Shadowing Practice: The Menace of Fast Food - Learn English Speaking with Video

So out of all the hundreds of different people I worked with over the few years I worked fast food, there's a couple people that really stick out that I still remember all these years later.

And one of those people was this one manager I had, we'll call him Jim.

And I feel like the one thing everybody who works in fast food can relate to is there's always

that one manager that has absolutely no chill.

And so these are some of the most memorable stories I have from my time working with Jim.

And a lot of the time working with him would be pretty normal, but you never knew when some type of situation was just gonna spawn out of nowhere.

Man's was unpredictable.

I mean, the possibility of an eventful shift was always on the table when you were working with Jim.

I mean, this man was the menace of fast food, to tell you the truth.

So I got a few stories from this guy that I probably won't forget for a long time, and you'll see why he was so memorable.

Like, this man would be raging at customers, raging at his employees, this man would be committing assault in the workplace.

I mean, you'll see what I'm talking about.

One memory that sticks out is this situation that happened this one night.

I remember it was pretty late at night, probably around 10pm or so, when this car with like 5 people in it pulls up to the drive through, and they weren't actually there to order food,

they were just there to mess around and be goofy.

They were making a bunch of noise, honking their horn.

Stupid, right?

But they were joking around, and we took it as a joke.

So my coworkers and I, we were having fun with it, talking back to them over the mics, playing along with it, yelling back at them.

It was honestly not a serious situation.

Everybody was having fun with it.

And besides, you already know nothing more interesting is happening.

I mean, we've been sweating, making fast food for the past 8 hours.

This is the first non-vanilla part of our day.

It was 10 at night.

They aren't holding up a line.

There's definitely nothing else going on.

We're all just standing around wiping off the same counter for the 8th time in a row.

If anything, this is actually a welcome surprise.

Something to make the shift more interesting.

I was just kind of standing there cleaning, listening to them go back and forth.

They continue honking their horn and yelling all this random stuff.

The people at the drive-thru are yelling stuff over the headset back at them.

And it was all in good fun.

It was not a serious situation.

And then all of a sudden, I hear Jim's voice come on over the headset, and he just goes in the most serious tone I've ever heard honk that horn one more time and see what happens.

And everybody kind of paused for a second.

We're like, whoa, Jim, coming out the gate with the negative energy.

It kind of caught us off guard because we thought everybody was having fun here.

And besides, if you give them that type of negative attention, you think they're actually gonna stop?

Nah, it's just gonna get worse.

And of course, this was the perfect opportunity, and they just played right into it.

They come out with the longest honk, and they're like, what was that old man?

You're not gonna do anything.

And Jim goes, honk that horn one more time, and I'm coming out there.

And of course, the response to that was again, just straight honks.

The sound of car honking is just flooding through every speaker in the kitchen.

And then all of a sudden, I hear the office door swing open.

Two seconds later, I see Jim making a beeline for the front doors.

I'm thinking to myself like, okay, this is escalating quickly.

I guess he was serious.

And we had camera monitors that showed a live feed of the drive-thru, and so of course, everybody is now watching to see what Jim's about to do.

And we see him waddle into the frame, and the best part was not only did we have the video, but they were right next to the drive-thru speaker, so we had the audio too.

And we could hear every word of their entire argument.

Everybody was crowded around the little drive-thru monitor, like we were all trying to watch a movie on somebody's laptop or something, and he's waving his arms all over the place,

just exploding in this fit of rage.

They continue honking the horn while he's trying to argue with them, and this is exactly what they wanted, to get a show out of the manager, and they got a whole primetime special.

His head was pretty much through their open window, like inside of their car, like Jim, you really gotta chill, you're not making the situation any better.

And I think at this point, Jim could kind of tell that he got played right into the position they wanted.

So I think in an attempt to try and get control of the situation again, he started making up this whole story about how he was gonna sue them

because they honked their horn so loud

that the sound of the horn through the headset traveled through his hearing aid and now he's deaf in his one ear.

And that made no sense because Jim didn't even have a hearing aid.

It was a story he just made up right there on the spot.

I guess to be like, aha, now I'm gonna sue you.

And we're all just looking around at each other like, what does this man Jim think he's doing?

Whatever the right way to handle this situation was, it's not like this.

I mean, there was never a situation to handle in the first place.

Everybody was chilling.

And they could tell that the story was obviously made up and that he was obviously not wearing a hearing aid.

And so they continued arguing back and forth for a bit longer.

And eventually the car just drove off.

And I get they were being obnoxious from Jim's point of view, but at a certain point, you gotta be the bigger man and just let it pass, not waddle out there, engage in a verbal argument,

make up a weird story about how you're gonna sue them for hearing loss.

Just such a random thing to come up with.

It was honestly just funny watching this whole thing unfold from the cameras

and seeing Jim go completely off the rails over this little thing.

I mean, I get that Jim thought they were being annoying, but this was just a classic example of Jim making a bad situation even worse.

Another good Jim memory I have

when he again just blew up the whole situation is

when he accidentally wasted the most insane amount of chicken fingers I've ever seen.

I don't even know how many hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of food it was.

So I was in the kitchen one night and me

and this one kid Nico were working the chicken fryers

and out of nowhere we just get slammed with customers

but it wasn't that uncommon I mean it was kind of a popular restaurant

so it wasn't anything we weren't used to so Nico

and I just start cooking more chicken doing our jobs

and out of nowhere Jim comes flying around the corner talking

a million miles a minute this dude's having like a panic

attack he's like oh my gosh do you guys see all these customers can you guys handle all of this

and we tell him like yeah we'll be good we got all this food we've got cooking over here.

You don't even need to stress, Jim.

We got you.

He looks at all the people pouring into the lobby.

He looks back.

There's like sweat pouring down his face.

He's like, I don't know.

That's a lot of customers.

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Are you guys sure?

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And before we could even give him an answer, he's like, hold on, I'll be right back.

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And then like 15 seconds later, he comes flying back around the corner with a spare cooking pan from the back, looking all worried.

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And I'm looking at him like, what you doing with a spare pan?

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We got plenty of food cooking.

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We don't need a third person to cook even more.

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And to his credit, there were a lot of customers that came kinda out of nowhere, but Jim would always do this anytime there were more than like two customers.

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He'd just enter panic mode and start stressing out.

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And I mean, I get that it's his responsibility to keep the restaurant running, but I knew right then and there, this man was about to massively overcompensate for the amount of food we needed.

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And he's like, no, you know what?

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New policy's starting right now.

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I need all of us to be nonstop cooking food and we're not stopping till I say so.

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And then he He immediately turns to the fryers and just starts going ham, rapid fire slinging chicken fingers into the oil by the dozens.

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Bits of flour and flour smoke is flying up everywhere.

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This man was acting like we needed to feed the entire city.

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Nico and I are looking at each other and this man is crazy.

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There's no way we're gonna need this much food.

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He looks back, he's like, I see way too much standing around right now.

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I said don't stop cooking chicken till I say so.

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And we're like, I don't know Jim, I mean I think we can take it slow.

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And he cuts us off.

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Like, no, see, this is why I need to be here.

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You guys don't know how to estimate the amount of food we need and this and that.

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So we're like, all right, all right, we'll shut up and do what you say.

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Just start cooking more chicken.

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And for like 20 minutes, the three of us were constantly filling up fryer after fryer, just stockpiling huge amounts of chicken working on overtime.

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This man Jim is like on crack.

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He won't let us stop making food.

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The pile of chicken fingers was really starting to get out of control, but he was still on we need to feed the entire city mode.

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And the crowd had been starting to die down by this point, and he eventually left the kitchen to go do something else.

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And before he walked out, he points to us, and I thought he was gonna tell us we could stop, but instead he's like, I better not see either of you stop cooking chicken for even one second.

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The crowds were starting to calm down, but Jim was not calming down.

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Like, we literally have basket after basket after basket of chicken fingers coming up, and you still want more?

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And I think he realized how much extra food we were about to have, because a few minutes later he comes back around the corner and starts analyzing his mistake.

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People are bringing over spare pans from the back

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because we ran out of space to store the chicken in all the regular places.

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There's mountains of chicken scattered everywhere.

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There's chicken overflowing onto the floor.

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Jim's like, all right, all right, good work everybody.

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We should be good for now.

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He's looking around at the 80,000 fingers he told us to drop.

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There's like some seven-year-old at the cash register.

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Like, what do you think, Jim?

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How much of a dent you think he's gonna make in this.

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Jim tried to play it off.

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He grabbed a few pieces off the top of one of the piles, ate two fingers off his thousand finger overdrop,

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probably trying to figure out how to explain to his boss why there was so much wasted food that day.

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There were piles of chicken everywhere.

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I had never seen so many chicken fingers in my life.

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In fact, we had this bucket that any wasted food gets thrown into, and there was a red stripe across it a little less than halfway up,

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and that was the maximum amount of food we were supposed to waste in a whole day.

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Like that would be a bad day.

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All those piles of chicken, they eventually went bad and we filled up that bucket like four times over.

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So we wasted like 10 times the limit for the entire day in like 30 minutes.

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All because Jim panicked

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and stormed into the kitchen all with his no chill we gotta drop a million fingers right now type energy.

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I don't know, sometimes it seemed like this man would just lose all sense of awareness.

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If a regular employee ever wasted that much food, that many hundreds of dollars of food, they were getting fired no question.

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And then other times, Jim would just do questionable things.

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Like I remember one morning, the delivery truck dropped off a bunch of boxes of chicken, but the expiration date on one of the boxes was old, like a day ago.

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I don't know if it was a mistake on the delivery company's part, or maybe the label was wrong.

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I don't know, but I asked Jim, I'm like, the date says it's expired.

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Do you want me to throw it out or what?

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And he just looks at it for a second and goes, nah, it'll be fine.

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Use that batch up.

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I was like, what?

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What do you mean it'll be fine?

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Like, what does that mean?

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Like, are you trying to give people food poisoning or what?

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I remember this one night.

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I thought Jim was going to find me and burn my house down with how angry he was with me.

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So they had this company policy, right?

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That if you had any sort of disciplinary issue, they would give you a write-up and they would keep track of it because if you got too many write-ups, you would get fired.

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I worked there for three years, never once got a write-up except on this one night where

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I got written up by Jim twice in the same night

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and he wrote a note to the general manager recommending I be fired immediately.

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Jim was not rocking with me on this night.

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And what happened was, I was preparing sauce cups with a partner my entire shift this night.

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For five hours, our job was just transferring sauce from these sauce containers to hundreds and hundreds of these little serving cups.

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And then you put all the little cups into buckets.

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That's all you do for hours and you had a certain quota you had to reach by the end of your shift.

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But Jim wanted us to reach the quota two hours early

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and turn the five hour shift into a three hour shift

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because I guess they had overscheduled the staff that week

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and needed to cut down on the number of hours they had to pay employees.

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So he asks us if we think we can be done by 7pm instead of 9pm

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and we were making good progress so we tell him yeah no problem we got you Jim don't even worry about it.

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So we're cruising along, we're on track to finish by Jim's deadline, we're like 50% finished after an hour and a half,

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and we had filled up all these buckets with sauce cups and the workstation was getting kind of crowded.

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So I tell Miguel, let's move these buckets into the walk-in, clear off our table, and then knock out the other half and get out of here.

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We'll finish early, we'll get to go home early, Jim gets to cut hours out of the schedule, everybody's happy, it's a win-win-win.

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And this is where the first problem came up when we were moving our finished buckets off the table, and Miguel decides to carry a stack of four buckets to the walk-in.

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They're like stacked above his head.

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And I'm walking behind him and the buckets, they're looking a little tipsy, but I honestly didn't think much of it.

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I'm just following him through the kitchen.

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And I guess there was this puddle of soapy water just chilling in the middle of the floor.

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Miguel's got buckets stacked over his head, so of course he's not gonna see it.

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And I noticed the puddle right as he walked up to it, but by then it was already too late.

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Bro, his foot hit the water.

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Next thing I know, this man is horizontal in the air, sauce buckets are flying everywhere, Miguel smacks the floor, the sauce buckets hit the ground,

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all four crack open, sauce cups start bouncing and flying and rolling all over the place, so there went an hour of work just on the floor.

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But it was kind of funny to be honest, everyone in the kitchen just started dying

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because this man Miguel was just horizontal in the air and is now laying in an ocean of sauce.

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But then Jim comes around the corner to see what all the commotion was

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and he did not think it was funny at all.

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Nah he was fuming bro talking about now you guys are

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behind schedule you gotta redo all these sauce cups you wasted all this product.

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He was not happy because he knows that we're probably not leaving early anymore.

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He goes you guys better be finished and walking out this restaurant not one second past your original schedule.

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So it took like 15 or 20 minutes to clean that whole mess up.

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A good chunk of our progress just got erased but soon enough we were back at it, but we're playing catch up now.

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So we're back to moving along and the station was getting kind of messy.

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So Miguel asked me to hold a sauce bucket

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so he can wipe off the table and as he went to pass me the bucket, he let go of it before I had a solid grip.

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So that was another bucket that we ended up having to redo.

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So that just extended the time we were gonna have to be there by even longer.

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But the worst of it hasn't even happened yet because the third problem came up when Miguel, most of this was Miguel being clumsy, but we drained the bucket we were pumping from,

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so Miguel goes to grab a new one from the cabinet underneath, and he takes it out, but before he gets it all the way up to the table, he drops this container also, and at first nothing seemed wrong,

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it was just sitting on the floor, like just pick it back up.

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But unknown to us, when the container hit the ground, it landed upright, but it was made out of plastic, so the entire bottom had cracked open, so when he picked it back up,

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it just started gushing sauce out everywhere.

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Like a sauce waterfall was just pouring out of this bucket.

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And Miguel was just standing there.

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He's like, what do I do?

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What do I do?

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He's just standing there panicking.

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Sauce is literally gushing out of the bottom.

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He didn't put it in the trash

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or even try to do anything to fix the mess that was just getting worse and worse.

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He just stood there and panicked and watched the whole thing spill all over the floor, the walls, everything.

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Like bro, there was sauce everywhere.

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The aftermath was brutal.

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You thought the first time was bad?

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Nah, that was nothing compared to this.

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There's just a layer of sauce covering the ground, spreading in like three different directions.

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And I knew it was over for us

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when I heard the office door swing open and I can hear Jim's keys rattling as he storms down the hallway.

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Jim looks at the floor, then looks back and he's just glaring at us because this was like the third spill tonight.

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We're definitely not finishing our shift on time.

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I mean Jim probably thought we were doing it on purpose at this point.

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He goes, give me one good reason I shouldn't fire both of you right now.

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It's completely silent and Miguel doesn't say anything.

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I don't know what to say.

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I was really just trying not to laugh because now was not the time to start laughing.

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But the situation was so goofy.

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We're standing there in this puddle of sauce that continues to spread across the floor.

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Jim is staring at us making me feel like this is some sort of showdown.

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And the clip of Miguel panicking with sauce spilling out everywhere just kept replaying in my head.

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I looked over at Miguel and saw this man's clothes just covered in sauce.

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I couldn't help but to let out that little nose snort

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that comes out when you're trying really hard to hold in your laugh but just can't quite do it.

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And me doing that made Miguel do the same.

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Jim starts going off again.

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He's mad as ever.

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He looks at us and is like, you know what?

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I'm gonna make sure tonight is the last night either of you ever step foot in this restaurant as employees ever again.

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And then walks back to the office and slams the door.

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So it took forever trying to clean up all this sauce.

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We probably ruined every mop in the restaurant trying to do it.

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By the time we cleaned it up, it was like 3 hours past the point Jim wanted us to leave, and the worst part was, the bucket he dropped was the last bucket of sauce we even had,

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because Miguel just dumped our last bucket on the floor, and all over himself.

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I checked the cabinet where we kept them, they were all gone, not one left.

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So we had to take like 45 minutes to whip up a whole nother batch of sauce from scratch, which is a whole separate process, and then keep going until we finally finish the quota for the night.

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The quota that we were scheduled to finish by 9, but Jim wanted it done by 7, and now it's like midnight.

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We spilled, I don't even know how much sauce on the floor at this point.

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Jim is furious with us, but it still gets worse, believe it or not.

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So right when we were finishing up, we finally got the sauces done.

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I don't even know what hour of the night or early morning it was at this point, but Jim was sweeping and mopping the floors by the cash registers, and he was just finishing them up.

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They were looking all clean and shiny, and right after I clocked out from my shift, I grabbed a Dr. Pepper to take home with me, and I turned around to walk out the door and just leave this night in the past,

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but one of my co-workers was for some reason walking backwards, so right when I turned around, neither of us could see each other, so I turned into him pretty forcefully.

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Jim is standing there above his shiny floors, mop still in hand, admiring his work, floors are sparkling clean,

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and the way we bumped into each other caused the cup of Dr. Pepper to fly up and out of my hand, and I swear I saw this in slow motion, bro.

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It went flying, came down, and busted open all over the floors Jim had just finished mopping.

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Yup, Jim is burning my house down tonight for sure.

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And it's not like it was even anybody's fault, it was just an unlucky situation.

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I mean, a Dr. Pepper on the floor isn't even that big of a deal, but combined with everything else that had already gone down that night,

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the fact that it was Jim who just cleaned the floors and me who spilled the Dr. Pepper, this specific Dr. Pepper on the floor was extra bad.

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So yeah, he wrote me up twice that night

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and I also found out later he wrote a note to the general manager asking him to fire both me and Miguel, but I guess the GM didn't go for that because I never did end up getting fired.

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Now the very last memory I ever had of Jim was the last day I saw him

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which was the day Jim actually got fired.

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That's right, oh how the turntables.

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Now Jim's the one needing to give one good reason why he shouldn't be fired. And basically, what Jim did to get fired was he got into an argument in the kitchen one day with this one kid.

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Ironically, it was actually with Nico from the time Jim told us to cook enough food to feed the entire city twice.

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And I don't know what they were arguing about, but one day I just hear Jim yelling at him about how he can't do his job, he's always messing up, and I walk into the kitchen to see what's going on,

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and they're all up in each other's faces and Nico goes, well then why don't you do it if you're so good at it?

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And then takes his apron off and sticks it out to Jim as if to say, you know, you do my job then if you think you're so good at it.

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And I guess that really set Jim off

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because he takes both his arms

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and just shoves his hands into Nico's shoulders with his full body weight sending him flying back, right there in the middle of the kitchen, right in front of everybody.

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And in addition to the fact that Jim was a tall, pretty big grown man, Nico was a skinny kid who was still in high school, So when I say he went flying back,

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he went flying back and ended up on his back on the floor.

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And obviously, you can't do that in a workplace, especially if you're the grown man manager doing it to your high school kid worker.

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And so yeah, Jim's boss, I don't know, someone at corporate or something, they fired good old Jim for that one.

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But I will say, it was never a stale day working with that man.

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There was always some sort of something happening.

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And that's going to be the end of this video.

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I hope you guys like the animation.

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I know this video took me a while to get out.

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It ended up being a lot longer than I first thought it would be, but I am working on hiring a team to help me with videos, so hopefully that'll help with getting videos out quicker in the future.

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But thank you guys for watching and for all the support, and I will see you in the next one.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: The Menace of Fast Food - Learn English Speaking with Video

Context & Background

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

What is the Shadowing Technique?