ShitiestOfTreeFrogs

I worked at McDonald's between 2000 and like 2011. Drink machines were cleaned every night. Like we'd pop all the nozzles out and put them in cups to soak overnight as part of closing duties. Not sure how that changed for 24hour places. The McCafe machine also gets cleaned nightly. There is a cleaning tablet and sanitized water is flushed through all the milk lines. This probably varies by location as to whether procedures are followed but it was never an issue when I worked. Morning boss would chew the closers out if they came in and it wasn't done.

Ice cream machine was shut down nightly and syrup lines were run and sanitized, nozzles washed etc. The machine shuts off and goes into cleaning (heat) mode automatically and if you mess any of it up it goes in this fun thing called freezer lock. That means you have to wake up maintenance or a store manager and even people with the know how needs hours to get it back to working right. If a store claims the machine is broken it could be in heat mode (no ice cream) or someone sent it into freezer lock and it's for real not working. Letting the machine run out of mix and not refilling also sends it into freezer lock.

Also, high volume in the summer makes the ice cream too soft to hold its shape. After flurries and sundaes for every order, the machine is straight shitting diarrhea and needs to sit for half an hour before it can handle any more cones. It's easier to say it's broken than to explain that we had a bus load of football players and cheerleaders and they all ordered ice cream.

Every two weeks there's scheduled deep cleaning of the machine. This takes a lot longer than the nightly stuff. All the product is drained out and bins are cleaned and all lines are flushed so there's no chance of mix sitting long enough to go bad. The machine initiates this automatically as well. This means the machine will be "broken" longer. In one store the night manager was the expert and would start between 8 and 9 pm. In another store the morning manager was the expert and would do it in the morning but that would leave it out of order at the start of lunch. The machine needs to run the sanitized water to a certain hot temperature for a certain amount of time. I'm told the procedure is also prime candidate to get the machine locked up accidentally. All of the stores I worked at had an expert and other people were not to mess with it.

If the machine quit working in the middle of the day for no reason, most likely the mix ran low and was ignored and then ran out and was still ignored and the machine locked up and no one was to touch it until the expert could get to it.

Have you had any changes in your personality? Not just the changes brought on by the accident, but changes in personality b/c of damage. I'm not sure if this makes sense.

A lot has changed between now and 2011. I feel like it was "a couple years ago" and it's been more than a decade!

I dropped a super long comment about my experiences with the ice cream machine on another comment. Short answer, I've never said a machine was broken simply because I didn't want to make ice cream. There was always reasons that the ice cream wasn't working without necessarily being broken, broken.