{"id":125,"date":"2026-05-29T20:58:40","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T20:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/?p=125"},"modified":"2026-05-29T20:58:40","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T20:58:40","slug":"who-took-my-tongs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/?p=125","title":{"rendered":"Who Took My Tongs?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Who Took My Tongs?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every kitchen has a sentence that gets repeated so often it stops sounding like language and starts sounding like psychological damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For me, it was:<br>\u201cWho took my tongs?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Not:<br>\u201cHas anyone seen the tongs?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No.<br>By the middle of service it becomes an accusation.<br>A threat.<br>A spiritual collapse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because five minutes earlier they were RIGHT THERE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019ve vanished into another dimension.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And now you\u2019re standing there holding a towel in one hand, burning your fingerprints off, while somebody on expo is yelling:<br>\u201cWHERE\u2019S TABLE TWELVE?\u201d<br>\u201cWE NEED TWO MORE BURGERS!\u201d<br>\u201cWHO RAN MY PICKUP?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Meanwhile some gremlin line cook is casually using your tongs across the kitchen like communal property doesn\u2019t lead directly to homicide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">People who\u2019ve never worked in kitchens think the stress comes from cooking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The cooking part is usually the easy part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The stress comes from:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>noise<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>heat<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>timing<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>chaos<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>running out of things<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>somebody calling in sick<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>printers screaming nonstop<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>and trying to coordinate twenty different moving parts while pretending everything is under control<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A busy kitchen is basically organized panic held together with butter and profanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And somehow \u2014 somehow \u2014 food still comes out looking beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That\u2019s the part civilians never understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They see the final plate.<br>They don\u2019t see:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>the burns<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>the prep<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>the yelling<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>the missing tongs<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>the emotional support Sharpie nobody\u2019s allowed to touch<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>the one fridge door that tries to kill somebody every shift<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>the cook surviving entirely on nicotine and spite<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And weirdly?<br>A lot of us loved it anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Not every minute.<br>Not even close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But there\u2019s something about surviving a brutal service with people who understand the insanity that gets into your bloodstream permanently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You can always spot former kitchen people in regular life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We move fast.<br>We say \u201cbehind\u201d in grocery stores.<br>We get irrationally angry when somebody blocks a walkway.<br>And somewhere deep in our nervous system lives the eternal question:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cOkay, but seriously\u2026 who took my tongs?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who Took My Tongs? Every kitchen has a sentence that gets repeated so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126,"href":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions\/126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/burntbutter.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}