Although I dont think there was any real danger, I was scared for my life. Today I rolled into work around 10ish and since it was Monday I was stuck on the fryline. (Tuesday, Wednesdday, Saturday I do sautee) After punching in and stocking up all the food and setting up the fryline I continued in my normal routine and began to turn on the fryers. I was struck by a surge of heat and a little extra flame coming out of the bottom of the "later" (what we call them) I thought nothing of it until I realized how much further the flames were shooting out than normal, I went to go shut it off and a drop of melted plastic splattered on my finger, leaving me a nice swollen blister. I thought that the later was just acting up so I went to the next one, only to be shocked by the same abnormal amount of flame and heat shooting from the bottom. I turned that one off and continued to move down the line, finding only 4 laters that worked normally and didnt try to engulf me. I told my manager about the situation, I found out that on Thursday one later had actually clogged up and caught on fire, they had to put it out with the extinguisher and everything. Feeling a little uneasy I decided not to clean out the laters like i normally would on a monday morning. Luckily it was monday, because if this had happened any other day of the week, the customers wouldnt get their food for about an hour with only 4 laters working. Newicks has 14 fryers, today we had 4 that were usable. However my favorite part of the day came when Jeff, the manager tried to convince me to clean them (in ordre to clean them we need to turn them on heat them up and empty them) not wanting to become a charred piece of flesh I refused and told him there is no way you are going to convince me to clean these today. After a bit I went on break, I came back to see that the laters had been cleaned by my co worker nick (both Mike and I had refused) I asked Nick if he was insane and he said Jeff had told him what to do.

"He said to just set them at 275 instead of 350, then he brought me the fire extinguisher from the back, placed it in front of the laters and said 'its right here if you need it and walked away'"

  posted by Darrell @ 2:32 AM