Don’t fire the messenger. Improve and enforce the message.

A Country Springs Hotel line cook claims he was wrongly terminated for “sanitation reasons” after dozens of people were sickened at a banquet at the Waukesha, Wis., hotel last week, adding,

"I'm the fall guy. I'm the scapegoat. There's been no proof that I was responsible for bringing a virus to work."

The cook told WTMJ he was getting over the flu and wasn't feeling 100 per cent the day he helped prepare the food for the banquet but he doesn't think he should have lost his job.

"The managers, they knew I was ill, they knew there were other people that were ill. They didn't send me home Sunday and Monday. They sent me home Tuesday. Sunday and Monday they needed me really bad. Tuesday it was not a busy day.”

The Wisconsin Food Code says kitchen employees must report if they have flu like symptoms. The Country Springs manager told Today's TMJ4 that's why they "fired one employee for failure to comply with the reporting requirement policies."

The Waukesha County Health Department is investigating an illness outbreak at the Country Springs Hotel.

About 500 people attended a luncheon at the Country Springs Hotel, and the managers were notified that about 50 of the guests were suffering from flu like symptoms.

The Health Department tells FOX6 the Banquet Room and the attached kitchen were completely sanitized.

Running a restaurant is hard enough without dealing with rats and wackos.

The Post-Crescent reports that a woman who attempted to extort money from an upscale restaurant by putting a rat in her lunch entered no-contest pleas Tuesday to two criminal charges.

Judge Dee Dyer found Debbie R. Miller, 43, guilty after she entered the no-contest pleas to a felony extortion charge and a misdemeanor for obstructing police. She will be sentenced March 8 in Outagamie County Court.

Miller planted a rat in her lunch at The Seasons on April 17, 2008, and then demanded $500,000 from the owners. She threatened to alert the media if the money wasn’t paid.

Bob Doller, who owns The Seasons in Grand Chute with his wife, Jessica, said,

“This has been a long, drawn out battle and it has affected my business. We would hope that if anyone had any doubts that it was a true claim, they would know now that it was extortion. In April, it will be two years since this happened. If you compare 2007 to 2008 (the year of the incident), the loss was tens of thousands of dollars.”

The Dollers kept the rat after the extortion attempt. Insurance investigators sent it for testing and determined that it not only wasn’t a wild rat, but rather a domestic, white rat that had been cooked in a microwave. The restaurant doesn’t use microwaves.
 

If I owned a fake zoo store, like a pet store, I’d probably call it Serpent Safari. Reminds me of the scene in the 2003 movie, Almost Famous, when the lead guitar player goes off to meet real people, in of all places Topeka, Kansas, just down the road, and after doing some acid, a basement-dwelling dude asks the guitar player if he wants to watch him feed a mouse to his pet snake.

Yes.

Topeka. Real people.

A lawsuit has been filed in Lake County circuit court claiming that a 2-year-old boy contracted salmonella after touching an albino Burmese python.

A lawsuit seeking $50,000 in damages has been lodged against a reptile store and zoo in Gurnee Mills after a 2-year-old boy purportedly contracted salmonella after petting a snake there in December 2007.

Serpent Safari Inc. violated state laws by not providing liquid sanitizer for patrons or having a sign warning of infection risk to children younger than 5 who touch or handle reptiles, according to the complaint, filed Dec. 11 in Lake County circuit court.

Lawyer Michael Maher, who didn't return telephone messages Tuesday, filed the suit on behalf of Sara Wirtz and her son, Trevor, and Judith Penoyer, all of McHenry County. Without providing specifics, the suit alleges Penoyer also contracted salmonella.

Serpent Safari owner Lou Daddono countered that he's confident the albino Burmese python that Trevor would have petted did not pass on salmonella. The snake lives at the store and is not for sale.

Daddono, who also denied the negligence claims, estimated more than 400,000 visitors have touched the python without a problem in his 11 years in business. He questioned why it took two years for the salmonella suit to be filed.

Serpent Safari's lack of sanitizer or signs noting the need for hand-washing after coming in contact with reptiles amounted to negligence, the complaint alleges. More than $50,000 in damages are sought from the business.

Penoyer suffered "severe and permanent illness and/or injuries, externally and internally," says the suit. The complaint states Trevor's hospital expenses and other medical care will require his mother to pay large sums of money.