It’s only regularly spoken by a minority but most can and will break it out on ocassion. It’s always fun to do on vacation.

Well, I live on the Minnesota side of the Minnesota / Wisconsin border and normally I can tell I crossed the border because I have to cross the 4th largest river in the world, the Mississippi river.

Joking aside a big tell used to be frac sand mines. Minnesota cracked down on them much harder much more quickly than Wisconsin so you would see them all over the place in Wisconsin but not in MN. I haven’t seen as many of those lately though. Also If I drive too far south I wind up driving out of the Kwik Trip gas station zone and into the vastly inferior Caseys gas station zone in Iowa.

Eh, I’m the guy who has to scrub the snot out of them and I still get ice unless I actually know it’s a place that doesn’t clean the machine. Most of the stuff that grows in them is disgusting to look at but benign. Even the concerning ones are often only an issue if inhaled. That’s not to say that a filthy ice machine can’t transmit foodbourne illness. They definitely can. But I’ve seen far more concerning things in various commercial kitchens than dirty ice machines. Also, this will vary by area, but usually the things get plugged full of lime scale to the point that they stop working long before the biofilm gets truely horifying. The only places I ever see where the biofilm gets really bad are bars and places that do in-house baking because yeast loves ice machines for some reason.

If it actually tastes like a lake then it’s probably the ice. Ice machine bins are notorious for growing algae in the bottom and no business likes sanitizing the bin because that requires emptying the bin and therefore not having ice for a while. I’m also willing to bet that dunkin “does their own ice machine cleanings.” Which usually means that once it gets so crudded up that it stops working then they put it through a clean cycle so they can tell the repair tech that that they now have to call that they clean it. Ice machine manufacturers also don’t like to advertize that the built in cleaning cycles don’t actually remove the need to have them professionally cleaned; you only find that out if you read the service manual. Every 3-6 months you still need to take the whole thing apart to manually scrub the biological snot and limescale out of them.

Get out of my garden you damn bean vampire!

Same in HVAC-R. I had a customer complain to me the other day about “having to teach one of my coworkers how to do their job” because that coworker asked where the condensing unit for their walk in cooler was located. Like my coworker should have just immediately known the exact layout of that site.

But thats fine, the customer is paying $280 per hour so if they’d rather I spend the time galavanting around their site finding where things are on my own then that’s on them. It’s actually nice they told me that they were an asshole up front so I knew not to worry about saving them any money.

Stupid scary areolas.

~also the name of my garage band~