Oops this has kind of turned ridiculously lengthy, due to me accidentally using this an opportunity for self-therapy LOL.

When I worked at Chipotle, I'd never felt the need to fight customers because I was already well-versed in the art of providing passive-aggressive customer service from my previous job. Plus, my default energetic-sunny-robotic customer service mask was a good shield for deflecting most sources of external emotional damage. But there was this one lady/ incident who made me snap and I just about cried during the ordeal.

I don't remember too well because it was a while ago, but basically it was a super crazy Saturday lunch rush. I'd been dealing with ongoing wrist and elbow tendonitis (due to having worked line... yeah I'm weaksauce LOL), and was assigned to cash that day. One full-shift morning crew member had called out, so I didn't have anybody to do Expo/Check Dining. And the managers were busy catching up on leftover work from opening, it seems.

I'd worked weekend lunches before (my location was in a shopping center, so weekends had the highest traffic), but that one was particularly insane. I was ringing out customers as quickly as possible to keep the line moving, but would get pulled away by customers to restock utensils and/or clean tables while I still had other customers waiting on me...which caused the line to back up even more. I don't remember why we didn't have the Digital Make Line that day, but I also remember having to package all the online orders, and dealing with a never-ending river of Doordash drivers.

Eventually, the customer line ended up insanely backed up, no matter how quickly I tried to work. And no other crew members were available to help out with Expo or Checking Dining for even a little bit. But there was still a large Doordash order that had been sitting on the line for a while, waiting to be packaged, and the driver had been waiting in-store a while. (I had been ringing out customers non-stop, waiting for a even the briefest of pauses so I could get to packaging that online order.) It was taking up a good amount of surface area on the line, so the best course of action was to package it and send Mr. Doordash on his way. But alas, the non-stop line of in-store customers was non-stop. I thought, screw it, the line of customers is never going to end anyway so I need to take care of Mr. Doordash's order.

However, an early-middle-aged lady who was like 4th in line and waiting to pay, saw me start packaging, and yelled at me exclaiming, "My food is getting cold!" I was so shocked that I aborted mission and decided to ring out the line until just after her, to eliminate the risk she would escalate. After I rang out only two people, Mr. Doordash agitatedly walks up to the cash register, presumably about to ask why I stopped preparing his order, and I accidentally snap at him sharply, saying "I'm sorry. I'm doing my best." It was at this moment I was THISCLOSE to running away and crying. I guess Mr. Doordash could sense that because he backed off.

I felt so violated when like an hour or so later, that lady came up to me to touch my shoulder and give a fake-ass apology while I was in the middle of frantically checking the dining area, which predictably, was a hot mess after that insane rush. She said that she normally wasn't like that, she must've been hangry, and was sorry. I don't remember my reply, but it was likely something non-committal, to match her non-committal apology. It kind of felt like she was only "apologizing" to protect her ego or something. There was no sincerity in her words, so I was baffled about why she felt the need to look for me after she finished eating. In retrospect, maybe she was afraid I'd report her to my boss and she semi-regularly ate the restaurant, or something.