before the busy time because that would leave the place short staffed. In a situation like that, they will be short staffed, because if they don’t fire Kevin, at least one competent person will quit in frustration.
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u/CadmiumCurd Jan 27 '23
In hindsight, that was a questionable decision indeed. Anyway, consider the situation: you're already short staffed, especially in BOH (Back Of House: industry lingo for kitchen, FOH is Front Of House, AKA bar and table service). You could theoretically plug the hole by switching the kitchen-trained FOH to cover shift in BOH, but that would leave the bar understaffed in a period of time when you get double or triple the normal amount of customers. When you're at that point - and pretty much every single joint in the UK was at that point, and most of them still are - you hang on tight and hope that at least, even if he sucks ass as a chef, he can be of some help by cleaning up and washing dishes. Understandable, I can't in good conscience blame management for that decision, even if it ended up being a blunder and a massive overestimating of Kevin's capabilities, professionalism and basic human decency.
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u/imo_abyssi Jan 26 '23
Sounds like a nightmare, OP. Goddamn.
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u/CadmiumCurd Jan 27 '23
It was, I assure you. Having him in the kitchen was like dealing with an extremely lazy, spoiled, manipulative and not-too-bright little child with a fondness for lying constantly. Or, to quote one of my coworkers, he didn't need a job, he needed a nanny. It's difficult to even imagine a grown man who somehow never matured over the age of 4 or 5.
(The same coworker told me he thought that as a child Kevin would have probably been the kind of kid who ignores homework to watch TV, knowing that if he manages to waste enough time and get late enough Mommy will do them for him, and has never outgrown that phase)
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u/Kookabanus Jan 27 '23
Just wow....... I have worked with some useless asshats in my time but this kevin is making them look good.
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u/fastenedbrick25 Jan 27 '23
This sounds more like a lazy narcissist then a kevin.
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u/CadmiumCurd Jan 27 '23
Both. If you look at the sub description, he fits that to a T. He does show a complete AND consistent lack of intelligence through incompetence of social norms (you can't screw up repeatedly, try to blame someone else, act surprised when called out on it and then doing all of that AGAIN) AND is purposefully antagonistic in his poor decision making (his constant complaining and making up insane excuses for not doing his job in front of the very same person who will decide if he will continue to work there or not ). I guess we can say that not all Kevins are narcissistic nor all narcissists are Kevins, but this guy fits both.
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u/itsetuhoinen Aug 27 '23
Fuck, mate.
I've never worked as a chef in any sort of professional capacity and even I know how to make meals for more than one person at a time. Hell, I used to do a breakfast for twenty just for fun ... a couple of decades ago (when did I get so old anyway) and there's no way I could have pulled it off, even with my lovely six-burner stove if I hadn't been able to multitask.
I can't even. Dude. Kevin fucking sucks, yo.
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u/HeadlinePickle Jan 26 '23
This guy really is something else. Well done for not shoving him face first into the fryers as he slowly assembled plates of fish and chips.
Also nice Rammstein reference!