From amusement park ride malfunctions to dealing with customer theft: the workplace mishaps and misadventures of CGS students and faculty

By Elise Kim ‘25

Photo by Ila Reynolds-Kienbaum ‘27

*Warning: This article contains descriptions of human and animal feces and profanities.*

The day I had been waiting all summer for had finally arrived. My first day working a paid job. That morning I donned black leggings, one of the three Chipotle shirts given to me, and a black cap to match. As I examined my reflection in the mirror, I tried to shake off the nerves with some positive self-talk.

I told myself I had nothing to fear because I had successfully made it through the interview process, completed my weeklong online training, and practiced wrapping burritos at home with about a dozen flour tortillas. What could possibly go wrong? Throughout that summer, I quickly found out the answer to that question: Quite a lot. 

The cheery training videos with cartoon characters shouting out “Customize with a smile!” and “Be guest-obsessed!” did not prepare me for the large line of hungry, impatient customers that snaked around the building. Within the first half of my shift, I had managed to ruin four burritos, burn most of my fingers on the tortilla press, and send a whole box of crunchy tacos spilling onto the dirty floor. 

As the weeks went by I thankfully adjusted to the fast-paced nature of the work environment. I comforted myself with the belief that surely everyone experiences mistakes and mishaps when working any job. However, in the back of my mind, I had always been curious if my peers and adults in their youth had fared any better than me. 

Thus, driven by this burning curiosity and perhaps as a means of preserving my pride, I interviewed numerous Catlin Gabel School (CGS) students and faculty on their workplace mishaps and misadventures. 

According to the individuals I interviewed, the main challenge when working any sort of service job is interacting with customers on a daily basis. The most frustrating moments have come from dealing with unruly, rude, and angry customers. 

Such was the case for senior Ben Bergstrom who started working for Chipotle over the summer. Towards the end of his shift, he was making a burrito for a customer who ordered “every wet thing possible,” such as numerous sauces like pico de gallo, sour cream, and hot sauce. 

“I am wrapping it [the burrito], and of course, something is going to get out. He ordered the wettest burrito of all time,” said Bergstrom. “It’s like a sauce pile in a burrito.” 

The customer proceeded to yell at him shouting, “Are you serious?!??” and then demanded the burrito to be refolded which according to Bergstrom somewhat ruined his day. 

“A lot of people think they have a lot of authority over you because you’re just a Chipotle worker,” said Bergstrom. 

A similar experience happened to senior Leon Liu at his job as an Olive Garden host. When he wasn’t greeting customers at the front desk, he was working the phones taking calls from those looking to make a reservation or to-go orders. At around 10 pm one night, Liu picked up a call and recited the signature host greeting: “Lake Oswego Olive Garden. This is Leon. How may I help you?” 

It was someone wanting to place a to-go order, so Leon put the caller on hold and transferred the call to the to-go team. Where it all went wrong was the to-go team missed the call, leaving him on hold and pretty soon the phone rang again. Liu repeated his greeting; it was the same customer, this time a more urgent and annoyed tone creeping into his words. 

When the to-go team finally picked up the call, to their overall surprise, the customer requested to speak to the manager to complain. The customer was transferred and was left on hold with no response once more. Impatient and officially ticked off, the customer called the front desk for the third time. Again, having no idea it was the same customer, Leon repeated his greeting once more only to be met with a torrent of angry words on the other side of the line. 

“I am not playing any f*cking games anymore! I am trying to get some food for my f*cking kids and wife!” the customer furiously belted into the phone. “I am gonna come in there and fight you and you’re gonna see what’s up!” 

The situation was eventually resolved by the manager who spoke to the customer and personally hand-delivered his order. Meanwhile, Liu, while waiting to see what his manager would do, found it difficult to contain his nerves as he was all alone in the lobby, facing the front entrance of the restaurant: a sitting duck. Thankfully, his coworkers as well as senior Henry Beckerman (who also happened to be there at the time) agreed to stand ready in case Liu needed defending. 

He told Beckerman, “Henry, if I scream for help, you gotta come defend me,” to which Beckerman immediately agreed. 

On the other hand, some of Liu’s interactions with customers have only landed him in mildly embarrassing situations. 

One night, a mother and her daughter were just about to exit the restaurant. The daughter before leaving handed Liu folded notes and asked if he could hand them over to his female coworkers. He found his female coworkers who he describes as being much older “in their mid-twenties or thirties” and handed them the notes that, to Liu’s shock and embarrassment, read “You’re stunning!” and even “My mom and I think you’re beautiful!” 

He immediately attempted to explain that it was a customer who wrote the notes but was only made fun of by his female coworkers. They sarcastically replied, “Yeah, sure like that totally happened.” 

“I get it’s a positive memo. It’s meant to be empowering, but it looked like I was writing the notes to the servers and I was saying that I think they were stunning and beautiful,” said Liu. “It made it a little awkward.” 

Some interactions can only be described as bizarre. 

A man who appeared to be blind with his service dog in tow checked into the hostel senior Annika Sirtori was working at that summer. That entire day he loitered around the hostel asking staff to do various tasks for him like putting away his dishes. At first, the staff obliged as they thought he was incapable of doing such tasks due to his disability, but gradually, he persistently asked staff to “do very questionable things”. 

According to Sirtori, the man was only pretending to be blind which was a fact he boasted to those around the hostel and said, “Guys, guess what? My service dog isn’t a real service dog. It just has a collar on it.” This was an issue as non-service dogs aren’t allowed in the hostel and that entire time staff were going around doing tasks the man most likely could have done himself. 

Word quickly got around to her boss who came up to the man and asked him to leave the hostel. The man then sat down, blocking the front entrance, and said, “You guys are being discriminatory and I am not leaving.” 

The owner then retrieved his bags from his room, tossed them outside, and asked him once more to leave. After the second time the man refused to leave, the hostel ended up calling the police to which the man promptly left and was never seen again by Sirtori. 

Senior Isaac Robinette is used to dealing with all three of these situations at the Safeway he works at as a courtesy clerk on the corner of MLK Boulevard and Rosa Parks Way. Robinette describes MLK as “a hilarious street” filled with a “broad range of humans” that all come into Safeway. 

“I won’t go a shift without a memorable interaction,” said Robinette. 

Robinette’s examples of this “broad range of humans” that regularly come into the Safeway include “the Russian dude” who drives his car filled with chickens and doesn’t speak any English. Or “the homeless dude that comes in and asks if we can get him food and then threatens to kill the person behind the deli when he doesn’t get free fried chicken.” 

Robinette also described an 80-year-old woman who “comes in and basically announces to the whole store that she is a sex worker and stripper” and always wants a special discount for her profession. When the Safeway workers told her they won’t give her a discount because “that’s not a thing”, the woman got mad, claimed to be having a stroke, and demanded they order her a cab. She then requested a separate cab for her groceries.  

He also has had his fair share of troubles not just with human customers, but relating to animals as well. 

“One time I came in[to the store] and someone had walked their dog… while it was diarrheaing down the aisle,” said Robinette. “So then I had to clean up basically an aisle of dog poop, which was definitely interesting.” 

Another part of his job is to deliver the groceries ordered online to the customer's car. The woman had parked her car and upon opening her trunk a wave of a foul, sour stench assaulted his nostrils. 

The entire back seat which was once tan was now black and green with mold and rot. Catnip and cat food were sprinkled throughout the entire car. 

“It reeked of cat. It reeked so bad,” said Robinette. “I was concerned because it almost smelled like something was dead in the car.” 

Junior Andy Han who works at Menchies also had his fair share of encounters with furry critters. 

Han was emptying a particularly overflowing trash can one night just outside the store. This trash can had a domed metal exterior that required workers to open a wooden panel to change the trash can liner. As he opened the panel, he saw a “large gray mass moving extremely quickly”, which he immediately realized was a rat, an “abnormally large one.”

Image of a Norway rat, one that is identical to the one Han discovered in the trash can.

Courtesy of https://www.pinestatepest.com/pest-identification/profile/norway-rats

Both rat and teenage boy jumped in fright, the former jumping “very high” almost “shin knee height” before scattering “towards the West which…was Crumbl cookie,” perhaps to try his luck on another trash can. 

After some profanities were said, Han, a little shaken up, finished doing the trash and prayed to never see that rat ever again. 

Another issue workers have had to deal with has been customer theft. For Robinette theft is an everyday occurrence at his Safeway location however he is instructed to not take any action to stop it. 

“They [the Safeway company] would rather take the loss on the stuff than take the loss of someone getting stabbed or something over some orange juice,” said Robinette.  

He simply reports the theft to his managers who can then hopefully identify the thief on the video cameras. This seems to be the only course of action employees can take to minimize theft as that particular Safeway has no alarms and “nothing is locked up” because the Safeway company “doesn’t want to spend too much money on their location.” 

“The only way that you know if someone’s stealing is if they [customers] walk a cart through the doors without going through the checkout line,” said Robinette. “But no one really is dumb enough to do that.” 

According to Bergstrom, customers steal from Chipotle frequently. A common way is they will claim they forgot their wallet in their car, then grab the food off the counter and run off. No moment was as egregious as the day his Chipotle lost their “tip monkey”. 

Essentially the power at the store went out making it impossible to make orders, so in an effort to still make some money some of Bergstrom’s coworkers bought a stuffed monkey from the nearest Target. They placed it near their tip jar, naming it aptly their “tip monkey”. 

“Someone was ordering a bowl and then they just ran out with it [tip monkey],” said Berstrom with a chagrined expression on his face. “One of my managers…tried to get them but couldn’t, so we lost our tip monkey.” 

Things did not fare much better for Bergstrom later in his career, which leads us to another painful part of working a job: cleaning up after messes left by customers. While Bergstrom was working his shift, his manager pulled him aside and told him that “something had happened in the bathroom” that he should check out. The restroom door swung open, revealing a revolting and horrifying scene that would keep any employee tossing and turning in their bed at night. 

“I walk in and I am met with poop and pee on the wall, floor, mirror, and in the sink,” said Bergstrom. “If it was a percentile, maybe ten percent of it was in the toilet, ninety percent was everywhere else in the bathroom.” 

Once he finished processing the sight before him he nervously turned towards his manager, asking who would be cleaning up this mess to which the manager simply replied, “oh…you are.” Thus, according to Bergstrom, he set about “cleaning up diarrhea for an hour”, while pondering how he could be so unlucky to be working “the worst job ever.” 

“It was awful. There was just so much poop and pee,” said Bergstrom. “I think it really can’t get any worse than that.” 

Junior Kai Wolohan also dealt with bathroom-related accidents from the get-go as a CGS summer camp employee. It was towards the end of his second day working and he was watching a brother and his sister both in kindergarten. 

The trouble began when the brother “shat his pants.” Then, upon hearing the unfortunate news of his brother’s accident his sister said, “Oh! I am sorry about that!” and in an effort to console him subsequently pooped her own pants. 

“Luckily it was water week, so they both brought a change of clothes, but it was a little annoying…,” said Wolohan. “I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it.”

Along with the diarrheaing dog in the aisle, Robinette cleaned up his fair share of messes, most of them, thankfully for him, was not related to the bathroom. One instance involved a woman who really wanted to find Greek Tzatziki sauce, a white, somewhat runny, yogurt-based sauce. After helping her find a glass jar filled with Tzatziki sauce, the woman immediately tossed it into the cart, which then “smacks and explodes all over her kid and all over the ground.” 

“She’s frustrated with me. She’s frustrated with her kid for being in the way,” said Robinette. “It’s clearly her fault.” 

Nevertheless, once his manager got involved he ended up having to mop up “this Tzatziki mess.” 

Rick White, a math teacher at CGS, knows a thing or two about cleaning up messes while working a job at Subway during college. One morning he came into the store an hour before they were supposed to open to find the entire “place…a disaster.” 

“It looked like someone had broken in and made themselves sandwiches,” said White. “There’s chicken everywhere and mayo…It was gross.” 

Freaked out and worried he wouldn’t be able to open the store on time, he gave his boss (who was also the owner) a frantic call telling him that he believed someone had broken into the store. Turns out the culprit was the boss himself who had been out with his friends and made themselves Subway sandwiches “at midnight or one in the morning.” They didn’t end up opening on time. 

Sometimes, however, things at the workplace just go epically and suddenly wrong. For instance, sophomore Atharva Deepak who went from door to door to fundraise in various communities such as Beaverton for the Janelle Bynum campaign to present the 5th congressional district ran into issues with the door rather than the people that were behind it. Deepak knocked on one door with what he would call “a normal force” and the door came tumbling down in one fell swoop. 

“This is a perfectly normal home, in a perfectly normal suburb of Lake Oswego…It even had Halloween decorations,” said Deepak. “It was clear no one was home because well no one came to answer the door!” 

Standing in front of the exposed living room of this stranger’s home and having no idea what to do, he quickly left. 

Teachers are no exception to this phenomenon. Mark Amasuga, another member of the Math Department, worked as the ride operator for the terrifying “Sky Jump” Ride at Knott’s Berry Farm in Southern California in his youth. Amasuga described the ride as a “ride where you step into a small cage attached to a parachute and get pulled up approximately 200 feet” before dropping all the way down to the ground. 

Essentially the main challenge of operating the ride was there was a weight limit on the cage (around 350-400 pounds according to Amasuga), and if exceeded the “emergency lock” would be activated, leaving the poor riders stranded in the air terrified until employees “manually unlocked it and lowered them [riders] to the ground.” 

“Me being a dumb high schooler, I didn’t know how much people weighed by just looking at them, so I just let people go up in the chute pretty much no matter what,” said Amasuga. “Needless to say, more than a few people got stuck in the air because of my incompetence.” 

“I only worked there for a month or so since it was a summer job, but I doubt I would have made it much longer without being fired anyway,” said Amasuga. 

While Amasuga described it as “a fun job”, he admits that “teaching math is much easier than judging people’s weights.” 

Science teacher Bianca Nakayama battled it out with nature while she worked and ran a butterfly farm as a college student in the summer of 2001 in rural Luck, Wisconsin. 

Despite the cheery welcome sign that read “You’re in Luck!”, an ambiance of danger greeted Nakayama and her coworker, the only two that would live on the butterfly farm. 

“Our boss told us to just assume all other drivers on the road were drunk 100% of the time,” said Nakayama. “He also warned us not to hunt for butterflies in certain wooded areas because a lot of people were growing cannabis illegally and they would kill us on sight.” 

Her troubles did not stop there and instead came in the form of “an old deer hunting trailer…on an abandoned Christmas farm”; this is where they would stay. Little did they know there were several deadly surprises waiting for them. First, when they opened the fridge they were “met with the stench of death.” Apparently, hunters had forgotten a dead deer in there months before and the power wasn’t on in the fridge. 

On top of that, the water that came out of the taps was “a bright orange and stank of sulfur and iron”. In addition, one day an adult black bear attempted to get inside the trailer. Since the trailer did not have a lock, Nakayama and her coworkers were forced to brace themselves against the door until the bear left. 

“There was a huge tornado that ripped whole trees out of the ground in our front yard and nearly blew our trailer to Oz,” said Nakayama. “The next town to the north of us was completely obliterated by the tornado, though thankfully nobody died.” 

“I clearly got out of there alive, but it was a little more harrowing than it needed to be,” said Nakayama. 

Despite initial struggles and challenges, many stated they eventually settled into the routine and even found some silver linings. 

Robinette broadened his viewpoint on the world at Safeway which strikes a “stark contrast from going to Catlin”. He explained how for him his major anxiety is schoolwork, while the majority of his customers are scared they won’t “bring food home for their families or pay this month’s rent.”

Some advice those I interviewed would give to someone going into their first job was to keep a good attitude and to stay open-minded. 

“You have to be really patient with people because…the general consensus is that people are nice. Most people aren’t that nice,” said Bergstrom. “Being overly friendly and nice is important.” 

Liu also stated that patience is key to working any job. “Don’t get frustrated when you don’t understand things immediately,” said Liu. “It’ll be a very new experience at first, but you’ll get used to it.”