There's a Jet Engine Roaring Out of my Fryer

Did you ever have the sneaking suspicion that what you were being told was slightly inaccurate?
We handle lots of technical questions from our end-user clients, but this one was particularly disturbing. The operator had called in to the dealer to complain about flames shooting from their new fryers.
I had been skeptical when it was first proposed to upgrade this pizza shop from economy equipment to high-efficiency deep fryers. But, after all, this independent restaurant was an extremely high volume store. The sale, installation and demonstrations all went off without a hitch. They loved the equipment. It kept up with demand. It was easy to use. Move onto the next opportunity, right? Wrong.
Three months in, the phone calls started. “The equipment works great during the day, but when we start it up in the morning we get a plume of fire shooting up from the flue.” That’s what they should have said. But instead the message we got translated from the original kitchen-Spanglish to the kitchen-Italian, to dealer lingo, then to the rep receptionist, and finally to me was that the fryers are ‘on fire every day, and that if we don’t fix it today they are going to put “my” fryers out on the street’.
Technical service was sent in, three times! No-one could find anything wrong. We decided to investigate ourselves.
One of our reps showed up early enough to watch them start up the equipment, stuck around through meal service, and there it was. Sure enough: flame thrower! We never saw anything like it. The factory service department couldn’t figure it out.
The fry-cook had decided that the fries would drain faster with a blast of heat from the flu. So every batch got drained down the flu, by resting the fry basket on top. It made a great crispy hot French fry, but it also caused a grease fire in the flue every time the fryer was started up.
A simple correction in operational procedure, and we haven’t heard of any problems on the fryers since.
Our industry continues to roll out ever more sophisticated equipment (particularly in NAFEM years). It seems as if each demonstration done is on a new software version of the operation controls. Ah, training, where would we be without it? Who pays for the multiple re-trainings in the high turnover environment of our end-users? Who trains the trainers?