By Bill Frost

Food and drink sabotage by disgruntled employees? Oh, not on your watch ...

Seemed like a good idea at the time: "Accidentally" drop a live bug (well, live for a few seconds, at least) into the manager's omelet, cook it up and serve it hot to the porker, thus proving we minimum-wage cooks under him weren't in fact "too stupid to ever sneak anything by the head honcho."

Yes, he called himself "honcho." He was sooo asking for it.

If my stint working the grill in a bug-ridden restaurant taught me anything besides how many cans of Pabst I could shotgun mid-shift before blacking out on a pile of dinner rolls (16...or so), it's this: The staff is fallible. And when overworked, constantly harangued by bosses or working on their fourteenth PBR, possibly malicious.

Those urban legends about waiters, cooks, bartenders and their ilk sabotaging the food and drink of the innocent and not-so-innocent aren't just spun from nothing--we all know they're real. Definitely more real than the government mind-control experiments, alien abductions and some so-called "swing-music revival" the honcho used to ramble on about back then in the late '90s.

Purposeful subversion is not to be confused with plain ol' neglect: Forgetting to wash up after restroom visits, handling garbage, sneezing, coughing, watching Christina Aguilera videos, voting Libertarian--all innocuous oversights.   Ditto using your armpit to warm the tuna melt of a senator who insists on calling you "Sugar Tits" all night. These things happen.

If you've been mistreated, had a bad day, suffer from mental disabilities or PMS (arguably the same thing), the usual ways to tamper with a customer's food order include unimaginative maneuvers like dropping items on the floor, under or overcooking, and, as we've already established, the occasional protein additive of an insect. Don't act like you're not familiar.

Stories of drink-slingers dropping mind-altering substances like Ecstasy into annoying customers' booze, however, tend to be bogus, because who's going to waste perfectly good drugs? Certainly not anyone who works in the service industry.

Whether you've worked in the food/drink biz for five minutes or five years, you've heard stories of servers going beyond these examples when provoked. Sordid tales of degreasers, low-level pharmaceuticals (such as laxatives and Viagra--sometimes an inconvenient combo of both) and various other things best left unsaid making their way into drinks and entrées abound. As for reports of kitchen sex on or near the food, again, these things happen. Just make sure your managerial policies against "workplace romance" aren't so vague to exclude "workplace insta-nookie involving no romance whatsoever--didn't even catch his/her name."

In fairness, it should be noted that most service-industry folks are conscientious, caring professionals who wouldn't dream of engaging in this kind of prankery--you wouldn't have plunked down four bones for this mag (or swiped it from the boss's office) if you didn't care about your craft. First of all, who's got time for tomfoolery? There's work to be done, and the most delicious...er, despicable...tricks require extra minutes and motivation--waitstaffs are notoriously short on both. Second: in most cases, you've got to have an exceptionally toxic weasel sitting in your section to dish out this kind of wrath. Thirdly, "prankery" may not even be a word--waiting on a ruling.

Back to No. 2: Choose to act or not, there are occasionally deserving targets. The following people should expect to be pranked on a regular basis, and/or accept that they probably already have many a time: restaurant critics (face it, nobody likes 'em); ex-girl/boyfriends (lovers-wronged are vicious--ask any of mine); reality-show celebrities (including hosts, like American Idol's Ryan Seacrest, a.k.a. "Bedhead Antichrist"); "playa" with a "posse" and "bling-bling" (especially if they're White); supermodels (like they're not going to throw it up anyway); or Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly (just because).

The ultimate lesson to be learned here? Not quite sure, but I really hope my old boss--sorry, honcho--is reading this.