Laughing at the ticket printer

Ticket printer jammed at 7:12 on a full book, and my new garde manger looked like the sky was falling; I showed him the ancient fix — unplug, mutter something unprintable, plug back in — and we laughed instead of spiraling. Twenty-two years in, I tell every cook the same thing: keep your mise tight and your humor tighter — what silly ritual or one-liner do you use to keep morale from burning like the 400°F salamander?

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I keep a pre-torn starter strip taped by the POS and a spare roll under it; when it jams, we say ‘sacrifice to the Paper God,’ yank the strip, and it usually feeds clean. But I run a cleaning card through the printer every Sunday so we’re not just living on unplug–replug magic.

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