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If you work in the service industry, you’ll come away with a few stomach-churning war stories. Everyone in the biz encounters crooked bosses, crazed coworkers, and of course, plenty of wild and weird customers. To give you an idea of how bizarre some of these patrons can be, we’re serving up 10 of the “strangest” things that customers have ordered, according to service workers on Reddit.
Asking for a BLT without the bacon and tomato — essentially a lettuce sandwich — is a bit like asking a dealership for a car without an engine. Stupid as it may be, a Redditor who worked in the military said one of his compatriots “wasn’t kidding” when he ordered an L (as in lettuce) sandwich.
If you’re at a seafood restaurant and you don’t like fish, you might order a pasta, a steak, or a salad. But not if you’re Flavor Flav. According to a server who waited on the iconic rapper, Flav was content with a “plate of cucumbers.” And yes, he was wearing his signature clock.
When someone orders something odd, sometimes the best thing you can do is nod and walk away. That was this Redditor’s approach when a customer ordered a salad without “purple in it.” When the salad came, the man started “very nervously” picking out any purple bits. “I can never unsee purple things in my salad now,” the Redditor adds.
While some of these orders qualify as felony-level culinary crimes — and therefore deserve a little mockery — we feel for the guy in this Redditor’s story. It's an unenviable tale of a restaurant regular who poops his pants in a booth and asks for a tablecloth to cover up on the way out. Talk about a nightmare. But despite the embarrassing scene, the man has continued to patronize the restaurant for the past 15 years. The Redditor writes, “We never asked about getting the tablecloth back …”
Assuming you’ve lived your life like a true epicurean, you’ve likely tried a variety of lasagnas, from veggie pesto to chocolate Oreo (it exists). But few have tried the pasta dish liquified, except for the odd man in this story, who requested that the chef blend his lasagna.
Warm salads are a thing. In fact, we recommend them. That said, you shouldn’t microwave just any salad unless you love the idea of soggy, warm, and wilted lettuce. But these warm salad-enjoyers exist, according to one server, who writes that a woman kept sending her salad back until they microwaved the whole dang thing. “We microwaved her salad. She ate it. I don't know man,” they write.
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Chili dogs are already pretty weird, but one customer took it even further by subbing chicken noodle soup for the chili. After the first bite, she realized the error in her ways quickly, exclaiming, “Oh, I made a mistake.”
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One server shares that a customer asked to book a “shark adventure tour” … at a resort restaurant. “It had nothing to do with my job or even the hotel. Those tours were entirely separate businesses,” the Redditor continues. Even so, it worked out in the end. The waiter says that they went to guest services and booked the tour themselves, which earned them a $250 tip.
Related: Fast-Food Employees Dish on the Weirdest Customer Orders
Olive Garden is a wild place. They’ve got free breadsticks, post-meal mints, the whole shebang. But did you know that you can also ask to drink the leftover pepperoncini juice? That’s what one woman did on a weekly basis, according to a former Olive Garden employee. She’d have a seat, ask the waiter to empty the pepper juices into a glass, and down the lime-green cocktail.
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Something only vegetarians (and vegetarian-adjacent folks) will understand is how wilfully ignorant people can be about what it means to not eat meat. Someone will be serving you soup at a party, and when you ask if there’s meat in it, they’ll say: “No, just chicken broth.” Or, even worse, they’ll order a chicken pizza for a table of vegetarians, as the woman in this Redditor’s story did. When the vegetarians pushed back, she replied, “Chicken is vegetarian.”
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