Opinion: Burger King does not want its employees to take baths

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Xenia, Ohio Burger King declares a 2319 after an employee takes a bath in the kitchen sink. Timothy ‘Mr. Unstable’ Tackett gets canned, along with several co-workers, after posting the clip to his MySpace page. BK orders the sink sterilized twice, liquidates all utensils involved:

I have low expectations of cleanliness anytime I dine out. So I’ll ask: What made Mr. Unstable’s baño any less hygienic than use of the sink to clean, say, pests and pest droppings, spoiled food, employee hands, vomit, stuff that fell on the floor, or any of the other contaminants that routinely need to be cleaned up even in the best restaurants?

‘My first thought was oh my God,’ Greene County health commissioner Mark McDonnell tells WDTN’s Megan O’Rourke, and his second and third thoughts aren’t much more coherent. Mr. Unstable hosts a clip of McDonnell free-associating on the possible dangers involved in letting a tattooed punker take a birthday bath in a kitchen sink: ‘Contaminating a food utensil, cleaning sink; employee health; spreading bacteria all over food contact surfaces; spreading bacteria all over... Bacteria that happened to be on his skin could be deposited on the utensils too. Could promote a food poisoning.’

Again, are these risks rendered any greater by a guy taking a bath? I say this is another case of aesthetic disapproval pretending to be a public safety concern.

Which isn’t to say Burger King shouldn’t have fired the guy (pity Xenia, where this is what an underappreciated show business genius has to do for fun on his birthday), though it’s a shame to see that the real protagonist of the video — money-grubbing manager ‘Karen,’ the only person doing any real work in the joint — seems to have taken a fall as well.