There’s a hot dog place in downtown Chicago called Portillo’s that’s making waves and not because of their famous wieners, but because of the number of roaches they allegedly have crawling all the hell around. Former employee Antwoine Johnson shared video of the cockroaches to WGN9 in Chicago.
Johnson says he was fired after excessive absences while he was dealing with the death of his mother and his brother over the Christmas holidays. A Portillo’s spokesperson claims that Johnson threw a chair when he was told he was being fired. Whatever happened, we know two things: the guy was fired and the restaurant has roaches.
Now look, we’ve all seen the occasional roach at our restaurant. It ain’t no big thing, right? We do our best to keep them away, but those bitches are as persistent as a senior citizen with an expired coupon. We call the exterminator and hope for the best. However, this video looks pretty bad. The roaches are walking around without a care in the world, brazenly crawling across the milkshake machine like they’re taking a stroll in Central Park.
Merle the Cockroach: Hey, Edna, wanna crawl out from our nest and go see what’s happening on the countertop today?
Edna the Cockroach: Oh, honey I would love to, but I’m about to lay 100 eggs and then I was gonna go poop all over the hot dog buns afterwards, can I take a rain check?
Merle the Cockroach: No worries, I’ll see if Charlie and Frankie wanna go with me. Maybe we can meet later at the to-go lids?
Edna the Cockroach: Perfect! I’ll see if Annie wants to join us. She loves the to-go lid area. That’s where she always lays her eggs.
Johnson says he is not a disgruntled employee and he had seen the roaches many times before. “We reported it to the managers and some were like, ‘Just brush it along and to keep on going.’ I thought it was a problem and I reported it every time, but there was nothing done about it.” When asked how often he saw them, he replied “Every day that I worked, at least three or four times a day.” Again, he says he’s not a disgruntled employee.
I do find it suspect that it wasn’t until after he was fired that he felt the need to suddenly share this video with the news. I mean, if he was so bothered by it, why didn’t he give them the video while he still worked there? Uh huh, Antwoine. Shady as fuck.
There are so many lessons to be learned here:
- If you see roaches in your restaurant, tell management so the problem can be handled.
- Video the roaches so they can know how big the problem is.
- Save that video so that you can use it to get yourself 15 minutes of fame and drag your former employer down into the gutter in case they ever fire your ass.
