Who Took My Tongs?

Every kitchen has a sentence that gets repeated so often it stops sounding like language and starts sounding like psychological damage.

For me, it was:
“Who took my tongs?”

Not:
“Has anyone seen the tongs?”

No.
By the middle of service it becomes an accusation.
A threat.
A spiritual collapse.

Because five minutes earlier they were RIGHT THERE.

You put them down for half a second to flip chicken or plate fries or pull something screaming-hot out of the salamander and suddenly they’ve vanished into another dimension.

And now you’re standing there holding a towel in one hand, burning your fingerprints off, while somebody on expo is yelling:
“WHERE’S TABLE TWELVE?”
“WE NEED TWO MORE BURGERS!”
“WHO RAN MY PICKUP?”

Meanwhile some gremlin line cook is casually using your tongs across the kitchen like communal property doesn’t lead directly to homicide.

People who’ve never worked in kitchens think the stress comes from cooking.

It doesn’t.

The cooking part is usually the easy part.

The stress comes from:

• noise
• heat
• timing
• chaos
• running out of things
• somebody calling in sick
• printers screaming nonstop
• and trying to coordinate twenty different moving parts while pretending everything is under control

A busy kitchen is basically organized panic held together with butter and profanity.

And somehow — somehow — food still comes out looking beautiful.

That’s the part civilians never understand.

They see the final plate.
They don’t see:

• the burns
• the prep
• the yelling
• the missing tongs
• the emotional support Sharpie nobody’s allowed to touch
• the one fridge door that tries to kill somebody every shift
• the cook surviving entirely on nicotine and spite

And weirdly?
A lot of us loved it anyway.

Not every minute.
Not even close.

But there’s something about surviving a brutal service with people who understand the insanity that gets into your bloodstream permanently.

You can always spot former kitchen people in regular life.

We move fast.
We say “behind” in grocery stores.
We get irrationally angry when somebody blocks a walkway.
And somewhere deep in our nervous system lives the eternal question:

“Okay, but seriously… who took my tongs?”