2009 honda civic enter code radio

1933-1945:Dr.Wernicke at some point under the Nazi regime conjures an early manifestation of the Walride 1945:Nazi Scientists are hired by the OSS under Operation Paperclip 1950s and 60s:Project MKUltra is commenced by the CIA which aided by Murkoff Corporation which also has the trials of the Reagents. 2009:Murkoff reopens Mount Massive under the guise of charity Sometime after 2009:Radio towers are built near the town of temple gate 2013:The Mount Massive Incident occurs due to the Walrider manifesting. Miles Upshur enters thanks to an anonymous tip from Waylon Park. The incident climaxes when Miles terminates Billy Hope and the Walrider, gets shot but is now the new host. Waylon escapes and leaks footage because of a man named Simon Peacock 2014:Blake and Lynn Langermann crash in Temple Gate because of one of the radio towers. Blake looks for Lynn and slowly goes insane, his mind breaking finally during the final flash, he is found by Murkoff teams

I've got a 2019 Honda Civic Sport (2.0L CVT) with 26k miles and sometimes when I'm accelerating from a stop I feel a bit of a lag and the engine is warm. It feels like a moment of a second or two before the car feels like it engages. It isn't consistently having the issue and the car isn't throwing any codes. Anything I should do? Should I change the transmission fluid?

First/Previous/Next
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Chapter 3 Part 1
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They always said that you never dreamed in cryogenic sleep. Which was true. It was \impossible to dream with your entire being frozen to negative temperatures, body flooded with preservation medications so ice crystals wouldn't form in the cell walls or a host of other complications that would otherwise kill a person. What they neglected to tell you was the dreams you had when thawing out and waking up.
The dreams a person experienced while undergoing this thawing process were always intense too. As vivid as reality as it was sometimes reported. No one knew why. Whatever it was; whether it was the combination of drugs, the brain trying to understand the trauma it had just experienced or even the soul catching up with the universe as some more spiritualist elements theorised, without fail the dreams were the most intense someone could experience. For her, this time, they were far more than just intense.
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Her eyes darted under her eyelids as the ghosts of energy bolts from aeons past darted in her memory. She heard the screams at the shaking of each dust filled rumble in her head. Her ears barely registered the dulled hum of ancient machinery fulfilling vital life sustaining protocols and the silent clicks of her standardised survival suit undergoing restart checks. Her helmet blocked out everything else or she'd have also heard the murmurs of voices beyond her pod. The cries of the dying desperately making one last stand echoed in her ears, drowning out the dull sounds. Those dying to protect her.
In her dream her arms reached out painfully slow for her father. She ached for them to go faster. This time she would make it. She'd be able to block the lid from fully sealing, preventing the cryogenic pod from starting. She was millimetres away. And yet the pod sealed effortlessly with a resounding hiss. At that her limbs decided to move normally again and hammered on the inside of the pod as the reinforced armour glass door's magnetic locks clunked to activation.
A dull green light shone into her face. Glacial coolness washed over her body as she slowly succumbed to the sensation of drowning. In one last desperate attempt she tried again to reach for her father. He wouldn't even look at her. A woman in midnight black armour cloaked in ragged robes embraced him from behind.
She screamed herself hoarse, trying to use sheer force of will to make the glass melt away. For her fingers and hands to phase through the transparent barrier and wipe away the tears staining his white bearded face. To just touch him one last time, even through the haptic feedback of her suit. To get him away from the stranger caressing him and wiping away the tears that belonged to her. She screamed a guttural scream as his face became sallow at the stranger's touch. It was killing him. Eyes sunk into sockets and flesh peeled back at the rapid mummification. "Alas" said the midnight black armoured woman in the ragged robes, holding her father's grinning skull in a gentle caress on the tips of her fingers. "Poor girl. Time to wake up. Wake up, and smell the ashes"
Fear gripped at her heart in a vice. There was nothing she could do but watch. The only way out was the emergency release button embedded at her side. But it was already too late, she didn't get to try as the feeling of drowsiness drowned her out, pulling her deep into the depths of slumber.
Except this time the feeling didn't become a stifling cold malaise. Instead, it was getting warmer. The sensation of drowning was slowly dissipating. As if she suddenly remembered she needed to breathe, her chest gave a mighty heave and began to rise and fall. For the first time in both more than a millenia and less than a handful of minutes, a large gasping breath passed through her lips. The inside of her visor fogged from the condensation.
She still heard the residual echoes of screams and cries in her ears like a phantom pain. But they were fading. Being replaced by a newer, stranger sound. The murmuring of a language she couldn't understand filtered through the glass and barely perceptible inside her helmet. Voices crowded around her pod. She hadn't yet opened her eyes. She didn't want to. She wished she was still in the dream.
Revival was always a confusing process and this was no different than the fifty odd times she’d undergone it before. But each time she had woken up her father had been there. He had to be there. Like how he’d be there this time. After all, it had only been a bad thaw dream.
The urge to open her eyes and look was almost overwhelming but she had to keep them shut. It was imperative until the medical diagnosis beeped an all clear signal. Otherwise she risked retinal damage before they were fully thawed. Until then she was alone in the dark with her thoughts. It was comforting to have thoughts however. What’s more; it was an even greater comfort knowing that because she was even having thoughts, she wouldn't spend an eternity of limbo in her frozen tomb, lost to the universe.
Finally, after what felt like an aeon, a dull chime resounded inside her helmet. Her eyelids slowly fluttered open. Microsensors within her helmet immediately noticed the movement and activated her suit's display systems. A heads up display appeared in front of her face. Light teal transparent letters flickered as she read information being displayed.
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CRYOGENIC REANIMATION COMPLETE.
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PLEASE EXIT THE UNIT AT YOUR DISCRETION.
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This was strange. If her father was monitoring he would have already opened the pod right as her eyes opened. At least the words were reassuring. If there was anything wrong with either the pod or herself it would have been indicated in bright red flashing letters. A flick of her eyes and a blink dismissed the notification from her visor and she laid there in a stupor. She needed to get out and find everyone, find out what had happened.
It had all been so fast. There was barely enough time to even put on her survival suit and rush to the lowest levels.
The guards escorting her, Sergeant Lockley and a subordinate of his she had never got the name of, had practically dragged her in their rush, the entire bunker wasn’t even bothering with security procedures anymore. Everywhere else had gone quiet days ago, as far as they had been aware they were the last ones left.
No matter how much she'd pestered Sergeant Lockley he'd never given her any details on what had happened beyond that they needed to hurry and were about to be under attack. He didn't need to say by who, especially that late into the war. If it could even be called a war by then. It was more like a genocide with the fleets falling from the sky burning the heavens. City after City had collapsed, less and less reports coming in until they were isolated. And then it had been their turn. The entire human race reduced from carving out their own territory in the wider community to a scant few fighting tooth and nail for every scrap of dirt in a few decades.
That pit in her stomach as she'd been unceremoniously thrown in the pod while her father had ran all the checks himself when it normally took an entire team, was returning. Or had it never gone and she was only now allowed to feel it once again?
But she had been woken up. If she was awake then someone knew she was here, which meant they must have won. Beat the terrible odds stacked against them and come out the other side. If it had only been a few hours, or even a few days, either way it didn’t matter. She needed to get out and help the survivors, an extra pair of hands would be absolutely invaluable.
Looking at the lid, there were unexpected layers of thick dust caked against the outside of the glass, all except where her head had been. Maybe the combat had been so heavy the cryo chamber had nearly collapsed and whoever had woken up had brushed that portion aside to check on her. Yes, that must have been it. Holographic displays floated in front of her beyond the glass, their brightness blinding her eyes as well as making it almost impossible to make out who stood beyond their glare. She tried squinting past them, the shapes of the people outside were hard to make out, the fuzzy outlines of their bodies blurred together. However, their heads were still identifiable in the darkness as her eyes still adjusted. And from the looks of it there were at least four people in front of her. There was only one way to definitively find out though.
She motioned her fingers to indicate she was awake to the internal sensors inlaid into the walls of her glass coffin. She didn’t know why they hadn’t used the external controls to let her out, maybe they had been broken.
A dull clunk sounded indicating the magnetic locks had been released and the holograms flickered off as the glass slowly slid upwards with a motorised hum. The metal brim passed over her face, her visor compensated automatically for the low light levels, revealing, at last, her rescuers.
Four definitely humanoid figures crowded around her in the dark room. If she hadn’t been wearing her helmet the light coming from their torches being shined directly in her face would have blinded her. Instead, the glare was automatically filtered, revealing the figures standing in the room with her. They wore strange plated purple armour, bulky in the fashion all military equipment tended to be. A metallic point descended in the middle of their faceplates giving them an appearance similar to angry owls. Maybe it had been a special prototype her father had kept in storage somewhere, something given to the few elite soldiers remaining that helped to turn the tide. All the guesswork and unanswered questions directly after the panicked scramble to get into the pod was beginning to agitate her.
As a result, even through her reasoning, something nagged at the back of her mind. Trying to tell her something was off. She slowly looked over the four people again with her eyes, studying them closely without turning her head and giving away what she was doing. The one to the far right of her had their weapon hovering vaguely in her direction, as if unsure of what to do suddenly. Why would people that knew about her be so scared of her? It looked like an odd combination between an ornate staff and a rifle yet not quite either and looked to be encased in the same dark purple material as their armour. No matter how it looked, a weapon was a weapon and these people were dangerous. But they had also just woken her up. Surely if they had done that they wouldn’t be here to harm her. If they were, they could have easily done that while she slept.
The one directly in front of her, however, had no weapon out that she could see. Instead they had paused with a hand pressed into what looked like a computer device embedded on their forearm armour. The glow of the screen was reflected in the strangely shaped visor.
She tried weakly reaching out of her pod for the one closest to her in an attempt for aid.
"Where’s my dad? Did we win? How many days has it been?" She asked in a rapid succession, her weak voice amplified by the speakers within her helmet. She had to know.
The strangers looked at each other. They seemed more shocked at her speaking than helping her get up in her weakened state. She gave up on reaching out and instead used her arms to adjust herself on her near vertical frozen bed. She could feel the strength slowly return to her limbs as she moved. It would take a little while longer until she felt she could make an attempt to stagger out of her cryo pod but until then she was essentially helpless.
The strangers simply kept staring at her, as if they didn’t even know what she was. Which meant they weren’t from her bunker. They truly were strangers in the truest sense. But even so, they were survivors. And if they had survived then perhaps others had as well. For now however she needed information, her feelings either way could wait until she knew more.
"Who are you, how did you get here?" She asked again.
One of the beings, the one she had been reaching out to, spoke. It was a strange, melodic language that she didn't understand. Almost haughty in tone. That it hadn’t been automatically translated meant it must have not been in the system. An oversight by the programmers no doubt. Either that or they were speaking in a form of code. She sighed, that would make this far harder in an already difficult situation. Her powerful in built computer would be able to eventually figure out and create a translation if it really was a language but until then she needed them to speak more to hurry the process. Or even better, if she could activate one of the embedded computers on the wall, it would be able to extrapolate from just a scant few words. A common frame of reference to start with would be the best option but she struggled to think of what to use.
She remembered reading back when she was younger; even under the best of circumstances experts would deliberate for months, even years, on the meanings and nuances of individual words to ensure the most accurate translations possible. Computers helped immensely with the process but without the subtleties of organic beings they could create embarrassing inaccuracies.
"I'm sorry, I don't understand. But if you can understand me, please help me get to the computer over there I'll be able to understand you" she pleaded, pointing with her right hand at the dust covered screen mounted into the wall.
The second stranger on the left, standing behind the closest one she had been reaching for, said something in their still untranslated language and slowly walked over to the computer.
They must not be able to understand me either she thought.
The stranger pointed at the screen and said something. She had a feeling this time it was a question with the tonal inflection. That was good, if her hunch paid off it would help immensely.
Hoping what they had asked was something similar to "do you want me to turn this on" she nodded. The being said something that sounded harsher this time and the two she hadn't interacted with raised their weapons squarely on her. That message didn't need a translation. They obviously didn't trust her. The being cautiously reached out while looking at her, hesitating only for a moment, before wiping away a layer of dust and placing their hand on the touch sensitive glass. The machinery hummed to life as the screen registered the limb pressed against it and turned on.
Relieved by the fact that the fortress bunker's fusion core was still operational, she watched as the state of the art device cycled itself.
Yet another dull blue glow added to the room’s illumination as the main screen activated. Her own armour's holographic interface automatically synchronised to the system and displayed in front of her, adding to the blue light, its own illumination and brightening the room from a dull gloom to a faded glow.
The strangers still eyed her warily, fingers not on their triggers but hovering close enough to fire if she tried anything. This was more than not trusting her. They seemed scared of her.
Slowly and deliberately to show them she wasn't up to anything untoward, she lifted her right hand to tap on the translator option in front of her among the myriad of options. The haptic feedback in her glove gave her the sensation of resistance as she pressed and the computer gave a chime of recognition. Three concentric rings appeared on the screen, pulsating like a heartbeat. She spoke and the rings pulsed in time with her words.
"If you speak, that should be able to translate for us in real time" she said.
The one to her left lifted up her arm with the miniature screen and pointed it at the wall computer as the one who had touched the wall screen voiced more of their melodic speech.
"I think it's a translation programme, commander. I've managed to connect and uploaded our language to its database. They obviously designed it to be universal, it automatically reached out to my pad. It doesn’t seem like there aren't any defences or compatibility issues at the moment but this one will need to go through maintenance checks back on the ship" the being said, the software translating the language to her in real time. “But right now the risk is minima, I’m letting our systems access the programme now”
It was a wonder of coding, even managing to mimic vocal tones and cadences of the individual accurately. Although there was a slight disorienting disconnect in person when the sounds didn't quite match up to the mouth movements but that was something you got used to.
She smiled inside her helmet and relaxed, the tension that had been building easing out of her body. It was working and she'd be able to talk to them finally. And get some much needed answers.
"At least you’ll finally be able to understand me" she said.
The beings were confused for a second, each looking at each other like they'd been the ones to say it before it dawned on them that she had just spoken to them in their own language. They turned to stare at her from behind their owlish visors. It would have been almost predatory if their brief naive confusion hadn't been so amusing.
Immediately, the two with their weapons trained on her began to lean in, their fingers barely hovering over the triggers. The one who had placed their hand on the computer moved in front and motioned to them with a gesture. They lowered their weapons but did not appear to have calmed down.
"Who are you?" the person demanded.
The simple question confused her immensely. If they didn’t know who she was then why were they even down here in the first place? Even so, she needed their help to be able to get out of her pod. Let alone leaving the bunker and getting to the surface and finding any survivors. There was little choice, she needed to be careful. Secrecy protocols drilled into her by intelligence trainers until she’d had migraines were almost second nature at this point. Especially with what she should reveal and to who. But her name was something she shouldn't have to worry about.
"My name is.. Alice" she said with only the briefest hesitation.
Deciding that she could get further with these strangers by forcing a situation and getting out of the pod rather than just laying there, Alice leaned up and took a tentative shaky step forwards. She braced herself with her hands against the cushioned sides as she placed her weight on her dominant foot, stepping out warily. As soon as she lifted the weight off her back foot her leg buckled and she collapsed onto the ground in a heap.
The one who had been closest to her this entire time rushed forwards to help her.
"Are you alright?" they panicked as they helped Alice stand.
"I'm fine. Just a bit shaky after being asleep for so long." Alice replied calmly. "It's a side effect of the drugs for cryogenics. It'll take me a few more moments for it to get out of my system"
"Why would they keep you frozen for so long if it would have such deleterious effects?" asked her helper.
"What do you mean for so long? It’s just what’s used"
"Can you tell us why you were here? What happened? Why are there so many dead soldiers in this facility?" asked the demanding one.
Alice couldn’t let them see how such a casual line of questioning shook her. Taking all of her meagre strength to not simply collapse again from shock. She had to compose herself or she’d let something go by accident. At least she could be honest in this instance.
"I don't know any of that either. I was put in there before any of that happened or anything was explained to me" she said, indicating with a thumb over her shoulder. Her casual body language was key. Keep them off balanced, make sure they didn’t know how much she was internally panicking then.
he body language of the person asking her so many questions appeared incredulous at her hesitancy to be forthcoming.
Besides which, Alice had questions of her own.
“Not to be ungrateful, but who are you all?” she asked.
The one who had been demanding of her appeared to straighten up their back even further somehow.
“I am Commander Yurisa. The one kindly helping you stand at the moment is Second Rating Shand."
The latter term was unfamiliar to her but she perfectly understood the implications of there being a commander. There were enough survivors to field a well equipped and manned military. Tentative hope began to form as Alice looked at the person helping her. She gave them a nod of greeting.
"What about them?" asked Alice, indicating to the two who had been the tensest and most willing to point their weapons eagerly at her. They were still slightly hovering their weapons in her general direction.
"Conscripts Doane and Hedi. They do not need your attention, pay them no heed" said the commander curtly.
The lack of respect for the two subordinates caught Alice off guard. The two people, Doane and Hedi, may have been jumpy at her. But they didn't deserve to be dismissed so out of hand.
Even so, she could think about the ramifications of someone who would dismiss their underlings in such a manner later. Now her focus was changing as the strength returned to her limbs. She needed to find out about the rest of the bunker, what had happened after she had been frozen.
She untangled herself from Shand who had been helping her and stood straight on her own, albeit still slightly wobbling.
"Thank you for waking me up, all of you. But if it's alright, I'd like to know what happened. How many days has it been since I was locked in there?" she slightly chuckled nervously.
"Not until we know you won't pose a danger to my people or my ship" Yurisa replied sternly, a hand extended in front of her. They had evidently identified the weapon she carried.
This seemed like a hard line she shouldn’t push for the moment. She didn’t know these people and they in turn didn’t know about her it seemed. A rapport was more important for the moment, leaving her only one course of action if she didn’t want to be shot by the jumpy soldiers. Slowly reaching towards her thigh for the standard issue civilian sidearm clamped there. Making sure to deliberately grab it by the casing rather than the grip and placed the rugged weapon in the proffered commander’s hand.
Yurisa looked at her for a seeming eternity before hooking her gun on an armoured belt.
Stand down" she commanded.
Doane and Hedi once again relaxed, except this time they slung their weapons onto their backs in fluid motions.
Content they had relaxed and weren’t going to shoot her after all, Alice went to the computer she had indicated to Yurisa to turn on. She tapped the screen to change menus from the translation software to a full cultural database download. The computer chimed and began downloading the entire memory bank into her onboard storage. All the information amassed before and after her sleep. All public research and development. All scientific theories and art and literature. The entire sum of all human knowledge and culture. She'd carry it with her. The weight would be immense. The guilt of leaving it behind would be worse.
"I promise I'm not a threat commander" she said dejectedly. The energy rushed out of her as fast as it had returned, like a collapsing wave on a beach. She accessed the imaging network. Before there had been hundreds of cameras available, ranging from CCTV in the cities to satellites in orbit. Now it seemed none remained, not even static from severed connections. They were simply blank screens with error codes. She couldn't even see what had become of her home. She tried accessing previous recordings, hoping at least the final moments of the people who had protected her had been saved. The files listed themselves in front of her in a cascade of videos all dated and timestamped. She added them to the download, vowing to sort through them at the earliest opportunity.
"I just want to leave. I want to get out and see what’s survived. Who’s survived. I want to see the Earth and help rebuild, maybe even find anyone I know if I’m lucky."
She stared at the screen, willing the cameras to life. To show her the bustling streets and busy sky lanes. To see the grand ships hanging in low orbit above the urban centres, ever watchful sentinels of the heavens. But the screen defied her will and remained stubbornly black. Her rapt attention shielded her from the awkward glances the people seemed to be sharing behind her.
Shand nervously cleared her throat. “About that..”
She began but the commander furiously cut her off with a swift hand signal.
Frustration clawed at her as Alice repeatedly swiped horizontally through the vast list of camera nodes, the error codes stubbornly refusing to yield. A single flash of colour blurred past her frantic swiping. She swiftly backpedalled, searching for the frame that had zoomed by. With a tap, the swiping stopped. She had found it. A single camera she had overlooked. Tapping on the frame to enlarge the feed, she stood back. The image before her was severely cracked and pitted, barely feeding a picture let alone video. Static suffused almost the entire screen. But past it she could just about make it out. The ruins of the city. No fires flared or smoke dissipated into the sky as she expected. Or even rebuilt to its former splendour like she was hoping with these strangers being in her bunker. Instead, her eyes tried to process the rusted sharp jags of bare metal left to rot into nothing. The illusion her brain had imagined while she had been so desperate moments ago shattered at the reality in front of her.
It was gone. All of it. Just how long have I been frozen?
Grief and fear threatened to rear up in her before an entirely different sensation replaced them.
They destroyed it all. All of it. No mercy After all we had given them. Their very reason for being. If it hadn’t been for the human race they wouldn’t have even existed. HOW DARE THEY!
“HOW DARE THEY!” she screamed, punching the screen with unbridled rage.
Webs of cracks spread out from under her fist as she took deep breaths. She had to control herself. She didn’t want to turn and look at the people no doubt staring at her after her outburst. No clacks of weapons had sounded so at least they weren’t panicking even if they would be on edge yet again.
A warbling chime broke the spell around her. The download was complete. Everything that had been was now with her. The importance of it was undeniable before but now it was possibly the only record left in the galaxy. She had to guarantee its safety, as well as her own. The fallback option when she was woken up without the expected personnel. She typed in the final command she had been told to do when she had been briefed so long ago.
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THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
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Alice snorted to herself.
Of course it would be that, they always thought they had a sense of humour. What idiots.
And with those last letters, the fortress that had survived fathomless millenia protecting its charge shut down with barely a dulcet low whine. The ruined screen flickered as the fission reactors went off line. The dull blue light slowly dimmed, once again returning the room to darkness. The last thread of life that had lasted so long finally free. And the last man made structure died, its duty carried for so long fulfilled.
Alice turned from the console a final time. The only sources of light came from the torches of the people standing in the room with her. She reached up to the side of her own helmet and touched a small pad. An embedded LED just above her faceplate illuminated itself, adding a narrow cutting beam to the wide ones of these apparent soldiers.
Commander Yurisa appeared to become distracted for a moment, her head tilting slightly to one side as if someone were talking directly into her ear. Her reply to whoever was on the other end of the obvious communication was heard by Alice.
"No, nothing to worry about. Sit tight, we're on our way back" she said to whoever it was.
Judging by that context, Alice guessed they were heading back up to the surface. They had come down and discovered her and were now leaving with their prize in tow.
No matter, as long as she could get off the planet she didn’t care where they took her now. She didn’t think she could handle the ghosts if they left her here.
Commander Yurisa indicated towards Alice, gaining her attention.
“We will be taking you back to our ship in orbit. Standard procedure means you will be confined to quarantine until medical scans show you are clear of any pathogens or other such contaminants that may prove a risk to us. These scans are non invasive and barring any complications will last no longer than a single rotation” she said in a statement that sounded rehearsed more than sincere.
Alice’s brain scratched like a record at what she had just been so casually told. A ship in orbit. She could barely comprehend all the implications it raised, not least of all the biggest one of how. She had to find out, to see if they had found an intact ship or maybe were even from a separate colony that had been missed. Her mind raced as she simply nodded in return, keeping the facade.
“I understand. I wouldn’t want to cause any harm to any of you. Just please, can we leave.” she begged.
“Doane, take the lead back to the surface. Second Rating, follow him and map our way out” ordered the stern commander.
Doane performed an odd slamming across his torso and nodded before heading towards the doorway. Alice gave one last glimpse at the pod that had kept her safe. She didn’t know if she would miss it in time but for now she felt hollow. Everything was proceeding so quickly and sooner or later she would have confront being left behind for such a long time. At least soon she would be getting answers. Why they had never found or woken her before now. She didn’t even know when now was, that was something she’d have to look up in the records when she had time.
Her lamenting was interrupted by the form of the commander filling her vision. Arm extended, indicating it was her turn to leave. Passing through the once pristine doorway, she immediately noticed the state of sheer decay. Instead of an elevator, rubble and rust met her eyes. She looked up, trying to spot where these people had climbed down. The opposite doorway wasn’t far above her, barely two levels. Doane and Shand were already more than halfway up. More beams of light were cutting through the gloom back at her, revealing the individual that Yurisa must have been talking to over the radio earlier.
Crossing the debris strewn floor, Alice reached for the corroded ladder, grabbing the rung closest to her. With mighty heaves she brought herself up, step by step, her limited strength making the simple task a strained ordeal.Finally she reached the opening she had seen from the bottom. Reaching out with her left food to dismount she hopped the small gap. Her weakened muscles still building their stamina back up from her lengthy internment failed her. Her foot slipped off the rung as she overexerted her leg, her left foot buckling from beneath her. Arms waving in front of her, desperately scrabbling for purchase on anything before she would plunge back into the darkness. Gravity inevitably overcame her struggle and pulled her back into the black shaft. A hand shot out, yanking on her forearm and dragging her back from the brink of her overbalance and firmly out of the doorway.
Alice collapsed hard onto her hands and knees, panting at the loss of strength and exhaustion wracking her body. Desperately trying to catch her breath, she looked up at who had pulled her in. Shand stood over her, head cocked while watching her. Alice fought against a giggle from erupting, the helmet the being was wearing made it look like a curious bird caught red handed in a spotlight.
Were they concerned? she wondered to herself.
Shand extended their purple gloved hand to her as she gasped from exhaustion. Alice grabbed the proffered hand. With a mighty heave, and a grunt from Shand, she stood unsteadily on her feet. Two of the soldiers rushed to her aid as she swayed on the spot, their rough armoured forms propping her up between them. Which two had helped her Alice didn’t know but nevertheless she voiced her thanks to them.
One of the group took the lead and began to head towards where they must have entered from. That must have been Doane, and Shand was the one following. She was easier to tell apart due to the holographic map being displayed on her wrist.
As they walked she looked at the aged remains of the carnage around her. Bodies and weapons strewn about the wreckage, no one left to bury them but entombed all the same in this bunker.
My father could be in here Alice realised as she slowly walked past an armoured skeleton wearing the stripes of a Sergeant draped over the remains of a concrete barrier.
They had still clung onto their rifle in a literal death grip, defending her as she had been frozen and slept. Guilt flushed through her at the sight of so many who had given themselves. Especially the Sergeant.
"Commander Yurisa. Could we stop for a moment please" asked Alice
The commander walked up to her, seeing her staring at the remains around her in the chamber.
"I think we can spare a minute or two" said Yurisa.
Alice gently removed the support of the two people who had been helping her and knelt in front of the Sergeant. An unsettling grin stared back at her through the smashed face plate of the helmet that once fitted. The unsettling truth suffused her being as she knelt. Days, or even months wouldn’t leave such a bare skeleton. This was years, decades at least. Alice looked around her at the other bodies lying around her, as if looking for any scrap of evidence that what she was realising couldn’t be true. All were beached with age, their tooth filled smiles laughing at the cosmic joke being played on her by the universe.
Looking away from the grim audience, she reached past the neck, briefly rummaging for the chain necklace she hoped would still be there. Gently lifting it past the skull, she dangled the rugged jewellery in front of her visor and attempted to read the dog tag hanging in the air. The thin slice of treated metal was caked in rust but even then it wasn't so far gone as to be illegible. Wiping the plate with her thumb, she read the name she had suspected it would say since seeing the rank of the remains.
Lockley.
The man who had rushed her to her pod so she could be where she was now. Alice bowed her head at the man she once knew. The man's armour may have been corroded with age but tradition was still tradition.
She reached out and disconnected his bulky left shoulder armour, the magnetic clamps still keeping it secure in place after so long. Placing it on top of her own civilian suit's lightly armoured shoulder with a light click, the piece looked completely out of place compared to the rest of her suit. A large dent in the centre showed where something had struck the late Sergeant as he had fought, perhaps an energy bolt or shrapnel from the fight. She rotated her shoulder, ensuring the piece wasn't interfering with movement or cumbersome. Satisfied it wasn’t, she then placed the dog tags back around the man's neck. The last thing she needed to take was his identity. The final thing he could keep.
Her deed done, she stood back up, looking around at the people she didn't realise had been staring at her.
"It was a tradition that started during the war" she said sheepishly. "You take the pauldron of whoever saved you if they died, that way you can carry them with you out of respect"
"That's a nice tradition" one of the soldiers she didn't know the name of yet said from behind her. One of the pair who had helped her. One who had been there when she had woken up. Which meant this must have been Hedi.
Alice chuckled slightly to herself as a sudden absurdity came to her. "Yeah but unfortunately I don't have enough shoulders right now for all the rest" she indicated with a sweep of her arms.
The group gave a few quiet sounds of amusement of their own, looking down at the ground or up at the ceiling rather than meeting her faceplate.
With a heavy sigh Alice willed herself to move. If she stayed any longer she would begin to lament on the lives lost for her and if she began that she may never leave.
Catching up with the awaiting Shand and Mannad, the group were led to a narrow maintenance utility shaft embedded into the wall. The cramped spaces twisted and turned as they took a winding path directed by shand.
The soldier Alice had not yet learned the name of was revealed to her when Iftan annoyed Mannad with an attempt at humour commenting on how it appeared to take longer to return the way they had come and if Shand had gotten them lost. Apparently Mannad had acute claustrophobia, however it was swiftly eased with a thump on the back of Iftan's helmet.
Alice smiled to herself at the thought of how soldiers were soldiers no matter what time or part of the universe you were from.

Originally.
(i) Slavery, in its different manifestations, was for a notable part of its history a spectrum, it could even be relative (to complicate things right from the start, relative in a legal sense, i.e., associated with split legal subjectivity, that is one could be a slave in relation to the person and not a slave in relation to the third person. E.g., this was a known regional occurrence in Ancient Near East family law, where (1) one could not be both a spouse and an owner, meaning the personality was split by the husband and an owner, (2) concubinage and offsprings in some circumstances, e.g. concubinage with a non-owner, could lead to peculiar consequences where ownership was limited. This complex interaction between law of persons, property law, family law and consequently inheritance, occurs when slaves have the recognized capability to enter legally cognizable familial relationships – comparatively rich and understudied subject, be it regionally or locally in Ancient Near East and (pre)classical Greece, as if we make a connection now with what will be said below, Slavery in later Greco-Roman milieu has some notable differences compared to previous millennia, this being one of them, but the situation changes again by the early middle ages, when we again see complex familiar relationship concurrent with changes to the insitution itself), it showed noticeable regional variability, it depended on citizenship status, potential public relation (e.g. corvée), etc.
(i.i) What it meant by a spectrum is that different status coexisted, what we typically call chattel slavery (heritable status with almost non-existent legal subjectivity - why almost is that ANE differed from Roman in this regard in some finesses, though granted, framing it like that can be a bit unfortunate) and other forms of slavery which had specific legal consequences, (a) ex contractu (self-sale, sale of alieni iuris, to show the complexity here, e.g. the latter form could result in chattel slavery, it could be with a limitation period on redemption if the loan was not for a full price of a pledge, after which the person could be non-redeemable, or via some other penalty provision etc.), in this broad category we could also add a pledge and a distrainee (all these would be subject to varying contractual provisions – we can however extrapolate some regional tendencies of customary law in some periods), (b) ex delicto, this was closely entwined with contractual obligations, but it nevertheless has some important peculiarities (e.g. slavery arising from these obligations could fall outside of some post hoc court-intervention or debt-release, a royal prerogative jurisdiction), (c) there are some other forms differentiated by some legal historians, like famine-slavery, but we would complicate this too much with further nuances. All these lead to different legal consequences and interactions with other fields of law.
(i.ii) Biblical peculiarity on this is that it is prima facie more stringent and detailed textually (I will return to this word) with limitation on ownership for some types of slavery – that is Israelite slaves. Non-Israelite slavery is rarely mentioned in legal texts of the Bible, and when it is, it is indirectly by contrasting it to the benevolence afforded to fellow Israelite slaves, its presence is better attested in other narrative sources. But it is not exactly clear how this would translate to practice (comparatively, even debt-slaves were alienable, but the right of redemption was a real right to be exercised against any new owner or possessor), given that similar limitations existed for some forms of slavery elsewhere in surrounding cultures. That is not to say there were no differences, but we do not have legal documentations from Palestine/Judea from this period. In any case, this did not apply to chattel slaves (unless naturally, they were not yours, but were in your possession with a real or contractual title), both in Ancient Near East or Old Testament. Another unsolved issue is that there were plenty of mechanisms for non-chattel slave to become a chattel-slave, but OT is rather silent on this (or better, we do not have actual legal documentation which would attest this to any specifics) with only very limited and rather ambiguous textual references – but if look at it comparatively in surrounding cultures, this did happen. Another one that is frequently mentioned is blanket sale prohibition (akin to Ham. Codex §279-281), or flight protection (cf. Deut. 23:16-17), but this did not and could not apply domestically - it would make the whole institution of slavery unworkable (and anything in relation to it, security, property rights, ...), both for chattel and other types of slavery. The idealistic meaning, the Covenant as addressee, is a blank prohibition to Israel of making treaties internationally to engage in slave-extradition - but again, what this meant in practice (or what basis it had in practice, if any) is not known.
(i.iii) Another issue frequently raised which warrants a closer look, which we will tackle comparatively, is Exod. 21:20-21. It seems easy to situate within Ancient Near Eastern tradition (e.g., Cod. Ham. 116), namely, a creditor could due to violence, mistreatment or injury done to a pledge or a distrainee with this action forfeit his claim in part or in full (subtract compensation from the loan), or even be subjected to vicarious punishment (this sub-principle of talion is later explicitly condemned in Deuteronomy, so it further complicates things) if a pledge or a distrainee dies and compensation is not paid (there is no direct talion as the injured party was not free). All this is fairly clear to this point, the issue becomes, if we reason a contrario, that chattel-slaves could be killed at discretion (without cause), which is mistaken – masters generally in Ancient Near East do not have the right to kill slaves (narrow exceptions), but have to go with cause through appropriate judicial venue (when executions happened, they were not to be performed by owners) – there is nothing special with Exod. 21:20-21, the misunderstanding enters due to anachronistic backreading of Roman legal norms which differed on this, where owners could exercise summary execution in principle without cause. To save myself here from further critiques, (i) this was a¸most plausible development (Roman law, comparatively, probably did not recognize this capacity in earliest stages, i.e., without cause, but due to development of roman society, e.g., later disappearance of a comparable institute of debt-slavery could have removed the incentives for moderation we see in Ancient Near Eastern milieu. Evolution and disappearance of nexum has been a subject of great scholarly attention (pre-tables, post-tables, lex Poetelia, comparatively with paramonè and antichresis (primarily as pledge) in service), but this is beyond our scope here, and this was naturally a simplification, selling, non-pledgeability of persons was a process which was not realized, but nevertheless, the characterization holds for our purposes here) and (ii) classical period slowly ascribes some very limited legal subjectivity to slaves. This Greco-Roman tradition is important to the development of rabbinic texts on slavery at this time, which changes the understanding of OT. [Nothing said here is precluding the corporal mistreatment, punishments, brandings, sexual exploitation, etc., it is merely beyond the intended scope of the post]
(ii) Now, if we return and expand on that textuality (i.ii), it was meant as a relation between legal codices (ANE codies, Old Testament) and legal practice. Much of the scholarship is about the former, and one should not conflate the two with bringing later ideas about law backwards. These texts were not positive law (i.e. that courts would apply in actual cases) – this had been a hotly debated subject for the more than half a century with various arguments, ranging from royal apologia, (legal) scientific text in Mesopotamian scientific tradition (divination, medicine, … e.g. they also share textual and structural affinity), notable juridical scribal exercises and problems … That is not to say they have no relation to practice or that they are not profoundly informative about ancient cultures, customs or law – but literal reading of them and literal application is more than problematic, not only because law rarely (never) gets application like this (there is always interpretative methodology), but because they were not positive law to be actually applied at all. Sadly though, this is extrapolated (high confidence) to Ancient Israel and Judea to the lack of record to be compared against, but it can be stated for surrounding cultures, where legal documentations plainly contradicts codices, neither does it reference them. So, when we read about time-limitations (3 years, 7 years, Jubilee), it is not something one would see either as legal norm itself in this strict sense narrowly or something the courts or contract would take as non-dispositive (if we take these texts to have some non-legal ideal with cultural values to be strived toward), not to mention they would be a notable inhibition in practice to legal transactions (they would as a consequence de facto limit loan-amount, shifting the preference of pledged objects, no one would lend and credit in years prior to Jubilee, etc.). Likewise, we have documentation from surrounding cultures which likewise plainly contradict these time-limitations. From this we also cannot know surely what limitations (if there were any practically, but even the text offers some workaround, or rather consitent pattern how courts would intervene customarily - though one should note customs were or would be territorially particularized) would there be for Israelites becoming chattel slaves to fellow Israelites through various mechanism (e.g. whether contractual provisions could bar or limit right of redemption under relevant circumstances, what sort of coercion could a creditor employ etc.) in practice.
Obviously, the situation is much more complex. The old revisionist vanguard (Kraus, Bottero, Finkelstein,...) has cleared the ground for newer, more integrated proposals (Westbrook, Veenhof, Barmash, Jackson..., Chripin in the middle, to those that squared it closer to the pre-revisionist line, Petschow, Démare-Lafont,...), while the latter is a modest minority (take this reservedly, I do not intend to mischaracterize their work, which is an unavoidable consequence of this short excerpt), even in biblical law, there seems to be no end in sight - but this is not the subject of this post.
(ii.i) A type of act that is referenced though are edicts. (There was no systematic legislation or uniformization of law, save some partial exceptions on the matters of royal/public administration and taxation/prices – royal involvement in justice was, beside edictal activity, through royal adjudication, beside mandates to other officials). Our interest here is limited to debt-relief edicts (as an exercise of mì“šarum prerogative), for which we have considerable textual attestation, both direct and indirect (references) – they were typically quite specific what kind of debt (and by implication slavery) was released (e.g. delictual debt could be exempt), by status (degrees of kinship, citizenship specific), region, time,… (e.g. Jer. 34:8–1, Neh. 5:1–13, but OT authors/redactors can be critical of failure to use this prerogative).
(ii.ii) Prescriptivity of written law (legislation whose norms would be primary, mandatory and non-derogable - or even the connection to understand law as "written" law) is something which slowly develops in Ancient and classical Greece, 7th-4th century BC, which was a considerable change in Mediterranean legal milieu, also influencing second Temple Judaism with emergence of prescriptivity in probably mid Persian period.
(iii) This shorter section will be devoted to some features of the principle of talion. Equal corporal retribution (talion) principle predates Hammurabi´s codex (e.g. codex Lipit-Ishtar, 19th century BC), though not in this specific textual form. The most famous textual form comes from the biblical tradition, e.g. Exod. 21:23-25, which is a modified transmission from Ham. Codex (§ 196-200). But biblical tradition likewise further changes the principle itself, e.g. insofar as it denies vicarious talion explicitly as a reference to previous textual tradition (Deuteronomy). It should be noted however that there is signifixant divergence in the understanding of these verses, e.g. Westbrook said it is not a case of talion at all and offers a completely different interpretation. In any case, the principle enters into cuneiform law (Summerian Lip.-Ish. and Akkadian Ham. in Old Babylonian Period) at the end of the 3rd mil. BC and early 2nd mil. BC, most plausibly through West Semitic (Hebrews & Ancient Israelites as their descendants) being the influence with migration at the time. Older cuneiform law texts do not know it in this corporal form - composition is in pecuniary amount with injury tarrifs (similar to e.g. later Anglo-Saxon tables, see this post). Regardless of what we say about the textuality and scholarly/scribal legal tradition above, there is no reason to suppose this textual change materialized in changed practice. Compositional systems follow the same logic, in lieu of revenge and retaliation (which was subsidiary and subjected to potential “public” intervention in Ancient Near East and elsewhere, medieval and early modern period had another institute, destruction), the injured party and offending party primarily negotiated a compensation, which results in a debt to be settled, where talion was a measuring value in negotiations, i.e. starting at the worth of injuries should they befall the offending party. Not the subject at hand, but the Medieval period on this is, if anything, more fascinating - the institution was present on the continent right to the end of the ancien regime in the 18th century and corresponding changes in criminal law into modern form, as it was gradually pushed out, starting in late medieval period.
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There are naturally multitudes of issues to be raised here (I tried to keep it concise), e.g., marriage and gender, children, role of sexuality and sexual exploitation to slavery, later developments to which I passingly alluded, etc., they might be addressed further down the line in the next post. Further clarifications in the comments.
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Had the battery disconnected to do some work, and when we reconnected the power the radio had reset and says "enter code" - We have input the code listed for it a few times but it just say ERR every time we try it. Help? :)

I know quitting your job as a cook usually simply comes with two weeks notice or a ragequit walkout, but for eleven months I worked at a new franchise that had such potential which was being squandered by the incompetence of upper management. I present the nearly 6000 word thesis I turned in on my last day. Locations and names have been changed to cartoon references. Brackets represent ambiguous information in place of specific details.
Krusty Krab Careers Jobs
Opening in [Month/Year], Krusty Krab (KK) Bikini Bottom is on its 4th kitchen manager in less than a year. Krusty Krab O-Town has recently let go its inaugural kitchen manager and sous chef. Almost no member of the Bikini Bottom opening management team remains employed by KK. There is a pattern developing where one must question both the choice of employee and the directive given to new franchises. These lingering issues I brought concerns about in the first weeks of opening but was disregarded at every turn despite my experience with festival traffic. As a result I decided this was not a place I wanted to advance, but with a good-enough paycheck I’d be a lowly grunt in the kitchen four days a week, at five days a week I would have quit or been fired over a public outburst long ago. If Krusty Krab alters course slightly while being true to the brand this could be a successful chain.
My unique employment history in brick and mortar restaurants, food trucks, pop up culinary concepts, trade shows/conventions, and the film industry make me an ideal candidate to be on the opening team for new KK locations. My outgoing nature and foresight are valuable assets. For example, on training week before opening when I was standing around idly without a task I took it upon myself to organize the disarray that was dry storage. Overhearing Krabs tell another manager where he wanted the cleaning products placed, I had a jumping off point and the organization I created nine months ago is still largely in place. Since returning from my vacation in early February I have made it my mission to keep the storage area organized because it was again starting to resemble a hoarder’s house rather than a commercial kitchen. This is now part of my weekly routines because every time I turn my back there is more product being placed haphazardly just anywhere with little regard. I also recently reorganized the walk-in cooler because of problematic stocking with items being placed on the same shelf or below raw proteins. I also simply put all the like products together such as cheeses or fruits that were scattered amongst several shelves. With recent overordering I cannot keep up with the organization of the walk in cooler. The pattern recognition of food types and even simple shapes appears to be lost on the Bikini Bottom crew. My daily reorganization of containers is proof of this. Most days I’ll take a few minutes to put all cylinders together, all cambros together in descending volume, all deep and shallow pans next to each other rather than intermixed. My decision to be a kitchen manager at age 19 from 2005 thru 2008 and rarely enter restaurant management since is very calculated.
With my prior knowledge of professional kitchens I was becoming Bikini Bottom’s resident nag to coworkers as I made note of health department violations on a daily basis. I stopped after being largely ignored for two weeks. My regular health department nags include; a battle with jackets and hats being placed only in the designated area (a designated area that did not exist until I created a place for personal items a in January by neatly organizing the dry storage area again), waiting until prepped items are cooled before a cover is placed on top, placement of raw seafood, open containers (very often sugar, flour, and pancake mix bags ripped open and left), and dirty dishes/containers placed back in rotation. The dirty dishes and containers in rotation with the clean ones are at an atrociously high number. I have given up on making the 4th fryer seafood allergy safe too. With the low volume of seafood allergy safe items Bikini Bottom should purchase smaller baskets to visually discourage cross contamination with the other fryers and baskets. My skills to organize the kitchen do not end with simply where to store products to meet minimal health department standards.
Half of the space in the Bikini Bottom kitchen is completely wasted on an ill-advised walkway to the dishpit. An intelligent design would place a second doorway directly to the dishpit connected to the bar or where the bathrooms reside. Numerous times during the opening week of KK Bikini Bottom I said, yelled, sang, and muttered that we have too many food items for the amount of space we have. Icus stated that there was more space than Bluffington. Is Bluffington intelligently designed? Because Bikini Bottom most certainly isn’t. So Bikini Bottom actually has less space even if there is more square footage. See the attached diagram for an intelligent design that could potentially house a menu of this size. Bikini Bottom forces a line design on this kitchen when an open concept is needed for this menu. It’s as if this floorplan was created by a person who had only ever seen one commercial kitchen previously and couldn’t think 4th dimensionally to understand the needs of the workers to smoothly serve customers.
There is not enough counter space for pizzas without getting off the line, the microwave is placed completely out of the way, the freezer’s curved design is a waste of potential counter space and a falling hazard for containers stored on top of it, the toaster is an overcomplicated and overexpensive piece of machinery that serves exactly one purpose when a flat top could be used to toast bread and other purposes like a quesadilla special, sautee was designed without an overhang for spices, the pantry station lacks the counter space to have two containers of flour and two containers of batter for seafood allergies, there are no Frialator fryers which I have worked with at every single kitchen job previously instead we got the cheap Vulcan model (is that logical), the cheap low boy in pantry that doesn’t drain excess water anywhere it’s just supposed to evaporate somehow but doesn’t, the grill and fryer should be placed next to each other (with a higher volume of crossover than other stations), the floors are flat instead on having a mild decline towards the drains (just look at the standing water residing behind the oven right now), in the dishpit the spraying area and the filled sinks are backwards of a logical dipshit, the ramp to the back door is on the wrong side, there is no refrigerated place downstairs to stage extra food for busy shifts (the beer cooler is once again used for such food items because of this massive oversight), the prep station is an afterthought and miniscule, the dishes on the line are difficult to grab for anyone under 5’11” and inaccessible for anyone under 5’6” (instead of putting them underneath tables that also give that desperately needed counterspace I spoke of), there is not enough space to store to-go containers or boats behind the line, expo is lacking a low boy for the numerous items that are supposed to be cold but are instead kept at room temperature all day long, no one in management thought about buying shelves until right before Bikini Bottom opened as a result the clean full sheets sat on the floor for days, we had only the exact amount of 1⁄6 pans for an absurd amount of time making it impossible to rotate and clean them when necessary (which is daily), we still struggle with 1/9 pan supply. And just when I thought I documented all the poor design choices possible I stumbled upon a person whose office holiday party was booked at KK Bikini Bottom. The deck space works just fine as a deck. It does not double well as a gathering space. The space is too long and narrow for parties, it promotes little splitoff groups rather than a coming together of a larger gathering. It may be advantageous to contact a social psychologist for help designing a private party space that promotes intermingling rather than enforcing small pockets to form. The reorganization of the physical kitchen isn’t all that screams for an overhaul.
There are six positions on the line at the Krusty Krab; expo, oven, grill, sautee, fryer, and pantry. But the pantry and fryer positions are forced together like a bad remix. Everyone who mainly works pantry deserves a $6 raise immediately because it is a station and a half. Both Icus and Krumm, while kitchen manager, kind of acknowledged the pantry is too big for one station without outright mentioning the lopsided distribution of work. I imagine in the only location where this works, Bluffington, a second person joins the pantry at noon because of the unreasonable amount of items one person is tasked with. Bikini Bottom only has one person in this position at all times, maybe modify it for one person? The excess of items on the pantry position largely resembles a position I would call “set-up” or “build” at a previous job that made sensible choices. This build position should have tostadas, tacos, butcher’s blocks, toast, salads, lettuce wrap set ups, and preparing plating for whichever station is most bogged down. I have absolutely lost my mind yelling about salads at least once a month, ranting that they do not belong on the fryer position because of how illogical it is that five salads are included on the mountain of other items the pantry has. I have always considered working in a kitchen a kind of dance, and the pantry station demands an unnecessarily convoluted dance to keep up with the demand. Without the salads, tostadas, and tacos the station is already the busiest. Do we really need to combine ballet and swing by including these extra awkward dance steps in this single station? For a kitchen designed this poorly I suppose it is. Again, see attached document for an intelligently designed kitchen that might be able to accommodate this menu. Unless Bikini Bottom is going to close for a month to fix the baffling floor plan design the menu is shouting to be reduced to 30-36 items.
The menu is too big. Krusty Krab is the jack of all foods, master of none. In general I believe individual locations should be allowed 18% omissions, and 18% unique items to this wildly unwieldy menu sitting around 50 food items including sides. The insistence on keeping menu items that don’t sell at Bikini Bottom because of Bluffington is mind boggling. Chicken tenders do not sell at Bikini Bottom. fried sushi does not sell at Bikini Bottom, not enough to justify their place on the line. I don’t care how well these items work in Bluffinton. They. Do. Not. Work. At. Bikini. Bottom. If the KK location in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean sells an incredible amount of live krill does that mean Bikini Bottom and O-Town must sell live krill too? Take the fried sushi off the menu. I had a complete meltdown about this during a Dimmadome service and my valid point was met with indifference. Replace the kid’s tenders with a kid’s fish sticks. We already have the tilapia fish sticks on the line for tacos. Or make the kid’s fish sticks cod. We cut cod to order for fish tacos in spite of health code violations because it is too rare of an order to make beforehand. Saffron in mashed potatoes? If you must. Why are green tomatoes only on the menu during lunch? Bikini Bottom throws away a sizable amount of spoiled green tomatoes each week. Have green tomatoes on the menu all day long or don’t have them at all. The smoked salmon could go on salads or a special taco to justify its place on the line. The corn pico’s place on the line is unjustified. It only goes on one item, tostadas, which are not particularly popular. If we had a taco salad we could throw the corn pico on there. We also have unreasonable waste from unusable taco shells, smash up those imperfect taco shells and throw them on said taco salad. But before we add salads, let's get rid of the pear and kale salads. The pears' position on the line are unjustified, if we threw them on a taco variation maybe their place on the Bikini Bottom line could be argued but for now they only go on a salad that isn’t particularly popular. The kale salad is an issue of space for a 4th green for salads is too much. The krusty salad is my most hated house salad of all time. And it comes down to the toast with goat cheese. This ancillary step of spreading goat cheese on a cracker is an unnecessary step for an overly complicated dance and should be part of the expo dance if expo wasn’t a shoddily designed afterthought lacking a low boy.
There are a plethora of squeeze bottles on the pantry station that have no place on the overloaded station. They belong to an expo station with a low boy to keep them cold. Pantry has an overwhelming ten squeeze bottles: chipotle crema, sweet chili vinaigrette, buffalo, korean bbq, ranch, caesar, wine vinaigrette, lemon vinaigrette, honey mustard, and lemon aioli. Only the first four are justified on an intelligently designed fryer section, the second four belong on the build station, the last two have no place anywhere but expo. With this extra space sautee could keep their bottles and two purees cold in the fryer's lowboy instead of leaving them at room temperature all day inviting a pathogen party. This theorized intelligently designed expo would have room to keep these four squeeze bottles and a double of every sauce chilled to pour them into ramekins, a move that is highly common in the expo dance. The fact that expo doesn’t have a double of all squeeze bottles is foolish. Expo has to bother an overloaded station to pour these side sauces instead.
How many gallons of basil aioli has Bikini Bottom thrown away in 11 months? Four aiolis in general is way too many and most go on a single item; basil aioli on the incredibly unpopular veggie burger, lemon aioli for calamari, sweet chili aioli for the BLT that is only served half of the day, and garlic aioli actually goes on two items…I believe. What a colossal waste of precious little space, lose two aiolis and then you can sing the logical song with me. Perhaps we can put garlic aioli and sweet chili vinaigrette on the BLT separately and accomplish the exact same thing the sweet chili aioli does. The wings too have unneeded complications. Having worked at a sports bar specializing in wings for the better part of a decade I find KK’s plating of wings to be overly pretentious. The carrots, celery, and blue cheese have lost function. Heffer Wolf always said no one eats the carrot/celery julienne with blue cheese. It’s a complete waste of all the ingredients because you’ve gone too far with the presentation. Wings aren’t fancy. Wings are supposed to have a small pool of sauce and be sloppy. It’s like a sloppy joe that’s not sloppy, an unsloppy joe is a failure to sloppy joes just as the KK presentation of wings is a disparagement to the dish. Ever since training week back in 2022 I have used a scale to give Bikini Bottom a passing or failing grade.
Chokey Chicken to Chum Bucket is the scale I use to judge efficiency and sanity at Bikini Bottom. Both establishments are upscale casual dining experiences in Capitol City in the same vein as KK. Chokey had high employee retention and relatively smooth openings for new locations. Chum Bucket’s employee turnover was high and every location opening was chaotic. Which one sounds closer to KK? Chokey Chicken was filled with chefs I respect including Chef Ren Hoek who remains a close friend to this day. Ren lost his lifelong passion for kitchen work after working management at Chum Bucket. He’s actually seeking work in Bikini Bottom. Call him up at [phone number], but KK will give him Nam’ flashbacks of why he chose driving for a living rather than cooking for five years. The pair of us together helming Bikini Bottom with the ability to omit and create 18% of the overloaded menu can bring success to this franchise. We have worked well numerous times in the past on various concepts in the past including creating The Attack of the Pickled Tomatoes Burger for [Promotional live performance of a TV show] at the Capitol City Theater. We served 100 people in 60 at the [sitcom filming] lunch. That’s physically impossible but somehow we did it quite a few times.
A fun anecdote about Ren Hoek’s KK experience from the soft launch; on training week numerous times I brought concerns about being seafood allergy safe that were dismissed. As mentioned earlier the pantry station lacks the counter space to have two containers of flour and two containers of batter, one each of which seafood never touches. Before the soft launch Chef Stimpy from Bluffington insisted all customers just kind of know everything is prone to be seafood contaminated. Well, chef Ren was a customer that night and this absolutely was not communicated to customers. He claimed to have a slight seafood allergy and was not informed of what the crab soup was. In reality he does not have a seafood allergy. I didn’t discuss the seafood issue with Ren, separately we noticed egregious violations of food safety standards and we each responded in our own way. The soft launch service was so awful that night Chef Ren walked out of a free meal to pay for some ramen, never to return to Bikini Bottom. I attribute this oversight, and many of Bikini Bottom’s (and probably O-Town’s) problems to hubris over the Bluffington location.
Chef Chokey would also be hesitant to join the KK team. It will cost a finder’s fee just for me to reveal Chef Chokey’s name. Chef Chokey was a lead in the rapid expansion of Chokey Chicken restaurants. He opened numerous restaurants and was big on the philosophy that each restaurant must have its own personality in order to fit the unique local culture and the variety of working spaces. This is in direct conflict with the KK way that everything must be exactly like the Bluffington location no matter what. There was only one Chokey Chicken location that had the full menu, Chokey Springfield. Chokey Springfield had a large space which was intelligently designed to accommodate such a large menu. The KK menu is all over the place, closing in on 50 menu items which comes up as a failure on the Chokey Chicken/Chum Bucket scale. This is not the only area KK comes up as a major failure on the Chokey Chicken/Chum Bucket scale.
Has anyone in this company ever worked festival traffic before? Does anyone have the experience of working next to a major venue with 8000 seats before this one? The way Bikini Bottom handles Dimmadome services it certainly appears that the decision-makers fall on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Having all 50 items available during such massive traffic is completely asinine. An unwillingness to serve a partial menu is hindering the Bikini Bottom kitchen staff. I have worked festival traffic before, and Dimmadome events bring in festival traffic. I’ve worked inside a festival whose line never ended but every customer got their order in 5 minutes or less because the line kept flowing with only four items on the menu as that’s what was warranted at the B-Sharps Music Festival. I refuse to be set up for failure the way Bikini Bottom sets up Dimmadome services for failure. The entire week of concerts in [summer] 2022 I was set up for failure every day (it was after this I modified my availability to keep my sanity and my paycheck). When I brought my concerns about running efficiently during Dimmadome services I was labeled a B-worker for the first time in my employment history by Icus and Krabs. It is that moment which I was either going to holler at them both for being 2-dimensional thinkers who were obviously unqualified for the positions they accepted in this company, or just put my head down. If Bikini Bottom has a successful concert day service, hail your team because they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. They swam with concrete shoes. I often wonder how many customers had bad experiences and never returned after concert days. A Dimmadome service should have no more than 25 items and have one or two specials to divert traffic towards an area the kitchen can keep moving. An Open Cup Open Plate (OCOP) special for foot traffic is absolutely needed. When I suggested OCOP special, Heffer was intrigued by this idea and immediately named burgers as the special to keep foot traffic flowing. Smithers wouldn’t hear this idea, babbling on about what’s advertised instead of hearing out a sound idea. This prattle despite radio commercials having inaccurate hours and social media promoting Bikini Bottom’s steak tacos to this day. I always found Smithers to be a better fit as a middle management office pencil pusher than as a hands-on restaurant manager. Overall I find KK managers are selected to be automatons not to question their orders rather than critical thinkers who could take the restaurant to the next level. During brunch service is another period of time that must be modified to lessen the heft of items. Having a full menu that barely works plus brunch is so deep into Chum Bucket territory, in my opinion we now have to use the Tropic Thunder scale of full [R-word censored by jobs] to describe a 60-plus-item brunch. Chef Ren hired back a Chum Bucket cook who had a mental breakdown and stormed out during brunch (plus full menu) service because Ren knew the employee was justified and upper management was completely unreasonable in their brunch requests. It’s not just questionable decisions that hinder KK staff but improper equipment as well.
This is the first restaurant I have worked at which uses a touch screen on the line rather than tickets. From day one I found this to be technology for technology’s sake inferior to tickets. Chef Ren forced a new Chum Bucket location to rip out touch screens from the line and bring in ticket printers because of the higher efficiency. The touch screen is a great idea for expo, not the entire line. My biggest gripe is that each station does not get all the information. Early on I was regularly yelled at for not staggering my items, well I can’t see the rest of the order; a problem I have never had with a ticket system. Touchscreen software is also much more prone to errors and glitches. When I reported an error during a heavy service Icus and Krabs blamed my skills on the line without looking into the malfunctioning screen further. It was glitchy for weeks before the two finally investigated and corrected the issue I brought to their attention long before. Those two gave me an immense amount of ammunition to dislike them in the opening weeks until I stopped caring. The issue I had with being unable to scroll beyond the bottom of a completely filled screen has returned and is still there as of [my last day]. There are also important details that get buried. A frequent meltdown I have is that sauce on side requests and other important modifications are not capitalized or in red to catch the eye as they have been at jobs with tickets. These details get lost on Bikini Bottom’s touchscreens. A sauce on side salad made by me will be wrong 50% of the time because of the instructions being camouflaged in a word salad. This goes for coleslaw on the side and drizzle on the side too. Drizzle in general I dislike because of the pretentiousness, but whatever, drizzle it on top rather than putting it in a ramekin if you must. There are numerous places where Bikini Bottom overcomplicates matters for reasons I cannot ascertain.
Why is there such a large variety of plates? Why do we have a medium circular plate for salads and a large bowl for salads with protein? This just confuses the simplest of matters. I was told this is done because of the high price hike with protein, a larger presentation was desired. But that price hike is the price of protein in 2023. Bikini Bottom should put all salads in the large bowls and use all the circular salad plates in a skeet shooting promotion. I understand why we have both a circular platter plate and a pizza plate but in my restaurant the circular platter plates must go...or maybe the large platter plate instead. Is the large platter used for anything besides fish and chips? That extra space on fish and chips plates are only used for side sauces which can easily be delivered to customers on small circular plates. What is the medium oval plate doing that the medium rectangular plate isn’t? And vice versa. Why do they both exist when they are approximately the same size? Let me write an internet commercial where we break a lot of plates so we can get some logical use out of the superfluous plates. I don’t care which one is destroyed, the ovals or the rectangles but one of them is an unnecessary redundancy in excess done again. Speaking of commercials, the unimaginative radio advertisements for Bikini Bottom are doing little to lure new customers to the restaurant.
The three radio spots I have heard on KBBL all sound like they were produced by a marketing 101 student who wasn’t a natural in the field. The voiceover actor was so uncharismatic I was certain someone from the office was chosen at random to read the copy. Then I heard that same voiceover actor selling pool supplies on another radio station so I concluded that Bikini Bottom must have hired the cheapest guy in town to produce the most basic of commercials. Perhaps there is someone else you could hire more qualified to voiceover these commercials, an actor with experience on an Emmy award winning cable program whose unique place in the film industry was written about on [website] would be a much wiser choice to be the voice of the KK? (See external link). In the ad there was no catchphrase, no jingle, no music whatsoever. This simple approach to commercials lacks the pizazz to catch the attention of radio listeners. The first two commercials I heard would get a C in marketing 101 as they were nearly the exact same and accomplished the bare minimum to sell wares, the third one would maybe get a B- because there was some sort of attempted gimmick with the voiceover whispering to represent thinking inside his head about what he was going to eat later at KK. Not only does this commercial give no reason for the man to think inside his head, the outside world still and unpopulated. To see what a creative person would do with this concept see the attached script. There is an attempted slogan that could become part of an ad campaign. Commercials aren’t the only lost opportunities in promotions.
There are numerous promotional celebrity tie-ins at Bikini Bottom’s fingertips with Dimmadome performers. The restaurant could have a Phish sandwich as a OCOP special on [Phish performance dates], or a pretentious Jelly Roll on [Jelly Roll performance date]. Has anyone reached out to the Dimmadome theater or talent management for approved special menu items to be promoted inside the dome? Perhaps a special 20% discount to ticket holders? Is Bikini Bottom capable of getting permits to extend Open Container hours beyond [cutoff time] for an afterparty or block party throughout a Dimmadome concert? I see additional marketing opportunities left on the table for all new locations.
I believe new KK locations are missing out on a marketing campaign by opening with the entire cumbersome 50 item menu. This is a staggering amount of menu items which is too much to ask new staffers to perfect all at once. After a few months expanding the menu by approximately ten items is catching to customers who haven’t returned after a single visit or infrequently stop into KK. There are ten new food items that might appeal to them. Just like it appears KK doesn’t know what it’s looking for in a good commercial spot, this company doesn’t appear to recognize a talented from an untalented worker until it’s too late.
It is my understanding that KK had a headhunter to find Icus, the first Bikini Bottom kitchen manager. If it were up to me I’d hire someone to break the legs of that headhunter for bringing in a subpar kitchen lead. We are still attempting to recover from the lousy choices she made in the floor plan. If anybody responsible for Bikini Bottom’s floor plan is still giving input, stop them immediately. Once the doors were open to the public Icus had his head in the clouds to a point where I questioned if he saw the writing on the walls of an imminent demotion and stopped trying as a result. I had a full deck of 3x5 cards in an archaic powerpoint presentation bringing numerous concerns to light that he kept putting off listening to until he was fired. Those same cards were broken out for this essay. The second kitchen manager, Krumm, is a good lesson in honesty. According to Heffer, Krumm was given a bill of goods about how smoothly KK Bikini Bottom was running. Since Krumm stepped into a latrine pit which he was led to believe was a heated pool, he left in short time. Krumm also had plans to modify the menu but when his bosses told him to be a rodeo clown rather than a cowboy Krumm didn’t take too kindly to that. Meanwhile Heffer was the savior of the Bikini Bottom kitchen. I didn’t agree with every single decision he made, but I did with a majority of them. Heffer’s overhaul was such a blessing so I didn’t have to fiddle with the organization of 60% of the equipment anymore, only about 20% now. Too bad Heffer’s crippling depression came back after bashing his head into the wall out of frustration with the shackles KK restrained him with.
The current management team is enthusiastic but inexperienced. I see an accumulation of small infractions that might bring down Bikini Bottom’s health department rating significantly. I see the entire management team being inattentive or unaware about organizational issues. Whatever bureaucratic nonsense corporate tasks everyone with from the original sous chef Skeeter to Patty Mayonnaise that makes them walk away from the line between 11am and 1pm especially is infuriating. I have never been left alone on a multi-person line during peak hours so regularly, and I won’t tolerate it anymore. As much as I believe in his drive, I imagine our current kitchen manager SpongeBob will be let go after a disastrous service during the Dimmadome concert season that someone has to take the fall for. Chef Ren and I could help bring experience in management and dealing with festival traffic...if corporate does not force us to follow a failing strategy.
After working nearly a year at KK you may ask why I’m not proficient on more than one station. Excellent question. First, when I move over to another station the squeeze bottles are never labeled (until Stu Pickles was hired, now they’re sometimes labeled), so I always looked at the glut of unlabeled sauces and I’d go back to my station because the basic information is missing (also a health department violation for having numerous unlabeled, unchilled bottles). In his first week the new general manager Stu Pickles pulled out 90% of the containers under the grill station because they were lacking labels despite an expected health department visit. The second reason for my menu ignorance is the mountain of prep for my own and upcoming shifts I have piled up on my station throughout service. My attention to detail appears to be next level with my ability to anticipate stocking all items for all shifts including the weeknd. The third reason I wouldn’t learn multiple stations is a defense against the afternoon conference calls. In [month] the Bikini Bottom line was unprepared for a busy post lunch because one cook was cut and our expo person was busy with a conference call. The two of us remaining on the line had a miserable slog through an unexpectedly busy afternoon. When I brought this up to Krabs he disregarded me, being a good bean counter he quoted the cost percentage. What he didn’t take into account was the missing expo person who could have jumped on the line and expo to help the understaffed two man team. That person was stuck on a conference call. Just recently I saw the company actively lose money because of this poorly thought-out meeting during business hours. A customer wanted to order a dessert that was 86ed but had been restocked by our prep cook an hour before. The server was unable to sell them their dessert because the only person in the building who could help un-86 an item was on a conference call. This conference call calamity is another bone-headed choice that speaks to a larger decision-making problem within the corporate structure. Finish the conference calls by 10:45 am eastern.
In conclusion, I quit my position as a lowly grunt for this company because of its unwarranted perplexing dance steps and below average management. I don’t care how much varnish and lacquer is supplied, I refuse to polish this Bikini Bottom turd as a manager or full-time employee under the current circumstances. You would have to take a pickaxe to the floor, possibly relocate the bathrooms to add a door to the dishpit, get rid of the cheap low boy that doesn’t properly drain excess water, and Mr Gorbachov knock down that wall in the middle of the kitchen to give the proper amount of space to work. Or simply reduce the menu to 36 items (including sides) because that’s the amount of space this dreadful design can comfortably output. Would Gordon Ramsay compliment KK for all the unnecessary convoluted complications abound, or would Chef Ramsay yell about keeping it simple and demand KK chuck it in the flip? Thanks to the numerous pop up restaurants I have been a part of and the hectic world of trade shows/conventions, I may have more experience than anyone else employed by KK in smoothly opening a new location. I would enjoy being part of the opening team to ensure new locations have an efficiency Bikini Bottom lacks, and to keep upper management away from their worst instincts. Work with me and Chef Ren and we will help you become a well oiled machine like Chokey Chicken instead of the Chum Bucket cesspit Bikini Bottom currently embodies.

I know quitting your job as a cook usually simply comes with two weeks notice or a ragequit walkout, but for eleven months I worked at a new franchise that had such potential which was being squandered by the incompetence of upper management. I present the nearly 6000 word thesis I turned in on my last day. Locations and names have been changed to cartoon references. Brackets represent ambiguous information in place of specific details.
Krusty Krab Careers Jobs
Opening in [Month/Year], Krusty Krab (KK) Bikini Bottom is on its 4th kitchen manager in less than a year. Krusty Krab O-Town has recently let go its inaugural kitchen manager and sous chef. Almost no member of the Bikini Bottom opening management team remains employed by KK. There is a pattern developing where one must question both the choice of employee and the directive given to new franchises. These lingering issues I brought concerns about in the first weeks of opening but was disregarded at every turn despite my experience with festival traffic. As a result I decided this was not a place I wanted to advance, but with a good-enough paycheck I’d be a lowly grunt in the kitchen four days a week, at five days a week I would have quit or been fired over a public outburst long ago. If Krusty Krab alters course slightly while being true to the brand this could be a successful chain.
My unique employment history in brick and mortar restaurants, food trucks, pop up culinary concepts, trade shows/conventions, and the film industry make me an ideal candidate to be on the opening team for new KK locations. My outgoing nature and foresight are valuable assets. For example, on training week before opening when I was standing around idly without a task I took it upon myself to organize the disarray that was dry storage. Overhearing Krabs tell another manager where he wanted the cleaning products placed, I had a jumping off point and the organization I created nine months ago is still largely in place. Since returning from my vacation in early February I have made it my mission to keep the storage area organized because it was again starting to resemble a hoarder’s house rather than a commercial kitchen. This is now part of my weekly routines because every time I turn my back there is more product being placed haphazardly just anywhere with little regard. I also recently reorganized the walk-in cooler because of problematic stocking with items being placed on the same shelf or below raw proteins. I also simply put all the like products together such as cheeses or fruits that were scattered amongst several shelves. With recent overordering I cannot keep up with the organization of the walk in cooler. The pattern recognition of food types and even simple shapes appears to be lost on the Bikini Bottom crew. My daily reorganization of containers is proof of this. Most days I’ll take a few minutes to put all cylinders together, all cambros together in descending volume, all deep and shallow pans next to each other rather than intermixed. My decision to be a kitchen manager at age 19 from 2005 thru 2008 and rarely enter restaurant management since is very calculated.
With my prior knowledge of professional kitchens I was becoming Bikini Bottom’s resident nag to coworkers as I made note of health department violations on a daily basis. I stopped after being largely ignored for two weeks. My regular health department nags include; a battle with jackets and hats being placed only in the designated area (a designated area that did not exist until I created a place for personal items a in January by neatly organizing the dry storage area again), waiting until prepped items are cooled before a cover is placed on top, placement of raw seafood, open containers (very often sugar, flour, and pancake mix bags ripped open and left), and dirty dishes/containers placed back in rotation. The dirty dishes and containers in rotation with the clean ones are at an atrociously high number. I have given up on making the 4th fryer seafood allergy safe too. With the low volume of seafood allergy safe items Bikini Bottom should purchase smaller baskets to visually discourage cross contamination with the other fryers and baskets. My skills to organize the kitchen do not end with simply where to store products to meet minimal health department standards.
Half of the space in the Bikini Bottom kitchen is completely wasted on an ill-advised walkway to the dishpit. An intelligent design would place a second doorway directly to the dishpit connected to the bar or where the bathrooms reside. Numerous times during the opening week of KK Bikini Bottom I said, yelled, sang, and muttered that we have too many food items for the amount of space we have. Icus stated that there was more space than Bluffington. Is Bluffington intelligently designed? Because Bikini Bottom most certainly isn’t. So Bikini Bottom actually has less space even if there is more square footage. See the attached diagram for an intelligent design that could potentially house a menu of this size. Bikini Bottom forces a line design on this kitchen when an open concept is needed for this menu. It’s as if this floorplan was created by a person who had only ever seen one commercial kitchen previously and couldn’t think 4th dimensionally to understand the needs of the workers to smoothly serve customers.
There is not enough counter space for pizzas without getting off the line, the microwave is placed completely out of the way, the freezer’s curved design is a waste of potential counter space and a falling hazard for containers stored on top of it, the toaster is an overcomplicated and overexpensive piece of machinery that serves exactly one purpose when a flat top could be used to toast bread and other purposes like a quesadilla special, sautee was designed without an overhang for spices, the pantry station lacks the counter space to have two containers of flour and two containers of batter for seafood allergies, there are no Frialator fryers which I have worked with at every single kitchen job previously instead we got the cheap Vulcan model (is that logical), the cheap low boy in pantry that doesn’t drain excess water anywhere it’s just supposed to evaporate somehow but doesn’t, the grill and fryer should be placed next to each other (with a higher volume of crossover than other stations), the floors are flat instead on having a mild decline towards the drains (just look at the standing water residing behind the oven right now), in the dishpit the spraying area and the filled sinks are backwards of a logical dipshit, the ramp to the back door is on the wrong side, there is no refrigerated place downstairs to stage extra food for busy shifts (the beer cooler is once again used for such food items because of this massive oversight), the prep station is an afterthought and miniscule, the dishes on the line are difficult to grab for anyone under 5’11” and inaccessible for anyone under 5’6” (instead of putting them underneath tables that also give that desperately needed counterspace I spoke of), there is not enough space to store to-go containers or boats behind the line, expo is lacking a low boy for the numerous items that are supposed to be cold but are instead kept at room temperature all day long, no one in management thought about buying shelves until right before Bikini Bottom opened as a result the clean full sheets sat on the floor for days, we had only the exact amount of 1⁄6 pans for an absurd amount of time making it impossible to rotate and clean them when necessary (which is daily), we still struggle with 1/9 pan supply. And just when I thought I documented all the poor design choices possible I stumbled upon a person whose office holiday party was booked at KK Bikini Bottom. The deck space works just fine as a deck. It does not double well as a gathering space. The space is too long and narrow for parties, it promotes little splitoff groups rather than a coming together of a larger gathering. It may be advantageous to contact a social psychologist for help designing a private party space that promotes intermingling rather than enforcing small pockets to form. The reorganization of the physical kitchen isn’t all that screams for an overhaul.
There are six positions on the line at the Krusty Krab; expo, oven, grill, sautee, fryer, and pantry. But the pantry and fryer positions are forced together like a bad remix. Everyone who mainly works pantry deserves a $6 raise immediately because it is a station and a half. Both Icus and Krumm, while kitchen manager, kind of acknowledged the pantry is too big for one station without outright mentioning the lopsided distribution of work. I imagine in the only location where this works, Bluffington, a second person joins the pantry at noon because of the unreasonable amount of items one person is tasked with. Bikini Bottom only has one person in this position at all times, maybe modify it for one person? The excess of items on the pantry position largely resembles a position I would call “set-up” or “build” at a previous job that made sensible choices. This build position should have tostadas, tacos, butcher’s blocks, toast, salads, lettuce wrap set ups, and preparing plating for whichever station is most bogged down. I have absolutely lost my mind yelling about salads at least once a month, ranting that they do not belong on the fryer position because of how illogical it is that five salads are included on the mountain of other items the pantry has. I have always considered working in a kitchen a kind of dance, and the pantry station demands an unnecessarily convoluted dance to keep up with the demand. Without the salads, tostadas, and tacos the station is already the busiest. Do we really need to combine ballet and swing by including these extra awkward dance steps in this single station? For a kitchen designed this poorly I suppose it is. Again, see attached document for an intelligently designed kitchen that might be able to accommodate this menu. Unless Bikini Bottom is going to close for a month to fix the baffling floor plan design the menu is shouting to be reduced to 30-36 items.
The menu is too big. Krusty Krab is the jack of all foods, master of none. In general I believe individual locations should be allowed 18% omissions, and 18% unique items to this wildly unwieldy menu sitting around 50 food items including sides. The insistence on keeping menu items that don’t sell at Bikini Bottom because of Bluffington is mind boggling. Chicken tenders do not sell at Bikini Bottom. fried sushi does not sell at Bikini Bottom, not enough to justify their place on the line. I don’t care how well these items work in Bluffinton. They. Do. Not. Work. At. Bikini. Bottom. If the KK location in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean sells an incredible amount of live krill does that mean Bikini Bottom and O-Town must sell live krill too? Take the fried sushi off the menu. I had a complete meltdown about this during a Dimmadome service and my valid point was met with indifference. Replace the kid’s tenders with a kid’s fish sticks. We already have the tilapia fish sticks on the line for tacos. Or make the kid’s fish sticks cod. We cut cod to order for fish tacos in spite of health code violations because it is too rare of an order to make beforehand. Saffron in mashed potatoes? If you must. Why are green tomatoes only on the menu during lunch? Bikini Bottom throws away a sizable amount of spoiled green tomatoes each week. Have green tomatoes on the menu all day long or don’t have them at all. The smoked salmon could go on salads or a special taco to justify its place on the line. The corn pico’s place on the line is unjustified. It only goes on one item, tostadas, which are not particularly popular. If we had a taco salad we could throw the corn pico on there. We also have unreasonable waste from unusable taco shells, smash up those imperfect taco shells and throw them on said taco salad. But before we add salads, let's get rid of the pear and kale salads. The pears' position on the line are unjustified, if we threw them on a taco variation maybe their place on the Bikini Bottom line could be argued but for now they only go on a salad that isn’t particularly popular. The kale salad is an issue of space for a 4th green for salads is too much. The krusty salad is my most hated house salad of all time. And it comes down to the toast with goat cheese. This ancillary step of spreading goat cheese on a cracker is an unnecessary step for an overly complicated dance and should be part of the expo dance if expo wasn’t a shoddily designed afterthought lacking a low boy.
There are a plethora of squeeze bottles on the pantry station that have no place on the overloaded station. They belong to an expo station with a low boy to keep them cold. Pantry has an overwhelming ten squeeze bottles: chipotle crema, sweet chili vinaigrette, buffalo, korean bbq, ranch, caesar, wine vinaigrette, lemon vinaigrette, honey mustard, and lemon aioli. Only the first four are justified on an intelligently designed fryer section, the second four belong on the build station, the last two have no place anywhere but expo. With this extra space sautee could keep their bottles and two purees cold in the fryer's lowboy instead of leaving them at room temperature all day inviting a pathogen party. This theorized intelligently designed expo would have room to keep these four squeeze bottles and a double of every sauce chilled to pour them into ramekins, a move that is highly common in the expo dance. The fact that expo doesn’t have a double of all squeeze bottles is foolish. Expo has to bother an overloaded station to pour these side sauces instead.
How many gallons of basil aioli has Bikini Bottom thrown away in 11 months? Four aiolis in general is way too many and most go on a single item; basil aioli on the incredibly unpopular veggie burger, lemon aioli for calamari, sweet chili aioli for the BLT that is only served half of the day, and garlic aioli actually goes on two items…I believe. What a colossal waste of precious little space, lose two aiolis and then you can sing the logical song with me. Perhaps we can put garlic aioli and sweet chili vinaigrette on the BLT separately and accomplish the exact same thing the sweet chili aioli does. The wings too have unneeded complications. Having worked at a sports bar specializing in wings for the better part of a decade I find KK’s plating of wings to be overly pretentious. The carrots, celery, and blue cheese have lost function. Heffer Wolf always said no one eats the carrot/celery julienne with blue cheese. It’s a complete waste of all the ingredients because you’ve gone too far with the presentation. Wings aren’t fancy. Wings are supposed to have a small pool of sauce and be sloppy. It’s like a sloppy joe that’s not sloppy, an unsloppy joe is a failure to sloppy joes just as the KK presentation of wings is a disparagement to the dish. Ever since training week back in 2022 I have used a scale to give Bikini Bottom a passing or failing grade.
Chokey Chicken to Chum Bucket is the scale I use to judge efficiency and sanity at Bikini Bottom. Both establishments are upscale casual dining experiences in Capitol City in the same vein as KK. Chokey had high employee retention and relatively smooth openings for new locations. Chum Bucket’s employee turnover was high and every location opening was chaotic. Which one sounds closer to KK? Chokey Chicken was filled with chefs I respect including Chef Ren Hoek who remains a close friend to this day. Ren lost his lifelong passion for kitchen work after working management at Chum Bucket. He’s actually seeking work in Bikini Bottom. Call him up at [phone number], but KK will give him Nam’ flashbacks of why he chose driving for a living rather than cooking for five years. The pair of us together helming Bikini Bottom with the ability to omit and create 18% of the overloaded menu can bring success to this franchise. We have worked well numerous times in the past on various concepts in the past including creating The Attack of the Pickled Tomatoes Burger for [Promotional live performance of a TV show] at the Capitol City Theater. We served 100 people in 60 at the [sitcom filming] lunch. That’s physically impossible but somehow we did it quite a few times.
A fun anecdote about Ren Hoek’s KK experience from the soft launch; on training week numerous times I brought concerns about being seafood allergy safe that were dismissed. As mentioned earlier the pantry station lacks the counter space to have two containers of flour and two containers of batter, one each of which seafood never touches. Before the soft launch Chef Stimpy from Bluffington insisted all customers just kind of know everything is prone to be seafood contaminated. Well, chef Ren was a customer that night and this absolutely was not communicated to customers. He claimed to have a slight seafood allergy and was not informed of what the crab soup was. In reality he does not have a seafood allergy. I didn’t discuss the seafood issue with Ren, separately we noticed egregious violations of food safety standards and we each responded in our own way. The soft launch service was so awful that night Chef Ren walked out of a free meal to pay for some ramen, never to return to Bikini Bottom. I attribute this oversight, and many of Bikini Bottom’s (and probably O-Town’s) problems to hubris over the Bluffington location.
Chef Chokey would also be hesitant to join the KK team. It will cost a finder’s fee just for me to reveal Chef Chokey’s name. Chef Chokey was a lead in the rapid expansion of Chokey Chicken restaurants. He opened numerous restaurants and was big on the philosophy that each restaurant must have its own personality in order to fit the unique local culture and the variety of working spaces. This is in direct conflict with the KK way that everything must be exactly like the Bluffington location no matter what. There was only one Chokey Chicken location that had the full menu, Chokey Springfield. Chokey Springfield had a large space which was intelligently designed to accommodate such a large menu. The KK menu is all over the place, closing in on 50 menu items which comes up as a failure on the Chokey Chicken/Chum Bucket scale. This is not the only area KK comes up as a major failure on the Chokey Chicken/Chum Bucket scale.
Has anyone in this company ever worked festival traffic before? Does anyone have the experience of working next to a major venue with 8000 seats before this one? The way Bikini Bottom handles Dimmadome services it certainly appears that the decision-makers fall on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Having all 50 items available during such massive traffic is completely asinine. An unwillingness to serve a partial menu is hindering the Bikini Bottom kitchen staff. I have worked festival traffic before, and Dimmadome events bring in festival traffic. I’ve worked inside a festival whose line never ended but every customer got their order in 5 minutes or less because the line kept flowing with only four items on the menu as that’s what was warranted at the B-Sharps Music Festival. I refuse to be set up for failure the way Bikini Bottom sets up Dimmadome services for failure. The entire week of concerts in [summer] 2022 I was set up for failure every day (it was after this I modified my availability to keep my sanity and my paycheck). When I brought my concerns about running efficiently during Dimmadome services I was labeled a B-worker for the first time in my employment history by Icus and Krabs. It is that moment which I was either going to holler at them both for being 2-dimensional thinkers who were obviously unqualified for the positions they accepted in this company, or just put my head down. If Bikini Bottom has a successful concert day service, hail your team because they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. They swam with concrete shoes. I often wonder how many customers had bad experiences and never returned after concert days. A Dimmadome service should have no more than 25 items and have one or two specials to divert traffic towards an area the kitchen can keep moving. An Open Cup Open Plate (OCOP) special for foot traffic is absolutely needed. When I suggested OCOP special, Heffer was intrigued by this idea and immediately named burgers as the special to keep foot traffic flowing. Smithers wouldn’t hear this idea, babbling on about what’s advertised instead of hearing out a sound idea. This prattle despite radio commercials having inaccurate hours and social media promoting Bikini Bottom’s steak tacos to this day. I always found Smithers to be a better fit as a middle management office pencil pusher than as a hands-on restaurant manager. Overall I find KK managers are selected to be automatons not to question their orders rather than critical thinkers who could take the restaurant to the next level. During brunch service is another period of time that must be modified to lessen the heft of items. Having a full menu that barely works plus brunch is so deep into Chum Bucket territory, in my opinion we now have to use the Tropic Thunder scale of full retard to describe a 60-plus-item brunch. Chef Ren hired back a Chum Bucket cook who had a mental breakdown and stormed out during brunch (plus full menu) service because Ren knew the employee was justified and upper management was completely unreasonable in their brunch requests. It’s not just questionable decisions that hinder KK staff but improper equipment as well.
This is the first restaurant I have worked at which uses a touch screen on the line rather than tickets. From day one I found this to be technology for technology’s sake inferior to tickets. Chef Ren forced a new Chum Bucket location to rip out touch screens from the line and bring in ticket printers because of the higher efficiency. The touch screen is a great idea for expo, not the entire line. My biggest gripe is that each station does not get all the information. Early on I was regularly yelled at for not staggering my items, well I can’t see the rest of the order; a problem I have never had with a ticket system. Touchscreen software is also much more prone to errors and glitches. When I reported an error during a heavy service Icus and Krabs blamed my skills on the line without looking into the malfunctioning screen further. It was glitchy for weeks before the two finally investigated and corrected the issue I brought to their attention long before. Those two gave me an immense amount of ammunition to dislike them in the opening weeks until I stopped caring. The issue I had with being unable to scroll beyond the bottom of a completely filled screen has returned and is still there as of [my last day]. There are also important details that get buried. A frequent meltdown I have is that sauce on side requests and other important modifications are not capitalized or in red to catch the eye as they have been at jobs with tickets. These details get lost on Bikini Bottom’s touchscreens. A sauce on side salad made by me will be wrong 50% of the time because of the instructions being camouflaged in a word salad. This goes for coleslaw on the side and drizzle on the side too. Drizzle in general I dislike because of the pretentiousness, but whatever, drizzle it on top rather than putting it in a ramekin if you must. There are numerous places where Bikini Bottom overcomplicates matters for reasons I cannot ascertain.
Why is there such a large variety of plates? Why do we have a medium circular plate for salads and a large bowl for salads with protein? This just confuses the simplest of matters. I was told this is done because of the high price hike with protein, a larger presentation was desired. But that price hike is the price of protein in 2023. Bikini Bottom should put all salads in the large bowls and use all the circular salad plates in a skeet shooting promotion. I understand why we have both a circular platter plate and a pizza plate but in my restaurant the circular platter plates must go...or maybe the large platter plate instead. Is the large platter used for anything besides fish and chips? That extra space on fish and chips plates are only used for side sauces which can easily be delivered to customers on small circular plates. What is the medium oval plate doing that the medium rectangular plate isn’t? And vice versa. Why do they both exist when they are approximately the same size? Let me write an internet commercial where we break a lot of plates so we can get some logical use out of the superfluous plates. I don’t care which one is destroyed, the ovals or the rectangles but one of them is an unnecessary redundancy in excess done again. Speaking of commercials, the unimaginative radio advertisements for Bikini Bottom are doing little to lure new customers to the restaurant.
The three radio spots I have heard on KBBL all sound like they were produced by a marketing 101 student who wasn’t a natural in the field. The voiceover actor was so uncharismatic I was certain someone from the office was chosen at random to read the copy. Then I heard that same voiceover actor selling pool supplies on another radio station so I concluded that Bikini Bottom must have hired the cheapest guy in town to produce the most basic of commercials. Perhaps there is someone else you could hire more qualified to voiceover these commercials, an actor with experience on an Emmy award winning cable program whose unique place in the film industry was written about on [website] would be a much wiser choice to be the voice of the KK? (See external link). In the ad there was no catchphrase, no jingle, no music whatsoever. This simple approach to commercials lacks the pizazz to catch the attention of radio listeners. The first two commercials I heard would get a C in marketing 101 as they were nearly the exact same and accomplished the bare minimum to sell wares, the third one would maybe get a B- because there was some sort of attempted gimmick with the voiceover whispering to represent thinking inside his head about what he was going to eat later at KK. Not only does this commercial give no reason for the man to think inside his head, the outside world still and unpopulated. To see what a creative person would do with this concept see the attached script. There is an attempted slogan that could become part of an ad campaign. Commercials aren’t the only lost opportunities in promotions.
There are numerous promotional celebrity tie-ins at Bikini Bottom’s fingertips with Dimmadome performers. The restaurant could have a Phish sandwich as a OCOP special on [Phish performance dates], or a pretentious Jelly Roll on [Jelly Roll performance date]. Has anyone reached out to the Dimmadome theater or talent management for approved special menu items to be promoted inside the dome? Perhaps a special 20% discount to ticket holders? Is Bikini Bottom capable of getting permits to extend Open Container hours beyond [cutoff time] for an afterparty or block party throughout a Dimmadome concert? I see additional marketing opportunities left on the table for all new locations.
I believe new KK locations are missing out on a marketing campaign by opening with the entire cumbersome 50 item menu. This is a staggering amount of menu items which is too much to ask new staffers to perfect all at once. After a few months expanding the menu by approximately ten items is catching to customers who haven’t returned after a single visit or infrequently stop into KK. There are ten new food items that might appeal to them. Just like it appears KK doesn’t know what it’s looking for in a good commercial spot, this company doesn’t appear to recognize a talented from an untalented worker until it’s too late.
It is my understanding that KK had a headhunter to find Icus, the first Bikini Bottom kitchen manager. If it were up to me I’d hire someone to break the legs of that headhunter for bringing in a subpar kitchen lead. We are still attempting to recover from the lousy choices she made in the floor plan. If anybody responsible for Bikini Bottom’s floor plan is still giving input, stop them immediately. Once the doors were open to the public Icus had his head in the clouds to a point where I questioned if he saw the writing on the walls of an imminent demotion and stopped trying as a result. I had a full deck of 3x5 cards in an archaic powerpoint presentation bringing numerous concerns to light that he kept putting off listening to until he was fired. Those same cards were broken out for this essay. The second kitchen manager, Krumm, is a good lesson in honesty. According to Heffer, Krumm was given a bill of goods about how smoothly KK Bikini Bottom was running. Since Krumm stepped into a latrine pit which he was led to believe was a heated pool, he left in short time. Krumm also had plans to modify the menu but when his bosses told him to be a rodeo clown rather than a cowboy Krumm didn’t take too kindly to that. Meanwhile Heffer was the savior of the Bikini Bottom kitchen. I didn’t agree with every single decision he made, but I did with a majority of them. Heffer’s overhaul was such a blessing so I didn’t have to fiddle with the organization of 60% of the equipment anymore, only about 20% now. Too bad Heffer’s crippling depression came back after bashing his head into the wall out of frustration with the shackles KK restrained him with.
The current management team is enthusiastic but inexperienced. I see an accumulation of small infractions that might bring down Bikini Bottom’s health department rating significantly. I see the entire management team being inattentive or unaware about organizational issues. Whatever bureaucratic nonsense corporate tasks everyone with from the original sous chef Skeeter to Patty Mayonnaise that makes them walk away from the line between 11am and 1pm especially is infuriating. I have never been left alone on a multi-person line during peak hours so regularly, and I won’t tolerate it anymore. As much as I believe in his drive, I imagine our current kitchen manager SpongeBob will be let go after a disastrous service during the Dimmadome concert season that someone has to take the fall for. Chef Ren and I could help bring experience in management and dealing with festival traffic...if corporate does not force us to follow a failing strategy.
After working nearly a year at KK you may ask why I’m not proficient on more than one station. Excellent question. First, when I move over to another station the squeeze bottles are never labeled (until Stu Pickles was hired, now they’re sometimes labeled), so I always looked at the glut of unlabeled sauces and I’d go back to my station because the basic information is missing (also a health department violation for having numerous unlabeled, unchilled bottles). In his first week the new general manager Stu Pickles pulled out 90% of the containers under the grill station because they were lacking labels despite an expected health department visit. The second reason for my menu ignorance is the mountain of prep for my own and upcoming shifts I have piled up on my station throughout service. My attention to detail appears to be next level with my ability to anticipate stocking all items for all shifts including the weeknd. The third reason I wouldn’t learn multiple stations is a defense against the afternoon conference calls. In [month] the Bikini Bottom line was unprepared for a busy post lunch because one cook was cut and our expo person was busy with a conference call. The two of us remaining on the line had a miserable slog through an unexpectedly busy afternoon. When I brought this up to Krabs he disregarded me, being a good bean counter he quoted the cost percentage. What he didn’t take into account was the missing expo person who could have jumped on the line and expo to help the understaffed two man team. That person was stuck on a conference call. Just recently I saw the company actively lose money because of this poorly thought-out meeting during business hours. A customer wanted to order a dessert that was 86ed but had been restocked by our prep cook an hour before. The server was unable to sell them their dessert because the only person in the building who could help un-86 an item was on a conference call. This conference call calamity is another bone-headed choice that speaks to a larger decision-making problem within the corporate structure. Finish the conference calls by 10:45 am eastern.
In conclusion, I quit my position as a lowly grunt for this company because of its unwarranted perplexing dance steps and below average management. I don’t care how much varnish and lacquer is supplied, I refuse to polish this Bikini Bottom turd as a manager or full-time employee under the current circumstances. You would have to take a pickaxe to the floor, possibly relocate the bathrooms to add a door to the dishpit, get rid of the cheap low boy that doesn’t properly drain excess water, and Mr Gorbachov knock down that wall in the middle of the kitchen to give the proper amount of space to work. Or simply reduce the menu to 36 items (including sides) because that’s the amount of space this dreadful design can comfortably output. Would Gordon Ramsay compliment KK for all the unnecessary convoluted complications abound, or would Chef Ramsay yell about keeping it simple and demand KK chuck it in the flip? Thanks to the numerous pop up restaurants I have been a part of and the hectic world of trade shows/conventions, I may have more experience than anyone else employed by KK in smoothly opening a new location. I would enjoy being part of the opening team to ensure new locations have an efficiency Bikini Bottom lacks, and to keep upper management away from their worst instincts. Work with me and Chef Ren and we will help you become a well oiled machine like Chokey Chicken instead of the Chum Bucket cesspit Bikini Bottom currently embodies.

I know quitting your job as a cook usually simply comes with two weeks notice or a ragequit walkout, but for eleven months I worked at a new franchise that had such potential which was being squandered by the incompetence of upper management. I present the nearly 6000 word thesis I turned in on my last day. Locations and names have been changed to cartoon references. Brackets represent ambiguous information in place of specific details.
Krusty Krab Careers Jobs
Opening in [Month/Year], Krusty Krab (KK) Bikini Bottom is on its 4th kitchen manager in less than a year. Krusty Krab O-Town has recently let go its inaugural kitchen manager and sous chef. Almost no member of the Bikini Bottom opening management team remains employed by KK. There is a pattern developing where one must question both the choice of employee and the directive given to new franchises. These lingering issues I brought concerns about in the first weeks of opening but was disregarded at every turn despite my experience with festival traffic. As a result I decided this was not a place I wanted to advance, but with a good-enough paycheck I’d be a lowly grunt in the kitchen four days a week, at five days a week I would have quit or been fired over a public outburst long ago. If Krusty Krab alters course slightly while being true to the brand this could be a successful chain.
My unique employment history in brick and mortar restaurants, food trucks, pop up culinary concepts, trade shows/conventions, and the film industry make me an ideal candidate to be on the opening team for new KK locations. My outgoing nature and foresight are valuable assets. For example, on training week before opening when I was standing around idly without a task I took it upon myself to organize the disarray that was dry storage. Overhearing Krabs tell another manager where he wanted the cleaning products placed, I had a jumping off point and the organization I created nine months ago is still largely in place. Since returning from my vacation in early February I have made it my mission to keep the storage area organized because it was again starting to resemble a hoarder’s house rather than a commercial kitchen. This is now part of my weekly routines because every time I turn my back there is more product being placed haphazardly just anywhere with little regard. I also recently reorganized the walk-in cooler because of problematic stocking with items being placed on the same shelf or below raw proteins. I also simply put all the like products together such as cheeses or fruits that were scattered amongst several shelves. With recent overordering I cannot keep up with the organization of the walk in cooler. The pattern recognition of food types and even simple shapes appears to be lost on the Bikini Bottom crew. My daily reorganization of containers is proof of this. Most days I’ll take a few minutes to put all cylinders together, all cambros together in descending volume, all deep and shallow pans next to each other rather than intermixed. My decision to be a kitchen manager at age 19 from 2005 thru 2008 and rarely enter restaurant management since is very calculated.
With my prior knowledge of professional kitchens I was becoming Bikini Bottom’s resident nag to coworkers as I made note of health department violations on a daily basis. I stopped after being largely ignored for two weeks. My regular health department nags include; a battle with jackets and hats being placed only in the designated area (a designated area that did not exist until I created a place for personal items a in January by neatly organizing the dry storage area again), waiting until prepped items are cooled before a cover is placed on top, placement of raw seafood, open containers (very often sugar, flour, and pancake mix bags ripped open and left), and dirty dishes/containers placed back in rotation. The dirty dishes and containers in rotation with the clean ones are at an atrociously high number. I have given up on making the 4th fryer seafood allergy safe too. With the low volume of seafood allergy safe items Bikini Bottom should purchase smaller baskets to visually discourage cross contamination with the other fryers and baskets. My skills to organize the kitchen do not end with simply where to store products to meet minimal health department standards.
Half of the space in the Bikini Bottom kitchen is completely wasted on an ill-advised walkway to the dishpit. An intelligent design would place a second doorway directly to the dishpit connected to the bar or where the bathrooms reside. Numerous times during the opening week of KK Bikini Bottom I said, yelled, sang, and muttered that we have too many food items for the amount of space we have. Icus stated that there was more space than Bluffington. Is Bluffington intelligently designed? Because Bikini Bottom most certainly isn’t. So Bikini Bottom actually has less space even if there is more square footage. See the attached diagram for an intelligent design that could potentially house a menu of this size. Bikini Bottom forces a line design on this kitchen when an open concept is needed for this menu. It’s as if this floorplan was created by a person who had only ever seen one commercial kitchen previously and couldn’t think 4th dimensionally to understand the needs of the workers to smoothly serve customers.
There is not enough counter space for pizzas without getting off the line, the microwave is placed completely out of the way, the freezer’s curved design is a waste of potential counter space and a falling hazard for containers stored on top of it, the toaster is an overcomplicated and overexpensive piece of machinery that serves exactly one purpose when a flat top could be used to toast bread and other purposes like a quesadilla special, sautee was designed without an overhang for spices, the pantry station lacks the counter space to have two containers of flour and two containers of batter for seafood allergies, there are no Frialator fryers which I have worked with at every single kitchen job previously instead we got the cheap Vulcan model (is that logical), the cheap low boy in pantry that doesn’t drain excess water anywhere it’s just supposed to evaporate somehow but doesn’t, the grill and fryer should be placed next to each other (with a higher volume of crossover than other stations), the floors are flat instead on having a mild decline towards the drains (just look at the standing water residing behind the oven right now), in the dishpit the spraying area and the filled sinks are backwards of a logical dipshit, the ramp to the back door is on the wrong side, there is no refrigerated place downstairs to stage extra food for busy shifts (the beer cooler is once again used for such food items because of this massive oversight), the prep station is an afterthought and miniscule, the dishes on the line are difficult to grab for anyone under 5’11” and inaccessible for anyone under 5’6” (instead of putting them underneath tables that also give that desperately needed counterspace I spoke of), there is not enough space to store to-go containers or boats behind the line, expo is lacking a low boy for the numerous items that are supposed to be cold but are instead kept at room temperature all day long, no one in management thought about buying shelves until right before Bikini Bottom opened as a result the clean full sheets sat on the floor for days, we had only the exact amount of 1⁄6 pans for an absurd amount of time making it impossible to rotate and clean them when necessary (which is daily), we still struggle with 1/9 pan supply. And just when I thought I documented all the poor design choices possible I stumbled upon a person whose office holiday party was booked at KK Bikini Bottom. The deck space works just fine as a deck. It does not double well as a gathering space. The space is too long and narrow for parties, it promotes little splitoff groups rather than a coming together of a larger gathering. It may be advantageous to contact a social psychologist for help designing a private party space that promotes intermingling rather than enforcing small pockets to form. The reorganization of the physical kitchen isn’t all that screams for an overhaul.
There are six positions on the line at the Krusty Krab; expo, oven, grill, sautee, fryer, and pantry. But the pantry and fryer positions are forced together like a bad remix. Everyone who mainly works pantry deserves a $6 raise immediately because it is a station and a half. Both Icus and Krumm, while kitchen manager, kind of acknowledged the pantry is too big for one station without outright mentioning the lopsided distribution of work. I imagine in the only location where this works, Bluffington, a second person joins the pantry at noon because of the unreasonable amount of items one person is tasked with. Bikini Bottom only has one person in this position at all times, maybe modify it for one person? The excess of items on the pantry position largely resembles a position I would call “set-up” or “build” at a previous job that made sensible choices. This build position should have tostadas, tacos, butcher’s blocks, toast, salads, lettuce wrap set ups, and preparing plating for whichever station is most bogged down. I have absolutely lost my mind yelling about salads at least once a month, ranting that they do not belong on the fryer position because of how illogical it is that five salads are included on the mountain of other items the pantry has. I have always considered working in a kitchen a kind of dance, and the pantry station demands an unnecessarily convoluted dance to keep up with the demand. Without the salads, tostadas, and tacos the station is already the busiest. Do we really need to combine ballet and swing by including these extra awkward dance steps in this single station? For a kitchen designed this poorly I suppose it is. Again, see attached document for an intelligently designed kitchen that might be able to accommodate this menu. Unless Bikini Bottom is going to close for a month to fix the baffling floor plan design the menu is shouting to be reduced to 30-36 items.
The menu is too big. Krusty Krab is the jack of all foods, master of none. In general I believe individual locations should be allowed 18% omissions, and 18% unique items to this wildly unwieldy menu sitting around 50 food items including sides. The insistence on keeping menu items that don’t sell at Bikini Bottom because of Bluffington is mind boggling. Chicken tenders do not sell at Bikini Bottom. fried sushi does not sell at Bikini Bottom, not enough to justify their place on the line. I don’t care how well these items work in Bluffinton. They. Do. Not. Work. At. Bikini. Bottom. If the KK location in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean sells an incredible amount of live krill does that mean Bikini Bottom and O-Town must sell live krill too? Take the fried sushi off the menu. I had a complete meltdown about this during a Dimmadome service and my valid point was met with indifference. Replace the kid’s tenders with a kid’s fish sticks. We already have the tilapia fish sticks on the line for tacos. Or make the kid’s fish sticks cod. We cut cod to order for fish tacos in spite of health code violations because it is too rare of an order to make beforehand. Saffron in mashed potatoes? If you must. Why are green tomatoes only on the menu during lunch? Bikini Bottom throws away a sizable amount of spoiled green tomatoes each week. Have green tomatoes on the menu all day long or don’t have them at all. The smoked salmon could go on salads or a special taco to justify its place on the line. The corn pico’s place on the line is unjustified. It only goes on one item, tostadas, which are not particularly popular. If we had a taco salad we could throw the corn pico on there. We also have unreasonable waste from unusable taco shells, smash up those imperfect taco shells and throw them on said taco salad. But before we add salads, let's get rid of the pear and kale salads. The pears' position on the line are unjustified, if we threw them on a taco variation maybe their place on the Bikini Bottom line could be argued but for now they only go on a salad that isn’t particularly popular. The kale salad is an issue of space for a 4th green for salads is too much. The krusty salad is my most hated house salad of all time. And it comes down to the toast with goat cheese. This ancillary step of spreading goat cheese on a cracker is an unnecessary step for an overly complicated dance and should be part of the expo dance if expo wasn’t a shoddily designed afterthought lacking a low boy.
There are a plethora of squeeze bottles on the pantry station that have no place on the overloaded station. They belong to an expo station with a low boy to keep them cold. Pantry has an overwhelming ten squeeze bottles: chipotle crema, sweet chili vinaigrette, buffalo, korean bbq, ranch, caesar, wine vinaigrette, lemon vinaigrette, honey mustard, and lemon aioli. Only the first four are justified on an intelligently designed fryer section, the second four belong on the build station, the last two have no place anywhere but expo. With this extra space sautee could keep their bottles and two purees cold in the fryer's lowboy instead of leaving them at room temperature all day inviting a pathogen party. This theorized intelligently designed expo would have room to keep these four squeeze bottles and a double of every sauce chilled to pour them into ramekins, a move that is highly common in the expo dance. The fact that expo doesn’t have a double of all squeeze bottles is foolish. Expo has to bother an overloaded station to pour these side sauces instead.
How many gallons of basil aioli has Bikini Bottom thrown away in 11 months? Four aiolis in general is way too many and most go on a single item; basil aioli on the incredibly unpopular veggie burger, lemon aioli for calamari, sweet chili aioli for the BLT that is only served half of the day, and garlic aioli actually goes on two items…I believe. What a colossal waste of precious little space, lose two aiolis and then you can sing the logical song with me. Perhaps we can put garlic aioli and sweet chili vinaigrette on the BLT separately and accomplish the exact same thing the sweet chili aioli does. The wings too have unneeded complications. Having worked at a sports bar specializing in wings for the better part of a decade I find KK’s plating of wings to be overly pretentious. The carrots, celery, and blue cheese have lost function. Heffer Wolf always said no one eats the carrot/celery julienne with blue cheese. It’s a complete waste of all the ingredients because you’ve gone too far with the presentation. Wings aren’t fancy. Wings are supposed to have a small pool of sauce and be sloppy. It’s like a sloppy joe that’s not sloppy, an unsloppy joe is a failure to sloppy joes just as the KK presentation of wings is a disparagement to the dish. Ever since training week back in 2022 I have used a scale to give Bikini Bottom a passing or failing grade.
Chokey Chicken to Chum Bucket is the scale I use to judge efficiency and sanity at Bikini Bottom. Both establishments are upscale casual dining experiences in Capitol City in the same vein as KK. Chokey had high employee retention and relatively smooth openings for new locations. Chum Bucket’s employee turnover was high and every location opening was chaotic. Which one sounds closer to KK? Chokey Chicken was filled with chefs I respect including Chef Ren Hoek who remains a close friend to this day. Ren lost his lifelong passion for kitchen work after working management at Chum Bucket. He’s actually seeking work in Bikini Bottom. Call him up at [phone number], but KK will give him Nam’ flashbacks of why he chose driving for a living rather than cooking for five years. The pair of us together helming Bikini Bottom with the ability to omit and create 18% of the overloaded menu can bring success to this franchise. We have worked well numerous times in the past on various concepts in the past including creating The Attack of the Pickled Tomatoes Burger for [Promotional live performance of a TV show] at the Capitol City Theater. We served 100 people in 60 at the [sitcom filming] lunch. That’s physically impossible but somehow we did it quite a few times.
A fun anecdote about Ren Hoek’s KK experience from the soft launch; on training week numerous times I brought concerns about being seafood allergy safe that were dismissed. As mentioned earlier the pantry station lacks the counter space to have two containers of flour and two containers of batter, one each of which seafood never touches. Before the soft launch Chef Stimpy from Bluffington insisted all customers just kind of know everything is prone to be seafood contaminated. Well, chef Ren was a customer that night and this absolutely was not communicated to customers. He claimed to have a slight seafood allergy and was not informed of what the crab soup was. In reality he does not have a seafood allergy. I didn’t discuss the seafood issue with Ren, separately we noticed egregious violations of food safety standards and we each responded in our own way. The soft launch service was so awful that night Chef Ren walked out of a free meal to pay for some ramen, never to return to Bikini Bottom. I attribute this oversight, and many of Bikini Bottom’s (and probably O-Town’s) problems to hubris over the Bluffington location.
Chef Chokey would also be hesitant to join the KK team. It will cost a finder’s fee just for me to reveal Chef Chokey’s name. Chef Chokey was a lead in the rapid expansion of Chokey Chicken restaurants. He opened numerous restaurants and was big on the philosophy that each restaurant must have its own personality in order to fit the unique local culture and the variety of working spaces. This is in direct conflict with the KK way that everything must be exactly like the Bluffington location no matter what. There was only one Chokey Chicken location that had the full menu, Chokey Springfield. Chokey Springfield had a large space which was intelligently designed to accommodate such a large menu. The KK menu is all over the place, closing in on 50 menu items which comes up as a failure on the Chokey Chicken/Chum Bucket scale. This is not the only area KK comes up as a major failure on the Chokey Chicken/Chum Bucket scale.
Has anyone in this company ever worked festival traffic before? Does anyone have the experience of working next to a major venue with 8000 seats before this one? The way Bikini Bottom handles Dimmadome services it certainly appears that the decision-makers fall on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Having all 50 items available during such massive traffic is completely asinine. An unwillingness to serve a partial menu is hindering the Bikini Bottom kitchen staff. I have worked festival traffic before, and Dimmadome events bring in festival traffic. I’ve worked inside a festival whose line never ended but every customer got their order in 5 minutes or less because the line kept flowing with only four items on the menu as that’s what was warranted at the B-Sharps Music Festival. I refuse to be set up for failure the way Bikini Bottom sets up Dimmadome services for failure. The entire week of concerts in [summer] 2022 I was set up for failure every day (it was after this I modified my availability to keep my sanity and my paycheck). When I brought my concerns about running efficiently during Dimmadome services I was labeled a B-worker for the first time in my employment history by Icus and Krabs. It is that moment which I was either going to holler at them both for being 2-dimensional thinkers who were obviously unqualified for the positions they accepted in this company, or just put my head down. If Bikini Bottom has a successful concert day service, hail your team because they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. They swam with concrete shoes. I often wonder how many customers had bad experiences and never returned after concert days. A Dimmadome service should have no more than 25 items and have one or two specials to divert traffic towards an area the kitchen can keep moving. An Open Cup Open Plate (OCOP) special for foot traffic is absolutely needed. When I suggested OCOP special, Heffer was intrigued by this idea and immediately named burgers as the special to keep foot traffic flowing. Smithers wouldn’t hear this idea, babbling on about what’s advertised instead of hearing out a sound idea. This prattle despite radio commercials having inaccurate hours and social media promoting Bikini Bottom’s steak tacos to this day. I always found Smithers to be a better fit as a middle management office pencil pusher than as a hands-on restaurant manager. Overall I find KK managers are selected to be automatons not to question their orders rather than critical thinkers who could take the restaurant to the next level. During brunch service is another period of time that must be modified to lessen the heft of items. Having a full menu that barely works plus brunch is so deep into Chum Bucket territory, in my opinion we now have to use the Tropic Thunder scale of full retard to describe a 60-plus-item brunch. Chef Ren hired back a Chum Bucket cook who had a mental breakdown and stormed out during brunch (plus full menu) service because Ren knew the employee was justified and upper management was completely unreasonable in their brunch requests. It’s not just questionable decisions that hinder KK staff but improper equipment as well.
This is the first restaurant I have worked at which uses a touch screen on the line rather than tickets. From day one I found this to be technology for technology’s sake inferior to tickets. Chef Ren forced a new Chum Bucket location to rip out touch screens from the line and bring in ticket printers because of the higher efficiency. The touch screen is a great idea for expo, not the entire line. My biggest gripe is that each station does not get all the information. Early on I was regularly yelled at for not staggering my items, well I can’t see the rest of the order; a problem I have never had with a ticket system. Touchscreen software is also much more prone to errors and glitches. When I reported an error during a heavy service Icus and Krabs blamed my skills on the line without looking into the malfunctioning screen further. It was glitchy for weeks before the two finally investigated and corrected the issue I brought to their attention long before. Those two gave me an immense amount of ammunition to dislike them in the opening weeks until I stopped caring. The issue I had with being unable to scroll beyond the bottom of a completely filled screen has returned and is still there as of [my last day]. There are also important details that get buried. A frequent meltdown I have is that sauce on side requests and other important modifications are not capitalized or in red to catch the eye as they have been at jobs with tickets. These details get lost on Bikini Bottom’s touchscreens. A sauce on side salad made by me will be wrong 50% of the time because of the instructions being camouflaged in a word salad. This goes for coleslaw on the side and drizzle on the side too. Drizzle in general I dislike because of the pretentiousness, but whatever, drizzle it on top rather than putting it in a ramekin if you must. There are numerous places where Bikini Bottom overcomplicates matters for reasons I cannot ascertain.
Why is there such a large variety of plates? Why do we have a medium circular plate for salads and a large bowl for salads with protein? This just confuses the simplest of matters. I was told this is done because of the high price hike with protein, a larger presentation was desired. But that price hike is the price of protein in 2023. Bikini Bottom should put all salads in the large bowls and use all the circular salad plates in a skeet shooting promotion. I understand why we have both a circular platter plate and a pizza plate but in my restaurant the circular platter plates must go...or maybe the large platter plate instead. Is the large platter used for anything besides fish and chips? That extra space on fish and chips plates are only used for side sauces which can easily be delivered to customers on small circular plates. What is the medium oval plate doing that the medium rectangular plate isn’t? And vice versa. Why do they both exist when they are approximately the same size? Let me write an internet commercial where we break a lot of plates so we can get some logical use out of the superfluous plates. I don’t care which one is destroyed, the ovals or the rectangles but one of them is an unnecessary redundancy in excess done again. Speaking of commercials, the unimaginative radio advertisements for Bikini Bottom are doing little to lure new customers to the restaurant.
The three radio spots I have heard on KBBL all sound like they were produced by a marketing 101 student who wasn’t a natural in the field. The voiceover actor was so uncharismatic I was certain someone from the office was chosen at random to read the copy. Then I heard that same voiceover actor selling pool supplies on another radio station so I concluded that Bikini Bottom must have hired the cheapest guy in town to produce the most basic of commercials. Perhaps there is someone else you could hire more qualified to voiceover these commercials, an actor with experience on an Emmy award winning cable program whose unique place in the film industry was written about on [website] would be a much wiser choice to be the voice of the KK? (See external link). In the ad there was no catchphrase, no jingle, no music whatsoever. This simple approach to commercials lacks the pizazz to catch the attention of radio listeners. The first two commercials I heard would get a C in marketing 101 as they were nearly the exact same and accomplished the bare minimum to sell wares, the third one would maybe get a B- because there was some sort of attempted gimmick with the voiceover whispering to represent thinking inside his head about what he was going to eat later at KK. Not only does this commercial give no reason for the man to think inside his head, the outside world still and unpopulated. To see what a creative person would do with this concept see the attached script. There is an attempted slogan that could become part of an ad campaign. Commercials aren’t the only lost opportunities in promotions.
There are numerous promotional celebrity tie-ins at Bikini Bottom’s fingertips with Dimmadome performers. The restaurant could have a Phish sandwich as a OCOP special on [Phish performance dates], or a pretentious Jelly Roll on [Jelly Roll performance date]. Has anyone reached out to the Dimmadome theater or talent management for approved special menu items to be promoted inside the dome? Perhaps a special 20% discount to ticket holders? Is Bikini Bottom capable of getting permits to extend Open Container hours beyond [cutoff time] for an afterparty or block party throughout a Dimmadome concert? I see additional marketing opportunities left on the table for all new locations.
I believe new KK locations are missing out on a marketing campaign by opening with the entire cumbersome 50 item menu. This is a staggering amount of menu items which is too much to ask new staffers to perfect all at once. After a few months expanding the menu by approximately ten items is catching to customers who haven’t returned after a single visit or infrequently stop into KK. There are ten new food items that might appeal to them. Just like it appears KK doesn’t know what it’s looking for in a good commercial spot, this company doesn’t appear to recognize a talented from an untalented worker until it’s too late.
It is my understanding that KK had a headhunter to find Icus, the first Bikini Bottom kitchen manager. If it were up to me I’d hire someone to break the legs of that headhunter for bringing in a subpar kitchen lead. We are still attempting to recover from the lousy choices she made in the floor plan. If anybody responsible for Bikini Bottom’s floor plan is still giving input, stop them immediately. Once the doors were open to the public Icus had his head in the clouds to a point where I questioned if he saw the writing on the walls of an imminent demotion and stopped trying as a result. I had a full deck of 3x5 cards in an archaic powerpoint presentation bringing numerous concerns to light that he kept putting off listening to until he was fired. Those same cards were broken out for this essay. The second kitchen manager, Krumm, is a good lesson in honesty. According to Heffer, Krumm was given a bill of goods about how smoothly KK Bikini Bottom was running. Since Krumm stepped into a latrine pit which he was led to believe was a heated pool, he left in short time. Krumm also had plans to modify the menu but when his bosses told him to be a rodeo clown rather than a cowboy Krumm didn’t take too kindly to that. Meanwhile Heffer was the savior of the Bikini Bottom kitchen. I didn’t agree with every single decision he made, but I did with a majority of them. Heffer’s overhaul was such a blessing so I didn’t have to fiddle with the organization of 60% of the equipment anymore, only about 20% now. Too bad Heffer’s crippling depression came back after bashing his head into the wall out of frustration with the shackles KK restrained him with.
The current management team is enthusiastic but inexperienced. I see an accumulation of small infractions that might bring down Bikini Bottom’s health department rating significantly. I see the entire management team being inattentive or unaware about organizational issues. Whatever bureaucratic nonsense corporate tasks everyone with from the original sous chef Skeeter to Patty Mayonnaise that makes them walk away from the line between 11am and 1pm especially is infuriating. I have never been left alone on a multi-person line during peak hours so regularly, and I won’t tolerate it anymore. As much as I believe in his drive, I imagine our current kitchen manager SpongeBob will be let go after a disastrous service during the Dimmadome concert season that someone has to take the fall for. Chef Ren and I could help bring experience in management and dealing with festival traffic...if corporate does not force us to follow a failing strategy.
After working nearly a year at KK you may ask why I’m not proficient on more than one station. Excellent question. First, when I move over to another station the squeeze bottles are never labeled (until Stu Pickles was hired, now they’re sometimes labeled), so I always looked at the glut of unlabeled sauces and I’d go back to my station because the basic information is missing (also a health department violation for having numerous unlabeled, unchilled bottles). In his first week the new general manager Stu Pickles pulled out 90% of the containers under the grill station because they were lacking labels despite an expected health department visit. The second reason for my menu ignorance is the mountain of prep for my own and upcoming shifts I have piled up on my station throughout service. My attention to detail appears to be next level with my ability to anticipate stocking all items for all shifts including the weeknd. The third reason I wouldn’t learn multiple stations is a defense against the afternoon conference calls. In [month] the Bikini Bottom line was unprepared for a busy post lunch because one cook was cut and our expo person was busy with a conference call. The two of us remaining on the line had a miserable slog through an unexpectedly busy afternoon. When I brought this up to Krabs he disregarded me, being a good bean counter he quoted the cost percentage. What he didn’t take into account was the missing expo person who could have jumped on the line and expo to help the understaffed two man team. That person was stuck on a conference call. Just recently I saw the company actively lose money because of this poorly thought-out meeting during business hours. A customer wanted to order a dessert that was 86ed but had been restocked by our prep cook an hour before. The server was unable to sell them their dessert because the only person in the building who could help un-86 an item was on a conference call. This conference call calamity is another bone-headed choice that speaks to a larger decision-making problem within the corporate structure. Finish the conference calls by 10:45 am eastern.
In conclusion, I quit my position as a lowly grunt for this company because of its unwarranted perplexing dance steps and below average management. I don’t care how much varnish and lacquer is supplied, I refuse to polish this Bikini Bottom turd as a manager or full-time employee under the current circumstances. You would have to take a pickaxe to the floor, possibly relocate the bathrooms to add a door to the dishpit, get rid of the cheap low boy that doesn’t properly drain excess water, and Mr Gorbachov knock down that wall in the middle of the kitchen to give the proper amount of space to work. Or simply reduce the menu to 36 items (including sides) because that’s the amount of space this dreadful design can comfortably output. Would Gordon Ramsay compliment KK for all the unnecessary convoluted complications abound, or would Chef Ramsay yell about keeping it simple and demand KK chuck it in the flip? Thanks to the numerous pop up restaurants I have been a part of and the hectic world of trade shows/conventions, I may have more experience than anyone else employed by KK in smoothly opening a new location. I would enjoy being part of the opening team to ensure new locations have an efficiency Bikini Bottom lacks, and to keep upper management away from their worst instincts. Work with me and Chef Ren and we will help you become a well oiled machine like Chokey Chicken instead of the Chum Bucket cesspit Bikini Bottom currently embodies.

I know quitting your job as a cook usually simply comes with two weeks notice or a ragequit walkout, but for eleven months I worked at a new franchise that had such potential which was being squandered by the incompetence of upper management. I present the nearly 6000 word thesis I turned in on my last day. Locations and names have been changed to cartoon references. Brackets represent ambiguous information in place of specific details.
Krusty Krab Careers Jobs
Opening in [Month/Year], Krusty Krab (KK) Bikini Bottom is on its 4th kitchen manager in less than a year. Krusty Krab O-Town has recently let go its inaugural kitchen manager and sous chef. Almost no member of the Bikini Bottom opening management team remains employed by KK. There is a pattern developing where one must question both the choice of employee and the directive given to new franchises. These lingering issues I brought concerns about in the first weeks of opening but was disregarded at every turn despite my experience with festival traffic. As a result I decided this was not a place I wanted to advance, but with a good-enough paycheck I’d be a lowly grunt in the kitchen four days a week, at five days a week I would have quit or been fired over a public outburst long ago. If Krusty Krab alters course slightly while being true to the brand this could be a successful chain.
My unique employment history in brick and mortar restaurants, food trucks, pop up culinary concepts, trade shows/conventions, and the film industry make me an ideal candidate to be on the opening team for new KK locations. My outgoing nature and foresight are valuable assets. For example, on training week before opening when I was standing around idly without a task I took it upon myself to organize the disarray that was dry storage. Overhearing Krabs tell another manager where he wanted the cleaning products placed, I had a jumping off point and the organization I created nine months ago is still largely in place. Since returning from my vacation in early February I have made it my mission to keep the storage area organized because it was again starting to resemble a hoarder’s house rather than a commercial kitchen. This is now part of my weekly routines because every time I turn my back there is more product being placed haphazardly just anywhere with little regard. I also recently reorganized the walk-in cooler because of problematic stocking with items being placed on the same shelf or below raw proteins. I also simply put all the like products together such as cheeses or fruits that were scattered amongst several shelves. With recent overordering I cannot keep up with the organization of the walk in cooler. The pattern recognition of food types and even simple shapes appears to be lost on the Bikini Bottom crew. My daily reorganization of containers is proof of this. Most days I’ll take a few minutes to put all cylinders together, all cambros together in descending volume, all deep and shallow pans next to each other rather than intermixed. My decision to be a kitchen manager at age 19 from 2005 thru 2008 and rarely enter restaurant management since is very calculated.
With my prior knowledge of professional kitchens I was becoming Bikini Bottom’s resident nag to coworkers as I made note of health department violations on a daily basis. I stopped after being largely ignored for two weeks. My regular health department nags include; a battle with jackets and hats being placed only in the designated area (a designated area that did not exist until I created a place for personal items a in January by neatly organizing the dry storage area again), waiting until prepped items are cooled before a cover is placed on top, placement of raw seafood, open containers (very often sugar, flour, and pancake mix bags ripped open and left), and dirty dishes/containers placed back in rotation. The dirty dishes and containers in rotation with the clean ones are at an atrociously high number. I have given up on making the 4th fryer seafood allergy safe too. With the low volume of seafood allergy safe items Bikini Bottom should purchase smaller baskets to visually discourage cross contamination with the other fryers and baskets. My skills to organize the kitchen do not end with simply where to store products to meet minimal health department standards.
Half of the space in the Bikini Bottom kitchen is completely wasted on an ill-advised walkway to the dishpit. An intelligent design would place a second doorway directly to the dishpit connected to the bar or where the bathrooms reside. Numerous times during the opening week of KK Bikini Bottom I said, yelled, sang, and muttered that we have too many food items for the amount of space we have. Icus stated that there was more space than Bluffington. Is Bluffington intelligently designed? Because Bikini Bottom most certainly isn’t. So Bikini Bottom actually has less space even if there is more square footage. See the attached diagram for an intelligent design that could potentially house a menu of this size. Bikini Bottom forces a line design on this kitchen when an open concept is needed for this menu. It’s as if this floorplan was created by a person who had only ever seen one commercial kitchen previously and couldn’t think 4th dimensionally to understand the needs of the workers to smoothly serve customers.
There is not enough counter space for pizzas without getting off the line, the microwave is placed completely out of the way, the freezer’s curved design is a waste of potential counter space and a falling hazard for containers stored on top of it, the toaster is an overcomplicated and overexpensive piece of machinery that serves exactly one purpose when a flat top could be used to toast bread and other purposes like a quesadilla special, sautee was designed without an overhang for spices, the pantry station lacks the counter space to have two containers of flour and two containers of batter for seafood allergies, there are no Frialator fryers which I have worked with at every single kitchen job previously instead we got the cheap Vulcan model (is that logical), the cheap low boy in pantry that doesn’t drain excess water anywhere it’s just supposed to evaporate somehow but doesn’t, the grill and fryer should be placed next to each other (with a higher volume of crossover than other stations), the floors are flat instead on having a mild decline towards the drains (just look at the standing water residing behind the oven right now), in the dishpit the spraying area and the filled sinks are backwards of a logical dipshit, the ramp to the back door is on the wrong side, there is no refrigerated place downstairs to stage extra food for busy shifts (the beer cooler is once again used for such food items because of this massive oversight), the prep station is an afterthought and miniscule, the dishes on the line are difficult to grab for anyone under 5’11” and inaccessible for anyone under 5’6” (instead of putting them underneath tables that also give that desperately needed counterspace I spoke of), there is not enough space to store to-go containers or boats behind the line, expo is lacking a low boy for the numerous items that are supposed to be cold but are instead kept at room temperature all day long, no one in management thought about buying shelves until right before Bikini Bottom opened as a result the clean full sheets sat on the floor for days, we had only the exact amount of 1⁄6 pans for an absurd amount of time making it impossible to rotate and clean them when necessary (which is daily), we still struggle with 1/9 pan supply. And just when I thought I documented all the poor design choices possible I stumbled upon a person whose office holiday party was booked at KK Bikini Bottom. The deck space works just fine as a deck. It does not double well as a gathering space. The space is too long and narrow for parties, it promotes little splitoff groups rather than a coming together of a larger gathering. It may be advantageous to contact a social psychologist for help designing a private party space that promotes intermingling rather than enforcing small pockets to form. The reorganization of the physical kitchen isn’t all that screams for an overhaul.
There are six positions on the line at the Krusty Krab; expo, oven, grill, sautee, fryer, and pantry. But the pantry and fryer positions are forced together like a bad remix. Everyone who mainly works pantry deserves a $6 raise immediately because it is a station and a half. Both Icus and Krumm, while kitchen manager, kind of acknowledged the pantry is too big for one station without outright mentioning the lopsided distribution of work. I imagine in the only location where this works, Bluffington, a second person joins the pantry at noon because of the unreasonable amount of items one person is tasked with. Bikini Bottom only has one person in this position at all times, maybe modify it for one person? The excess of items on the pantry position largely resembles a position I would call “set-up” or “build” at a previous job that made sensible choices. This build position should have tostadas, tacos, butcher’s blocks, toast, salads, lettuce wrap set ups, and preparing plating for whichever station is most bogged down. I have absolutely lost my mind yelling about salads at least once a month, ranting that they do not belong on the fryer position because of how illogical it is that five salads are included on the mountain of other items the pantry has. I have always considered working in a kitchen a kind of dance, and the pantry station demands an unnecessarily convoluted dance to keep up with the demand. Without the salads, tostadas, and tacos the station is already the busiest. Do we really need to combine ballet and swing by including these extra awkward dance steps in this single station? For a kitchen designed this poorly I suppose it is. Again, see attached document for an intelligently designed kitchen that might be able to accommodate this menu. Unless Bikini Bottom is going to close for a month to fix the baffling floor plan design the menu is shouting to be reduced to 30-36 items.
The menu is too big. Krusty Krab is the jack of all foods, master of none. In general I believe individual locations should be allowed 18% omissions, and 18% unique items to this wildly unwieldy menu sitting around 50 food items including sides. The insistence on keeping menu items that don’t sell at Bikini Bottom because of Bluffington is mind boggling. Chicken tenders do not sell at Bikini Bottom. fried sushi does not sell at Bikini Bottom, not enough to justify their place on the line. I don’t care how well these items work in Bluffinton. They. Do. Not. Work. At. Bikini. Bottom. If the KK location in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean sells an incredible amount of live krill does that mean Bikini Bottom and O-Town must sell live krill too? Take the fried sushi off the menu. I had a complete meltdown about this during a Dimmadome service and my valid point was met with indifference. Replace the kid’s tenders with a kid’s fish sticks. We already have the tilapia fish sticks on the line for tacos. Or make the kid’s fish sticks cod. We cut cod to order for fish tacos in spite of health code violations because it is too rare of an order to make beforehand. Saffron in mashed potatoes? If you must. Why are green tomatoes only on the menu during lunch? Bikini Bottom throws away a sizable amount of spoiled green tomatoes each week. Have green tomatoes on the menu all day long or don’t have them at all. The smoked salmon could go on salads or a special taco to justify its place on the line. The corn pico’s place on the line is unjustified. It only goes on one item, tostadas, which are not particularly popular. If we had a taco salad we could throw the corn pico on there. We also have unreasonable waste from unusable taco shells, smash up those imperfect taco shells and throw them on said taco salad. But before we add salads, let's get rid of the pear and kale salads. The pears' position on the line are unjustified, if we threw them on a taco variation maybe their place on the Bikini Bottom line could be argued but for now they only go on a salad that isn’t particularly popular. The kale salad is an issue of space for a 4th green for salads is too much. The krusty salad is my most hated house salad of all time. And it comes down to the toast with goat cheese. This ancillary step of spreading goat cheese on a cracker is an unnecessary step for an overly complicated dance and should be part of the expo dance if expo wasn’t a shoddily designed afterthought lacking a low boy.
There are a plethora of squeeze bottles on the pantry station that have no place on the overloaded station. They belong to an expo station with a low boy to keep them cold. Pantry has an overwhelming ten squeeze bottles: chipotle crema, sweet chili vinaigrette, buffalo, korean bbq, ranch, caesar, wine vinaigrette, lemon vinaigrette, honey mustard, and lemon aioli. Only the first four are justified on an intelligently designed fryer section, the second four belong on the build station, the last two have no place anywhere but expo. With this extra space sautee could keep their bottles and two purees cold in the fryer's lowboy instead of leaving them at room temperature all day inviting a pathogen party. This theorized intelligently designed expo would have room to keep these four squeeze bottles and a double of every sauce chilled to pour them into ramekins, a move that is highly common in the expo dance. The fact that expo doesn’t have a double of all squeeze bottles is foolish. Expo has to bother an overloaded station to pour these side sauces instead.
How many gallons of basil aioli has Bikini Bottom thrown away in 11 months? Four aiolis in general is way too many and most go on a single item; basil aioli on the incredibly unpopular veggie burger, lemon aioli for calamari, sweet chili aioli for the BLT that is only served half of the day, and garlic aioli actually goes on two items…I believe. What a colossal waste of precious little space, lose two aiolis and then you can sing the logical song with me. Perhaps we can put garlic aioli and sweet chili vinaigrette on the BLT separately and accomplish the exact same thing the sweet chili aioli does. The wings too have unneeded complications. Having worked at a sports bar specializing in wings for the better part of a decade I find KK’s plating of wings to be overly pretentious. The carrots, celery, and blue cheese have lost function. Heffer Wolf always said no one eats the carrot/celery julienne with blue cheese. It’s a complete waste of all the ingredients because you’ve gone too far with the presentation. Wings aren’t fancy. Wings are supposed to have a small pool of sauce and be sloppy. It’s like a sloppy joe that’s not sloppy, an unsloppy joe is a failure to sloppy joes just as the KK presentation of wings is a disparagement to the dish. Ever since training week back in 2022 I have used a scale to give Bikini Bottom a passing or failing grade.
Chokey Chicken to Chum Bucket is the scale I use to judge efficiency and sanity at Bikini Bottom. Both establishments are upscale casual dining experiences in Capitol City in the same vein as KK. Chokey had high employee retention and relatively smooth openings for new locations. Chum Bucket’s employee turnover was high and every location opening was chaotic. Which one sounds closer to KK? Chokey Chicken was filled with chefs I respect including Chef Ren Hoek who remains a close friend to this day. Ren lost his lifelong passion for kitchen work after working management at Chum Bucket. He’s actually seeking work in Bikini Bottom. Call him up at [phone number], but KK will give him Nam’ flashbacks of why he chose driving for a living rather than cooking for five years. The pair of us together helming Bikini Bottom with the ability to omit and create 18% of the overloaded menu can bring success to this franchise. We have worked well numerous times in the past on various concepts in the past including creating The Attack of the Pickled Tomatoes Burger for [Promotional live performance of a TV show] at the Capitol City Theater. We served 100 people in 60 at the [sitcom filming] lunch. That’s physically impossible but somehow we did it quite a few times.
A fun anecdote about Ren Hoek’s KK experience from the soft launch; on training week numerous times I brought concerns about being seafood allergy safe that were dismissed. As mentioned earlier the pantry station lacks the counter space to have two containers of flour and two containers of batter, one each of which seafood never touches. Before the soft launch Chef Stimpy from Bluffington insisted all customers just kind of know everything is prone to be seafood contaminated. Well, chef Ren was a customer that night and this absolutely was not communicated to customers. He claimed to have a slight seafood allergy and was not informed of what the crab soup was. In reality he does not have a seafood allergy. I didn’t discuss the seafood issue with Ren, separately we noticed egregious violations of food safety standards and we each responded in our own way. The soft launch service was so awful that night Chef Ren walked out of a free meal to pay for some ramen, never to return to Bikini Bottom. I attribute this oversight, and many of Bikini Bottom’s (and probably O-Town’s) problems to hubris over the Bluffington location.
Chef Chokey would also be hesitant to join the KK team. It will cost a finder’s fee just for me to reveal Chef Chokey’s name. Chef Chokey was a lead in the rapid expansion of Chokey Chicken restaurants. He opened numerous restaurants and was big on the philosophy that each restaurant must have its own personality in order to fit the unique local culture and the variety of working spaces. This is in direct conflict with the KK way that everything must be exactly like the Bluffington location no matter what. There was only one Chokey Chicken location that had the full menu, Chokey Springfield. Chokey Springfield had a large space which was intelligently designed to accommodate such a large menu. The KK menu is all over the place, closing in on 50 menu items which comes up as a failure on the Chokey Chicken/Chum Bucket scale. This is not the only area KK comes up as a major failure on the Chokey Chicken/Chum Bucket scale.
Has anyone in this company ever worked festival traffic before? Does anyone have the experience of working next to a major venue with 8000 seats before this one? The way Bikini Bottom handles Dimmadome services it certainly appears that the decision-makers fall on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Having all 50 items available during such massive traffic is completely asinine. An unwillingness to serve a partial menu is hindering the Bikini Bottom kitchen staff. I have worked festival traffic before, and Dimmadome events bring in festival traffic. I’ve worked inside a festival whose line never ended but every customer got their order in 5 minutes or less because the line kept flowing with only four items on the menu as that’s what was warranted at the B-Sharps Music Festival. I refuse to be set up for failure the way Bikini Bottom sets up Dimmadome services for failure. The entire week of concerts in [summer] 2022 I was set up for failure every day (it was after this I modified my availability to keep my sanity and my paycheck). When I brought my concerns about running efficiently during Dimmadome services I was labeled a B-worker for the first time in my employment history by Icus and Krabs. It is that moment which I was either going to holler at them both for being 2-dimensional thinkers who were obviously unqualified for the positions they accepted in this company, or just put my head down. If Bikini Bottom has a successful concert day service, hail your team because they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. They swam with concrete shoes. I often wonder how many customers had bad experiences and never returned after concert days. A Dimmadome service should have no more than 25 items and have one or two specials to divert traffic towards an area the kitchen can keep moving. An Open Cup Open Plate (OCOP) special for foot traffic is absolutely needed. When I suggested OCOP special, Heffer was intrigued by this idea and immediately named burgers as the special to keep foot traffic flowing. Smithers wouldn’t hear this idea, babbling on about what’s advertised instead of hearing out a sound idea. This prattle despite radio commercials having inaccurate hours and social media promoting Bikini Bottom’s steak tacos to this day. I always found Smithers to be a better fit as a middle management office pencil pusher than as a hands-on restaurant manager. Overall I find KK managers are selected to be automatons not to question their orders rather than critical thinkers who could take the restaurant to the next level. During brunch service is another period of time that must be modified to lessen the heft of items. Having a full menu that barely works plus brunch is so deep into Chum Bucket territory, in my opinion we now have to use the Tropic Thunder scale of full retard to describe a 60-plus-item brunch. Chef Ren hired back a Chum Bucket cook who had a mental breakdown and stormed out during brunch (plus full menu) service because Ren knew the employee was justified and upper management was completely unreasonable in their brunch requests. It’s not just questionable decisions that hinder KK staff but improper equipment as well.
This is the first restaurant I have worked at which uses a touch screen on the line rather than tickets. From day one I found this to be technology for technology’s sake inferior to tickets. Chef Ren forced a new Chum Bucket location to rip out touch screens from the line and bring in ticket printers because of the higher efficiency. The touch screen is a great idea for expo, not the entire line. My biggest gripe is that each station does not get all the information. Early on I was regularly yelled at for not staggering my items, well I can’t see the rest of the order; a problem I have never had with a ticket system. Touchscreen software is also much more prone to errors and glitches. When I reported an error during a heavy service Icus and Krabs blamed my skills on the line without looking into the malfunctioning screen further. It was glitchy for weeks before the two finally investigated and corrected the issue I brought to their attention long before. Those two gave me an immense amount of ammunition to dislike them in the opening weeks until I stopped caring. The issue I had with being unable to scroll beyond the bottom of a completely filled screen has returned and is still there as of [my last day]. There are also important details that get buried. A frequent meltdown I have is that sauce on side requests and other important modifications are not capitalized or in red to catch the eye as they have been at jobs with tickets. These details get lost on Bikini Bottom’s touchscreens. A sauce on side salad made by me will be wrong 50% of the time because of the instructions being camouflaged in a word salad. This goes for coleslaw on the side and drizzle on the side too. Drizzle in general I dislike because of the pretentiousness, but whatever, drizzle it on top rather than putting it in a ramekin if you must. There are numerous places where Bikini Bottom overcomplicates matters for reasons I cannot ascertain.
Why is there such a large variety of plates? Why do we have a medium circular plate for salads and a large bowl for salads with protein? This just confuses the simplest of matters. I was told this is done because of the high price hike with protein, a larger presentation was desired. But that price hike is the price of protein in 2023. Bikini Bottom should put all salads in the large bowls and use all the circular salad plates in a skeet shooting promotion. I understand why we have both a circular platter plate and a pizza plate but in my restaurant the circular platter plates must go...or maybe the large platter plate instead. Is the large platter used for anything besides fish and chips? That extra space on fish and chips plates are only used for side sauces which can easily be delivered to customers on small circular plates. What is the medium oval plate doing that the medium rectangular plate isn’t? And vice versa. Why do they both exist when they are approximately the same size? Let me write an internet commercial where we break a lot of plates so we can get some logical use out of the superfluous plates. I don’t care which one is destroyed, the ovals or the rectangles but one of them is an unnecessary redundancy in excess done again. Speaking of commercials, the unimaginative radio advertisements for Bikini Bottom are doing little to lure new customers to the restaurant.
The three radio spots I have heard on KBBL all sound like they were produced by a marketing 101 student who wasn’t a natural in the field. The voiceover actor was so uncharismatic I was certain someone from the office was chosen at random to read the copy. Then I heard that same voiceover actor selling pool supplies on another radio station so I concluded that Bikini Bottom must have hired the cheapest guy in town to produce the most basic of commercials. Perhaps there is someone else you could hire more qualified to voiceover these commercials, an actor with experience on an Emmy award winning cable program whose unique place in the film industry was written about on [website] would be a much wiser choice to be the voice of the KK? (See external link). In the ad there was no catchphrase, no jingle, no music whatsoever. This simple approach to commercials lacks the pizazz to catch the attention of radio listeners. The first two commercials I heard would get a C in marketing 101 as they were nearly the exact same and accomplished the bare minimum to sell wares, the third one would maybe get a B- because there was some sort of attempted gimmick with the voiceover whispering to represent thinking inside his head about what he was going to eat later at KK. Not only does this commercial give no reason for the man to think inside his head, the outside world still and unpopulated. To see what a creative person would do with this concept see the attached script. There is an attempted slogan that could become part of an ad campaign. Commercials aren’t the only lost opportunities in promotions.
There are numerous promotional celebrity tie-ins at Bikini Bottom’s fingertips with Dimmadome performers. The restaurant could have a Phish sandwich as a OCOP special on [Phish performance dates], or a pretentious Jelly Roll on [Jelly Roll performance date]. Has anyone reached out to the Dimmadome theater or talent management for approved special menu items to be promoted inside the dome? Perhaps a special 20% discount to ticket holders? Is Bikini Bottom capable of getting permits to extend Open Container hours beyond [cutoff time] for an afterparty or block party throughout a Dimmadome concert? I see additional marketing opportunities left on the table for all new locations.
I believe new KK locations are missing out on a marketing campaign by opening with the entire cumbersome 50 item menu. This is a staggering amount of menu items which is too much to ask new staffers to perfect all at once. After a few months expanding the menu by approximately ten items is catching to customers who haven’t returned after a single visit or infrequently stop into KK. There are ten new food items that might appeal to them. Just like it appears KK doesn’t know what it’s looking for in a good commercial spot, this company doesn’t appear to recognize a talented from an untalented worker until it’s too late.
It is my understanding that KK had a headhunter to find Icus, the first Bikini Bottom kitchen manager. If it were up to me I’d hire someone to break the legs of that headhunter for bringing in a subpar kitchen lead. We are still attempting to recover from the lousy choices she made in the floor plan. If anybody responsible for Bikini Bottom’s floor plan is still giving input, stop them immediately. Once the doors were open to the public Icus had his head in the clouds to a point where I questioned if he saw the writing on the walls of an imminent demotion and stopped trying as a result. I had a full deck of 3x5 cards in an archaic powerpoint presentation bringing numerous concerns to light that he kept putting off listening to until he was fired. Those same cards were broken out for this essay. The second kitchen manager, Krumm, is a good lesson in honesty. According to Heffer, Krumm was given a bill of goods about how smoothly KK Bikini Bottom was running. Since Krumm stepped into a latrine pit which he was led to believe was a heated pool, he left in short time. Krumm also had plans to modify the menu but when his bosses told him to be a rodeo clown rather than a cowboy Krumm didn’t take too kindly to that. Meanwhile Heffer was the savior of the Bikini Bottom kitchen. I didn’t agree with every single decision he made, but I did with a majority of them. Heffer’s overhaul was such a blessing so I didn’t have to fiddle with the organization of 60% of the equipment anymore, only about 20% now. Too bad Heffer’s crippling depression came back after bashing his head into the wall out of frustration with the shackles KK restrained him with.
The current management team is enthusiastic but inexperienced. I see an accumulation of small infractions that might bring down Bikini Bottom’s health department rating significantly. I see the entire management team being inattentive or unaware about organizational issues. Whatever bureaucratic nonsense corporate tasks everyone with from the original sous chef Skeeter to Patty Mayonnaise that makes them walk away from the line between 11am and 1pm especially is infuriating. I have never been left alone on a multi-person line during peak hours so regularly, and I won’t tolerate it anymore. As much as I believe in his drive, I imagine our current kitchen manager SpongeBob will be let go after a disastrous service during the Dimmadome concert season that someone has to take the fall for. Chef Ren and I could help bring experience in management and dealing with festival traffic...if corporate does not force us to follow a failing strategy.
After working nearly a year at KK you may ask why I’m not proficient on more than one station. Excellent question. First, when I move over to another station the squeeze bottles are never labeled (until Stu Pickles was hired, now they’re sometimes labeled), so I always looked at the glut of unlabeled sauces and I’d go back to my station because the basic information is missing (also a health department violation for having numerous unlabeled, unchilled bottles). In his first week the new general manager Stu Pickles pulled out 90% of the containers under the grill station because they were lacking labels despite an expected health department visit. The second reason for my menu ignorance is the mountain of prep for my own and upcoming shifts I have piled up on my station throughout service. My attention to detail appears to be next level with my ability to anticipate stocking all items for all shifts including the weeknd. The third reason I wouldn’t learn multiple stations is a defense against the afternoon conference calls. In [month] the Bikini Bottom line was unprepared for a busy post lunch because one cook was cut and our expo person was busy with a conference call. The two of us remaining on the line had a miserable slog through an unexpectedly busy afternoon. When I brought this up to Krabs he disregarded me, being a good bean counter he quoted the cost percentage. What he didn’t take into account was the missing expo person who could have jumped on the line and expo to help the understaffed two man team. That person was stuck on a conference call. Just recently I saw the company actively lose money because of this poorly thought-out meeting during business hours. A customer wanted to order a dessert that was 86ed but had been restocked by our prep cook an hour before. The server was unable to sell them their dessert because the only person in the building who could help un-86 an item was on a conference call. This conference call calamity is another bone-headed choice that speaks to a larger decision-making problem within the corporate structure. Finish the conference calls by 10:45 am eastern.
In conclusion, I quit my position as a lowly grunt for this company because of its unwarranted perplexing dance steps and below average management. I don’t care how much varnish and lacquer is supplied, I refuse to polish this Bikini Bottom turd as a manager or full-time employee under the current circumstances. You would have to take a pickaxe to the floor, possibly relocate the bathrooms to add a door to the dishpit, get rid of the cheap low boy that doesn’t properly drain excess water, and Mr Gorbachov knock down that wall in the middle of the kitchen to give the proper amount of space to work. Or simply reduce the menu to 36 items (including sides) because that’s the amount of space this dreadful design can comfortably output. Would Gordon Ramsay compliment KK for all the unnecessary convoluted complications abound, or would Chef Ramsay yell about keeping it simple and demand KK chuck it in the flip? Thanks to the numerous pop up restaurants I have been a part of and the hectic world of trade shows/conventions, I may have more experience than anyone else employed by KK in smoothly opening a new location. I would enjoy being part of the opening team to ensure new locations have an efficiency Bikini Bottom lacks, and to keep upper management away from their worst instincts. Work with me and Chef Ren and we will help you become a well oiled machine like Chokey Chicken instead of the Chum Bucket cesspit Bikini Bottom currently embodies.

In-Vehicle Payment Services Market Comprehensive Study is an expert and top to bottom investigation on the momentum condition of the Global In-Vehicle Payment Services industry with an attention on the Global market. The report gives key insights available status of the Global In-Vehicle Payment Services producers and is an important wellspring of direction and course for organizations and people keen on the business. By and large, the report gives an inside and out understanding of 2021-2027 worldwide In-Vehicle Payment Services Market covering extremely significant parameters.
Some key Players in This Report Include:
Alphabet Inc. (United States)
Audi AG (Germany)
BMW AG (Germany)
Daimler AG (Germany)
Ford Motor Company
General Motors Company (United States)
Honda Motor Co. Ltd. (Japan)
Hyundai Motor Corporation (South Korea)
IBM Corporation (United States)
Mastercard Inc. (United States)
The global In-Vehicle Payment Services market is expected to witness high demand in the forecasted period due to the rising popularity of autonomous vehicles across the globe. The automotive in-vehicle payment system enables drivers to pay for goods and services including refilling at a gas station, movie tickets, toll tickets, smart parking, order ahead for pickup, and also share their location with their families. In-car payment systems are one of the most prominent Human-Machine-Interface trends in the mobility industry with rapid growth in autonomous and connected vehicles. In addition, 5G and improved Wi-Fi connectivity are also expected to increase the adoption of in-car payment systems. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will also be a critical factor that will contribute towards the growth of the in-car payment systems.
Market Trends: Autonomous vehicles are enabled with internet connectivity according to the growing demand for luxury, convenience, and comfort.
Market Drivers: The growing trend of autonomous vehicles
Market Challenges: The technological complexities associated with the payments
Market Opportunities: Advancements in technology, such as the Internet of Things and connected vehicle technologies
The Global In-Vehicle Payment Services Market segments and Market Data Break Down by Type (NFC based, APP based, QR code based, Credit Card based), Application (Parking Management, Drive-through Purchasing, Toll Collection, Others), Mode of Payment (NFC, QR Code/RFID, App/e-wallet, Credit/Debit card), Technology (Radio Frequency Identification(RFID), Bluetooth Low Energy), Vehicle Type (Passenger cars, Light Commercial Vehicles (LCVs), Heavy Commercial Vehicles (HCVs), Automated Guided Vehicles), Sales Channel (OEMs, Aftermarket), Connectivity (Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G, Bluetooth), Component (Camera, Code Scanner, ECU), System (Software System, Hardware System (Integrated System, Embedded System))
Presented By
AMA Research & Media LLP

I'm seeking some advice and insights regarding a series of strange electrical issues that have been plaguing my 2006 Honda Civic lately. I'm hoping someone here can help shed some light on what might be going on.
It started during a road trip from California to Louisiana. I’m a medical student and I had to be in Louisiana by Monday(I left Friday). Coming out of California, I stopped at a rest stop and when I started my car again after 5 mins the AC wouldn’t work. I thought it might need a a recharge or whatever but looking at it I didn’t see the compressor running. And the pressures were very high when I checked on the low pressure line. It had been working perfectly for the last 4 hours.
When I stopped in Phoenix and started the car the next morning, I noticed that the dreaded "Check Engine" light had decided to make an appearance. I drove it from Phoenix to Tucson with no issues but I knew going into Texas there’s a long stretch with not much on the way so I decided to get it checked. Got the code read at O’Reilly’s and it was “P0507 - Idle Air Control System RPM Higher Than Expected”. Didn’t think the car had been idling any different and there were no real issues but I couldn’t risk it so I showed it to a mechanic nearby. He looked at it and said it needed a new throttle valve/body. I tried to get some more information about what was wrong with it, whether it just needed to be cleaned etc. He kept being vague saying it’s just not working and said maybe an electrical issue when really pressed. Charged me $1300 for parts and labor - felt like I was being ripped off (and also felt there was nothing wrong with the throttle body and don’t think he really did anything) but I didn’t have the luxury of waiting around and other shops were closed. This issue hasn’t reoccurred(maybe they just cleaned it?)
To add to the confusion, the following day, while driving, I noticed that the "Daytime Running Lights" (DRL) light on my dashboard had come on and the daytime running lights were flickering intermittently when I checked. Not a huge issue I thought, I can replace those. However, the issue mysteriously resolved itself the very next day and hasn’t reoccurred.
Fast forward a couple of days, and the left speaker in my car suddenly stopped working. I hadn't made any changes to the audio system, so this was completely unexpected. It seemed like the electrical gremlins were at it again, targeting a different component this time.
Just to provide some additional information, my car's battery was replaced last year, and I haven't noticed any battery-related issues. There's no battery light on, and the car continues to run and start without any problems. The only “new thing” is a CarPlay system that plugs into the DC outlet that I put in a week before I left California.
At this point, I'm at a loss as to what could be causing these sporadic electrical issues. I haven’t had it parked for a prolonged time and didn’t notice any animals but I haven’t looked at it too closely. I have driven this car in California for a year without issues and all throughout the US before that over the past couple of years. I thought I'd reach out to this community for any insights or suggestions you might have. Has anyone experienced something similar? Any ideas on what might be going on?
I am going to take it mechanic and have them run a diagnostic but I thought I’d gather some ideas before I go.
Any expertise and guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your help!
TL;DR: My car's electrical issues started with the AC going out at the start of a road trip. Check Engine light came on the next day and I got it fixed(throttle body issue), followed by DRL light flickering, which resolved itself. Days later, the left speaker stopped working. Battery was replaced last year, and the car runs and starts fine. Seeking advice and suggestions on how to diagnose and fix these issues.

Does anyone have a trusted auto repair shop they go to?
This week, both my car and my girlfriend's car have started making a rattling noise when the engine is running and I would like to bring em to a good mechanic to take a look.
I could take them to Canadian Tire but in my experience they have been a bit expensive and they try to upsell on services I don't need.
Thanks!
Edit
My car is a 2015 Lexus RX350 and hers is a 2009 Honda Civic