sorry in advance for format, typos, etc, i’m on mobile.

sometime last week i came in at 5 am and my shift put me on simultaneous DTO and DTR, which normally is not an issue as it’s usually pretty dead around that time but for whatever reason i was slammed. i rung up my first person at the window and turned around and realized that nobody was on bar, so i asked who was making my drinks and my shift said i had to make them too.

i don’t know if this is company-wide, but i was told by my SM that if we are at DTR or handling cash/cards in any way that we’re not allowed to touch drinks for any reason other than to hand them out to customers. no adding whip, no lidding even. so i said, “i thought that wasn’t allowed” and he basically told me to just get it done because he had my two other coworkers doing other things and couldn’t spare one of them or even himself. :/

so i felt like i had no choice but to basically run drive solo, which pre-covid was a mild inconvenience at worst but because of the way things are right now my anxiety was through the roof. i debated washing my hands after every transaction but i felt like it would be overkill and take a ton of time so i settled for sanitizing in between each one.

my one constant thought was that MOST of these customers were on their way to their jobs at the hospital down the street, so i was all but a vector to transfer the virus between them, myself, and the older men getting their pikes. i also felt responsible for potentially contaminating the hot bar, cold bar, and brewer. i don’t know how rational that thought actually is, but i really would rather be safe than sorry and i hate that my shift put me in that position when our SM clearly told us what the protocol was.

i told this to a friend and they said i should report this or go to my SM with it. this shift is normally very well liked around here, and he was one of my favorites to work with before this happened. while i would hate to damage his standing with this job, i think the public’s health is kind of a crazy thing to risk over some coffee. i don’t know what my next step should be or if i should do anything at all.