Worst Restaurant Experience You Ever Had?

A Facebook question asked, “What Is the Worst Restaurant Experience You Ever Had?”.

People spewed horror stories. Terrible service, disgusting food, rats, roaches… It all made me want to Lysol my own kitchen and have dinner at home.

Growing up in this tourist town, both daughters waitressed as teenagers and came home with disgusting stories about the kitchens in some of our favorite spots. We still go to them anyway. I’ve managed to block the images from my mind. It’s just the way many kitchens are, I tell myself.

All in all, what I don’t know can’t necessarily hurt me…until I do know it, especially if it is an image which can’t be erased.

That’s how it was with one place back in my bachelor days.

I worked a graveyard shift at the Defense Intelligence Agency. A computer operator working with an IBM 360-65 mainframe that took up more floor space than a football field and had less power than a cheap cellphone does today.

Being DIA though, the place was not easy to get in and out of.

Arlington Hall Station was home to NSA and DIA. Very secure.

Driving up to the front gate to start my graveyard shift, the guards stopped me to check the pass on my front bumper and the ID on a chain around my neck. The ID lit up under a hand-held ultraviolet light they used to make sure it was legit.

If MP’s were satisfied, the gate lifted. Once parked in my assigned spot, cameras on tall metal poles swiveled their heads to follow me as I walked up to the entrance to the first perimeter, a 12-foot metal fence topped with concertina wire. That’s where a stationary camera eyed me menacingly as I pushed the speaker button beneath it, identifying myself as “Haller, DS5B2”.

A narrow 20-foot corridor lead me to the front door. There sat a guard behind thick glass. He checked my badge again with the ultraviolet light and looked up “Haller,DS5B2” to see that I was on the access list for that evening.

Once inside, the drab olive halls were paired with unlabeled, locked doors that ushered me down a long hallway. There, at another blank door, I pushed a red button and stood in front of another overhead camera and waved. On the inside, the guard had to recognize me in order for him to buzz the door open as I entered a small room with yet another locked door on the far side. If the guard saw that it was really just me and everything was OK, he reached under his desk and buzzed the far door.

Almost inside, standing in a brightly lit hall, I faced a huge steel door like a bank vault, a large rectangle as thick as a panel truck.  On the wall next to it was a cipher box mounted chest high. Four numbered keys allowed me to enter the code I had been given the day before. It changed every day.

A huge hiss as air blew out, 14 tons of steel slowly opened, air pressure equalized on both sides.

Once we were in, we were in for the night. We didn’t want to leave and have to go through that security gauntlet again until our shift was over.

In the middle of the night, when everyone was hungry, we always elected one guy to make the food run for all of us.

Jack-In-The-Box was the closest 24-hour place around, so Jack-In-The-Box it was. The same routine, night after night. A few times when I was the lucky courier, I picked up our orders at the drive through window from the same guy who was always there. The only person working at 3am. Cook, cashier, manager and worker all rolled into one. The night shift king of Jack-In-The-Box, with a girth and waddle that told me he was a food lover.

Yup, he was a food lover alright, but not in a good way

One quiet night after the run had been made and as we all sat around letting the food digest and prepare itself for the moist gauntlet that is peristalsis, one of the guys sat up in his chair with a start. Reading from a news article in the Washington Post, he said “Oh Shit, Listen to this!” “Area Jack-In-The-Box closed. Night Shift Employee Caught Masturbating on Food!”

That particular employee was our guy. He had worked there for about 6 months, almost exactly the same time that we had been buying food from him every night. There was reference to serving  “Local military” shops that ran 24-7 and needed to be fed…  

Someone had complained. They identified a smell in the special sauce that caused them to dissect their food. Two appropriately named Jumbo Jacks.

Newly installed kitchen surveillance cameras caught him adding his own secret ingredient to the special sauce.

The name "special sauce" took on new meaning.

After that, the guys concentrated on outlets for our boredom other than going out for food. We made sure to bring our own, and tried not to think about "Jack Off in the Box" anymore.

That's when we talked the female Airman, an Airwoman? into ditching her panties one night for a sit-down formal portrait after climbing up onto the giant copy machine. That monster spit out and collated briefings for the Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff each weekday morning. I think of that particular run of copies as “Pixilation’s For Peace”. Normally we would pull and wipe down the drum after each run as a security precaution. No ghost images. That night, in our enthusiastic gratitude for such good fortune, we forgot.

With enough distance, a very specific ghost image emerged from the pages of the briefing documents, long arms helped all the Joint Chiefs who alerted and started looking for it. Background dots morphed into man’s best friend.

All upper brain activity in the guys ceased for the day. Those were late Vietnam war years, but after turning the first few pages of their briefing, no war efforts were discussed.

The Joint Chiefs could have heard the chants of “No more war, no more war…” going on outside the Pentagon walls if their brains still worked, but they didn’t.

Our own crew had been simpatico with those protesters, so we like to think that we contributed our little part to the anti-war efforts that day.

Anyway, all of my crew started bringing their lunches and stopped going out for fast food completely.

Our Airwoman friend transferred out. No more possibility of playing a poker version of “Truth or Dare”.

One guy on our graveyard shift who had frequently expressed his love for Jack-In-the-Box “Special Sauce” as being the best burger and taco sauce he had ever tasted, never lived it down.

After much effort, he finally got himself a transfer. Guess he couldn't take the heat.

But yes, there[s my answer, worst restaurant experience...no question.

Now, forty five years later, at any restaurant anywhere, I wonder where that Jack-In-The-Box guy is working today.