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It won't shock you to find out that fast food restaurants can be terribly filthy places. That's especially true in the bathroom. Again, you've seen a fast food restaurant bathroom, you don't need my descriptions. Even with a team of employees (hopefully) taking shifts to keep the restrooms in presentable enough shape for public use, they inevitably fall into a state of disrepair at least 15 times per day. That means, all day long, employees are in and out of the bathroom, cleaning supplies in tow, fighting the dirtiest fight in the building.

That can cause problems when a manager starts doling out responsibilities to employees who are already handling multiple tasks. For example, at a burger joint I worked at very briefly, I saw an employee, fresh off of cleaning the restrooms (plural), asked by a manager to fill the shake machine.

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"So we can keep making moments like this."

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This involved emptying a 30-pound bag of yogurt or something like it into a bin at the bottom of the machine.

I was already a little put off when, instead of putting away the cleaning stuff and maybe tidying up his hands, my fellow employee just dropped the cleaning supplies where they were and went to retrieve the shake mix. After returning, things got worse. A failure to estimate the force with which liquid chocolate flows from a plastic bag caused an excessive amount of shake mix to spill onto the top of the bin (there was a lid on top with a hole in it where the liquid is poured in). What he did next haunts me to this day. Instead of grabbing a roll of paper towels to clean up the mess, this nasty animal took the same rag that he'd just been using to clean the bathroom, meaning it was full of cleaning products and disgusting bathroom filth, and used it to push the spilled shake mix back into the machine.

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Someone else actually spotted this and intervened before I had a chance to speak, but here's the thing: They didn't do anything about the shake machine. A refresher course in proper cleaning techniques might be all that's needed to get the employee in order, but who's going to see to removing the E. coli that's just been pushed into those frosty shakes? The answer to that question, unfortunately, was no one. If you happened to be at that restaurant on that day and ordered a chocolate shake, I'm sad to report that it was probably way more chocolate than you even realized.

I quit shortly after that incident. I'd love to tell you I did it out of protest or something, but honestly I just hated my job, just like damn near everyone else who works in fast food.

Adam hosts a podcast called Unpopular Opinion that you should check out right here. You should also be his friend on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.