The first five years I worked at Jack in the Box, the restaurant was franchised to a man named Dennis Earls and his wife, Lisa.  Dennis and Lisa were Certified Public Accountants; I learned a great deal from them. One of the trivia-type lessons I learned from Dennis is that a mistake in which someone transposes a set of numbers will always result in an “error number” that is divisible by 9.

     Dennis visited the restaurants that he owned more often than Lisa.  He was a good and decent man, and a lot of fun to be around.  As he assisted us working the grill station, which he did often, he would sing (in his very loud voice) “I found my thrill, on the Jack in the Box grill” (sung to the tune of Blueberry Hill by Fats Domino).  Would always bring a smile; those of use who worked for Dennis still mention this, almost 20 years later.

    Late one March, I decided that I was going to pull a funny prank on Dennis for April Fool’s Day, one of my favorite “holidays”.  I obtained a cassette taped recording of “American Fast Food” by Randy Stonehill and sent it to Dennis.  Not sure if the prank was appreciated much, but had I been able to foresee what would happen in coming years, I might not have played the prank at all, due to some of the lyrics:

    AMERICAN FAST FOOD

Words and Music by Randy Stonehill



American fast food, what a stupid way to die

American fast food, order me the jumbo fries

Oh, oh, it's easy

It's so easy and it's trouble free

It's quick and disposable, just like me

If I don't stop eating this greasy American fast food



Well, we're undernourished, but we're overfed

And we're munching on the burger with the whitebread

And we're sucking up the sugar in a milkshake

Till we slip into depression with a big headache

And our arteries are crying out, "give us a break"



American fast food, what a stupid way to die

American fast food, you kiss your old age goodbye

Oh, oh, it's easy

It's so easy and it's trouble free

It's quick and disposable, just like me

If I don't stop eating this greasy American fast food



You won't have to embalm me when my life is through

There are so many preservatives in what I eat

The job's being done right now for you



"Can I take you order, please?"

"A cheeseburger, fries, and a big chocolate float."



It's prefab junk at an exorbitant price

And it's bound to make you nauseous if you look at it twice

But they're selling you by telling you it's food that's fun

When it tastes like cardboard

It chews like sponge

'cause it's really only garbage on a sesame bun



American fast food, what a stupid way to die

American fast food, order me the chili-size

Oh, oh, it's easy

It's so easy and it's trouble free

It's quick and disposable, just like me

If I don't stop eating this greasy American

I don't stop eating this greasy American fast food.

The video of the song can be found on YouTube.

Click here to see the video.

A couple years down the road, people actually did die from eating American Fast Food.  At Jack in the Box.

As I was going through the mail one day late in the year 1990, I noticed one memo that seemed important.  Although at the time my restaurant was franchised, this memo was sent from Jack in the Box’s parent company, Foodmaker, Inc (now Jack in the Box, Inc).  The memo stated that it was in regards to an incident that had happened in one of the restaurants in the Phoenix, AZ area.  The company stressed that we read the memo to all of the members of our crew and to let them know that Jack in the Box does not condone such activity.  The looks I received when I read this note to the crew still make me giggle some.  Why the company would think that it was beneficial to “plant this seed” into every mind in the company, I will never know.  This is what the memo said:

     A 20-year-old fast-food worker has been arrested after he allegedly blew his nose into a hamburger that he served to a Phoenix police officer and then laughed about it.

     George J. Kuehme, who had been on the job for less than a week, reportedly told a co-worker, ''That's what the cop gets'' as he tainted the food, police said.

     Kuehme, of the 2400 block of East Willetta Street, was accused by police of aggravated assault, adding a harmful substance to food and disorderly conduct. He was being held at a Maricopa County jail in lieu of $3,425 bail.

     ''This is like pulling a gun on an officer,'' said Sgt. Kevin Robinson, a Phoenix police spokesman. ''He intentionally tried to injure or provoke the officer.''

     Kuehme, who declined to be interviewed Tuesday, would face up to 45 months in prison if he were charged formally and convicted of the two felonies and one misdemeanor police are recommending to prosecutors.

     The incident occurred about 8:30 p.m. Monday when Officers Gary Underhill and David Duron placed an order at the drive-through window at Jack in the Box, 1001 N. 24th St., police said.

     The officers left with their food, responded to a forgery call then sat down to their meals, police said.

     Underhill reportedly took three bites into his hamburger when he noticed ''nasal mucus'' on his hands and face, according to Officer Leo Speliopoulos, a police spokesman.

     ''It was a repugnant act,'' Speliopoulos said.

     Underhill and Duron returned to the restaurant and spoke to the shift manager, Aaron Gulsarry, who confronted Kuehme, police said.

     Kuehme reportedly admitted the prank but offered no reason for his action, authorities said. He was immediately fired by Gulsarry.

     ''We are shocked and horrified at the information reported by the officer,'' said Jan McLane Rieger, a spokeswoman at Jack in the Box corporate headquarters in San Diego.

     The restaurant closed early Monday night as a result of ''the commotion'' caused by the arrest, she said.

     Underhill complained of stomach pains after the meal and expressed concern about catching communicable diseases, Duron wrote in his report.

     Underhill, however, required no medical treatment.

     Copyright:

(c) 1990, Phoenix Newspapers Inc.

http://tafkac.org/food/burger_spit.html

 Watch Jack (in the Box) doing "Cops"

Funny Video

The robber.  Entry five

One evening I was home surfing the web when I heard a knock on the door.  I opened it to see Carlos, one of my hardest working and most dependable employees, standing there. 

     “We tried to call you but couldn’t get through”, he said

     “I am sorry; I was online” (we only had dial up), I answered

     “We just got robbed” he tells me “The police need the security video”

     “WHAT?!?!?” I screamed 

I grabbed my car keys and raced the mile and a half to meet the police at Jack in the Box.  I give them the video tape from the machine, and then attempted to piece together what had happened. 

Captain Green, from the Aberdeen Police Department, was off duty and was in the drive thru with his daughter, getting dinner.  Captain Green wasn’t watching the transactions on the inside of the restaurant, but his daughter was.  She saw something very odd, and alerted her dad.  Her father, ever the policeman, quickly figured out what was happening.

One of the more “colorful” people in the area decided to make a quick buck.  Walking along the sidewalk in the dark in his pajama bottoms and bare feet, he figured he could go into Jack in the Box, reach across the counter, and take whatever money he could when the register was opened.  He got $20.  Maria and Khase, two of the employees, immediately gave chase.  They chased the man down the street.

The man (whose name I do not recall) was subdued by the police and arrested.  Maria and Khase never were able to catch this thief; however the danger of their actions was not taken lightly.  They were warned never to chase a robber or attempt to be a hero.  The rest of the crew was reminded of the policies regarding robberies. 

The story was written up in the paper the following day.  The fact that the employees gave chase was not omitted.  Maria and Khase were also warned by the district Manager, Tony Downey, never to make such a dangerous decision again.

A couple weeks later, I received the court papers for this robber in the mail.  I cannot recall how much “time” the young man got for the robbery, but I do know that he was ordered never to go near Jack in the Box or Mike (the employee working the counter at the time) for the rest of his natural life.  That’s what $20 bought for this young man. 

Here is what The Daily World, our local AP newspaper, wrote up about the story:



By Levi Pulkkinen



Daily World writer



After four blocks, Capt. John Green had his man.



First in his car, the final block on foot, the Aberdeen Police officer chased down a 31-year-old Shelton man suspected of robbing the Jack In The Box drive-in last night. Minutes before, the pajama-clad man allegedly grabbed money out of a server’s hand at Bridges restaurant. Little money was taken at either restaurant.



For Capt. Green, the chase began in the Jack In The Box drive-thru. It was just after 6:30 and he’d just picked his daughter up from dance class. They were there for tacos and milkshakes.



My daughter’s the one who alerted me to him, he said today. I didn’t even notice him at first.



The girl saw a man dive over the restaurant’s counter and reach for money in the cash drawer. Green pulled his car out of the drive-thru just as a barefoot man in plaid pajamas burst from the restaurant, a pair of Jack In The Box employees on his heels.

Initially, Green only planned to shadow the man, calling 911 with his cell phone and sticking with the suspect until on-duty officers got there. But when a darkened, erratically driven pickup truck joined the pursuit of the robber, Green felt he had to take action.

Normally, you just want to be a good witness, the captain said. I had observed the subject and was fairly sure he was unarmed. I only got involved because of the threat to public safety. Someone was bound to get in a collision.

Green told the restaurant employees to flag down the pickup truck, then left his car and called to the robber.

He just looked at me and kept running, Green said. He still had the money clutched in his hand. (But) he was tired and he was barefoot. He’d already been running for three blocks and I was fresh.

The captain’s daughter waited in the car. We talk about this kind of thing. She did exactly what she was supposed to do.

Green nabbed the suspect near the corner of Wishkah and South I. On-duty police arrived shortly thereafter.

Upon entering Bridges, the robber pulled his shirt over his head, Capt. Dave Johnson said.

The man confronted the hostess near the register, demanding cash and implying that he had a weapon.

When the hostess told him she couldn’t open the restaurant’s safe, the man snatched $40 from a server headed for the register, Johnson said.

     The captain said police believe the man, now jailed in Aberdeen, fled a nearby drug and alcohol rehabilitation center moments before the robberies.

Johnson said the suspect’s criminal record is extensive. The man has been arrested 23 times for various offenses, including robbery, the captain said. 

 

At Jack in the Box, the “maintenance person” is a person who ensures that the building and the premises are clean and who does simple tasks, like filtering and changing the shortening used in the deep fryers.  For a short time, the full time maintenance person was a young man with a peculiar name:  Aqualica.  He was obviously of Asian descent.

I asked him once what country he was from and he told me he had been born on a boat in the middle of the ocean.  He either didn’t know or didn’t want to tell me what heritage his parents had.  I let it drop.

It wasn’t very long before my assistant manager, Kerri, was complaining that Aqualica was saying odd things to her.  He called her his “daughter” and told her that he had thousands of children all over Europe.  (He was only in his twenties at this time.)  I had to tell him to stop saying stuff to her like that.

One morning, Aqualica had his nametag changed to “Emmanuel”.  I asked him why.  He said that was his name.  The next week, it was something different.  I told him to pick a name and stick with it.  I was NOT about to revise what I called him every other day.  I didn’t care which name it was, but I needed him to be consistent.  Shirly, one of the other crew members, said she like Emmanuel better; “Aqualica” made her think of “Aqua Lung”.

A couple weeks later, Aqualica was supposed to be at work at 6am.  He didn’t show, and he didn’t call.  He finally came in at about 8:30.  I asked him what had happened.  He said that he was in his house, looking out his front window, when all of a sudden,  some aliens showed up.  They took him away…who knows where?  He finally got away from them, and as soon as he could, he came to work.   This happened several times; however, the story changed from aliens taking Aqualica away, to God interfering with his day.

These odd incidents were becoming more and more frequent, and the young man wasn’t ceasing to say things to my assistant.  I had to make a decision.  His actions were alarming, and I had 30 other people to protect.  I decided that we needed to “part ways”.

A year or so later, I was reading the local “court cases” in our daily Associated Press newspaper, The Daily World, when I saw a headline that made me curious:  “God speaks to the jury, too”.  Turns out that this same young man, Aqualica, had taken after someone with a large tool (if I remember right, it was a heavy crescent wrench) and hit them over the head multiple times.  Apparently, he tried to make the court believe that God had told him to do this.  The jury wasn’t buying it, and he was convicted. 

A few years later, Jack in the Box introduced a new set of videos to show to new hires at Orientation.  One of the videos was how to recognize the signs of, and how to prevent, violence in the workplace.  That video could have been a manual of all the things we dealt with when Aqualica worked there.  The video even specified that if a person tells us that “God or Aliens” have told them to do something, beware.   At that point, we could look back on what had happened and laugh, because we were no longer in danger.  This was the confirmation I needed, however, to know that I had done the right thing with Aqualica, for the protection of the crew and the customers.

Jack in the Box in Aberdeen sits at the intersection at the foot (the offramp) of the Chehalis River Bridge, a large, steep bridge over a large river that runs through the town.  Occasionally, an individual would come to the front counter and inquire as to whether anybody inside had witnessed a fender-bender that had happened in the intersection.  The individual claims to have had their brakes fail; causing them not to be able to stop.  I don’t remember a time when anyone had actually been a witness.

One day, as I was working at the grill station near the back of the restaurant, I heard a loud crunch.  Barbara, the shift manager who was working the drive thru started to scream “call 911!!”  “call 911!”.  I ran up to look at what had happened.  In the overflow water that was standing in the drive thru lane because of the clogged storm drain, I saw the unconscious body of a woman.  Her face was swollen beyond recognition.  I turned and ran to the office.  Sean, a crew member, got to the phone before me.  He dialed 911. 

Apparently, it rang several times before being picked up.  It seemed like an eternity had passed.  Sean finally started talking to the dispatcher, and then asked me questions about what was happening.  (The dispatcher needed information, so she/he could get the right kind of help.)  I screamed “Tell them to hurry up; she’s drowning!!”

In the melee that followed, I knew that I had to lock the restaurant.  We could not serve anybody during this emergency.  The door along the main street could only be locked from the outside; the lock “core” matched the restaurant keys only on the outside.  I made my way to the door and when I got there, looked down in shock.  There was yet another body lying there, unconscious…across the doorway.  The body of a young man.  Shaken, I leaned over to lock the door. 

After the lock-up, I went to peruse the entire situation that had unfolded in our drive thru.  I saw an older model green car, resting on the brick window ledge.  The entire front of the car was suspended in the air.  There was the body of a woman with a swollen face, in the water in the drive thru.  An unconscious man lying across the doorway.   I could tell that had the building not been made out of brick, there would have been serious structural damage, and possibly injuries to even more people.

It wasn’t long before emergency personnel were on the scene.  The police questioned all of us.  It wasn’t until later that I learned what had happened.  A teenaged boy, on his lunch break from High School was heading back to the school.  He claims that his breaks failed when he neared the intersection at the end of the bridge.  He hit two pedestrians who were on the sidewalk in front of the building and landed with his car hanging from the window ledge in the drive thru lane. 

We found out later that both of the young people who were hit had died.  The police seized the car for forensic testing on the brake system.  They questioned all of us.  Someone overheard Kaye, a shift supervisor, tell another worker that she told the police that she hadn’t seen anything, because the memories of the flying bodies sickened her and she couldn’t talk about it.  I remember letting Rhys (pronounced “Reese”) Davis, disc jockey from the town’s radio station and local celebrity, in to the office to use the telephone to call his radio station. 

A few weeks later, a representative from Buick handed me his business card and asked me if anybody had witnessed the accident.  Buick would be liable for the deaths of the two pedestrians if the brakes truly had failed.  I told them I thought Kay had seen it, but she denied any knowledge of what had taken place.

The police’s testing on the brake system came back inconclusive.  No one could tell whether they had actually failed or not.  Rumors circulated for a time.  Rumors that the driver had been at his friend’s house, smoking pot right before the accident.  Rumors that it was because the driver’s father was a city employee that he “walked”.  Rumors that he had challenged another teen to a race at the top of the bridge, immediately before the crash.

I learned that the young man who had been hit in the accident is the grandson of “R”, a very lovely older woman who is a close friend of some very good friends of mine.  My friends told me recently that “R” is still devastated by the accident, and that she will sometimes talk about her grandson who passed away that day.

The following year, when the business passed hands from franchise back to the Jack in the Box corporation, my new supervisor, District Manager Linda S, asked me why the hedge lining the drive thru looked so weird.  I told her about the accident.  “Thanks Dennis”, she said out loud.  Dennis was the former franchisee, and she was expressing disdain because he had not had the hedge repaired.

Fifteen years later, the damage to the hedge and to the building is still apparent.  The hedge never grew back right, and there is still a deep “V” shape near the end of it.  The building still has a small piece missing.  Jack in the Box never fixed it, and anyone who knows about the accident knows why it is like that.  I often wonder what “R” thinks when she sees it.  My husband took pictures two days ago of the hedge, the building, the bridge and the intersection.  I put them onto a picture page, which you can view here:

http://angelasdiscountmarket.com/photos.html

After this fateful accident, I never once heard another person claim to have had their brakes fail while coming off the bridge into the intersection.  This accident was the very last time anyone ever said that.